Ill Will

Readers of this blog may have noticed I’m an avid admirer of alliteration. Not everyone is a fan, as demonstrated by this line spoken by Albert Brooks’ ironically named TV journalist Aaron Altman in James L. Brooks’ “Broadcast News”:

“A lot of alliteration from anxious anchors placed in powerful posts.”

Call me anxious but, more and more these days, I’ve found three alliterative words popping up in my thoughts or out of my mouth – deranged, demented, delusional.

Looks like I’ve inadvertently tapped into the national zeitgeist. A new survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration found that 20% of American adults have experienced mental illness in the past year. That adds up to a whopping 45 million crazed citizens.

In an age when federal frisking of innocent airline passengers in the name of fighting terrorism seems sane, this comes as no surprise to me, especially since trying to be all “Que Sera Sera” all the time brought on my own year-long bout with depression exactly a decade ago.

What was alarming about the whole episode – besides the ever-present ennui, vaguely suicidal thoughts and a constant knot between my shoulder blades the size of a baby’s fist – was not recognizing the demon until I was well out of hell. My epiphany came one night several months later, when the symptoms of the disease were listed in a TV commercial touting a miraculous new anti-depressant, followed by those always scarifying drug side effects. So that’s what was eating me. Hmmm.

Turns out I didn’t need a magic bullet like Prozac, Paxil or Zoloft to blow me out of my black hole, but a healthy dose of that always energizing elixir, anger. During an office holiday party at the end of that “lost year”, one of my former company’s muckety-mucks publicly and wrongfully accused me of making slanderous comments against her. After a fitful night’s sleep, I woke up like I was shot out of a cannon, said “piss on this” and set about gathering my advisers and allies to do battle. I was back and loaded for bear.

I think my own experience neatly reflects what’s really ailing Americans – our meek willingness to drink a Kool-Aid that promises to cure our security ills but, instead, inflicts such debilitating side effects as loss of freedom, dignity and control.

Here’s my personal Rx for fighting the forces that have induced this coma of passivity and powerlessness: rationality, reaction and, most of all, rage.