Photo 7.1
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Bambang Rujito

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1 Story Summary

Bambang Rujito is an intelligent and educated man living in the outskirts of Jakarta, Indonesia’s largest metropolis. He attended the prestigious University of Indonesia and has worked a variety of high-status jobs, including in the Indonesian stock market and for the Unilever Corporation. He is a soft-spoken but humorous conversationalist; his earnest reflections are often punctuated with a joke and a gentle self-deprecating laugh. He works part-time teaching English to neighborhood children and spends the rest of his days caring for his young son, doing household chores, and attending neighborhood prayer groups.

Bambang is in his mid-thirties, but he has had episodes of what local psychiatrists have diagnosed as schizoaffective disorder since he was a sophomore in high school, primarily characterized by the euphoria and excessive energy of mania. This mania is often combined with delusions and hallucinations inspired by current events: Wars in distant nations seem to be enacted before Bambang’s eyes on the streets of his city. He believes himself to have befriended celebrities, declares his own political parties, and feels he has assumed the identities of esteemed religious leaders. Concern for Bambang’s well-being during these bouts has led friends and family to hospitalize him numerous times throughout his adult life.

The globalized features of Bambang’s experience are quite influential to his illness and recovery narrative. Western psychiatric diagnostics, institutionalized care and pharmaceuticals, work opportunities in a rapidly changing urban environment, participation in an interfaith religious community, and his family’s understanding and acceptance of what Bambang describes as a “mental disability” all effect the trajectory of his illness. Meanwhile, the complex historically and politically shaded layers of his manic verbal expression give a deeper substance to Bambang’s disorder. Through puns, word play influenced by Javanese vernacular joking style, and swift unexpected associations, Bambang vibrantly weaves together various threads such as lyrics from 1980s pop songs, Qur’anic verse, and allusions to Dutch colonial rule, into a lexical fabric of sometimes absurdist and sometimes strikingly insightful commentary.

The content and course of Bambang’s schizoaffective disorder suggest that globalized popular culture does indeed pervade people’s consciousness and the ways they understand and interpret their worlds. Meanwhile, it illustrates how the residues of colonialism, experienced as the lingering effects of subjugation or subjection, remain a significant part of those worlds.

Bambang was born in 1969 and grew up near Borobudur, a rural area in Central Java home to the world-famous temple of the same name. He lived surrounded by his sisters and a warm extended family with relatives living close together in neighboring villages. His grandfather worked for the prestigious national railway, his mother sold traditional health tonics known throughout Indonesia as jamu, and his father was a sailor often leaving home to travel the trade route from Jakarta to Japan.

When Bambang was only four, his father got in a violent fight in a distant port and died from his injuries. Bambang’s mother moved to Jakarta to make her living selling coconut rice from a food stall while Bambang stayed behind with his aunt until he finished elementary school. He was a funny and clever child, and doted on by the community because of his unfortunate family circumstances. For middle school, Bambang went to live with his mother in a suburb of Jakarta. He worked hard, earned a reputation for being a perfectionist, rose to the top of his class, and was accepted into a prestigious local high school.

When he was a sophomore in 1986, Bambang began to struggle. He was dedicated to his studies in addition to participating in sports, and was often tired. Religion fascinated him but also led to disturbing thoughts, as he vividly imagined characters from Islamic cosmology and worried that theological doctrine did not always match up with everyday reality. Then his girlfriend broke up with him and he was devastated. The pop wisdom that “first love never dies” echoed in his mind, and he feared that since it had died he too was truly finished. One night, in the midst of his sadness, exhaustion, and frustration, he decided to pray. He lost consciousness and awoke into a world of hallucinations, feeling that his sins had come to life to pursue him. He was taken to the doctor, who first diagnosed him with a fever and thyroid problems. However, as the psychiatric elements of his illness became more apparent, his school suggested he take a year off to rest. He was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility in Bogor for a month, and after the prescribed period, he resumed his academic life.

Bambang began his studies at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta, but relapsed frequently. His friends often knew when he was becoming unwell because they would notice he was not sleeping. When encouraged to sleep, Bambang would reply that God does not sleep. He would feel smart and strong and perfectly devout, like he could become the next president or the next Great Imam. These feelings of power were sometimes countered by splitting headaches and bouts of weeping. Bambang would board a train for a long-distance trip only to impulsively get off before he reached his intended destination. He frequently got in trouble for shoplifting or bothering strangers, and was occasionally beaten by passersby angered by his misbehavior. He was again hospitalized in Bogor, but feeling unhappy there, he escaped. After about a month, he returned to a stable condition.

Bambang did not complete his university education but became an English teacher with plans for starting up his own school. He met a young woman named Yatmi, who was impressed by his language skills. They married in 1996 and were soon expecting a child. With his attentions turned to his work duties, Bambang’s university registration expired, and then the school he started failed. When Yatmi was in her late pregnancy, Bambang relapsed again. This was Yatmi’s first introduction to her husband’s history of mental illness. Again, Bambang was taken to Bogor, but filled with loneliness, he left and then returned to a stable condition.

Bambang took a higher paying job working in the stock market to support his family. He often worked nights, reading the news feed from Reuters. He developed the habit of taking energy supplements and drinking cups of coffee to stay awake. In 1999, the mounting stress of his work caused him to resign. He went home, and hallucinating that it was Independence Day, he took his young toddler on a marathon walk to join in the celebration. The two wandered the malls and streets of South Jakarta for twenty-four hours, until Bambang decided to visit his sister. Because of these events, his child was taken away from him, and his mother decided to bring Bambang back to Central Java with her for treatment.

This period became Bambang’s longest and most severe episode of mental illness. His family first tried to care for him at home, but they were unable to handle his behavior and committed him to psychiatric ward in Magelang in 2000. Bambang was briefly released to tend to his ailing mother. She ultimately passed away and he was re-hospitalized in 2002, at which point he met the film crew.

Bambang returned home in 2003 and did not experience any major relapses until 2011, although he has continued to struggle with erratic moods. He maintains his religious and official social life, attending neighborhood events and Qur’an recitation, but he has withdrawn from more casual friendships. Bambang feels that his wife and family do not view him any differently because of his illness, yet they have moved five or six times to avoid neighbors who have witnessed his relapses. Yatmi continues to support the family by working at a garment factory, where she has risen to a management position.

Bambang is ambivalent about his current situation. He wants to be an advocate for those with mental illness, asserting that it is just like any other illness and should not be stigmatized. He believes that with continued support he will continue to get better, yet he is often frustrated and feels that he is “mentally handicapped.” He is alternately grateful for his family’s financial assistance and emotional support and resentful that he is rarely consulted on major household decisions. He wants to re-enter the work force, but he has low self-confidence and is worried about future relapses. Although he once felt bright and filled with promise, on his bad days Bambang fears his life has been reduced to a boring routine of meaningless chores. However, he is also quite proud of the English lessons he has begun to teach part-time to neighborhood children, remains dedicated to developing his son’s intellect and planning for his future education, and derives sustenance and encouragement from his Islamic faith and his religious community.

2 Post-coloniality, Globalization, and the Subjective Experience of Mental Illness

Within the field of psychiatry, the understanding of manic delusions and hallucinations associated with schizophrenic disorders has changed. Early twentieth-century psychoanalytic approaches stressed individual personality dysfunction or reactivity, offering various explanations as to the way delusions or voices might serve to shore up a vulnerable or damaged psyche (Berrios 1996; Berrios and Hauser 1988).

The 1960s–1970s saw increases in attempts to medicalize psychiatry, which led to the “decade of the brain,” beginning in 1990. This era focused on genetic and/or synaptic causes for mental illness and sought cure in pharmaceuticals. Within this perspective of biological psychiatry, it is the fact that certain symptoms are present—like voice-hearing or manic delusions—that is important to diagnosis, rather than the content of what the voices are saying or what the delusions are about (Luhrmann et al. 2015). Rather than exploring their cultural or personal context, a purely biological psychiatry considers complex verbal productions a form of “irrationality” due to a disordered neurobiology, neurochemistry, and neurophysiology—a type of “form vs. content” distinction in psychiatry (Larkin 1979; Fabrega Jr. 1989, 1992).

Contemporary work in psychological anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry has called for a return to an earlier understanding of how the content of delusions (or other symptoms of mental illness) might be personally meaningful, while additionally considering how culture might influence these. This newer approach seeks to account for a more refined understanding of brain function in mental illness, with the fundamental understanding that the brain “is inherently social dynamic, plastic, adaptable, and locally and globally integrated” while never forgetting that self-awareness, interpersonal interactions, and larger social processes give meaning to, and influence the trajectory and outcome of, mental health problems, necessitating an “ecosystemic approach” that accounts for these multiple factors (Kirmayer et al. 2015). A key example of what ethnography can offer in this area is Tanya Luhrmann’s recent comparative work in auditory hallucinations experienced by people with schizophrenia in different cultures. Luhrmann suggests that “social kindling” or “culturally shaped patterns of attention” determine the kind of auditory phenomena the person with psychosis pays attention to and shares, and this attention may in turn shape the actual experience of psychosis (Luhrmann et al. 2015, see above). While Luhrmann’s research addresses voice-hearing in schizophrenic patients, her conclusions are applicable to other symptoms of mental illness, including manic speech and delusion, in that the local social world will give it significance and meaning, either by shaping content or influencing the interpretations of that content.

If contemporary ethnography on major mental illness is taken into consideration, there is an opportunity for a rich analysis of Bambang’s discourse; such an analysis must include an understanding of the content of manic speech, delusions, and even auditory hallucinations as having some meaning. By extension, this creates an opportunity for a deeper understanding of the way Bambang’s episodes of illness expressed his frustrations at the conditions of middle-class Indonesian life during the transition to the new millennium. In other words, making meaning out of Bambang’s ravings, rather than dismissing these as merely the effluvia of a man who is deeply disturbed, can lead to insight into his personal situation and provide national and cultural context.

When Bambang is having a schizoaffective episode, the flamboyant genius of his mania often manifests in free associations and verbal play that incorporate and interweave complex gestures, jests, innuendo, interpersonal communications, historical references and analogies, and plaintive lamentations. When taken together, these all artfully rearrange aspects of local histories and globalized popular culture. In one extended episode included in the film, Bambang quotes both Sukarno’s nationalist maxims and the movie Ghost (Zucker 1990), rapturously sings a song from the 1980s progressive rock band Genesis, retells tragic events culled from the local news, postulates on the ancient Mataram kingdom and the value of the Australian dollar, and all in one breath mentions Indonesian soccer, Islamic prayer, and the tobacco trade. He also evokes Indonesia’s colonial past, calling Indonesia “the Dutch territory,” referencing the history of plantation agriculture and export, ironically claiming “the Dutch occupied us in order to teach us,” and criticizing ex-president Suharto’s development plans and mottos. So, are these loquacious interludes merely the incoherent speech typical of schizoaffective disorder, or are they related to the overwhelming information stream of globalization that seems to offer infinite possibilities for both meaning and absurdity? Can Bambang’s commentary on Indonesian nationalism and geopolitical history, performed in the voice of an unhinged Javanese linguistic virtuoso, be heard as a poetic critique on the lingering madness of subjection and the maddening promises and premises, centripetal and centrifugal (Anderson-Fye 2003) forces of globalization?

Numerous post-colonial scholars have articulated the idea that colonialist and imperialist policies have a detrimental effect on the psyches of those subjugated. Famously, Franz Fanon, a Martinique-born and French-educated psychiatrist stationed in French-colonized Algeria, provided illustrative case studies from his patients to argue that a “constant and considerable stream of mental symptoms are direct sequels of this oppression” (Fanon 1963). Some of the symptoms he identified were hyper-vigilance, a painful inferiority complex and self-consciousness with regard to image and position, and the sense of an unstable identity, concluding that because colonialism systematically negates the colonized, they are forced to constantly question the very essence of their being (Fanon 1963).

The Dutch colonized what is now Indonesia for over three hundred years, although their influence was felt in varying degrees in different areas. Some territories, such as Aceh and Bali, resisted for decades, locals fought back bravely, and in the end were conquered by a brutal suppression campaign. Where they did have solid control, the Dutch instituted apartheid, deplorable plantation conditions, and the exploitation and extraction of resources that kept many Indonesians impoverished while supporting the industrialization and development of the Netherlands. The Dutch were forced out of Indonesia during World War II during the Japanese occupation and lost the war for independence, which was fought after Indonesia’s declaration in 1945. Indonesia as a self-governing country is not even a century old (Vickers 2013).

Bambang directly references this history of Dutch colonialism in the speech of his manic episodes. Yet, he simultaneously references a history of resistance. He calls himself a “crazy Dutchman” in Javanese (londo edan) and claims, “I am the Commander and Prince of Jayakarta which was known as Batavia. I am the thirteenth grandson of Prince Diponegoro,” assuming the identity of a Mataram prince who fought against Dutch colonization from 1825 to 1830, was arrested, and put in exile. When Bambang met the film’s director—an anthropologist and a Caucasian American—Bambang teased, “You want to invade my country!”

Through these discourses of imprisonment, invasion, and insanity, Bambang makes explicit the connection between mental illness and subjugation that has been theorized by contemporary psychological anthropologists and post-colonial scholars who insist that investigation into the subjective experience of mental disorder must take into account the political histories of the construction of ideas about both “subjects” and “disorder” (Good et al. 2008a). The colonial view positions disorder within the person of the native, who, as Fanon stated, was seen as part of a landscape of a “hostile, ungovernable, and fundamentally rebellious Nature” (Fanon 1963). According to colonialist rhetoric, it was up to the occupying powers to impose “order”; and yet of course this pretext of “order” was used to carry out all kinds of violence. Those who protested this order—such as domestic servants who rebelled against their masters or plantation workers who organized—were at times labeled as violently or madly “running amok.” In this milieu of oppression, some registered their discontent through passive resistance and verbal rebellion. In listening to Bambang, Indonesian historians might be reminded of the Samins, nineteenth-century Indonesian plantation workers who wore down the resolve of their Dutch overseers through implicitly disrespectful or evasive double entendres, cryptic puns, and confounding responses to orders. For example, if ordered to work, a Samin might not outright refuse but rather reply, “Sorry, I am already in service, my work is to sleep with my wife” (Vickers 2013).

These references to colonial domination and Indonesian resistance in Bambang’s manic monologues indicate that colonial histories continue to shape post-colonial realities and affect the subjective worlds of citizens who did not directly experience colonial rule (Banerjee and Linstead 2001; Kiong and Fee 2003; Reuter 2009). While the residues of colonialism might not be immediately apparent in contemporary Indonesia, they linger through what anthropologist Byron Good calls the “haunting presence of the colonial” (Good et al. 2008a). These hauntings are multiple and encompass even the kinds of treatment Bambang is receiving. The presence of the mental institution within which Bambang finds himself can be traced to histories of Dutch health intervention, encompassing both genuine efforts to reduce infectious diseases and self-serving framings of the local mind as primitive or childlike (Pols 2006, 2007) There is also the oblique inheritance of “generational trauma,” as children register the effects of being raised by parents who themselves still struggle with experiences of war or violence, which has been theorized to have not only psychological/familiar transmission processes but distinct epigenetic components (Yehuda and Bierer 2009; Yehuda et al. 2001). For Indonesians of Bambang’s age, these generational traumas include not only Dutch colonial rule, but also the Japanese occupation, the difficult transition to independence, the killings of 1965 that occurred during the nationwide purge of suspected communists, and the autocratic rule of Suharto, which many critics have compared to colonialism due to the way his regime exploited and sometimes terrorized his subjects.

These traumas are woven into Bambang’s story, albeit sometimes implicitly; while Yatmi did not know that Bambang had a history of mental illness when she married him, she was not exceedingly troubled by it because she believes her father had a similar condition. As she tells it, Yatmi’s father’s illness consisted mainly of discomfort around strangers, reluctance to leave the house, and a persistent fear that he was going to be taken away or imprisoned. Yatmi suggests that this illness may have stemmed from the violence and upheaval of the 1965 purge of communists that happened in Indonesia, where many of her father’s friends were in fact imprisoned or killed (see Chap. 5 for a Balinese parallel). Bambang also thinks his father, of the same age as Yatmi’s father, may have suffered from a similar mental illness, perhaps even schizoaffective disorder. Bambang believes the fight that cost his father his life was perhaps typical of recurring manic outbursts, although Bambang does not explicitly cite the events of 1965 as a possible cause of his father’s instability.

In twenty-first-century urban Indonesia, these persistent haunting colonial presences and generational traumas, perhaps in themselves overwhelming, collide with the manic excesses of globalized culture, including reference and access to alternate narratives of development, possibility, and self-expression. Especially since the fall of Suharto in the late 1990s when censorship loosened and a sense of liberatory, international, and cosmopolitan polyvocality bloomed, Indonesian citizens have enthusiastically participated in global media and global discourses of identity politics, religious expression, and popular culture (Boellstorff 2004; Luvaas 2006, 2010; Mansurnoor 2004). Yet increased media access and far-reaching global networks also implicate everyday citizens in global struggles, stoking fear and worry with unrelenting representations of the new forms of enduring violence and inequality. As Homi Babha, another influential post-colonial scholar, puts it, the “colonial shadow falls across the successes of globalization” as economic policies create (or perpetuate) divided worlds; even accelerated and comparatively successful development cannot mask underlying problems such as enduring poverty, class and racial injustice, exploitation, and victimization.

The consumer of global media reads, sees, and hears about all this with increasing immediacy and detail, but may have limited tools to make sense of it or feel helpless to intervene. During his lucid moments, Bambang tells how many of his hallucinations were based on what he heard and read, as he projected global struggles onto his immediate surroundings, or introjected and internalized the characters of influential public figures. Traditional healers initially named Bambang’s illness as being the result of “too many thoughts”; indeed his voracious reading worried the boundaries of his own personal experience and blurred distinctions between media and autobiography.

In thinking through the subjective experience of mental illness or mental distress, Byron Good suggests, “whether read as pathologies, modes of suffering, the domain of the imaginary, or as forms of repression, disordered subjectivity provides entrée to exploring dimensions of contemporary social life as lived experience” (Good et al. 2008b). Or as anthropologist Douglas Hollan states more plainly, explorations of mental illness can illustrate “how directly and deeply an organization of self and identity can be affected by differentials in social, economic, and political resources” (Hollan 2005). Ambivalence about colonialism, globalization, and his own subject position seems to trigger interpenetrating affects that cycle quickly for Bambang when he is unwell. As captured onscreen and included in the film, on the one hand he enacts a fascinating metonymic transfer of mental illness, saying “bye-bye Schizophrenia,” symbolically relocating pathology onto the surrogate colonizing body in order to banish it. Yet, at the same time, Bambang gleefully welcomes the opportunity to practice his English and engage in the exchange, performing his broad cosmopolitan knowledge that just might have the power to change him from being “schizoaffective” to being “effective.” In his rapidly shifting thoughts that dart from memory to media story and back again, Bambang negotiates the euphoria and grief of a globalized subjectivity, diagnosing this condition with yet another poignant pun: “The most disturbed patient, his name is ‘The World.’”

Throughout the course of his illness, Bambang received different kinds of therapeutic interventions, including being cared for in the home by his family, undergoing inpatient institutional treatment, and managing his illness through ongoing outpatient pharmacological therapy and occasional counseling, and boarding at religious facilities. These alternatives speak to both changing and enduring approaches to how mental illness or disturbance is treated in Indonesia, and each has implications for how Bambang experiences his illness, and hence, shapes his sense of self.

It is a common assumption in the field of “global mental health” that infrastructure of therapeutic services similar to those provided in the West is needed to provide adequate care. However, institutional treatment in Indonesia can be unreliable, somewhat clouded by histories of colonial hierarchies, and in many ways runs counter to Javanese constructions of the healthy self.

Bambang was hospitalized at a psychiatric facility in Central Java that provides integrated treatment, including pharmaceutical medications, individual and group psychotherapy, ECT, and recreational, work, and art therapies. Despite being comprehensive, this milieu was not always positive for Bambang, in part because it was not congruent with cultural understandings of health and recovery. Institutionalization still carries a significant amount of stigma for Indonesian families; while the family and community may be comparatively accepting and forgiving of minor episodes of disturbance (Subandi 2015, 2011), institutionalization suggests more disturbing severity and chronicity of illness (Connor 1982). It is also quite expensive and risks putting the extended family into debt. For these reasons, some patients and families might find that institutional care exacerbates the stress of illness. Even temporary hospitalization, which separates the individual from his or her family or community, may lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness intolerable to a communally oriented Javanese person. Bambang abandoned institutional care numerous times because he was so miserable there, which is not unusual in Java.

Home care and family treatment harmonize with Indonesian folk models of well-being and communal approaches to recovery. Bambang’s mother-in-law explained, “I guess when he gets ill, as Indonesians, we can’t let him suffer by himself.” Home care allows for a sense of continuity, contribution, and inclusive community. If this home care is in a small town where people know a patient’s history and therefore might be more tolerant, it might prove more supportive or safe for someone with mental illness than an anonymous urban center. Bambang’s aunt explained,

He was taken back to the family community in Central Java because he was ill, suffering from stress. How could he live in Jakarta, if he suffered from stress it would be hard to live there. He wandered around a lot, his family was afraid that people would beat him up, the poor guy But in Java, in this region, Magelang, most people still have pity on a person who suffers from stress, that’s the point.

As Bambang’s primary caretaker for a number of months, his uncle provided individualized and comprehensive attention; he frequently chatted with Bambang and tried to lighten his mood and minister to his needs. He tried to keep his nephew’s self-esteem high and life balanced by providing him with basic chores that he could handle and bringing him on excursions. This has turned into a long-term solution: The family has successfully adjusted to Bambang’s difficulties by allowing him to stay at home and care for his son while his wife works in a factory to financially support them.

However, there are significant challenges to this kind of home care, which is illustrated by Bambang’s case. When Bambang was in the throes of mania, which he described as feeling “euphoric,” he would stay awake for days at a time. He wandered away from the house and disrupted neighbors with trickster-like behavior, for example, switching off neighbors’ electricity in a scheme to save them from the rising energy costs. Sometimes his behavior was deeply disturbing to others—once, he urinated inside a mosque and once he made an obscene gesture at schoolchildren, for which he was beaten harshly and had his teeth knocked out. When Bambang became too disruptive, his family would resort to locking him up in a room of their house.

Another significant area in relation to the issue of outcome is daily routines and particular work routines. While perhaps statistically contributing to better long-term outcomes, the process of adapting to flexible, low-pressure work at home, does not in and of itself guarantee a sense of self-esteem or efficacy in the world. Bambang was deeply depressed by the way his recurring illness prevented him from consistently and adequately performing his role as a contemporary middle-class husband, specifically as a breadwinner working a white-collar job outside the home. According to Bambang,

Bill Gates himself started in his garage, but he’s been able to take over the world… What makes me feel a bit negative is that I just stay at home, my income is just a fraction of what my wife makes. That sometimes becomes a problem. Why, as a husband, can I not meet the needs of my family?

Interestingly, wage economies have been associated with poorer prognoses among those with major mental illness. This may partly be due to the more stringent requirements and definitions of successful employment and family contribution, which may in turn lead to more intense feelings of stress or failure. Due to Bambang’s history of mental illness, it is challenging for him to perform fitting jobs that might be more lucrative. His manic behavior, when it surfaces, is unacceptable in an office environment. Furthermore, the tasks required to fulfill the role obligations of an educated upper-middle-class Indonesian man, such as working long hours in an office, working in high-pressure situations, or following current events, are often a trigger for his illness episodes.

However, while the tasks that Bambang engages in at home—cooking, laundry, childcare—are certainly integral to the functioning of the family, they make him feel “useless” because they are not the normative tasks for a married Javanese man. For Bambang, doing “women’s work” feels ill-fitting, demeaning, and boring.

Bambang’s Uncle Mugo sees a real economic basis for Bambang’s mental health issues:

In my opinion, I can say that if Bambang can get a job, a routine one, with God’s blessing he will recover. The problem is, what he always has in his mind is (he) wants, really wants to be responsible for his family. ‘What should I do so that I can feed my wife and child?’ That’s the only thing Bambang has in his mind.

Due to earning disparity with his wife and his lack of participation in activities befitting his role, Bambang feels like he is no longer treated as the man of the house should be treated, as a decision maker and “head of the household.” Therefore, beyond a sense of economic failure, Bambang also laments the fact that his wife’s opinion toward him has changed.

She used to think I was smart … Now, she doesn’t include me in making decisions… she thinks that it’s useless even if she tries, I won’t understand her anyway. … I keep silent. I realize that I have handicaps. I’m mentally handicapped.

Bambang’s return in 2006 to English teaching seems to have eased some of these tensions. While this job is not full-time nor particularly lucrative, because it is prestigious work (and perhaps because it reminds Yatmi of what first attracted her to Bambang), it allows Bambang to feel like his wife “has a husband” again. While not “curing” Bambang’s illness, this part-time work is therapeutic to Bambang in addressing his major worries about gender and role performance; it allows him to feel like “a man,” both actively as a provider for his family, and as a recipient of the respect and consideration he feels he deserves.

While Bambang’s economic struggles are compounded by his episodes of mental illness, he is not the only man struggling with lack of work opportunities and the corollary ambivalence about proper role performance. Many other men in Bambang’s neighborhood are also helping out at home due to chronic unemployment or temporary joblessness due to the fluctuations of contract work.

Bambang’s episode of mental illness in 1999 corresponded with a time of pan-Asian economic crisis and national political transition. Yet, as Indonesia has regained its footing over the last decade, the urban upper middle class in Indonesia has grown exponentially. The ideal of the married man as breadwinner and consumer with a car, new house, and television is now heavily promoted in the media and popular culture, but this ideal may not be equally accessible to all. While Bambang was from an average background, due to his hard work he succeeded at school and got accepted into a prestigious college. At the University of Indonesia, however, Bambang’s Uncle Mugo says that many of his other friends were much more affluent, which may have led Bambang to feel inferior. After graduation, many of them were offered prestigious jobs at Indonesian organizations, like the national television station, but Bambang was not.

3 From Strangeness to Empathy

The filmmaking team met Bambang, the subject of the film Memory of My Face , while shooting exploratory footage at Rumah Sakit Jiwa Magelang (RSJM), the state mental hospital in Magelang, Central Java. The visit happened to fall several days before Independence Day, and the hospital had organized a patient performance of jathila n, a locally popular folk possession dance, as a form of group therapy. It may seem odd that the hospital would have the patients perform jathilan, which in its more extreme versions has performers eating light bulbs, rolling on thorns, or even pressing their skin with a hot iron—ostensibly quite disturbing, painful, and even “crazy” behaviors. Yet the patients were engaged in these wild behaviors in order to be seen as normal, by participating in an accepted theatrical activity that has ancient animist roots across Indonesia and is interpreted by contemporary practitioners as both a strategy of community building and empirical proof of communication with the ancestors and other spiritual beings (Foley 1985; Browne 2003; Lemelson 2011b). Bambang was the most expressive dancer of the group and the cinematographer was drawn to film his performance.

Photo 7.2
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Bambang participating in a jathilan dance performance at a mental hospital in central Java

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After a walkthrough of the hospital grounds with Bambang as the guide, he gave an interview on one of the locked wards, talking fast and peppering the conversation with expressive Jakarta slang. The research team, fluent in the local language Bahasa Indonesia, could lexically understand him, but the deeper semantics of his words were almost entirely unintelligible, not surprising given his pressured speech, flight of ideas, lability and loosening associations that are common linguistic features of a heightened or manic state. So first attempts to relate to Bambang, at least in terms of understanding who he was and what he was trying to express, left the crew almost entirely lost. It was only after returning to the United States and analyzing the footage that Bambang’s complex layers of allusion, symbolism, and emotion could be untangled.

An understudied and poorly conceptualized area in the psychology of long-term fieldwork is the issue of initial “astonishment” over what one finds, and the sense of cultural “strangeness” of the people one is working with (Shweder 1990), which may gradually diminish over time, as a familiarity with once different norms and practices develops. There is a lovely quotation from A Kalahari Family where Lorna Marshall says,

My diary records my first impressions: I was frightened, a measurement of lack of understanding. The healers went into trance to cure the sick. I did not know what hysteria might develop. In another month, the dances were not frightening, but were romantically strange to me. I no longer can capture that pleasant tingle of strangeness. (Marshall and Ritchie 1951–2002)

Once one has spent a certain amount of time in a culturally different place, as an anthropologist, and has a degree of language fluency, the strange and at times wondrous, fantastic, or bizarre quality of what one is seeing, hearing, and in general experiencing slowly diminishes until it becomes “ordinary.”

There may be a similar trajectory in clinical encounters with patients, even of similar cultural backgrounds (Shweder 1990). Since the dawn of psychiatry and the birth of comprehensive clinical analysis and case notes, psychiatrists have wondered about the sense of “difference” and strangeness in their encounters with their mentally ill patients. This is most pronounced when their patients are in the throes of a psychotic episode, but can occur in encounters with patients who are not obviously psychotic, but present with strange or unusual symptoms, or with personality disturbances or disorders. More difficult to describe is the sense of difference or strangeness that arises in therapeutic encounters that are more based on the subtle complexities of intersubjective experience—at times it may be difficult to develop an empathetic response to patients, wherein the psychiatrist or therapist does not feel a disjuncture in his or her understanding of what the patient is actually experiencing. Out of all the therapeutic modalities, psychoanalysis has perhaps the best models in language for interpreting, understanding, and expressing the subtle complexities of these intersubjective states.

When these two forms of initial “strangeness” intersect—in other words, when cultural “astonishment” is compounded by the strangeness of the clinical encounter—the initial sense of exotic otherness may be quite significant, meaning that a considerable amount of time is required before a psychological anthropologist working on mental illness can actually see beyond cultural differences and symptom expression to get to the more humanistic concerns about a subject and address more basic personal material.

At first, while taking in the stunning jathilan scene and wading through Bambang’s multiple linguistic references, it was difficult to get a sense of the “real” Bambang. However, during follow-up interviews after he was released from the hospital and returned to his neighborhood in Jakarta, the lead author was able to engage in extended person-centered interviews and establish an ongoing relationship with him. It was then that attention could be given to the issues that mattered most for him, including his sense of disappointment and failure in the loss of career opportunities due to his illness; his contentious relationship with his wife who supported him economically and psychologically but also was herself deeply disappointed with his loss of status; his profound love for his son; and his involvement in a religious community that sustained him through his intermittent periods of illness. Yet, in retrospect it was this understanding of Bambang that allowed for interpretation of the content of his verbal play, going beyond exegesis to understand how his multiple historical and cultural references gave voice to a young man wrestling with the burden of stigma and contending with what seemed to be at times a hopeless life course of illness and disability, where he felt that he was constantly falling dishearteningly behind.

The structure of the film was designed to recreate this process for the viewer. The film opens in a large public psychiatric hospital in rural Central Java, with the initial footage of Bambang that the team shot; Bambang is a patient, manically psychotic, and performing for hospital Independence Day festivities, his face streaked with performance makeup, eating the Indonesian flag, as trance dancers might eat glass or live chickens. At this early stage, it is unclear what the viewer is seeing. The “strangeness” of what is clearly a performance is evident. It is only as the performance ends and the camera pans to the hospital entrance and the title card informs the viewer that this is a mental hospital, does the viewer begin to understand that the “strangeness” was present because they were seeing a performance, at a mental hospital, by patients. A bit later, after some further shots of patients resting and being contained on a lock ward, does the view see Bambang, in his hospital uniform—slightly more coherent but still bearing visual markers of “disorder” or “insanity.” For both of these takes, Bambang is eager to be interviewed and “hamming it up” in a way that is simultaneously entertaining and quite sad. In these shots, the anthropological team almost seems to be modeling “order” or “sanity” in contrast—asking Bambang measured questions and trying to understand and make sense of his answers, but appearing slightly bemused. At this point in the film, the viewer is certain also to feel at a distance from Bambang.

The film transitions out of these opening sequences with a cross-fade from the florid patient—wearing the hospital gown, his head shaved to avoid the spread of lice—to a to a more hirsute but somber Bambang in his small family house in a poor neighborhood in urban Jakarta. The film unfolds over a number of years, but repeatedly returns to the scene of Bambang in the mental hospital. It was an editorial decision to return repeatedly to that original scene in the mental hospital to create contrast between his manic state and his “normal” self, at least in relation to his cognition and self-presentation. This more calm, self-reflective, somber (B.I. lebih tenang), and even perhaps somewhat depressed or melancholic state he is in in most of the rest of the film highlights his “disordered” state in the hospital.

This transition highlights the dramatic transformation Bambang has been through and also elicits a striking moment of self-reflection in the viewer, who must reconfigure their understanding of Bambang. If before he was “a crazy person,” now he is clearly recognized as “a normal person.” This demands some self-awareness on the part of the viewer, who must question their own assumptions, categorizations, and reactions to people with mental illness. In doing so, the film also calls attention to Bambang’s own perspective on his illness, offering insight into his fears of being seen as noticeably handicapped by his wife, his peers, and the larger community, with an obvious illness being the defining factor in his life. On a visceral level, the viewer knows that Bambang’s fears are founded, because the viewer felt startled by and distanced from Bambang in the opening shots. This transition also underscores the radical disorientation of a schizoaffective episode and introduces a significant theme of the film, which is how Bambang is struggling to understand, reconcile, and perhaps reluctantly accept the way mental illness has affected his life. Interestingly, participation in the film project impacted Bambang during this process of reconciliation and acceptance.

4 Last Encounters

During filming, and before the film was finalized, Bambang and his family were given opportunities to watch the footage. As a thoughtful and reflective man, Bambang has been thinking about his life throughout the course of research, but interacting with his own image has influenced him deeply. Bambang noted:

When I was watching the documentary, a true film, I was so sad and I cried. I prayed “God please give a way out, a way I can get normal, and support my child.”

Later in the interview, he said:

This is more than just a soap opera. By seeing with what is disclosed, with all sorts of backgrounds, this is more than just a toothpaste advertisement. I feel that [way]. I am encouraged that this movie can help many people for healing.

After the film was made, Bambang and Yatmi interacted with the filmic depiction of Bambang by participating in screenings of the film at educational and social service organizations where they were interviewed by journalists and sat on panels with other participants in the Afflictions (Lemelson 2010–2011) series (Ronny 2013). At a screening for Memory of My Face (Lemelson 2011a) at Magelang Mental Hospital, in 2015, fifteen years after the original interview that opened the film, Bambang noted how difficult the last number of years had been,

I feel touched watching the film, but also sad as well as ashamed every time while watching the film, seeing how out of control I was. I am happy that through the film I can share with other people about my recovery, especially the families who have member suffering from mental illness.

Later in the interview, he stated:

I avoid people who are negative about mental illness or about meeting with people with mental illness. But I believe this film can open many eyes so people like me can be accepted by society.

Bambang and his wife Yatmi are now frequently called upon to present and discuss their story whenever the film is screened and have made themselves available as spokespeople for increased understanding, tolerance, and human rights in the care and advocacy for people living with severe mental illness. In this way, the film process has actually been rather significant in reducing the shame and stigma that he so deeply feared, by allowing Bambang to embrace his own history and have his story compassionately told in the film and in the popular media, contributing to a changing popular discourse on mental illness in Indonesia.