The Man with No Belt

This book is about my time spent in the Parkplace crisis unit in Kissimmee, Florida, where I was involuntarily confined under Florida's Baker Act.

The degree of trauma from this experience surprised me.  I have had quite a few traumatic experiences in my life—the deaths of my parents (one due to medical incompetence), various abusive relationships including with cutters, a handgun being pointed at me when I was in 3rd grade, suicides of friends, sexual battery, and many other things too painful to recount—yet this affected me far more than I expected.

It was surprising because, in a way, it was not that bad.  The food was decent.  The beds were not good, hard rubberized pallets 18 inches from the floor,, but I have paid money to stay at worse places, and at least there were no bedbugs.  None of the staff ever treated me abusively in any overt way, and I still believe that they all meant well.  There were none of the blatant abuses that one knows from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey.

I am extremely strong, yet felt a pull into darkness from that place in a mere six days.  I have suffered far more in my life than I did there; why did it affect me so much?  If I can be so affected, what about the myriad others who have been in and out, under circumstances worse than mine?  I have worked hard to come to grips with this, and the result is this book.

I think I can summarize the effects in one word: insidious.  The system works to enfeeble people by enlisting them in the process.

I do not think it was designed this way.   I think that everyone involved meant well, though there was a great deal of incompetence.  More importantly, I don't think that any one person is smart enough to understand, let alone of being able to design, the entire system.  The effects of the system are emergent properties, like the V formation of Canada Geese or the mass trampling on pilgrimages that emerge from the behavior of individuals, acting upon simple local rules.  Yet the results are bad and, to a large extent, the system creates the problems it ostensibly is to solve.

This book is about my coming to grips with and analyzing the reasons for this trauma

It is also about a belt.

I have a nice belt, black metal with a simple, robust, silver buckle.  I think I found it in the trash of a rich kid in a University town.  It has lasted me 30 years.  I do not think I could afford such a belt, if I knew where to buy one.

It has eight holes, plus one I punched.  I have used all of them.  It chronicles my struggles with my weight, formerly too much but now too little.  It's a kind of microcosm of my life.  It works well with jeans and a suit and even coattails and white tie.

They take away your belt.  Also earrings, necklaces, and everything else, leaving you only clothes that you can wear for a few days until you can persuade people on the Outside to bring you more.  They also take away your cell phone, wallet, identification, laptop.  

I suppose that taking away all of these things can be justified on an ad hoc basis.  Cell phones might be stolen.  Belts might be used for violence.  I still can't figure out how they justified taking away an old woman's dentures and expected her to eat without.  Whatever the justifications, the net effect is to strip away one's identity, all of the symbols that make one a person.

I believe that there is some awareness of the symbolic role of clothing, albeit perhaps unconscious, because the staff wear extra clothing.  I saw staff wearing scarves and other accoutrements unusual in Florida.  I do not know that this is deliberate, but there is a message, perhaps unconscious: I am unlike you.

The House of God by Samuel Shem describes medical culture in a way that most medical professionals recognize but few are willing to admit.  All physicians and nurses should read it.  There are 13 laws of the House of God.  Number 4 reads "The patient is the one with the disease.”

Inside, you know who has the disease.  The ones with no belts have the disease.  The ones with belts are sane.

Everything Inside is about this.  Every human behavior is pathologized.  It is almost impossible to look at someone and not see a disease.  I have seen far worse behaviors in High School, but Inside, it is all about pathology.

I have come to realize how hard this is to describe to anybody who has not been in that environment.  Definition is everything, and people who have not experienced this want to believe in the definitions.  That is the point.  These definitions are more important than the actual conditions people have, and certainly than the people themselves.

On being admitted, I became the Man with No Belt, and everything changed.