For the good of the group

One of the classics.

Tonight I attended an Intensive Outpatient Group meeting, where closet Orwellians herd dysfunctional human livestock into rooms and smile at them for three hours. To spare us all the displeasure of being there, you in sympathy, and for the first time, and me in protest, for the second, I'll stenograph its minutes:

6-630: "Congratulations for not killing yourselves this weekend." "How's everyone feeling?" "Okay."
630-7: "Draw what makes you angry. Use these markers."
7-830: "Let's look at this table matching various emotions with facial expressions."
830-9: "You're not going to go kill yourselves right?"

From the program's multitude failings, I'll select two to explain why I won't be returning for tomorrow night's repeat performance. Let's start with the diction: "Intensive Outpatient Group Therapy." I won't object to identifying most of my fellow harrowers as outpatients, as five to seven of us, I gather, had only days before, or on that very day, been released from inpatient treatment. Technically, I suppose, we were a group, so that word bothers me only a little, although I should add that, as three of us spent the session in catatonic retreat, it does mislead one into believing us a cohesive charge of participating, healing beings. My two major complaints are with "therapy," which it decidedly isn't, and "intensive"; I've passed more intense purgatorial periods in line at the grocery store.

Therapy: from the Greek therapeuein, "to attend to, to care for." Not once in those three hours did I notice this happen, and I was paying pretty close attention, as the drab lamplight and the fat, dormant man sprawled in or on or around--a grammatical and structural conundrum, both--the chair opposite mine severely handicapped my distractibility. A more apt description for the night's goal would be "witnessing," as in, what happens at an accident. Patients talked, some cogently. The handsome woman at the front of the room, who leaned empathically forward, like a trained animal displaying its skill, at any verbal or near-verbal event--some were closer to protolinguistic bellows--acted like an actor, a "facilitator." I wrote a sonnet about doors. The fat, sleeping guy slept. Not a lot was attended to.

Intensive: I'm disappointed that so much can be spent doing so little for so long. Those who lobotomized themselves with me in E398T share my sad knowledge. The only thing intensive about our work tonight was the force with which it blocked progress. All evening the image came to mind of an eagle straining very hard not to fly.

Second, you would think that crazy people must have something in common to make them all crazy, some craziness factor, and that this common quality would provide a basis on which to develop useful, purposeful conversation. You'd be very wrong. It turns out people are crazy for all kinds of reasons, most of which are totally incomprehensible to other crazy people. Twice during the festival, when we broke for food and to get some space from the looming Weird, my mind drifted to the countless medieval dream visions in which birds and books argue with each other about which is better, combs or mirrors, while the dreamer, not fluent in their fake languages, wonders, what's with the comb, and the mirror, and what is that bird saying? Maybe I'm cynical, but I don't estimate as high the chances of success when you throw together in a locked room random people, with random, debilitating disorders and attempt to smile them into healing.

So, although I feel for every poor soul that I shared that room with tonight, and although I appreciate the municipal bureaucracy that organizes such services and renders them unhelpful, and although I wish us all the very best of luck, I think I'll spend tomorrow night at home, lonesome crazy, with a cup of ginger tea, a shedding rabbit, and my own unsleeping brain.

And for fuck's sake, pull the door.