Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [17]
In the ten years prior to the orphans he had published one novel and a bunch of short stories without coming close to making a living at it. The roughly ten years disrupted by orphans produced The Sirens of Titan; Mother Night; Cat’s Cradle; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; Welcome to the Monkey House; and Slaughterhouse-Five. Not so bad.
As soon as I got out of the hospital after my first series of breaks I started writing about what had happened to me. Writing is very hard mostly because until you try to write something down, it’s easy to fool yourself into believing you understand things. Writing is terrible for vanity and self-delusion. It wasn’t therapy as much as trying to tell a story that took me by surprise, plus there weren’t a lot of people beating down my door with alternative plans for what I should be doing.
I imagined neighbors saying, “I think he’s writing in there.”
“Whatever. As long as there’s no screaming or broken glass, he can do whatever he wants.”
In the middle of the illness I had promised to try to remember and tell the truth. One of the first pieces of mail I received after getting out of the hospital was from a magazine wanting to publish a story I didn’t remember writing, which I took as a helpful, possibly divine hint about what the hell I might be good for.
I thought the fact that people could get well from serious mental illness was good news and worth writing about. It was good news that it was more about biochemistry and neurotransmitters. There should be no shame or blame. They were illnesses like other illnesses.
It crossed my mind that if I was able to tell the story well enough to get it published and it sold well, I might make some money and it might be the end of shame and blame and stigmatization. The medical model would reign supreme. Unequivocal diagnostic tests would be available shortly. Medications without side effects would come along a little later, and mental illness would become a thing of the past.
It was not impossible that an accurate understanding of mental illness would lead to world peace and universal prosperity. Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.
And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. —Ecclesiastes 12:12 (King James Version)
Once a week and then every two weeks and then once a month, I drove up to Boston to see my old friend Dr. Kirk. Before, I had been doing due diligence, checking out whether it was crazy to try to set up a commune in British Columbia. It seemed odd that a psychiatrist working at Harvard in the sixties and seventies had a crew cut and looked like a Marine. His appearance was a testament to my open-mindedness. My Harvard crew-cut psychiatrist had said that my plans to set up a commune in British Columbia were just fine and, in fact, probably what he himself would be doing if he was my age. Now I was seeing him for permission to take a little less Thorazine. Our relationship had range.
“How are you sleeping? Eating? Any voices? Ideas of reference?”
“Not me, boss.”
“Let’s go down to fifty milligrams three times a day.”
Today, if I was lucky, I’d see a case supervisor monthly and maybe a psychopharmacology nurse every three months. Clinical guidelines would mandate that I be on antipsychotics for at least five years. The medication I was on would be determined by who paid for lunch and what deal was cut between my health insurer and the pharmaceutical industry.
It didn’t seem all that special at the time, but the fact that a doctor and I were left alone to figure out what was best for