The Scary Guy Defense

Posted on April 25, 2011 in Depression Fear Mania Stigma

A friend of mine who is a mental health professional in Germany and I often watch a certain social media site for signs of distress among the denizens. Recently, I dropped her a note about one fellow who struck me as being on the proverbial roller coaster. She shuddered when she checked him out and told me that she was sure that he was going to be explosive.

All this causes me to look back at my own behavior when I was in extremis. The world looks as if it is always about to teeter and dump you and anyone close by into a pit. Some people find this fascinating. They hover around you, watching you as you rant and rave about your unsteadiness and the threat the world poses toward you. They are often nice people, kind people. You think they don’t know you, they can’t possibly know you. And their proximity adds to your sense of [[Koyaanitsqatsi]]. ((In Hopi: “crazy life, life in turmoil, life out of balance, life disintegrating, a state of life that calls for another way of living”))

They laugh at your jokes. They find you interesting. The edge of an episode cleaves your consciousness. You are beginning to repeat yourself. What can you do to right things again so that you can resume stability? The problem, your troubled mind jumps to conclude without reasoning, is that you are dangerous. So you have to show them that you are genuinely and truly mad. You launch into what is called the Scary Guy Defense.

Thanks to your mania or mixed state, you have already emitted a series of cues that suggest you are losing it. You raise your voice. You shake. You wave your arms. Words pour out of your mouth at an erratic pace. The lids of your eyes roll back and the orbits bulge out. The euphoria squares your shoulders and tenses every muscle sliding across every bone in your body. A terrible strength props you up. And it seems fit to exaggerate these symptoms because you want people to run away, because nothing scares you more than the prospect of your body flipping blindly about and striking one of the gentle ones. You pull on a monster mask because you don’t want to hurt anyone. ((One time I got into an email exchange with a Berkeley student who shared my interest in [[Stephen Sondheim]]. With each long letter, I felt encroached upon. So I suggested she come down to Palo Alto to have a threesome with my wife. It worked. She never contacted me again.))