Patch

“At the beginning of my freshman year in college, Donna, my girlfriend from senior year of high school, broke up with me. The uncle I had adopted as a surrogate father committed suicide. I flew home to his funeral and a few weeks later dropped out of school. A pulsing inner chant told me to die without hope. Once I took twenty aspirins, thinking that would kill me. I obsessed about suicide every day but needed to work up to it, so I went to a cliff near the college called Lover’s Leap and sat at the edge, writing epic poetry to Donna. I composed sonnets, searching for the right words that would really get to her. If I had ever finished my outpourings I would have jumped; fortunately, I was too long-winded.

After a disastrous visit to Donna, during which I tried to lay a guilt trip on her, I took a Greyhound bus home and trudged six miles through the snow to my mother’s doorstep. When my mother opened the door I told her, “I’ve been trying to kill myself. You’d better check me into a mental hospital.” She called the family doctor, who called a psychiatrist, who admitted me to a locked ward at Fairfax Hospital. I spent Halloween there. My two-week stay was the turning point in my life. The people who had the greatest impact on my recovery were not doctors but my family and friends, especially my roommate, Rudy.

Rudy had had three wives and fifteen jobs and lived in an unfathomable abyss of failure and despair. When my friends came to visit me, I realized how good it felt. But nobody ever came to visit Rudy. He told me about a loneliness I had never dreamed existed, and that made my pain seem trivial by comparison. For the first time in my adult life, I empathized with another person.

Talking to Rudy, I realized the importance of love and the people who loved me. I had been surrounded by love but hadn’t let it affect me. I perceived a deep personal truth: I needed to be open to receive love. Without it I was not a strong person. And I realized that if I continued living as I had been—without tender, human love—I would end up like Rudy. He represented the Ghost of Christmas Future that I would become if I refused to surrender to my needs.

That moment was a spiritual awakening to the power of love. My destructive use of science, math, and reason to disprove whatever was not factual had, in fact, left me very lonely. I talked to the other patients on the ward and found similar threads of loneliness and lost dreams. It became obvious, through the tears, that these people weren’t crazy or insane. There was no switch in our heads for “normal” or “abnormal.” I was the same person I had always been; so were they. Maybe that’s what was so painful. These supposedly “crazy” people had merely responded to life’s complexities with fear, anger, sadness, and despair to such an extent that they—we—needed protection from ourselves.

I saw a very significant movie about that time: Zorba the Greek. My dilemma was the same as that of the English bookworm in the story. “You think too much, that is your trouble,” Zorba told him. “Clever people and grocers, they weigh everything.” I stopped thinking that thinking mattered more than anything else and started putting feelings first. After ten or twelve days in the hospital, I told my mom, “I’m all right now,” and she believed me. She had never acknowledged that I needed to be in a mental hospital in the first place. “You’re not crazy,” she said. And she was right in the sense that I was a soul in pain, not insane…

I experimented with friendliness by calling hundreds of wrong numbers just to practice talking to people; I wanted to see how long I could keep them on the line and how close we could get. I’d pretend to be a sociology student, or an artist, or anything that would help me draw people out and get them to talk to me. I went out in public and engaged strangers in conversation. I rode elevators to see how many floors it would take to get the occupants introduced to one another, and even singing songs.

During the summer between my second and third years of college, I went to local neighborhood bars several nights a week and didn’t allow myself to leave until I knew—or had tried to learn—everybody’s story. I could scarcely believe how great and unique people were, yet how common the threads of their stories. Like a modern Ancient Mariner, I felt compelled to talk to everyone possible about life and its joys and woes. I became an explorer of continents of experience and fun, a journalist who didn’t keep notes.

I was becoming an intentional person, experimenting with new behaviors in a methodical way. At last science had come back into my life, this time fortified by faith in friendship, with human beings as the experimental subjects. I’m still that kind of scientist, always doing research in the laboratory of humanity. After leaving the hospital, I knew I wanted to perform some service and decided to go into medicine. I applied for the premedical curriculum at the George Washington University in Washington, D. C. My acceptance was delayed because the admissions people wanted me to take eight or nine months to see psychiatrists and get myself together. While waiting to be admitted, I worked in Anacostia, a neighborhood of Washington, as a file clerk.

The file room of the Navy Federal Credit Union in Anacostia might seem like an unlikely place to thrive. The people who worked there spent half their waking hours doing something they hated. Filing was considered particularly horrible work: joyless, boring, and dull. I decided to change all that. My fellow file clerk was Louis Fulwiler, who remains my oldest friend. Louis, like me, had dropped out of college temporarily. From the very first day we decided to make the files a “happening”—it was, remember, the mid-1960s—and egged each other on. We drove to and from work wearing kids’ aviator helmets with little noisemakers that went “vah-roooooorrrr.” We interacted with other people in the office by singing file information. One day, when anybody asked us for a file, we replied in a high-mass Gregorian chant, “Which file do you wa-ant?” Another day we arrived for work attired in gorilla suits. Louis was my partner in fun, and we gave each other the courage to be goofy in public. When we went back to visit ten or fifteen years later, everybody still remembered us. We had opened whole new vistas in the filing shtick.”

~ Patch Adams, Gesundheit!: Bringing Good Health to You, the Medical System, and Society through Physician Service, Complementary Therapies, Humor, and Joy
Hunter Doherty "Patch" Adams (born 1945) is an American physician, comedian, social activist, clown, and author. He founded the Gesundheit! Institute in 1971. Each year he organizes a group of volunteers from around the world to travel to various countries where they dress as clowns in an effort to bring humor to orphans, patients, and other people. Adams is currently based in Urbana, Illinois. In collaboration with the institute, he promotes an alternative health care model not funded by insurance policies. As of April 2015, he serves on the Green Shadow Cabinet of the United States as "Assistant Secretary of Health for Holistic Health".