Is There a Black Hole in My Mind?

P, a young lady, was my first patient when I became a psychiatrist. She was an artist, and believed that she would make a magnificent piece of work which would change the world, with the power from space, which took the form of light, that would give her inspirations. She had thrown off all her clothes and lit hundreds of lights in Youido Park, insisting that it was to take in the inspirations more perfectly, and was taken to the hospital by force. It was clearly a symptom of expansion delusion.

Problems started as she started recovering her sense of real world. I was a “novice” psychiatrist, and I began to confuse how far the expansion delusion was and where the start of artistic creativity was, whether her drastic performances before entering the hospital were symptoms of mental illness or her artistic subjectivity. When she comes out from her ward and sits, describing the sunshine pouring from the window, I can’t help falling into her sensitive expressions and looking through half-closed eyes at the sun. Sometimes, I even felt sorry, for while she recovers, her unrestricted sensibility seems to be restrained.

“K-Pax,” which was released last month and came out in video early this month, is a movie about a man named “Prot” (Kevin Spacey), who claims that he is an alien from a star called “K-Pax” in the constellation of Lyra. He says the radiation intensity is too high and always wears black sunglasses, praises earth fruits such as apples and bananas, and talks in alien words.

As Prot gives hope to the people in the hospital and brings changes, the patients really start to believe that he is a person from outer space, and request him to take them along when he returns to “K-Pax.” When I saw the events which happened when Prot said that he would go back to his star, P flashed into my mind.

This movie exactly followed the stereotype misunderstandings that most movies about mental illness patients have. Nevertheless, this movie captivated my mind, because what Mark, the psychiatrist who was treating Prot, was feeling, was similar to mine when I had met P. Even after Mark, who was tired and weary of everyday, had made clear Frot’s truth, it seemed that he really wanted to believe Prot to be an alien.

In psychiatry, we call symptoms which are having strong beliefs besides the real world, a delusion. At the present, it is considered that abnormality in the cerebral nervous system is the main cause of delusion. The psychological motive that causes it is denying the painful real world, and projecting their wish or fear to the outside, accepting that it really happened. Patients, as a result, make a world of their own, different from the real world, and persistently refuse to come out of it.

Prot was incapable of taking in and settling the chain of events connected to his family’s death. So he denied the sorrow, fear and anger in his heart, even his existence and name, and made a new world, “K-Pax,” and went into it.

His emphasizing that no one makes a family in “K-Pax” is denying his “I have lost my family and I am sad and painful” heart, and turns his mind to the “No one makes a family there” thought, trying desperately to stable his heart.

In P’s case, she too possessed inferiority complex of her talent and frustration had been deeply set in her heart, and I later found out that her expansion delusion of receiving inspirations from space was an attempt to overcome it.

But sometimes, I imagine what if the patient’s thoughts that we believe to be delusions are really true. How small the world that we recognize is. Many things happen in a world that we don’t know, and it is hard even to maintain a realistic position in the merest everyday life.

Moreover, when things become complicated, I wish to make a world of my own like “K-Pax” and go to it, but I don’t have the courage to do it, and so instead, I think what about learning to see the world as a little unfamiliar and interesting with the eyes of an alien who has come to earth. It seems handy when the usual life seems dull and boring, especially when the streets are crowded with of people, when disturbed of people who talk loudly anywhere they go, and when I have to eat something that isn’t tasty.

Yoo Hee-jung