Miscasting of James Brown

I was visiting someone in the behavioral health unit of a hospital.

The music was playing over the loudspeaker, loud enough to notice but not quite loud enough to understand. Unless you happened to be standing directly beneath one of the speakers, it was mostly just a muffled noise drifting through the halls. She complains about the music fairly often. It’s repetitive, she says. The same songs, over and over. So as we paced the halls, she kept wondering what was playing. We walked toward the speaker. A little closer. Then closer still. And finally, standing almost directly underneath it, I could make it out.

James Brown.

“Get Up Offa That Thing.”

I burst out laughing. Because, really. What else could I do? I love James Brown. I genuinely do. His music was the last music I listened to with my dad before he died. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with the song itself. James Brown telling the world to get up and dance is pretty much James Brown doing his job. But in a behavioral health unit?

Allow me to use one of Mr. Dynamite's lines: Good God!

There is something almost comically tone-deaf about hearing "Get Up Offa That Thing" playing in the halls of a mental health facility. Hilariously and also painfully inappropriate. Because there are people walking those halls who are doing everything they can just to get through the day. Some are depressed. Some are dealing with trauma or grief or addiction or thoughts they are afraid to say out loud. Getting out of bed might feel like trying to swim across Hudson Bay.

And then James Brown comes through the speaker:

Get up!

Shake it! You'll feel better!

It was funny. But it was so sad, too.

And the longer I thought about it, the more that little moment started to feel like a strange illustration of how poorly we still understand mental illness in this country. We're often much better at noticing what people are doing than understanding why they're doing it. We see someone who can't get out of bed and tell them to try harder. We see someone pacing and wonder what's wrong with them. We see the crisis, but not necessarily what's underneath it.

The timing really hit me, too, considering the enormous public conversation people are having about Lindsay Clancy's case — a case that's forcing us to look at and not away from the frightening complexity of postpartum mental health, responsibility, treatment, and what happens when a person's mind becomes a place of profound danger and suffering.

Those conversations are uncomfortable because they push against the easy categories we like to use, and I see people struggling with those categories constantly on social media right now.

Good person. Bad person...Choice. Illness...Responsible. Not responsible...Sane. Insane.

But mental illness doesn't fit neatly into the boxes we want to put it in, and neither does suffering. Neither does getting well. 

Sometimes getting well is just being able to sit on the edge of the bed and think about getting up. Sometimes it's taking a shower or eating something. Sometimes it's making it through another hour. Sometimes it's simply staying alive long enough for tomorrow to come.

It may not look super heroic from the outside, but they can be huge accomplishments to the person doing them. And perhaps that's what struck me most as I walked those halls with her. She wasn't just a patient. She was a person who was curious about what song was playing. She was annoyed by the repetitive music. She was walking the halls with someone. She was trying to figure something out. She was, in other words, a person living an ordinary little moment in time in a place where people can very easily become reduced to their illnesses, their symptoms, their meds, or whatever brought them there.

People experiencing mental illness are still people.

They can be funny. They can be curious. They can love music. They can hate "that 70s shit." They can laugh at the absurdity of James Brown being the soundtrack to their walk down the unit hallway.

They are not their worst moment. They are not their diagnosis. They are not a problem to be solved. And maybe we could stand to be a little more curious about what is happening underneath. Sometimes the music is muffled. Sometimes you have to walk closer to really hear it. Sometimes, when you finally do, you discover that the message we've been playing isn't the message people actually need.

So, with all due respect to the Godfather of Soul: No.

But maybe the bigger problem is that we've been playing the wrong song for a very long time.

(And a courtesy suggestion to the hospital: Maybe switch it up? Could you play some Chopin? Even some bluegrass, hell!)