Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) Read Online Free

work was to be called
SS Psychiatrist
. This was about an MD who had been psychoanalyzed, and he was stationed at Auschwitz. His job was to treat the depression of those members of the staff who did not like what they were doing there. Talk therapy was all he or anybody had to offer back then. This was before the days of—Never mind.
    “My point was, and maybe I can make it today without having to finish that book, that workers in the field of mental health at various times in different parts of the world must find themselves asked to make healthy people happier in cultures and societies which have gone insane.
    “Let me hasten to say that the situation in our own country is nowhere near that dire. The goal here right now, it seems to me, is to train intelligent, well-educated people to speak stupidly so that they can be more popular. Look at Michael Dukakis. Look at George Bush.
    “I think I was invited here mostly because of what happened to my dear son Mark Vonnegut, now Dr. Vonnegut. He had a very fancy crack-up, padded-cell stuff, straitjacket stuff, hallucinations, wrestling matches with nurses, and all that. He recovered and wrote a book about it called
The Eden Express,
which is about to be reissued in paperback by Dell, with a new Afterword by him. You should have hired him instead of me. He would have been a heck of a lot cheaper, and he knows what he is talking about.
    “He speaks well. When he lectures to mental health specialists, he always asks a question at one point, calling for a show of hands. I might as well be his surrogate and ask the same question of you. A show of hands, please: How many of you have taken Thorazine? Thank you. Then he says, ‘Those who haven’t tried it really should. It won’t hurt you, you know.’
    “He was diagnosed, when I took him to a private laughing academy in British Columbia, where he had founded a commune, as schizophrenic. He sure looked schizophrenic to me, too. I never saw depressed people act anything like that. We mope. We sleep. I have to say that anybody who did what Mark did shortly after he was admitted, which was to jump up and get the light bulb in the ceiling of his padded cell, was anything but depressed.
    “Anyway—Mark recovered sufficiently to write his book and graduate from Harvard Medical School. He is now a pediatrician in Boston, with a wife and two fine sons, and two fine automobiles. And then, not very long ago, most members of your profession decided that he and some others who had written books about recovering from schizophrenia had been misdiagnosed. No matter how jazzed up they appeared to be when sick, they were in fact depressives. Maybe so.
    “Mark’s first response to news of this rediagnosis was to say, ‘What a wonderful diagnostic tool. We now know if a patient gets well, he or she definitely did not have schizophrenia.’
    “But he, too, unfortunately, will say anything to be funny. A more sedate and responsible discussion by him of what was wrong with him can be found in the Afterword to the new edition of his book. I have a few copies of it, which I hope somebody here will have xeroxed, so that everyone who wants one can have one.
    “He isn’t as enthusiastic about megavitamins as he used to be, before he himself became a doctor. He still sees a whole lot more hope in biochemistry than in talk.
    “Long before Mark went crazy, I thought mental illness was caused by chemicals, and said so in my stories. I’ve never in a story had an event or another person drive a character crazy. I thought madness had a chemical basis even when I was a boy, because a close friend of our family, a wise and kind and wryly sad man named Dr. Walter Bruetsch, who was head of the State’s huge and scary hospital for the insane, used to say that his patients’ problems were chemical, that little could be done for them until that chemistry was better understood.
    “I believed him.
    “So when my mother went crazy, long before my son went