Jakarta and Stream of Consciousness

The Michael Jackson Voodoo death post has been visited by readers as far as Jakarta.

A reader, much closer to home in the US, wrote in with the following post:


A Jacksonian Break:
Did the King of Pop die from a broken heart?


If so, how did it break? Perhaps it was progressive, like other things Jacksonian…

Progressing along an exponential curve: increased stimulation, followed by increased need for numbness, followed by tolerance, and repeat cycle. Chicken is to egg as Jackson’s escapism is to his sensationalism. Or is it vice versa? Extreme emotion propelling a life, which ended in death caused by the agent used to escape the extreme emotion.

Irony.

Was each administration of propofol an inadvertent death wish? Or successive approximations thereof? Perhaps not death in the morbid way it is most often imagined; perhaps he longed for Death as the Great Escape.

{He was the King of Pop, not the King of Emo after all. His colleague, Elliott Smith, made clear his need for escape when he stabbed himself in the heart times 2. Now there’s a sensationalist.}

Perhaps some of Jackson’s graphic/gruesome imagery was born out of his nightly drug-dependent “sleep.” Brandner et al (1997, Anesthesia) reported more memorable/vivid imagery during dream states induced with IV propofol than during those induced with nitrous. Or, again, flipping that coin on its head, maybe the anesthetic was required to tame an inherently active “id,” which visited frequently and without invitation/provocation during sleep. A hyperactive eros-thanatos, fed by fame and fortune.

One could argue that he was chronically deprived of sleep, and thus physically and psychologically unable to sustain the level of vibrancy required for his personal and professional daily living activities. Such a parsimonious explanation so dull in the face of the plethora of more dramatic ideas.

Irregardless of the acute and specific cause of his death, one might argue Jackson’s lifestyle led him down a road untraveled, through the labyrinth of deeply private and public psyches, thus raising the interesting and perhaps more poignant questions: What thrilled Michael? Will a gaze in the mirror truly instigate positive change? Did he look in the mirror, or was his anesthetic addiction a subconsciously-propelled attempt to look away, far far away…


- Elizabeth Adams


Note: Propofol is the generic name of Diprivan.


- Dr. Daniel Kantor, MD BSE
Medical Director
Neurologique

info@neurologique.org
www.neurologique.org