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But the idea had a lot to recommend it. The hopelessness of dealing with it on a poetic level was the start. The doctor who had apparently been able to bring me out of it was working from a biochemical model. According to most authorities who believed in this or that poetic theory, my case was hopeless. The biochemists said otherwise. The poets in the business gave little hope and huge bills. The chemists fixed me up with embarrassingly inexpensive, simple nonprescription pills. Vitamins mostly. The biochemists said no one was to blame. The poets all had notions that required someone’s having made some mistake.

The AMA had no particular affection for megavitamin therapy. That was something. Anything the AMA hated couldn’t be all bad.

The more research I studied, the more impressed I was. I remain converted.

It’s impossible to say whether full insight and understanding would help a schizophrenic or not. We all have vastly greater capacities for experience than for understanding. A hundred of the best shrinks in the world working day and night for years would be doing well to scratch the surface of a day in anyone’s life. Schizophrenia multiplies the problem manyfold and disability makes the problem more pressing. Since there is always so much more to be understood and dealt with, the notion that understanding will clear up the problem can’t be tested.

They used electroshock on me. There was nothing I or my parents or any of my friends could do to stop them. I was scared to death of it. It probably did me some good.

I was given no advance warning about it. One morning my breakfast tray didn’t show up and I knew what that meant. The rationality of my efforts to avoid it is the best proof I have that I was already in pretty good shape. I talked to the nurses perfectly logically. I remembered phone numbers and talked with my mother and then Virginia, trying to get them to do something about it. I think it was another case of hierarchy lag. The nurses knew I was OK, the orderlies knew I was OK, but the doctors who gave orders for such things hadn’t caught on. They were several days behind.

I thought the purpose of it was to make me forget things that were bothering me. I composed a series of ten rhyming couplets that included all the most awful things that had ever happened to me and scratched the first letter of each line in the wall behind my mattress. For the experience itself, I was knocked out with sodium pentothal. Just before I went under I remember saying to the doctor in charge that I didn’t think this was such a good idea. When I came to, about fifteen minutes later, I was disoriented for a bit but remembered my ten rhyming couplets without having to look at the wall. Except for a bitch of a headache, I felt fine.

I think that maybe a lot of the horror people feel about shock comes from confusing its effects with those of mental illness itself, or some of the other medications often used. The dull, glazed look, the amnesia and confusion found in mental patients may be caused by a number of things, but electroshock is what people usually blame because it sounds so awful.

If I found myself going under again, I’d choose electroshock ahead of a lot of things. My only complaint is that they made no attempt to clear up my misconceptions about it and that they didn’t use it earlier. I really didn’t need it by the time they got around to using it. This isn’t to say that shock isn’t grossly misused in some situations.

GETTING OUT RIGHT. “This time we’re going to do it right.” Virginia said it so often I started thinking there might be some sort of hidden meaning or message. “This time we’re going to do it right. We’re not going to make the mistakes we made last time.”

I, for one, wasn’t all that sure we had made mistakes. They were the ones who blew it. If they had given me a little more information and some pills, everything would have been fine.

If we had just listened to Dr. Dale, everything would have been OK. That was certainly