According to the reports of a survey, it takes very little to make a person labelled as ‘mentally ill’


HOW not to fall to your death? Two weeks after graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University, Paul Gilligan lost balance as he opened a window at his friend’s Central Park apartment in the middle of the night. He thudded six floors below. Gone in an instant; this ‘golden boy’ who had jogged the Brooklyn Bridge a day before and had won a scholarship to roam the world before joining Harvard Medical School.

If he was so smart, as his House tutor and all his friends vouch, could he have skirted the fatal free fall? Who will know of his rendezvous with death. Read Pablo Neruda and the answer may come: “We are dust and to dust return / in the end we’re / neither air, nor fire, nor water, / just dirt... and maybe, some yellow flowers.”

“Paul embodied those yellow flowers, that spark of gold that made anyone who saw it glad to be on this earth. He achieved in a lifetime what the poem reminds us most can never achieve,” wrote Sarah Seltzer, a magazine editor of The Harvard Crimson. Her brother Daniel Seltzer graduated with Gilligan and together they were vacationing at the Seltzer home in New York.

From the Crimson’s front page, Paul’s portrait leaps out at me. I sigh. The man on the next table gives back a blank stare. It’s terribly close and the heat in Cambridge that day is stifling. The coolness of the trees under which we are seated, courtesy the cafi that serves coffee, brings cold comfort to the disoriented beingness in me. Having shown up here, age suddenly smacks one on the face. Everyone around is young and vibrant. It’s disconcerting. “America worships youth”, the voice of the US ambassador some years back in Islamabad wondering why I was leaving my country for his, rings true.

I hear voices. They all touch the future and overwhelm even more. The Harvard Square is a hothouse of ambition, hopes, scholarship, academic excellence. Every young is so charged. Ready to rivet a place of honour, a permanent prize, in the halls of learning... to leave behind a hallmark and to cart along the Harvard stamp on his exit.

And then the bells toll from across the famed Harvard Yard.

For whom the bells toll? I ask myself. How does Hemingway enter my head in the heat of this moment? Aha, it’s that very strange man sitting there. Is he as dysfunctional as the great American writer? Both have dishevelled hair. Beyond that, little else.

And then I notice the man wearing fleece - a blue buttoned down jacket. In this swelter? He’s got to be crazy.

He is crazy — not in the real sense of the word — but a bum, a basket case. As if to shock me a degree more, he stands up, goes to the dumpster around the corner, lifts the lid (oh the stink of decomposed food!) and begins to pull out skeletons of leftovers.

“There’s nothing there”, he mutters in disgust, “these people have left nothing for me to eat!”

Walking to Adams House, a grand pine panelled quadrangle built in the 19th century — my living quarters for the summer — I see another ‘crazy’ in a red kerchief around his head, like a pirate. Is he a street bum also? Why else would he have a cat and a dog perched atop a wooden cart with a sign saying: “We are hungry, give us money to feed ourselves,” hogging half the pavement of red bricks.

Now, why, you may wonder — and rightly so — do I dwell on loonies, losers, crackos in this pinnacle of intellectual setting?

There’s a method to this madness. Hear me out.

Half of all Americans during their life will break into “mental disorders”, says Ronald Kessler, professor at Harvard Medical School, who has engineered a $20 million nationwide survey, announcing its results recently.

And what’s more hairy, according to the professor is that today one of every four people in America fits the definition of “mentally ill.”

Does that mean I should sniff around for more nuts among Harvard students, rather than the genius variety that one hears about ad infinitum? If doc Kessler is to be believed, I guess I should, for he insists quarter of us in any year are mental cases! And what better place to start my search than Harvard?

Because it will not brook failure, it sires the stress generic in students.

It won’t teach you how to get over the hump when you hit one. Nor will it nurse your nerves. Even if they are inflamed. A few undergrads tell me they would never have come here had they known that they would be left to separate the chaff from the grain. Chris, now in his last year, says, “I remember how I struggled all alone in my room in the dead of winter with no one to turn to for help. I was losing it.” Harvard does not expect your panic attack to balloon into acute psychosis. This place is not for the fainthearted. Should you stumble, Harvard won’t catch you... you are a dropout and must trundle along some tunnel to look for succour elsewhere.

So which four demons does Kessler say attack half of America? “Anxiety disorders, such as panic, phobia, and post-traumatic stress”, make up about 30 per cent of “high enough anxiety at some time in their lives to meet the definition of being mentally disordered”.

Now wait a minute. Who doesn’t suffer ‘high anxiety’? Can anyone among us stand up and say that ‘high anxiety’ is missing from their mental lexicon? Come on... slogging the SAT route to outsmart the thousands hungering after Harvard or any other Ivy League school is a constant pressure cooker for youth anywhere in the world. And I haven’t begun talking about placement tests that the chosen must undergo.

Rejection in any form — be it university, friendship, marriage proposal, job application, social and familial breakdown is traumatic, to say the least. Are all these people then “mentally disordered”? Kessler would answer in the affirmative. I have trouble with such definitions lumping ‘anxiety disorders’ with being labelled a mental case. If that was to be so, then we all are psychos requiring therapy and strong drugs. Don’t you agree?

However, not to be taken lightly is Kessler’s next category: deep depression and manic depression. This accounts for almost 20 per cent of mental problems. In one year almost half of sufferers in this category (45 per cent) will have severe problems”.

Still, America won’t mind if you are a depressed person; students at Harvard read memoirs of their professors that open up shocking revelations of their ‘sickness’; TV viewers don’t mind if their star anchor is Lithium addicted to stabilize his mood swings and patients don’t mind if their psychologists are melancholic men.

The third in rank is “defiance, hyperactivity, and explosive behaviour” attacking one in every four American.

Harvard can again be my case study for this category. Students love defiance. It’s so ‘cool’ to outrage others. And when things get bad, they can resort to “hyperactivity” and even “explosive behaviour”.

The last category is “abuse of and dependence on alcohol and drugs” which affects about 15 per cent of people, with alcohol abuse accounting for most of this category.

Kessler says young people are the hardest hit. “Most of the mental illness in this country starts early. Anxiety disorders usually begin by age 14. Most mood problems start by age 20-25.” He equates arthritis, diabetes, and heart disease that are the “chronic diseases of the elderly” to mental illness, which is the “chronic disorder of young people in our nation”.