All the students interviewed made it back in a relatively short time--but time enough for therapy, freedom from normal social pressures, experiments in behavior, and a lot of thinking to prepare them for dealing with other people's realities. For most the process of coming back was a series of forays into the world. One girl went to classes while spending nights at McLean. Another student worked for awhile before returning to Harvard.
Carbon Copies
Some said that the final return was the most difficult experience of their lives. "There I had been," one recounted, "having my past mistakes hashed over and analyzed and tinkered with and scrutinized. My present progress was reviewed and supervised and picked apart and weighted with tremendous significance. One extra conversation in a day, one extra act of participation, everything I did was seen by my doctor as progression or regression. The psychology of all my actions took pre-eminence over any moral value that could be imputed to them.
"So when I came back to Harvard, I was so unused to having people judge my actions objectively, according to their efficiency or morality, that I found it very hard to relate to people. I had forgotten that people found it strange when I made carbon copies of my class notes or dropped a girl I was taking out because she was beginning to care too much about me."
Re-assimilation into student life was a sticky process. One boy said his greatest problem was the time lapse. "Things that happened five months ago for my friends happened yesterday for me. I came back and my roommates were into things I knew nothing about . . . . I felt humiliated by never knowing what anyone was talking about." He felt threatened by the same feelings of isolation that had originally driven him to the hospital.
"I had to learn all over again how to talk to normal people," he said. "I had to force myself to look a person in the eye and forget about myself while I tried to get inside his head. I had to schedule my day's activities according to The Man's requirements rather than to the cycle of my feelings."
Only one student said people changed their estimation of him because he had been in a mental hospital. "They were very straight, very uptight people," he said. "They just didn't know how to handle the situation. One of my roommates treated me very gingerly, as if he were afraid of me. The other regarded me voyeuristically, and was offensively solicitious about everything I did."
A Cliffie accused herself of selling out. "I felt that by conforming I was eradicating all that was me in my personality. By pretending to be cheerful when I wasn't or by adjusting the tenor of my conversation according to whom I was talking to, I thought I was being hypocritical. I fought all my compromises. I would stare at the person before whom I thought I was compromising myself until my eyes burned."
But eventually, she said, some of her values began to coincide with others'. "And then I discovered that once you've made what you consider a compromise, it no longer torments you. It no longer even matters. Your new worldview, your new schedule, your new friends, your new major becomes your entire concern."
The Old Ghosts
Not all the students had to go through the gradual reconciliation this girl did. For some the return was swift and joyous. One boy said, "I walked up the steps to my room and pushed open the door. All my roommates were there slapping me on the back and saying, 'Hey, man.' Right then all the old ghosts were swept away. Before, the people I had known in high school were much realer to me than my college friends. But from then on, the characters in my dreams were the same people I saw walking around in the daytime."
The Cliffie who had been lost in her own eyes found a sharer in a whole new vision. "The day I got back," she remembered, "I walked down to the Yard and sat on the steps of Widener. It was the first warm day in such a long time. There was a boy sitting near me dressed in corduroys. He had a wise old face and the kind of arm you knew--well, you knew could cradle the head of a beloved as well as fill out income tax forms. We started talking...."
She and the others made it back and started talking. One of them wants to be a psychiatrist, and they all have heavy ideas about people and meanings. Some of them are bitter about Harvard, or about life, but they all speak with reverence about the lush garden of the mind.