Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin by Norah Vincent Page A

was taking my orders one day, and Kid asked for an iPod, I got the reality check I deserved. I decided this whole fellow man thing wasn’t for me. There was just too much childish need for gratification and endless expectation of same. This was no solution. I was giving junk food to diabetics, recovering addicts, and sedentary near-vagrants whose meds were already well on the way to making them obese. And all purely for the hit of pleasure it would give them and, more important, me.
    The worst of it is that they came for me in other ways too. As soon as I extended my rubber-gloved helping hand to them, they grabbed hold. They latched on. They wanted to keep in touch on the outside. They wanted to be my friend. But I just wanted to help them from a safe distance and be rid of them. I didn’t want their company. I was posing, or passing, but I didn’t really want to know them. They were my subjects, and if I cared about them at all it was out of authorial self-interest and pity and moral vanity. Moral vanity being that great middle-class indulgence that makes us write checks to charities and do the right thing for the less fortunate, because doing so reinforces our fiercely guarded belief that we are good people. But when the less fortunate come banging on your door and your heart in real time, up close, blowing their not so fresh breath in your face, wanting to be a person instead of a project or a write-off, then your cherished little antibacterial ideals turn all squeamish and stuttery, saying “Well, but, . . .” “Yeah, but, . . .” and finally show themselves outright to be as vaporous and self-serving as they always were.
    Where are the boundaries? What can help really mean? And isn’t that why we leave it to the professionals, who, in turn, leave it to a lost cause, or to the pharmaceutical path of least resistance? Nobody wants to do the personal work. It’s disgusting. What’s more, it challenges—no, rakes up and scarecrows—every humanitarian illusion you have about yourself. It makes you know that at heart you are a little bit of a fascist like everybody else, thinking in the way, way back of your mind that wouldn’t it really just be cheaper and better and utilitarian—now there’s a word we can work with—to be rid of these people?
    Yes, this is all very ugly—but so true. I don’t want to know what’s in your soul. Not really. And you don’t want to know what’s in mine. Keep back, we tell each other. Those are your problems, which is really just a polite way of saying, “Go starve somewhere else. You’re ruining the view.”
    I couldn’t do well by these people. Not that it was my job to do so, but it felt like my obligation somehow. And maybe, for some of the same reasons, nobody else could do very well by them either. It was just too much. Too hard. Too late. The question is there all the time. What to do? I can denigrate the system, impugn it with all the progressive zeal that makes my brain twitter with self-satisfaction, and I might actually be right. The psychiatric emperor has no clothes. But I would be lying, or pruning the full picture, if I said I didn’t see why that system fails the chronics and admit that I abandoned them myself.
    You got tired of their ceaseless intrusions after a while, and in order to draw boundaries that they would respect, you had to be a little mean.
    I was on the pay phone with my shrink one day, the one I had on the outside, when Clean started orbiting me like some kind of demented circus balloon. Per Dr. Balkan’s instructions, I was trying to make an appointment to see someone when I got out. I was trying to explain how I’d landed in Meriwether without even so much as a by-your-leave, or a drowning wave, or some indication that I was in distress. I didn’t want to put him in a sticky position by telling him that I was A-OK fine and doing research, so the conversation was odd and halting, with me trying to avoid direct answers until I got out