The Myth of Normal 191

to interrupt his misery were self-medicating with alcohol and overt self-harm: his body still bears the scars of over fifty self-inflicted cuts. Thirty-five years into his psychiatric odyssey, Hammond met a clinician, Dr. Nabil Kotbi at New York City’s Weill Cornell Medical College, who changed his life with two short sentences: “I don’t want you to call what you have a mental illness. You have been injured.” The insight that his symptoms were not the manifestations of some mysterious medical condition, Hammond told me, “was a ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ moment . . . What [Dr. Kotbi] seemed to be saying to me was that mental illness comes from somewhere very specific. It has a story, and in that story, you’re the only one that has no power.” In the decades between his first encounter with the mental health system and his meeting this particular psychiatrist, no one had asked Hammond about traumatic childhood experiences. “I can’t describe what it was like to go into a doctor’s office, in acute pain, and have them look at me and go, ‘You shouldn’t be feeling this way.’ No one at the time was saying, ‘Hey, you’re probably a victim of child abuse.’ At that time, if you felt bad for no apparent reason, they called you bipolar. That’s all they knew. ‘He has unexplainable highs and lows,’ you know. They treated me with [the mood stabilizers] lithium and then Depakote. Neither of those were successful. Nothing was really successful until the truth about my life was acknowledged.” The truth of Hammond’s life included a cavalcade of abuse at the hands of his mother.[*] While mental ailments certainly exhibit some features of illness—the brain seeming to function like a disordered organ—mainstream psychiatry takes the biological emphasis too far, reducing everything mostly to an imbalance of DNA-dictated brain chemicals. Psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison, one of today’s most eloquent authors on manic-depressive illness, also known as bipolar disorder, wrote the memoir Unquiet Mind. This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to appreciate the experience of an exquisite consciousness oscillating from episodes of hyper-elation to immobilizing despair. And yet, embedded in Dr. Jamison’s gorgeously rendered recollections are faulty assumptions that exemplify the simplistic genetic narrative to which psychiatry still clings. Here she recalls a manic episode: