You might ask: Is she getting professional help? Does she see someone?
Someone? Someone? How about: two psychologists, six psychiatrists and one psychopharmacologist for a grand total of nine mental health professionals for well over half her lifetime, and it’s fair to say, “Fat lot of good it’s done her.”
When Bunny turned sixteen she told her parents that she wanted to go to a psychiatrist, but her parents said no. “Those people,” her mother said, “they blame the mother for everything.” Later this anecdote was to become part of Bunny’s canon of therapy fodder.
Although the incident in her freshman year of college that required her to go to Student Mental Health Services was a regrettable one, she was elated at the prospect of seeing a psychologist. She imagined it to be something like undergoing psychoanalysis in old Vienna, but to be a staff psychologist at Student Mental Health Services is more like being a physician for the prison system, insofar as it doesn’t necessarily attract the top tier of the graduating class. But at the time, how was Bunny to know such a thing? However, halfway through her first session with Dr. Browning, Bunny came to the obvious and accurate conclusion: Dr. Browning was no Otto Rank.
Next was Dr. Itsy, which was not her real name. Bunny can’t remember her real name, but she was the height and weight of an average ten-year-old girl. Each week, Dr. Itsy went on and on about how Bunny had to embrace her pain, as if Bunny’s pain didn’t already have her in a chokehold. “Embracing your pain is the only way you can move on,” Dr. Itsy said, while Bunny, sitting in the opposite chair, marveled at how Dr. Itsy’s feet did not reach the floor.
Bunny, in her way, took the doctor’s advice and moved on.
Dr. Sellers, a burly man with a beard, who wore Birkenstock sandals, put great store in hugging. A hug when you arrived, a hug when you departed. Dr. Sellers’s hugging was more like tree-hugging than inappropriate hugging. Inappropriate hugging at least would’ve been interesting. Dr. Sellers did blame Bunny’s mother for everything, which, oddly, didn’t please her quite as much as she thought it would, but in the end she quit seeing Dr. Sellers because, as she told Albie, “You know how I feel about facial hair. I can’t get past the beard.”
Bunny would’ve given up on mental health professionals entirely but for the medication. The meds—not those that came with side effects, such as loss of libido and narcolepsy, because, given that choice, who wouldn’t rather be depressed—were effective, which is not the same as being happy. But as she put it, “All my life I had a headache, and now the headache is gone.”
The headache was gone until it came back.
Dr. Stine prescribed a cocktail, adding Effexor to the Zoloft. Dr. Stine wore velvet shawls and wrote papers for professional journals in which she psychoanalyzed artists and writers. They were all dead, the artists and writers, but still, she should’ve changed their names. A year or so in with Dr. Stine, Bunny related an exquisite example of the systematic erosion of her confidence, how when it was time for Bunny to apply to college, her mother left on her bed a brochure and application for dental hygienist training.
“Read this.” Dr. Stine gave Bunny a copy of a paper she’d written called “Too Much Mother Too Close to Home,” one she just happened to have on hand, in which, based on his story “So Much Water So Close to Home,” she psychoanalyzed Raymond Carver as if his story and his life were one and the same. Goodbye Dr. Stine.
The Effexor/Zoloft cocktail wore thin.
Unlike the others, Dr. Lowenstein neither gave her advice nor spoke in platitudes. Mostly, he said nothing, which might’ve provoked Bunny to ask, “What am I paying you for? I can talk to myself for free,” except it seemed that he rarely spoke because he was listening. Moreover, he was the one who found the best mix of drugs for her to date and the only side effect was a dry mouth. In mid-November, at the onset of the holiday season and after approximately eight months of weekly sessions with Dr. Lowenstein, at the end of their hour, which, as with all psychologists, was fifty minutes, Dr. Lowenstein took a moment, and then he clasped his hands together and leaned forward. “Bunny,” he said, “this is something important for you to know. So listen carefully to what I am saying.” He waited for her to nod, and then, his Bronx accent as thick and dark as history, he continued. “In the eyes of the world, Bunny, people such as yourself are the same as the mentally retarded. You’re both at the far ends of the spectrum. You’re not the norm. People in the norm, they can’t relate to what’s at either end. There’s nothing you can do to change that. Do you understand what I am saying?”
When Bunny was six years old, her grandfather, a world-class misanthrope who loved only his wife and one of his granddaughters, came and sat beside Bunny under the willow tree in his backyard. “You’re smarter than all of them put together,” he said. “And I’m including your parents in that. They’re not even smart enough to know how smart you are.” When Bunny was seven, he died.
All that prevented Bunny from staying on with Dr. Lowenstein from then until forever was a massive stroke that forced him to retire, for which Bunny has yet to forgive him. He’s probably dead by now.
The woman who took over Dr. Lowenstein’s practice had elephantine ankles, and she responded to Bunny’s stories by scrunching her face. When, for the fourth time in three months, she analogized Bunny’s profound lack of confidence to some boring story about her kid learning to brush his teeth, Bunny moved on to Dr. Rodgers.
Dr. Rodgers upped her dosage of Wellbutrin to 450 mg. Dr. Rodgers was massively empathetic. He felt Bunny’s pain far more than she did, which she thought to be unfair.
Dr. Manfrid, the psychiatrist who followed Dr. Rodgers, was the one she disliked most of all, and for good reason. Yet, she stayed with him for more years than any of the others because, as she said to him, “It’s sort of like a hostage situation here.”
“Do you want to explain what you mean by that?” he asked.
“This,” she gestured, her hand moving like a flipper, “this, me, you, here, this is a waste of time. But if I don’t come here, then you won’t write me the prescription.”
“That’s right,” he said.
“So, that’s what I meant. It’s like you’re holding me hostage.”
As if he were issuing her a challenge or a dare, he said, “You’re free to leave any time you want.”
“You’ve got a point,” Bunny said, and then, neglecting to close the door behind her, she left. You could read into her neglecting to close the door behind her, something about wanting to keep the door between them open. But you’d be wrong. It was only Bunny being rude.
Hence, the psychopharmacologist. Once every three months, he took her blood pressure, asked how she was feeling and wrote out her prescription. Over time he raised the 450 mg of Wellbutrin XL to 600 mg, which is the maximum dose. Eventually, he threw in some Lexapro.
When it was becoming evident to Albie that the drugs were failing, and Bunny was slipping, he suggested she might want to go back into therapy.
“I’ve been talking to those people for more than half my life,” she said. “And what good has it done me? What? I’m going to start in with someone new, and they’ll ask about my childhood, and I’ll tell them those same stories I told all the others? There’s only so many times you can tell the same stories.”
Albie suggested that perhaps she tell some different stories, some other stories, but Bunny said, “I don’t have any other stories.”