Friday, November 19, 2004
Psyched Out
[I'd recommend reading the whole thing; here are a few excerpts]
He was in the hospital the day he learned he had been elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Rodney Plamondon looked for a while at the letter that told him this. He was pleased. He was the 22-year-old son of a long-haul truck driver. Rodney's future wouldn't involve driving a Kenworth. ... He was, on this July 1984 day, in the psychiatric unit of a hospital in Boise, Idaho, his hometown. He was newly diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. It happened to me that way, too— a psychotic break out of the blue during a twentysomething life that had been shaping up quite nicely. It was difficult to build a new life out of that. There were many, many setbacks. That's the absurd deal of mental illness: You get taken most commonly in your youth, when life is just beginning to gel. You get an illness that, in many cases, is so disabling that it strips you of the psychological and practical goods essential to a decent existence. Often you get kicked right out of the mainstream, no matter how solid a citizen you were before it all went bad.
What are you going to do about that?
You have three choices: kill yourself, lead a featureless existence, or fight back and extract some measure of revenge on that which laid you low. Rodney and I rejected options one and two. Option three is no cakewalk. It takes years of determined effort before you see light at the end of the tunnel, and as you feel your way along, you've got to do it all on blind faith that something good might happen. After 15 years, I'm finally beginning to see a faint glow.
[I'd recommend reading the whole thing; here are a few excerpts]
He was in the hospital the day he learned he had been elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Rodney Plamondon looked for a while at the letter that told him this. He was pleased. He was the 22-year-old son of a long-haul truck driver. Rodney's future wouldn't involve driving a Kenworth. ... He was, on this July 1984 day, in the psychiatric unit of a hospital in Boise, Idaho, his hometown. He was newly diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. It happened to me that way, too— a psychotic break out of the blue during a twentysomething life that had been shaping up quite nicely. It was difficult to build a new life out of that. There were many, many setbacks. That's the absurd deal of mental illness: You get taken most commonly in your youth, when life is just beginning to gel. You get an illness that, in many cases, is so disabling that it strips you of the psychological and practical goods essential to a decent existence. Often you get kicked right out of the mainstream, no matter how solid a citizen you were before it all went bad.
What are you going to do about that?
You have three choices: kill yourself, lead a featureless existence, or fight back and extract some measure of revenge on that which laid you low. Rodney and I rejected options one and two. Option three is no cakewalk. It takes years of determined effort before you see light at the end of the tunnel, and as you feel your way along, you've got to do it all on blind faith that something good might happen. After 15 years, I'm finally beginning to see a faint glow.
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