Okay. Remember yesterday�s entry where I was on the floor making major decisions about my life? I�ve decided to move myself off the floor, take you past the bit in which I chose to chat up the receptionist at the mental health clinic instead of go in to work, also breeze by the days I spent explaining why I should keep my job, and just move right on to my first appointment with Dr. Science.
I realized from the moment I walked into the waiting room, which if I recall correctly had no artwork on the walls � just posters for mental health � that I didn�t really belong there. If ever I thought honestly to myself, �Mr. Node, you are not at all crazy, you are strategically escaping the responsibilities of adulthood by pretending to have a nervous breakdown, which means that you really are experiencing a nervous breakdown but have hidden that knowledge from yourself in order to deal with it properly, but going to a publicly funded shrink is certainly not the best way to do it�, here would have been the point at which that convoluted sentence would have floated closest to the surface of my consciousness. Because I was alone in that room, alone in my straightness of tooth and purity of cognition, utterly alone in the clarity and focus of my gaze, the health of my body and the fit of my clothes. I was not some poor bastard born already broken into this world, currently shuffling between shelter and street. And it was pretty obvious, given the unfocused pupils of most of the people there, I was completely alone in my sobriety. Everybody else was dosed to the gills.
After a half hour or so of watching fatherly psychiatrists in soft wool sweaters shepherd hapless shuffling people in and out of the waiting room, Dr. Science appeared and called my name. He was precisely as I had pictured him � portly, with a trim beard, his tie in a Windsor knot. Certainly he was not the soft wool sweater and corduroy type. He took me into his office, brought me a cup of instant coffee with artificial whitener, and asked me if I minded having an intern sit in on my session. With some surprise I realized that the intern was already in the room, placed patiently in a corner. He was so still that I had taken him for a model of a human being set there for some therapeutic purpose. His name was Jimmy and he seemed to be having trouble staying awake.
Dr. Science let me take a sip of my coffee before asking brightly what my problem was. I began to unreel my tale of hardship, my difficulties as a child and then as a teenager, my inability to concentrate, my agoraphobic behaviour, my unshakeable life-long sense that I'm constantly trying to brush a cognitive cogweb from my face. Do you worry that you will cause yourself harm? He said. I replied that my bad days outnumbered my good ones, and that at a certain point my account of good days would be irretrievably in arrears, and when that point arrived I would go for some big-time harming of self, yes. And isn�t it already harmful to the self to be in this condition? Dr. Science nodded and studied the steel barrel of his pen. Behind him in the corner Jimmy had fallen asleep.
Tell me, Dr. Science said: Do you know anything about science? For some reason the question didn�t strike me as an assholeish non sequitur, so I answered that yes, despite being an English major I did know a bit about science. That�s good, he replied, handing me a piece of paper with a graphic of a human brain and a number of arrows pointing in all kinds of directions. He pulled his chair up next to me and began to explain to me the anatomy of the brain and the nature of neurotransmitters, indicating the important areas of the graphic with his eager stainless steel pen. I realized with great pleasure that Dr. Science did not want to hear me talk about my problems or begin to untangle the endless tiny slights and mild traumas of my childhood. He wanted to push some drugs on me and get the next butt in the seat as quick as possible. He was everything that was wrong with psychiatry and he was exactly what I wanted.
I nodded along as he described the effects of serotonin and norepinephrine. He then told me that if I were to take a drug which selectively inhibited the reuptake of serotonin, I would likely acquire a sunnier outlook on life, that I would be amazed every time I checked my account of days to find my balance accruing on the side of good. Then he wrote me a prescription for P@xil, handed me eight weeks� worth of free samples and told me to come back in six months.
