The Myth of Normal 190

Chapter 17 An Inaccurate Map of Our Pain: What We Get Wrong About Mental Illness We don’t understand any major mental disorder biologically. —Professor Anne Harrington[*] At age nineteen, a freshman journalism student at the University of Florida, Darrell Hammond was plunged into his first experience of searing mental distress. “I was in unspeakable terror,” the comedian recalled. “That level of fear—I don’t even know how I survived it. The doctors were treating me for depression and paranoia, and for psychosis because I told them that I had seen someone talking, and the words didn’t come out at the same time their mouth was moving.” He was prescribed an antidepressant, amitriptyline, as well as the antipsychotic thioridazine. Over the subsequent decades, Hammond estimated that he was evaluated by up to forty psychiatrists and labeled with multiple diagnoses, including depression, bipolar disorder, and complex PTSD, and he didn’t recall what else. The assumption that guided his treatment was the same one that dominates much of medical thinking: that such torments are caused by a biological disease of the brain. Accordingly, he was treated with an ever-changing cocktail of medications. Throughout years of professional success, including an unprecedented fourteen-year run on Saturday Night Live—his range expressed in roles from Bill Clinton to, perhaps most belovedly, a jocularly vulgar Sean Connery—he continued to feel lost, irritable, isolated, and despondent. The only recourses he could find