mad people are not generally what you see in the horror flicks: wearing an apron with CSI-styled blood splatters, waving sharp-edged weapons about and applying them to the bodies of the general public. in fact, the mad people that i've known so far through my nursing career are generally nice people. just that they have a few harmless and sometimes charming idiosyncrasies. i remember one eccentric forty year old man during my Mental Health posting of the nursing school days. we reminisced about the days of yore in Hokkien and we actually got to know each other better for about twenty minutes or so. it wasn't until he started offering me the private number of the Prime Minister that i realized something was amiss. he wrote this down on a piece of paper:

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'Make sure you don't give it away or i'll die!' he warned me. And then with an ominous look on his face, he gave the last words he ever said to me, 'Le Mai Shiong Kong Zeng Hu Mm Zai, Zeng Hu kua eh tio eh hor!' very wise ones indeed. i went home that day pondering about what the mad man said (albeit translated) 'Don't think the government doesn't know, they can see hor!!' i never saw him again as that was the last day of my posting. but i will always remember the look on his face. it was pure George Orwell and 1984.

but really, how many times have you seen the insane or the eccentric in the public with all their weird little habits? i've seen the streakers. i've seen the paranoid. i've seen the depressed. i've seen the ones with the tics. i've seen the truly mad. most of the time, their actions are interpreted as a bloody katana slicing through the peace of the public. they ruffles a few feathers and perhaps piss off a few of the sane people in this world. but to tell the truth, it's very seldom that they actually mean anyone harm or have ill-intentions at all. in fact, i can think of more sane people who are really fucked up compared to the insane. i guess that if we treat the mad with respect or at least leave them alone, they will generally leave us alone too.

unfortunately, not everyone sees it from that viewpoint. well at least not the psychiatric doctors which came a-visiting today. they were called in for a referral for one of my patients who has a history of mental problems. he was forty-two but looked about thirty. he spoke decent English and was actually quite a gregariously charming chap. i've actually taken quite a liking to him, not in a gay way, but in a chummy patient-practitioner way. he asks for the minor irritating things that my nursing diploma and job scope doesn't cover (eg. making tea with sugar and no milk and charitable donations of 10 cents to make phone calls), but once i settle all his wants, he leaves me alone and stays a good boy. of course, the rosy picture i painted above would fade to gray when i mention that he goes around the hospital in pyjamas, wearing a red scarf around his neck that's tied like a boy scout and uses a golf club as a walking stick.

traditionally, when someone who doesn't blend in with the crowd, they are generally treated different. you could be holding a harmless object like a teddy bear, but if the public thinks that you're crazy, everyone steers clear of you and maintains a 4 meter radius around you. after all, don't all mad people go around carrying Desert Eagles in teddy bears? naturally, all the patients staying beside Tiger Woods are freaked out by him. they are thinking that he will creep up one night and bash their heads in with his 3-iron.

even the Psychiatric doctors wrote in their reports that Tiger Woods had a previous incident of having 'brandished' (written in capital letters and double underlined; they were pissed at me, but i'll elaborate later) the golf club at passer-bys in the street. i could be wrong of course, but how 'brandished' is 'brandished' really? i might be holding my cock and using it as a weapon of sorts, is that equated to 'brandishing' too? it seems that all the actions of the mentally-unstable are defined as dangerous.

the psychiatric doctors wrote down orders to remove the golf club from Tiger Woods so that he would be less dangerous to the staff and the patients and perhaps the doctors themselves. to which i was pretty unhappy about. how do you remove an object of certain importance from a mad man? because it's not exactly like taking candy away from a six-year old boy. for all you know, Tiger Woods might be a stable tea-drinking person when everything is at peace. but when threatened, he might just turn the golf club into a weapon which would then evolve the whole situation into a self-fulfilling prophecy full of 'I-told-you-so' looks from the psychiatric team.

the psychiatric team (made up of a woman with a permanently scandalized look on her face and a really nice gentleman) confronted me, 'Why is it that nobody has removed the golf club from him yet?'

'He's just using the golf club as a walking stick,' i explained, 'and furthermore he shows no signs or intent on causing harm to anyone'

'You need to remove the golf club from him before he does any harm to anyone' scandalized face said.

'Okay, how would you like to try and remove a potential weapon from a mad man? Would you like to try that yourself?' i retorted. to which at that point of time, scandalized evolved to the next available level of even more scandalized looks. they were consultants and seldom did people of a lower level speak back to them. of course, i didn't know that they were consultants at the point of time. so i just gave them my five cents worth when they were expecting more like a thousand-dollar note because of their elevated statuses.

it's one thing to sit one's ass down and get paid more than $5k a month (they were consultants - high-ranking doctors) to write down rational orders for the nurses to carry out. it's another however, to write down orders that will potentially put the nurses and patients in danger. so there came a compromise. the nurses would administer a sleeping pill to him. and when he is in a deep sleep, we remove the golf club from him. crossing our fingers that he won't start harassing the other patients and the staff for his golf club.

crazy is apparently only as crazy as one sees it. i mean, they used to think that the homosexuals were crazy as well. which is why craziness is all about context. for all you know, tea-drinking, golf clubs and boy scout scarves will be all the sartorial rage next year.

and perhaps then, Tiger Woods would not be so crazy after all.

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