Jane’s husband looks at the baseball tickets in his hand, then up
at Jane. “Honey,” he says, “I know that crowds scare you, but
there really isn’t anything to be afraid of. You just have to tell
yourself that you’ll be okay, that’s all. It just takes a little will-
power.”
Jane wrings her hands and gasps for breath. “I just can’t,”
she says.
“Why can’t you just try?” her husband says. “Maybe you
could take one of those chill pills.”People who have never had a mental disorder have no idea what it
feels like. They can only draw on their own experience. Jane’s husband
has had some problems with performance anxiety before making a pre-
sentation at work, so he thinks of Jane’s fear in relation to that. He talked
himself out of it, so why can’t she?
Jane’s fear feels to her more like she is falling out of an airplane with-
out a parachute.
Before you condemn Jane’s husband for being utterly insensitive,
let’s look at the situation from his point of view. Jane’s illness is forcing
him to make a choice between abandoning her or missing the game. What
evidence does he have that her illness is as real as the knots in his stom-
ach? Jane doesn’t look sick; seconds before he mentioned the game, she
was fine, and she’ll be fine again later that evening. All he actuallysees is
Jane wild-eyed in the kitchen, saying she’s afraid.
To make matters more confusing, the experts seem to agree with
Jane’s husband. The E.R. doctor did prescribe the chill pills, and Jane’s
psychologist is treating her using cognitive therapy, which it seems to him
consists of teaching her how to talk herself out of it. If you can talk your-
self out of a disease, were you really sick in the first place?
Jane’s husband knew better than to think this way, but like everybody
else, when he’s upset or frustrated, what he feels is more real to him than
what he ought to know. More recently acquired information is no match
for lifelong beliefs, even if they are prejudices.
Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, her husband’s skepticism had a pow-
erful, though unintended, effect on Jane. Though she wasn’t aware of it,
she felt trapped into defending the integrity of her disorder. To prove she
was really sick, she had to get worse. Any effort she might have made to
What’s Wrong with These People? ❧ 31