The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness by Stout Martha

Author:Stout, Martha [Stout, Martha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2002-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

SPLIT IDENTITY

CHAPTER SIX

Replaced

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

—Viktor Frankl

The first time I encountered someone with floridly apparent dissociative identity disorder was during my internship at McLean Hospital. Founded in 1811, in the quiet, affluent town of Belmont, Massachusetts, just west of Cambridge, McLean is Harvard Medical School’s major psychiatric teaching hospital, a venerable institution uneasy with its fame as it makes appearances in novels, autobiographies, film, and even popular song. Much of the physical facility consists of a collection of mansions, each of which was built in the nineteenth century to accommodate a single individual from a wealthy family—not quite “right” enough to remain decorously at home—along with his or her servants. These tremendous, ivy-smothered houses, long ago divided into multiple offices and wards to house the many, rest at unobtrusive angles to narrow roads that wind through acres of dignified old trees, placid lawns, and hilly apple orchards.

Driving through the grounds, one might easily imagine that this is the campus of a fine old New England college, at a time when school is evidently not in session, for very few people are to be seen out of doors, even on a clear, warm afternoon. But then one sees, perhaps, a solitary individual walking along one of the roads, slumped, head down in almost palpable depression, and one’s sense of the place begins to shift to something darker.

A substantial contingent of the patient population is still well-to-do and educated, and at any given time may include the world-famous, or the children of the famous, clientele whose identities are meticulously guarded from the curious outside world. The aura of the place, and the privileged, educated status of some of its patients, is permanently represented in my mind by the cosmopolitan graffiti that one of the young residents of the hospital’s renowned children’s unit once escaped long enough to inscribe in large letters, as if to signal for help, upon an outside wall:

“LES ADULTES SONT FOUS.” (The adults are crazy.)

When I was an intern at McLean, outsiders often found the patients indistinguishable from the staff, none of whom wore uniforms; and much to the institution’s credit, the VIP inmates were usually indistinguishable from the other patients.

On this particular occasion, I was supervising a community meeting on one of the adult wards, convened each week to address the day-to-day living issues of the dozen or so patients living there at the time. The patients, one psychiatric nurse, one mental health worker, and I sat in an old country kitchen on the ground floor of one of the reappropriated mansions, around an extremely long distressed wood table. A motley assortment of pots and pans and other cookware, conspicuously devoid of knives, hung from hooks on the walls, and a chubby antique refrigerator chugged away in a corner. The windows were dressed in ruffled checkered curtains. In our absence—for we

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.