Bureaucracy Trumps Psychosis

I had learned early in life that, when faced with uncomfortably, difficult options, it is best to disappear, either in actuality or in mind. A dichotomous childhood riddled with the tenderness and fun of a mother’s boundless love paired with physically obtuse discipline at the hands of my, now repentant, father, had shepherded me down the road of avoidance. Simply refuse to decide, refuse to act, it’s easier. Unfortunately, I had also learned, that sheer refusal to act is an act in and of itself, and it’s only easier because it is a downhill path which, the zombie blindly marching to gravity’s unfaltering dictates, always ends at the bottom.

As I walked into the office of the Justice of the Peace, I sang this lesson over and over to myself. Besides, I knew that my mother needed me now just as I had needed her as a young, diaper-clad child.  This was the right thing to do. I had filled in the forms requiring my sister to be picked up by the police and held in a psychiatric unit for at least 72 hours.  I had done it before and, although the familiarity lent some sense of normalcy, the pit of my stomach was rumbling to the contrary.

I sat down in front of a cold looking man who clicked on his tape recorder.  He adjusted the glasses on the long,  red, pointy protuberance on his face, whose only aesthetically viable purpose was to act as the medium between his lungs and the oxygen upon which they depended, and then he barely glanced up at me. Already I was overtaken by a deep, purple urge to shake him into reality.  Before I could act on this impulse, he ensured that we were aware that this entire encounter would be taped, the monotone never giving way to the slightest inflection. “Really?”  I wanted to shout, “I didn’t know that the machine you punched with such a flourish was actually going to tape us, I thought you were just entering the next number in your count-down until your day was over?.. I thought you were just using an adding machine to calculate the number of idiots who walk through your office door!” But I didn’t, I managed to focus on his lopsided, half red, half grey moustache that framed the cracked, drawn lips with which he uttered the following;

“So, what do you want from me?”

Insanity floods this world for little wonder. We come up against people every single day whose persona ostensibly form the weft and weave of sanity and rationality, but rather than embrace us with their silken fabric, they steward us in to a Kafkaesque nightmare.  Emotionless and arctic in their approach to a humanity crying from hurt, from need, they are unaffected and placid in its onslaught, almost irritated by things more human than they. So unaffected did my interrogator appear, I was fleetingly tempted to storm out of his office as if that might awaken him to the emotions pulsing within the neat forms he held in his hands that I had so painstakingly filled out. Instead;

“My sister is very ill. As you can see from the forms I filled in, she has been psychotic for some time. The police arrested her last week for …”

He actually had the audacity to interrupt me. OMG! Grey matter had long ago given up residence within his cranium. It had clearly been replaced by red tape.

“Psychosis in and of itself is not necessarily cause for a Form 2.”

Was this man (and I use the term loosely since it is a derivative of the word human) really going to listen to me, to consider the outward and inward impact of my sister’s condition? Or did he just have some quota to fill? 10 nutbars issued forms today, 20 turn-downs, 30 bails accepted, 15 bench warrants…

“I am very familiar with the Form 2 requirements. I’ve done this before. My sister is a danger to herself and others, but mostly to herself. The police caught her running up the middle of the highway last week, naked and flapping her arms. She said she was on her way to visit Alice in Wonderland. She said Peter Pan was leading her because he was a personal friend of Jesus Christ and that Neverland was where the sinless people went who Christ bestowed with a special permit. She was naked and dancing up the middle of a road with a 100Km/Hr speed limit. She doesn’t look after herself anymore. She never showers, brushes her teeth, changes her clothes. She won’t take her meds.  In the last 15 years doctors have diagnosed her as manic-depressive, schizo-effective, schizophreniform, alcoholic and everything in between. She needs to be in hospital.”

“Do you understand all the ramifications of this order that you are asking me to sign?” was the monotone, staccato response.

Is his ivory tower so prophylactic that he barely perceives the ants scurrying below? Would he need a magnifying glass to catch a glimpse? If he had a magnifying glass would he use it to burn us out of existence given half a chance?… A shake of the head, a reorganizing of thoughts, and I realized that he is not the source of my anxiety. I may try to blame him for something from which he is totally detached in every way possible, but it will never stick.

“Yes, I do. “

A few more questions, further explanation of the Mental Health Act and I left his office clutching the Form 2 not certain that I had done the right thing.  My lack of confidence would only be underlined by events that would take place later that night.  The arrival of the Emergency Task Force, bullet-proof shields out, weapons drawn and then, finally, my sister dragged away in handcuffs would leave me forever questioning the haleness of my choice.   In an effort to force treatment on a vulnerable person suffering from paranoid delusions, I went a football field or two in the wrong direction, the denouement of which was to utterly confirm her paranoia. Mental health patients are not of the same genus as gangsters, pedophiles and murderers yet we deal with them in exactly the same way.  Is it any wonder insanity is profligate in the world.

Truth

Truthfulness doesn’t have to be an external expression to have effect.  I hide my truth, I wrap it up in a cloak so thick that it is impermeable to even the purest oxygen. But I peek inside that cloak, I know what it holds enfolded in its tight-fisted embrace.  On occasion, very rare and only when circumstances somehow have mutated to such a degree that the familiar daily landscape of my life has become alien, do I allow a fleeting glimpse to others of what lies nestled in the germ of my conscience.  The allowed viewing is not done in anxious nervousness with shaking fingers but rather with a flourish, as if, once having decided to bare my truth I bare all. The outside participant must be quick to catch it for no sooner has the seal been broken, the innermost sanctum penetrated by light and air, than it is obscured once again, withdrawn within my self.

And so I found myself this day in July. This day so surreal  a viable mist had enveloped all that was habitually known to me.  This day, standing next to my sister’s hospital bed, the middle of it cranked up to its apex and she perched atop declaring the air so fresh and invigorating there on Mount Everest. She would slide down the bump she had made of the bed as if tobogganing and clamber her way up again. The physical exertion of her exercise had given her jaundiced face an almost rosy glow. She seemed happy, joyous and this irritated me enormously. I, who normally prized my patience in the face of almost everything (some may call it apathy) had grown weary of the delirium. There was nothing amusing about watching a grown woman, her legs and belly distended by cirrhotic fluid retention, blissfully ignorant to her imminent demise, display for the world a mind pocked by disease. A disease of her own choosing, I kept trying to convince myself.  Not a scintilla of sympathy was I able to net in bearing witness to this spectacle. No maudlin childhood memories of happier days paraded their way through my awareness to buffer the tragedy unfolding before me. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.  Had my heart hardened to this stranger in front of me?  While grappling with this paradox, anger forcing its way up my throat, the unravelling drew me into its fold. It gave me the answer. She, this sad, bloated facsimile of my once vibrant sister, was my mirror. She was my future, my present and my past. It humiliated me. It terrified me. The reflection so powerful it blinded me.

Tectonic plates shifted, the volcano lunged and I exploded at my mother,  ”Why aren’t you doing anything to stop her?”

My mother’s breath caught in her throat, her face all shades of hurt and shock. Silenced by my outburst she just stared quietly at the great lump on top of the bed, perched and ready for another slide down the face of her mountain.

“Where is the nurse?  It’s got to be time for her medication. I cannot stand to watch this any more in good tempered acquiescence.” I continued, ignoring the pain I was inflicting.

I knew in that instant that I had revealed my truth to my mother. I knew, that if she hadn’t been so all-consumed by the parody taking place on the bed, she would have seen my fear, my reality for even as it was fleeting so it was blatant. She would have seen and said nothing.

Discomfitted by my own revelation, agitated by the stark insanity pervading the atmosphere, I left the room. As the door closed behind me I believed that the reality the room contained would be imprisoned in there by that door. I felt that I was exiting the rabbit hole, the mist dissipating in the cacophony of midday traffic. The noise, the smells, the crowds, this was my stress. This was the stress I knew intimately and could juggle blind-folded.  Even as I absorbed the everyday  and felt comforted by it, I knew where my path lay. And it wasn’t forward into the clamour of the city but back into the disjointed, deformed charade of my sister’s hospital room.  I sat for a moment, lit a cigarette and emptied my thoughts, discarded my anger and quietly folded the cloak back around the kernel of truth pulsating inside. It would always be waiting there for me if and when I dared befriend it.  There was no urgency  I was convinced, a realization which induced a deceleration of my heartbeat and brought a fragile peace of its own. Although it was a tranquility that balanced on the exquisite dance of avoidance, it would suffice for me, for now. I floated in thoughtlessness for some minutes, smoking automaton fashion and then with a great sigh I returned, in the grand style of Sisyphus, to the hospital. To the room.