Read Online Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin by Norah Vincent - Free Book Online

declaring herself the bride of Christ. She’d gone out to this part of the city, she told me, because she had seen Jesus flying that way, calling her to follow.
    When I met her, Mother T’s delusions were many and various, though all biblical in origin and extremely pressing. She couldn’t stop herself from describing her visions of Jesus and the second coming and trying to convert or preach to pretty much everyone she saw.
    This, more than anything, was responsible for the crippling loneliness she felt, and spoke of tearfully, on the few occasions when she wasn’t talking about Christ. She wanted very much to find a husband. She had been married very young and had had her three children, but her husband had left her not long after the children were born, and he was no longer in her life. She missed her extended family terribly. Before she left Puerto Rico, she had been living with her mother, father, and siblings. She spoke often of wanting more than anything to be reunited with them. But it seemed they were unable to deal with the wild vicissitudes of her illness and had sent her packing.
    There was a pay phone on the ward accessible to any patient, but long-distance calls required a calling card, and most of the patients, including Mother T, didn’t have the money for one. I did have one, though, so one afternoon I suggested that perhaps she might feel better if she gave her family a call. Maybe they could patch things up. She was very excited by the prospect, dialing the number eagerly as I walked away.
    But only a few minutes later she appeared in the doorway of my room, crying.
    “They told me to shut up. That I’m crazy and I can’t come home. They don’t see Jesus as I do. They don’t understand.”
    After an episode like this, Mother T would spiral vigorously back into her delusions. As I watched her deal with the pain of her family’s rejection, and later with other rejections and crushing disappointments, I saw her grab hold of her visions and her perceived special connection to Christ like a buoy in a raging sea. They kept her afloat. They were a refuge from the cruel knowledge that no one wanted her.
    “It’s okay,” she would say, her sobs abating, “I have the Lord and he knows me, and his plan for me is the most important thing. I must be here to do his work.”
    “Yes,” I would say, stroking her back. “Yes. That’s right.”
    “Ah, and you know, Norita, he is so beautiful. His eyes are like fire. Clear fire. And when his spirit descended, and my crown came down on my head, oh, it was . . .”
    “Heavy?” I said.
    “Very.”
    “I bet.”
    I put my arms around her.
    “It will all be okay,” I said.
    And then came a reprimanding voice shouting from the nurse’s station:
    “NO TOUCHING. Down the hall, there. You two. No touching.”
    “What?” I said, looking at Mother T as she pulled away. “Is that a rule?”
    “Oh yes,” she said. “It is a rule.”
    A necessary rule in some ways, as I came to learn, in a world where people had few or often no natural boundaries, and where tempers were likely to flare into violent altercations over almost anything. Keeping the patients from getting sexually or amorously involved with one another was a wise policy, and giving vitriolic patients as few pretexts as possible for overreaction was a prerequisite for keeping order.
    But depriving lost and desperate human beings of the healing comfort of something as innocuous as a hand on the shoulder or, in extremis, a kindly hug was, at moments like that one with Mother T, just another form of gratuitous deprivation, just another reason why this place made you feel less than human.
    I realize that this may sound hopelessly naïve, and I also realize that there was a lot about my fellow patients’ histories and conditions that I didn’t and couldn’t know, but it seemed to me that a lot of the therapy they needed was of this simple tactile and sympathetic kind. Not because they were crazy, mind