About 15 years ago, I got a call very late one night from a college friend. She was in graduate school at a VPU, living with her husband in a little apartment off campus. She was in the second year of a 2-year program, getting her master’s in public policy, and she was one of the smartest, most pulled-together people I knew.
She called to tell me she was pregnant with the baby Jesus. It was time for his second coming, and she was carrying him. She was going to give birth to him, and I was going to write a book about it. I didn’t even write books then, but that’s what she said was going to happen.
It was about 2 a.m., and I had been out drinking with a friend, so I was still a bit drunk. I didn’t understand at first what was happening. I went along with what she was saying in a half-asleep stupor – Yeah, I’ll write a book! It’ll be a best seller! – before finally realizing she was talking like a crazy person. And she meant it. “Where’s your husband?” I asked her. She said he was asleep in their bed, and she was on the cordless phone in the living room, so he wouldn’t hear her. She indicated that he wasn’t happy with how much time she’d been spending on the phone lately.
We talked for 5 or 10 minutes as I tried to figure out what the hell was going on. She kept saying she’d figured out the secrets of the universe, that everything made sense now and she was going to explain it to everyone. She was ecstatic, rambling, full of energy. Then, the phone went dead.
I panicked. I called right back, and after 10 rings or so, her husband answered with a groggy voice. I told him I’d just been on the phone with his wife, and she was saying crazy things. I said the phone had gone dead. He woke up in a hurry, and called out to her. But she wasn’t in the apartment. Where could she have gone? She was clearly not in her right mind – it wasn’t safe for her to wander this college town alone, at 2 a.m., in such a state.
He and I were still on the phone trying to figure out what to do when she beeped back in through call waiting. I answered her call, and she was at a pay phone a few blocks away. I managed to convince her to hang up and go back to the apartment, and her husband took her straight to the campus infirmary. Turns out, he’d taken her there the day before, when she’d started acting strangely, but they didn’t admit her. Now, they took her into the psych unit to evaluate her.
My friend was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I knew nothing about it at the time, but learned a lot about it in the coming weeks, when I traveled up to the college town to help her husband out as he tried to come to terms with the new reality of having a spouse with a mental illness. She was hospitalized for a week, and because she was in a manic phase, she repotted all the plants on the hospital floor, refiled all the books and magazines, made collages, made phone calls, and wrote long letters to all her friends. Each day that passed felt like an eternity to us, because she didn’t seem to be getting better. But at the end of the second day, she said to her husband, “Wow, this day has flown by! I feel like I just woke up!”
I thought of my friend on Monday when I saw the clips and read the stories about Charlie Sheen. Everyone knows already that he has a substance-abuse problem, but when he appeared on the Today show, saying things like, “I’m tired of pretending like I’m not special. I’m tired of pretending like I’m not bitchin’, a total … rock star from Mars,” and that his favorite drug was “Charlie Sheen. It’s not available because if you try it once you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body,” it felt like the same strange, fantastic narcissism my friend had gone through.
And it made me sad. Ordinarily, I don’t really care what Charlie Sheen does. I’m not a fan, and he has always seemed indifferent to whether he gets clean and sober or not. But seeing him being interviewed on TV, when he’s clearly in a delusional state, made me sad for him. Fair or not, it seemed before like he could choose to take control of his life, but just wouldn’t. Now it seems he’s psychologically incapable. It’s sad to see a morning show exploit that for ratings.
LP, you are an excellent story teller. I hope you do write books.
Great post! I can imagine very few medial outlets not exploiting a delusional Charlie Sheen. And of course there was the joke at the oscars (James Franco in a dress saying, “I just got a text message from Charlie Sheen!”) — he’s clearly lived too long to be a “real” Hollywood tragedy.
As a sidebar: our collective willingness to misunderstand mental illness and the resulting marginalization of the mentally ill continues to feed our ever-hungry prison industrial complex…
Sheen will likely harm a woman and/or himself, and the pathetic media narrative will be, “why didn’t anyone do anything to stop this?”
You’ve got me in a state, LP! Get me a carrier pigeon; I need to send a message!
Excellent post, LP! I must admit that until now the possibility of CS’s having a mental disorder had not entered my mind. I also sheepishly admit having had my share of chuckles while reading some of his recent quotes. Reading the story of your friend’s episode alongside of CS’s story has changed my outlook on him and recent events. True, he’s not my favorite Hollywood personality, but now I have to object to this exploitation of what very well may be a serious mental disorder, not simply a case of a crack-addled narcissist with a huge media following.
Not to get overly preachy on you Tim, but being “crack-addled” is also a medial condition, which we should take a little more seriously…
1: KS, thanks for this! It’s especially nice to hear right now.
2: “our collective willingness to misunderstand mental illness” indeed. It’s more pervasive than people think, and less understood. On a side note, once my friend began taking lithium – and not even in large doses – she was fine. The only times she’s ever had problems since then is when for one reason or another (breast feeding, long trips) she stops taking it.
3, 4: This is what I meant when I wrote “Fair or not, it seemed before like he could choose to take control of his life, but just wouldn’t,” although I don’t think my meaning was clear. It really isn’t fair to suddenly be concerned about Charlie Sheen just because I now suspect he has a mental illness. He has been ill along, but my own prejudices deemed his addiction somehow less of a worry, and more something to disdain in him.
Oh my gosh, I LOVE this post. It would never have occurred to me to feel one scrap of compassion for him–I just lumped him in with Mel Gibson and other Class-A assholes in my mind. I love how this turns my assumptions on their ear and makes me view the whole situation differently. This is what good art does! Thank you for this post!
(p.s. Should I feel compassion for Mel Gibson too? Please advise.)
In Yoruba, there’s this idea that you choose what head you will have before you’re born, so when people start acting out in some antisocial freaky way, people tell them that they are “olori buruku”–the possessor of a bad head. It’s a pretty bad insult in Yoruba, but seems slightly more compassionate than “crazy motherfucker.” At any rate, apparently when someone is being a total olori buruku, the traditional treatment is for the community to deal with it. It’s not torture, expulsion, exposure, or isolation; the point is for the olori buruku to be reintegrated into the community. Apparently it’s historically been pretty successful as a psychological treatment.
I feel like our way of dealing with mental illness tends to assume either that the person should figure out how to snap out of it on their own, or else it’s hopeless, short of medicating the shit out of them. (I am absolutely in favor of medication for relief, but as it stands, it seems meds can take a vicious bite out of quality of life.) When someone gets drowned in his head, we just watch him sink.
I’m not really in an all-embracing compassionate place for Sheen. I’ve always hated that guy, just on the level of being an ignorant talentless douche. But he’s totally olori buruku, and it is sad that he doesn’t seem to have a community to pull him in and deal with him.
One of the assumptions of the community strategy is that each individual person must be functional for the community to succeed. They don’t have to be normal or extraordinary, but they do have to be able to participate in some meaningful way. As the possessor of a bad head, I have been dealt with in a lot of different ways by my communities over the course of my life. IME, feeling needed by the people around me has almost always been the thing that helped me want to negotiate with my limitations. The fact that people still count on me to give *them* support is deeply comforting. The real breakdown comes when no one ever challenges you or asks you for anything, because you know that everyone has given up on you.
There was an interesting (ish) article about Mel Gibson in January’s Vanity Fair.
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/features/2011/03/mel-gibson-201103
It may well be that the guy is an A-hole, but I did gain a little more insight into what makes people like Jodie Foster still willing to work with him.
Disclaimer: I was trapped on a transcontinental jetliner while reading this article (and literally every other one in that Vanity Fair). So I cannot guarantee that it is actually worth your time.
6: Thanks! And your Mel Gibson question is one that threatens to topple my whole argument, because it’s VERY difficult for me to bring myself to feel compassion for him, although he seems to suffer the same set of problems Sheen does. Perhaps the difference is that Gibson expresses his craziness through violent hateful speech toward others, while Sheen expresses a more benign, self-involved sort of craziness. (Though he has certainly had his antisemitic moments in the last couple of days.)
Expanding the argument, if we are to feel compassion for everyone who suffers from mental illness, we might as well feel it for Kim Jong Il too. But I don’t. OK, maybe a little tiny bit I do, and I reserve the bulk of my contempt for the non-impaired people around him who prop him up. Anyway, it’s a very tricky argument.
7/8: I love this notion of olori buruku, and the practice of taking care of it through the community. One thing that has always struck me about our judicial system is that you cannot sit in judgment (i.e. on a jury) if you know the defendant. But isn’t that really the only way you can truly judge a person? Seems to me that when small communities take care of their own issues, they do so with a knowledge of contingencies and histories that can only help in making appropriate judgments. Of course, there’s no way to replicate that in today’s peripatetic society, unless you live in a small town where no one ever comes or goes.
9: Looking forward to reading this article, especially because it’s been so baffling to me, as a non-religious, Jew-loving gay person, to see how much Jodie Foster has been defending Gibson of late. Of course, she has a movie coming out with him in it, but her defense seems to be about more than making sure her movie doesn’t tank. Thanks for the link!
You so nailed this.
hold up!!!!!
KS you don’t know who lisa is!???!
wow, this is so internet weird.
i know you both.
i’m not charliesheen, although on line i come off that way, cause typing is boring.
lisa YOU ARE A ROCK STAR FROM MARS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
SG I think the thing is it feels less unfair to refer to someone like Charlie Sheen (who has every imaginable resource for dealing with issues like addiction) as “crack-addled” than the people who might usually get called thusly.
It’s a complicated subject because there is certainly no bright line between “bad person” and “troubled person.” This is the entire story of my job, and what makes my work taxing sometimes. Almost anyone’s reprehensible acts come from somewhere. What makes me able, in my job, to say with a certain degree of comfort, “X did Y because of environment/pathology” (and not think “well, so did Stalin!”) is that many of my clients haven’t had an opportunity to pull it together ever. It’s harder with the ones who have been through three residential treatment facilities and it’s really hard to excuse Mel Fucking Gibson who has money, access, and a ton of functional people surrounding and supporting him, but somehow his pathology gets splattered on everyone who doesn’t shut out the media, and he’s still a very rich man with a lot of admirers.
Um, I’m not sure this makes sense. Good night, everybody!
This was really thoughtful and thought-provoking, LP.
It does seem like Sheen has lost it, and that’s sad. I wonder, thought, whether his bipolar symptoms stem from the usual neurochemical causes, or whether the years of drugs and celebrity made it that much harder for him to maintain a grip on reality. If treating mental illness can be a communal, social process, I wonder whether helping someone stay sane and connected is similarly a community affair. And whether we can also communally allow someone to slip away: certainly it’s not healthy the way we expect nothing of celebrities other than to provide tabloid fodder and to perform whatever strange tasks the entertainment industry has assigned them. Charlie Sheen made how many millions of dollars per year playing a toned-down version of himself in one of the stupidest sitcoms ever produced, yet that sitcom somehow became incredibly popular. It’s not hard to imagine him becoming filled with contempt, and then the contempt turning into something darker. I don’t know. The mind is complicated.
Anyway, enough compassion: I can’t resist linking to this.
Thank you so much, FP, for the permission to keep hating Mel Gibson. I do think he is beyond compassion.
Lane, thanks for making the introduction. I never cease to be impressed by all the cool, smart, successful peeps on TGW.
I agree with swells about MG being beyond compassion. Perhaps his megalomania is attributable to some sort of DSM “disorder”, Hollywood culture, or substance abuse, but is there any mental affliction that can justify repeated acts of extreme misogyny, homophobia, and racism?
sheen brought out the jewish mother in me.
“Charlie, HONEY!, go back to make up! call a lighting tech… plueezzze!”
and gibson brings out the primal self loathing of the white man, and his british keeper. “Now mel,,,, be reasonable good chap!””” uh,,, let’s ,,,, not get, carried away…” ; )
but yeah, hollywood, , like dave said.
oh and i’m glad to see quick daffy there representing for the non-white world.
so yeah, ladies, sorry.
sincerely,
the other half
and of course becks repressor is linked with such self righteousness.
so he brings out the basketball jock.
SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
and of course i don’t speak arabic, so quidaffi, … i have no idea what’s supposed to hold him back?
that’s probably the worst part… : (