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Mark's story

This article is more than 21 years old
Doctor Mark Vonnegut has written an acclaimed account of his mental illness

One of the many worst things about being nuts was being so goddamned important. Who was I that such powerful mysterious forces were buggering around with my life? One team would come through cramming my head full of new knowledge, the next would sneak in and erase all the new stuff plus a lot of the old. I'd be crucified and resurrected several times a day.

If I died lots of wonderful things would happen. If I died lots of awful things would happen. I was a rag doll between two bull mastiffs with very little way to know which one I wanted to get me, let alone have any say in the matter...

Well, so here I am in a mental hospital. It took a while for it to sink in. In a way, I knew it all along. Simon and my father had talked about it and I had been able to pick up on some of what they were saying. The nurses and orderlies, the little room, the needles in the ass, it all added up: a mental hospital. It took a while before I was able to pay much attention to the fact. I was taken up with voices, visions and all. I vaguely knew I was in a mental hospital but it wasn't any different from being anywhere else. Where I was was beside the point.

Little by little, with the help of massive doses of Thorazine in the ass and in my milkshakes (which was all they could get me to eat), little by little it started mattering to me where I was and what was going on.

For a while I was convinced that the whole thing I was going through was my father's way to help me give up cigarettes. Here I was, thinking the end of the world or worse was happening and what was really going on was all about cigarettes. It was like the Trafalmadorians [other- wordly beings in some Kurt Vonnegut novels] getting the earthlings to build the Great Wall of China to send a little message to a second-string messenger carrying a message that just said hello.

Some lesson. "Cigarettes, Dad?" "Cigarettes, Mark." "Shit, Pa, who would have guessed?" "Well, it took you quite a while, Mark." But then, when I said I wouldn't smoke any more and they still wouldn't let me out of my little room, I got suspicious that cigarettes weren't the whole story. Little by little it sank in. It was all on the level. This was a real mental hospital with real doctors and nurses. It wasn't some weird put-up job designed by my father or anyone else.

The only weird thing about this hospital was that I was a patient here. Everything else made sense. All the other patients fit nicely into my idea of what mental hospitals were about. They were all victims one way or another. They had been dealt lousy parents, lousy jobs, lousy marriages, lousy friends, lousy educations. They hadn't had breaks. No one really loved them. I just picked up bits and pieces, but it all kept adding up the same. I'd see a husband or wife or mother come in to visit them and I'd wince in pain as the various pictures of what their lives had been came together. Their craziness, their being in a mental hospital, was so understandable. Good, brave people who had done the best they could until it was just all too much.

What was my excuse? What more could I have possibly asked from life? For them there was some hope. Call it therapy. A change of job, some understanding of themselves and the people around them: given half a break, these people could make it. Maybe if they got 80 acres back in the mountains or something.

Most of the patients were older. I was the only one there with long hair or a beard. Some discarded old people, a lot of middle-aged people who had gotten messed up with alcohol, a few junkies, plus a few other misfits. I worried some that my being so different from the others meant they didn't really know how to deal with whatever my problem was. I had been put in the wrong bin. In a way it was the same for me, but the only way I could get to feel the sameness was by stretching definitions quite a bit. It felt lonely.

· This is an edited extract from The Eden Express by Mark Vonnegut, published in a new edition this month by Seven Stories Press

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