Free Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So by M.D. Mark Vonnegut

Turow’s
One L
, an excellent account of his first year at Harvard Law School, but I either wasn’t interested in writing anymore just then or couldn’t get an angle on medical school that made me want to write about it. If I really loved writing all that much, I wouldn’t have gone to medical school. Maybe it wasn’t so good for a guy like me to spend too much time alone with a typewriter.

    It amazed me how angry some of my teachers and much of the psychiatric profession was that I had been treated with megavitamin therapy. There were two instances in large lectures where I was all but mentioned by name as promoting quackery. I felt like I had been kicked in the chest by a horse and would havethrown up except it would have drawn attention. I was just a guy still in his twenties glad to no longer be in and out of psychosis. I didn’t think the vitamins had much to do with my recovery, and I did nothing to promote vitamin therapy. It just happened to be what they were doing at the hospital I was hauled off to.
    The megavitamin docs and their critics all seemed like self-absorbed babies whose interest in helping patients was outweighed by the joys of self-righteous vehemence. Their primary interest was in yelling at one another.
    A pox on both their houses. Where are the adults when you need them?
    Gradually and carefully I’d stopped taking most of the vitamins. It didn’t seem to make any difference. So when I discovered my own enlarged thyroid in anatomy class and the doctors at Harvard’s Health Services suggested I stop taking the lithium, I didn’t think much about it. It was increasingly clear that there wasn’t really much wrong with me anyway. I had been started on lithium by one of the “vitamin doctors.” He didn’t change my diagnosis but said, “You’re the kind of schizophrenic who gets better on lithium.” This was all pre–
DSM III
, the modern way to slice and dice mental illness. The only thing I really had come to believe in, more than any specific therapy, was the medical model itself, which got rid of shame, blame, and other hurtful voodoo. That was worth doing.
    The basic science and the preclinical courses were easy. I was looking forward to learning how to use a stethoscope and those cool little lights and how to draw blood. We practiced on one another and ourselves until we were ready to be unleashed on the world.
    After a year and a half of amphitheater/classroom learning, we put on white coats and learned medicine by pretending to be doctors with people who really were patients with the whole show being overseen by people who really were doctors in real hospitals.
    If you’re not sure what to say to a patient or the patient pauses for a while in his story, what you say is, “That must be hard for you.”

    I remember staring and watching carefully as our Introduction to Clinical Medicine instructor easily took a patient’s hand and gently stroked his arm. I wanted to be able to do that. I was moving from a world where I couldn’t touch people I didn’t know to one where I could.
    It was an advantage for me, over most of my classmates, to know that I was in medical school, at least partly, to save my own life.
    We knew some things in amazing detail, right down to the microscopic and molecular level, like how cholera kills people. And over the years cholera has killed a ton of people; there were accounts of cholera epidemics where dehydrated corpses were stacked like cordwood. And now, because we understood it, we could prevent it and/or treat it. All those people who would have died from cholera and been stacked like cordwood got to do something else, like maybe have a son or daughter who went to Harvard Medical School.

    There were no stains whatsoever on my coat, which was so white it glowed. I was an HMS II—Harvard Medical student, second year—doing Introduction to Clinical Medicine hoping I might stumble into doing something right or good or at least not humiliate myself