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Mental Health
Clinic
I thought the place looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure. I put down my plate of eggs, grabbed the TV remote, and turned up the sound. It was an abortion-clinic bombing: one bomb to lure the law, a second bomb to blow them up.
March 2004
Sparrows In Purity Supreme
Sometimes when I’m sad, I become convinced that the world is going to end. And it will end someday, of course, but scientists give it billions of years yet. My “sense of impending doom” (the phrase psychiatrists use to describe this type of fear) is all out of proportion to what I know to be true.
February 2004
Telling You
The worst thing that could possibly have happened was that I fell in love with my therapist, a man whose hand I’d held briefly and anonymously in the spring, not knowing that by August I’d be in therapy with him.
November 2003
Parting Questions
When I told my sister, my mother, and my friends that the voice was real, they said I was wrong; it wasn’t possible. Their disbelief was hard for me to take. It scared me. I stopped talking to them.
October 2003
The Designated Marksman
A second is how much time it takes a .50 caliber bullet to travel six hundred meters, and what a lot of people don’t know is that there is a momentary ghost image as the bullet disrupts the air in the focal plane above the target. It’s just science, but I could see it through the scope, and it looks like a soul, a soul that departs the body before the bullet strikes.
October 2003
Nixon’s Funeral
When Wendy murdered her father in her dreams, she used a coat hanger or a wood-handled kitchen knife. She always stabbed him right in the heart. She dreamed of killing him so many times that when he finally died for real, her whole life felt like a dream for a few days.
June 2003
The Botany Of Desire
Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting — on a process, that is, of subtraction. Ordinarily we think of drug experiences as additive. It’s often said that drugs “distort” normal perceptions and augment the data of the senses (adding hallucinations, say), but it may be that the very opposite is true — that they work by subtracting some of the filters that consciousness normally interposes between us and the world.
May 2003
A Phenomenology Of Panic
Part of the problem with panics, Gene taught me, is the very sense that there is a problem. This creates a bogus responsibility for either oneself or someone else to solve it. If the patient can’t solve it, he is not only panicking; he is a failure. If he passes the responsibility to a clinician, he loses power and gives up the right to direct his own life.
April 2003
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