“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” —Susan Sontag
What have you learned as a citizen in the land of illness?
In 1992 I was in the hospital for several weeks with bacterial endocarditis. The disease was serious, even life-threatening. The positive lesson, for me, was that there is a host of otherwise ordinary healing folks that I had no notion of being in this world with me. Besides physicians, there were nurses, various kinds of technicians and many kinds of aids, who came into my space and showed abundant kindness. The world with the world’s people in it, is really better than I had thought.
Patients in psychiatric hospitals are just ordinary people. Before I went there myself, I had a lot of preconceived notions that served to dehumanize such people. Now I know that the differences between the people in there and the people in the world at large aren’t so big and that they’re mostly a matter of degree.