Crazy Talk

          I knew him many years ago.  Billy (I’ll call him) came in for his appointment that afternoon crazier than I had seen him a long time.  He stared around himself jerkily, trying to locate the screams and murmurs.  His face was desperate.  World War III had begun again inside.  The forces of good and evil were clashing on a colossal scale, the devil voices were telling him to die, and other things too bad to utter.  Why this sudden collapse in someone who had been doing much better, out of the hospital 6 months, attending college classes again, picking up some abandoned friendships?

          An interaction with his father of less than five minutes seemed to have sunk the ship.  Leaving the farm for his appointment he was jumping into his truck when his father stopped him with a shout.  Billy paused, irritated and distracted, because he had just enough time to arrive his customary early five minutes.

          “What do you want?  I’ve got to go!”

          Billy’s father banged on the truck hood, maybe mad that his plans had been interrupted.  “You’re going now?  You’re cutting it tight as a rat’s a--!”

          Billy grew flustered and defended himself.  “I know how long it takes!  This is when I know I ought to leave.”

          The father sneered.  “You think so!  You’d better go see that man.  I’ll be glad when you grow up and get a mind of your own!”  He waved angrily and turned a sudden, deaf back.

          Billy dove away, not angry as much as confounded.  A few miles down the road he realized he didn’t remember where he was going.  And what was this road he was on?  The voices began to speak.

          It took weeks to tease that interaction apart, and calm the inner warfare.  Billy had been caught in what is called a “double-bind,” a communicational transaction in which one is given two contradictory commands at once by someone who has power, and in which the contradiction is hard to see or comment on.  Billy was being told to leave (if at all) at a time of his father’s choosing.  At the same time, he was told that he should have a mind of his own.

          However, until he did things his father’s way, he was mad (“you need to see that man”) and did not have a mind of his own.  Billy had in fact been working hard in therapy at finding a mind of his own, and had figured out the best time to leave (along with a lot of other new things, that his father was upset about).  Suddenly, his own mind was not his own mind, to not obey his father was to be insane, and in the inner dither, voices emerged.

          Of course, a single interaction cannot cause madness.  This one was emblematic, though, of the whole fabric of life in Billy’s family.  Deception, manipulation, confusion and soul-murdering invalidation were daily fare.

          Like the flowers in springtime, fashions in psychiatry and psychology come and go regularly.  A recent fashion that has picked up lots of steam is the idea that mental illness is entirely a biological problem, caused by chemical imbalances and only treatable by pharmacists.  There is some truth to this (as there is to most of the fashions), but it is far from the whole truth.  The quality of relationship in the family, and the kinds of communication that carry it, are vitally important in the child’s development into health or illness.  And certain especially malignant kinds of relationship and communication can go a long way toward making you crazy