Crazy is as Crazy Does

For awhile I worked as an attendant on the day shift at Psych Hospital in Iowa City. It was 1965. I was 21. Psych Hospital was part of the University of Iowa. They only accepted patients who had some reasonable prognosis of being returnable to society, no hopeless schizos, no catatonics. I worked on the women’s ward. There were mostly manic-depressives and depressives, a few schizophrenics, and a few teenage girls and young women who were committed by concerned relatives for what were really moral transgressions. The depressives got shock treatments, after which they were somewhat confused, disoriented, and missing part of their memory, but were generally less depressed. The manics and the schizophrenics we just had to deal with, although they were of course thoroughly thorazined and lithiumed.

The primary therapy at Psych Hospital was to inform the patients who really wanted to get out, that there was a way they could make that happen. They were essentially trained in how to act normal so that no one would know that they were crazy. If, after a certain amount of time, they didn’t get “better”, they would be sent to the big house, the state mental institution at Clarinda. It was a very effective therapy. I witnessed many miraculous cures of mental illness.

One of the patients on the ward was a young woman, mid-20’s, sexy. She was in for f**king a priest. She liked to f**k, and had been committed by a concerned relative. You could do that in those days. I was forced to resign from my post on the day shift at Psych, partly because of her. I had applied to be transferred to the night shift, where I had several friends. After submitting my application, I was called into the office and told my services were no longer required. The two reasons given were that I had been having an affair with the afore-mentioned priest-f**ker, and also, that I had been distributing communist literature to the patients. I was entirely innocent of these disgusting crimes, but, it so happened, I knew the two guys who were actually, respectively, guilty. They were friends of mine. They worked on the night shift. What could I do? I didn’t much like the job anyway.

While I was still working there, a good friend of mine wound up as a patient on the men’s ward, across the lobby from where I worked in the women’s ward. Bob Costler (the name has been changed) was someone I had known from my years at Iowa State. I was an Economics major, but all of my friends and associates were writers and poets in the English department. Costler was the best of the poets. He was short, stocky, red-headed, freckled, from some little Iowa town, and he had a lyric gift. He wrote ornate,evocative poetry, kind of like Dylan Thomas.

He moved to Iowa City awhile after I did, and one night, after ingesting some peyote or mushrooms or something, he had a psychotic break. I wasn’t there when it happened, but later I went to visit him across the hall at Psych Hospital, where he had been committed. We were sitting on a couch in the visiting area, a big room, about twenty people. He leaned over and said, “You see that guy sitting there on the other side of the room?”. I said, “Yeah, I see him.” “Is that me?”, he whispered. He was quite serious.

Later, in the mid-70’s, after Bob got out for good, I saw him a couple of times in California. He had a job at the Shell oil refinery in Richmond and had married an extraordinarily square woman. The sense I got from him was that he was as crazy as ever, but had learned an elaborate discipline which allowed him to pass. There was no more poetry. He considered it part of his illness. I sensed a fierce determination in him to never ever fall back into whatever the dark, fearsome place was that he had worked his way out of.

I think that’s how it is, for most, if not all of us. We learn to mask our insanity. Some of us are better at it than others. It’s called civilization.