… traditional reliance on conspiracy: the hidden plot.
Anti-Semitism never sees itself as a hatred; it views itself as a revelation. An attack on the Jew is never offensive; it is always defensive.
InPart II I began to tell the story of Mr. A, an 18 year old who suffered his first psychotic episode shortly after graduating from high school.
The story continues:
When Mr. A started to hear voices he first worried that he was going crazy, that he was losing his mind. He was terrified. His world had become increasingly confusing and tumultuous. He was getting signals at an increasing rate. Words and numbers on billboards, on the sides of buses, mentioned on TV, all had arcane meanings known only to him, yet despite his “insight” he could not make sense out of what he was experiencing. Once the voices started, often accusing him of being stupid and a failure, or being gay, he felt under siege. He began to despair of ever figuring out what it all meant. He failed two of his courses in his senior year because he could no longer study and his answers on tests had become increasingly idiosyncratic and unappreciated by his teachers. (Despite his failures, he was able to graduate having been a good student prior to his senior year and having accrued enough credits for a diploma.)
For the next two months, Mr. A's life was a living hell. When he left his apartment he would be bombarded with signals; the voices would scream at him with increasing volume and ferocity. He was a fagot; he was worthless; he should just kill himself. Even when he stayed in his room the voices found a way to enter his hitherto safe space. He felt increasingly threatened. He couldn't understand why he was singled out or what was wanted of him but began to fear that an organized group was behind the attacks. He had never been a religious person but began to pray. He began to feel that he could understand the persecution that Jesus must have felt.
Mr. A continued in this terrible state for two months. He lost weight; he couldn't sleep.
One day, while during a brief respite form the voice, he passed a Synagogue in his neighborhood. He was startled to hear the voices return with great intensity, disparaging him and telling him he was nothing. He suddenly realized that only the Jews could be so sophisticated and so evil as to implant a device in his head by which to plague him with their voices. It was that Jewish Doctor he had seen for his senior year physical who must have inserted the device into his brain during the exam! Everything began to make sense except for one detail. Why would the Jews single him out for torment?
For the next few weeks he remained under siege, but no longer in quite so much turmoil. He still didn't have all the answers but knew he was important and exactly who was persecuting him. He remined puzzled why he had been chosen by the Jews but was convinced he would find the answer. And then, one day the scales fell from his eyes and everything fell into place.
He was walking, in an agitated state, at 2 AM, when he passed a Catholic Church in his neighborhood. Suddenly, a light beamed down from the steeple, illuminating him in a warm, loving glow. A voice spoke and told him that he was being tested, that he was the embodiment of Jesus Christ, that many people would reject him and try to stop him, but that his mission was to bring healing to the world, to bring peace to mankind. He could not allow “them” to stop him, but they would try. Suddenly, everything became clear. He looked up and saw a sign proclaiming “we are number 1”. This not only meant that he was Christ but that he must go to the “first place.” But where was that? The most important place? A bus with the number 45 in its identification answered his question and directed him to 45th Street and 1st Avenue; of course, he needed to get to the UN! He had to get to Manhattan. He would need to walk, realizing that if he took the subway, he could be more easily stopped. He ran home and got his katana; he would need protection. He began to walk with a new purpose, sure of himself, no longer worried about losing his mind or being crazy. He also finally, put two and two together:
The Jews controlled the banks and the newspapers; they had killed Christ once and were trying to stop his return because they knew he could expose them and destroy them.
When the police noticed a disheveled man walking down the street in the middle of the night carrying a sword, they intervened, luckily with no harm to anyone involved and brought Mr. A to the hospital.
Once Mr. A began to respond to the powerful anti-psychotics which he was given, there was a marked change in his demeanor. He had come in quite agitated, then had become catatonic, immobilized by the struggle taking place within him. (He told me some time later that when he was Catatonic, he had realized that he had the power to create miracles but wasn't sure how to safely wield his power. He could cause hurricanes to destroy his enemies but if he made the wrong move he would lose control of the hurricanes and kill good people, too. His immobility was an effort to avoid making a disastrous, “wrong” move.) Once his catatonia resolved, he had shown himself to be a bright, clever young man, seemingly sure of himself, confident and unwilling to reveal what was on his mind. This was a period in which he remained convinced he was the Second Coming and knew he needed to hide the fact. As his illness decreased its hold on him, there was marked change in his mood. He became profoundly depressed and at one point became overtly suicidal. He told me that he understood he had as serious illness and that it meant his life was ruined. How could he ever find happiness if he was so impaired. He was going to end up homeless, on the streets, like the bums he saw in his neighborhood who spent all day muttering to themselves and glaring at passers-by. His mind was broken; how could ever be normal?
Mr. A recovered from his initial episode, though never recovered his full functioning. Several years later he was re-admitted to the hospital where I was then an attending. By that time he had already been through the recurrent cycle of illness, hospitalization with medication, recovery, cessation of medication (on his own) and recurrence on several occasions. He was quite deteriorated and did not do well in the long term. The medications available in the 1980s were inferior to those that are available now (one reason patients often stopped them on their own) and he suffered from the worst kind of progressively deteriorating Schizophrenia, the kind that Emil Kraepelin called Dememtia Praecox, ie Premature Dementia, later renamed by Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term Schizophrenia.
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