Blue Bloods

 I was skimming through a long-form New York Times article yesterday. It recounted the life's work and mission of a writer who has devoted her career to weening people off psychiatric medications. She benefitted from going off the pills, so she is encouraging others to do so as well. 

And yet, she is not a medical doctor or an epidemiologist or a psychologist. So—how did she get a book deal to dispense mental health advice to the public? 

One reads on into the article, and the mystery begins to resolve itself. One sees certain tell-tale indicators that build to an inevitable conclusion. First—a Harvard undergraduate education. That alone is often enough to secure a book deal, viz. the career of one Ross Douthat. 

Then—"one of the nation's leading squash players." Aha. Squash. I get the picture. 

Then, that last name—the name that had seemed somehow familiar to us as soon as we opened the article. The one that starts with a D. And we realize, ah, you mean, D--, of the D---s, of New York, as in F. D--- R.... And the picture becomes even clearer. 

But the real give-away is the site of her mental health hospitalization: McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. If you know, you know. 

In short, one is reminded all over again that a life history as a mental patient is simply one of the various career paths open to the American ruling class. In a given generation of their tribe, some of the children will go into finance; others into the arts; and still others into the institutions. 

As Robert Lowell once wrote of his own hospitalization at McLean's—in one of his great confessional poems—it was a place full of "thoroughbred mental cases." An indelible phrase, from a poem that serves as a kind of manifesto for the well-heeled Harvard-educated mental patient. 

Lowell is delightfully sardonic on the subject. He is more than willing to poke some fun at himself and his fellow inmates, for making of their enviable head-start in life the basis for an improbable career in suffering. 

He is even able to see how their gratuitous self-destruction and life-long exploration of ennui must appear in the eyes of those outside the ranks of their privileged caste:

hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.

"Mayflower screwballs." I should have remembered that one too. That's almost as good as "thoroughbred mental cases." 

Lowell is able to see the humor in this WASP suffering, then. But does he not also—in his poem—reveal a bit of its romance? Does not the patient-career he describes have a kind of bewitching glamour as well, which tempts us to follow— like a will-o'-the-wisp leading us further into the swamp? 

I don't mean to deny the reality of their suffering. I don't suggest that Lowell or the author profiled in the Times had no good reason to seek mental health treatment. But if one has to have a crack-up, it is surely best to do it as a blue blood. 

If one has to be a mental patient, that is to say—doing it as a member of the Brahmin class comes with certain unique consolations. Many other classes suffer from debilitating mental illnesses too, but they do so without book deals. 

One does not wish for a moment to deny, therefore, that the rich too can suffer. But, as Ogden Nash once put it: "The only incurable troubles of the rich are the troubles that money can't cure, / Which is a kind of trouble that is even more troublesome if you are poor."