1 Boring Old Man

I woke up Thursday morning to an email alerting me to the fact that my blog had disappeared. I tried it and saw:

Was it something I said? The nice technician in Utah [who knew it was in Utah?] said not-to-worry. It had been moved to a new server [?] and the domain pointer hadn’t been ‘hooked up.’ The department that looks into such matters didn’t open until 10:00 AM EST. Oh by the way, after it’s hooked up. it’ll take several days "for global DNS propagation."

I had an uncanny and uncomfortable feeling that the blog was gone for good in spite of the technician’s reassurances, and I thought through its ten year history as I rocked on the porch waiting for the sun to come up. It didn’t take me very long in that mode to understand the why of my "uncanny" feeling. My daughter had set up the blog as 3oldmen.com when I retired in 2003. The other two "old men" were lifelong friends who had retired to the same place I did. They didn’t write much on it. So when my own posts turned serious, she joked sarcastically, "I should change the name to 1boringoldman.com!" I actually liked the sound of that, so we did change it. Those two friends both died within a week of each other at the end of April [in memory…]. So my "uncanny" feeling when the blog disappeared this morning wasn’t so hard to figure out after all – just another example of the realization of finality that grief brings [displaced onto a bunch of magnetic ones and zeros somewhere in Utah].

I actually should’ve realized that almost immediately. There have been so many reminders of them in the recent weeks. The original bond among the three of us was as veterans of the Civil Rights years in the South, the two of them more than I [see, for example Look out Lord, here comes Al Clayton]. This week, PBS’ The American Experience had two pieces on the year 1964, 50 years later. That was "Mississippi Freedom Summer," my first year in medical school in Memphis. Watching the documentary brought floods of my own memories from those days, and with them came the memories of the two of them. I actually met them ten years later in Atlanta – 1974. They had weathered the 1960s in Nashville in the thick of things. So we all had plenty of stories to tell, and became fast friends in the telling.

It hadn’t fully occurred to me that my zeal in writing about what happened in psychiatry had something to do with the Civil Rights days. But sitting on my porch with a wandering mind that morning brought the parallels immediately to the front burner. I had grown up in what might be called an enlightened Southern household. Racism wasn’t tolerated, but quietly not tolerated. All of that changed for me on September 16, 1963, a few days before I was to leave for medical school in Memphis. I read in the paper about a church bombing in Birmingham the day before that killed four little girls. I guess in today’s parlance, I was ‘radicalized’ at that moment. Then I didn’t know what was happening, and it was only in retrospect that I realized how much that article changed the trajectory of my life, who my friends were, and how I saw the world. The same thing happened in October 2008 when I read about Senator Grassley’s investigation of Dr. Charles Nemeroff, chairman of the department of psychiatry at Emory University where I was on the clinical faculty. I had left an academic career there some twenty-five years before when psychiatry changed so dramatically after the coming of the DSM-III and the neoKraepelinians. Wherever things were going back then wasn’t where I was headed, and I exited stage left [by mutual agreement]. By 2008, I was five years retired from a private practice in Atlanta to these mountains near where I grew up to think about other things. But reading about Nemeroff’s misadventures with industry had the same impact that the bombing had back when I was young. In both cases, there was something I knew on the edge of my mind, but I didn’t quite know I knew. But it didn’t take too much of a pin prick to know it all over the place. I had ignored Nemeroff as a self promoter, but hadn’t keyed in to his industry connections, his challenged morality, or his power [or how many others there were around like him].

About that same time, I started working some in a little clinic and realized what seemingly outrageous medication regimens were being prescribed. I had no idea that polypharmacy had become the name of the game. I had been a psychotherapist using not very much medication. It seemed that everyone was Bipolar and had a chemical imbalance. In rural Appalachia? Chemical Imbalance? Bipolar? I bought some contemporary psychopharmacology books and couldn’t even finish reading them – gibberish. I’d practiced in a cocoon and missed a revolution it seems, and the more I saw of it the gladder I was to have missed it. That reminded me of those days in the sixties when I woke up and saw the world I’d grown up in a very different, much darker way. I felt guilty back then for what I hadn’t really seen clearly. I also feel guilty about what happened in psychiatry in the twenty-five years between 1983 when I left academia and 2008 when Senator Grassley blew his whistle – the years when I was in a self-styled exile. I guess you can feel as guilty for not looking as you can for seeing but not doing anything.

But the point of this post came after all those thoughts. By this time, the sun was up and my dogs were clammoring for breakfast. I had figured out in the recent days after my friends died that they had given me back something I’d lost in those Memphis years [along with being great friends]. Memphis was a hard place to be of the Civil Rights persuasion in the 1960s. There weren’t so many of us that were white. The garbage strike, the King assassination, a less well known hospital strike that shut down my training program, tanks and soldiers in the streets, sniper shots in the night. There was a racial divide in those days as wide as the Mississippi that runs through the town. When we left for Europe in 1971 [drafted into the Air Force], I wouldn’t have bet on our returning to the South. But three years later, I picked Atlanta for a psychiatry residency from among many other [actually better] choices. It felt like something I was supposed to do, but the remnants of those darker days were still hanging like storm clouds. Almost immediately, I met Al and Andy, like-minded Southerners who introduced me to many more. They’d made their peace with all that had happened and literally gave me back the South. I didn’t feel like a stranger in my own land anymore [because I wasn’t]. And the parallel to the present is very clear to me now. Through this blog, I’ve connected with any number of new friends that I may never meet in person, but that doesn’t too much matter. They’ve helped me reconnect with a psychiatry that I understand, even though we come from diverse ideological backgrounds, places, and even countries. I just don’t feel like an exile anymore [because I’m not]. I guess it felt like I’d lost that connection too when I saw that message up there.