‘I entered a tiled cubicle. There was a bed covered with a rubber sheet
and beside the bed some sort of apparatus with a handle.
“So you’re going to give me electric shock treatment,” I said to Dr
Benjamim Gaspar Gomes.
“Don’t worry. It’s far more traumatic watching someone being treated
than actually having the treatment yourself. It doesn’t hurt at all.”
I lay down and the male nurse put a kind of tube in my mouth so that my
tongue wouldn’t roll back. Then, on either temple, he placed two electrodes,
rather like the earpieces of a telephone.
I was looking up at the peeling paint on the ceiling when I heard the
handle being turned. The next moment, a curtain seemed to fall over my eyes; my
vision quickly reduced down to a single point, and then everything went dark.
The doctor was right; it didn’t hurt at all.’
The scene I have just described is not taken from my book, “Veronika
Decides to Die”. It comes from the diary I wrote during my
second stay in a mental hospital. That was in 1966, the beginning of the
blackest period of Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1989), and, as if by
some natural reflex of the social mechanism, that external repression was
gradually becoming internalised (not unlike what is happening in the United
States today, where a man doesn’t even dare look at a woman without having a
lawyer by his side). So much so that good middle-class families found it simply
unacceptable that their children or grandchildren should want to be ‘artists’.
In Brazil at the time, the word ‘artist’ was synonymous with homosexual,
communist, drug addict and layabout.
When I was 18, I believed that my world and that of my parents could
coexist peacefully. I did my best to get good marks at the Jesuit school where
I was studying, I worked every afternoon, but at night, I wanted to live out my
dream of being an artist. Not knowing quite where to begin, I became involved
in an amateur theatre group. Although I had no desire to act professionally, at
least I was amongst people with whom I felt some affinity.
Unfortunately, my parents did not share my belief in the peaceful
coexistence of two such diametrically opposed worlds. One night, I came home
drunk, and the following morning, I was woken by two burly male nurses.
‘You’re coming with us,’ one of them said.
My mother was crying, and my father was doing his best to hide any
feelings he might have.
‘It’s for your own good,’ he said. ‘We’re just going to have some tests
done.’
And thus began my journey through various psychiatric hospitals. I was
admitted, I was given all kinds of different treatments, and I ran away at the
first opportunity, travelling around for as long as I could bear it, then going
back to my parents’ house. We enjoyed a kind of honeymoon period, but, after a
while, I again started to get into what my family called ‘bad company’, and the
nurses reappeared.
There are some battles in life that have only two possible outcomes:
they either destroy us or they make us strong. The psychiatric hospital was one
such battle.
One night, talking to another patient, I said:
‘You know, I think nearly everyone, at some point in his life, has
dreamed of being President of the Republic. But neither you nor I can ever
aspire to that, because our medical record won’t let us.’
‘Then we’ve got nothing to lose,’ said the other man. ‘We can just do
whatever we want to do.’
It seemed to me he was right. The situation I found myself in was so
strange, so extreme, that it brought with it something unprecedented: total
freedom. All my family’s efforts to make me the same as everyone else had
exactly the opposite result: I was now completely different from all the other
young men of my own age.
That same night, I considered my future. One option was to become a
writer; the other, which seemed more viable, was to go properly mad. I would be
supported by the State, I would never have to work or take on any
responsibility. I would, of course, have to spend a great deal of time in
mental institutions, but I knew from my own experience that patients there do
not behave like the mad people you see in Hollywood films. Apart from a few
pathological cases of catatonia or schizophrenia, all the other patients were
perfectly capable of talking about life and had their own highly original ideas
on the subject. Every now and then, they would suffer panic attacks, bouts of
depression or aggression, but these did not last.
The greatest risk I ran in hospital was not of losing all hope of ever
becoming President of the Republic, nor of feeling marginalised or unfairly
treated by my family – because in my heart I knew that having me admitted to
hospital was a desperate act of love and over-protectiveness on their part. The
greatest risk I ran was of coming to think of that situation as normal.
When I came out of hospital for the third time – after the usual cycle
of escaping from hospital/travelling around/going back home/enjoying a
honeymoon period with my family/getting into bad company again/being readmitted
into hospital – I was nearly twenty and had become accustomed to that rhythm of
events. This time, however, something had changed.
Although I again got into ‘bad company’, my parents were growing
reluctant to have me readmitted to a mental hospital. Unbeknown to me, they
were by then convinced that I was a hopeless case, and preferred to keep me
with them and to support me for the rest of my life.
My behaviour went from bad to worse, I became more aggressive, but still
there was no mention of hospital. I experienced a period of great joy as I
tried to exercise my so-called freedom, in order, finally, to live the
‘artist’s life’. I left the new job my parents had found for me, I stopped
studying, and I dedicated myself exclusively to the theatre and to frequenting
the bars favoured by intellectuals. For one long year, I did exactly as I
pleased; but then the theatre group was broken up by the political police, the
bars became infiltrated by spies, my stories were rejected by every publisher I
sent them to, and none of the girls I knew wanted to go out with me – because I
was a young man without a future, with no real career, and who had never even
been to university.
So, one day, I decided to trash my bedroom. It was a way of saying,
without words: ‘You see, I can’t live in the real world. I can’t get a job, I
can’t realise my dream. I think you’re absolutely right: I am mad, and I want
to go back to the mental hospital!’
Fate can be so ironic* When I had finished wrecking my room, I was
relieved to see that my parents were phoning the psychiatric hospital. However,
the doctor who usually dealt with me was on holiday. The nurses arrived with a
junior doctor in tow. He saw me sitting there surrounded by torn-up books,
broken records, ripped curtains, and asked my family and the nurses to leave
the room.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
I didn’t reply. A madman should always behave like someone not of this
world.
‘Stop playing around,’ he said. ‘I’ve been reading your case history.
You’re not mad at all, and I won’t admit you to the hospital.’
He left the room, wrote a prescription for some tranquillisers and (so I
found out later) told my parents that I was suffering from ‘admission
syndrome’. Normal people who, at some point, find themselves in an abnormal
situation – such as depression, panic, etc. – occasionally use illness as an
alternative to life. That is, they choose to be ill, because being ‘normal’ is
too much like hard work. My parents listened to his advice and never again had
me admitted into a mental institution.
From then on, I could no longer seek comfort in madness. I had to lick
my wounds alone, I had to lose some battles and win others, I often had to
abandon my impossible dream and work in offices instead, until, one day, I gave
it all up for the nth time and I went on a pilgrimage to Santiago de
Compostela. There I realised that I could not keep refusing to face up to my
fate of ‘being an artist’, which, in my case, meant being a writer. So, at 38,
I decided to write my first book and to risk entering into a battle which I had
always subconsciously feared: the battle for a dream.
I found a publisher and that first book (The Pilgrimage – about my
experience on the Road to Santiago) led me to The Alchemist, which led me to
others, which led to translations, which led to lectures and conferences all
over the world. Although I had kept postponing my dream, I realised that I
could do so no longer, and that the Universe always favours those who fight for
what they want.
In 1997, after an exhausting promotional tour across three continents, I
began to notice a very odd phenomenon: what I had wanted on that day when I
trashed my bedroom seemed to be something a lot of other people wanted too.
People preferred to live in a huge asylum, religiously following rules written
by who knows who, rather than fighting for the right to be different. On a
flight to Tokyo, I read the following in a newspaper:
According to Statistics Canada: 40% of people between 15 and 34, 33% of
people between 35 and 54, and 20% of people between 55 and 64 have already had
some kind of mental illness. It is thought that one in every five individuals
suffers from some form of psychiatric disorder.
I thought: Canada has never had a military dictatorship, it’s considered
to have the best quality of life in the world, why then are there so many mad
people there? Why aren’t they in mental hospitals?
That question led me on to another: what exactly is madness?
I found the answers to both those questions. First, people aren’t in
mental institutions because they continue to be socially productive. If you are
capable of getting in to work at 9.00 a.m. and staying until 5.00 p.m., then
society does not consider you incapacitated. It doesn’t matter if, from 5.01
p.m. until 8.59 a.m. you sit in a catatonic state in front of the television,
indulge in the most perverted sexual fantasies on the Internet, stare at the
wall, blaming the world for everything and feeling generally put upon, feel
afraid to go out into the street, are obsessed with cleanliness or a lack of
cleanliness, suffer from bouts of depression and compulsive crying. As long as
you can turn up for work and do your bit for society, you don’t represent a threat.
You’re only a threat when the cup finally overflows and you go out into the
street with a machine gun in your hand, like a character in a child’s cartoon,
and kill fifteen children in order to alert the world to the pernicious effects
of Tom and Jerry. Until you do that, you are deemed to be normal.
And madness? Madness is the inability to communicate.
Between normality and madness, which are basically the same thing, there
exists an intermediary stage: it is called ‘being different’. And people were
becoming more and more afraid of ‘being different’. In Japan, after giving much
thought to the statistical information I had just read, I decided to write a
book based on my own experiences. I wrote Veronika Decides to Die, in the third
person and using my feminine ego, because I knew that the important subject to
be addressed was not what I personally had experienced in mental institutions,
but, rather, the risks we run by being different and yet our horror of being
the same.
When I had finished, I went and talked to my father. Once the difficult
time of adolescence and early youth was over, my parents never forgave
themselves for what they did to me. I always told them that it really hadn’t
been that bad and that prison (for I was imprisoned three times for political
reasons) had left far deeper scars, but my parents refused to believe me and
spent the rest of their lives blaming themselves.
‘I’ve written a book about a mental institution,’ I said to my
85-year-old father. ‘It’s a fictional work, but there are a couple of pages
where I speak as myself. It means going public about the time I spent in mental
hospitals.’
My father looked me in the eye and said:
‘Are you sure it won’t harm you in any way?’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘Then go ahead. I’m tired of secrets.’
Veronika Decides to Die came out in Brazil in August
1998. By September, I had received more than 1,200 e-mails and letters relating
similar experiences. In October, some of the themes touched on in the book –
depression, panic attacks, suicide – were discussed in a seminar that had
national repercussions. On 22 January 1999, Senator Eduardo Suplicy, read out
passages from my book to the other senators, and managed to get approval for a
law which they had been trying to get through the Brazilian Congress for the
last ten years, a law forbidding arbitrary admissions into mental institutions.
Paulo Coelho
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
5 MIN
READING: “Daddy, I am going to talk about my experience in an asilum”
(paulocoelhoblog.com)
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