Janet’s review of Neurotic Styles (The Austen Riggs Center Monograph Series, No. 5) > Likes and Comments
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Liam wrote: "Great review as always, Janet! It sounds really interesting. This reminds me of a humorous incident from almost exactly twenty years ago. In 2006, as part of the never-ending quest of my family to ..."
As a fiction writer, I find psychology/psychiatry texts like this absolutely fascinating. I don't pathologies characters, but I find the descriptions of people's problems and processes, the variety of contents of human heads and hearts, riveting.
Well said, Janet. The diversity inherent in the human experience absolutely is riveting.
One of the most fascinating aspects of spending most of one's life living in the so-called "ghetto", at least to me, is the experience of living in close proximity to such a wide variety of people who have been designated as "flawed" or "broken" (i.e. "mentally ill", "emotionally impaired", "disturbed" or whatever terminology was in vogue when they were so designated) and ultimately, in most cases, "undesirable" to the mainstream of society. That undesirability, of course, applies to many if not most of us for various & sundry reasons aside from, and often regardless of, our mental health status!
The largest public out-patient mental health clinic in Michigan was located in the neighbourhood where my wife & I lived between 1992 and 2009, and many of its patients lived in its immediate vicinity. Needless to say, this tended to make a place which was already quite diverse and colourful even more so. The Lafayette Clinic was suddenly shut down with little or no warning around 1996, leaving patients suddenly with no access to care or even medication, which was (obviously) extremely traumatic & difficult for them. It was difficult to see one's friends & neighbours suffering and being completely incapable of helping in any meaningful way as well.
To some extent, there was a certain level of resemblance between our neighbourhood and the Berlin-Kreuzberg milieu in which you had your main character living at the end of 'White Oleander'; the College for Creative Studies campus (right behind the Detroit Institute of Arts) formed the North-East corner of our neighbourhood, so there were quite a few art students around in addition to all the non-student artists.
I sometimes have to laugh at myself when I try to explain that time and place to others. I get some strange reactions sometimes when I talk about what a wonderful place it was, then explain that not only was it so diverse that no ethno-cultural group had anything close to a majority, but also that of the people who lived there on a more-or-less permanent basis approximately 25% were prostitutes and/or drug dealers, 25% were musicians, 25% were artists, 10% writers (mostly poets & journalists but others as well), 10% were grad students or professors, and the remaining 5% were simply random working-class or lower middle-class people, many of whom were employed by one of the nearby educational institutions (CCS, Wayne State University & Wayne County Community College). Obviously, in an inner-city neighbourhood with that sort of diversity (not to mention eccentricity!), a larger than average number of schizophrenics won't be quite as noticeable as they would be in a "respectable" suburb!
A friend of ours, who I will call G., had been one of the patients under treatment for schizophrenia at the clinic. Like most of them, he had a fairly rough time when it was shut down, but was eventually able to stabilise himself. He used to engage in a lot of different behaviours that most people would probably see as bizarre and abnormal, and conversations with him were more often than not like verbal acid trips in a maze, but one of the primary methods he used to use to try and make sense of the world (and also attempt to divine the future) always fascinated me. He would photo-copy pages from the bible, cut them up, toss them until they were mixed, then pick them up and place them in lines while trying to ascertain what they meant. At the time, I was a young poet (I was fairly successful at this, and some of those I did readings with went on to be much more successful, but I don't write poems anymore), and his use of this method immediately made me think of Tristan Tzara (I know many if not most scholars nowadays credit the "cut-up method" to Brion Gysin, but many of them are also, from my perspective, ignorant & intellectually lazy- I doubt if Tzara invented it either, but he certainly used it before Gysin, Burroughs et al.).
G. has always had what I would describe as an extremely flamboyant sartorial style. Even when I was still a working musician and dressed accordingly, he sometimes made me seem positively drab in comparison. Neither my wife or myself have ever known anyone who dressed anything like G. (and he would probably have looked good in just about anything as he is a tall, thin but well-muscled Black man with a fairly dark complexion and, in those days, medium-length dreadlocks). One of his favourite outfits was a sort of matching surfer shorts & Cuban-style shirt ensemble made from bright blue fabric with a repeating pattern of vaguely cartoonish-looking white clouds, bright yellow ducklings and rainbows (!), accessorised with a large newsboy cap in a matching shade of bright blue, socks in very nearly the same shade (with slightly different yellow ducklings printed on them), and faux-alligator dress shoes in a slightly more subdued blue colour. We always used to wonder where he bought his clothes- I mean, where the hell could one obtain clothes like that, "The Crazy Guy Straight Pimpin' Boutique"??? G. had many different outfits that were more-or-less similar to that one in terms of being colourful, but that one was the best for my money. He always looked super-cool!
Predictably, when the gentrification really got into full swing things became a good deal less comfortable not only for G. but for all of us. We had not seen him since we all were scattered throughout the city during the time the old neighbourhood was being gentrified, but ran into him a couple of years ago- happily, aside from more white hair he seemed about the same. The last time we saw him was at the farmer's market where my wife has worked for many years. None of us dress quite as colourfully as we did thirty years ago, but as we stood there talking, the sidewalk teemed with ever-so-respectable suburbanites who stared at the three of us with undisguised horror and contempt as they made absurdly wide detours around us while walking past...
Liam, I suggest to read a book by Thomas Szasz which is called the myth of mental illness, it will help a lot to clear things about psychology, psychiatry.
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Liam wrote: "Great review as always, Janet! It sounds really interesting. This reminds me of a humorous incident from almost exactly twenty years ago. In 2006, as part of the never-ending quest of my family to ..."As a fiction writer, I find psychology/psychiatry texts like this absolutely fascinating. I don't pathologies characters, but I find the descriptions of people's problems and processes, the variety of contents of human heads and hearts, riveting.
Well said, Janet. The diversity inherent in the human experience absolutely is riveting.One of the most fascinating aspects of spending most of one's life living in the so-called "ghetto", at least to me, is the experience of living in close proximity to such a wide variety of people who have been designated as "flawed" or "broken" (i.e. "mentally ill", "emotionally impaired", "disturbed" or whatever terminology was in vogue when they were so designated) and ultimately, in most cases, "undesirable" to the mainstream of society. That undesirability, of course, applies to many if not most of us for various & sundry reasons aside from, and often regardless of, our mental health status!
The largest public out-patient mental health clinic in Michigan was located in the neighbourhood where my wife & I lived between 1992 and 2009, and many of its patients lived in its immediate vicinity. Needless to say, this tended to make a place which was already quite diverse and colourful even more so. The Lafayette Clinic was suddenly shut down with little or no warning around 1996, leaving patients suddenly with no access to care or even medication, which was (obviously) extremely traumatic & difficult for them. It was difficult to see one's friends & neighbours suffering and being completely incapable of helping in any meaningful way as well.
To some extent, there was a certain level of resemblance between our neighbourhood and the Berlin-Kreuzberg milieu in which you had your main character living at the end of 'White Oleander'; the College for Creative Studies campus (right behind the Detroit Institute of Arts) formed the North-East corner of our neighbourhood, so there were quite a few art students around in addition to all the non-student artists.
I sometimes have to laugh at myself when I try to explain that time and place to others. I get some strange reactions sometimes when I talk about what a wonderful place it was, then explain that not only was it so diverse that no ethno-cultural group had anything close to a majority, but also that of the people who lived there on a more-or-less permanent basis approximately 25% were prostitutes and/or drug dealers, 25% were musicians, 25% were artists, 10% writers (mostly poets & journalists but others as well), 10% were grad students or professors, and the remaining 5% were simply random working-class or lower middle-class people, many of whom were employed by one of the nearby educational institutions (CCS, Wayne State University & Wayne County Community College). Obviously, in an inner-city neighbourhood with that sort of diversity (not to mention eccentricity!), a larger than average number of schizophrenics won't be quite as noticeable as they would be in a "respectable" suburb!
A friend of ours, who I will call G., had been one of the patients under treatment for schizophrenia at the clinic. Like most of them, he had a fairly rough time when it was shut down, but was eventually able to stabilise himself. He used to engage in a lot of different behaviours that most people would probably see as bizarre and abnormal, and conversations with him were more often than not like verbal acid trips in a maze, but one of the primary methods he used to use to try and make sense of the world (and also attempt to divine the future) always fascinated me. He would photo-copy pages from the bible, cut them up, toss them until they were mixed, then pick them up and place them in lines while trying to ascertain what they meant. At the time, I was a young poet (I was fairly successful at this, and some of those I did readings with went on to be much more successful, but I don't write poems anymore), and his use of this method immediately made me think of Tristan Tzara (I know many if not most scholars nowadays credit the "cut-up method" to Brion Gysin, but many of them are also, from my perspective, ignorant & intellectually lazy- I doubt if Tzara invented it either, but he certainly used it before Gysin, Burroughs et al.).
G. has always had what I would describe as an extremely flamboyant sartorial style. Even when I was still a working musician and dressed accordingly, he sometimes made me seem positively drab in comparison. Neither my wife or myself have ever known anyone who dressed anything like G. (and he would probably have looked good in just about anything as he is a tall, thin but well-muscled Black man with a fairly dark complexion and, in those days, medium-length dreadlocks). One of his favourite outfits was a sort of matching surfer shorts & Cuban-style shirt ensemble made from bright blue fabric with a repeating pattern of vaguely cartoonish-looking white clouds, bright yellow ducklings and rainbows (!), accessorised with a large newsboy cap in a matching shade of bright blue, socks in very nearly the same shade (with slightly different yellow ducklings printed on them), and faux-alligator dress shoes in a slightly more subdued blue colour. We always used to wonder where he bought his clothes- I mean, where the hell could one obtain clothes like that, "The Crazy Guy Straight Pimpin' Boutique"??? G. had many different outfits that were more-or-less similar to that one in terms of being colourful, but that one was the best for my money. He always looked super-cool!
Predictably, when the gentrification really got into full swing things became a good deal less comfortable not only for G. but for all of us. We had not seen him since we all were scattered throughout the city during the time the old neighbourhood was being gentrified, but ran into him a couple of years ago- happily, aside from more white hair he seemed about the same. The last time we saw him was at the farmer's market where my wife has worked for many years. None of us dress quite as colourfully as we did thirty years ago, but as we stood there talking, the sidewalk teemed with ever-so-respectable suburbanites who stared at the three of us with undisguised horror and contempt as they made absurdly wide detours around us while walking past...
Liam, I suggest to read a book by Thomas Szasz which is called the myth of mental illness, it will help a lot to clear things about psychology, psychiatry.
The very nice fellow who did the testing told me that he had never met anyone like me, which was neither the first nor the last time I had heard that. I don't remember what the test is called (it was commonly used in prisons & the military, among other places), but when the supervising psychiatrist saw my results he insisted that I be tested again, because apparently the test showed that I was perfectly sane but significantly more paranoid than most schizophrenics, hahaha! He was absolutely sure that could not be accurate, but the results of the second test were even worse. At that point, he decided he would like to meet me- the look on his face during our interview was absolutely hilarious...