Mental

by Jaime Lowe

  Sitting with Matt in the grass, outside the ward, I thought of the birthday mix tape. On it was Tom Waits’s song “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” a coal miner’s croaky anthem to regression, to the freedom of inhibition and youth. I think in a lot of ways, breakdowns are both a resistance to growing up and an acceleration of maturity. In his song Waits’s chorus loops, an insistent, chanting anthem: “I don’t wanna have to shout it out / I don’t want my hair to fall out . . . I don’t wanna grow up.” That acid-throated voice was going through my head; I listened to it in the dayroom on my Walkman. I did not feel ready to grow up; I did not feel ready to be discharged from the ward, a place I had never wanted to be. It’s possible I didn’t even feel ready to have this day pass. To have this lunch with my brother. I could feel myself getting better; my manic and psychotic symptoms were diminished. Just having a sense of ever having been sick was thought of as real and important progress. But I wasn’t sure how much of the episode lingered: How would it alter me fundamentally? Did it change my personality? Did my mood disorder—a disease of the brain—change me? How did I see myself? How did others—family and friends included—see me?

  Lunatics have always been a curiosity. I could tell that Matt was curious, cautious. In eighteenth-century London, Bethlem Royal Hospital for the insane, aka Bedlam, was open to the public on visiting days, making all patients and residents more like zoo attractions than empathetic or equal humans. The idea was that civilians would bring “jollity and merriment” to otherwise depraved souls, but one visitor noted “a hundred people, at least, suffered, unattended to run rioting up and down the wards making sport of the miserable inhabitants.” Decades later a Russian visitor described seeing patients who grunted like a bear and another who walked on all fours. Outside the doors of Bedlam were two carved figures—statues that represented melancholy and mania. Victorian literature had a habit of sequestering mad women from society, stashing them in towers or attics, where they might chew at the wallpaper, itching and wailing into the night. Just think about Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in which the heroine of the narrative is introduced to the “lunatic” wife of Mr. Rochester: “What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell . . . but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face . . . The maniac bellowed: she parted her shaggy locks from her visage, and gazed wildly at her visitors.” The description is feral, animalistic, and wild—the pronoun Brontë uses is it, not her, as if the person is no longer present. When Matt came to visit, and when my friends tried to make idle conversation in the visitor’s room, I felt gawked at. I’m sure they heard or knew or sensed that something very serious was wrong with me. I was in the ward.

  In the late 1800s, as the medical field was looking toward more humane treatment, the mentally ill were still considered an enigma and sequestered into unfathomable conditions. In 1887 the journalist Nellie Bly, a pen name for Elizabeth Cochran Seaman, published an account of her undercover experience as a patient at Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum, which she documented in serial for the New York World. While the treatment she witnessed was appalling—she writes in detail of her experience with abuse, inhumane conditions, malnutrition, and rampant untreated sickness—she’s most struck by the way the women are ignored. She writes, “I always had a desire to know asylum life more thoroughly—a desire to be convinced that the most helpless of God’s creatures, the insane, were cared for kindly and properly.” If I had been born in the late nineteenth century, when lithium was first being tested as a medicine, even to the most sympathetic ear—someone like Nellie Bly—I would have been considered among the most helpless of God’s creatures, just a haunted body with a corrupt soul and an inconsolable mind. Or worse, from 1909 to 1979, California had a state law that authorized forced sterilization of people judged to have “mental disease, which may have been inherited.” The researchers who uncovered the eugenics program (in my own state! still happening in my lifetime!) found that people were sterilized at very young ages, as young as seven. The average age of sterilization was the low teens—many of those sterilized were the same age I was when I was hospitalized. Maybe my paranoia was not so far off?

  Temperament itself is so tempestuous. One year after Jane Eyre was published, a medical oddity revealed one of the first examples of the brain’s effect on personality. On September 13, 1848, Phineas Gage was blasting rock while constructing a railroad in Vermont. While Gage was working, he brought his head near the blast hole and opened his mouth to speak. There was an explosion, and the large tamping iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain’s left frontal lobe. But, miraculously, he survived and lived for another eleven years. The injury left a lasting and dramatic effect on his personality. His friends who knew him before the accident described him as “no longer Gage.” After Gage’s death, one of the doctors who treated him, John Harlow, described the difference: “The equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation.”

  The idea that the brain influenced personality and emotion wasn’t new, but it wasn’t proven either. The brain and its propensity to define and control personality and emotion was still a relative mystery. This seemed relevant to me because at the most basic level Gage represented two people, one brain. Even if I didn’t have an actual rod through my brain, I felt like something had altered my personality. Something had shifted the direction of my thinking, my impulses. I was me, but I had been not me. Maybe I was permanently a different person because of the trauma of mania, and my brain was responding and forming around that?

  But I was not born in an era when the mentally ill were pitied and hopeless; I was born in an era when the medical field was beginning to understand and to treat mental illness, an era when mental illness has almost been fetishized. Doctors could identify symptoms and prescribe remedies, which was a relatively new method. Just a few months before I was hospitalized, public figures like Patty Duke, who had published her book A Brilliant Madness, were emerging to talk about and advocate on behalf of this newly recognized group of people. Wild people, tamed with pills, who were reintroduced into civilian life.

  Sitting on UCLA’s lawn, one thing was clear: Matt could recognize a calmer me. I had a slight tremor from the cocktail of meds, which my brother noticed. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a gang of muscular squirrels near our picnic spot and quickly explained that although I was fine and doing better, it looked like those squirrels had a plan and that we should probably flee the area. He laughed, I laughed, and then I said with urgency, “No really, we need to leave.” I felt certain that the squirrels were collaborating and planning a rabid feast of flesh. Our flesh. They looked big, they were flexing, and I was betting on them. They stared with the intensity of a thousand suns. They started to look like kangaroos to me, growing more giant with each nose wiggle and acorn nibble. I was not hallucinating anymore, I was seeing actual satanic squirrels: aggressive, bloodthirsty rodents on steroids.

  “Calm down,” Matt said. “It’s okay.”

  I was determined to be better and normal and okay. Our lunch expedition cut short, we scrambled out of the grassy hills with my view on squirrels permanently altered.<
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  CHAPTER 7

  IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES AND THE OMNIPOTENT DR. VISCOTT

  BEFORE NEVERLAND, before mania, before bipolar, before NPI and Dr. DeAntonio, before diagnosis, before my parents worried for my safety and for theirs, before I was predicting apocalypse in public places, before I falsely accused my dad of abuse, I was just Jaime. Sometimes Jaime Rose, occasionally Jaimer, or JR. I was born at Oakland Kaiser on November 20, 1976, the day before a big Michigan football game.

  My mom always told me that Preston, their friend and OB-GYN, caught me in a catcher’s mitt and that I didn’t cry. I had thick curly hair. When they brought me home to our house in Berkeley, Matt, age three, faked nice but secretly had a stash of sticks ready to poke through my crib gate. My nursery was cloaked with curtains that my mom made: big orange ladybugs geometrically lodged against a kelly-green backdrop. We lived in the Berkeley hills next to an elderly neighbor named Mrs. Potter who had an elderly dog named Muffy; he was disabled and carted around his janky back legs on wheels through the neighborhood, where dewy mornings smelled like night-blooming jasmine and eucalyptus. My time in Berkeley was short. When I was eighteen months old my parents split up and we moved to Los Angeles. My mom moved into an apartment on Almayo Avenue in West Los Angeles and started her master’s in screenwriting at the American Film Institute (AFI). Irreconcilable differences and divorce were words I used in sentences by age three.

  My parents were divorced, but both partnered shortly after their separation—my mom met Jeff at the AFI, and my dad knew Marilyn from work. After a downstairs neighbor complained about my screaming from night terrors, my mom moved us into a duplex on Comstock Avenue near the Century City mall in West Los Angeles; my dad’s house was on a tree-lined street abutted by Paramount Studios. They made nice, happy homes. We had two rooms, two closets full of toys, two closets full of clothes, a dog at my dad’s house, a hamster at my mom’s. We were kind of dumb kids when it came to food—we thought celery hearts were an extravagant treat and that carob was chocolate. My dad picked us up Thursdays and drove the thirty to forty-five minutes between the houses; we would shout out a song to the tallest building on Larchmont, the 3-2-1 song for the 3-2-1 building and that meant we were almost home.

  I was a very verbal kid with unruly red hair that I refused to brush. Jack at Tipperary would scissor-cut my mane into a thick bowl, something that resembled a Michael Dukakis cut. I wore striped hand-me-downs from Matt, and I never wore matching socks. I was constantly mistaken for a boy. Freckles clustered on my face like constellations and I would say, objectively, that I was an impish troublemaker. My mom got me headshots and an agent like every other kid in LA. I posed in the orange tree in our backyard and grinned making sweet faces that were clearly forced. One picture looked real—an action shot of me in patchwork jeans, attacking a Wiffle ball with a yellow bat. Good swing, measured stance, fierce aggression and concentration. I auditioned for Jell-O commercials and hawked laundry detergent with other miniature hopefuls, but in my short three-month career—maybe eight auditions with two callbacks—I only landed one gig, as a leotard model for a catalog. It was obvious why: I had an outsized chubby belly, and when augmented by the dance clothes, I looked like a little piglet stuffed into spandex casing. I went to school. I had friends. I had Barbies. I made my Barbies have sex in the hot pink dream car with or without Ken. They were naked, they were headless, they lived tortured interior lives always striving for more and I continuously denied them fairy-tale happy endings. If Barbie was to live in the real world, my real world, she would have to work for success and contentment. Barbies had to learn about real life and disappointment and failure.

  I grew up with swimming lessons; quartered oranges at soccer practice; sleepovers; doting grandparents and stepgrandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins; and loving, involved parents and stepparents. We’d visit Jeff’s family on Lake Thompson in Maine.

  We’d go to Yosemite with my dad and Marilyn. I would resist hiking and play “pizza” with Marilyn, a game that involved running and operating a pizza parlor that served ghost food to babies made out of blankets.

  FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: MATTHEW, JEFF, MY MOM, LEEAN, AND ME IN MAINE.

  FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: MARILYN, MATT, ME, AND MY DAD, STEPHEN.

  Matt and I would spend the six-hour drives up to the redwoods recording ourselves on portable cassette tapes. My mom got a deal on a rental car once, returning it to Berkeley. Driving up the 5, I would sing Madonna lyrics while Matt played a cassette tape of himself reading entries from the Guinness Book of World Records. While reciting improbable weights and feats of strength, he repeatedly mispronounced words, reading lbs. as “libbles.” I only mention this because he was always smarter, more well read, and more academically diligent than I.

  We were kids of the 1980s: we grew up with The Muppet Show and Three’s Company and Mork and Mindy. My mom worked full time, so before I was old enough for kindergarten, I would be dropped off at an old lady’s house across the street from Westwood Elementary. Mrs. Brown would flip on Richard Simmons’ workout and I would lay on the carpet enchanted by his sequined short shorts and his high kicks. We listened to Schoolhouse Rock and we sang “Free to Be You and Me” like it was a Bible hymn. My mom had the original cast recording of A Chorus Line. I played that record till the grooves were dulled, dancing around the living room shouting, “Tits and ass won’t get you jobs, unless they’re youuuuuuuurs.” And then in deep baritone, I’d sing, “Have ’em all done, honey take my word, go see the wizard at Park and Seventy-Third! For?” And I’d cup my ear in mock call and response to an audience of no one, standing as tall as I could on top of our maroon velour couch, then shout again, “Tits! and ass! Yes tits! And ass! Can’t save your liiiiiiife, unless they’re youuuuuuuurs.” Bah bah bada bada dum. The fact that I was crooning about the glory of plastic surgery was lost on me. My dad had a more expansive record collection stacked with Sondheim and jazz and whatever hipster selections KCRW happened to be hawking that week. Our commutes were lessons in listening. One morning he popped in Tom Waits’s Bone Machine, and I had never been so audibly repulsed in my life. Matt would play those cassettes on loop and Tom Waits’s hangdog growl-shouting did not make sense to me. Not for a long time. Not until high school. Not until the ward, really. Not until I understood what it meant to not want to grow up. Not until I understood what it meant to love and to suffer and to disappear into a world of swordfish trombones. There was a loneliness to his voice but reassurance in knowing he always had an audience. He always had heart and heartbreak.

  As children of divorce, we had to contend with a ferkakte schedule. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we were at my mom’s; Thursday and Friday we were at my dad’s; and every other weekend we alternated houses. My favorite pastime was hitting a big red rubber ball against the driveway. My second favorite was hiding in a burro weed bush in the backyard in which I elected myself president of a “club” with no other members. On hot days at my mom’s we would walk over to the Century Plaza Hotel and sneak in—as a family—to the pool. To make it more authentic Matt and I would fake New York accents and talk about our magical West Coast vacation with long-drawn-out vowel-dominant syllables. We always could entertain each other. There were moments of intensity that would devolve into hysteria and my brother would chant: “Calm down, Jaime. Calm down.” Mary Karr once wrote, “In the entire history of anxiety worldwide, telling someone to calm down has worked zero times.” “Calm down” should only be used in response to watching someone win the lottery. I was not calm. Would never be calm. I would never want to be calm. Calming down was for suckers.

  At my dad’s house I would scale the back fence to climb on top of the garage roof to eat tiny pickles from the local Italian deli. I exercised enough magical thinking that in my long afternoons I had fantastical visions of being crowned a handball champion or becoming president or someday landing that first teeth-clashin
g kiss or even, most improbably, scoring a goal in soccer. We were normal kids. We climbed trees; we scabbed knees; we outgrew clothing; we set small fires; we went to the beach; we Xeroxed our faces; we ate pancakes; we ate waffles; we listened to Michael Jackson. I was a normal kid. Aside from constantly commuting and being unhealthily obsessed with musical theater, my childhood was normal, normal, normal with lots of love from every direction.

  When I asked my mom if there were ever any indications or hints at bipolar, she just laughed and said, “Well, you were a very dramatic kid.” Then went on to describe a typical scenario. At dinner, I might be kicking Matthew under the table and my mom said she would send me to my room for punishment. Outraged, I would throw my napkin on the floor and march up the stairs to my room and slam the door. Thirty seconds later, she remembered me emerging red with rage spreading across my freckled face and screaming, “AND I’M NEVER COMING BACK.” Then I would slam the door again, extra hard. About three minutes would pass and I would be back at the table eating homemade pizza. My mom said it was hard not to laugh at me, the tiny fury. “But that was just my personality, right?” I asked her. “Yeah, I mean that doesn’t seem bipolar to me, that just seemed like you.”