In a Darkness
by W. W. Norton , New York 1972 , $5.95 .
Through a Darkness Clearly
“Don't blame yourselves or anyone,” wrote Michael Wechsler to his family before taking a fatal overdose of barbiturates on May 16, 1969. In a Darkness is his family's response. James Wechsler, Michael's father and the editorial page editor of the New York Post, seems to be writing as a personal tribute to his son, a duty to the public, and an attempt to formulate and comprehend what he and his family experienced. Personal tributes are not appropriate subjects for critical review. As a public service, the work has some serious flaws, although it is really disturbing only because of the author's immense prestige and influence. However, the book's greatest interest stems from our being invited to share the family's experience of their son's and brother's illness-to see and feel what they saw and felt, and even more remarkably, to ignore and deny what they chose to conceal from themselves.
It is particularly by revealing their denial that the work rings true. We learn, for example, that when his father came across Michael, depressed, sitting on a ninth floor window sill with the window wide open on a cold, rainy, winter night, “I quietly reminded him that it was time to leave. He said he would be ready in a few minutes. With new foreboding, I left him alone.” A few minutes later, Michael tried to jump. We share the father's bewilderment, helplessness, anger. What was he to do? I have heard similar stories told by therapists and patients, but rarely with such openness by the family members themselves.
It is unfortunate that we don't have Michael's own story or that which must be scattered in the records and charts of the eight therapists from whom he received such fragmented treatment over a period of nine years. The family's book is an important one, but it is not a book about Michael, or his treatment, or even the family, but rather about the family's personal subjective experience of Michael's illness, treatment, and death. It is a portion of their biography, not of his.
The death of a gifted, well-educated 26-year-old-man by his own hand is tragic. However, the real tragedy of this family's experience, as of so many others, was not their son's death, but rather the many experiences-Michael's, his family's, his friends', and his therapists,' which somehow never came together. We hear one theme clearly-his parents pleading, hoping, sometimes threatening or bribing, and always bewildered. We can imagine the others-Michael, at times secretive, isolated, always difficult-the many therapists, frustrated, struggling with both Michael and his family to maintain a neutral yet therapeutic posture. These themes are never harmonized; and the cacophonic confusion that results is ended only by Michael's final act. The book offers innumerable examples, but the issue is clear from the beginning. Michael, age 17, tells his father that he would like to have psychiatric treatment. Father is amazed. The psychiatrist finds Michael “very sick”-the parents thought him normal! A strange detail foretells the pattern of the family's future relationship with the therapists. In his initial phone contact with the parents, the psychiatrist mentions that Michael has “rectal bleeding.” The family pediatrician finds nothing wrong. Michael insists to his parents that the psychiatrist denied ever having said such a thing. Yet the father heard him. The parents then see the psychiatrist for a number of joint sessions-and the subject never comes up! Over and over, with doctor after doctor, and hospital after hospital, questions are raised and then unanswered; we move on to the next therapist, the next institution. There is always a reason for the change, and often an enthusiasm for the new, but somehow nothing is ever really resolved.
With time, the family gets progressively angrier, and, understandably, attacks the therapists. Michael wants a motorcycle (although he is “accident prone”). His therapist (now “Dr. Third”) said it was up to him to assess whether he felt well enough to drive a motorcycle and up to us to decide… whether to help him buy it.” The family labels this an “abdication,” and compromises by buying him a motorbike. Mike has a terrible accident. Father is angry at the therapist. Later, the other driver admits responsibility. The family is still angry, and the chapter closes, “No one he encountered could heal the mental dismay as Dr. Malt and his associates had so skillfully mended his body.” Unfortunately, all too true.
Michael is hospitalized five times and proves a difficult patient. He elopes from one hospital on eight separate occasions-and the hospital's prescription is to make him an involuntary patient. The family understands the reason for this advice and is candid about its necessity, “In part they wanted the legal authority to make him stay; in part they wanted us to convey unequivocally to Michael that we were not going to help him run away. Each time he eloped this was the issue, and Michael knew that Nancy and I were not in full agreement between ourselves about the wisdom-or necessity-of bringinq him back to the hospital” (italics mine). He doesn't take his medication, conceals this from the doctors, and his family views this as his being “required to defraud the doctors in trying to save himself from becoming a ‘vegetable.’” The content changes, but the pattern is constant.
The family blames the therapists, and, one presumes, the therapists must have blamed the family (a colleague suggested to me that this review be titled “Autobiography of a Schizophrenogenic Family”). And so it goes, until the end. And then the book. And now the reviews. Karl Menninger recognizes the “picture of the… bewilderment…the uncertain groping for therapists.”1 Seymour Halleck finds a “major lesson… No social institution, whether it is a government, a university, or a psychiatric care system, should be allowed to operate without openly stating its methods and purposes.”2 Robert Coles finds in it the dangers of insight-“when everything is so closely watched, when events are turned over and over, so that their ‘significance’ can be appreciated, when psychological ‘meaning’ is attributed to everything a person does, then awkwardness and self-consciousness become a fact of life-become life itself.”3
One note is clear-Michael is dead. The rest blurred, confused, misunderstood, is “in a darkness.” Few statements by the families of the mentally ill have communicated that darkness so clearly.
