RULE 8

TELL THE TRUTH—OR, AT LEAST, DON’T LIE

TRUTH IN NO-MAN’S-LAND

I trained to become a clinical psychologist at McGill University, in Montreal.
While doing so, I sometimes met my classmates on the grounds of Montreal’s
Douglas Hospital, where we had our first direct experiences with the mentally
ill. The Douglas occupies acres of land and dozens of buildings. Many are
connected by underground tunnels to protect workers and patients from the
interminable Montreal winters. The hospital once sheltered hundreds of long-
term in-house patients. This was before anti-psychotic drugs and the large
scale deinstitutionalization movements of the late sixties all but closed down
the residential asylums, most often dooming the now “freed” patients to a
much harder life on the streets. By the early eighties, when I first visited the
grounds, all but the most seriously afflicted residents had been discharged.
Those who remained were strange, much-damaged people. They clustered
around the vending machines scattered throughout the hospital’s tunnels.
They looked as if they had been photographed by Diane Arbus or painted by
Hieronymus Bosch.
One day my classmates and I were all standing in line. We were awaiting
further instruction from the strait-laced German psychologist who ran the
Douglas clinical training program. A long-term inpatient, fragile and
vulnerable, approached one of the other students, a sheltered, conservative
young woman. The patient spoke to her in a friendly, childlike manner, and
asked, “Why are you all standing here? What are you doing? Can I come
along with you?” My classmate turned to me and asked uncertainly, “What
should I say to her?” She was taken aback, just as I was, by this request
coming from someone so isolated and hurt. Neither of us wanted to say
anything that might be construed as a rejection or reprimand.
We had temporarily entered a kind of no-man’s-land, in which society
offers no ground rules or guidance. We were new clinical students,