Judged – Chapter Fifty-Eight

Madness is not new.

What is new is that mad people are no longer warehoused in madhouses. Instead, madhouses have been deemed unnecessary because—beginning in the mid-1970s—the worst symptoms of madness became controllable with psychotropic drugs. Meds that clinical testing had shown would do the job. Honest tests, but only meaningful as far as the lab door.

What those tests failed to grasp was how ordinary most mad people are. Meaning they usually get nothing back from nature on account of their despised affliction—nothing that society values, in any case. Thus, once put out on the streets, such folk often escape their ordinariness by refusing to ingest any drugs that might force them to compete with normal people on the latter’s own terms.

The fact most of the mad have refused to take their meds has left society with the false impression that modern psychotropic drugs have not lived up to their initial promise. Never worked any modern medical miracles. This is quite wrong. Psychotropic meds have indeed worked plenty of miracles, if only for that small group of the mad who have something society wants. Something they can use to excel once cured of their madness.

As any Ivy admissions officer will tell you, high intellect is relatively commonplace. But high intellect combined with creativity is rare. And that rarity is made all the more precious by the high incidence of madness in those who have such dual qualities of mind. Which latter grouping clearly included Shane. A Shane whose family tree had plenty of both intellect and creativity. Plus containing a sufficiently high incidence of madness to have generally undone every bright star in the few generations Shane knew anything about.

It was at age forty-seven that he’d finally overdone things to the point that the need to take meds had become a personal issue for him. Coming off a bad split with Gus Bondoc, he’d been too stressed to properly handle the mega IP case he’d been handed by an ex-DA friend close to surgeon cum inventor Thomas P. Thomas, MD, better known as Doc Tom Tom. Doc Tom Tom kept bobcats as pets. Declawed but not defanged. Doc Tom Tom’s pride and joy was his self-proclaimed but nonetheless uncanny expertise at medical diagnosis of all sorts. An insight which led him to call Shane “half-crazy” to Shane’s face within an hour of meeting him.

By the time all settlement efforts had failed—failed because an entirely vindictive Doc Tom Tom never had any intention of settling anything—Shane had walked out on his wife Nancy and was sleeping less than four hours a night at the St. Francis.

In response to Shane’s walking out on her, Nancy had insisted on a joint session with his then shrink, threatening Shane with divorce papers if he refused her request. A distraction Shane could hardly afford with the Tom Tom trial just around the corner.

While his doc had never insisted on meds before—always bowing before Shane’s expressed fear of such things after massive doses of Thorazine during his prior hospitalization had left him feeling robbed of all personality—this time Nancy did most of the talking. And, when she was finished, the doc was quite firm.

“Shane,” John Jenkins said, “I’ve been treating you, what, ten years?”

Shane said nothing.

Nancy said nothing.

“You have two choices. Three really, but number three is you just leave here right now. Because if you say no to one and two, then there is nothing I can do for you or Nancy, so there’s no point billing your insurance for my time. And I never charge for the last visit anyway.”

The psychiatrist’s attempt at humor fell flat. Though it did succeed in making Shane angry.

“Look, Dr. Jenkins,” Shane said, barely glancing at either his doctor or his wife, “who the hell do you think you are? It’s bad enough I had to leave home and sleep at a hotel because Nancy here won’t tolerate me doing what I have to do to win this trial. And it’s even worse to be dragged away from work by a threat of divorce. So what makes you think I want to hear you make any sort of joke about what’s happening to me?”

Jenkins stared blankly. Let the tension diminish, as he was trained to do. Then he spoke.

“Okay, okay, you have that much of a point, Shane. But listen, there’s a reason you come to see me, right? I’m not missing anything when I say you have a clear memory of what the inside of a locked-down psych ward looks like, am I? Divorce is one thing, though in your case I doubt it’s in your best interest. But getting locked up, having to live with what winds up in the hospitals these days—you do understand that’s serious business?”

Doctor Jenkins’ speech shut Shane up but good. Made him glower. But shut him up. He remembered his time at McLean very well.

“So, look. I’m a professional. My degree from UCSF is right over there on the wall. And that degree and all my experience say you will never make it through this trial. Not a chance. Try it and you’ll be forced out before the trial ends, and you’ll wind up in the hospital. Or maybe you’ll lose the trial, and then wind up in the hospital. Or you’ll simply wind up dead, whatever else happens. Which is why your wife has brought you in here like this. What else could she do?”

“Screw you both,” Shane answered, spitting out the words. “No way do I quit on a big case that’s set for trial. I’m a professional, too. Whatever else I am, I’m at least that much. And no matter what, I am not going to be a cripple. Whatever shape I’m in now. Whatever happens to me later on.”

“Okay,” Jenkins replied mildly, for all appearances entirely unruffled by either Shane’s tone or anything he’d said. “That appears to dispose of choice one as an option. Choice two is what’s in my hand here.”

He held out a sample package of Depakote.

“Take this glass, go into the men’s room, and take six of these pills right now. Then fill this script for three hundred more and take six every morning and six every evening.”

The doctor held out a prescription he must have had filled out before the interview had even begun.

“There is a more than fair chance this will pull you through. Maybe not, but it’s all you have—this or maybe Lithium. Though if this doesn’t do it, Lithium probably won’t either, and there is very little time for experimentation here. That’s it. Take the meds. Take the meds or all that’s left is choice three.”

Nancy had looked at Shane hard then. A combination of frantic concern and fierce determination. They’d been married nearly twenty-five years, and her look resonated deeply with him. Pushed by both wife and doctor, Shane hadn’t even asked what the pills would do. He’d just swallowed them as instructed.

The Depakote hadn’t tranked him. Not at all. But it had restored his ability to sleep, getting him back up to seven, even eight hours each night no matter what chaos was going on around him during the day. And all that sleep restored his mental balance in short order.

None of this made him any less a dictator when it came to dealing with the junior lawyers and staff assisting him at trial. But it did pull him up well short of becoming irrational. Pure magic, given where he’d been heading mentally before he’d started popping handfuls of the pills every morning and evening.

He’d even had the unique satisfaction—midway through trial—of buying old Doc Tom Tom lunch. Showed him the pill bottle, and explained that the only thing standing between the client and loss of his net worth was the Depakote. And then going back into court and crushing the most difficult witness the plaintiff had to offer up.

Normal, no. Fun, yes.

So psychotropic meds worked for Shane. They had worked in the late 1990s, and they had kept working for decades afterward. And once Jeff Hale’s mind games ceased, there seemed to be no reason why they shouldn’t work to heal Shane’s fragile psychology again.

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