Dual diagnosis, Jekyll & Hyde and the Hulk
Above: Mark Ruffalo's Hulk from The Avengers. (Wired.com)
Bad news: You have a drug addiction or a mental illness.
Worse news: You have a drug addiction AND a mental illness.
That second scenario is known as dual diagnosis or co-occurring disorder (COD) or co-morbidity, and may exist in as much of half of all drug abusers, and a third of all people with mental illness or alcohol addiction. If both problems aren’t diagnosed and treated at the same time, there is little hope of curing either because they are probably related: one may be causing the other. Fix just one problem, and the other may make it recur.
Take Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. Henry Jekyll lives his life as a good and respected doctor, but he has unnamed vices for which he feels guilty but can’t give up. So he devises a potion that splits his personality into two parts: the good doctor and the more licentious Edward Hyde. As Hyde’s crimes move from the merely immoral to the illegal, including murder, Jekyll tries to stop taking the potion, but he is addicted. He also has mental problems that today might be called multiple personality disorder (MPD). When Jekyll does stop taking the potion, Hyde returns anyway (like an acid flashback) because Jekyll hasn’t cured the mental illness/MPD. In the end, unable to become Jekyll and with the police closing in, Hyde commits suicide. Thoughts of suicide are among the symptoms of a dual diagnosis.
Or take the comic book and film character The Hulk. Dr. Robert Bruce Banner was exposed to gamma rays, and thereafter turned into a huge green brute, with little of the vocabulary or thought processes of Banner. Most of the time he seemed a different personality, but for years this wasn’t really addressed. Various attempted cures of Banner’s gamma radiation problem failed and he inevitably reverted to the Hulk.
Then a similarly irradiated psychiatrist (don’t ask) named Dr. Leonard Samson (or Doc Samson) tried to psychoanalyze the Hulk and determined he was actually a case of MPD all along. When he was a child he was traumatized by seeing his father accidentally kill his mother in a drunken rage. The gamma radiation only gave form to his other personality. That’s why the cures always failed.
The Hulk’s personality continued to evolve, eventually splitting into two personas: one green and child-like, the other gray, crafty and less moral.
Eventually all three personalities – green, gray and Banner – were re-integrated (for a time) into a large, green but intelligent persona. He wasn’t wholly any of his three personalities, but he was whole. However the gamma radiation problem remained untreated, and so Banner’s personality re-fragmented. At least once he attempted suicide for fear of what the Hulk might do.
In the Marvel Cinematic Universe film The Avengers, its version of Banner reveals that in his despair over turning in to the Hulk, he also tried to kill himself: I put a bullet in my mouth, he said, and the other guy spit it out. Suicide wasn’t even an option.
Before giving in to despair or resorting to suicide, seek dual diagnosis treatment in Texas or wherever you live or feel most comfortable.
