As was often his habit, Arthur Gilbert listened to a recording of his last stage performance from forty years ago. He listened to the lines and the life in his voice, the intensification of vocal tones and articulation. He would also listen to audio books. The susurrant stream of words lulled him to sleep each time. And today. But the sound of a distinct thud roused him and he remembered what brought him into another state of flux – a dream
“Waking up this morning,” Arthur told his best friend, “I had a dream. I was in a large passenger plane that was crashing in slow motion. When it finally landed nose first, I walked out of the cockpit window.”
Hearing this, his friend and fellow actor told Arthur that he saw a ghost of a man just last night on the ramparts. He wanted Arthur to see for himself. Arthur balked at the idea that an image could tell him anything. But his friend convinced him and Arthur said that he would go see “this poor ghost while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe.”
So that night his friend accompanied Arthur to the “parapet.” There, Arthur was beckoned by a voice to follow it to an enclosed space. Once inside, Arthur heard his bulwark being bombarded thud shudder thud. “Sling n arrows outrageous!”
“Are you OK Arthur?”
“To sleep, perchance to dream. I’m shuffling off . . .”
With acoustic script murmuring and a hovering thumping and whirring around his head, Arthur closed his eyes. After some time, he became aware that he was in a dream.
He left his apartment in east central Indiana and was driving to his home town in Illinois for a funeral. Call me when you get there, his friend told him.
Heading west on I-70 dark-bottomed clouds appeared. He heard packing paper being crunched. He became angry. He didn’t like driving in the rain or at night or to funeral. He didn’t like being cooped up for long rides.
His demeanor softened when he saw distant silos along the way. Memories of friends. His demeanor saddened as he drove further away from them.
Restaurant signs began to appear.
Good’s Family Restaurant
It’s All Good at Bob and Martha Good’s
~
A Good Breakfast is not hard to find – Exit ½ Mile
Good’s Family Restaurant
~
One Good Turn Deserves Another-Turn Left After Exit
Good’s Family Restaurant
He took the exit for Good’s Family Restaurant. He saw and heard what happened next.
He entered Good’s. He found a booth next to a window. Across from him sat a plump 30-ish woman with fuchsia streaks of hair, tattoos down both arms, and a face mask. She was wiping the table and menu with disinfectant wipes. The squeaking sound annoyed him.
He looked around the room wondering if there was another pandemic that turned everyone into Karens. He saw no one else wearing a mask. To each their own pandemic he said.
A waitress walked up with a pot of coffee.
Mornin’ Coffee?
Yes ma’am.
She turned over a cup and poured the coffee.
Where you headed?
He took a sip. To a funeral.
Someone close?
An ex.
I’m sorry.
She wasn’t.
Did she know Jesus as her personal savior?
He put the coffee down.
You’d have to ask her.
What about you? Do you know Jesus as your personal savior?
Ma’am my relationship with a personal savior began when I came into God’s good creation seventy-five years ago and when I realized that the fires of creation and apocalypse were inside me, I set out to find out what that meant.
He continued. Say, you remind me of Altar-call Jake with his tracts and the folk gospel road that I’d been on. That road reduced the cosmos to four spiritual laws and a personal tow-truck service ready to remove you from life on earth. Those on that road had a strangely-dim view of the things of earth.
He became unsettled. Doesn’t that machine noise bother you?
The waitress stood looking at him with a hand on her hip. Alrighty then. Do you know what you want to eat apocalypse man?
Yes ma’am. Two eggs over easy with hashbrowns and a side of bacon. He looked up from the menu. Are you Martha, Martha Good?
Yes, and I’m with Bob, the man that’s working the kitchen. She pointed to the opening above the counter where a head with a sports cap moved back and forth.
Ain’t no good flirting with me, Martha said with a twinkle in her eye.
Well, Martha Good, I wasn’ . . . well you do have qualities you don’t find every day on the menu. I’m sure Bob is a lucky man. You bring a lot to the table. He looked over at the woman across from him.
He hit the jackpot with me, Martha teased.
Bonanza Bob? he played along.
Is that your final answer?
Yes ma’am.
Martha finished writing the check. You win the million-dollar breakfast. She grabbed the menu and walked off.
After breakfast he walked to the cash register, told Martha that breakfast was satisfying in a Good’s way and she smiled and said Y’all come back after your funeral.
He was back in the car with the whirring thumping.
The wet putty looking sky above the interstate released its moisture. The pit-pat of rain drops became a steady thudding as he crossed the state line. Washing machine rain slashed his windows. Wipers whirred and thumped. He pulled off the road to wait. He didn’t want another rear end accident, another concussion. When a semi-trailer truck swooshed by his head throbbed.
The pounding rain stopped and he got back on the road.
He passed Danville then Champaign. He hooked up with I-72. He passed Decatur. He passed a Springfield sign. There was a thumping clanking noise. Car trouble? He pulled over into a cul-de-sac.
He suddenly felt cramped stiff panicky. His hands twitched. He couldn’t remember for the life of him why he was in this suffocating machine. He wanted out. He cursed the incessant banging clicking whirring clanging and beeping going on around him. Where was he going anyway?
He turned the car around in the cul-de-sac to retrace his way.
He passed the Decatur sign. The Champaign sign. I-74. He passed the Danville sign and looked for the Indiana sign. He saw a familiar sign.
Your Lookin’ Good at the Next Exit
Good’s Family Restaurant
For Breakfast Lunch and Dinner
He drove to Good’s.
The waitress saw him come through the door, grabbed a menu, and said Welcome back. How was your funeral?
Who died?
No one here.
I can see that. The clanging of dishes and the overhead whirring of the fan bothered him.
The waitress showed him to a booth and handed him the menu.
Coffee?
Yes, and a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup.
She wrote the order, grabbed the menu and walked away staring at him.
An ancient scrawny-looking man in a flannel shirt jeans and a Peterbilt hat walked up to the booth across from him. It was the same pipe smoking guy who came out of the rig parked outside his window. It was his Cavendish tobacco father.
The trucker threw down a book on the table with a thud.
What are you reading?
This. The trucker held up the book and then sat down.
The waitress brought coffee, filled his cup and turned to the trucker.
Morning ma’am, the trucker said.
Morning. What y’all reading? She poured him coffee.
The trucker showed her the book.
The Road. Cormac McCarthy. Don’t know it. Is it about trucking?
Well, yeah, in a keep on truckin’ kinda way after an apocalypse with who or what remains.
The waitress looked over at him. You read that, too?
He nodded and said Cannibalism.
Cannibalism? What on earth! The waitress scrunched her face. We don’t serve that here.
What’s left to eat is eaten, the trucker said.
To be eaten or not to be eaten that is the question! Right dad?
The waitress pointed the coffee pot in the trucker’s direction. How about you, fella? Do you know Jesus as your personal savior?
The trucker looked over at him and then at her. Ma’am, I’ve been on the road with him my whole life. But you see this Formula World is in a road race to end things to get on with the next big thing. Escaping the road and getting everyone to heaven before the next big thing, that is one formulation I don’t need. I’m a biker not a passenger in a car being towed off the road.
Uh huh. Just checking your GPS.
I had to break up with my GPS. She kept telling me to take a U-turn in my life!
Some of us need more than one U-turn. The waitress took his lunch order and headed to the kitchen.
What ya hauling?
Motorcycles, parts, manuals.
Where you headed?
Cross country. To the coast. How about you?
Home.
Where’s home?
If I knew that I wouldn’t be here.
What happened, son?
I am being eaten alive on this road. I live by words. I am made of words. And now words are being taken from me.
The trucker leaned over into the aisle Do you know your way home?
I’m seventy-five. I know my way home. What is that high-pitched beeping?
Where is home, Arthur?
Right where I left it.
The waitress brought his soup and sandwich.
Did I order this?
Yes, you did. The waitress put her hands on her hips. It’s not cannibalism but it’ll do.
Then I’ll eat it he snapped back.
The waitress looked over at the trucker and he nodded.
She turned back Everything OK?
Right as rain he replied.
The waitress looked over again at the trucker and then went to the kitchen to retrieve his order.
The trucker leaned over. Arthur, do you have family?
Yes, of course I have family . . . ah, ah . . . ah daughter.
What’s her name?
What’s her name?
Yes.
If I knew that I wouldn’t be here.
Should you call her?
I did. She told me I had an appointment today.
Did you make it to the appointment?
Damn, that whirring is so annoying.
The trucker got up and put a hand on his shoulder.
He looked up. Are we going to be OK?
You’ll be OK. You’re one of the good guys, Arthur. You’re carrying the fire. Swear that you will carry the fire.
I swear.
Come with me.
Where?
He felt himself being pulled from the booth.
“Arthur, the MRI is done. Let’s take off these acoustic tubes.”
Arthur blinked a reset and looked all around.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“In the hospital yard there stands a small lodge surrounded by a perfect forest of burdocks, nettles, and wild hemp. Its roof is rusty, the chimney is tumbling down, the steps at the front-door are rotting away and overgrown with grass, and there are only traces left of the stucco. The front of the lodge faces the hospital; at the back it looks out into the open country, from which it is separated by the grey hospital fence with nails on it. These nails, with their points upwards, and the fence, and the lodge itself, have that peculiar, desolate, God-forsaken look which is only found in our hospital and prison buildings.”
Ward No. 6., a story by Anton Chekov, opens with this description of an outpost hospital 150 miles from a train station. This provincial hospital with a lunatic asylum annex, worlds apart from “sane” society, is the setting for the reader to examine the disturbing dehumanization taking place in Russia and, perhaps, everywhere else.
Chekhov wrote the story with reformist concerns after he visited a far east penal colony of the Russian Empire – Sakhalin Island.[1] Chekhov’s aim was to survey the prisoners and publicize their conditions. His compiled notes became the book Sakhalin Island.
Chekov, as guide, invites us onto the premises of the provincial hospital and into its mental ward. He would have us understand suffering in the presence of it and not in the abstract. So, he has us listen in on conversations between Dr. Andrei Yefimich Ragin, who is in charge of the hospital and asylum, and inmate Ivan Dmitrich Gromov.
With a phrase similar to Dante’s opening of the Divine Comedy – “abandon all hope, ye who enter here” – Chekhov forewarns us about our entry into Ward No. 6: “If you are not afraid of being stung by nettles, let us go along the narrow path.”
As we follow our tour guide, he shows us the hospital’s neglected and unsanitary conditions and then introduces us to the brutish Nikita, who I consider one of the “nettles”.
“The porter, Nikita, an old soldier wearing rusty good-conduct stripes, is always lying on the litter with a pipe between his teeth. He has a grim, surly, battered-looking face, overhanging eyebrows which give him the expression of a sheep-dog of the steppes, and a red nose; he is short and looks thin and scraggy, but he is of imposing deportment and his fists are vigorous. He belongs to the class of simple-hearted, practical, and dull-witted people, prompt in carrying out orders, who like discipline better than anything in the world, and so are convinced that it is their duty to beat people. He showers blows on the face, on the chest, on the back, on whatever comes first, and is convinced that there would be no order in the place if he did not.”
After walking past the cluttered pitiful state of the entry-way conditions and the fearful porter, we enter the annex.
Here, the “walls are painted dirty blue, the ceiling is as sooty as in a hut without out a chimney . . .The wooden floor is gray and full of splinters. There is a stench of sour cabbage, smoldering wicks, bugs, and ammonia, and for the first minute this stench gives you the impression of having walked into a menagerie.
“The beds in the room are bolted to the floor. Sitting and lying on them are men in blue hospital dressing gowns, wearing nightcaps in the old style. These are the lunatics.
There are five of them in all.”
Chekhov describes the inmates and then begins to focus on the two protagonists, inmate Ivan Dmitrich Gromov and doctor Andrei Yefimich Ragin. We learn about both from their dialog. As we listen in, we soon begin to wonder who the patient is and who is the doctor.
Early in life Ivan Dmitrich Gromov was severely flogged by his father. His mental state became more unstable with personal misfortunes. Later in life he sees convicts being led away by armed guards. This was not an uncommon sight for Gromov to witness. But this time he reacts with pity and unease and transference. He begins to conceptualize that like the convicts, it is also his lot in life to be clamped in chains and punished for some crime. This inordinate thinking, a persecution complex that becomes a paralyzing fear of some random moment someone will come down on him for something, lands Gromov in Ward No. 6. He tells Dr. Ragin that he has “persecution mania.”
Though he’s an inmate because he’s out of touch with reality, Gromov is very much in touch with the mental anguish caused by his fixation and the physical pain delivered by the blows of Nikita. Ward No. 6 reinforces Gromov’s cycle of fear and pity.
Dr. Andrei Yefimich Ragin, on the other hand, is not in touch with the human condition. Passive and cynical, he is unable to bring reforms to the hospital.
In conversations with Gromov, Ragin justifies his indifference to others’ plight by suggesting that everything is subject to chance. For instance, he posits that there is no difference between wearing a doctor’s smock and an inmate’s smock.
To further justify his coolness to the human condition he references Ecclesiastes – “it is all futile, senseless” – and quotes Marcus Aurelius: “Pain is just the idea of pain: make an effort of will to change that idea, reject it, cease to complain, and the pain will disappear.” The inner self should dictate one’s experience according to Ragin.[2]
The doctor’s inner self has him ignoring the unsanitary and detrimental conditions of Ward No. 6 and the plight of his patients. Dr. Ragin “knows such surroundings are torture to feverish, consumptive, and impressionable patients, but what can be done?” His stoic outlook of mind over matter is, in practice, one of heartless neglect toward others.
He increases suffering, instead of relieving it, by remaining aloof and disconnected from it. He has intellectualized reality to justify his inaction and seeks further intellectualization to relieve him of his post’s boredom and purposelessness.
Adding to the doctor’s disinterest is what our guide tells us: “probably in no other place is life so monotonous as in this annex.” As one day is no different than another in this outpost hospital, Dr. Ragin becomes disenchanted with his doctor routine.
When he first came to the hospital, Dr. Ragin “worked very diligently. He saw patients every morning till dinnertime, performed operations, and even practiced obstetrics. . .. But in the course of time the work unmistakably wearied him by its monotony and obvious uselessness.”
The doctor extrapolates from his daily routine and reasons “why interfere with people dying if death is the normal and prescribed end for everyone?” and “If the aim of medicine is to utilize drugs to alleviate suffering, the question necessarily arises: why alleviate it?” With similar thoughts, he reasons away the need for himself to be involved in the lives of suffering people. Why should anyone be spared pain when “their lives have nothing of importance in them and would be entirely empty, like the life of an amoeba, were it not for suffering?
“Oppressed by such reflections, Andrey Yefimich let things go and gave up going to the hospital every day.”
To avoid the messy, tedious, and nonsensical reality around him, Dr. Ragin leaves work early and goes home to his books and beer. He withdraws from the physical world to seek mental stimulation. As he reads he is wowed by recent medical discoveries and yet makes not one application to his own hospital. He blames society for the mess he has to deal with.
Evenings consist of conversations with his postmaster friend Mikhail, the only one in town who doesn’t bore the doctor. (Is Ragin more Epicurean in practice than Stoic?)
This routine changes when one day Dr. Ragin follows an inmate, the Jew Moiseika, returning to the annex from his daily wandering in the town. The doctor notices that Moiseika is walking around with bare feet in the winter. Inside, he tells Nikita to give Moiseika some boots for the cold weather. Dr. Ragin, we learn, is not unaware of what’s around him.
From his bed Gromov hears the doctor’s voice, jumps up and reacts with loud vitriol at his presence. The doctor goes in to see who is making the fuss about him. After Gromov calms down, the two begin a dialog that Dr. Ragin finds pleasurable: “What an agreeable young man!” The doctor, breaking with routine, visits Gromov again the next day.
The doctor encounters Gromov lying in bed holding his head in terrible pain. Gromov is suffering with a splitting headache. He reasoned over and over again since the day before that Dr. Ragin was a “spy or doctor who has been charged to test me – it’s all the same -.” Gromov’s persecution mania was triggered.
Dr. Ragin responds, reasoning that if true and Gromov is arrested and sent to prison then he is no worse off being right where he is. This response frees Gromov up a bit and the two have a bit of relaxed conversation. Gromov wishes to be in a better place – outside in “the country somewhere” and “to have a decent doctor to cure one’s headache.”
“It’s so long since I have lived like a human being. It’s vile here. Insufferably vile!”
The doctor responds, not with an antidote for Ivan’s headache, not with a ride in the country, but with a philosophical take on how to think about things – with simple equivalency.
“There’s no difference between a warm and comfortable study and this ward” and “Peace and contentment do not lie outside a man, but within him.”
Gromov questions this. The doctor continues.
“The ordinary man expects the good and the bad from external things – from an open carriage and a study – but a thinking man derives them from within himself.”
Gromov rejects the doctor’s philosophical reasoning. The doctor responds, telling Gromov that “One must strive for the comprehension of life, and therein lies true happiness.”
Gromov understands nothing of what the doctor has been saying and inferring: Comprehension? External, internal? Life is just a mental exercise, a thought experiment, detached from the tragic dimension of human existence? Gromov gets up, looks angrily at the doctor and speaks:
“I only know that God has created me of warm blood and nerves, yes, indeed! If organic tissue is capable of life it must react to every irritant. And I do react! I respond to pain with tears and outcries, to baseness with indignation, to filth with loathing. To my mind, that is precisely what is called life. . . . How is it that you don’t know that?”
Gromov continues, commenting perceptively about the Stoics. He then asks why Dr. Ragin why he preaches Stoicism. “Are you a sage? A philosopher?” The doctor responds “No …. but everyone ought to preach it because it is reasonable.”
Gromov, the inmate, then wants to know how the doctor considers himself to be “competent to judge comprehension and contempt for suffering”.
“Have you ever suffered? Have you any idea of what suffering is? Allow me to ask you, were you ever thrashed as a child?”
“No, responds the doctor, “my parents had an aversion to corporal punishment?”
Gromov tells the doctor that his own father, “a harsh, hemorrhoidal government clerk with along nose and a yellow neck” flogged him cruelly. Sizing the doctor up, Gromov then proceeds with his analysis of the doctor, excoriating his competency to understand anything about Gromov’s life or life itself.
“No one has laid a finger on you all your life, no one has terrorized you nor beaten you; you are as strong as an ox. . .. You are by nature a lazy, flaccid man, and so you have tried to arrange your life in such a way that nothing should disturb you or force you to budge.”
I’ll stop here and leave you with Gromov’s cri de coeur and Dr. Ragin’s inability to come to terms with suffering. Even when the doctor does act to relieve suffering, he thinks that he will be paid back for his trouble. He lends his postmaster friend money after his friend suffers gambling loses. But the doctor is never repaid and soon becomes destitute. It appears from all that happens to the doctor as the story unfolds, that the doctor’s friends and associates also hold to “It’s all the same” thinking.
This story is rich with insight and worth a read. And though one may not be interested in reading a story in a Russian setting, consider that cultures change but human nature doesn’t change much from place to place or age to age.
“It’s all the same!”, first spoken by Gromov when he encounters Dr. Ragin (“a spy or a doctor”) is oft repeated and inferred by Dr. Ragin as he explains his philosophy to Gromov. You’ll have to read the story to see how the doctor’s “It’s all the same” philosophy works out. He holds on to it to the end of the story.
““Ward Six” is affective and effective largely because Chekhov makes proper, judicious, and artistic use of the very faculty that is impaired in his two heroes, Gromov and Ragin, the faculty for contemplating similarities. Their respective disorders, which are two extremes of the same continuum, prevent them from experiencing fear and pity in a healthy, moderate, cathartic fashion.”[3]
As you read Ward No. 6, ask yourself these questions:
Is “society” at fault and therefore responsible for the ills and disorder of society or are individuals responsible?
If one assigns “society” as the cause for “systemic” failures, is the individual therefore absolved of any personal responsibility?
Is detachment from reality a sign of mental illness?
Do you spend your time in the laboratory of thought and have never played baseball or wrestled with another human being?
Does lying to oneself promote mental health?
Is it healthy to be being disconnected from physical reality via drugs or the TV and the internet – supposed mental stimulants that will lessen our boredom?
“It’s all the same!”: Is that a motto for your life? How has that worked out for you?
If we say chance or fate determines things, do we give up believing we can make a difference?
Do false equivalencies, such as occur in Ward No. 6 and that also operate in our culture, lead to mental illness?
A momentary transposition of one’s reality into another through imagination is healthy. Day dreaming is healthy. But what about the permeant transpositions into unreality that is occurring around us today?
Have you ever asked God to heal your imagination?
(As mentioned before, Chekhov is my favorite writer. His stories (and plays) show rather than tell. Chekhov doesn’t moralize or preach. As with Ward No. 6, he lets readers see and hear for themselves and make their own judgements. I appreciate this way of writing. For one thing, I am not a fan of preaching. I had my fill growing up. I attended churches where preaching, and not the Eucharist, is the pinnacle of the service. I’ve moved on to an Anglican church.)
[2] When Chekhov wrote Ward No. 6, he was reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. A couple of quotes from that journal apply to Dr. Ragin’s disposition: “Our life is what our thoughts make it.”; “You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
[3] Liza Knapp, “The Suffering of Others: Fear and Pity in “Ward Six,” in Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories, ed. Cathy Popkin (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2014), 629
“We need everyone who suffers to be a victim because only thus can we maintain our pretense to universal understanding and experience the warm glow of our own compassion, so akin to the warmth that a strong, stiff drink imparts in the cold.”
“Psychology is not a key to self-understanding, but a cultural barrier to such understanding as we can achieve…” from the Preface of Admirable Evasions, How Psychology Undermines Morality by Theodore Dalrymple, 2015.
Theodore Dalyrymple is a pen name used by retired prison psychiatrist Dr. Anthony Daniels.
“The name ‘superfluous man’ refers to an important and recurrent character type in 19th c. Russian literature. It denotes an idealistic but inactive hero who is aware of and sensitive to moral and social problems but who does not take action; in part because of personal weakness and lassitude, in part because of social and political restraints to freedom of action.”
– “usually an aristocrat, intelligent, well-educated, and informed by idealism and goodwill but incapable, for reasons as complex as Hamlet’s, of engaging in effective action. Although he is aware of the stupidity and injustice surrounding him, he remains a bystander.”
“This episode of Health Care News focuses on the recent repeal of the Certificate of Need and financial credentialing in the healthcare industry . . . and how it will enhance competition in the healthcare market, ultimately leading to reduced prices.”
The World Health Organization and its partner organization, the Bill Gates-controlled GAVI, announced Wednesday that they will be flooding Africa with 18 million doses of malaria vaccines.
“. . . multiple federal laws were broken to change the recording metrics for COVID-19-deaths. There is also evidence of multiple acts of what appears to be willful misconduct by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other agencies throughout the COVID-19 crisis.”
A group of young musicians who hail from homeschooling backgrounds have crossed states and blended musical styles to form a unique band with a mission: to keep the classics alive.
The following took place during my thirteenth year . . .
A week before Christmas Day, a gaggle of us self-conscious teenagers loaded into three cars. We headed to Elgin State Hospital, formerly called the Northern Illinois Hospital and Asylum for the Insane. Our church’s youth group leader had decided that, in the spirit of Christmas, his charges should bring hope and joy to the less fortunate.
Four of us sat bunched together in the back seat of one of the cars. We kidded each other about who was the crazier. We cackled and fidgeted and sniffed the mimeographed sheets of Christmas Carols and became giddier. None of us knew what to expect. “But for the grace of God” is all I heard the youth group leader say before I got in the car.
The high school senior driving our car asked us if we wanted to hear about “Elgin State.” We became quiet and ready to squeal like when the four of us sat at a campfire last summer. Jeff slowly spun out his words and waited for our reaction.
“They say the place is . . . haunted … horrific experiments had been performed there . . . spirits of the unclaimed dead walk the cemetery grounds and, . . . in the buildings, . . . the criminally insane live there.”
It didn’t take much. Jeff’s description of Elgin State and the winter wind that howled through Jeff’s rusted-out car gave us goose bumps. I wound and unwound the pretty purple printed sheets. Lise snapped her gum. Mary kicked the front seat and Joan kept biting her nails.
The three cars drove through the front entrance and down a long driveway towards the largest brick building I had ever seen. I suddenly felt out of place. I saw no signs of Christmas anywhere.
We parked along the front of the building. The youth group leader led our group of sixteen through the front door. He announced us at the front desk. Soon an older gentleman came down the stairs.
Dr. I-Forget-His-Name was bald and wore thick-rimmed glasses. In his white lab coat, he looked like the mad scientist I’d seen in a movie that I wasn’t supposed to watch but watched anyway at a friend’s house. Up close, I could see small blood vessels on his nose and cheeks. Whispering to Lise, I wondered if that is what happened when you work here. I tried not to stare when he escorted the group upstairs.
On the second floor he directed us to a double-door entrance. We walked through it. The room before us was bigger than any church sanctuary I had been in. There were large windows along the length of the room. They were foggy, providing a pale spectral light. None of the patients stood near them.
There were no curtains around the windows. There were no pictures on the walls, no paintings, and no Christmas tree or decorations. The furniture, wooden chairs and tables, was scattered around the room on the dull linoleum floor. The hall seemed soulless and indifferent toward the fifty gowned inmates within it.
The patient’s voices, moans, yelps, and shrieks sounded like they were coming out from a deep cave. Many sat staring off blankly. Some of them bobbed their head endlessly. Those who walked around seemed content to be walking in no specific direction. Our appearance at the double-door made no difference to them.
We gathered in two rows just inside the doorway and began signing Jingle Bells. Our voices reverberated and then seemed to go off somewhere. Our captive audience didn’t stir. We followed with Silent Night. There were a couple of moans of recognition. Then we sang The First Noël.
The First Noel the angels did say Was to certain poor shepherds In fields as they lay In fields where they Lay keeping their sheep On a cold winter’s…
Out from the hallway behind us came a naked man. He began shouting and writhing right in front of us. One of the girls shrieked. The patients whooped and hollered.
Two men with white coats tried to grab the man. But he squirmed and threw them off again and again. He jumped and shouted and flung his arms right in front of us. He wanted to be right in front of us.
More white coats came to help. They surrounded the man and subdued him. He was dragged from the room.
It took a few minutes for our youth group leader to get us back to singing. When we did, we kept looking behind us to see what was next. But nothing happened after that.
When we finished singing our host escorted us down stairs. At the door, he thanked us for coming. On the way home we had a lot to talk about. Jeff said nothing.
That night I told my parents about my experience at Elgin State. Father said he was reminded of the Gadarene demoniac. Mom said “That poor man.”
Two weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, I was allowed to stay up late. I sat with my father as he watched the newsman recap what had happened in 1965. Something was said about demonstrations and Vietnam and The Great Society. But I sat there thinking about “that poor” wild “man” in Elgin State. He sure reacted to The First Noël.
Close to 800 000 people die due to suicide every year, which is one person every 40 seconds. Many more attempt suicide. Suicide occurs throughout the lifespan and is the second leading cause of death among 15-29 year olds globally… There are indications that for each adult who died of suicide there may have been more than 20 others attempting suicide. –Mental Health, Suicide Data, World Health Organization
Overdoses killed young and middle-aged Americans at a breakneck pace as the country battles a crippling opioid crisis, adding to the first two-year drop in life expectancy since JFK was President.
The numbers quoted above are not insignificant. These instances of mental illness are not insignificant. And, these statistics represent only a small fraction of the de-humanizing effects of mental illness. Most of the effects of mental illness are hidden from the public eye until a person’s mental illness reaches a peak. The media then reports the violence done to others or done to one’s self in the form of suicide. Mentioned briefly by the newscaster: mental illness and the need to find a way to deal with it.
Again, the numbers quoted above are not insignificant. The quotes tell us in effect that mental illness influenced a person’s choice to self-harm. The quotes (and newscasts) do not tell us the choices that led to a mental illness that in time led to an act of violence. A post about mental illness could go in many directions. Here, I will take the path less traveled. I want to talk about what I see as the genesis of most mental illness – people’s choices.
Certainly, there are forms of mental illness which are not based on a person’s choices. Some prominent forms of mental disorder such as Bi-Polar Disorder have been ascribed primarily to a person’s genetic make-up. Some mental disorders are related to a chemical imbalance. Either abnormality can result in abnormal brain structure and function. Much progress has been made to mitigate the effects of these disorders. Some mental disorders may have come about through a child’s early environment. Talking in therapy and building good trust relationships can bring about healing.
Beyond physiological and early childhood causes, there is a spectrum of mental illnesses due to a person’s choices, choices that have been assessed and weighed based on one’s belief system and emotions. Each of us make deliberated decisions using our free will. We may choose to act in a mentally healthy way or in a mentally harmful way. We may choose to turn the other cheek or we may choose to imitate revenge (Copy-Cat Revenge). We may choose to endure pain or we may choose to commit copy-cat suicide (the Werther Effect). Choosing to choose to act against God, oneself and others is evil-based mental illness. Evil-based mental illness involves a person’s choices.
Adam and Eve made a choice and learned of evil through their disobedience. Their son Cain made a choice when he murdered his brother Abel. God, acknowledging Cain’s mental distress, let him know that his choice figured in his distress:
Then the LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”-Genesis 4:6-
One’s choice makes all the difference for one’s mental state. And, when a person makes the wrong choice, there are public and private consequences. There are mental health consequences. A descent into madness is one of the consequences.
“This is the interpretation, Your Majesty, and this is the decree the Most High has issued against my lord the king: You will be driven away from people and will live with the wild animals; you will eat grass like the ox and be drenched with the dew of heaven. Seven times will pass by for you until you acknowledge that the Most High is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and gives them to anyone he wishes. The command to leave the stump of the tree with its roots means that your kingdom will be restored to you when you acknowledge that Heaven rules. Therefore, Your Majesty, be pleased to accept my advice: Renounce your sins by doing what is right, and your wickedness by being kind to the oppressed. It may be that then your prosperity will continue….
Immediately what had been said about Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled. He was driven away from people and ate grass like the ox. His body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird.
At the end of that time, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven, and my sanity was restored. Then I praised the Most High; I honored and glorified him who lives forever. – Daniel 4:24-27, 33-34 (emphasis mine)
We live in a world where choice is king. And, people want to reign as king or queen of their choice. What you won’t hear these choice-driven folks say is that they are responsible for the choices they make. If their choice doesn’t work out the way they planned they blame others, including the government. Scapegoating is a characteristic of evil-based mental illness. For example, I was once accused by LGBT advocates on Twitter of likely going on to cause the depression and suicidal death of gay community members because I spoke out against homosexuality. The advocates of the LGBT will tell you that any resistance to the homosexual lifestyle equates to depression and death for the LGBT. People want choices and want to rule in them but it their choices which cause the mental breakdowns, depression and worse. Resistance to accountability is another characteristic of evil-based mental illness. The Apostle Paul insists on accountability to the Lord as he reminds the Ephesian church that there are those who by their choices have darkened their minds:
So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed. But that isn’t what you learned about Christ. -Ephesians 4:17-20
A darkened mind, evil-based Mental illness, starts with small concessions to evil. One acknowledges and then accepts these concessions and compartmentalizes them in part of the psyche. They are filed away from the conscious and away from public view. One goes on to absolve and protect oneself from outside reference with a half-truth: “It’s a hard life and I must do what I have to do to make it”.
One goes on to concede more ground to evil because the appetite for defiant free will choice has been whetted and there have not been any immediate consequences. The addiction to compromise has begun. The conscious is silenced. One’s mental health begins to deteriorate because thoughts are confused and growing darker; the light has been switched off. One becomes duplicitous. A public face is put on because one’s sanity is on shaky ground but others must see you as proudly self-assured and in control. And what better place to hide your self-deceit and look respectable:
Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church. What better way to conceal one’s evil from oneself, as well as from others, than to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture? … I do not mean to imply that the evil are anything other than a small minority among the religious or that the religious motives of most people are in any way spurious. I mean only that evil people tend to gravitate toward piety for the disguise and concealment it can offer them. – Martin Buber
When mental illness is discussed, evil-based mental illness should also be discussed. But I believe the reason evil-based mental illness isn’t discussed is because it involves putting people’s choices under scrutiny. Twitter users become afire when I speak against homosexuality as a lifestyle acceptable for the church. They have told me that I am not like Jesus; I am judgmental. In truth, as a Follower of Jesus, I am trying to help the world around me become fully human. In the process, I’ve come to learn that Evil is defensive of its territory – humans.
Because Evil is nothing and has no substance, it must have access to human choice to act. Evil can, by human will, pervert what God created and called good. A glaring example of this hideous conversion from the good and absolute to sliding scale values and Epicureanism is the growing Christian acceptance of homosexuality as an acceptable good. In truth, it is a queering, a perversion, of the good.
It is a curious state of affairs today and a clear indication of evil’s degenerative effect: there are those today who demand rights for this and that while at the same time say they have no control of themselves or they can’t help themselves in their behavior. They want special human rights and the right to live as animals at the same time. They take Pride (Month) in this. De-humanization (e.g., giving over your free will and conscious to animal impulse) is a guaranteed effect of the choice to dwell in mental illness. Renouncing sin and turning back to the One true God will begin restoring your humanity and sanity. Just ask King Nebuchadnezzar.
The church should be the place for evil-based mental illness to be addressed. Sadly, many mainline churches have been comprised and now affirm evil as good, thereby increasing evil-based mental illness among its members. Read the Word and receive the Eucharist. The Word and prayer can help put you back in your right mind.
I am laid low in the dust;
preserve my life according to your word.
I gave an account of my ways and you answered me;
teach me your decrees.
Cause me to understand the way of your precepts,
that I may meditate on your wonderful deeds.
My soul is weary with sorrow;
strengthen me according to your word.
Keep me from deceitful ways;
be gracious to me and teach me your law.
I have chosen the way of faithfulness;
I have set my heart on your laws.
I hold fast to your statutes, Lord;
do not let me be put to shame.
I run in the path of your commands,
for you have broadened my understanding. -Psalm 119: 25-32
Are You a danger to yourself or to others? If so, what choices have you made to bring you to this place? You are dead to rights accountable for the wrong choices. But your life doesn’t end there. Have more fear of what you may end up doing than talking to someone. Seek out a Christian and begin talking. Ask God for wisdom and do so with no doubt of receiving it, as a matter of mental health. For, “A person who doubts is like a wave of the sea which the wind blows and tosses about. Someone like that should not suppose they will receive anything from the Lord, since they are double minded and unstable in everything they do.”
Interactive media has influence on your mental health, if you let it. Added 6/19/2018:
Gaming disorder is defined in the draft 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) as a pattern of gaming behavior (“digital-gaming” or “video-gaming”) characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.
For gaming disorder to be diagnosed, the behaviour pattern must be of sufficient severity to result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning and would normally have been evident for at least 12 months.
“See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness.” Jesus, from an eyewitness account recorded by Luke the physician, chapter 11, verse 35.
“The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” Jesus as recorded in the eyewitness account of Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 6, verses 22 and 23.
~~~
I don’t have to tell you that mental health and the lack thereof has been in the news lately. Tied mainly to reports of mass killings, the national mental health issue has been spotlighted when evil rears its ugly head. This post is about perspective on the mental health industry from someone who knows and for those on the treadmill of psychoanalysis.
Yet, Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez willfully and coherently texted “an Islamic verse: “Whosoever shows enmity to a friend of Mine, then I have declared war against him.” Then, Abdulazeez immediately acted out those words by killing four Marines and a sailor.
Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez
GIGO: Abdulazeez was not depressed. Rather, he was unhappy, bored and dissatisfied with his view of the West and probably with himself. Stoking his ego with radical Islamist mal-machismo and personal grandiosity, Abdulazeez thought he would become bigger than life itself by becoming part of something that he thought was even bigger than himself – Islam’s Grand Jihad and the Slaughter of Innocents.
Psychology would not have benefitted the mental health of Abdulazeez. Psychology does not judge right from wrong. Psychology is the multiculturalism of all values, the egalitarian leveler of all thoughts into equal subjective and even political values.
Could it be that psychology, like gun laws is ineffectual due to the depraved moral character of the persons involved? Could it be that the individual’s eye and society’s eye is NOT focused on “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things.” (From the apostle Paul’s to epistle to the Philippian church, chapter 4, verse 8.)
With regard to mankind’s focus and his progress in the area of proper human self-reflection…”Psychology is not a key to self-understanding, but a cultural barrier to such understanding as we can achieve…” from the Preface of “Admirable Evasions, How Psychology Undermines Morality” by Theodore Dalyrymple, 2015.
Admirable Evasions
Who is Theodore Dalyrymple? Theodore Dalyrymple is a pen name used by retired prison psychiatrist Dr. Anthony Daniels. I have written about Dalrymple in a previous post (see below).
Theodore Dalrymple aka Anthony Daniels, retired prison psychiatrist
“Admirable Evasions” sheds much-needed light on the mental health industry and in particular on the proactive diagnosis of depression.
Commercially advertised medications are prescribed to stave off unhappiness, dissatisfaction and ennui. Depression as a mental health state is used in courtrooms (and the media, as shown above) as a defense. Thus, responsibility for one’s felony first degree murder is not correlated to one’s accumulated misbehavior or evil compounded into utter darkness.
Dalrymple’s book, as the sub-title puts forward, exposes the absolution of patients from moral culpability. Psychology, instead, seeks to divine a secret knowledge through its Sisyphean scientism efforts in hopes of uncovering the ‘deep’ mystery of the patient’s unhappiness. We read also of the consumer’s constant demand for felicity and the bottom line commercialism behind antidepressant prescriptions. Dalrymple also provides a brief and sardonic history of psychoanalysis.
“The purpose of such all-encompassing understanding, other than moral self-aggrandizement, is the evasion of one’s own moral responsibility; for it follows that if no one is to be judged (because to judge is to judge harshly), then one is not oneself to be judged-not even by oneself. This, in effect, means carte blanche to do as you feel like, because all behavior is put on equal moral footing; it is only to be understood.” (Chapter Four)
Briefly, scientism is a coupling of the lexicon and theories of science with pop culture, anthropology, politics, popular consensus and ultimately with Neo-Darwinism. Scientism becomes a form of ‘truth’ through repetition and consensus opinion. Scientism is the appearance, the apparition, of science and not the reality of science.
Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) for example, is a frequent scientism apparition. And, just as in the opening scene of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the apparition of AGW sets a macabre and eerie tone while foreshadowing a theme of death.
Scientism, like Hamlet’s apparition’s appearance is expected by ‘those in the know’ to be feared and revered-the spirit of Mother Gaia is to be worshipped.
But scientism, uncoupled from reality and from this earth, is not subjected to honest reflection on the empirical science or the realities of cost to benefit analysis (see my previous post). Scientism seeks to generate free-floating angst meant to separate you from your money for the ‘right’ environ-mental cause and candidate.
~~~
Theodore Dalrymple has worked in the mental health industry over a course of a lifetime, mostly with prison inmates. With characteristic insight, candor, humor and background Dalrymple empowers the reader with his common sense observations about the mental health industry. He tells us that the mental health industry is NOT based on science. (This pseudo-science has to finance its own grandiosity by repeating its weekly psychic readings.)
Using his logo centric cerebral scanner Dalrymple gives us his diagnosis of mental health scientism where experimentation becomes published ‘settled science” until the next ‘sure’ thing comes along. Counseling “initiates” sooner or later are subjected to new ‘insights’ but the game is always to designate them as “victims”, victims who need to forgive themselves and/or learn to churn out positive self-esteem so as to inflate the ego and ward off scary intruders. And, remember Primal Screaming? “Shout, shout, Let it all out.”
“We [the mental health industry] need everyone who suffers to be a victim because only thus can we maintain our pretense to universal understanding and experience the warm glow of our own compassion, so akin to the warmth that a strong, stiff drink imparts in the cold.” (Chapter Four)
From Chapter One: “The first psychological scheme of the twentieth century to provide man with the illusion of much expanded, if not complete, self-understanding, together with hope of an existence free of inner and outer conflict, was psychoanalysis, then came behaviorism, after which came cybernetics, Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology were next; and now neuroscientific imaging, together with a little light neurochemistry, persuades us that we are about to pluck out the heart of our mystery.Suffice it to say, by way of deflation of exaggerated hopes and expectation, that 10 percent or more of the population now takes antidepressants, a figure is all the more remarkable as the evidence is lacking that they, the antidepressants, work except in a very small minority of cases; rather the reverse. That they are taken in such quantities is evidence more of dissatisfaction with life than of increased understanding of its causes, as well as of the spread of superstition regarding neurotransmitters and so-called “chemical imbalances.” (emphasis added)
Dalrymple goes on to talk about the absurdities of Freudianism and of Freud himself: [Freud] belonged more to the history of techniques of self-advancement and the foundation of religious sects than to that of science… He says Freud was ”a habitual liar who falsified evidence…”and “ he was a self-aggrandizing manipulator of people…”
“Admirable Evasions” delves into the mental health industry’s ‘absolution’ of a patient’s wrong doing based on as yet to be determined psychological mysteries locked in the patient’s brain. Hence the undermining and “Evasion” of morality as the book’s title posits. Hence, morally deficit people are left to roam our streets and at times kill others. Garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is not a defense in court or a comfort to those who have lost a loved one to amoral psychoanalysis with its lawless diagnosis.
“Men can change; this is their glory and their burden, for it is precisely the capacity to change that renders them responsible for their actions; but what they do may be irreparable.”
The above quote from Admirable Evasions is found within the article “The Multiple Lives of Mehdi Nemmouche” . There Dalrymple talks about the “doctrine of the Real Me”.
Mehdi Nemmouche
~~~
Everyone wants an out…
Remember CPL Max Klinger of the MASH unit who feigned mental illness (in women’s clothes) so as to be discharged as unfit?
Remember “The devil made me do it.”?
On the couch, morality is posited as just a scary apparition, an angry “Epicurean” god, a figment of a tormented mental condition, an unwarranted guilt complex, genes gone awry, synapses misfiring or firing at the wrong time due to over-stimulation. One Nudge too far!
To neo-Darwinists, morality is considered a Darwinian materialist’s adaption to one’s societal surroundings. Neo-Darwinists do not want to go where morality dwells because that would entail submitting to a Moral Absolute. It is much easier for their pride to accept a humanist’s scientism solution every time. It is easier for them to dabble in the mystical arts of new age scientism.
Dalrymple, in a footnote, admits that he (an atheist) has no moral high ground of his own: “The fact that I do not have any watertight metaphysic of morals does not mean that psychology can just rush in to fill the gap.”
…but fools rush into the utter darkness anyway.
“…Emerson said in one of his brief excursions into comprehensibility, foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” (Chapter Four)
The default diagnosis of mental illness proffered by the media and by the waiting in the wings defense psychologists is most likely evil and its focus on fatalism.
“But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!”
~~~
Theodore Dalrymple’s answer to the mental health industry’s inability to improve one’s healthy self-awareness is straightforward-read good literature. Read and become self-aware after reflecting on the characters and the situations they encounter in the book. I agree. Psychoanalysis tends to be a masturbation of the ego.
I also agree, as Dalrymple asserts, there is some good in the mental health industry. There are those who are dealing with incurable psychosis. These need help working with reality. But, most people do not need the packaged nonsense. They do need good books, good friends, exercise and to be held accountable for their actions by their friends and society before the point of no return.
As a Christian, I would strongly suggest that if you are desirous of a healthy mind that you also turn your eyes upon Jesus. Cable TV and today’s media have nothing healthy to offer you. You won’t find moral absolutes on TV.
[Ryan] “Murphy tells ET that he plans to initiate Gaga with a particularly “disturbing and awful” murder scene with her co-star Bomer, when the show begins filming next week.”
~~~
“Diversion is the only thing that consoles us in our wretchedness, and yet diversion is itself the greatest of our miseries. For it is diversion above all that keeps us from seriously taking stock of ourselves and so leads us imperceptibly to perdition.”
—Pascal, Pensées
From the Evil One’s point of view, the liturgy of psycho-babble is meant to replace the Lord ’s Prayer.
In Jesus you learn to forgive others and no longer hold grudges or unresolved anger. Any root of bitterness is soon uprooted and you are free to plant a plush garden in its place. That garden will be where Jesus comes to visit-as he did with St. Teresa of Avila and where He also visits me.
~~~
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” Isaiah 5:20
“Following more than 2 1/2 hours of closing arguments, Judge Timothy Joyce concluded that Bryant Brewer wasn’t mentally ill but simply chose “not to be bound by society’s norms.”
“The only completely truthful thing I heard from (Brewer) is that he’s a cop killer,” the judge said as Soderberg’s widow, Jennifer Loudon, clutched a tissue in her right hand. “He brutally, callously, viciously and without compunction murdered Officer Thor Soderberg.””
…
Officer Thor Soderberg
“Joyce delivered a lengthy verdict, finally announcing the guilty decision after 8 p.m. He found Brewer guilty on all counts — including the attempted murder of three other officers in addition to Soderberg’s first-degree murder.
The judge concluded that the defense presented no admissible evidence that Brewer had schizophrenia.”
“…the same jury that convicted Holmes of 24 counts of first-degree murder and 140 counts of attempted murder last month in the July 20, 2012, massacre at a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” in Aurora. The jury deliberated less than 13 hours before reaching that decision.”
“Defense attorneys argued that [James] Holmes suffered from schizophrenia and he was legally insane when he carried out the attack. The jury rejected that defense in finding Holmes guilty.”
~~~
Added: 10-4-2015
This astounding finding should be an integral part of the mental health debate:
Is there a correlation between the increase of prescribed psychotropic medications over the past twenty-five years and the current epidemic of disabling mental illness? He notes that the disabled mentally ill place a significant burden on society.
“We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture, and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work” Roger Scruton
*****
“When a common culture declines, the ethical life can be sustained and renewed only by a work of the imagination.”-Roger Scruton
*****
“Jesus prayed, “This is eternal life, that they may know You . . .” (John 17:3). The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything it has to face without wavering. If we will take this view, life will become one great romance— a glorious opportunity of seeing wonderful things all the time. God is disciplining us to get us into this central place of power.” Oswald Chambers
*****
“No power on earth or in hell can conquer the Spirit of God in a human spirit, it is an inner unconquerableness.” Oswald Chambers
*****
To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs it, and I will do it for him.” The Shadow of an Agony,Oswald Chambers
*****
“If we wish to erect new structures, we must have a definite knowledge of the old foundations.” John Calvin Coolidge
*****
Atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon.
*****
If social justice looks like your hand in someone else’s pocket then you are stealing.
*****
“In Sweden, giving to charity, absurdly, came to be considered a lack of solidarity, since it undermined the need for the welfare state.” – Roland Martinsson
*****
“…to love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.” Alexis de Tocqueville
*****
Capitalism seeks to help others through a servce or product it provides. Free Market Capitalism is the most moral and fair economic system available to man. Capitalism augments personal growth, responsibility and ownership. Charity flourishes under capitalism. Charity dies under subjective “fair share” government confiscatory policies. Socialism redistributes ambivalence and greed.
*****
“We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.” G.K. Chesterton
*****
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein
*****
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” Flannery O’Connor
*****
“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
*****
“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).
*****
God’s grace is not about the allowance for sin. God’s grace is about the conversation God allows regarding sin.
*****
From the book of Proverbs: We are not to favor the rich or the poor. We are to pursue justice.
*****
“Always keep in contact with those books and those people that enlarge your horizon and make it possible for you to stretch yourself mentally.” Oswald Chambers
*****
One goldfish says to another, “If there is no God who keeps changing the water?”
*****
“The truth is always there in the morning.”
From Cat On A Hot Tin Roof script – playwright Tennessee Williams
*****
God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.
*****
“America’s greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.” John W. Gardner
**
“Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.” John W. Gardner
*****
“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” Dorothy L. Sayers
*****
“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
*****
“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
*****
This is what the LORD says:
“Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
-The prophet Jeremiah, 6:16
*****
“…our common task is not so much discovering a truth hiding among contrary viewpoints as it is coming to possess a selfhood that no longer evades and eludes the truth with which it is importunately confronted.” James McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1
*****
Cindy Wity 
Fear and Loathing in Ward No 6
July 9, 2023 Leave a comment
“In the hospital yard there stands a small lodge surrounded by a perfect forest of burdocks, nettles, and wild hemp. Its roof is rusty, the chimney is tumbling down, the steps at the front-door are rotting away and overgrown with grass, and there are only traces left of the stucco. The front of the lodge faces the hospital; at the back it looks out into the open country, from which it is separated by the grey hospital fence with nails on it. These nails, with their points upwards, and the fence, and the lodge itself, have that peculiar, desolate, God-forsaken look which is only found in our hospital and prison buildings.”
Ward No. 6., a story by Anton Chekov, opens with this description of an outpost hospital 150 miles from a train station. This provincial hospital with a lunatic asylum annex, worlds apart from “sane” society, is the setting for the reader to examine the disturbing dehumanization taking place in Russia and, perhaps, everywhere else.
Chekhov wrote the story with reformist concerns after he visited a far east penal colony of the Russian Empire – Sakhalin Island.[1] Chekhov’s aim was to survey the prisoners and publicize their conditions. His compiled notes became the book Sakhalin Island.
Chekov, as guide, invites us onto the premises of the provincial hospital and into its mental ward. He would have us understand suffering in the presence of it and not in the abstract. So, he has us listen in on conversations between Dr. Andrei Yefimich Ragin, who is in charge of the hospital and asylum, and inmate Ivan Dmitrich Gromov.
With a phrase similar to Dante’s opening of the Divine Comedy – “abandon all hope, ye who enter here” – Chekhov forewarns us about our entry into Ward No. 6: “If you are not afraid of being stung by nettles, let us go along the narrow path.”
As we follow our tour guide, he shows us the hospital’s neglected and unsanitary conditions and then introduces us to the brutish Nikita, who I consider one of the “nettles”.
“The porter, Nikita, an old soldier wearing rusty good-conduct stripes, is always lying on the litter with a pipe between his teeth. He has a grim, surly, battered-looking face, overhanging eyebrows which give him the expression of a sheep-dog of the steppes, and a red nose; he is short and looks thin and scraggy, but he is of imposing deportment and his fists are vigorous. He belongs to the class of simple-hearted, practical, and dull-witted people, prompt in carrying out orders, who like discipline better than anything in the world, and so are convinced that it is their duty to beat people. He showers blows on the face, on the chest, on the back, on whatever comes first, and is convinced that there would be no order in the place if he did not.”
After walking past the cluttered pitiful state of the entry-way conditions and the fearful porter, we enter the annex.
Here, the “walls are painted dirty blue, the ceiling is as sooty as in a hut without out a chimney . . .The wooden floor is gray and full of splinters. There is a stench of sour cabbage, smoldering wicks, bugs, and ammonia, and for the first minute this stench gives you the impression of having walked into a menagerie.
“The beds in the room are bolted to the floor. Sitting and lying on them are men in blue hospital dressing gowns, wearing nightcaps in the old style. These are the lunatics.
There are five of them in all.”
Chekhov describes the inmates and then begins to focus on the two protagonists, inmate Ivan Dmitrich Gromov and doctor Andrei Yefimich Ragin. We learn about both from their dialog. As we listen in, we soon begin to wonder who the patient is and who is the doctor.
Early in life Ivan Dmitrich Gromov was severely flogged by his father. His mental state became more unstable with personal misfortunes. Later in life he sees convicts being led away by armed guards. This was not an uncommon sight for Gromov to witness. But this time he reacts with pity and unease and transference. He begins to conceptualize that like the convicts, it is also his lot in life to be clamped in chains and punished for some crime. This inordinate thinking, a persecution complex that becomes a paralyzing fear of some random moment someone will come down on him for something, lands Gromov in Ward No. 6. He tells Dr. Ragin that he has “persecution mania.”
Though he’s an inmate because he’s out of touch with reality, Gromov is very much in touch with the mental anguish caused by his fixation and the physical pain delivered by the blows of Nikita. Ward No. 6 reinforces Gromov’s cycle of fear and pity.
Dr. Andrei Yefimich Ragin, on the other hand, is not in touch with the human condition. Passive and cynical, he is unable to bring reforms to the hospital.
In conversations with Gromov, Ragin justifies his indifference to others’ plight by suggesting that everything is subject to chance. For instance, he posits that there is no difference between wearing a doctor’s smock and an inmate’s smock.
To further justify his coolness to the human condition he references Ecclesiastes – “it is all futile, senseless” – and quotes Marcus Aurelius: “Pain is just the idea of pain: make an effort of will to change that idea, reject it, cease to complain, and the pain will disappear.” The inner self should dictate one’s experience according to Ragin.[2]
The doctor’s inner self has him ignoring the unsanitary and detrimental conditions of Ward No. 6 and the plight of his patients. Dr. Ragin “knows such surroundings are torture to feverish, consumptive, and impressionable patients, but what can be done?” His stoic outlook of mind over matter is, in practice, one of heartless neglect toward others.
He increases suffering, instead of relieving it, by remaining aloof and disconnected from it. He has intellectualized reality to justify his inaction and seeks further intellectualization to relieve him of his post’s boredom and purposelessness.
Adding to the doctor’s disinterest is what our guide tells us: “probably in no other place is life so monotonous as in this annex.” As one day is no different than another in this outpost hospital, Dr. Ragin becomes disenchanted with his doctor routine.
When he first came to the hospital, Dr. Ragin “worked very diligently. He saw patients every morning till dinnertime, performed operations, and even practiced obstetrics. . .. But in the course of time the work unmistakably wearied him by its monotony and obvious uselessness.”
The doctor extrapolates from his daily routine and reasons “why interfere with people dying if death is the normal and prescribed end for everyone?” and “If the aim of medicine is to utilize drugs to alleviate suffering, the question necessarily arises: why alleviate it?” With similar thoughts, he reasons away the need for himself to be involved in the lives of suffering people. Why should anyone be spared pain when “their lives have nothing of importance in them and would be entirely empty, like the life of an amoeba, were it not for suffering?
“Oppressed by such reflections, Andrey Yefimich let things go and gave up going to the hospital every day.”
To avoid the messy, tedious, and nonsensical reality around him, Dr. Ragin leaves work early and goes home to his books and beer. He withdraws from the physical world to seek mental stimulation. As he reads he is wowed by recent medical discoveries and yet makes not one application to his own hospital. He blames society for the mess he has to deal with.
Evenings consist of conversations with his postmaster friend Mikhail, the only one in town who doesn’t bore the doctor. (Is Ragin more Epicurean in practice than Stoic?)
This routine changes when one day Dr. Ragin follows an inmate, the Jew Moiseika, returning to the annex from his daily wandering in the town. The doctor notices that Moiseika is walking around with bare feet in the winter. Inside, he tells Nikita to give Moiseika some boots for the cold weather. Dr. Ragin, we learn, is not unaware of what’s around him.
From his bed Gromov hears the doctor’s voice, jumps up and reacts with loud vitriol at his presence. The doctor goes in to see who is making the fuss about him. After Gromov calms down, the two begin a dialog that Dr. Ragin finds pleasurable: “What an agreeable young man!” The doctor, breaking with routine, visits Gromov again the next day.
The doctor encounters Gromov lying in bed holding his head in terrible pain. Gromov is suffering with a splitting headache. He reasoned over and over again since the day before that Dr. Ragin was a “spy or doctor who has been charged to test me – it’s all the same -.” Gromov’s persecution mania was triggered.
Dr. Ragin responds, reasoning that if true and Gromov is arrested and sent to prison then he is no worse off being right where he is. This response frees Gromov up a bit and the two have a bit of relaxed conversation. Gromov wishes to be in a better place – outside in “the country somewhere” and “to have a decent doctor to cure one’s headache.”
“It’s so long since I have lived like a human being. It’s vile here. Insufferably vile!”
The doctor responds, not with an antidote for Ivan’s headache, not with a ride in the country, but with a philosophical take on how to think about things – with simple equivalency.
“There’s no difference between a warm and comfortable study and this ward” and “Peace and contentment do not lie outside a man, but within him.”
Gromov questions this. The doctor continues.
“The ordinary man expects the good and the bad from external things – from an open carriage and a study – but a thinking man derives them from within himself.”
Gromov rejects the doctor’s philosophical reasoning. The doctor responds, telling Gromov that “One must strive for the comprehension of life, and therein lies true happiness.”
Gromov understands nothing of what the doctor has been saying and inferring: Comprehension? External, internal? Life is just a mental exercise, a thought experiment, detached from the tragic dimension of human existence? Gromov gets up, looks angrily at the doctor and speaks:
“I only know that God has created me of warm blood and nerves, yes, indeed! If organic tissue is capable of life it must react to every irritant. And I do react! I respond to pain with tears and outcries, to baseness with indignation, to filth with loathing. To my mind, that is precisely what is called life. . . . How is it that you don’t know that?”
Gromov continues, commenting perceptively about the Stoics. He then asks why Dr. Ragin why he preaches Stoicism. “Are you a sage? A philosopher?” The doctor responds “No …. but everyone ought to preach it because it is reasonable.”
Gromov, the inmate, then wants to know how the doctor considers himself to be “competent to judge comprehension and contempt for suffering”.
“Have you ever suffered? Have you any idea of what suffering is? Allow me to ask you, were you ever thrashed as a child?”
“No, responds the doctor, “my parents had an aversion to corporal punishment?”
Gromov tells the doctor that his own father, “a harsh, hemorrhoidal government clerk with along nose and a yellow neck” flogged him cruelly. Sizing the doctor up, Gromov then proceeds with his analysis of the doctor, excoriating his competency to understand anything about Gromov’s life or life itself.
“No one has laid a finger on you all your life, no one has terrorized you nor beaten you; you are as strong as an ox. . .. You are by nature a lazy, flaccid man, and so you have tried to arrange your life in such a way that nothing should disturb you or force you to budge.”
I’ll stop here and leave you with Gromov’s cri de coeur and Dr. Ragin’s inability to come to terms with suffering. Even when the doctor does act to relieve suffering, he thinks that he will be paid back for his trouble. He lends his postmaster friend money after his friend suffers gambling loses. But the doctor is never repaid and soon becomes destitute. It appears from all that happens to the doctor as the story unfolds, that the doctor’s friends and associates also hold to “It’s all the same” thinking.
This story is rich with insight and worth a read. And though one may not be interested in reading a story in a Russian setting, consider that cultures change but human nature doesn’t change much from place to place or age to age.
“It’s all the same!”, first spoken by Gromov when he encounters Dr. Ragin (“a spy or a doctor”) is oft repeated and inferred by Dr. Ragin as he explains his philosophy to Gromov. You’ll have to read the story to see how the doctor’s “It’s all the same” philosophy works out. He holds on to it to the end of the story.
““Ward Six” is affective and effective largely because Chekhov makes proper, judicious, and artistic use of the very faculty that is impaired in his two heroes, Gromov and Ragin, the faculty for contemplating similarities. Their respective disorders, which are two extremes of the same continuum, prevent them from experiencing fear and pity in a healthy, moderate, cathartic fashion.”[3]
As you read Ward No. 6, ask yourself these questions:
Is “society” at fault and therefore responsible for the ills and disorder of society or are individuals responsible?
If one assigns “society” as the cause for “systemic” failures, is the individual therefore absolved of any personal responsibility?
Is detachment from reality a sign of mental illness?
Do you spend your time in the laboratory of thought and have never played baseball or wrestled with another human being?
Does lying to oneself promote mental health?
Is it healthy to be being disconnected from physical reality via drugs or the TV and the internet – supposed mental stimulants that will lessen our boredom?
“It’s all the same!”: Is that a motto for your life? How has that worked out for you?
If we say chance or fate determines things, do we give up believing we can make a difference?
Do false equivalencies, such as occur in Ward No. 6 and that also operate in our culture, lead to mental illness?
A momentary transposition of one’s reality into another through imagination is healthy. Day dreaming is healthy. But what about the permeant transpositions into unreality that is occurring around us today?
Have you ever asked God to heal your imagination?
(As mentioned before, Chekhov is my favorite writer. His stories (and plays) show rather than tell. Chekhov doesn’t moralize or preach. As with Ward No. 6, he lets readers see and hear for themselves and make their own judgements. I appreciate this way of writing. For one thing, I am not a fan of preaching. I had my fill growing up. I attended churches where preaching, and not the Eucharist, is the pinnacle of the service. I’ve moved on to an Anglican church.)
[1] Chekhov spent three months at Sakhalin Island interviewing thousands of convicts and settlers under the ruse of taking a census. For more details of his trip see Anton Chekhov and the Sakhalin Penal Colony – Hektoen International (hekint.org).
[2] When Chekhov wrote Ward No. 6, he was reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. A couple of quotes from that journal apply to Dr. Ragin’s disposition: “Our life is what our thoughts make it.”; “You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
[3] Liza Knapp, “The Suffering of Others: Fear and Pity in “Ward Six,” in Anton Chekhov’s Selected Stories, ed. Cathy Popkin (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2014), 629
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Audio: Ward No. 6 : Anton Chekhov : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
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“We need everyone who suffers to be a victim because only thus can we maintain our pretense to universal understanding and experience the warm glow of our own compassion, so akin to the warmth that a strong, stiff drink imparts in the cold.”
“Psychology is not a key to self-understanding, but a cultural barrier to such understanding as we can achieve…” from the Preface of Admirable Evasions, How Psychology Undermines Morality by Theodore Dalrymple, 2015.
Theodore Dalyrymple is a pen name used by retired prison psychiatrist Dr. Anthony Daniels.
Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality by Theodore Dalrymple | Goodreads
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Dr. Ragin – “superfluous man”
“The name ‘superfluous man’ refers to an important and recurrent character type in 19th c. Russian literature. It denotes an idealistic but inactive hero who is aware of and sensitive to moral and social problems but who does not take action; in part because of personal weakness and lassitude, in part because of social and political restraints to freedom of action.”
A short note on the term ‘superfluous man’ and its examples – Literary Ocean
– “usually an aristocrat, intelligent, well-educated, and informed by idealism and goodwill but incapable, for reasons as complex as Hamlet’s, of engaging in effective action. Although he is aware of the stupidity and injustice surrounding him, he remains a bystander.”
Superfluous man | literature | Britannica
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“This episode of Health Care News focuses on the recent repeal of the Certificate of Need and financial credentialing in the healthcare industry . . . and how it will enhance competition in the healthcare market, ultimately leading to reduced prices.”
Killing “Certificate of Need” Laws (Guest: Marcello Hochman, M.D.) – The Heartland Institute
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World Economic Forum’s Ward No. 6:
The World Economic Forum has declared that by 2030 fashion will become completely obsolete and all humans will be vegan, whether they like it or not.
12ft | WEF Says Fashion Will Be Abolished by 2030: “Humans Will All Wear a Uniform”
Informed Dissent:
God help us . . .
The World Health Organization and its partner organization, the Bill Gates-controlled GAVI, announced Wednesday that they will be flooding Africa with 18 million doses of malaria vaccines.
WHO & Gates Inc announce plans to flood Africa with ultra dangerous malaria “vaccines” (dossier.today)
“More pandemics are coming” – bioweapons expert Dr Francis Boyle (biznews.com)
Ozempic, Hormone Mimicking Drugs & Their Side Effects (rumble.com)
Lancet Study on Covid Vaccine Autopsies Finds 74% Were Caused by Vaccine – Study is Removed Within 24 Hours – The Daily Sceptic
U.N. To Seize Global ‘Emergency’ Powers With Biden’s Support (thefederalist.com)
‘What Is the Sin Committed by Christians?’: The Persecution of Christians, May 2023 :: Gatestone Institute
“. . . multiple federal laws were broken to change the recording metrics for COVID-19-deaths. There is also evidence of multiple acts of what appears to be willful misconduct by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other agencies throughout the COVID-19 crisis.”
Call to Action>>>>
Sign The Petition To Investigate The CDC! (standforhealthfreedom.com)
The Biden Crime family:
‘Missing’ Biden corruption case witness Dr. Gal Luft details allegations against president’s family – YouTube
New video suggests Jill Biden knows exactly what is going on in her family… – Revolver News
Electronic message from Hunter Biden demanded payment from Chinese businessman: ‘I am sitting here with my father’ – NaturalNews.com
Climate Alarmism vs. Climate Reality:
Greenpeace Founder: Anti-Carbon Dioxide Agenda Is a Hoax – Slay News
2015 Annual GWPF Lecture – Patrick Moore – Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide? – YouTube
Baseball-Sized Hail Smashing Into Panels At 150 MPH Destroys Scottsbluff Solar Farm | Your Wyoming News Source (cowboystatedaily.com)
Obamas complained about being black and oppressed from luxury yacht in Greek islands – Disclose.tv
Coming to America – as a result of open borders:
A group of young musicians who hail from homeschooling backgrounds have crossed states and blended musical styles to form a unique band with a mission: to keep the classics alive.
Listen To Our New Single! (ffm.to)
L-O-V-E – YouTube
Man Caught Drinking Bud Light Insists He’s Not Gay – YouTube
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Filed under Health Care, mental health, Russian Literature, social commentary Tagged with Anton Chekhov, healthcare, mental health, suffering, Ward No. 6