Missing a Few Buttons

Anyone who’s seen the movie “What About Bob?” knows that being a little loony can be fun.

Bob, played by that old kook Bill Murray, races around the country after his psychiatrist, ingratiates himself to the shrink’s family and ultimately becomes a kind of loveable kick-around who may, we suspect, be better off slightly askew than we are mentally intact.

Murray builds on the great tradition of cultural giants like Jerry Lewis, who made nuttiness a condition the whole family could enjoy. Sex is “R,” but the incredible lightness of dementia praecox is Everyone Admitted.

So.

I mention this today in view of a new attitude developing among those who do not think being nutty is fun, and who resent the way nuttiness is perceived and treated. They’re not exactly militant loonies, but they’re close.

I use these disparaging terms, by the way, because isn’t that what we’ve always called those who are dangling over the edge?

They’re nuts, schizos, crazies, cuckoos, wackos, screwballs, lamebrains, head cases. They’re off their rocker, not playing with a full deck, mad as a hatter and strictly Looney Tunes. They’ve got bats in their belfry. They’re missing a few buttons.

The list goes on ad infinitum, the reason being that those who are, well, emotionally impaired are one of the last classes of citizenry we can still mock with impunity.

So thank God for those with leaks in their think tanks.

I know “What About Bob?” was never intended to be, as critics say, mean-spirited. Humor is born in dark places of the soul, and I am not going to be the one to inhibit its stretch. It is, after all, possible to think and laugh at the same time.

But not everyone thought screwy old Bob was that funny. One of them is a woman I’ll call Marge, who is currently involved in a “clients’ rights” movement in L.A. Clients is a term they prefer to patients. A patient to them is a prisoner. A client comes and goes.

Marge says her cause is a Mental Liberation Movement.

She’s a slim, fidgety woman of 45 who finds little to laugh at in life. “Bob,” like “The Nutty Professor,” just isn’t all that funny to anyone who’s been there.

Molested as a child, chemically sensitive to just about everything, she suffers from an almost paralyzing combination of depression and anxiety that often casts her world in blurry focus.

Marge is an “ex-client” of the county’s mental health system, which treated her for a dozen years.

“I don’t call myself an ex-mental patient,” she explains, “because it’s a stigmatizing term. I visited an osteopath once. Does that make me an ex-osteopathic patient?”

She’s part of an amorphous group in L.A. organizing to fight forced commitment to psychiatric hospitals and the involuntary injection of drugs into patients under psychiatric care.

Current law allows forced commitment with due process and involuntary medication in emergency cases. Marge, and a growing number across the country--members of a “madness network”--want the law changed.

“I used to see monsters in my bedroom,” Marge says. “Now I see monsters in the mental health system.”

Mickey Weinberg, a social worker, and his wife, Beverly Jones, a documentary movie maker, are involved with Marge and others in a psychiatric survivors’ movement.

They’re working on a film called “Committed” which they hope will alter the public perception of mental illness. It’s a compelling work that focuses on the eloquent anguish of those abused by a society that sees them as less than human.

As Jones put it, “Everyone cares about the rights of animals. Who will speak for the rights of mental patients?”

Patients and former patients tell their stories in “Committed.” A woman from New York says, “They told me I was diseased.” A man from Oakland says, “They took away my adolescence.” A woman from Berkeley says, “They tried to beat the psychosis out of me.”

Shock treatment, they tell us in graphic terms, turns the living into the living dead. The use of chemicals, they tell us, turns people into lab rats.

Marge’s crusade is a cry in the night: “We’re not subhuman. We just need help.”

The mentally ill were once tortured and destroyed. Later, we dropped them into snake pits. It isn’t that bad anymore. We’ve learned. Now, perhaps, the time has come to stop laughing and start listening.

What they’ve got to say may not be that nutty after all.