A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt

5. Sanitarium Blues

5  Sanitarium Blues U TMB-GALVESTON WAS IN THE 1960S and still is one of the best medical and psychiatric facilities in the country. In 1964, the physical plant at UTMB was a collection of Victorian brick buildings mixed with some drab additions from the 1930s and the early 1950s, nestled into a palm-shaded campus in the northeast corner of the city. The old main building, a monumental redbrick known as Old Red, was built in 1891 and survived the Galveston Storm of 1900. Just west of Old Red was the Galveston State Psychopathic Hospital (later renamed the Marvin Graves Building), the first building in Galveston built to house psychiatric patients. Dr. Titus Harris was the first Director of Psychiatry there, and his colleague Dr. Abe Hauser was the Assistant Director. Together, they had established the Titus Harris Clinic for psychiatric inpatients in 1929.1 Grace Jameson is a psychiatrist who has been on staff at the Titus Harris Clinic since the early 1950s. According to Dr. Jameson , “By the early 1940s, people all over Texas knew about Dr. Harris and his associates, and the phrase ‘gone to Galveston’ began to mean that the individual had a psychiatric disorder 46  Sanitarium Blues 47 and the only possible reason someone would come to Galveston would be to consult Dr. Harris or one of his partners.” 2 At the Titus Harris Clinic—one of the first facilities of its kind to serve children and adolescents—a team of doctors (primarily Doctors Ford, Martin, and Wight) evaluated Townes for a few weeks, overseeing the administration of a barrage of physical and psychological tests. According to his psychological report, Townes “attained a full scale I.Q. of 134 which places him in the very superior range of intelligence.”3 The psychological report, filed by Dr. Charles Gaston, goes on: The patient’s character structure is predominantly obsessive-compulsive. This is a pleasant, friendly, but quiet, reserved, somewhat shy and aloof individual. His pleasantness and affable unobtrusiveness lend themselves to being quite charming and gracious in most social situations. Though he is quiet and reserved , he has a capacity for great intensity of feeling, and is also prone to mood swing [sic] and depression. He is outwardly quite deferential and respectful to adults and other authority figures, though he feels quite hostile toward them inwardly. This is a sensitive, artistic, and idealistic youth. His value system emphasizes that he work hard, achieve, be courageous, take pride in himself, be an honorable and somewhat moralistic individual and stand on his own two feet. While there is nothing too unusual in this assessment, the report goes on to describe what the doctor found to be the darker side of Townes’ personality: “This youth has a strong paranoid potential to his character structure, and this appears to be becoming more prominent at the present time. The sources for this appear two-fold. One, this youth feels quite inadequate in comparison with his successful father and feels he can never compete with him.… Two, there are indications of some feminine elements in his character structure and these feminine elements threaten his whole value system, sense of self, and adequacy as a male.” The doctor believed that Townes’ feelings of inadequacy in relation to his father, along with a recognition of his “feminine”  48 A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt characteristics (most likely just his sensitivity and “artistic” nature ), formed a conflict that was fomenting paranoia and the development of “grandiose perceptions of himself to bolster his feelings of personal worth.” The report continues: “While the overall pattern of this youth’s protocol is not floridly psychotic, he is moving in that direction, and his test protocols are reflective of a definite schizophrenic potential and possible current underlying psychotic ideation.” The psychological report concluded with emphasis that Townes had an “obsessive-compulsive schizoid character with strong paranoid trends.” The official diagnosis was “Schizophrenic reaction, Schizo-affective type (Depression).”4 The treatment prescribed was cutting-edge at that time: a regimen of “shock therapies”—both insulin coma therapy and electroshock treatments—to be administered over the course of the next couple of months—nearly forty treatments between early April and early June 1964—during which time Townes was only to leave the confines of the hospital on occasional supervised weekend passes. One of the original practitioners on staff at the clinic was Dr...