As for Dr. B, he suggested a method that triggered a considerable problem for me. I told him how I got up several times in the night to make sure the eggs were stored properly because if I forget to put them in the refrigerator and subsequently died, someone worried about me might come into the apartment with the firemen or the police several days later, and I was afraid they might mistake the stench of rotten eggs for that of my body. I also explained my obsession with eggs was tied to the pain I felt over not being able to have children and to a comment I once heard a vegan make that when you eat an egg you are eating a hen’s period, which served only to remind me that I’d never had regular periods in my life. Of course by now I was savvy enough to know better than to speak about my phantom pregnancy. Dr. B ordered me to write down twenty times on a piece of paper exactly what I’d told him about this obsession and close with a sentence: The eggs we eat are not hens’ periods. I couldn’t understand the therapeutic advantages of this method, but did it anyway. Instead of getting out of bed each time the compulsion struck, I wrote The eggs we eat are not hens’ periods over and over again. After writing this hundreds of times, I went from being obsessed about eggs at night to thinking about them at all hours of the day. The repetitive writing had only bolstered my fear. Months later, when the obsession subsided thanks to the therapeutic effects of the passage of time, I sent a note to the doctor that consisted of a single phrase: Your eggs are nothing but a hen’s period.
Something had intrigued me since I started looking for psychological help, and I wondered how it was possible that methods created for Western brains were used to analyze brains like mine, which are shaped in a society with entirely different moral, aesthetic, civil, and legal codes. I was relieved to find I wasn’t the only person to consider the issue. A small group of psychologists and sociologists with a bit of common sense criticized the phenomenon, employing the English term weird, an acronym for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies, to call attention to the fact that the studies were produced—and still are—based exclusively on people from Western societies who could be categorized as cultivated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. So the word weird called into question the legitimacy of studies applying pseudoscientific methods and, more dangerously, medications, in which 96 percent of the cases were drawn from a group that represented only 12 percent of the world population. The supposed mass therapeutic method was based on the study of this minority (weird for how scarce they were, not for the symptom indicators), a group to which I definitely did not belong.
Not a single one of the doctors I saw helped me get any better, and I was continually amazed by the audacity with which they tried to tell me how I felt. They actually used sentences like “You’re much better” or “You’ve had a relapse this week.” Even while everything was collapsing around me, the sidewalks and streetlamps and sky curling round my head, how could I be persuaded that anybody else knew how I was feeling except me? And yet there they were, all those diplomas on the wall, charging me a fortune to tell me what I, and nobody better than I, could possibly know. It was the last straw for me, this pretense that they could intuit other people’s feelings. I remember feeling truly shaken once by a case. During the hours I spent in Dr. B’s office, I had time to get to know and grow fond of other patients in the waiting room. One young man was elegant, well read, and lonely. He told me how at certain critical times during his illness he heard voices that according to others existed only for him. He admitted this symptom had to be controlled in some patients, but in his case it wasn’t necessary, he said. The voices others heard were often insulting or frightening, while in his case they only said nice things and in many ways they were his only company. Months later, I heard he’d committed suicide. They’d taken away the only voices that spoke to him. The medication had taken effect.
As a result, above and beyond my normal fears, what now flourished was my phobia of psychiatric or psychological practices. It would have been silly to go to a psychologist to be treated for a phobia against psychologists, though according to them, this is entirely possible. They would employ, if I’m not mistaken, implosive therapy, a behavior therapy that exposes a patient to the feared stimulus (“anxiety-arousing situations,” I think is the phrase they use, with those fake airs of erudition) without an escape route. As things stand right now, and for the good of the therapist, may I never find myself locked in a room with one of them.
Regardless, I didn’t make the final decision to leave off therapy and medication. I didn’t have the willpower to give anything up. Though I had to hear as many diagnoses as therapists I visited, they all concurred on the date when I could finally consider myself cured. I remember it perfectly; it was April 7, the day my medical insurance expired. I was still a little woozy at the time, but realized I’d finally put an end to an ongoing process of ignorant speculation that’d had nothing to do with science, and for months I’d been incapacitated for thinking and for physical exercise, since the medications left me feeling lethargic and floppy.
IMAGINE BEING LUCID ENOUGH during an episode of madness to know the thoughts gripping you are the product of your neurosis and not what is commonly accepted as reality. It’s a hard thing to accomplish, but imagine, if only for a second, reaching the level of awareness that allows you to figure out that your head is playing tricks on you by using the rationality of that very same head. But this kind of lucidity—an advantage I’ve been lucky to have—isn’t enough. The second step is inevitable, which is to ask for help. And that’s just what I did. I asked for help. And since the psychologists offered none, I turned to friends. But there was a problem with that. When I picked up the telephone, desperate, begging frantically for someone to come and fetch me, to embrace me, to relieve me if only with the bullet I wasn’t resolute enough to use on my own; when I called someone to scream for help and that person was willing, saying, “Yes, I’m on my way. Calm down, everything is going to be all right. Just let me know where you are and I’ll be right there,” I could never say where I was. Of course I don’t mean literally; I knew my address—what city I was in, the name of my street, the number of my apartment—but I didn’t know where I was in my own head, where it was that I had gotten lost.
Later I was astounded to find a book that dealt with exactly what I’m trying to explain. The title is My Stroke of Insight, and the author gives a personal testimony of having survived a stroke. In some languages the title was translated in a more revealing way, something like A Rush of Illumination. There’s a reason this book is particularly exceptional, and it’s that the author, Jill Bolte Taylor, is a neuroanatomist and impassioned brain researcher who specialized in strokes, so she was able to experience (from the section of her brain that remained unscathed) the stroke as it happened in real time, even with evident fascination, since she was now able to understand from the inside the reaction of her brain, this organ to which she’d devoted so many years of research, projects, and dreams. What was the likelihood that a person who had sacrificed so much to comprehend the nature of a stroke, a bona fide expert, would herself succumb to that specific condition? So there she was, dying, while experimenting on an organ that neither she nor her colleagues had ever been able to experiment on before: not a monkey’s brain or a dead person’s brain, but a live brain, and not any old live brain, but her own.