RECOVER SALESMAN!

RECOVER SALESMAN!

"But he's a human being and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.  He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog.  Attention must be paid to such a person... But you don't have to be very smart to know what his trouble is.  The man is exhausted..."  "The man who never worked a day in his life but for your benefit? When does he get a medal for that?" *

I was thinking of those hauntingly piercing words from Linda Loman in Miller's "Death of a Salesman" while we were talking about Max who admitted himself to the psychiatric hospital yesterday. He did this out of sheer exhaustion.

After cycles of going in and out of sobriety, promising to stay continent and then losing it because of his damnable bipolar disease, his wife had finally given up on him and filed for and got the divorce.

The final straw for Max who, although he intellectually understood what was happening, found himself spiraling into a vortex of depression so deep that it had threatened his latest successful run at temperance. He was having a hard time keeping a smile on his face and confessed to us daily, when he came to meetings, that his depression was sucking him down like quicksand; each move further ensnaring him in a despair  which left him exhausted and more deeply entrapped in that constitutional morass than before.

I had been watching this,  getting progressively worried for weeks for many reasons, one of which was professional and the other which came from a notion that wafted in the rooms like a fog hugging the ground, that all behavioral problems could be solved by a greater, more attentive application of the AA principles to one's life.

Which is to say that it is the experience of many in the rooms who have suffered deep depressions as a result of abuses of alcohol and drugs that only by a slavish adherence to AA rules and precepts, denial of self, and self serving ideas and behavior, can one ever be free of depression and 'psychiatric abnormalities'. (Of course that is only true to the extent that one's depression was purely or substantially drug and alcohol induced to begin with.)

For those for whom the drugs and alcohol have just complicated pre-existing depression, bipolar or schizoaffective disorders, just coming to meetings and not drinking or drugging will probably only temporarily solve the abuse problem. Because without addressing and attacking the underlying pathology, the etiology and stressors for the drug behavior, which often becomes a means of release from those oppressive feelings of the depression, remains untreated.

So it was with Max, and my worries were justified because he was not holding his own even as I approached him with some suggestions about the latest thinking about treatment for his bipolar disorder. It was my hope that armed with some fresh and current information, it might become clear that he would need to be switched to a completely new drug regimen; and for this he might require a complete "time out" from his daily affairs.

I must confess that I had nothing to do with his recent admission but I am glad that he found courage before the desperation became so great that he might lose all that he had so recently struggled to regain.

It was clear from this morning's meeting that there are two poles, two schools of thought about how we "get better" in AA. But it is also clear from the Big Book and other approved literature that people who have true mental illness need to have that cared for before a reasonable expectation of AA's efficacy can be divined.  Otherwise it would be unfair to the sufferer to expect performance beyond his ability and unreasonable to expect of AA to provide a venue in which those people can heal unaided by modern medical treatment.

So as Arthur Miller implies by other reference, "attention must be paid..." to all aspect of the lives of people; their bigness, their smallness, their greatness and their foibles.  And even those of us who often brought tremendous pain to our families may have done so after many years of steady house holding, plodding provisioning and having careers, the success from which our families readily shared both remunerative and social returns. And then we fell because we did not 'pay enough attention' and failed to be on the lookout for our souls.

And now attention must be paid to ourselves in life's most important matters of the spiritual, the physical and the psychological realms, for our own salvation's sake.

© res 4/19/2012

*Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, 1949