He was alone in there for days before he was offered a chance to talk to a doctor. Michael agreed, and the doctor he met arranged to move him to the hospital part of the jail. Michael had a roommate and a TV now. That seemed like a move in the right direction. But next came another complete reversal of fortune: With no room available for him at Sacramento General Hospital, Michael was told that he was being transferred to Atascadero—California’s notorious maximum-security mental hospital, holding two thousand inmates.
For the second time in the space of a year, Michael had been sent to a mental hospital—this time a mental hospital in a prison setting—and he could not have been more certain that there was nothing wrong with his brain. It had taken this moment—locked away with men who had killed their wives or their bankers or their kids—to finally shake him awake. This was not a lark, it was real life, happening to him.
Michael was told that he was only in Atascadero for observation, but nobody would tell him how long that was supposed to last. The uncertainty was as bad as anything else.
His father came to visit, but this time he couldn’t do anything for him.
Brian came, too, but the best advice he could muster for his little brother was, “Life is about the journey, not the destination.”
It was five months before the court let Michael plead guilty in exchange for time served. There was no way to explain this; Michael could only move forward, shake it off. His time in Atascadero wasn’t without its diversions: Michael did meet one Yaqui Indian—a boxer who told a story about his brother fighting Sugar Ray Robinson—but the serendipity of that meeting was lost on him. He agreed with Brian: Life was about the journey. But some journeys, Michael decided, were better than others.
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THERE WAS ONE thing Michael was sure about: He was not like Donald. He was not crazy. He would spend the rest of his life proving everyone wrong about that if he had to—his parents included. The problem here, he believed, was a labeling error. Not everyone who saw the world differently had schizophrenia. If that were true, every hippie would be crazy.
To help Michael make that argument, he had the entire 1960s ethos on his side. It seemed to a lot of people at that time that anyone who stood up and said no to authority, or rejected the military-capitalist superstructure, risked being labeled insane by those in power. By the 1970s, the public conversation about mental illness was no longer just about Freud and Thorazine. It was about seeing the diagnosis of mental illness as an instrument of conformity and power—just another way of clamping down on independent thought and freedom.
This was a countercultural position, but its roots ran back to the anti-psychiatry movement—a wave of therapists and others who, more than a decade earlier, had rejected traditional assumptions about insanity almost completely out of hand. In the 1950s, Jean-Paul Sartre had argued that delusions were just a radical way of embracing the world of imagination over “the existing mediocrity.” In 1959, the iconoclastic Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing, influenced heavily by Sartre and other existentialists, made the case in The Divided Self that schizophrenia was an act of self-preservation by a wounded soul. Laing famously decried the “lobotomies and tranquilizers that place the bars of Bedlam and the locked doors inside the patient.” He believed patients retreat inside their own mind as a way of playing possum, to preserve their autonomy; better to turn oneself into a stone, he once said, than to be turned into a stone by someone else. In 1961, the sociologist Erving Goffman published his book Asylums, in which he explored life in mental institutions and came away believing that the institution informed the illness of patients, not the other way around. That same year, the Finnish psychiatrist Martti Olavi Siirala wrote that people with schizophrenia were almost like prophets with special insight into our society’s neuroses—our collective unconscious’s shared mental illness. And again, that same year, the godfather of anti-psychiatry, Thomas Szasz, published his most famous book, The Myth of Mental Illness, in which he declared that insanity was a concept wielded by the powerful against the disenfranchised—a step in the ghettoization and dehumanization of a whole segment of society that thinks differently.
A year later, in 1962, anti-psychiatry crossed over into the mainstream with a juggernaut of a novel that treated the brutality of a state-run mental hospital as a metaphor for social control and authoritarian oppression. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the story of Randle Patrick “Mac” McMurphy, a low-level criminal and free-spirited renegade who fights a war of wits inside of an insane asylum, only to be crushed by the malevolent forces of authority. Even before it became a movie, Cuckoo’s Nest became one of the foundation myths for the counterculture, as romantic, in its way, and as powerful as Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde—a perfect way to explain the way the world was working right now and expose everything that had flattened out the culture of the previous generation.
Going back even further, of course, that idea of whatever society deems to be mental illness sharing the same wellspring as the creative, artistic impulse has been with us for centuries: the artist as iconoclast and truth-teller, the only sane one in an insane world. Even Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, in the years before her death in 1957, came to believe in a “secondary element” in the loneliness of some psychotics that makes them “more keen, sensitive, and fearless as observers.” She wrote about the composers, artists, and writers with mental illness, suggesting their talents sprang from the difficulty they had with direct, conventional communication. Like a court jester, Fromm-Reichmann wrote, people with schizophrenia often tell uncomfortable truths that the rest of us would rather not hear. She was referencing the Cervantes novel The Man of Glass, about a village idiot who’s treated tenderly by the people around him, as long as they can laugh off the painful truths he spouts as crazy delusions. But when the man recovers, the community prevents him from getting back on his feet, lest they suddenly have to take seriously everything he says.
By the late 1960s, the anti-psychiatry movement was no longer concerned just about the treatment of the mentally ill, or even about creativity or art—it was about politics, justice, and social change. In his 1967 book, The Politics of Experience, Laing argued that the insane people were sane all along—and that to call someone schizophrenic was, in essence, an oppressive act. “If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epic as a veritable age of Darkness,” he wrote. “They will presumably be able to savor the irony of the situation with more amusement than we can extract from it. The laugh’s on us. They will see what we call ‘schizophrenia’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.”
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MICHAEL DECIDED THAT the only thing wrong with him was the repressive way he had been raised. “There was some kind of suppression,” he would say. Michael believed conformity had corrosive power. He blamed practically all of his brothers’ troubles on that. But even he had no idea how to help them. To him, they seemed trapped in prisons of their own making, and no one, not even he, had the keys to the locks.