Raise your hand if you're not just a little bit crazy

Who among us isn't neurotic, at least sometimes?

Some people are very good at venturing out with little or no preparation for an overnight away from home. I am, alas, not one of these.

When I need to go someplace new, all my insecurities come to the fore, waving their gnarled little hands and calling out, “Me, me, me!”

I worry that I won’t measure up—that no matter how I dress or what I say, it won’t be right: that I’ll be judged as not good enough. That’s the bad little tape that plays in my head, especially in the wee hours if I’ve woken up and can’t get back to sleep.

Chances are, I’ve already made a checklist with a little box by everything I need to remember to do or pack before I leave. I might add to the list in the middle of the night—or venture into the closet to see if a garment I have in mind is hanging there or in the dirty clothes hamper (further wrecking my chances of getting back to sleep). Sometimes, if I’m really stressing badly—and if I’m on my own—I may forget to eat.

Last week, on a day I planned to catch the Metro North into Manhattan, my most neurotic self was on full display. I had a pair of tickets for what promised to be a fabulous opera production. But as it turned out, my husband was away. I invited a dear new friend of mine, who lives in Manhattan, to go with me in his place. She invited me to make the journey easier by sleeping over.

I lay in bed the night before, mentally shuffling and reshuffling what I planned to put in my daypack. I didn’t want to have to deal with a roller-bag. I wanted to make the smallest package possible of whatever shoes, clothes, and toiletries would see me through two train rides, walking in the city in the summer heat, going to the opera, and an overnight stay.

My friend is sweet, unpretentious, and undeniably chic. She has wonderful clothes, and looks great in them. She is wise, talented, and kind, and I admire everything about her. She likes me a lot. And I worry, as I’ve always worried about such things, that she’ll see through my public persona, at some point, to the mess of a person I actually am, and she’ll be so appalled that she’ll stop wanting to be my friend.

When I gave up on getting any more sleep, at about 5 am, I ransacked my closet and dresser drawers for two suitable outfits—one to wear for the journey and the other to wear to the opera. I was determined not to carry more than my purse and a daypack. (The last time I’d been in Manhattan, I was turned away from the Morgan Library because I had a carry-on bag with me.) There was a prediction of rain as well as extreme heat and humidity. And I wanted to take my laptop with me, so I could work during the five or so hours, all told, I would spend on the train.

My bed was soon piled high with clothing—and I hadn’t yet eaten breakfast or packed any food for the journey. I had meant to set my hair. I had meant to leave enough time to drive to the train station—about twenty minutes away from our house—and do whatever I needed to do to legally park overnight at the station.

I rushed out of the house with a sense of panic welling up inside me. I hated the clothing I’d stuffed into my daypack. I’d allowed enough time to get to the station but hadn’t bargained on both the parking machines there being out of order.

Yes, I downloaded the app I needed to buy an overnight parking permit online. I had to run back to my car, because I haven’t yet memorized my new Connecticut license plate and needed to fill it in for the online form. I activated my ticket and climbed aboard the train with a minute or two to spare. But I was filled with self-reproach for not having my act more together.

Even though I’m loathe to admit it, I’m very neurotic sometimes. Who isn’t?

It’s all too easy to believe that other people’s lives are perfect—that we are alone in our struggle to cope with the cards dealt to us by life. The sometimes crippling insecurities. The viciously destructive tape-loops in our heads instilled there by unskilled or downright sadistic parents. The sense that we have failed or are about to fail: that everything we’ve strived to achieve is actually nothing. That we are nothing, and soon everyone will know. The overwhelming sense of shame.

In her gripping memoir, Straitjackets and Lunch Money, Katya Cengel writes about four harrowing months she spent in a now defunct psychosomatic ward at Stanford Children’s Hospital in 1986, at the tender age of 10.

There are two distinct voices in the narrative: that of the author as a child undergoing treatment for a largely baffling mental disorder that made her determined to starve herself to death (and caused her to be put in a strait-jacket at one point in the course of her force-feeding); and that of the present-day Katya, now a strikingly lovely and successful journalist.

The book is the writer’s clear-eyed view of the treatment she received during this very low period of her life, as well as an overview of how, as a society, we all too often fail our children.

A writer friend of mine recently posted a brilliant essay on her SubStack elucidating our psychological and even physiological need to experience dark stories. As I went further and further into Katya Cengel’s memoir, I recognized the perverse comfort I was deriving in reading about horrors that were even darker than my own—and my relief, at the end of the book, that Katya survived.

She still struggles—and so do I. Struggle, not perfection (as we like to tell ourselves), is the nature of our lives.

*****

Katya Cengel and I are both part of a powerful group of commercially published Bay Area women writers, all of us committed to supporting one another in this very challenging profession. I had the privilege of talking with Katya about her book, which was published in 2023 and certainly deserves to find many readers, both inside and outside the clinical world.

BQ: The title of your book is so striking! Did you know the title when you started writing your memoir—or was the title something that evolved?

KC: After my parents divorced, my father struggled in many ways, including financially. I thought I might be able to fix the situation by saving my lunch money for him. In fourth grade, I stopped eating lunch. When no one did anything to stop me, I cut out breakfast and then dinner. I starved myself slowly. I was admitted to Stanford Children’s Hospital at the start of fifth grade. During my stay in the hospital, I was once restrained in a straitjacket. It was my literary agent who came up with the title.

BQ: For your research, you tracked down the psychiatrist and other people who treated you. What was it like, encountering them again as a healthy, successful adult?

KC: Terrifying! As a child on the ward, the main psychiatrist was our equivalent of God, deciding our fates. Whether we could walk around the ward or had to stay on our beds, where we went after we were released from the hospital, what kind of therapy and treatment we received: all these things were decided by him. I feared and hated him. Those feelings lingered. When he was late to our first meeting, I was tempted to bolt. What enabled me to go through with the interview was my training as a journalist. Holding my notepad and pen, as well as my recorder, provided me with a barrier and a new role. I was a reporter, not a patient.

BQ: You were in a psychosomatic ward. Is that what it sounds like?

KC: A psychosomatic ward is where the body and mind are treated together. Children on our ward had both mental and physical problems. For example, we had a teenage girl who was unable to walk even though, medically, there was no reason she couldn’t walk. There were teenage diabetics who were not eating properly—and, of course, anorectics and bulimics. The idea was that to treat patients like these you must address both the physical issue and the mental issue as well. I learned through my research that anorectics are often anxious. Starvation calms them. When they gain weight, the anxiety returns—which is one reason why it’s dangerous to address the physical part of weight loss in isolation.

BQ: Your use of the child’s voice in this book—your reconstruction of your voice as a child—is very powerful!

KC: I wanted the immediacy of the present tense and the child’s voice. I wanted readers to experience how terrifying it is to be a 10-year-old who has no control over her life. Children have a different way of communicating and seeing things. I wanted readers to understand the loneliness of being a child trapped in a bad situation—to allow readers to begin to understand why children act out in the ways they do.

 BQ: It’s my understanding that the rates of mental illness among children and youth are higher than ever. Are we, as a society, doing a better job now than we did before in helping these children?

KC: The whole system still fails children in so many ways. Insurance restrictions mean that many children are hospitalized just long enough, until they are physically stable—and then released without the tools or resources they need to live healthy and meaningful lives. I am not a fan of overly long hospital stays. But I firmly believe that children need to be made to feel safe enough to talk about their environment at home—and their treatment providers need to pay attention to what these children say.

BQ: The situation you describe is very moving and dramatic, with the makings of a mini-series! Did you ever think about writing it as a novel or a screenplay?

KC: I wanted my story to be part of a larger story about children who had been cast aside, if you will. I began investigating my own treatment, and the history of treating children with mental illness—and the structure of alternating narrative voices emerged. But I never thought about reconceptualizing the book as a drama. Maybe someone else would like to option the story and do that for me!

You can buy Straitjackets and Lunch Money on Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop

Katya Cengel today (used by permission of the author)

Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash