The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [157]
[23] Lynd: op. cit., p. 52.
EPILOGUE
THE STORY of the three Christs of Ypsilanti cannot, of course, be finally told as long as they remain living men. Still, a few things can be said that go beyond the account related here.
After Clyde and Joseph and Leon were left to themselves again in August of 1961, they continued to be seen together in their sitting room in combinations of two or three. But they no longer held daily meetings, and Leon soon reverted to eating alone. Nevertheless, a strange sort of cohesiveness continued to persist among them, not unlike the cohesiveness of a conflict-ridden family in which the individual members, while withdrawing into themselves, carefully avoid breaking the final strands of human interdependency.
A look into the future must always be disciplined by the guidelines of the past. Clyde and Joseph and Leon had been living in the overcrowded back wards of custodial mental hospitals for a long time before we brought them together. Due to the inadequate staffing of these hospitals, they rarely saw a doctor—as Joseph put it, maybe once a year. Whatever hopes we may have had of somehow being able to bring them back to reality were quickly dissipated. For one thing, too many years had passed. Clyde was close to seventy, Joseph was nearing sixty, and each had been in mental hospitals for almost two decades. Leon, while not yet forty, had spent five years in custodial confinement. If the three men were unfit to cope with the real world when they were first committed, they had become, if anything, less fit as the years passed. Their loneliness and isolation, the loss of their ego boundaries and its resultant depersonalization, could only become accentuated through years of neglect by a society which up to now has been more ready to disburse funds for incarceration than for regeneration.
It may well be significant that Clyde, the oldest, changed the least as a result of our experimental procedures and that Leon, who was the youngest, changed the most. Our evidence, while inconclusive, gives weight to the common-sense conclusion that with increasing age the chances decrease that a patient will respond to social stimulation. As he becomes older, there is less ego to work with; the need to appear rational and consistent, both to one’s self and to others, is weaker; denial as a mechanism of defense against unpleasant reality is stronger; ties with the outside world become progressively weaker. The cave, the last stronghold, becomes more and more inaccessible to light.
Clyde and Joseph give every appearance of remaining essentially unchanged. But Leon continues to show evidence of change or at least further elaborations in his delusional system of belief. I still visit him every few months and at each visit I find Leon’s story a bit different from the one he told before. He is still groping for new answers to the riddle of his identity to replace earlier and less satisfying answers.
The prognosis for schizophrenia, paranoid type, is poor, perhaps poorer than for any other diagnostic category of functional psychosis. In the extreme, it is a condition which some textbooks describe as incurable or irreversible.
But to say that a particular psychiatric condition is incurable or irreversible is to say more about the state of our ignorance than about the state of the patient. This study closes with the hope that at least a small portion of ignorance has here been dispelled, and with the faith that as knowledge gradually advances, the incurable conditions of yesterday and today become the curable conditions of tomorrow.
AFTERWORD
Some Second Thoughts About the Three Christs:
Twenty Years Later
TWENTY years have elapsed since I said goodbye to the three Christs. Leon Gabor, the youngest of the three, is alive and well but still a patient at Ypsilanti State Hospital; Clyde Benson, the oldest, was discharged into the custody of his family in January, 1970; Joseph Cassel died in August, 1976.
As I reread my account of the three Christs, I must confess that I now almost regret having