Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock
I’m ready for my nervous breakdown, Mr. DeMille
Saturday, Jan. 29, 2006. Modern science, specifically that financed by pharmaceutical companies, continually comes up with new medicines, new cures or at least new treatments for symptoms. That’s why they whine about government or anything else that slows them down. Lives could be saved, people could be less miserable: Out of the way, FDA! We expect R&D; it makes for new commercials, bloated e-mail inboxes, and jokes by TV comics.
New diseases come up, as well. Mad cow disease, it could spread to humans. Bird flu, we could catch it eventually. They have been around a long time, but seem to be flaring up, or is it just publicized concern? The last new affliction must have been AIDS. What is happening now is more or less old bacterial infections are returning because the little bugs are becoming smart. In grad-school language, they are becoming resistant to antibiotics.
We’ve always known viruses mutate; that’s the fear from bird flu. It is why you get a flu shot every year; every year various flus (flues?) mutate, and government and pharma scientists try to guess which ones will take, then they create an inoculant against it.
My annual fall sinus infection got last year’s antibiotic but at a stronger dosage because resistance was increasing. This was the doctor’s suggestion, as opposed to another kind of antibiotic. But won’t that make the germs of next year’s infection about the size of ping-pong balls? Or pills that size?
Along with new medicines and maladies, it seems like every year we retire some. We retired aspirin but it came back for blood improvement. We retired wine (one tasty medicine) but it came back. We retired caffeine, but first green tea then black tea were shown to be good. I am pro-anti-oxidant!
We’ve retired diseases, as well. Whatever happened to the nervous breakdown? The closest you come to this now is an anxiety attack, but those just last a few minutes. Take deep breaths, leave the cause (the snake, the shaky top of the ladder) and the attack is over. If you have them regularly, the doctor has some nice pills to … make you less anxious.
Lo, the nervous breakdown. When you finally had it up to here, they (family members, I suppose, like Elwood Dowd’s kin in Harvey) sent you to a facility for a few weeks to recuperate, with quiet, and maybe some soothing therapy, including probing couch talk or even electrodes to the temples.
No one is reported to have nervous breakdowns any more. Folks only get sent away for rehabilitationat a sanatorium (Asylum? Loony bin? Just “The Home.”) for substance abuse.
James Frey (as below, type his name in here) writes about life before, during and after his rehab. It’s fictional, but then what was Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar? Now there’s a nervous breakdown story. Oh, that was marketed as fiction, wasn’t it, and only later understood as based on real events. But not the narrative flow. Life isn’t that sequential.
Ah, Miss Plath. She made nervous breakdowns sound unpleasant and the treatment only temporary, certainly temporary in the author’s life.
Nervous breakdowns do not appear in People magazine. If celebrities don’t have them anymore (and that’s where one heard of them 40 or more years ago), then we must not be, either.
“If Mr. McMurphy doesn’t want to take his medication orally, I’m sure we can arrange that he can have it some other way, says Nurse Ratched in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
I want a nervous breakdown. I deserve one. I’d feel one coming down on me now, if I knew what it was supposed to be like.
It’s been weeks since I have felt rested after a night’s sleep. I sleep well but rarely feel refreshed. That it?
I am vaguely unhappy. Home is terrific, but feel certain it is not all that it’s supposed to be. That it?
The job is stable and rarely boring, but shouldn’t there be more accomplishment and satisfaction? Aren’t you supposed to actually accomplish something, over which you can satisfied? That it? Is a nervous breakdown the extreme of the emotion felt when life really is not-bad, and you wonder — you obsess — that must be it.
I want a month in a reputable home, a single room on the second floor. It’d just be a minor breakdown, no need to lock me up or supervise my shaving then keep the razor. My wife would visit on a weekend afternoon. We’d sit on a bench on the expansive lawn. No need for medicine or electroshock, though talk with a counselor who really understands me might do some good.
Shouldn’t my job’ health insurance pay for all that? I’d be an ever so much more productive employee when I return.
Nuts. -30-
