If you are insane …. move to Vancouver
“I want to know if I am crazy or sane”
I said to my family doctor, immediately after the usual greeting and after he asked me his usual “Sooooo! what can I do for you today?”
The doctor looked surprised.
He didn’t know what to say.
He asked me to explain.
I reminded my family doctor of my brother’s first psychotic episode, that had preceded my visit to the doctor by about two months. The doctor nodded to indicate that he remembers. So I continued to explain how since my brothers hospitalization in the psychiatric ward, all the meeting with all the doctors, the medications, time spent observing the other crazies in the psychiatric ward made me start thinking
“What if I am crazy too”
“Perhaps I am insane like my brother but nobody has noticed”
“Perhaps I am mentally ill but in milder form and hence nobody has noticed it”
“Perhaps this thing is genetic, perhaps it runs in the family, perhaps we are all insane”
“If this thing is genetic then perhaps if I have children they will have the mental illness as well” (I didn’t have children at the time but was thinking about having children)
“Perhaps I am sane now but will become insane later”
Doctor! …. I have so many questions that I need answers to.
The doctor took a deep breath and started asking me questions about my job, my marriage, my relationship with my family, relationship with friends.
Then he explained to me that mentally ill people have a hard time staying in the same job for a long time, staying in a marriage, maintaining a good relationship with friends and family.
The doctor said:
“From what you have told me about your life it seems that you have a fairly stable life, you have been in the same job for years, you have been married for years as well, you have a positive relationship with many people, you are telling me that you don’t take drugs nor drink alcohol, most people that experience metal illness start displaying symptoms in their teens or early twenties, since you haven’t displayed any symptoms thus far there is a very small chance you will have mental illness later on in life. So I don’t understand why you have these concerns”
I explained to the doctor how I sometimes feel down, even depressed, how I sometimes feel sad even though there is no particular reason for it, how I sometimes wakeup in the morning and wish I didn’t have to go to work.
“And when you experience the feeling that you don’t want to go to work, what do you do?” asked me the doctor
“I force myself to go to work anyway” I told the doctor.
“Aha!” said the doctor “That is the difference, all of us experience those feelings, but some of us know how to function despite of it but for others those feeling take control”
So the good doctor assured me that I am most likely sane, that I shouldn’t worry about it.
But back in my mind for years there was a little nagging voice
Family friends have the most interesting cure suggestions for my brother’s insanity. My favorite is
Ali: Why don’t you find him a bride and merry him off to somebody.
ihath: My brother is schizophrenic, what woman would want to marry him?
Ali: You know! …. don’t you have an eligible cousin in Iraq that is marrying age?
ihath: Yes, we have many female cousins that fit the category, but don’t you think that it would be unfair to inflict a man who hears voices inside his head and needs his family to remind him to take a shower on a young woman of any nationality?
Ali: Yeah! but maybe if he got married he would feel better.
ihath: The man can’t take care of him self, how is he supposed to take care of a wife?
Ali: You can help him.
And they say that my brother is crazy …. sigh!
Then there are those that after deep thinking come up with a brilliant explanation for my brother’s predicament.
Sa’eed: You know, I figured out why your brother is not feeling well.
ihath: (thinks to herself: oh boy! here we go again) Aha! please tell me.
Sa’eed: You brother received a shock to his system when he moved to Canada, the cultural change was too much for him and that effected him. It’s living in Canada that drove him insane.
ihath: Aha! ….. and ….. what do you suggest we do now.
Sa’eed: You must get him to move back to living in the middle east.
ihath: In the middle east they lock up people like my brother and throw the key away. People like him are kept out of sight. If we were living in the middle east we wouldn’t be having this discussion because we would all be pretending that we don’t know my brother. If you are going to be insane, Canada is probably the best country to be insane in.
( I rattle off about the long list of services available for the mentality ill in this country).
Sa’eed: But while I lived in the middle east I never heard about schizophrenia, its only since I moved here, therefore it must be this country that is causing it.
And they say that my brother is crazy …. sigh!
Then there is all the crazy stuff that we his family do thinking that we are helping him.
Like the time my brother’s therapist chastised me for continuously bugging my brother about his smoking.
“He is battling suicidal thoughts, do you think he needs the added pressure and anxiety that comes when people try to quit smoking?” he told me.
What a self righteous prim and proper ass hole I can be sometimes.
“But smoking is bad for his health” I wanted to reply …. luckily I managed to stop myself from saying it.
And then I say that my brother is insane …. sigh!
10 years later from my appointment with the good doctor and many more psychotic episodes and trips to the psychiatric ward, I have learned to accept my brother as is, craziness and all.
So in the last episode he decided to attack a policeman and was arrested before he was moved to the psychiatric ward. In our family we have the standard routine for such an event. I go over to my parents house. My mother prepares the standard bag with the standard stuff in it: a change of clothes and cigarettes. No need for food, they feed them up the ying yang there but don’t provide them with cigarettes. Then my dad and I go to visit him. We already know the visiting hours and all the dos and don’t at the psychiatric ward. My mother never comes with us, she spends all the time crying and causes the other crazy people there to become even more upset.
Do not mention the word crazy, nuts or insane in the psychiatric ward. It doesn’t bother the crazies but it seems to deeply offend the nurses working there.
Do not attempt to strike up a conversation with any of the other visitors, the newbies are usually so distressed they don’t want to talk to anybody.
You can tell the newbies from the hardened family members from the look on their faces. Shock, disorientation and disbelief versus “here we go again” look.
The doctors and nurses never wait the white lab coat as in Hollywood movies. One nurse explained to me that the white coast has too much of a stigma attached to it and the mentally ill are terrified of the white lab coat wearers and so all the staff wear regular street clothes.
Do not ask any of the other patients why they are in there, they actually will tell you and frequently you will hear stuff you didn’t want to hear.
Finally, everybody knows that you do not mess with the big burly security guards, they can put you in a straight jacket faster than you can say “I am a visitor”.
So my dad and I walk into my brothers room and see that he has bruises all over his body.
“So, the police decided to teach you a lesson you will never forget” … I asked my brother.
My brother shakes his head,” the police didn’t do this to me, I did it to myself. I started banging my head against the wall in the detention cell they placed me in at the police station. When the psychiatrist couldn’t calm me down they brought me here in an ambulance”.
How lucky that we live in Vancouver, because in the middle east if somebody had attacked a policeman they would certainly receive a lesson they would never forget.
When my brother is released from the hospital, I go to visit him at his apartment and I am pleasantly surprised to when I walk into a clean and neat one bed room apartment.
ihath: “Hey! brother ….how come your apartment is so clean?”
brother: “I knew you were gonna come”
I feel rather flattered that he bothered to clean his apartment just because of me. “He must be feeling well, this must be a good day” I think to myself.
After we chat for a while I notice that there is no food is his apartment and so I suggest that we go do some grocery shopping, I take him to the corner grocery shop and try to interest him in various produce.
“yum! yum! look cookies ….. would you like cookies?”
my brother doesn’t look interested but I place the cookies in the shopping basket anyway.
“Hmmmmmmmm! look instant noodles in a cup ….. surly even crazy people like those”
my brother gives me a sly smile
“What else should we buy? bread, cheese, milk, cereal, what else do you want?
my brother doesn’t care and shows no interest. So I just buy what I think he might need and we go back to his apartment.
Afterwards I decide to take my brother for brunch at the elbow room café in downtown Vancouver. This place is full of character. It is run by these gay men whose motto is “The customer is always wrong and the abuse is free”. The waiter is greeting all the male customers by calling them doll or queen , he calls me a sweetie. I usually like going there because the food is good and the place has character, but as soon as we walk in I realize that I made a mistake. While going to funky place is fun, bringing a mentally unstable person to such a place can be difficult. For one thing my brother is confused by why the waiter is calling him doll, I keep explaining to him that this part of the gay atmosphere of the café. When the waiter comes to take our order, my brother asks a question about one of the menu items then he asks the same question about three times in different ways. Typical behavior for my brother. In cafés where the motto is “the customer is always right” the waiter would patiently answer the same question 4 times but this isn’t one of those cafes. The waiter gets annoyed and says “What is wrong with you? Did the doctor drop you on your head after you were born? Are you crazy?”
My brother and I look at each other and start laughing hysterically, we are both thinking of the same thing. “Yes! I am crazy” my brother says, “Yes!, he is crazy I say”. We keep on laughing.
The waiter looks surprised, he didn’t know that what he had said was that funny.
I am absolutely certain that my brother is crazy, as for me, I guess I will live forever in doubt about my sanity. But a wise doctor taught me that worrying too much about it is a waste of time.
I said to my family doctor, immediately after the usual greeting and after he asked me his usual “Sooooo! what can I do for you today?”
The doctor looked surprised.
He didn’t know what to say.
He asked me to explain.
I reminded my family doctor of my brother’s first psychotic episode, that had preceded my visit to the doctor by about two months. The doctor nodded to indicate that he remembers. So I continued to explain how since my brothers hospitalization in the psychiatric ward, all the meeting with all the doctors, the medications, time spent observing the other crazies in the psychiatric ward made me start thinking
“What if I am crazy too”
“Perhaps I am insane like my brother but nobody has noticed”
“Perhaps I am mentally ill but in milder form and hence nobody has noticed it”
“Perhaps this thing is genetic, perhaps it runs in the family, perhaps we are all insane”
“If this thing is genetic then perhaps if I have children they will have the mental illness as well” (I didn’t have children at the time but was thinking about having children)
“Perhaps I am sane now but will become insane later”
Doctor! …. I have so many questions that I need answers to.
The doctor took a deep breath and started asking me questions about my job, my marriage, my relationship with my family, relationship with friends.
Then he explained to me that mentally ill people have a hard time staying in the same job for a long time, staying in a marriage, maintaining a good relationship with friends and family.
The doctor said:
“From what you have told me about your life it seems that you have a fairly stable life, you have been in the same job for years, you have been married for years as well, you have a positive relationship with many people, you are telling me that you don’t take drugs nor drink alcohol, most people that experience metal illness start displaying symptoms in their teens or early twenties, since you haven’t displayed any symptoms thus far there is a very small chance you will have mental illness later on in life. So I don’t understand why you have these concerns”
I explained to the doctor how I sometimes feel down, even depressed, how I sometimes feel sad even though there is no particular reason for it, how I sometimes wakeup in the morning and wish I didn’t have to go to work.
“And when you experience the feeling that you don’t want to go to work, what do you do?” asked me the doctor
“I force myself to go to work anyway” I told the doctor.
“Aha!” said the doctor “That is the difference, all of us experience those feelings, but some of us know how to function despite of it but for others those feeling take control”
So the good doctor assured me that I am most likely sane, that I shouldn’t worry about it.
But back in my mind for years there was a little nagging voice
Family friends have the most interesting cure suggestions for my brother’s insanity. My favorite is
Ali: Why don’t you find him a bride and merry him off to somebody.
ihath: My brother is schizophrenic, what woman would want to marry him?
Ali: You know! …. don’t you have an eligible cousin in Iraq that is marrying age?
ihath: Yes, we have many female cousins that fit the category, but don’t you think that it would be unfair to inflict a man who hears voices inside his head and needs his family to remind him to take a shower on a young woman of any nationality?
Ali: Yeah! but maybe if he got married he would feel better.
ihath: The man can’t take care of him self, how is he supposed to take care of a wife?
Ali: You can help him.
And they say that my brother is crazy …. sigh!
Then there are those that after deep thinking come up with a brilliant explanation for my brother’s predicament.
Sa’eed: You know, I figured out why your brother is not feeling well.
ihath: (thinks to herself: oh boy! here we go again) Aha! please tell me.
Sa’eed: You brother received a shock to his system when he moved to Canada, the cultural change was too much for him and that effected him. It’s living in Canada that drove him insane.
ihath: Aha! ….. and ….. what do you suggest we do now.
Sa’eed: You must get him to move back to living in the middle east.
ihath: In the middle east they lock up people like my brother and throw the key away. People like him are kept out of sight. If we were living in the middle east we wouldn’t be having this discussion because we would all be pretending that we don’t know my brother. If you are going to be insane, Canada is probably the best country to be insane in.
( I rattle off about the long list of services available for the mentality ill in this country).
Sa’eed: But while I lived in the middle east I never heard about schizophrenia, its only since I moved here, therefore it must be this country that is causing it.
And they say that my brother is crazy …. sigh!
Then there is all the crazy stuff that we his family do thinking that we are helping him.
Like the time my brother’s therapist chastised me for continuously bugging my brother about his smoking.
“He is battling suicidal thoughts, do you think he needs the added pressure and anxiety that comes when people try to quit smoking?” he told me.
What a self righteous prim and proper ass hole I can be sometimes.
“But smoking is bad for his health” I wanted to reply …. luckily I managed to stop myself from saying it.
And then I say that my brother is insane …. sigh!
10 years later from my appointment with the good doctor and many more psychotic episodes and trips to the psychiatric ward, I have learned to accept my brother as is, craziness and all.
So in the last episode he decided to attack a policeman and was arrested before he was moved to the psychiatric ward. In our family we have the standard routine for such an event. I go over to my parents house. My mother prepares the standard bag with the standard stuff in it: a change of clothes and cigarettes. No need for food, they feed them up the ying yang there but don’t provide them with cigarettes. Then my dad and I go to visit him. We already know the visiting hours and all the dos and don’t at the psychiatric ward. My mother never comes with us, she spends all the time crying and causes the other crazy people there to become even more upset.
Do not mention the word crazy, nuts or insane in the psychiatric ward. It doesn’t bother the crazies but it seems to deeply offend the nurses working there.
Do not attempt to strike up a conversation with any of the other visitors, the newbies are usually so distressed they don’t want to talk to anybody.
You can tell the newbies from the hardened family members from the look on their faces. Shock, disorientation and disbelief versus “here we go again” look.
The doctors and nurses never wait the white lab coat as in Hollywood movies. One nurse explained to me that the white coast has too much of a stigma attached to it and the mentally ill are terrified of the white lab coat wearers and so all the staff wear regular street clothes.
Do not ask any of the other patients why they are in there, they actually will tell you and frequently you will hear stuff you didn’t want to hear.
Finally, everybody knows that you do not mess with the big burly security guards, they can put you in a straight jacket faster than you can say “I am a visitor”.
So my dad and I walk into my brothers room and see that he has bruises all over his body.
“So, the police decided to teach you a lesson you will never forget” … I asked my brother.
My brother shakes his head,” the police didn’t do this to me, I did it to myself. I started banging my head against the wall in the detention cell they placed me in at the police station. When the psychiatrist couldn’t calm me down they brought me here in an ambulance”.
How lucky that we live in Vancouver, because in the middle east if somebody had attacked a policeman they would certainly receive a lesson they would never forget.
When my brother is released from the hospital, I go to visit him at his apartment and I am pleasantly surprised to when I walk into a clean and neat one bed room apartment.
ihath: “Hey! brother ….how come your apartment is so clean?”
brother: “I knew you were gonna come”
I feel rather flattered that he bothered to clean his apartment just because of me. “He must be feeling well, this must be a good day” I think to myself.
After we chat for a while I notice that there is no food is his apartment and so I suggest that we go do some grocery shopping, I take him to the corner grocery shop and try to interest him in various produce.
“yum! yum! look cookies ….. would you like cookies?”
my brother doesn’t look interested but I place the cookies in the shopping basket anyway.
“Hmmmmmmmm! look instant noodles in a cup ….. surly even crazy people like those”
my brother gives me a sly smile
“What else should we buy? bread, cheese, milk, cereal, what else do you want?
my brother doesn’t care and shows no interest. So I just buy what I think he might need and we go back to his apartment.
Afterwards I decide to take my brother for brunch at the elbow room café in downtown Vancouver. This place is full of character. It is run by these gay men whose motto is “The customer is always wrong and the abuse is free”. The waiter is greeting all the male customers by calling them doll or queen , he calls me a sweetie. I usually like going there because the food is good and the place has character, but as soon as we walk in I realize that I made a mistake. While going to funky place is fun, bringing a mentally unstable person to such a place can be difficult. For one thing my brother is confused by why the waiter is calling him doll, I keep explaining to him that this part of the gay atmosphere of the café. When the waiter comes to take our order, my brother asks a question about one of the menu items then he asks the same question about three times in different ways. Typical behavior for my brother. In cafés where the motto is “the customer is always right” the waiter would patiently answer the same question 4 times but this isn’t one of those cafes. The waiter gets annoyed and says “What is wrong with you? Did the doctor drop you on your head after you were born? Are you crazy?”
My brother and I look at each other and start laughing hysterically, we are both thinking of the same thing. “Yes! I am crazy” my brother says, “Yes!, he is crazy I say”. We keep on laughing.
The waiter looks surprised, he didn’t know that what he had said was that funny.
I am absolutely certain that my brother is crazy, as for me, I guess I will live forever in doubt about my sanity. But a wise doctor taught me that worrying too much about it is a waste of time.
There is a way between voice and presence where information flows.
In disciplined silence it opens.
With wandering talk it closes. .... Rumi
12:16 PMYeah, the Elbow Room is a great place. Actually, it sounds like it was a great place to take your brother. The straight-up ( ;) ) semi-playful tone is probably a great relief from the tip-toeing walking-on-eggs treatment he's used to getting.
BTW, the waiters especially enjoy it if you escalate the mutual abuse (within broad limits, of course). It's quite a release to not have to worry (much) about really offending someone.
8:35 AM
What a great post! an honest and painful view into the world of the mentally ill. I hope that your brother's diagnosis is established, if so then the doctor can surely give you some statistics on the heridibailty of Schizophrenia. The middle east has good hospitals but not those well established services as Europe and North America. The white coats are not worn so that shrinks and patients can mingle together with out intimidation; you will be surprised that some patients are better dressed than most doctors or nurses.
Your friend mentioned Canada as the reason for your brother's breakdown. That holds true in one thing, migration has proved to be a precipitating factor only becasue Schizophrenia is multi factorial and no one single thing has been proved to be its cause 100%.
Well done for looking after your brother, that takes courage more than anything else.
11:01 AM
You, my dear, are so right. I tried in the past to explain depression to my husband (also Iraqi) which runs in our family. He didn't get it "so people get sad, that's what life is!"
Many of the men here (the US in my case, not Canada) have post traumatic stress disorder. Very few of them get help.
By the way, I freakin love Vancouver. We went there last summer, and I'd move there if we could afford it!
5:59 PM
Crazy people often smoke. The ones I know are chainsmokers. I've heard this explained in two ways I consider plausible:
The first is that the feeling of hankering after a cigarette is close to the ordinary feeling of anxiety. You can see that in action when smokers are stressed. Suddenly, they start to smoke a lot more because they respond to anxiety as they would to a very similar feeling.
The other possible explanation is that the way nicotine affects you genuinely reduces anxiety. If that is true, then smoking is for the mentally unstable a sort of self-medication.
5:44 AM
"If you are insane … move to Vancouver"
Is there enough room for a few million bloggers?
10:21 AM
I think sane (or saneish) people have a little bit of all the kinds of craziness, and often worry about whether they are mad. Real crazy people are specialists - they have a lot of one of the kinds of craziness.
7:18 PM
F. in Amsterdam has it right - smoking cigarettes is a form of self-medication. I'm sure I would go quite insane if I had to live in Vancouver, to remain sane I require living a rural area with contact with lots of animals, I smoke cigarettes, and I'm fond of pot and beer as well. Having learned what I require I have become a very respectible and contributing member of society, I have a good job and I am a good parent. Without these things I expect I would be totally loony.
I'm sure there's probably good reasons why your brother oughtn't to investigate drugs and alcohol, I couldn't recommend that kind of treatment just because it works for me, but perhaps you could get him out to the country some time, maybe give him a chance to relate to animals. You never know, it's something perhaps as a city person you would never think of, but he might find the company of critters and/or the absence of his fellow humans as much of a relief as I do!
9:10 AM
Funny in a strange way how having a loved one afflicted with a mental disorder, paranoid schizophrenia in my loved one’s case, changes one’s perception about mental health. I used to believe that there was a great gulf or chasm between sanity and insanity. This is probably due to the fact that my only encounters with “insane” people were with the aluminum foil helmet wearing variety. For those unfamiliar with the helmet, it consists of a wig with an interior shield of aluminum foil which protects the wearer from radiation emitted by the FBI or CIA and designed to probe the mind of ordinary folks.
However, having spent the last 14 or so years living with an afflicted individual, I have come to believe or at least view sanity as more of a continuum rather than a great divide. The thoughts, “bad thoughts” in my wife’s terminology, are common, everyday thoughts experienced by all people. A sense of paranoia, that people are talking about something you did or how you did it, say for example, when a person is starting a new job and believes that all eyes are upon him or her, evaluating, weighing and watching. Have you ever witnessed a group of people talking and felt for one reason or another that they were talking about you? The difference, though, is how one manages those thoughts. In my wife’s case, “bad thoughts” are not processed. The thoughts stay in her mind, worrying her, depriving her of sleep, and ultimately her sanity. What starts as an ordinary self conscious thought, over time, replicates itself, and mutates into a full blown conspiracy theory.
The solution, at least for us, is that she tells me when she has “bad thoughts” and what they consist of. I, in turn, listen, and then I ask her questions about what actually happened, what she heard or observed. I don’t provide answers or solutions, but rather order, or structure for her to use in resolving or addressing her thoughts. Perspective, in a word. Her problem is not that she all of a sudden has thoughts that the CIA is “interested in her,” but rather, she has ordinary, common distressing thoughts which she cannot manage on her own. In the past, these thoughts would deprive her of sleep and snow ball into a full blown CIA conspiracy where she, as insignificant but precious as any human can be, is the center of attention. Funny in both a humorous and a strange way.
My wife is sane now. She can laugh at herself, at the same time shaking her head, thinking how crazy or insane she was at different times in the past. But she is not “normal”. She lacks an automatic shutoff switch for “bad thoughts”. Her mental/emotional engine came without a reliable governor. Left alone, with her thoughts, she would eventually become disturbed.
As I said earlier, rightly or wrongly, I now view sanity as more of a continuum, rather than a great divide between the sane and insane. While different in form and specific function, I even see productive, gainfully employed, social people donning what are essentially foil lined wigs, mechanisms which they created to protect their head from threats created in their head, but neither the threat nor the defense having any existence or function in my reality.
6:59 PM
great post. great comments. thanks
1:58 PM
jo-ann said
I have been through the mental health system and I think that moving makes insanity for those prediposed to it.
I often wish I could wake up and be normal.
WEll done for looking after your brother.
» Post a Comment