Bill made no effort to “look the part”—he wore a clean T-shirt and bell-bottoms. The bushy beard remained, as did his longer, slightly wavy hair and thick black-framed glasses. The interview went as planned: Bill told the intake officer that he was a student at Stanford, that he was unmarried, and that he had started hearing voices, sticking strictly to the script, saying that he heard them say “thud, empty, hollow.” His nerves probably helped sell his story. The interviewer handed over his case file and told him to find a ride to Agnews State Hospital, where he would be admitted.
Bill asked Maryon to drop him off out of the sightline of Agnews State Hospital’s front entrance for fear that… what? That someone would see him with a woman and assume he was lying about having a wife? (This seems pretty paranoid to me. I think that the shock of his admission hit him harder than he admits.) Maryon watched as her husband walked up the palm-tree-lined drive to the entranceway of the stately psychiatric hospital. Right then, she said, she knew he wasn’t coming back.
Bill’s dread deepened the closer he got to the admissions building. Eventually he reached a sign directing him to INTAKE, which looked like an ordinary doctors’ office waiting room, where patients were diagnosed and sent off to hospital wards that had become increasingly ill equipped to deal with them.
Located less than half an hour south of Palo Alto in the city of Santa Clara, the Great Asylum for the Insane (later renamed Agnews State Hospital) opened in 1885 after a farmer donated his three-hundred-acre farm to the state to house the growing army of the “chronically insane.” Superintendent Leonard Stocking, who lived on the grounds, instituted a return to a more humane approach to psychiatric care called moral treatment (which, as we saw earlier, proliferated in the 1800s until it overreached). Stocking built libraries, gymnasiums, a piggery, and a chicken coop, and opened tracts of farmland, all maintained by patients and staff. His daughter Helen Stocking lived on one of the wards for most of her adult life and even wrote and directed plays that patients staged in her honor.
But Agnews, like most institutions, was a product of its time, and the institution where Maryon dropped her husband off was not the same place Helen Stocking lived and wrote. “They were tense times,” former Agnews psychiatrist Izzy Talesnick told me. Money was tight, and the hospital was plagued by the lethal combination of overcrowding—at its height it held forty-five hundred patients—and understaffing.
Upon arrival, Bill participated in a series of interviews. A German Nurse Ratched type interrogated him about his sexual preferences and drug use. Rosenhan quoted from Bill’s notes, which Bill told me he threw away years ago. “A woman who had only limited command of English talked at length about my sex life. She pressed me for an admission of homosexual activity. She also asked about my childhood more than the others did. She asked if I had been jealous of my father.”
Bill’s beard, his long hair, and his clothes created a portrait of the perceived “other,” a mentally ill deviant, which at that time was a gay man. He continued: “They seem to want to press me into admitting the use of psychedelics.” This was yet another example of a doctor seeing what she expected to see. We witnessed it with Rosenhan, when the doctors described his “constricted speech.” This type of misjudgment is common in physicians; it predisposes people to fill in the unknowns and disregard anything that may not support their conclusions.
It took the admitting psychiatrist less than half an hour to reach her diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia. He was officially admitted—case #115733.
Bill was placed into a dorm with twenty other men. He was now just one grain of sand in a desert of sick men, as if he had always been there and always would be. The unwritten rule was that you never asked “Why are you in?” Diagnoses were rarely, if ever, discussed, though everyone knew the difference between the “acutes,” or the temporary ones, and the “chronics,” who were lifers. There were guys in for drugs and alcohol, those who went on a few too many acid trips or—more frighteningly—did one acid trip and lost it; there were some McMurphys there, too, malingerers who were there to dodge the draft or escape from their lives. Sometimes Bill mistook the staff for the patients, until he noticed their keys, a signal of distinction that Rosenhan also noted, which separated “them” from “us.”
Bill made a friend whom he nicknamed “Samson.” All Samson talked about was his hair. He felt his power and mental strength were forged in his follicles. Sure, hair was important. Bill had grown out his wavy red hair long enough to put up into a ponytail to announce where and how he fit into the new world. But this was something altogether different. Samson had started dealing drugs, and to make his new career a little less obvious to narcs, he had cut his hair off. When the drug deal fell through, and Samson realized that he had chopped it off for nothing, he attempted suicide. He survived and ended up on Bill’s ward. Magic hair aside, Samson made sense to Bill. He was the kind of guy you might see around campus. The two spent hours talking and playing cards—of all games, crazy eights.
In her husband’s absence, Maryon’s mind drifted off into dark places. She couldn’t bat one particular image away: men strung up by their ankles from the ceiling. Where she got this, she doesn’t know to this day. She tried to focus on her girls but lost herself in crying jags. Will they medicate him? Shock him? Tie him up in a straitjacket? Her friends and neighbors acknowledged her red eyes and Bill’s sudden disappearance but didn’t pry, assuming that the couple had hit a rough patch. All she could do was brush them off. She had promised Bill and Rosenhan not to tell a soul.
A day later, on Friday the thirteenth, she was finally able to visit. Walking up the same palm-tree-lined walkway that she had watched her husband disappear along, she felt almost outside herself as she asked the receptionist for “Bill Dickson.”
Door. Hallway. Door. Second hallway. Door. A huge, double-wide oak door the size of something you might find on a college campus.
She heard scratching on the other side. She pictured patients clawing the door, their fingers bloody nubs where their nails should be, desperate to be freed. As the door swung open, she recoiled, bracing herself for the worst of her visions.
But there was only David Rosenhan. The scratching sound came from Rosenhan fiddling with the locks (somehow he had a key).
“How is he?” Maryon blurted out. Rosenhan was her one source of calm. He had been so kind to her in her husband’s absence, advising her to write down her thoughts in a journal since writing had helped him during his own hospitalization. He reassured her that Bill was safe thanks to writs of habeas corpus that he had filed. The idea that a piece of paper was prepped and ready to go that could release her husband soothed her.
I interrupted Maryon here. The writ of habeas corpus—the term is Latin for “that you have the body”—is the document that saved Elizabeth Packard from false imprisonment in the 1800s. Once presented, it required that Bill be brought before a court, where it would be determined if his hospitalization was valid. Though Rosenhan did write in “On Being Sane in Insane Places” that “a writ of habeas corpus was prepared for each of the entering pseudopatients and an attorney was kept on ‘on call’ during every hospitalization,” this wasn’t entirely true. I had tracked down the ACLU lawyer named Robert Bartels, now based in Arizona, who had worked as a law assistant aiding Stanford professor John Kaplan with Rosenhan’s experiment. Bartels was a bit hazy on details, but he was confident that though they had discussed writs for one or two people, he had never prepared any and that “on call” may have been an exaggeration. When I told Maryon this, her anger flared. “Good thing that I didn’t know—that’s what got me through. I guess that I was naive. I just believed.”
Back in that doorway: She didn’t remember what Rosenhan said, only that he looked distressed. And then he was gone. Maryon found herself on the other side of the locked door she so dreaded. Did Rosenhan tell her how to get there? She doesn’t recall. The next minute she found herself in the dining room, which reminded her of her high sch
ool cafeteria, her thoughts resting on a safe place, on Bill, her high school sweetheart.
There he was. Bill was slumped down in his seat, his head resting on his folded arms. He seemed to be either crying or dead asleep. She approached the table and softly called his name. He didn’t budge, didn’t even acknowledge her presence. She took the seat opposite her husband. Eventually he lifted his head. “I’m sleeeeeepyyyyy,” Bill said. His words came out muddy, as if he’d had a few scotches too many. Forget the hanging bodies or the bloody fingernails. This was the real fear. Her husband was altered.
An hour or so before Maryon’s visit, a nurse clad in stiff whites had walked through the cafeteria handing out paper cups with pills. When she handed one to Bill, he recognized the medication from Austin State: Thorazine, psychiatry’s miracle drug. Bill had felt confident that he could easily cheek the pill. He popped one without thinking and let it nestle beneath his tongue. But what he didn’t expect was the burning sensation. The new capsule coating was designed to melt away, making him feel like it would burn a hole in his mouth if he didn’t swallow. He stumbled toward the nearest bathroom, but didn’t make it there before his automatic reflex took hold and he swallowed. Bill was well aware of the drug’s side effects—the tremors, nonstop drooling, uncontrollable body movements, muscular rigidity, shuffling gait, and blue tinge of the overdosed—and he comforted himself with research he had read in class about the placebo effect. He had to believe that all would be okay for it to be. But when he finished his meal and walked out into the ward, the world went black.
Next thing he knew he was being shaken awake by an attendant, who told him it wasn’t time to sleep. He had a visitor. David Rosenhan.
Bill told me he didn’t remember their conversation, and Rosenhan didn’t write about it. Rosenhan kept spare notes on Bill’s hospitalization, which were mostly found in a few short sections of his unpublished book. All Bill could recall was an unrelenting desire for sleep. “I would have paid a thousand dollars right then and there to just put my head down,” he said.
“Did he notice that you were… did you tell him that you had taken the drug by mistake?” I asked.
“I don’t think I did.”
“Did he notice that something was off?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say. He didn’t say anything if he did. I may have made more of an effort to hide that with him than I did with Maryon. That’s one of the nice things about being in a relationship, you don’t have to hide that stuff.”
This was why Maryon had found him so changed. “I was used to being married to somebody that was going to have a PhD someday,” she told me. “Somebody who had control over his life, had control of everything. To see him in a situation where he was like an invalid almost, where he couldn’t do anything or make decisions, that was hard.”
This institution had suddenly transformed her husband, and she didn’t know when—or if—she would get him back.
15
WARD 11
As Bill shuffled the deck for another round of crazy eights, a miraculous series of events was unfolding a few yards away inside the same hospital on a special unit called Ward 11.
The idea for Ward 11 was sparked in the mountains of Big Sur at Esalen Institute. Most people of a certain age know of Esalen thanks to its notoriety—Naked therapy! Orgies! Drugs! (And, more recently, many may recognize it as the setting of Mad Men’s finale episode, where Don Draper experiences his “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” aha moment.) Two years before Bill’s hospitalization, a Life magazine article skewered Esalen. It reads like satire: “Not only do people publicly neck and nuzzle like teenagers, but they sit on each other’s laps like babies. And they cry a lot. Crying is a sort of status symbol.”
Despite the bad press, Esalen was a key incubator for the growing counterculture and human potential movements as everyone from movie stars, businessmen, and bored housewives tapped into their better selves. Attendees participated in programs like “The Value of the Psychotic Experience.” Bob Dylan visited. R. D. Laing lectured. Joan Baez was basically an artist in residence. Charles Manson showed up with one of his girls and performed an impromptu concert days before the Tate murders. During the heady first decade, you may have rubbed shoulders with anyone from British philosopher and Eastern culture disseminator Alan Watts; to chemist Linus Pauling, one of the founders of quantum mechanics and molecular biology; to writer Ken Kesey; psychologist B. F. Skinner; and quite possibly to social psychologist David Rosenhan. Despite the debauchery and celebrity worship, the goal—to offer a peaceful oasis away from the world’s soul-crushing conformity—was a legitimate one dreamed up by Esalen co-founders Mike Murphy and Dick Price, who had barely survived his experiences on the other side of sanity.
Dick Price was supposed to follow in his successful father’s footsteps: attend a respectable school, major in economics, and settle down with a suitable wife. Instead he pursued a degree in psychology and developed an interest in Eastern religions after taking a class by Frederic Spiegelberg on the Hindu text Bhagavad Gita, which championed the pursuit of a “dharma” or path that each enlightened person is destined to fulfill. He seemed back on the straight and narrow when he enlisted in the air force—if you ignored the fact that he spent his nights at The Place, a nightclub in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, frequently haunted by Allen Ginsberg and poet Gary Snyder. Soon Price met a dancer and fell hard. On the night he met her, he heard a disembodied voice say: “This is your wife.” The two married. It all sounded poetic, even though it was the beginning of Dick’s unraveling.
His behavior grew odder, even within the affectedly strange and drugged-out Beatnik scene. One night at a bar in North Beach he was hit by an urge: “He felt a tremendous opening up inside himself, like a glorious dawn,” wrote political scientist and author Walter Truett Anderson in his book The Upstart Spring. The feeling was: “I’m a newborn, I should be celebrated.” Price began repeating: “Light the fire, light the fire,” over and over, spooking the bartender, who called the cops. Price ended up in handcuffs and woke up in a psychiatric hospital at the Parks Air Force Base, where he fought aides and was sequestered in a padded isolation room. He threw himself against the walls, believing that there was an “energy field” around him that protected him from injury and pain. There he received his first in a series of electroshock therapies.
Dick’s family moved him to a fancier private hospital across the country in Hartford, Connecticut, called the Institute of Living. On the surface, the institute had more in common with a country club than a hospital. A Victorian main mansion, surrounded by cottages and research buildings, stood on ornate grounds designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the chief architect of Manhattan’s Central Park. Patients could pick from a fleet of chauffeur-driven Packards, Lincolns, and Cadillacs. There was even an in-house magazine, The Chatterbox, which once ran an illustration of glamorous patients wading around the pool.
But these images only told the stories the institute wanted to share. Though the hospital catered to the rich and famous with its putting greens and fancy cars, it also deployed the experimental treatments of the era—lobotomies, ECT, and insulin coma therapy. The institute’s psychiatrist-in-chief, Dr. Francis J. Braceland, had deep attachments to the Catholic Church and admitted priests who had been sent by archdioceses to be “cured” of their “disorders.” Pope Pius XII knighted him in 1956, the same year that Dick entered the hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia.
At the Institute of Living, Dick lived on the locked ward, his “private prison,” where he was subjected to cutting-edge “treatments.” During his stay he underwent ten electroshock therapies, doses of Thorazine, and what Dick called “the complete debilitator,” insulin coma therapy. Viewed at best as malpractice, this therapy, which involved inducing comas with insulin to cure psychosis, went out of style by 1960 after a series of articles revealed that there was no scientific evidence to back the dangerous, sometimes lethal pro
cedure.
This is what Dick would have faced: After a series of tests—blood work, heart rate monitoring—a nurse would inject the insulin. As his glucose levels fell, Dick would sweat and salivate; his breathing would slow and his pulse quicken. Gradually, unconsciousness would blanket him. Patients would sometimes drool so much that nurses would have to sop up the saliva with sponges. Sometimes the skin burned hot, the muscles twitched, and the patient would jerk. Often a seizure would occur, which doctors saw then as a sign that the treatment was working. Glucose injections followed, administered intravenously or via a thin rubber tube inserted through the nose and into the stomach, bringing the patient back to life (if they were lucky).
During the year he spent at the institute, Dick Price said he underwent fifty-nine of these therapies. The naturally trim Price, a born athlete, put on over seventy pounds, since the insulin treatments caused ravenous hunger. He fell into a stupor, wandering around the halls as if he were in “a pool of molasses” until something clicked inside him: He had to get out. After learning how to successfully cheek his Thorazine, Dick convinced his father to get him off the locked ward and onto an open one. On Thanksgiving Day 1957, he was released. (Another famous Institute of Living resident, screen actress Gene Tierney, would later call her stay there “the most degrading time of my life… I felt like a lab rat.”)
Dick Price returned to California, where he hooked up with Mike Murphy, whose family owned the land on which the two men would build Esalen, their dream retreat, which they opened to the public in 1962. Price envisioned Esalen as a place that “would serve people coming to this type of experience and there would not be the drugging or the shocking—that was my main motivation.” He believed that madness should be taken seriously, probed, embraced, and examined as a path to insight. He saw Esalen as a place to “live through experience” and facilitated this approach by providing treatments like encounter therapy, bodywork (massage, Rolfing, and sensory awareness), and psychedelic drugs. Dick was influenced by the work of Fritz Perls, a German psychotherapist in residence at Esalen, who created Gestalt therapy, which pushes people to focus on the present moment.
The Great Pretender Page 15
