Brilliant Madness by Patty Duke

Author:Patty Duke [Duke, Patty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-57276-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Ginny: Still Angry at the Medical System

Ginny says that she is the victim of a medical system that has been insensitive to her needs and convictions, of doctors who treated her with drugs she didn’t want and electroconvulsive treatments she didn’t agree to have. Today, fifteen years after her initial manic episode, she is still angry, still opposed to medication, still worried about her future.

When Ginny was in her late twenties, she began to feel like two different people. On one level, she saw herself as a gutsy, dynamic, risk-taking feminist. On the other, she saw a crumbling woman without spirit, who wanted to kill herself.

She attributed her intense mood swings to an unhappy home life, to parents who clearly favored her older brother, to the way young adults feel as they struggle to survive.

The Freudian psychoanalyst she saw every day wasn’t helping her. Her mood swings became more intense, and she was fighting impulses to kill herself. She thought of all the ways she could do it: she would fill the bathtub with water and drown herself; she would stick her head in the oven; she would overdose on Thorazine (prescribed by her psychiatrist) and sleeping pills. She would do it on her thirtieth birthday.

That morning—it was a brisk, sunny day in mid-October—Ginny checked into a motel and swallowed enough pills to end her life. She doesn’t know how she got from the room to the motel lobby, where she was found crawling on the floor. Her next memory is the hospital, where her stomach was being pumped. “I felt as though I was being run over by a truck and I was trying to push the truck away,” says Ginny. “So I guess my unconscious didn’t really want to die.”

Ginny was in the mental hospital for seven months, with her parents footing the bill. During that time, part of her was learning how to kill herself more successfully; the other part was wanting to get out and live a healthy life. And her anger built.

“I wasn’t allowed to see my parents because I was so angry at both of them,” Ginny says. “I had violent outbursts. I broke windows and slit my wrist. I put a plastic bag over my head. I was strapped down in an isolation room for twenty-four hours, screaming and crying. And I had all this rage inside me because the nature of the therapy I was getting wasn’t helping me at all.”

But it was through twice-a-week group therapy that Ginny was exposed to a philosophy of life that she says has embraced her and helped her survive. “A leader came to our group and asked all of us to sit in a circle and begin by chanting ‘om.’ It is a part of Yoga and it means God, life, infinity, faith. The first time it happened, it was so powerful for me, it was scary. I had to leave the room. It was only later that I could take in all that energy and use it as a resource to heal myself.

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