Trepanning
I flunked my license exam in clinical psychology
by four points—a respectable score
for the over forty crowd in California,
but a flunk in Pennsylvania.
Foolish me, I’d studied the body of knowledge
the test purported to examine
when I should have focused on learning how
to take a modern multiple-choice test.
Some of the items were all incorrect. You
had to learn how to choose
the least incorrect answer. Should I have
used that strategy with my patients,
encourage the least incorrect way of dealing
with their depressions and obsessions?
Remember, only use Ivory soap when you
wash your hands 200 times a day.
I fell into a deep depression. My analyst,
a lovely man who knew as much
about psychotropic medication as I did
about astrophysics, put me on Tofranil,
an antiquated antidepressant from the sixties.
Almost immediately an impenetrable
plaster wall appeared in my large intestine that
required enough daily Metamucil to
blow me up like an irradiated tomato. Then,
Mr. Happy donned a sombrero and took
the fast train south to Tijuana where he embarked
on a protracted siesta. Try as I might, I
couldn’t get in touch with him, if you know
what I mean. So clogged and cramped
on one side, limp as a bizkit on the other, I
thought of trepanning, the ancient treatment
for depression. The Greek physician would
take an iron stake and pound it into
the melancholic’s head. If the patient
survived, he was no longer depressed.
If he didn’t…well, at least they tried. Hippocrates
observed that patients’ depressions often
disappeared at the mere mention of trepanning.
As usual, the Greeks had the right idea.
I stopped the Tofranil and enrolled
in a course on how to take multiple choice
exams. I learned how to pick the least
incorrect answer, avoided forever the chemical
trepanning prescribed by my analyst,
and passed my license exam with flying vapors.