With one of the clients in the series 100 days in your head last week hung a checklist on the wall for dealing with voices in your head: “Do I see the one saying it? Do I have him on the phone? New? Then it is not true.” What is not true is dangerous and must be chased out of the mind or at least smothered with drugs.
Clear, but you can also turn it around. Aired on Mondays documentary Blue Monday (KRO-NCRV) Ingrid Kamerling portrays three people with ‘psychotic sensitivity’ based on the idea that there is indeed value (and perhaps truth) in what they are going through. Jerry Allon explains how he experienced his psychosis as the confirmation of a doomsday scenario in his own head, a reaction of his body to inflammation, a wound. He became convinced that his father was not his father. That delusion turned out not to be delusional: a DNA test, he says, subsequently showed that his father was indeed not his causative agent.
Kamerling films Jerry while he is choking on the phone with people who have to help him find his biological father. He clings to the idea that his psychosis was a meaningful event that set him on his father’s trail. “If it turned out to be a flat disease, I would be very sorry.”
You hold your breath when you hear that: many things just turn out to be flat diseases. Joyce de Jager also sees meaning in what she experiences. “I hear a kind of wisdom in the woods,” she says of the voices that sometimes compliment her and strongly advise against drinking coffee – she giggles as she says it. Joyce was hospitalized for a while because she wanted to “hurt herself”.
Kamerling films the experiential experts at home, during everyday actions, which emphasizes their vulnerability. Most impressive are the images of Chester Navarro, a restless thirty-something who went through ten psychoses in twelve years. He wants to become a lawyer, just like his father in Curaçao, but has difficulty finding work at his level of education (HBO Law). When a counselor tells him to accept his limitations, he immediately responds: “I don’t know how to do that, accept!”
As if God is speaking directly to you
What Chester can do is tell breathtakingly about what he experienced during his psychosis, in which ecstasy and fear can no longer be separated. “It is as if God is speaking directly to you. It feels like you become one with the universe, you can make connections that no one sees. I’ve seen demons in the solitary cell, I was alone with my own thoughts that are hell. I saw shadows on the walls, I smelled fire and I smelled piss.” That’s how Chester took us in Blue Monday up to the threshold.
“Life has become quite a setback,” Chester says. “I have a lot of revenge and hatred in my body. It seems like I lose friends every year, which is very painful.” He reported to the End of Life Clinic, but was refused there because of his “treatment perspective”. He had to come back in a year. That seems to have been a good decision, because at the end of Blue Monday he works at a community center and gets compliments from a colleague: “You inspired me without even knowing it.”
The most remarkable turn in this intimate, uncomfortable and exciting film comes at the end, when Jerry suddenly has his found father on the phone. The man lives abroad, but is eager to make up for lost time with his son. After the conversation, Jerry looks dreamy for a while. A man who will never again have to think that he has had a “flat disease.”
#delusion #psychosis #turns #delusion
