Reefer Madness

Back in the 60’s college film societies used to show a l930’s film called Reefer Madness as a joke. The film was reminiscent of another jeremiad the famed Olivia de Havilland film about asylums, The Snake Pit In one a drug caused insanity and a host of attendant horrors. The other dramatized the horrors of institutionalization and the medieval attitude towards mental illness that was prevalent in the l940’s, when the film was made. And then there was masturbation. Some just on the cusp of baby boomerdom might remember being threatened with the warning that masturbation caused insanity. The problem is that it’s all true. Does Colorado’s legalization of recreational marijuana use mean that the very strong marijuana sold these days has no deleterious affects both with respect to affect (motivation) and brain chemistry? It’s one thing to argue that making marijuana legal is tantamount to the repeal of Prohibition, but it’s another to justify legalization by claiming that marijuana doesn’t affect the brain. Now what about the masturbating marijuana user? Again no one is claiming that anything is wrong with masturbation. But let’s face facts. Marijuana and masturbation have one thing in common: fantasy. And there are people who have so much trouble living in the real world that they would rather smoke pot and jerk off then navigate the shoals of human interaction. Yes isolating from others by smoking pot and masturbating on a prolonged basis might both be both a prescription for and description of insanity.

Tiresias or the DSM

In therapeutic sessions, patients often express their fears. If a patient is extremely disturbed, he might believe that there are little men lurking outside his window. He might think these men are talking and that they are telling him to do something, even something rather trite. If the condition is not too severe, the therapist might attempt to help the patient to understand that he is displacing or projecting his own feelings and thoughts onto another person. Hypochondriacs feel they are sick when they are perfectly fine, and parents who suffer from the esoteric syndrome called Münchausen’s syndrome by proxy have very real but illusory feelings about their children being sick. Amongst the neurological symptoms that indicate distorted cognitions is Capgras syndrome, in which the sufferer believes a friend or relative is an imposter, a stranger occupying a familiar-seeming face and body. This last is dramatized by Richard Powers in his novel The Echo Maker. The horror classic The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is particularly terrifying in that it creates a funhouse view of this very real phenomenon. The reverse neurological symptom is prosopagnosia, in which the afflicted person is no longer able to recognize the faces of those he would otherwise know. Capgras might create paranoia, but prosopagnosia is an adult form of stranger anxiety in which the comfort of familiarity is lost. The DSM, the manual that psychologists and psychiatrists use to categorize and identify illnesses, lists conditions ranging from eating disorders, compulsivity about the search for pleasure (a form of hedonism), and anhedonia (the inability to tolerate pleasure at all), to more far-ranging disorders like psychosis and schizophrenia. Joanne Woodward starred in a movie about multiple personality called The Three Faces of Eve (1957). David and Lisa (1962) elaborated on the theme of schizophrenia and Olivia de Havilland starred in The Snake Pit (1948), a classic about abusive treatment of the mentally ill that foreshadowed the deinstitutionalization of the many severely disturbed patients who would go on to constitute our vast homeless population. But more disturbing than symptoms that are rooted in paranoia and delusion are those that turn out to be rooted in a grim reality. Let’s say a patient had walked into a therapist’s office in Tokyo six months ago and said that he had the feeling that the Northern coast of Japan would be hit by a huge wave that in turn caused a nuclear meltdown? What would we tell to sufferers from pre-9/11 nightmares about terrorists taking over jetliners and flying them into World Trade Center? What would we say to the patient who is obsessed with the idea that it was a genetically engineered double and not Osama bin Laden who was murdered last week?