I’ve been spending time with ghosts. The research for my novel has finally begun in a serious, formal sense, and I’m quite excited. Since finishing my BA in February, I’ve had the chance to immerse myself in the psychiatric history books I’ve amassed since I first became interested in the subject. I haven’t the faintest idea why the topic interests me so (the only reason I could give you is that it’s fascinating, which isn’t exactly objective, if that is what you’re looking for)…but I will tell you that the culture of psychiatry as a practice in the early to mid 20th century is as interesting as the pathologies of the patients it treated.
Dr. Walter Freeman, Psychiatrist (Left) with his sometime partner Dr. James Watts, Neurosurgeon.
What a strange thing, to find yourself in a world of antiquity not yet old enough to have gained a solid fan base (and thereby the accompanying reverence). On the cusp of being romanticized. In the shadow of those who, in their “infinite” hindsight is 20/20 wisdom find themselves in a position from which they feel comfortable judging the efforts of those for whom, in their time, there existed none who knew better. So much of the information out there, particularly pertaining to psychosurgery, is dangerously misrepresented. To read some of the interpretations and “histories” put together by random amateurs whose only qualifications are visits to wikipedia and web access, you might imagine that your average psychiatrist in the early to mid 20th century sat around his office purposefully dulling dirty scalpels by chopping wood for the blazing fireplace in his office, waiting until his patients were frozen enough in the back wards that the frostbite might provide some sort of respite in numbness as he sawed open their skulls, or attached them to car batteries for ECT (Electro Convulsive Therapy). I’m afraid all the damage done wasn’t as purposeful as all of that. Certainly, there were sadistic doctors, but I’ve found more tragic heroes than menacing villains. So I’ve been occupying myself with the lives of ghosts, wondering where everything went wrong, how ambition begets consumption, and how we can blame doctors alone for what we ourselves (the public, the community) allowed to happen to the mentally ill in the United States.
The novel isn’t horror story, but an examination of a blighted past, a fevered era. It’s tragic, but not in the ways you think it is. The most complicated are the questions that seem easiest to answer.
