There is no point in recounting the stages which had converted my panic flight from the wrath of the Secret Service into this interview with one of Johns Hopkins psychiatric staff, except that I had been amazed by the ease with which he had drawn me aside shortly after I had sat down in the waiting-room.
"Of course I realize, doctor," I replied, "that everyone must be abnormal since that is how you establish an average normality. My case is so peculiar, though, that I'd like to have you check on me."
"Here we can take you only on the recommendation of a registered physician or psychiatrist," he told me. "We're understaffed and over-crowded as it is. My advice to you would be to return to your home—you live near New York, you say—and put yourself in the hands of your regular family physician. There are plenty of institutions in your part of the country which are fully qualified to give the necessary treatment. Even if you were recommended to us now we could only put you on the waiting list."
I murmured something vague about war-conditions and neurotics, but he raised his hand like a traffic-cop and interrupted me.
"The war, at least so far as active service is concerned, has taken a load off us, Mr. Tompkins," he informed me. "You see, in normal times people live under any number of pressures which force them to restrain their natural impulses. War gives them outlets—including sex, a sense of gang solidarity, and permission to commit acts of violence and homicide—which would result in jail-sentences for them at other times. Of course, there are a good many psychos coming out of actual combat but the government takes care of them. No, the bulk of our current cases are essential civilians: generals, administrators, politicians, business executives—who find that the war simply redoubles the pressures on them. Some of them are really insane in the medical sense but their positions are so high that we dare not insist on their hospitalization. Instead, we have a simple prescription which most of them find no difficulty in taking. Perhaps it would help in your case."
"What's that?" I asked.
"Oh, just go out and get drunk now and then, and find yourself a girl-friend. Blow off steam, in other words. Find an outlet for your natural impulses. If the White House had consulted me, Roosevelt might still—Oh, well, no use crying over spilt milk. Half the mental trouble in this country is due to people trying to be something they are not, and the other half is due to people trying not to be something that they naturally are. Primitive people are rarely troubled with neuroses."
"But you said that everybody's crazy, doctor," I objected. "How does that fit into the picture?"
"Mr. Tompkins," the psychiatrist remarked, "you must have noticed that the only sane people today are the alleged lunatics, who do what makes them happy. Take the man who thinks he is Napoleon. He is Napoleon and is much happier than those who try to tell him that he isn't. The real maniacs are now in control of the asylum. There's a theory among the psychiatrists that certain forms of paranoia are contagious. Every now and then a doctor or a nurse here and at other mental clinics goes what they call crazy and has to join the patients. My theory is that it is sanity which is contagious and that the only sane people are those who have sense enough to be crazy. They are locked up at once for fear that others will go sane, too. Now, take me, I'm—"
At that moment two husky young men came in and led him away. After a short interval one of them returned.