So one day I decided to trash my bedroom. It was a way of saying, without words: "You see, I can't live in the real world. I can't get a job. I can't realize my dream. I think you're absolutely right. I am mad, and I want to go back to the mental hospital!"
Fate can be so ironic. When I had finished wrecking my room I was relieved to see that my parents were phoning the psychiatric hospital. However, the doctor who usually dealt with me was on vacation. The nurses arrived with a junior doctor in tow. He saw me sitting there surrounded by torn-up books, broken records, and ripped curtains, and asked my family and the nurses to leave the room.
"What's going on?" he asked.
I didn't reply. A madman should always behave like someone not of this world.
"Stop playing around," he said. "I've been reading your case history. You're not mad at all and I won't admit you to the hospital."
He left the room, wrote a prescription for some tranquillizers, and (I found out later) told my parents that I was suffering from "admission syndrome." Normal people who at some point find themselves in an abnormal situation--such as depression, panic, etc.--occasionally use illness as an alternative to life. That is, they choose to be ill because being "normal" is too much like hard work. My parents listened to his advice and never again had me admitted to a mental institution.
From then on I could no longer seek comfort in madness. I had to lick my wounds alone. I had to lose some battles and win others. I often had to abandon my impossible dream and work in offices instead, until one day I gave it all up for the nth time and I went on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. There I realized that I could not keep refusing to face up to the fate of "being an artist," which in my case meant being a writer. So at thirty-eight I decided to write my first book and risk entering into a battle which I had always subconsciously feared: the battle for a dream.
I found a publisher and that first book (The Pilgrimage, about my experience on the Road to Santiago) led me to The Alchemist, which led me to other books, which led to translations, which led to lectures and conferences all over the world. Although I kept postponing my dream, I realized that I could do so no longer, and that the universe always favors those who fight for what they want.
After an exhausting 1997 promotional tour across three continents, I began to notice a very odd phenomenon: what I wanted on that day when I trashed my bedroom seemed to be something a lot of other people wanted too. People preferred to live in a huge asylum religiously following rules written by who knows who, rather than fighting for the right to be different. On a flight to Tokyo I read the following in a newspaper:
According to Statistics Canada, forty percent of people between fifteen and thirty-four, thirty-three percent of people between thirty-five and fifty-four, and twenty percent of people between fifty-five and sixty-four have already had some kind of mental illness. It is thought that one in every five individuals suffers from some form of psychiatric disorder.
I thought: Canada has never had a military dictatorship and it's considered to have the best quality of life in the world. Why then are there so many mad people there? Why aren't they in mental hospitals?
That question led me to another: what exactly is madness?
I found the answers to both those questions. First, people aren't placed in mental institutions if they continue to be socially productive. If you are capable of getting to work at 9:00 A.M. and staying until 5:00 P.M., then society does not consider you incapacitated. It doesn't matter if you sit in a catatonic state in front of the television from 5:01 P.M. until 8:59 A.M. You may indulge in the most perverted sexual fantasies on the Internet, stare at the wall blaming the world for everything and feeling generally put upon, feel afraid to go out into the street, be obsessed with cleanliness or a lack of cleanliness, or suffer from bouts of depression and compulsive crying. As long as you can turn up for work and do your bit for society you don't represent a threat. You're only a threat when the cup finally overflows and you go out into the street with a machine gun in your hand, like a character in a child's cartoon, and kill fifteen children in order to alert the world to the pernicious effects of Tom and Jerry. Until you do that you are deemed normal.
And madness? Madness is the inability to communicate.
Between normality and madness, which are basically the same thing, there exists an intermediary stage: it is called "being different." And people were becoming more and more afraid of "being different." In Japan, after giving much thought to the statistical information I had just read, I decided to write a book based on my own experiences. I wrote Veronika Decides to Die in the third person and using my feminine ego because I knew that the important subject to be addressed was not what I had personally experienced in mental institutions, but rather the risks we run by being different and, conversely, our horror of being the same.
When I finished I went and talked to my father.
Once the difficult time of my adolescence and early youth was over, my parents never forgave themselves for what they did to me. I always told them that it really hadn't been that bad and that prison (for I was imprisoned three times for political reasons) had left far deeper scars, but my parents refused to believe me and spent the rest of their lives blaming themselves.
"I've written a book about a mental institution," I said to my eighty-five-year-old father. "It's a fictional work, but there are a couple of pages where I speak as myself. It means going public about the time I spent in mental hospitals."
My father looked me in the eye and said: "Are you sure it won't harm you in any way?"
"Yes, I'm sure."
"Then go ahead. I'm tired of secrets."
Veronika Decides to Die came out in Brazil in August 1998. By September I had received more than twelve hundred e-mails and letters relating similar experiences. In October, some of the themes touched on in the book--depression, panic attacks, suicide--were discussed in a seminar that had national repercussions. On January 22, 1999, Senator Eduardo Suplicy read passages from my book aloud to other senators and managed to win approval for a law forbidding arbitrary admissions into mental institutions they had been trying to get through the Brazilian Congress for the last ten years.
This essay originally appeared in The Sunday Telegraph Review (London), (c) 1999 by Paulo Coelho.