Finally, there was Janet, an early twenties college student at the prestigious New England hospital. She had started a fire in her dormitory and supposedly believed that her best friend had died in the fire. I got to know Janet (who was only several years younger than me) and probably fell a bit in love with her. Janet revealed to me that she was fully aware of not having killed her best friend. She was telling the staff this lie because she wanted to stay in the hospital—being a bit afraid of the world she would face if discharged from the hospital (including criminal charges regarding the fire).
Conclusions
These men and women were all “social deviances.” They had been cast out of “polite society” and were declared to be incapable of living safely outside the hospital. Those citizens who were not cautious (“politically correct”) about the term they assign to these cast-off citizens, would call them “insane” or “mad” or “crazy.” I called them “courageous”, “captivating”, “energetic”, “creative” and “wounded.” Each of them was seeking like the rest of us to make some sense of the challenging world in which they were living–both inside the hospital and perhaps, someday, outside the hospital. Each of them led me to question everything I had been taught about the nature and treatment of psychopathy—which came from the fourth assumptive world to which I now turn. This the world in which psychopathy is considered a “mental illness” and is relegated to the halls of medicine.
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