37
" Statistics say that a range of mental disorders affects more than one in four Americans in any given year. That means millions of Americans are totally batshit.
but having perused the various tests available that they use to determine whether you're manic depressive. OCD, schizo-affective, schizophrenic, or whatever, I'm surprised the number is that low. So I have gone through a bunch of the available tests, and I've taken questions from each of them, and assembled my own psychological evaluation screening which I thought I'd share with you.
So, here are some of the things that they ask to determine if you're mentally disordered
1. In the last week, have you been feeling irritable?
2. In the last week, have you gained a little weight?
3. In the last week, have you felt like not talking to people?
4. Do you no longer get as much pleasure doing certain things as you used to?
5. In the last week, have you felt fatigued?
6. Do you think about sex a lot?
If you don't say yes to any of these questions either you're lying, or you don't speak English, or you're illiterate, in which case, I have the distinct impression that I may have lost you a few chapters ago. "
― Carrie Fisher , Wishful Drinking
39
" It was worse than she’d expected.
“None?” she asked.
“No fresh boot prints anywhere around the perimeter of the house,” Sheriff Coughlin confirmed.
“It was windy last night. Maybe the drifting snow filled in the prints?” Even before she finished speaking, the sheriff was shaking his head.
“With the warm temperatures we’ve been having, the snow is either frozen or wet and heavy. If someone had walked through that yard last night, there would’ve been prints.”
Daisy hid her wince at his words, even though they hit as hard as an elbow to the gut, and struggled to keep her voice firm. “There was someone walking around the outside of that house last night, Sheriff. I don’t know why there aren’t any boot prints, but I definitely saw someone.”
He was giving her that look again, but it was worse, because she saw a thread of pity mixed in with the condescension. “Have you given more thought to starting therapy again?”
The question surprised her. “Not really. What does that have to do…?” As comprehension dawned, a surge of rage shoved out her bewilderment. “I didn’t imagine that I saw someone last night. There really was a person there, looking in the side window.”
All her protest did was increase the pity in his expression. “It must get lonely here by yourself.”
“I’m not making things up to get attention!” Her voice had gotten shrill, so she took a deep breath. “I even said there was no need for you to get involved. I only suggested one of the on-duty deputies drive past to scare away the kid.”
“Ms. Little.” His tone made it clear that impatience had drowned out any feelings of sympathy. “Physical evidence doesn’t lie. No one was in that yard last night.”
“I know what I saw.”
The sheriff took a step closer. Daisy hated how she had to crane her neck back to look at him. It made her feel so small and vulnerable. “Do you really?” he asked. “Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable. Even people without your issues misinterpret what they see all the time. The brain is a tricky thing.”
Daisy set her jaw as she stared back at the sheriff, fighting the urge to step back, to retreat from the man looming over her. There had been someone there, footprints or no footprints. She couldn’t start doubting what she’d witnessed the night before. If she did, then that meant she’d gone from mildly, can’t-leave-the-house crazy, to the kind of crazy that involved hallucinations, medications, and institutionalization. There had to be some other explanation, because she wasn’t going to accept that. Not when her life was getting so much better.
She could tell by looking at his expression that she wasn’t going to convince Coughlin of anything. “Thank you for checking on it, Sheriff. I promise not to bother you again.”
Although he kept his face impassive, his eyes narrowed slightly. “If you…see anything else, Ms. Little, please call me.”
That wasn’t going to happen, especially when he put that meaningful pause in front of “see” that just screamed “delusional.” Trying to mask her true feelings, she plastered on a smile and turned her body toward the door in a not-so-subtle hint for him to leave. “Of course.”
Apparently, she needed some lessons in deception, since the sheriff frowned, unconvinced. Daisy met his eyes with as much calmness as she could muster, dropping the fake smile because she could feel it shifting into manic territory. She’d lost enough credibility with the sheriff as it was.
The silence stretched until Daisy wanted to run away and hide in a closet, but she managed to continue holding his gaze. The memory of Chris telling her about the sheriff using his “going to confession” stare-down on suspects helped her to stay quiet.
Finally, Coughlin turned toward the door. Daisy barely managed to keep her sigh of relief silent.
“Ms. Little,” he said with a short nod, which she returned.
“Sheriff.”
Only when he was through the doorway with the door locked behind him did Daisy’s knees start to shake. "
― Katie Ruggle , In Safe Hands (Search and Rescue, #4)
40
" Maybe it’s not metaphysics. Maybe it’s existential. I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it’s not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than “die,” “pass away,” the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday—’
‘And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what—a hundred years? two hundred?—and they’ll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I’m cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that’s why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are. "
― David Foster Wallace , The Pale King
