Psycho | SunStar Cebu | April 16, 2010

Junior year in nursing school was probably my favorite part of college life. We had a whole semester of psychiatry subjects and an internship at the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center Psychiatric Ward. I don’t want to brag, but it was in psychiatric nursing and the subsequent exposure to the mental ward where I earned my biggest grades. What can I say, my clinical instructor, she with the Mona Lisa smile, told me, “Indeed, it takes one to know one, Januar.”

She saw the quick bonding taking place between me and my patient, a manic-depressed case who thought he was Balweg, the rebel priest, but wailed Rod Stewart’s “I don’t wanna talk about it…” at the top of his lungs at the first hint of C-D minor during music therapy.

Quite a wild mix of delusions, and of all the loonies in that ward, this single most violent case (with two red precautionary stripes on his ward chart) was assigned to me. A week before my round, Balweg gave another intern a right uppercut, and the latter gave him a big wallop in retaliation. The student earned for himself a month-long suspension.

When it was my turn, the bipolar Philip Salvador behaved like he was my aide-de-camp, rushing into every bit of errand he was sent to do. Psychiatric theory says bipolar people have low self-esteem, and the best way to feed their ego fat is to overwhelm them with tasks and give them their due pat-in-the-back after. So that was what I did for the rebel priest, although I had to remind him politely in between his fits of Cordillera and Hot Legs World Tour that he was neither Balweg nor Rod Stewart just to put his feet back on the ground. “Yeah, right,” he once told me, “and you are Aga Muhlach.” It was a tempting delusion, and for one moment, my mental equilibrium was in a crucial tilt. But thank God for my better grasp at reality.

So my stint in that psychiatric shelter was a rewarding experience. I was about to type “loony bin,” but that would have been cruel. Those were feeble people who turned to the better part of their imagination for safety and got lost in some nowhere thicket in the mind.

But there was one curious case held in a special cell. He was neither violent nor spaced out. You could tell he was lucid each time he’d ask any student nurse for packs of cigarette before he allowed them the required interaction. The students took his word when he narrated in detail how he got there. Well and good, and the student brought to class transcriptions of their interactions for psychiatric analysis, but only to find out later that the guy gave them varying versions of his life story. They’ve been conned by a first-rate storyteller.

I found the case curious for many reasons. Why was he in a special cell in the first place, while the apparently more hostile Balweg was free to walk around? What could be the diagnosis for his mental state?

He was a psychopath. A quick definition by Wikipedia puts psychopathy this way, “a personality disorder characterized by an abnormal lack of empathy combined with strongly amoral conduct, masked by an ability to appear outwardly normal.”

In a world gone grotesquely mosaic, hideous psychopaths dangerously roam like chameleons, shifting skin colors according to the day’s music. But here’s how to put that rather bluntly. Right here, right now, a little juggling of the news will tell you whose mental state fits the psychopath mold and, therefore, should be in a special cell because, of all the loonies at large, they are the most stealthy and dangerous. Back then, at least, the bipolar Stewart, unlike today’s hardcore psychopaths, had the temerity to apologize in a song, “I was only joking, my dear…”