by Mary Pilon
Television and radio played a part, as the perfect time to communicate with the voices of the dead, Lettie said, was after Lawrence Welk, as the vibrations were the highest. She often laid out sacred objects of Roger’s to help conjure his voice: red puppets he had played with; his favorite type of apples, picked fresh; a postcard-sized framed pencil drawing of two cats that once hung above his small bed.
My mother went on to study psychology and work with people who, among other things, said they heard voices and were struggling to keep a steady hold on reality. Instead of being spooked, or romanticizing Lettie’s struggle, my mother became curious and made it her job to try and understand them. People who heard voices were not presented to me as a child as dangerous or scary. They were friends, neighbors, fellow citizens. Often, they were suffering, needed help, and lacked support. They had a different story to tell, but it was still that—their own story. They were, literally, in our blood.
Perhaps it was no surprise then that by the time I began reporting The Kevin Show in the summer of 2014, the annals of crazy had become my microniche on the sports desk at the New York Times. It was then that Andy Lehren, a colleague of mine there, breezed by my desk one day and mentioned that he had heard of “an Olympic sailor with some weird mental illness,” I reluctantly, and skeptically, made some calls. While reality television was more than ubiquitous at that point, as was social media and our collective push toward being our own publicists online, I had no idea how the themes of the story would only amplify more loudly over the ensuing years.
Fast-forward to November 2016, when, with the aid of Russian hackers, Donald J. Trump, a reality television star with no political credentials and an exhaustive platform of racist, homophobic, sexist, and otherwise bigoted ideals, won the U.S. presidency. Among other things, he used the idea of a distorted reality (now, infamously, “fake news”) as a weapon with lasting impact. The surreal became real.
One of many things that fascinated me about the election as I reported The Kevin Show was the flippant use of mental health terms like “crazy” or “from the loony bin” or “insane” to describe Trump. Marisa Lancione, a blogger with bipolar disorder who frequently writes about her experience on Mad Girl’s Lament, has called for people to stop calling Donald Trump mentally ill, noting that “when we equate a person like Trump with mental illness we’re creating a false equivalency.” While Trump’s behavior is far beyond societal norms (the diagnoses of sociopath or narcissistic personality disorder are most often bandied about), Trump isn’t representative of the mental health community, most of whom don’t share his misogynistic, bigoted, and xenophobic views.1
It was against this tumultuous backdrop that in the fall of 2016, the Halls moved back to the United States from New Zealand. Amanda would be closer to her roots and her family and Kevin could find more coaching opportunities. Being stateside also meant that they would have a more robust support system as Kevin continues his transition from professional athlete to writer, coach, and mentor. After packing up their boxes, children, and their dog, they settled in Hudson, New York, just a short train ride up from where Kevin had his Grand Central episode years ago.
It hasn’t been easy. Kevin was hospitalized once during the winter. He considered killing himself because of an overwhelming feeling that he was going to let his family down and never be a good enough dad, that life as himself was impossible. “I wasn’t psychotic,” Kevin said. “I just wanted not to wake up.” He spent his time there copying passages from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Moby-Dick and earned the nickname of Yoda from his fellow patients for his wisdom and insights. And his sense of humor remained intact. With Trump in office, Kevin said, “at least my mental illness is trendy.”
In the hospital, Kevin once again asked doctors about how medications worked and if he could learn more about gradually getting off of them. He was told that would be virtually impossible. One of his dialectical behavior therapy groups focused on identifying patterns and giving ways to help cope with stress, and with these new tools in hand, Kevin decided to go medication-free on his own.2
A few days after he was released, Amanda heard Kevin singing in the shower—a sign that he could be spinning up—and asked him about it. Kevin told her he was off of his meds and that he was willing to die trying to stay off of them. He said he felt that, for twenty-eight years, he had lived “chemically incarcerated.” Amanda took a sip of wine and told Kevin she knew that he could do it, pointing to his drug-free run ahead of the Olympic trials years ago. They knew more now than they knew then. “We’ll do it together,” she said. “I love you.”3 Then, not long after Kevin’s release, he received the news that his father, Gordon, with whom connections were still strained, had died suddenly while riding his bicycle in California.
Just two days before, Kevin had talked to Amanda about being ready to see him again. He had spent the moments before Gordon’s death listening to John Denver and the Beatles, albums he knew his father loved. “I felt like I spent a day with him,” Kevin said. Amanda received the call from Kristina that Gordon had passed away, and when she told Kevin, he said that although he felt sadness, he maybe even experienced a sense of relief. “I collapsed and I picked myself up,” he said. “He was a good man. He believed in justice and trying hard, being responsible, and owning your own behavior. I’m glad I have a lot of that in me.”
Kevin reports feeling grounded, healthy, connected. He wonders: How many of his “relapses” were due to the drugs rather than his own mind? How has his brain changed and grown since his original diagnosis in Boston? He’s increasingly feeling comfortable talking to friends and family about his mental health odyssey, but what of others who still feel stigmatized?
The conversation around medication and treatment can get wonky, jargon-filled, and politically loaded pretty quickly. But it’s a critical one; half of all Americans will have a mental health crisis, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and it would be virtually impossible to draw up one single type of treatment path for every one of them. Thinking about mental health in terms of our legal system, prisons, schools, workplaces, homeless shelters, and beyond can be dizzying, and the desire for a quick and easy fix is often well-intended; it’s hard to experience suffering or see it in others, to say nothing of its unwanted companion, helplessness. Many solutions, including Kevin’s evolving treatment, are long and arduous; medication or no, they involve investments of patience and compassion. If only it were as simple as taking pills.
Aunt Lettie lingers in my mind; it’s hard not to think of her communicating with Roger as her own way of coping with an unfathomable tragedy, along with her own difficult childhood. I now find it remarkable and fortunate that she was received by family and friends who asked questions, and lived a life of her own on the farm, in spite of what were widely perceived as heavy eccentricities.
It would be foolish to pretend that Kevin’s story, or that of any one person, contains all of the answers. In some ways, it leaves me with more questions than when I set out with my first phone calls. I spent more than three years reporting a story about a man who called himself (jokingly) “the village idiot” only to find myself at times more confused by the village than its purported nutcase.
Kevin is rethinking the narrative of his own diagnosis, instead wondering if what he experienced in Boston was more of a spiritual crisis rather than what he feels may be the overly simplistic label of bipolar disorder. The problem with the label of a diagnosis, Kevin said, however well intended, is that it leads some people to believe they’re permanently defective, and it may serve the labelers more than the labelees. (He also points out that while he can’t recommend a solution for everyone, and that in many cases drugs have saved lives, John Nash stopped taking his psychiatric medication4 in 1970, a fact that was in the book A Beautiful Mind, but not in the feature film adaptation.)
“The message is ‘We know exactly what’s wrong and you must stay within the DSM and comply with our r
egimen,’ ” Kevin said. “And here are all these other broken people who go on to do things. It’s a setup that doesn’t empower you. I’m not broken. How about ‘You’re human and you’re trying to handle something. Let’s heal you so you can have your life.’ ”
The descriptions and implications of Kevin’s delusions have stuck with me, even though I wasn’t present for any of them. They’ve also become a filter through which I now see the world, as I’m continuously fascinated with our (and, at times, my own) willingness to invade a sense of presence to create that perfect Instagram,5 however staged it may be, even as we’re often missing the very things we’re supposed to be capturing: our lives. It’s becoming harder and harder not to think that for many of us, every corner of the world is a photo set. Now some lives are actually ending in selfie deaths: people falling into canyons through the inattentive use of the gadgets. At best, however, filming can bear witness to racial discrimination, sexual harassment, or other ills that now can be chronicled with justice-seeking voices. This is not to be dismissed. But at worst, there’s Steve Stephens, who posted video of his murder of a man on Facebook in April 2017 and even more grimly, how millions of people watched. How prescient Susan Sontag was when in 1977 she wrote that cameras are “fantasy machines whose use is addictive.”6
When our screens are up, and we’re all somehow creating our own versions of The Show, how connected are we, really? How are we to draw the line between what is real and what is distorted? What is sane or crazy in our own version of heeding the Director? Isn’t everything—language, culture, customs, societal norms—made up? Yet we choose this, day in and day out, many of us acknowledging that our engagement with a distorted reality often makes us less happy, adding a strange, masochistic tone to the behavior of our current moment. None of this is new. For Lettie, it was a radio show of sorts. For Kevin, it was television with a dash of Google Glass. For many of us, it’s social media.
Roger’s cat drawing from the séances passed from Lettie to my mother, and then to me after her death in 2004. I still keep it on my desk in New York as a reminder that the Director, whether being beamed into Lettie’s farm, in Legoland, in our own head or that of someone we know or care about, isn’t ever really that far away.
Kevin considers his children who are growing up in today’s complicated digital landscape.
“The message is ‘We measure whether your fake show is watched more than my fake show,’ ” Kevin said. “I’m glad I didn’t have to go through that, too. It was all in my head. But now it’s real and terrifying. It’s hard to shake a nineteen-year-old who has been raised with every fiber of his existence in a meritocracy machine construct, then say ‘None of that matters.’ ”7
How fitting, then, that it was the age-old storyteller Shakespeare whose work made a cameo in Kevin’s first episode in Boston. All the world is a stage more than ever before.
Maybe Truman Show Disorder isn’t as rare as we think.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
This book is the result of hundreds of hours of interviews with more than fifty people, a review of hundreds of pages of medical records, research, reports, journal entries, correspondence (handwritten and digital), sailing footage, police reports, and a variety of other documents. Given the nature of the topic and some of the incidents described, not every single detail was confirmable by two or more sources. To the best of my ability, I have tried to detail that in the endnotes, along with where and how I came about information. Not even the best work of journalism can be a perfect work of the truth, rather a version of the truth, an irony that’s not lost on me as I write a book about a man who grapples with reality. If anyone has suggestions for how better to report out someone’s inner world, I’m all ears.
In addition, per Wall Street Journal and New York Times ethics policies, I have not, nor will I, accept funding from conflicted parties, such as pharmaceutical companies, Scientologists, or any political organizations.
RECOMMENDED READING AND MENTAL HEALTH RESOURCES
The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
—JACK KEROUAC, The Portable Jack Kerouac
First and foremost, I highly recommend Kevin’s memoir about his own experience, Black Sails White Rabbits, which is cited throughout this text. You can find out more about the book and Kevin’s latest work on his website, kevinahall.com and the audio book of Black Sails is a particularly vivid way of getting into the story.
Joel and Ian Gold’s book Suspicious Minds: How Culture Shapes Madness is the definitive work on the “Truman Show” delusion, as well as a fascinating exploration of how cultural influences can inform madness. It was the brothers Gold’s work that first tipped me off to Kevin’s story, and their contributions to the field have been enormous.
At the risk of stating the obvious, The Truman Show is a must-see film, but also one of the best rewatches for those looking to revisit the rare film about technology that truly stands the test of time.
MENTAL HEALTH MEMOIRS
Manic by Terri Cheney
Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
Marbles by Ellen Forney
An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison
The Center Cannot Hold by Ellyn Saks
Darkness Visible by William Styron
BOOKS ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH
The Alchemy of Mind by Diane Ackerman
Am I Bipolar or Waking Up? by Sean Blackwell
Psychosis and Spirituality: Consolidating the New Paradigm edited by Isabel Clarke
The Brain by David Eagleman (book and documentary series)
Illusions of Immortality: A Psychology of Fame and Celebrity by David Giles
Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis edited by Stanislov Grof and Christina Grof
The Stormy Search for the Self: A Guide to Personal Growth through Transformational Crisis edited by Christina Grof and Stanislov Grof
Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness by Will Hall
The Antidepressant Era by David Healy
Rational Mysticism by John Horgan
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature by William James
Exuberance by Kay Redfield Jamison
Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by Kay Redfield Jamison
To Walk on Eggshells by Jean Johnson
Myths about Suicide by Thomas Joiner
The Red Book by Carl Jung
A Farther Shore: How Near-Death and Other Extraordinary Experiences Can Change Ordinary Lives by Yvonne Kason and Teri Degler
The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch
After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path by Jack Kornfield
Shrinks: The Untold Story of Psychiatry by Jeffery A. Lieberman
A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar
Healing the Split: Integrating Spirit Into Our Understanding of the Mentally Ill by John E. Nelson
Fame: What the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity by Tom Payne
Far Side of Madness by John Weir Perry
Trials of the Visionary Mind by John Weir Perry
Breaking Down Is Waking Up: The Connection Between Psychological Distress and Spiritual Awakening by Russell Razzaque
What Is Self?: A Study of the Spiritual Journey in Terms of Consciousness by Bernadette Roberts
Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon (Solomon’s work for the New York Times Magazine and his TED talks are also invaluable)
The Healing Wisdom of Africa by Malidoma Patrice Somé
Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives by Frank J. Sulloway
Out of the Darkness: From Turmoil to Transformation by Steve Taylor
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk
Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters
Unshrinking Psychosis by John Watkins
Rethinking Madness: Towards a
Paradigm Shift in Our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis by Paris Williams
The Outsider by Colin Wilson
I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong
BOOKS ABOUT TESTICULAR CANCER
The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
BOOKS ABOUT SPORTS, SAILING, AND THE OLYMPICS
The Champion’s Mind by Jim Afremow
The Sports Gene by David Epstein
Players by Matthew Futterman
The Games by David Goldblatt
Winging It by Diane Swintal
POP CULTURE IN KEVIN’S DELUSIONS
LITERATURE
Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved” letters
Time Out of Joint (a nice Hamlet shout-out in the title) and the other works of Philip K. Dick
They by Robert A. Heinlein
Finnegans Wake, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses by James Joyce
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D. T. Max
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
The works of Rainer Maria Rilke
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The works of Kurt Vonnegut (the short story “Harrison Bergeron” in particular)
“Good Old Neon” (short story), Infinite Jest, The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, as well as his other fiction
MUSIC
The works of Alanis Morissette
“Lithium” by Nirvana
“ÜBerlin” by R.E.M. (along with all of the R.E.M. catalog)
“And She Was” by the Talking Heads
FILMS
12 Monkeys
A Beautiful Mind
E.T.
The Firm
The Frame
Inception
Ink
The Matrix
North by Northwest
Total Recall
Trading Places
Wicker Man
PODCASTS