Altered States

I remember making a visit to the Comedy Store in Los Angeles many years ago. It seems to me that it was an Open Mic night.

At the time--the late 1980s--Open Mic nights were like those blue lights that draw insects to their inevitable doom. Stand-up was enjoying a surge in popularity and, as a consequence, it seemed as though everyone had a "set" they were working on and they were looking for a chance to get in front of an audience.

In the interests of full disclosure, as it happens I was researching the world of stand-up for a play I was directing. At the time of this trip, I was part of a class that promised, over the course of three weeks, to take its students from comedy novice to performing in a comedy club before a live audience.

Through the long lens of time, I seem to recall that one of the comics who performed that night at the Comedy Store did a "bit" about William Shatner and what he described as "pause acting." I have since seen Kevin Pollak do a bit like this on television and now think it might have been him that I saw on stage.

I bring all of this up to talk about impressionists. Pollak, if it was him, does a near-perfect impression of Shatner's voice and his unique rhythms.

Part of what made it so funny was the comedic premise and his caricature of Shatner's style, but some of the comedy came from the disconnect between seeing an identifiable voice come from an unfamiliar source. You are forced to question your own perceptions and it puts you off balance.

When it came time for my final class in stand-up, we were to meet at an open mic night at a bar in downtown Sacramento. From a starting class of about a dozen, three of us showed up for the final. We discovered that in addition to ourselves, the mic would be open for any other comics in the area which turned out to be about twenty or so. Slots are drawn by lot and, as it turned out, I was to go fifth and be the first of my class of novices.

I followed four working comics. This meant that they had, at some point, been paid to be funny.

I had no previous experience doing comedy and about five minutes of unproven material.

My first joke was, "Well, I guess you can probably tell I'm from Ohio...."

That's all I said.

And I waited.

The most remarkable thing happened: the audience started to laugh. There really was no joke there in the traditional sense. The audience expected me to be funny and so they took the input and processed it as a joke. They looked for, and found, the funny in an unfunny line.

Jokes are always funniest when you try and explain them, but it seems as though here again there was a disconnect between what they heard and what they expected and the audience filled it with a laugh.

I have been thinking about this because I had a phone conversation earlier today with a man who experiences mental illness. He exists in that same disconnected space and he is working hard to make sense of it.

Unlike my comedy club audience, the caller is not in a comedy club and does not have that context to explain how he experiences his life. What he does have is a background in Tibetan Buddhism. He has a vocabulary that accepts different levels of enlightenment and consciousness. He knows that reaching enlightenment and understanding the world can occur by leading a contemplative life and so he studies his world and the people in it.

Through this frame of reference he seeks to process the hallucinations he experiences as a function of his illness. Are they hallucinations resulting from a medication interaction, his illness or a new level of consciousness? This is a serious question for him. He sees people transform in front of him and he wants to make sense of it.

What is so troubling about his calls is that, in addition to his interpretive searching, there is also an analytical process going on. It is as though he is watching himself. He seems to be aware of how people react when he asks them if they are zombies or why they are physically transforming into completely different people.

Sadder still is that, for a period of about nine months, I did not hear from him. During that period I saw him once and he seemed a completely different person. I was the one questioning my reality as he seemed what we might call "perfectly normal." He looked healthy and he seemed to be content, both of which were previously unknown states of being. More importantly, he seemed to be experiencing the world in a single plane of existence.

In our Agency we talk about how recovery is real. And it's true but it's not recovery in the sense that one recovers from a broken leg, it's recovery in the sense that alcoholics and gamblers recover from their addictions. To be successful they must still think of themselves as addicts who are making active choices not to indulge in their addictions.

Those who experience mental illness must work on their wellness every day. This can mean taking medication, working with counselors and sticking to treatment plans. My caller has begun to stray from his plan and is currently experiencing a return of symptoms.

I have some compassion for his situation because I am always trying to make sense of my own world.

My uncle died about three months ago. An organization that he had once been the president of published a memorial tribute and mentioned his career as a lawyer. Granted, we are not a particularly close family, but I had never before heard anything about this aspect of his life. I could not make sense of the person I thought I knew being a lawyer and I wondered why this had never come up before. I could not discount that he could have been a lawyer and I hadn't known, but I couldn't understand how I could not have known.

I knew he had been a bomber pilot during World War II, I knew he had worked in the dairy business and had travelled the world in some mysterious capacity related to setting up air transport systems. I suppose he could have been a lawyer, but it somehow seemed unlikely.

Suddenly every interaction that I could remember had to be reevaluated in the light of this new information.

Turns out that he was not in fact a lawyer, but he did attend Harvard for a year. Again, I have no context for this information.

It's a bit like trying to walk through a fun house where the floorboards that shift in opposing directions: it's difficult to maintain your footing. If you can imagine living in a world where all of the floorboards are always moving all of the time, you can begin to understand what my caller might be dealing with.

My ability to make sense of the world is governed by a combination of genetic and environmental factors. My individual reality, how I experience what happens to me, will be modified by my brain chemistry and also by previous experiences, education and background. As I cross the fun house floor, I can be impressed by the engineering, or panicked by the fact that I can no longer control my body, that one foot wants to move in a direction other than I intend. The choice I make--either of these two extremes, or some middle ground--then becomes the lens through which I see subsequent experiences.

Each of us alters our perception of our world every day. Some alterations are temporary and some are, or can become, permanent. Most of us can manage these altered states, but some--about 20% of us--cannot.

And for that 20%, and the families who care for them, our Agency exists to help get them help.

Graham Campbell
Associate Director