Stories, lies and mysteries


	Alan Bodnar, Ph.D. is the Co-Director of Psychology Training at Westborough State Hospital, Mass. and a consultant in the field of leadership development.

By Alan Bodnar, Ph.D.

When is a story not a story? Ask Vince Teague, the 90-year-old newspaper editor in Stephen King's novella, "The Colorado Kid," and he'll tell you, "When it doesn't have a beginning, a middle or an end." News stories, according to Vince, have all three important parts and convey the truth of a situation. Feature stories, on the other hand, most often lack a clear ending except for the one conveniently supplied by an author who needs some form of closure. Old Vince calls these lies.

So where does that leave psychologists who tend to hear what our patients tell us as stories of their lives so far? Because we can never hear the end from a living narrator, our best guess at the middle is entirely arbitrary and only the beginning is fixed in time and space. As a result, we don't hear grand, sweeping epics but instead encounter a good many novellas and short stories. Patients come to tell us the stories of their panic attacks, compulsions, the way their delusions cost them their most recent job, their marriage or their relationship with their children. Presented with these kinds of news stories having clear beginnings and middles, we can consider our mandate to be one of helping our patients write more satisfying endings.

Panic strikes. Panic cripples. Panic abates with cognitive behavior therapy. Just as advertised, this is "all the news that's fit to print."

We can never know all that is needed to erase the mystery from our efforts to understand another person or, for that matter, ourselves. Yet realizing our limits should not prevent us from doing all we can to unearth the information that will help us illuminate the beginning, an approximation of the middle and a prediction about the end or, more precisely, what comes next. If Vince Teague were a psychologist instead of a newspaper man, I suspect this is the way he would go about our work. Nor would Vince be surprised by the unanswerable questions. He has had to deal with a few mysteries of his own in his more than 60 years on the staff of his local Maine newspaper.

The mysteries we encounter in the office concern every phase of our patients' lives, the beginning, the middle and the end. Regarding the etiology or cause of a person's mental illness, our diagnostic procedures will give us enough information to develop a reasonably adequate formulation of the problem. Still, there will always be questions that cannot be answered.

If we consider the middle of the story to be the chapter that the person before us is currently living, we find mysteries here as well. Why is it that some people respond to a variety of different antipsychotic medications, while for others, only one seems to work? What is it that finally convinces a person to accept his illness and follow his treatment regimen after so many promising but ultimately false starts?

We never hear the end of a patient's story first-hand, but we are often called upon to give opinions about what our patients can reasonably expect to achieve in the future. Is it reasonable for a young man struggling with the symptoms of schizophrenia to go back to college and try to finish his degree? Is it too much to expect a patient with lingering symptoms of depression to return to work on a part-time or full-time basis? A lament and a question heard frequently in the hospital is the issue of whether or not a given individual will ever be able to develop an intimate, loving, committed relationship.

If the literature of recovery and our experience as mental health professionals teach us anything, it is the caution not to set limits on what a person can achieve. On the other hand, it would be cruel to encourage a person to pursue a patently unrealistic goal. Dreams die and, when they do, we need to mourn their passing and fill the space with new dreams that have a better chance of surviving.

Perhaps the best we can do as psychologists is to listen to our patients' short stories and be a part of satisfying endings to tales of discreet symptoms or stressful life events. Even so, we do this in the context of the grand unfinished narrative that we try to understand in all its complexity but respect and cherish in its unfathomable mystery. When Vince Teague, Stephen King's grizzly newspaper editor, was working as the paper's photographer 60 years earlier, he took a picture of some unexplained lights that appeared over the town during a little league baseball game. Some spectators were curious and others were afraid. "And on the mound, the little boy who had been pitching held his glove up to one of the bright circles which hung in the sky just below the clouds as if to touch that mystery and bring it close and open its heart and know its story." The author doesn't say, but I wonder if that boy grew up to become a psychologist.

Stories, lies and mysteries (January 2008 Issue)

By Alan Bodnar, Ph.D.

Stories, lies and mysteries
(January 2008 Issue)