So when I decided to start writing again I found this little gem unfinished in a pending draft format. I wrote this in 2008 while working at an in-patient behavioral health unit. I think any previous form of self must be to some degree more naive and less-experienced than the present self, but the four-year-ago me is a real piece of work. I feel like I've come along way since I wrote this (In terms of being less condescending but that just may be my present self's burning ego falsely telling me I'm more sophisticated now) but since it's unfinished I think it's better to finish it. I haven't seen the film in four years and it comes through as sort of a haze so I'll do my best to solidify my previous self's condescending point without the detail i would have had. Everything in blue was written four years ago and black is now.
I've spent the last four years working on a behavioral health unit with people. People like you and people like me; real people in their most vulnerable, fragile states. People who hold on to life like its being pried out of their hands. They pretend, ignore, manipulate and flee from everyone and everything. They cut to stop the pain, lie to find the truth and push away those who pull the hardest. Some have barely escaped death; one woman flat lined 3 times in 3 months. Some attempt suicide just to see who cares. And others recieve death as their reward for their efforts. I've seen true sorrow, intense hatred and determined denial; all from the same person during the same stay. I've been spit on, punched at and bit. One woman told me that the only thing that would make her life better would be my death. Another promised me they would find my family and kill them.
But oddly, I can't wait to go to work each day. I somehow enjoy it. There have been a handful of people that I feel like I've helped, and that meager handful makes it worth it to me. I see people when life sucks the most; when they are on the verge of ending it all, and when nothing else seems to matter. People in crisis are not rational. They are stripped down to basic human instincts and act on impulses. They have no to little control and feed on the decline of their emotional freefall. Depression can be bruttle and usually leaves the toughest of blokes deflated and unreckognizeable. They come to us at their lowest point-and sometimes- I get to see them crawl out of the abyss and fight their way back. That to me is worth a few verbal threats and sloppy punches.
Besides those with depression and sucicidal ideation I also see people with schizophrenia, mania, delusions, hallucinations and dissocative behaviors. Often times people steeped in delusional episodes come to the unit because family and friends are either incapable of understanding how to deal with it or they're scared. Currently we have a woman who gives on average 3 spiritual births a day, complete with spiritual doctors and spiritual nursery carts. We also have a man who speaks "the Devil's Chinese," and is the world's worst piano player(we have a piano on the unit). What he calls Tchaikovsky, I call Tchaicrapsky, and yet for some reason we keep letting him play.
Recently I watched two movies back to back that provided incredible depth and insight in dealing with mental illness.
The first and by far the better film is Lars and the Real Girl.
Lars is more of a blueprint on dealing with mental illness rather than an accurate portrayl of how people tend to deal with it. At first glance, someone with a fixed delusion seems like an easy undertaking to remedy. We would seemingly just tell the bloke that the doll he insists is a real person, isn't. Easy Cheesey Lemon Squeezy. However, the more rationallity you use with irrational delusions, the better chance they have at becoming fixed. Because what is an apperant delusion to us is reality to its maker.
So, without much backstory we see Lars (Ryan Gosling), a quiet, nervous, emotionally dead and socially inept 20-something who inhabits a make-shift garage appartment behind his brother's house. With routine being the only dependable aspect of Lar's life he strolls into work one morning finding his cubicle-mate checking out life-like sex dolls on the internet. "They're anatomically correct," says his perverted friend. But Lars seems drawn to the site for other reasons. In a few scenes later, Lars, who normally would have to be wrestled into the chair in order to have dinner with his brother and pregnent wife, shows up on the door step with his wheelchair bound Brazillian girlfriend, Bianca.
Rational, normal people (I use these terms loosely) have a difficult time accecpting the irrational. People pride themselves and juice their ego's with their ability to identify and discern the fradulent from the truth. It's always a nice pat-on-the-back to hear that you have unparrallel "street smarts," or a "high social IQ." The backward braniac sort, with booksmart brains and the social cues of a slug is seemingly looked downed upon by his socially sharp counterpart. It's a very human thing to not only categorize personality types but then to create some self-promoting level system that puts your type in the upper echelon of a mental-make-shift personality tier system. So, instead of embracing the delusional and empatheticaly try to understand, we symbolically point and laugh, so to wave our upper-tier mentally and socially superior flags for all to see. It's not that the difference of people is the problem, it's the constant identification and superotiy of "identifyable types" that causes social stigmas and gaps. Lars' brother Gus is no different than the rest of us and needs his brother to understand that the Braziallian beauty sitting next to him is not a real person.
Lars is fortunate to be taken to a Doctor who has a tad more insight into delusional behavior than his brother Gus. Dr. Dagmar (Patrica Clarson) insists that the family goes along with the delusion and advises them to treat Bianca like a real person. Gus's better half Karin takes the assignment one step further and invites community leaders including a christian pastor to help them meet the request. They agree.
Like I said before, This movie is more of a what if. Eventually the entire town is full throttle in aiding Lars in his delusion. I found when I was working at the unit that family members of people in a delusional state were far less supportive or insightful. In one particular case a middle-age-woman would interrupt her demented mother every time she spouted something extra-ordinary then lock into a power struggle with the patient urging her to see "reality." In Lars' case, this was reality. Bianca was real and his girlfriend. The movie's final point is to allow the delusion to pass on its own time table and that power struggles are for UFC cage fighters and parents with teenagers. I remember liking the film, but don't know if I would recommend it as homework for people in a similar situation without a second viewing. I think it evoked a lot of thoughts and emotion at the time but now it's just another film I've seen.
The second film I watched was Wristcutters: A Love Story. As you can probably imagine it was pretty depressing, not so much so that I wanted to commit suicide but depressing enough to get me to eat an entire pint of cookie dough Haagen Dazs. So, according to Wristcutters, when you kill yourself you go to this sort of depressing, dried-and-shriveled, sepia-toned purgatory town and drive around in junked vehicles trying to find something to do, in other words, you go to Price Utah. I like this idea as a suicide determent. Hey don't kill yourself, or you'll end up in Price. If this wouldn't work for you, then you've never been to Price. Eventually the two lead characters, who have both killed themselves, fall in love. I'm sure I had a grand epiphany at the time of viewing about the greater picture of life, love and death and how Price makes sense as Hell, but I don't recall it.
So much for finishing it, I think I have created more questions from my hazy recollections than if I would have just published it without the present day commentary. So if you get anything from this, let it be "don't kill yourself, or you'll end up in Price."
