Speaker 1: The chances of harm coming to you or someone else
Speaker 1: simply because you are starting from an irrational point of view.
Speaker 1: However rationally you now carry it forward is high. Wow.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time. Great thinkers
Speaker 2: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
Speaker 2: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
Speaker 2: think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
Speaker 2: thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 2: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 2: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 2: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 2: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 2: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 2: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 2: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3: Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is
Speaker 3: Jonathan Rosen, an American author and editor. Rosen graduated from
Speaker 3: Yale and is the author of many books, including Joy
Speaker 3: Comes in the Morning and the book discussed here with Eric,
Speaker 3: The Best Minds, a story of friendship, madness and the
Speaker 3: tragedy of good intentions. It's a memoir about his friendship
Speaker 3: with Michael Laudoor, a Yale school graduate with schizophrenia who
Speaker 3: killed his fiance in nineteen ninety eight during a psychotic episode.
Speaker 3: The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Speaker 4: Hi, Jonathan, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5: Hi, nice to be here.
Speaker 4: I'm excited to have you on. We're going to be
Speaker 4: discussing your book, which is called The Best Minds, a
Speaker 4: story of friendship, madness, and the tragedy of good intentions.
Speaker 4: And it's an outstanding book and we'll be getting to
Speaker 4: it in a moment, but we'll start like we always
Speaker 4: do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent
Speaker 4: who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life,
Speaker 4: there are two wolves inside of us that are always
Speaker 4: at battle. One's a good wolf, which represents things like
Speaker 4: kindness and bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf,
Speaker 4: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 4: the grand child stops and they think about it for
Speaker 4: a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well,
Speaker 4: which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.
Speaker 4: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 4: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 4: the work that you do. First of all, I love parables,
Speaker 4: so I love it that you begin with one. I
Speaker 4: also love it that in the parable both wolves are present.
Speaker 4: Everyone has them both.
Speaker 1: Within many years ago, like twenty four years ago, I
Speaker 1: wrote a book called the Talmud and the Internet, which
Speaker 1: was about joining unlikely things. And at one point I
Speaker 1: tell a story from the Talmud, which is this ancient
Speaker 1: codified book of Jewish law and story, and the rabbis
Speaker 1: ask a question, does God pray? And the answer is yes.
Speaker 1: So the question then becomes, what does God pray? And
Speaker 1: God prays, may it be my will that my mercy
Speaker 1: is greater than my anger, so that my attribute of
Speaker 1: mercy will overwhelm my attributive judgment, and I can approach
Speaker 1: my children mercifully. So what I love about that is
Speaker 1: that even God prayse for more mercy than anger, and
Speaker 1: God is omnipotent. But I guess in Judaism, since you're
Speaker 1: created in the image of God, that's not anthropomorphizing God.
Speaker 1: That's theomorphizing people. Even we do this divine thing, which
Speaker 1: is hope that our mercy is greater than our anger,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't mean that anchor can ever be eliminated,
Speaker 1: nor necessarily even should it. So I think what it
Speaker 1: makes me think about in my own work is how
Speaker 1: many times I've been drawn to twins, to pairings, and
Speaker 1: you're not always sure what the proportions are of those
Speaker 1: or what the differences are. And certainly the best minds
Speaker 1: is about my childhood best friend, who literally lived across
Speaker 1: the street from me, so we were always twinned. Even though,
Speaker 1: of course within each of us were these attributes, we
Speaker 1: didn't each represent a principle.
Speaker 4: I think you're the first person to ever use the
Speaker 4: term theomorphizing in seven hundred episodes of this show or so,
Speaker 4: I'm not sure i've ever heard it before. I understood
Speaker 4: it the minute you used it, but I'm not sure
Speaker 4: it's a word I've ever heard before.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I must have heard it before, And I think
Speaker 1: it's one of those things that is an explanation for
Speaker 1: the mysterious strangeness of being made in the image of God.
Speaker 1: We're always trying to figure out what that means. But
Speaker 1: if we are theomorphos, then that means we ourselves have
Speaker 1: within us some image of God, and therefore our behavior
Speaker 1: is bound up with not only at odds, with some
Speaker 1: divine ideal.
Speaker 4: Before we get into the book, one of the things
Speaker 4: that I've heard you say before about your Jewish faith
Speaker 4: is that there's one practice that you do every morning,
Speaker 4: and it's sort of the thing that you feel like
Speaker 4: you're most consistent with in a life that's not very
Speaker 4: adherent to the rest of Jewish law. What is that thing?
Speaker 1: When I wake up, I say the morning prayer. In
Speaker 1: the morning prayer is thanking God for giving you back
Speaker 1: your soul to be who returns my soul to me
Speaker 1: in loving kindness. So it allows you to begin the
Speaker 1: day with gratitude. And in fact, the instruction for that
Speaker 1: prayer in the Shokranarach, this medieval code which tells you
Speaker 1: the order of prayers and things, says you should awake
Speaker 1: to say that prayer with a lion like resolve to
Speaker 1: do God's will, a lion like resolve.
Speaker 5: I like that.
Speaker 1: And then of course it's all newspapers and anxiety. But
Speaker 1: at least I have my morning island in which I
Speaker 1: try to acknowledge how mysterious.
Speaker 5: And wonderful it is that I am alive.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, so your book again, The title is The
Speaker 4: Best Minds, The Story of Friendship, madness and the Tragedy
Speaker 4: of good intentions. Boy, are good intentions that go wrong
Speaker 4: always so tragic too. And it's a book about you,
Speaker 4: referenced a little bit. A childhood friend of yours, who
Speaker 4: I'm just going to give the whole thing away here,
Speaker 4: goes on to develop a severe mental illness, schizophrenia, And
Speaker 4: the book is about your friendship with him his journey
Speaker 4: through mental illness. But also I would say our culture's
Speaker 4: journey through serious mental illness, whether that be the counterculture
Speaker 4: that became the main culture, whether that be literature, whether
Speaker 4: that be the law, whether that be psychiatry itself. I mean,
Speaker 4: all these things weave together in this really interesting tapestry.
Speaker 4: But why don't we start by having you just describe
Speaker 4: your friend Michael and what your childhood roughly was like.
Speaker 5: Sure.
Speaker 1: So, I grew up in New Rochelle, which is a
Speaker 1: Westchester suburb of New York City. We moved there in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three. I was ten years old. I lived
Speaker 1: on a very short street, had about seven houses, and
Speaker 1: Michael lived across the street and down a few houses.
Speaker 1: And I met him the day I moved in pretty much.
Speaker 1: He was very precocious. He was very tall. His nickname
Speaker 1: was Big and also toes because he was always like
Speaker 1: leaning upward and forward, whereas I was very shy, and
Speaker 1: so although I was almost as tall as he was,
Speaker 1: nobody called me big. He also was brilliant, He read
Speaker 1: incredibly fast.
Speaker 5: And he had a photographic memory.
Speaker 1: I was dyslexic, although I didn't know it then it
Speaker 1: wasn't identified. But still we were both going to be writers,
Speaker 1: and so we were very competitive and very very close,
Speaker 1: and we were inseparable for many years, and we both
Speaker 1: went to Yale mi Coe graduated in three years because
Speaker 1: that was his way as summa cum lauda, and then
Speaker 1: he went to work for a management consulting firm. His
Speaker 1: plan was to work for ten years, make a lot
Speaker 1: of money, retire and write. And when he got hired,
Speaker 1: it was just the beginning in the eighties. When people
Speaker 1: came to recruit you for management consulting, it was almost
Speaker 1: a new thing, and as he himself said, they wanted
Speaker 1: people like him who could talk with enormous conviction about
Speaker 1: things they knew nothing about, and he was masterful at that.
Speaker 1: So he was doing all that and then already within
Speaker 1: the first year, he began to have signs of mental
Speaker 1: illness of what turned out to be schizophrenia, hallucinations, delusions.
Speaker 1: He came to feel there were Nazis following him in
Speaker 1: the streets, that his phone was being tapped, But it
Speaker 1: took several years before he had a psychotic break, and
Speaker 1: so I didn't know. Most people didn't know. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure he shared with anyone, and I'm not sure he
Speaker 1: knew in a sense that these things he was seeing
Speaker 1: and experiencing were anything other than this strange, weird world
Speaker 1: that he was kind of accepting. And in fact, I
Speaker 1: was jealous because he quit after just a year and
Speaker 1: was living in the attic of this grand house in
Speaker 1: Niroschell owned by two psychiatrists for the view of the water,
Speaker 1: and was writing stories. And I was a grad student,
Speaker 1: and I thought, ooh, he's got the jump on me.
Speaker 1: He's writing stories. But then he began to really become delusional.
Speaker 1: He thought his parents had been replaced by Nazi replicas
Speaker 1: who looked just like his parents, and so he began
Speaker 1: patrolling the house with a kitchen knife, and his mother
Speaker 1: called the police, and he was in a locked ward
Speaker 1: for eight months, and that was his break. The amazing
Speaker 1: thing about him, though, and this is just in keeping
Speaker 1: with who he was, is that while he was still
Speaker 1: in a halfway house before his break, he had applied
Speaker 1: to law school, all the top law schools while he
Speaker 1: was in the locked ward he got into all of them.
Speaker 1: His brother, on his behalf turned them all down except
Speaker 1: for Yale, which he deferred. And while he was in
Speaker 1: the halfway house, he decided I'm going to go to
Speaker 1: ye law school and did yes.
Speaker 4: And this is where things in the story start to
Speaker 4: get very interesting. And I read the story like we
Speaker 4: all do, by seeing things through our own lenses, and
Speaker 4: I have a lens of around the age you and
Speaker 4: Michael were at this point, maybe a little bit older,
Speaker 4: but not by much, of being a homeless heroin addict
Speaker 4: who was in long term treatment and then in a
Speaker 4: halfway house and trying to rebuild a life after that.
Speaker 4: And so it was very interesting for me to sort
Speaker 4: of look at Michael's journey and mine, and they're very
Speaker 4: very different, right, like I would, I mean, I never
Speaker 4: went to college at all, let alone Yale and graduate
Speaker 4: in three years lucky for you, maybe so, Yeah, And
Speaker 4: in that case. But what I was struck by was
Speaker 4: this idea that the halfway house felt very demeaning and
Speaker 4: beneath him, and I felt that way certainly at points
Speaker 4: with that right. We had this saying though early on
Speaker 4: in Recovery, and I never really liked it, but I
Speaker 4: understood it in essence. It was you can't be too
Speaker 4: dumb to get sober, but you can be too smart.
Speaker 4: And I thought about that a lot right in this book,
Speaker 4: because in many ways Michael's huge intelligence and gifts were
Speaker 4: not gifts or benefits in the battle he was in
Speaker 4: against mental illness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'd actually go even farther. When we were
Speaker 1: growing up, being smart was enormously important. Didn't even really
Speaker 1: know what it meant, and certainly didn't know what you
Speaker 1: were going to do with it. You didn't want to
Speaker 1: be smart so you could invent something helpful to make
Speaker 1: people's lives better. It was just like you would be
Speaker 1: inoculated against all the ills or sorrows.
Speaker 5: Of the world.
Speaker 1: And it was, as I say in the book, we
Speaker 1: were like our brain was going to be our rocket ship.
Speaker 1: And it went without saying we were going to climb
Speaker 1: in and just blast off. And later of course, I
Speaker 1: came to think about just how destructive that was as
Speaker 1: an idea, and Michael used to say something that was
Speaker 1: almost the opposite of the saying in your halfway house.
Speaker 1: He would say, I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid.
Speaker 1: And he found himself in an environment in which brilliance
Speaker 1: was recognized, just as we had thought about it, and.
Speaker 5: Although he could not actually do the work.
Speaker 1: At Yale Law School, he was known or seen as
Speaker 1: brilliant and that was somehow going to be the means
Speaker 1: of his salvation, whereas in fact what he needed was
Speaker 1: what a traditional asylum would grant you, space and time,
Speaker 1: and somehow, when the doctors and the halfway house suggested
Speaker 1: that he'd do something that at the beginning would be
Speaker 1: more basic despite his brilliance, like work in Macy's or
Speaker 1: a grocery store, so he could recover what he lost,
Speaker 1: however much he.
Speaker 5: Could, and then moved to another level.
Speaker 1: His family felt and he felt that it was enormously demeaning.
Speaker 5: And then, because he'd already gotten into Yale before.
Speaker 1: His break, he would say, why would I beag groceries
Speaker 1: when I could be a Yale lawyer. The tragedy of
Speaker 1: the subtitle is that one of his professors said to me,
Speaker 1: he never thought Michael was going to be a Yeal lawyer.
Speaker 5: He thought Michael was going to be someone who.
Speaker 1: Had gone to Yale Law School and might therefore be
Speaker 1: a spokesperson for people with severe mental illness. So already
Speaker 1: Michael's understanding of himself and why he was there was different,
Speaker 1: and since the space between reality and how he perceived
Speaker 1: it was the very nature of his illness, they were
Speaker 1: actually widening that gap in their minds. They were accommodating him,
Speaker 1: but it was like they were rhetorically accommodating him. And
Speaker 1: although they granted him what was like a kind of
Speaker 1: asylum for him for a while. It's a green interior
Speaker 1: with walls around it, and people were very kind to him,
Speaker 1: but there was no actual provision for his recovery or
Speaker 1: for his future there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a line that says it also went without
Speaker 4: saying that Macy's would destroy him and Yale Law School
Speaker 4: would set him free. I believed it, My parents and
Speaker 4: Michael's parents believed it. So did Guido Calabrizzi, who was
Speaker 4: the dean there at the time, and the professors who
Speaker 4: became his mentors. Right. Everybody believed this is the best
Speaker 4: thing for him, and none of us know what would
Speaker 4: happen if the story had gone differently, right. We can't
Speaker 4: know that. But to your point, what happened was he
Speaker 4: got that Yale Law school, which then led to a
Speaker 4: profile in the New York Times of the genius who
Speaker 4: has basically, in spite of schizophrenia, still gotten into Yale
Speaker 4: Law school and is this incredible, amazing person, which led
Speaker 4: to a book deal, which led to a movie deal,
Speaker 4: and led in many ways to him being in a
Speaker 4: profession that very challenging for even the mentally stable, which
Speaker 4: is to be alone on your own writing books.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you made a list of all the things
Speaker 1: you shouldn't do if you're trying to recover from a
Speaker 1: psychotic break, he did them all, you know, being alone
Speaker 1: for long portions of the day, enormous pressure to write
Speaker 1: a book that in a sense he couldn't write because
Speaker 1: it wasn't quite his story. And that's also something that
Speaker 1: has haunted me because my mother is a writer. I
Speaker 1: grew up loving stories. I do love stories.
Speaker 5: But you can be.
Speaker 1: Trapped in a story, you can be trapped in other
Speaker 1: people's stories. And you mentioned my interest in the role
Speaker 1: the culture.
Speaker 5: Might have played.
Speaker 1: You spoke about how Michael killed the person he loved
Speaker 1: most in the world is fiance. It never felt like
Speaker 1: a spoiler to me to say that, because it always
Speaker 1: felt like a murder mystery. Not just why him, why
Speaker 1: not me? Even though I knew he did it, but
Speaker 1: also how was it that there were not places for
Speaker 1: him when he needed them? What had happened to the
Speaker 1: systems that were supposed to care for him? And more
Speaker 1: than that, how had it happened that people had developed
Speaker 1: an artificial understanding of what psychosis might be? How had
Speaker 1: it become almost romanticized? And one of the things I
Speaker 1: like to remind people is that in the fifties, antipsychotic medication,
Speaker 1: which was a revolution for people who were with psychosis,
Speaker 1: was introduced the same year as LSD, and they were
Speaker 1: both given to psychiatrists to figure out. You know, so
Speaker 1: you had people with a drug in one hand that
Speaker 1: suppressed delusions and hallucinations and a drug in the other
Speaker 1: hand that induced them, and the culture pretty much decided
Speaker 1: inducing hallucinations was mind expanding and that therefore those people
Speaker 1: who naturally hallucinated must be like prophets. Or priests, and
Speaker 1: so it immediately spilled over from the medical into the cultural,
Speaker 1: and that the cultural transformed the law, and then the
Speaker 1: law reinforced the culture, and so pretty soon all the
Speaker 1: ways of understanding illness as an illness had fallen away,
Speaker 1: sometimes even inverting its meaning. And tracing that backwards was
Speaker 1: a revelation for me. And since he was literally lived
Speaker 1: at a house with psychiatrists who provided his care and
Speaker 1: were of the sixties community mental health movement, and then
Speaker 1: he was in yeah law school where his mentors were
Speaker 1: law professors who had clerked for the very judges who
Speaker 1: had changed the institutionalization laws. Every place he went was
Speaker 1: almost emblematic, even though it was actually real at the
Speaker 1: same time. So I'm not sure where I started by sentence,
Speaker 1: I've ended somewhere.
Speaker 4: There's a lot in there to sort of tweeze apart.
Speaker 4: And let's start with the deinstitutionalization process. Talk to me
Speaker 4: about when we say that, what we mean and what happened.
Speaker 1: So as with all these things, many things came together.
Speaker 1: It wasn't as if one guy had an idea and
Speaker 1: put it into practice. When I began to learn all
Speaker 1: these things, I should say, speaking of the two Wolves
Speaker 1: that I was incredibly angry. I was angry at all
Speaker 1: of these smart people who seemed to have made so
Speaker 1: many dreadful decision But what I decided to do was
Speaker 1: tell my book from childhood forward, not backwards like a journalist.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't going to be a tragic inevitability.
Speaker 5: And how did everybody cause it?
Speaker 1: It was really going to be people actually making decisions in.
Speaker 5: Real time, just like I lived my life in real time.
Speaker 1: So during the Second World War, first of all, there
Speaker 1: seemed to be a mental health crisis. Several million people
Speaker 1: were found unfit for service or were released from service
Speaker 1: for psychiatric reasons. Some of them had what was then
Speaker 1: called shell shock, but that allowed, in the aftermath of
Speaker 1: the war people to think, oh my god, we have
Speaker 1: to address this. Meanwhile, state hospitals had fallen into a
Speaker 1: dreadful state, partly because half the staff had been drafted,
Speaker 1: partly because of the wars. They were now bursting with people,
Speaker 1: partly because people lived longer, and so instead of just
Speaker 1: younger people suffering from illnesses, there were older people who
Speaker 1: had dementia, and those people really were only heading in
Speaker 1: one direction. Twenty percent of all the people who have
Speaker 1: a psychotic break and an accurate diagnosis of schizophrenia never
Speaker 1: have another break.
Speaker 5: So the character of.
Speaker 1: These places had changed, and they were huge. They were
Speaker 1: like medieval villages. They had farms and theaters and people
Speaker 1: worked in the soil, and all of this was devised
Speaker 1: before there were any medications.
Speaker 5: It was called moral care.
Speaker 1: But when you looked at it, and Life magazine ran
Speaker 1: pictures of naked people huddle together, it looked as much
Speaker 1: like a concentration camp that had been liberated. And Life
Speaker 1: had run those pictures not long before, as it did
Speaker 1: like anything else. So the desire not to reform them
Speaker 1: but just to like tear them down was very great. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: antipsychotic medication came along, and lots of people who were
Speaker 1: there shouldn't have been there, so many people could be released.
Speaker 1: But then what happened was partly President Kennedy. The last
Speaker 1: piece of major legislation he signed into law before he
Speaker 1: was assassinated was the Community Mental Health Act, And as
Speaker 1: he put it, no longer should the cold custodial care
Speaker 1: of the asylum in prison in people when we could
Speaker 1: have the warmth of community care. Problem is, nobody had
Speaker 1: figured out what community care would mean and more than that,
Speaker 1: hospitals were for a very specific, small percentage of the
Speaker 1: population who were extremely sick. Community mental health centers didn't
Speaker 1: just replace the word like a psychiatric disorder with the
Speaker 1: word mental illness, which itself became a vast category, far
Speaker 1: beyond the limits of its small particularity. It used the
Speaker 1: word health, and its goal was to make everybody healthier.
Speaker 1: And the one group of people who were not cared
Speaker 1: for were severely ill people because they often didn't see
Speaker 1: themselves as sick. It was a symptom of their illness,
Speaker 1: and they required a tremendous amount of care and attention.
Speaker 1: So instead they were either turned away or never showed up.
Speaker 1: Some went home, many wound up on the street, Many
Speaker 1: wound up in prison. They were reinstitutionalized, not deinstitutionalized, because
Speaker 1: what people had fantasized would take the place of state hospitals.
Speaker 1: Community care helped everyone but the one group of people
Speaker 1: in whose name they'd been created. That's a very cartoonish
Speaker 1: and truncated version. But it took me ten years to
Speaker 1: write the book, so I'd like to spare everyone a
Speaker 1: small portion of that time.
Speaker 4: There's another thing that's happening alongside this. There's probably many things,
Speaker 4: but the other one is that we are moving from
Speaker 4: the idea of psychiatry being for the truly extremely mentally
Speaker 4: ill to the rest of us, which Freud called what
Speaker 4: was it, the psycho pathology of daily living.
Speaker 5: Of everyday life?
Speaker 1: Yeah, or it could have been the translated volume, Yes,
Speaker 1: the Psychopathology of every Day Life. That was an enormous
Speaker 1: revolution that had already taken place in psychiatry.
Speaker 5: So Freud died in I don't know thirty nine.
Speaker 1: I think he'd never treated people with psychotic disorders like
Speaker 1: bipolar disorder or schizophreniam, but he drew from their experiences
Speaker 1: the way he drew from his own dreams. And this
Speaker 1: was something I kept discovering. People kept borrowing almost the
Speaker 1: metaphor of severe illness and redistributing it to everyone. So
Speaker 1: if everybody suffers from the psychopathology of everyday life, then
Speaker 1: instead of living in a giant, rustic asylum where your
Speaker 1: only patients are severely ill people, you could have an office,
Speaker 1: you know, on Fifth Avenue, like a dentist, with normal
Speaker 1: hours and send your kids to private school. So the
Speaker 1: first group of people to be deinstitutionalized were psychiatrists. They
Speaker 1: kind of got themselves out, and that did two things.
Speaker 1: It left behind those who most needed psychiatric attention, but
Speaker 1: it also sort of universalized a state of illness, as
Speaker 1: if the default wasn't that you're well, but that you're ill,
Speaker 1: and you require psychiatric attention just to enter what Freud
Speaker 1: would call ordinary unhappiness. It's one of the reasons I
Speaker 1: write about myself personally, because, first of all, when I
Speaker 1: was a teenager and Michael was getting sick, you never
Speaker 1: feel normal. And second of all, because I certainly struggled
Speaker 1: with plenty of things that would now be in the DSM,
Speaker 1: the Psychiatrist's Guide, and I thought, well, if I decided
Speaker 1: to take prozac, I would not want people to force
Speaker 1: me to take it, and I wouldn't want anyone to
Speaker 1: tell me I had to stop taking it. And so
Speaker 1: I thought of myself as being in the same category,
Speaker 1: not that I was in any way remotely like thinking
Speaker 1: your parents have been replaced by Nazi replicas, and therefore
Speaker 1: you have to arm yourself to defend yourself.
Speaker 5: But nobody explained any.
Speaker 1: Of those things. There was just this giant, fungible notion
Speaker 1: of mental illness. That doesn't mean ordinary suffering is not intense,
Speaker 1: and many people with depression are undermedicated despite the way
Speaker 1: we talk about overmedication and undertreated. Nevertheless, it allowed for
Speaker 1: a confusion that I participated in, and I kind of
Speaker 1: wanted to acknowledge that so I could think about it
Speaker 1: more clearly because I think it's hard to retreat from
Speaker 1: that position.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I think we all have, right, I mean,
Speaker 4: I think we all have expanded what mental illness mental
Speaker 4: health is and an attempt to destigmatize, which I think
Speaker 4: we're going to come around to at some point. We
Speaker 4: did lose this idea that there are some people schizophrenics,
Speaker 4: bipolar being the main ones. I mean, we can call
Speaker 4: it the same as anxiety or depression in that it's
Speaker 4: an illness that affects your mental state. But like you said,
Speaker 4: it's very different to be worried about whether you're going
Speaker 4: to pass all your classes versus thinking your parents are
Speaker 4: Nazis are Those are pretty diametrically different problems to be having.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 1: It's interesting you've talked and had people on the program
Speaker 1: before talking about the elephant of a Actually John Hight,
Speaker 1: who I think used that initial metaphor was my class
Speaker 1: at Yale. But what was amazing to me about Michael's
Speaker 1: illness was that he was intensely rational, but he would
Speaker 1: be making rational conclusions based on an entirely irrational premise.
Speaker 1: If you think your parents are Nazis, it actually makes
Speaker 1: sense to arm yourself, And the question of whether you're
Speaker 1: dangerous or not is not the properly phrased question. The
Speaker 1: chances of harm coming to you or someone else simply
Speaker 1: because you are starting from an irrational point of view,
Speaker 1: however rationally you now carry it forward, is high, and
Speaker 1: that took a very long time for me to understand.
Speaker 1: Many people think that to be psychotic is to simply
Speaker 1: be entirely irrational in every aspect of your being, and that,
Speaker 1: I think made it much harder for people to recognize
Speaker 1: that Michael was ill, even though he actually told his
Speaker 1: professors about his hallucinations. And at one point the dean
Speaker 1: of yel Law School, who you mention his daughter, who
Speaker 1: I knew, and who was at that very moment studying
Speaker 1: to be a psychiatrist and working with a homeless, mentally
Speaker 1: ill population. Michael had told this dean that he saw
Speaker 1: him in the morning, sitting on his bed, surrounded by flames,
Speaker 1: and thought.
Speaker 5: He was the devil.
Speaker 1: The dean told his daughter this stories if it were
Speaker 1: kind of amusing instance of what he called neurosis, and
Speaker 1: his daughter said, Dad, you have no idea what you're
Speaker 1: talking about. And yet people in that position had all
Speaker 1: changed the laws that made it very very difficult to
Speaker 1: get someone help when they required it, and not able
Speaker 1: to help themselves. And that became a real tangle. We're
Speaker 1: still untangling that.
Speaker 4: Not yeah, I mean the other tragedy of good intentions,
Speaker 4: I think. I mean there's lots of right. Deinstitutionalization a
Speaker 4: tragedy of good intentions. Right, The people who did that,
Speaker 4: President Kennedy and the people that he was working with
Speaker 4: had very good intentions. But it's also interesting that, in
Speaker 4: addition to the people at Yale Law School who perhaps
Speaker 4: helped Michael in ways that didn't end up being helpful,
Speaker 4: is the fact that he was surrounded by psychiatrists. That's
Speaker 4: the other amazing thing. As you hear the story, and
Speaker 4: there's the occasional lone voice among the psychiatrists, like the
Speaker 4: dean's daughter, who are saying, like, hang on, like there's
Speaker 4: a real problem here. And you guys are ignoring it
Speaker 4: and other people going, well, now, things seem okay. I
Speaker 4: think it's okay. And the good intention that people have
Speaker 4: is they don't want to interfere in someone else's life
Speaker 4: or take away their autonomy, you know, forcing somebody, as
Speaker 4: you alluded to, to take their medication, to confine someone
Speaker 4: against their will. These all seem like really bad things,
Speaker 4: except when the alternative is perhaps even worse.
Speaker 1: He was surrounded by people who were convinced they were
Speaker 1: honoring his autonomy, as you say, and instead they were
Speaker 1: facilitating his illness, and they were putting his girlfriend in
Speaker 1: harm's way as well, and.
Speaker 5: That truly was tragic.
Speaker 1: Their goal, the psychiatrist goal, was to save him from
Speaker 1: the system, much more than they wanted to save him
Speaker 1: from the worst effects of his illness. And again, they
Speaker 1: were formed at a time when the system really sucked.
Speaker 5: It was very bad, but that it overshadowed.
Speaker 1: The reality of his illness was a kind of It
Speaker 1: wasn't a mass illusion. It was the product of many elements,
Speaker 1: including by the way, the idea, and I.
Speaker 5: Fell victim to it myself.
Speaker 1: If you're telling your story, and he sold his story
Speaker 1: for a lot of money, and you're going to be
Speaker 1: in a movie and Brad Pitt is going to play you,
Speaker 1: and Brad Pitt was going to play him. Then you
Speaker 1: feel well, he has indeed succeeded. So when the dean
Speaker 1: said at the end of the New York Times profile,
Speaker 1: he's conquered his illness, although it's not an illness you conquer,
Speaker 1: it invoked a story that is deeply appealing. Michael's the
Speaker 1: person who had told me about the Hero with a
Speaker 1: Thousand Faces, a book I loved by Joseph Campbell, that
Speaker 1: the z goes out into the world, is wounded, but
Speaker 1: somehow gathers the strength, is helped by like supernatural creatures,
Speaker 1: and then survives and maybe limps has a wound.
Speaker 5: But has gifts to give the world.
Speaker 1: And Joseph Campbell even wrote an essay in the grip
Speaker 1: of this cultural moment called the Schizophrenic Journey, and he
Speaker 1: described the schizophrenic person just like the hero. Let the
Speaker 1: traveler go. In other words, don't medicate this person. We
Speaker 1: now know, of course that the sooner you can stop
Speaker 1: a cycle of psychosis, the better the recovery is, the
Speaker 1: less damage is done.
Speaker 5: But let the traveler go.
Speaker 1: They still believed perhaps that there was going to be
Speaker 1: some transcendent reward for everyone.
Speaker 5: As a later.
Speaker 1: Dean of Yell Law School who knew Michael said to me,
Speaker 1: he said, if I'd spent less time thinking what a
Speaker 1: wonderful place Yelle is for having taken Michael, and more
Speaker 1: time wondering what his actual experience was, I think it
Speaker 1: would have been better for him.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you just touched on that I idea of telling
Speaker 4: our story. You say Freud had borrowed freely from literature
Speaker 4: for his new science, but he gave it back, the
Speaker 4: idea that telling a story was an act of healing.
Speaker 4: And it's interesting because telling stories can be an act
Speaker 4: of healing, no question right. Twelve step programs are based
Speaker 4: on that to a very large degree, and hearing other
Speaker 4: people's stories. But you say, you would have to be
Speaker 4: very ignorant about schizophrenia, as I certainly was, and deluded
Speaker 4: about writing, as I continued to be, to think that
Speaker 4: telling the story of your struggle with psychosis could turn
Speaker 4: it into a past tense affliction, like sorrow transmuted into words.
Speaker 4: And I think that past tense affliction is a really
Speaker 4: interesting way of saying it, because twenty five years out
Speaker 4: from opioid addiction. I tell my story, and it has
Speaker 4: been a way of healing for me, and I think
Speaker 4: it's been a way of many people also hearing it
Speaker 4: and helping. But I undern way shape or form think
Speaker 4: that I suddenly now could use Heroin safely. Right, Like
Speaker 4: it's past tense in a sense, and in another sense
Speaker 4: it's not. And I think that if I were to think,
Speaker 4: and I'm just speaking for myself, right, that the only
Speaker 4: thing it took for me to get over an addiction
Speaker 4: of the severity that I had was telling my story.
Speaker 4: That would be semi delusional. That was part of it,
Speaker 4: and there were a thousand other little things.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I've always.
Speaker 1: Really admired and I came to admire it even more
Speaker 1: while I was writing my book, The present tense aspect
Speaker 1: of people in twelve step programs who acknowledged the ongoing
Speaker 1: potential or capacity to return to the state they were in,
Speaker 1: and so instead of seeing it as a conquered story,
Speaker 1: once told and then forgotten, it's an ongoing journey. And
Speaker 1: Michael was described as having conquered his illness like it
Speaker 1: was a mountain.
Speaker 5: And now he was on the other side of it.
Speaker 1: Of course Hollywood has a you know, habit of liking
Speaker 1: happy endings, understandably. But I found in writing my book
Speaker 1: that I wasn't just telling stories. I had to untell
Speaker 1: stories also because this idea, for example, that being smart
Speaker 1: was special, And when I looked into that, it wasn't
Speaker 1: just that we were from striving. My father was an
Speaker 1: immic refugee really, you know, like the classic refugee story,
Speaker 1: especially Jewish refugees. You want to you know, get ahead
Speaker 1: being smart as your ticket in and in the meritocracy.
Speaker 1: That's true, But there was a very ugly period of
Speaker 1: time in the early twentieth century where the mind was
Speaker 1: divorced from the soul. You know, psyche means soul, and
Speaker 1: a psychologist does not study your soul, It studies your mind.
Speaker 1: And the measurable mind became something you could quantify to
Speaker 1: the point where in the early twenties, there was a
Speaker 1: Supreme Court decision sterilizing a woman because she fell below
Speaker 1: the level of acceptable intelligence. And Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said,
Speaker 1: three generations of are enough, and the youngest generation was
Speaker 1: like nine years old, and they sterilized her. And so
Speaker 1: when you only think of someone's worth in terms of
Speaker 1: their intellect. That is not the thing. It's funny we
Speaker 1: began by talking about what it means to be theomorphic
Speaker 1: to those who share this beliefs as I do. That
Speaker 1: you're made in the image of God. That's the source
Speaker 1: of your equality and your worth. It's not how well
Speaker 1: you do on a test. And yet I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people felt invested in seeing him as brilliant
Speaker 1: because they thought of he didn't.
Speaker 5: Have that, he would have nothing.
Speaker 1: And I sometimes want My parents were very loving, but
Speaker 1: there's a reason I hid my dyslexia, even if I
Speaker 1: didn't know what it was called, and like to pretend
Speaker 1: that I'd read a lot more than I had, because
Speaker 1: where would I fit in this society where all your
Speaker 1: heroes were people of intellect, and many of those people,
Speaker 1: by the way, like Nazi doctors, they were not our heroes.
Speaker 1: But intellect does not inoculate you. It's the culture you
Speaker 1: live in that applies knowledge that matters. And that's about morality.
Speaker 1: And I felt ashamed in a sense to have participated
Speaker 1: so zealously in something that had really stacked the deck
Speaker 1: against him. In addition to all the other fantasies and
Speaker 1: good intentions.
Speaker 4: We are talking a little bit about this idea of
Speaker 4: forced institutionalization or forcing someone to take their meds, and
Speaker 4: I think that is a reaction to things like the
Speaker 4: forced sterilization of somebody who's not intelligent, the people who
Speaker 4: are forced into institutions. And this is a really tricky area,
Speaker 4: and I greatly appreciated in the book the nuance at
Speaker 4: which you take it on, because it is a slippery slope.
Speaker 4: Should I have been forced as a twenty five year
Speaker 4: old into treatment as a heroin addict?
Speaker 5: Maybe?
Speaker 4: And the court certainly encouraged. I was in plenty of
Speaker 4: legal trouble too, and there was a very strong encouragement
Speaker 4: that I go that direction, you know. And yet these
Speaker 4: questions come up again and again, and we talk about stigma,
Speaker 4: and you've got a line that I really loved, and
Speaker 4: I want to just try and take a second here
Speaker 4: and find it. You said, the problem with stigma wasn't
Speaker 4: only thinking that everyone with schizophrenia might end up like
Speaker 4: Michael in a violent crime, when only a very small
Speaker 4: percentage of people do. The problem was an environment that
Speaker 4: saw even an inquiry into the possibility of violence among
Speaker 4: the untreated, as stigmatizing. Say more about that.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 1: One of the things that was interesting is that Michael
Speaker 1: had become, after the New York Times profile, which was
Speaker 1: so heroic, a real champion for many, many people. The
Speaker 1: woman who was head of NAMI, which is a wonderful organization,
Speaker 1: national association. It's not for mental illness, it's for families
Speaker 1: of people with mental illness. Like just always forget what
Speaker 1: the preposition is. But in any case, the woman who
Speaker 1: was head of it had a daughter who herself suffered
Speaker 1: from a psychotic disorder, and Michael was.
Speaker 5: A real hero.
Speaker 1: When Michael killed Carrie, it was an earthquake for them.
Speaker 1: And one of the things many of them began to
Speaker 1: say and to say publicly, was that their initial approach
Speaker 1: had been to say that people with schizophrenia are just
Speaker 1: like everybody else. There are the person next door, which
Speaker 1: was interesting because Michael was the person.
Speaker 5: Next door for me. But they all actually bore.
Speaker 1: Literal scars as well as emotional scars, because there had
Speaker 1: been times when their children were unmedicated and therefore dangerous
Speaker 1: in all kinds of ways, either to themselves or to others,
Speaker 1: And they began to wonder if perhaps it made more
Speaker 1: sense and would be more destigmatizing to acknowledge these as symptoms.
Speaker 1: They're not intrinsic personality traits, the potential symptoms that therefore
Speaker 1: can be treated. And in fact, people who are medicated
Speaker 1: are no more likely to be violent than anyone else
Speaker 1: in society. And the way I kind of think about
Speaker 1: it is like, here was this extraordinary article in The Times.
Speaker 1: Three years later he was on the cover of the
Speaker 1: New York Post under a single gigantic headline psycho And
Speaker 1: what could be more stigmatizing than that? And so sometimes
Speaker 1: acknowledging the potential for something is not a way of
Speaker 1: diffusing or denying it, but it does what actually a diagnosis?
Speaker 1: Did people forget that before there was a diagnosis of
Speaker 1: severe mental illness, we'd called people possessed by the devil,
Speaker 1: and they were locked in basements or beaten to get
Speaker 1: the devil out of them, or it was seen as
Speaker 1: a character flaw. And so there was a kind of
Speaker 1: enlightenment relief that this is a medical illness. It has
Speaker 1: a set of symptoms, same as other medical illnesses, and
Speaker 1: we don't treat it perfectly, but we do have things
Speaker 1: we can do. So it's not about you there's a
Speaker 1: thing that you have unfortunately developed. We don't even know why,
Speaker 1: by the way, and we have, you know, crude but
Speaker 1: not ineffective methods of helping people. It's hard, of course,
Speaker 1: because it's the mind, and the mind is like nothing else.
Speaker 1: It's how we know the world. And if you don't
Speaker 1: know the world because your mind is the afflicted portion
Speaker 1: of your body, or your brain is, then you won't
Speaker 1: believe you're ill.
Speaker 5: It is very tricky.
Speaker 1: But I often when I read, when I started reading
Speaker 1: from my book or talking about it, I was always
Speaker 1: afraid because I knew there'd be people who have children
Speaker 1: with psychotic disorders, and I was afraid that my book
Speaker 1: had told the worst case scenario, the dreaded thing had
Speaker 1: actually happened in this case, and how would they feel.
Speaker 1: Would they feel that I was tarnishing their families and
Speaker 1: that has never happened. They have all identified with what
Speaker 1: might happen because they understand that when you are in
Speaker 1: a state that is totally detached from reality, you are
Speaker 1: not responsible. And indeed Michael was found not responsible by
Speaker 1: reason of insanity. And in fact, it's interesting to think
Speaker 1: even about the two wolves in this sense, because you
Speaker 1: want to feed the good wolf, not the bad wolf.
Speaker 1: But it used to be called the right wrong test.
Speaker 1: You were not found guilty if you did not know
Speaker 1: the difference between what was right and what was wrong.
Speaker 1: And if you do not know, it is cruel to
Speaker 1: punish someone, But if you don't punish someone afterwards, it
Speaker 1: should affect how you think about the disorder untreated before
Speaker 1: as well. Not that these are simple, and by the way,
Speaker 1: I am not in any way recommending reconstituting asylums, state hospitals.
Speaker 1: Medication can be delivered in all kinds of ways. Supportive
Speaker 1: housing which is a kind of community mental health, which
Speaker 1: is housing where services are in the building for you.
Speaker 1: They're very expensive and they're hard to find, but they're
Speaker 1: very important. Those make an enormous difference. We failed people,
Speaker 1: but we're kind of Maybe as psychiatry rebuilds it, I'd
Speaker 1: like to think we will now fuse the psychiatric hospital
Speaker 1: and community care in a more natural, appropriate way.
Speaker 4: But it's so hard for all sorts of legal Yeah,
Speaker 4: it is in the book. When I read that section
Speaker 4: about some of the NAMI members sort of changing their
Speaker 4: mind to some degree around forced institutionalization, right, that's pretty telling,
Speaker 4: But I've been around recovery and mental illness situations long
Speaker 4: enough to know several families who have been trying to
Speaker 4: make that decision, recognize that their loved one is schizophrenic,
Speaker 4: off their medication, and extremely dangerous to themselves and others.
Speaker 4: And it's not easy necessarily to get somebody admitted against
Speaker 4: their will to one of these places, nor should it
Speaker 4: be easy. I'm not indicating that it should be easy.
Speaker 4: I'm not actually recommending anything, because I think, like you,
Speaker 4: it's a very difficult and thorny problem, but I think
Speaker 4: it's one that we have to be willing to talk about.
Speaker 4: And somewhere in the book, also it's a line from
Speaker 4: a woman who wrote a memoir about having schizophrenia. Ellen Sachs.
Speaker 5: Is that correct, Yeah, it's a wonderful memoir. Yeah.
Speaker 4: And she's describing a story where she got involved with
Speaker 4: a student law clinic and one of the student advisors
Speaker 4: had gotten a maybe a fellow student released from psychiatric
Speaker 4: care and they saw this as a legal victory that
Speaker 4: this person had gotten out, and then that person went
Speaker 4: on to burn down their house, killing their parents and
Speaker 4: their seven year old brother. And she says, and I
Speaker 4: think this sums it up very well for a bunch
Speaker 4: of idealistic law students. Some lessons were harder to learn
Speaker 4: than others, And this one that helping people isn't always
Speaker 4: a good thing. This is the line that I really loved.
Speaker 4: Or maybe that helping translates differently from case to face
Speaker 4: and must be cautiously scrutinized. And I think that's really
Speaker 4: the key here, right, It's not that Michael's situation, no
Speaker 4: one was cautiously scrutinizing whether what they were doing for
Speaker 4: him wasn't necessarily the right thing they thought it was.
Speaker 4: And again, everybody's intentions were good. But I love that
Speaker 4: line from her. Yes, and even when you do cautiously scrutinize,
Speaker 4: you still don't know, you know. That's the tragedy of
Speaker 4: these sort of things, you know. I talk to a
Speaker 4: lot of parents whose children have addiction, and they're like, well,
Speaker 4: should I kick him out? And I'm like, well, I
Speaker 4: don't know. I can't tell you that, Like that could
Speaker 4: be what turns them into recovery. It could be we
Speaker 4: just don't know. Again, that's partially what drew me so
Speaker 4: into your book was the nuance at which it discusses
Speaker 4: things and how often people who are unwilling to admit
Speaker 4: nuance do real damage.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the one thing I would want people to
Speaker 1: recognize is like in New York City, when the mayor
Speaker 1: tried to broaden it didn't even broaden.
Speaker 5: It broadened the.
Speaker 1: Interpretation of the statute which allowed people to bring someone
Speaker 1: to the hospital if they were unhoused, too ill to
Speaker 1: care for themselves and so sick they did not know
Speaker 1: they were sick. There was still like the headlines and
Speaker 1: all the major newspapers made it sound as if he
Speaker 1: was randomly rounding up all homeless people and hospitalizing them
Speaker 1: till forever, whereas in fact they were just going to
Speaker 1: be evaluated and then it would be a medical decision.
Speaker 1: But the alternative means that the freedom you think you're
Speaker 1: fighting for isn't how you might feel gathered up one
Speaker 1: day and like a Kafka character and just mysteriously brought
Speaker 1: to prison.
Speaker 5: You're allowing people who are dying.
Speaker 1: In slow motion all around you to die or to
Speaker 1: get arrested. And that's a different quality. I remember it
Speaker 1: was a real turning point for me. I read a memoir,
Speaker 1: very honest memoir by a very idealistic psychologist, and in
Speaker 1: the sixties he'd created a community mental health center in
Speaker 1: Baltimore's Inner City, as they called it then, And what
Speaker 1: he said was that they had a few beds, and
Speaker 1: they thought everybody in the community who was poor marginalized
Speaker 1: needed care because that all produced mental illness. The one
Speaker 1: group they wouldn't take were people released mental hospitals because
Speaker 1: they just needed too much care. So what do the
Speaker 1: families do. The parents were just as poor, just as marginalized,
Speaker 1: just as victimized by racism or some other form of discrimination.
Speaker 5: They called the cops.
Speaker 1: So this is what they consigned the sickest people that
Speaker 1: were the nominal reason for creating the center. To your parents,
Speaker 1: or your sister, or your son, or your father, your mother,
Speaker 1: or your wife, would call the police. If you were lucky,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't get shot because you were probably in a
Speaker 1: very florid state of psychosis. They'd bring you to prison,
Speaker 1: a jail cell, where you'd sit for twenty four hours, unmedicated,
Speaker 1: in a state of abject terror. And it had never
Speaker 1: dawned on me how fully terror dominates the life.
Speaker 5: If someone doesn't know.
Speaker 1: What's happening, and then the next day perhaps you would
Speaker 1: be brought to a psychiatric hospital where perhaps they would
Speaker 1: take you, though more likely, if they even took you,
Speaker 1: they might release you a day or two later, because
Speaker 1: at that point being violent was legally turned in into
Speaker 1: the only criterion for hospitalization, as if that were the
Speaker 1: only symptom.
Speaker 5: And it isn't even a symptom.
Speaker 1: And so people wonder why there's an association between mental
Speaker 1: illness and violence. Well, you can't get care simply for
Speaker 1: being sick, and it's one of the most intractable illnesses.
Speaker 1: You can only get care if you're an immediate danger
Speaker 1: to yourself or others. As one psychiatrist said to me,
Speaker 1: if you have a noose around your neck or a
Speaker 1: knife in your hand. And often by then needless to
Speaker 1: say it's so. That does not mean it is a
Speaker 1: simple problem. Framing it again, what I said, I want
Speaker 1: to love so much about the parable, this parable in
Speaker 1: particular and parables in general, is that it's holding two
Speaker 1: contrary things together they live side by side. Framing that
Speaker 1: dilemma isn't the same as solving it. Stories don't have
Speaker 1: to solve a problem, just articulating aspects, maybe contradictory aspects
Speaker 1: of it, and I have been very moved by the
Speaker 1: number of people who are wrestling with different aspects of
Speaker 1: this who have felt found inside of it. Even though
Speaker 1: I don't give any answers. It's very humbling, actually, because
Speaker 1: I always feel mildly ashamed that you don't have answers,
Speaker 1: that I don't have answers, and that's something that I
Speaker 1: was also began with a reckoning with something so personal
Speaker 1: for me.
Speaker 5: I mean, I'm moved that.
Speaker 1: For me, it was always this guy who was so
Speaker 1: extraordinary lived on my street. Finding out in a way
Speaker 1: he lives on everybody's street was part of the process
Speaker 1: of writing the book. But you want to do more.
Speaker 1: I understand the impulse by the way to just want
Speaker 1: to fix. My wife is a hospital chaplain, and she's
Speaker 1: been wonderful for telling me that sitting in the presence
Speaker 1: of someone who has pain, not trying to solve it,
Speaker 1: merely allowing that pain to be expressed is itself a service.
Speaker 1: And I kind of approached a lot of my interviewing
Speaker 1: that way actually, and it made a big difference.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean, there are things that unfortunately can't
Speaker 4: be fixed. What's the phrase, they can only be carried
Speaker 4: or something along those lines. It can't be fixed, but
Speaker 4: they can be carried.
Speaker 5: It's a good way of putting it. I've never heard that.
Speaker 4: All right, I'm going to completely change directions on us here.
Speaker 4: You take boxing lessons.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I do. And you know what's funny, my boxing
Speaker 5: teacher told me the wolf parable years ago.
Speaker 4: Oh really. She also goes by the name the Hawaiian Mongoose,
Speaker 4: which is a sweet name, isn't it. That's her fighting name,
Speaker 4: Eileen Oshevski. She's a terrific trainer, by the way. So
Speaker 4: how long have you been taking boxing lessons.
Speaker 5: I don't know, maybe fifteen years.
Speaker 4: Oh you must be actually decent, do you, spar.
Speaker 5: I used to, but not in a meaningful way like
Speaker 5: it was first all.
Speaker 1: I was old even when I started, and I didn't
Speaker 1: go Mickey Rourke where I was like it's okay that
Speaker 1: I'm just going to be fighting a bunch of people.
Speaker 5: It's not like that at all.
Speaker 1: It really started because I was at a crunch and
Speaker 1: I had a speedbag and I just somehow occasionally you
Speaker 1: know you're going to be able to do something and
Speaker 1: you want to do it. So I was hitting the
Speaker 1: speed bag and actually I think it was Mioko or
Speaker 1: maybe her husband Matthew, who's her trainer and a fighter himself,
Speaker 1: came over and showed me how to do it, and
Speaker 1: then I just loved it.
Speaker 5: And that led to hand wraps.
Speaker 1: And that lit to gloves, and that lit to boxing,
Speaker 1: and that left to her ring. And again, if someone
Speaker 1: had told me when I was a little how satisfying
Speaker 1: an important it was to hit.
Speaker 5: Something, I think I would have been. It would have
Speaker 5: been good for me in all kinds of ways.
Speaker 1: When they would put me in the ring with someone,
Speaker 1: it was somebody who was really trading to fight and
Speaker 1: wasn't allowed to hit me back, and I got to
Speaker 1: throw at them, which didn't mean I ever connected.
Speaker 5: And in fact, initially part of.
Speaker 1: My training was that it made me nauseous to even
Speaker 1: imagine that I would hit them. And then yeah, one
Speaker 1: day I was hitting this double nd bag and I
Speaker 1: was going to be sparring that day.
Speaker 5: She said you want to hit him, now, don't you?
Speaker 5: And I was like, well, maybe.
Speaker 1: Just a little, just because they kept saying to me,
Speaker 1: you're not doing him a favor.
Speaker 5: You're not going to knock him out, and you're probably
Speaker 5: not even going to hit him but any case, it's
Speaker 5: a martial art.
Speaker 1: And so if you don't get hit in the head
Speaker 1: a lot, when you watch these like lighter fighters, it's
Speaker 1: you know, defense turns into offense. The whole sense of
Speaker 1: having a body, and you know, if you read my book,
Speaker 1: you're having a body had been left out of the
Speaker 1: recipe somehow, And not only is that a sorrowful loss,
Speaker 1: but it's also not good for your mental health, because
Speaker 1: your mood is an aspect.
Speaker 5: Of your so all of it was part of just
Speaker 5: a It was just a kind of joyful thing.
Speaker 1: And I really loved my trainer and she's a wonderful person.
Speaker 1: The fact that she told me that parable was precisely
Speaker 1: because they understood that getting angry is not how you fight.
Speaker 1: It's not a good attribute because then you lose your control.
Speaker 5: Actually you know. Yeah, so yes, yes, I confess. But
Speaker 5: you know, my daughter was young enough when I started.
Speaker 1: I think there was a very brief time where she
Speaker 1: thought it's what I did, and it was hard for
Speaker 1: me to have to tell her.
Speaker 5: You know, she would tell people.
Speaker 1: Who would come over, my dad's a boxer, and they'd
Speaker 1: look at me like really.
Speaker 4: You know, and I'd be like, no, so did you
Speaker 4: take on a fighting name? Do you have a fighting
Speaker 4: name like Hawaiian mongoose?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 1: I did not, although because I wrote a book about
Speaker 1: bird watching, they would sometimes call me bad bird, which
Speaker 1: I'm embarrassed to confess. But here I have mocking loving
Speaker 1: But you know there, yes.
Speaker 4: Maybe I'll read your book on bird watching and have
Speaker 4: you back on because I am. I'm a fan of
Speaker 4: the birds myself, for sure.
Speaker 5: It's great.
Speaker 4: All right, well, I think we're going to wrap up there.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for
Speaker 4: writing a really great book. It's extraordinarily well written.
Speaker 5: You're a great writer and.
Speaker 4: Wrestling with these difficult questions.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. This
Speaker 1: was a wonderful conversation.
Speaker 2: If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
Speaker 2: consider making a monthly donation to support the One You
Speaker 2: Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this
Speaker 2: monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits.
Speaker 2: It's our way of saying thank you for your support.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: We are so grateful for the members of our community.
Speaker 2: We wouldn't be able to do what we do without
Speaker 2: their support. And we don't take a single dollar for granted.
Speaker 2: To learn more, make a donation at any level, and
Speaker 2: become a member of the one You Feed community. Go
Speaker 2: to oneufeed dot net slash join. The One You Feed
Speaker 2: podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting
Speaker 2: the show.