'Frenzy,' A Diary Of Insanity - A Mental Asylee And A True Believer Find Camaraderie At The Barricades In Minneapolis

I am not sure why I am here, but then again does anyone ever know? I am to be released after far too many years, and to be honest, I’m nervous.  Will He still guide my path, light my way, nurture my dreams. and salve my wounds?

 

Ronald Benchley kept a diary while interned at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, the publicly-maintained institution for the mentally ill, and in this entry, read by his psychiatrists after his rampage in Minneapolis, it was quite clear that they had mistakenly discharged him.

'We admit that there are still some bumps in the road'. said the Chief Attending Physician responsible for Benchley's discharge.  'Our release protocol is by no means perfect', but when Benchley went berserk in Minneapolis, questions about the protocol were asked and the supervising medical officer was summarily terminated. 

'We care very much for our patients', wrote the Chief of Staff, 'and while they are at St. Elizabeth's, we do everything we can to either cure them or make their lives comfortable.  We release patients only when they have demonstrated a viable, objectively verifiable socialization, and even then we follow up with regular visitations and supervision.  On behalf of the hospital, the city council, and the faculty here, I regret the unfortunate behavior of a patient who seemed on the road to recovery.'

The Biden Administration had encouraged legislation to open the doors of state mental institutions throughout the country.  In a State of the Union address, Biden made his intentions quite clear:

The mentally ill are no different than anyone else in our diverse land; but they have faced discrimination, oppression, and bigotry no less that our black brothers and like them have been hunted down, tethered and harnessed, thrown into the back of anonymous vans, and locked in maximum security facilities.  Just as we intend to release the many black men unfairly and unjustly arrested and convicted, so will we release into society the men and women of differing mental capacity who have suffered for far too long. 

And with that, the doors to the hundreds of state hospitals for the insane were opened, and their inmates released.  

Of course there was no way that this would turn out well.  St. Elizabeth's alone was filled with the craziest, most demented, most schizophrenically violent people anyone could imagine.  Images of Bedlam, the mental institution founded in England in 1247 - a truly unholy and inhuman place - only suggested what went on in American institutions.  

Conditions had improved - medication had taken the place of chains, bolts, and irons; and patients were housed in heated quarters not the rat-infested dungeons of times past - but still, these were institutions from which no one should ever be released. 

 

Another excerpt from Benchley's diary:

God appeared again to me today, this time in golden robes, a halo of mystical beauty, and a loving smile on his face, a welcoming one, an embracing one; but suddenly his expression changed and he looked at me harshly and with reprimand in his voice.  'Why have you forsaken me' He thundered, and then disappeared, leaving me to parse his meaning, search my soul for the dereliction he saw.  I fell on my knees and looked up at the sky, hoping that He would reappear and make my way clear. 

Ronald Benchley wandered the city that day, disconsolate, depressed, and humbled.  Why was he here? What was his duty? He had been released from St. Elizabeth's for a reason, but what was it?

On the corner of 19th and K Streets there was a gathering in front of an official-looking building.  Everyone was holding signs and placards, pushing forward against the barricades and the police line that had been formed.  'Fuck Trump', he heard. 'Fuck ICE.  Fuck everyone'.  

Many of the people in the crowd looked familiar - the man on the front line spitting and pissing on the police could have been Manny Oberdorfer, a fellow patient at St. Elizabeth's.  Manny in his day did much the same, shitting on the shoes of the male nurses, puking on puzzles, and waving his dick around like a wand. 

And there was Billy Joe Crosby, as naked as a coot, painted like an Indian, whooping and hollering, and screaming like a banshee.  It wasn't Billy Joe, Ronald quickly realized, but someone just like him.  The whole crowd had a strange, unexpected familiarity.  Taken as a whole it was no different than the gatherings in C Ward at the hospital before medication, everyone shouting obscenities, spitting, showing their private parts, and jumping up and down. 

Joining the group was inevitable.  He, for the first time since his release, felt at home, comfortable, among friends.  He joined in whooping and hollering just like anyone else, quickly picking up the phrases and epithets directed at the police.  As the crowd became more unruly, more angry, and more determined, the police pushed forward and moved it backward.  

Again, Ronald was reminded of the time that Billy Joe led all of C Ward in a kind of St. Vitus's dance - a wild jamboree, an enthusiastic release of pent-up free spirits.  It took twenty-five nurses, attendants, and hospital security staff to corral everyone and put them back in their cells. 

 

'Who are you?', said one demonstrator to Ronald after the crowd had dispersed, a man who wore an eye patch like a pirate, but whose other eye burned with some stellar light. 'They took fifty away today', the man said, 'down the rat hole, never to be seen again, tortured victims of Donald Trump; but we showed them!'

Ronnie had no idea what the man meant but thought he had found a friend.  There was something akin to any one of a hundred inmates at St. Elizabeth's in the man - perhaps some Jungian world soul, or at least an intimate, unspoken bond of 'otherness'. 

'Nutcases, wackos, loonies', Ronnie and his new friend heard yelled at them from the sidewalk, again a flash of familiarity.  He had heard those words before, a thousand times over.  That was what ignoramuses called people like him, otherly ordered, diverse, different, sometimes unable to control their emotions and therefore had to be treated at St. Elizabeth's, but human beings. 

If one deconstructed those noxious words, yes, they applied.  He and his fellow patients were indeed as crazy as loons, as cracked, and weird as any bunch of men with screws loose could be; but so were the protestors in front of the federal building. 

Arnold Briggs, Professor Emeritus at Emory University Medical School and former Dean, was an expert in socially psychopathic behavior, and had written extensively about the remarkable similarity between patients in the psychiatric ward of his hospital and the state mental institutions he had visited and the political protestors on the streets of American cities. 

There is something, to use a carpenter’s expression, 'unhinged' about  both the mental patient and the true believer, a man or woman who is infused with a divine mission to do good, to rectify all former evils, to right the ship, and sail to Utopia. No logic, no sense of polity, rectitude, or generosity can temper the exaggerated passions of the true believer, the advocate, the reformer.

And so it is with the schizophrenic who has lost all touch with reality and for whom there is nothing but odd voices speaking to him, phantoms in the night, walking corpses, half-human bodies dangling from the ceiling. 

'Come with me to Minneapolis', Ronald Benchley's new friend said to him. 'There we will do some real damage'; and so the two boarded a Greyhound bus north. 

Professor Briggs was uncanny in his analysis, so much so that the Antifa protestor and new friend of Ronnie Benchley had no idea whatsoever that he was as nutty as a fruitcake and far beyond the reaches of any normal interaction.  Every wild, inchoate outburst by Ronnie was taken by his friend as nothing less than pure hatred for the system that oppressed the poor, the ethnically diverse, and the racially different.  The more than Ronnie fulminated and thrust his hands skyward like an Old Testament prophet, the more his friend was convinced that he had found a soulmate. 

The trip was a homecoming for Ronnie.  He had thought that leaving St. Elizabeth's would be the end of community, camaraderie, and intimacy; that he would wander alone on the streets, joining the derelict bums on the streets of San Francisco, unhoused, alone, kicked aside by society, released from their proper homes, St. Elizabeth's and its sisters; but no, he had found a warm, congenial, friendly place. 

He howled and spat at ICE like his friend and the hundreds of like-minded comrades on the streets of Minneapolis.  He was never happier, and every night when God appeared to him without censure or reprimand, with that beatific smile he had come to love, he shouted 'Hallelujah', righted his display of upside down statues - Jesus, St. Joseph, and St. Jerome - turned toward Hell because of his own sins, but now upright again in the light of the Lord. 

A further entry in Ronnie's diary:

I am redeemed, saved by the intercession of God Almighty, a crusader in his army, a keeper of the flame of righteousness.  Slay me, O devilish swarm of Satan, kill me as a martyr in His cause.  Let me die like all the saints before me, killed in the service of the Lord

And with that, and a swift, mighty sweep of his sword at the neck of God's sworn enemy, he was cuffed, hauled away, and kept in a holding cell until, happily (God works in mysterious ways) he was sent back to St. Elizabeth's where he had fabulous stories to tell.