Method in his Madness

Method in his Madness

Many things have fallen only to rise higher. Seneca

Roger was insane.  Not the normal kind of insane though, where you can’t sit in a room with the door open.  Or where you can’t stand the sight of people under 5-feet tall.  No, Roger was full-on bat-shit crazy.  Padded-room crazy.  And that’s how he found himself in the Bucke Mental Asylum.

He lasted for a while on the wards with the other patients, but after a time he became so agitated that they had to remove him from the company of others.  He would lash out at the other patients, blaming them for things he had done, or telling them what they were thinking about.  All in all, he was a very disruptive influence in a place already full of very disrupted people.

So, the doctors hummed and hawed about what should be done.  Finally, after one incident where Roger managed to wedge a bishop in another patient’s ear for ruining his chess game, they decided to place Roger in isolation for an indefinite period of time.

So there Roger sat, alone in his gleaming white cell, surrounded by nothing but soft edges and rounded corners.  For a long time he was silent, and contented.  Eventually, he got bored of being silent and alone, so he started to kick up a fuss.  Screaming right through the night, smearing excrement all over his cell and himself (much to the orderly’s chagrin) and refusing to eat.

Luckily, a young psychiatrist with a head full of creative and hopeful ideas had recently started working at Bucke.  She saw the state that Roger had gotten into, and purposefully strode to the Warden’s office.  She knocked forcefully, and was invited in.

“Warden, I was walking around the hospital today, and I noticed Mr Arthur down in isolation is making a terrible racket.”  The crisply attired young lady looked pointedly at the rumpled, bespectacled Warden.

The Warden tented his hands in front of his broad frame, the dazzling starched cuffs of his shirt poking out past his battered tweed jacket.  He looked distantly disappointed, as though contemplating some unseen failure.

“Ah yes, old Roger.  He is quite a difficult case.  Really quite troublesome.  Never been one to shut people away, but if you could have seen the mess he made when he was up here, you would understand.”

The lady’s blond hair fell slightly in front of her face as she nodded her understanding.  One elegant hand reached up and brushed the wayward tendrils aside.

“I see.  Well, I wonder if you have considered giving him something to amuse himself with down there?  Perhaps some materials with which he could conduct some art therapy?”  She looked at the Warden hopefully.

The Warden’s hands moved towards his face, his index fingers pressed to his lips.

“I can’t see anything wrong with that.  He never was much of a danger to himself, always the others he had a problem with.  If you will arrange it all, I will be happy for you to try it out.  On your head be it if he kills himself with paper cuts though.”  The Warden smiled, although he was only half-joking.

So the young lady left the office, and set her plan in motion.  She felt unusually pleased with herself, normally being a very humble soul.

The next day, the young psychiatrist returned to the isolation ward, a ream of paper and several crayons in hand.  She had an orderly open the door to Roger’s room, and cautiously stepped inside.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me, my dear.” Roger’s voice creaked and groaned from lack of use.  “The only person any of us truly have to fear is ourselves.”

“I see,” the young lady retorted briskly, “well Mr Arthur, I have brought you something that will hopefully make your stay with us a little more bearable.”

She looked towards Roger, hoping for some gesture to show he approved.  None was forthcoming.  She continued, “I have some paper and a few crayons for you.  I wanted to give you pencils and pens, but they were afraid you may use them to hurt yourself, or someone else.”

Roger’s head raised slightly, his sunken eye sockets concealing piercing blue eyes.

“They were probably right.  I find myself, at times, far outside the boundaries of my own control.” His head dropped back down and his eyes again rested on the floor.

“That is something I am working on though,” he whispered.

“That is good to hear Mr Arthur.  Now, I will pop back in the next couple of days to see how you are getting on.”  And with that, the young lady set the items on the padded cushioning of the floor, and left the room.

Roger sat for a while, eyeing the stack of paper and brightly coloured crayons suspiciously.

Then, he had an idea.  He pulled himself up, legs complaining after being crossed for so long.  He reached down, picked up the pile, and returned to where he had been seated.  He crossed his legs and  began to scrawl wildly on the page.

A couple of days later, the young psychiatrist returned to the isolation ward.  As she walked to the door of Roger's room, she felt a mixture of apprehension and delight.  She knew Roger would have found her little gift useful.

She opened the door, and Roger crammed a sheet of paper between his back and the wall, throwing down his crayon with the other hand.  His face twisted and contorted into a rage.

“DAMMIT, I CAN'T JUST HAVE PEOPLE WANDERING IN HERE!  YOU ARE MAKING MY THOUGHTS FUZZY!  I NEED TO CONCENTRATE!  GET OUT OF HERE AND DON'T COME BACK!”

Roger was up now, pacing the room waving the battered sliver of paper around.  He was bouncing off the walls, and falling heavily to the floor.

The young psychiatrist had never seen Roger like that before.  She felt it would be best for her to leave, before he did himself an injury. 

As she closed the door, she noticed the pile of paper was considerably smaller than before.

She would occasionally check in on  Roger, peering through the glass window to his cell.  He never spotted her, so engrossed was he in his task.  He spent most of every day hunched over, scratching away with his rapidly depleting crayon.

Then one day as the young psychiatrist arrived in the morning, bleary-eyed and bushy-tailed as usual, an orderly came over to her.

“Your mate, that one down in isolation?”  The massive orderly towered over her, looking down from above with disinterest, “croaked last night.  Just looked in, and there he was.  Toppled over with a face as white as a sheet.”  The orderly scratched his leg.

“Oh, that's terrible,” the young psychiatrist replied, her feeling of self-worth rapidly fading.

“If you say so.  Least he's not smearing shit on the walls now.” The orderly flashed a simian grin, then continued, “thing is, he left a big pile of paper, looked like a kid had tried to learn to write with a blunt crayon on them.  Top page had your name on it.”

“What did the rest say?” the young lady asked.

“Dunno, couldn't read 'em.  Handwriting like Muhammad Ali.” The grin wormed it's way back onto his  face, “Put 'em on your desk, anyway.”  The orderly lost interest and wandered off, leaving the young lady to wonder.

She arrived at her desk, and sure enough there was a pile of badly crumpled paper laying there.  She removed the top sheet, and began to try to decipher the words.  At first, she could only extract the odd letter here and there.  She painstakingly transcribed these onto her computer, then her gaze returned to the paper.  As she stared, more and more letters and then finally entire words emerged.  She filled in the remaining blanks with a mixture of guesswork and logic, until eventually she had translated the entire passage.  Her screen glowed happily, the words dark spots on a page of light:

         Methods of Avoiding Mind Control

1.Stay focused

Anyone who concentrates on every decision they make cannot be controlled.  By their own force of will they can create any reality they want.

2.Stay Positive

A positive thought is infinitely more powerful than a negative one.  It is a common wisdom that you should never be too confident, to plan for the worst.  By imagining the worst, we aid it's creation.

3.Banish Confusion

Confusion is the root of all evil.  If you feel your thoughts becoming fuzzy, take a deep breath in through your nose, and breathe slowly out through your mouth.  Then meditate on rules 1 and 2 and you may find that you can decipher any problem, if you have the strength of will.

4.Avoid People

Not entirely, as that can become unhealthy.  However, if you feel you are in a negative situation which you cannot  control, there is no shame in walking away.  You should choose your company wisely.  Sometimes it is impossible to reconcile your reality with another's.  At these times, it is important to let go.

5.Maintain Clarity

If you take a substance and you feel it impairs your ability to think clearly or positively, avoid it.  Not to say avoid all substances, as I have experience of many.  In my time here I have found certain medications can dull the mind, and some enhance it.  Choose wisely.

6.Keep Learning

There are patterns in everything, and they all hold common features, from galaxies to hurricanes.  If you learn enough about a wide enough variety of subjects, you may start to see a common thread.  Once you have that thread, it becomes all the more easy to shape the world to your advantage.

7.It's All Reciprocal

You will never break totally free from the will of those around you, but by following the rules above you can maintain the path you wish to follow.  Anything is possible, within reason.  All you have to do is convince yourself it can be done, then show others.


The young psychiatrist stared at the words for a while, mulling them over.  She sighed to herself, then deleted the file.  She stretched her neck, stood, and walked out into the corridor, flashing a brief smile at the gigantic orderly who had delivered the papers to her. 

She walked into a large room filled with metal towers, a library of insanity.  She opened the drawer marked Am-Az, found Roger's file, and placed the crumpled papers in carefully.  The file returned to the drawer, and was locked safely away.