This essay is a bit of a deviation from my usual formula over in this section of my site, but I'm nothing if not versatile in my opinions and theories. This is a subject I've been turning around in my mind ever since I reignited my passion in M*A*S*H a little over a month ago, and have been posting about it sporadically on my tumblr, but I've finally decided to go ahead and write it all out somewhere once and for all.

The series finale 'Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen' is an incredibly well-written episode, and -- in conjuction with several of the previous seasons' episodes -- has resulted in a number of people reading Hawkeye Pierce as a textually mentally ill character on a chronic level. I'll disclaim myself here on a Do Whatever You Want Forever level, I don't think that people with this headcanon are wrong or baseless to do so, and I used to interpret his character that exact way the first time I watched the show. However, as I've gone on my most recent rewatch of the series, I have started to feel like this interpretation isn't my Favorite to say the least. You're not obligated to agree with me or continue reading this essay if you're not interested in it, but I am going to take this opportunity to discuss my thoughts on the Political implications of labeling Hawkeye as Mentally Ill -- both in an American War Machine context, and in an Anti-Psychiatry context.

It doesn't exactly escape my notice, after all, that many of the behaviors and statements that Hawkeye exhibits that have "earned" him this Mentally Ill label are typically salient political statements explicitly speaking out against the Army and the military violence it is perpetuating in Korea. See episodes like: 'Depressing News', 'Give Em Hell Hawkeye', 'Adam's Ribs', 'Hawk's Nightmare', 'Back Pay', and 'Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen', and so on.

For this essay, I'm going to start off by speaking about 'Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen' specifically, because I feel like I can articulate my thoughts on the psychiatry of it all the most saliently. The finale episode picks up in media res -- Hawkeye is already incarcerated in a mental hospital in Seoul, and we are not given the context for why he is there until later in the episode, and even then it is only referenced obliquely. Although Hawkeye is the one who outlines the traumatic event that took place on the bus that triggered his breakdown (a mother smothered her own child in front of him, as a response to Hawkeye begging her to keep it quiet as they hid on a bus full of wounded GIs and civilian refugees from an enemy platoon on the side of a road), it is Sidney who explains that Hawkeye had a subsequent outburst in an Operating Room session when the sight of an anesthetist putting the mask over the patient's face made Hawkeye panic, and then he drove a jeep through the side of the camp's Officer's Club. We don't get any perspective from Hawkeye on these last two events, nor do we know what took place after the jeep accident to get Hawkeye from the camp to the mental hospital. What we do know is that Hawkeye is vehement about his incarceration being unnecessary and unfair, that he is being held there against his will,a nd he doesn't understand why everyone is insisting that he stay -- and despite the fact that he states and asks this outright numerous times, no one ever actually gives him an answer.

The fact that no one around Hawkeye seems capable of interfacing with him the way they usually do is clearly only worsening the stress this involuntary incarceration is having on him. When the other members of the 4077 call him on the phone, their conversation is notably unusual and stilted, no one responds to any of the questions he asks or the jokes that he makes -- they dance awkwardly around the topic of his incarceration, refuse to engage with his statements on any real level, and all aim to exit the conversation as quickly as possible. Klinger is the only one in camp who makes an attempt to joke around with Hawkeye the way they usually might, but doesn't respond to Hawkeye's clear lack of amusement and is forced by the others to get off the line and end the call quickly thereafter. The reason for this treatment can be effectively summed up in the way Klinger speaks about Hawkeye once this phone call has ended, saying "You gotta know how to handle people like that." -- their perception of Hawkeye has shifted in a fundamental way due to his emotional breakdown. He has made a transition from Being A Person in their eyes to being Mentally Ill, which they consider alien and unrelatable, and therefore don't speak to him like he's their friend, but as if he's a stranger to them.

Sidney handles this transition just as poorly, maybe even worse. Because he is acting as a "professional", his perspective and point of view can be considered more Understandable than the others -- he can't relate to Hawkeye as a Friend anymore, he has to relate to him as a Patient. However, the nature of the psychiatrist-patient relationship and dynamic is Not an equal one, and Sidney is therefore under no obligation to relate to Hawkeye as an individual anymore, but as a collection of Symptoms to be Treated. The way he persistently drives Hawkeye to talk about one specific thing makes sense for his role as Psychiatrist, but Hawkeye -- who has not consented to this shift in dynamic and does not speak to Sidney like he has processed this change -- continues to talk to Sidney as though they're friends, the way they have always historically spoken to one another, making his perception of Sidney's selective engagement as nothing but an alien source of frustration. The entire first part of the episode, Hawkeye seems to be pushing to understand why Sidney is doing this, but Sidney As Psychiatrist is under no obligation to tell him. Sidney has always been a very Dry character, but his complete refusal to engage with Anything Hawkeye says that doesn't relate back to the bus specifically is nothing less than Shut Down Entirely. He isn't playing the straight man anymore, he's treating Hawkeye like a particularly frustrating Puzzle Box -- an Object to be poked and dissected until it spits out the answer Sidney wants to hear.

People are always very quick to understand Hawkeye's frustration and anger in this section of the finale as an indication of mania, as anosognosia, but I can't see it as anything other than a perfectly understandble manifestation of Stress. After all, the way Sidney and the others are interacting with him here is explicitly denying him access to a key method of coping that Hawkeye relies on during his internment in Korea. In the episode 'The Interview', Hawkeye says outright that part of the way he copes with being drafted into a war against his will is to deliberately provoke reactions and joke around with people in order to get them to Look At Him so that he knows that they see and understand him as a human being. In 'The Grim Reaper' he says, "Joking about it is the only way of opening my mouth without screaming," in a way that ties back to episodes like 'The Follies of the Living Concerns the Dead' that relate an inability to be Perceived with a Final Death. Hawkeye seeks connection with other people to anchor himself to His Self as a human being, and Sidney is denying him this perception by refusing to actually visually or verbally engage with anything Hawkeye is saying. Hawkeye isn't a human being in the eyes of his friends anymore, he's being dehumanized at every turn in a way that is detrimental to Hawkeye on a number of levels. Of course he is frustrated and angry and confused -- what else makes sense for him to be feeling when they treat him like this?

The way Hawkeye is speaking in the hospital is not a deviation from his usual behavior or manner of speech. He is talking the exact same way he always has, but because of this shift in the way the people around him are perceiving him, he's suddenly considered alien and unstable. Hawkeye, however, has not experienced this shift in perspective -- he knows that he's speaking the exact same way he always has, and that nothing has fundamentally changed, except for the way people are speaking Back to him. His confusion, frustration, and anger are completley rational.

And circling back to the specific events of Hawkeye's breakdown at the camp, people have interpreted his behavior as anything from a manic episode relating to bipolar disorder, to a detachment from reality caused by PTSD, to an extreme psychosis in general. I, however, would argue that I'm not under the impression that Hawkeye was behaving irrationally or insanely during his breakdown at the camp. I think that Hawkeye made a deliberate choice to drive the jeep through the Officer's Club -- an emotional and impulsive one, certainly, but a deliberate one all the same -- and I feel that the text of the episode even backs me up on that. When Sidney outlines Hawkeye's actions as a "gotcha" to finally explain to Hawkeye why he's at the hospital, Hawkeye concedes the point but doesn't react as though he doesn't fully recall or understand his own behavior. He's cowed by the invocation of the events, but he's not surprised by them.

My interpretation of the events of Hawekeye's breakdown immediately preceding GFA is seemingly more and less straightforward than other people's usual interpretations. Hawkeye's reaction in the OR is a flashback -- although Hawkeye's brain has repressed the memory of what happened on the bus, it is still subconsciously Aware of what happened (the same way this manifested in the episode 'Bless You Hawkeye', and thus why Sidney is able to pick at semantics like Hawkeye's allusions to busses and chickens to peel back the eventual recovery of the memory), and so the sight of the anesthetist covering the patient's face with the mask provoked a flashback Hawkeye can't actually recall, let alone contextualize/ground himself through. He's being inundated with the emotions of the flashback, but has no context for what they're from. Even if he knows on some level that his reaction is caused by something coherent, he has no ability to explain it to anyone who is a witness to what's happening. At this point, based on previous incidents and outbursts in the OR from a variety of characters, I think it makes the most sense that at this point, Hawkeye was simply told to exit the OR and take a break. After all, several doctors have been overworked to the point of collapse and delirium due to the strain of how many wounded come through the camp, and I think it makes sense that Hawkeye's initial panic would simply have been chalked up to another one of these incidents.

It's the destruction of the O Club that seems to be more of a sticking point. Hawkeye leaves the OR still struggling under the weight of the whiplash of those recalled emotions of horror and grief and guilt and terror that his brain has shoved at him, which are feelings that intersect entirely with the Core Deep Rage at the Army for drafting him and putting him in this position during this war in the first place, which has been a core aspect of Hawkeye's character from the very beginning of the Pilot episode. And historically, Hawkeye has always coped with this anger via acts of destruction and disruption. Whether it's ruining a propoganda film reel, or gaslighting military officers into losing their commands, or defrauding the military out of thousands of dollars, or sending letters and telegrams to generals and politicians, or ordering takeout to Korea, to punching out Frank, to dumping a truck full of garbage onto the head of a general -- pranks, outbursts, and dancing on the edge of getting court martialed has always been Hawkeye's go-to. I think the only thing that sets driving through the O Club apart from these other incidents is that Hawkeye has finally run up against the end of his rope, he's finally been confronted with a situation that he's incapable of talking through or joking about. The O Club isn't a massive deviation from Hawkeye's typical patterns of behavior, it's just his first deliberate act of destruction that has no Punchline -- he's past the point of Joking, and I think this is why he chooses to drive through the O Club specifically.

Sidney says that he makes a glib joke about ordering a drink after the crash, but I don't think it's incidental that the O Club was destroyed. After all, the Officer's Club isn't just general property of the army that Hawkeye hates, it's also -- per the episode 'Officer's Only' -- explicitly a gift that was given to the 4077 by a General because Hawkeye treated his son that was wounded in battle. It is through and through a symbol of the Army, of its role in the war and its glorification of the wounded and dead that the conflict is causing, and even of Hawkeye's involuntary role in that cycle. It's also, in a way, symbolic of the general way the army treats its draftees as a whole -- a paltry gift that comes with pointless regulations and restrictions, and the paltry scraps of "here's how you can Cope, then" tossed at them carelessly, without giving a single shit about taking responsibility for the fact that It is the reason why people would wind up needing to drink to cope in the first place, or the ramifications of the only salient coping mechanism you Have being to drink to excess (a la the episode 'The Consultant', which really drives home the consequences of Getting Drunk to Cope directly into Hawkeye's face specifically). I don't think that Hawkeye is confused or delusional when he drives through the building, I think he does it on purpose because he's past the point of being able to come up with a punchline to justify his emotions anymore. He's beyond "Joking about it is the only way of opening my mouth without screaming", he's now left with Just Screaming as his only available choice.

(I think this also ties back in to episodes like 'Hepatitis', where the penultimate "reason" for Hawkeye's psychosomatic back pain is meant to be that he's supposedly repressing his feelings about being drafted, which I don't think is entirely accurate. After all, Hawkeye is and always has been extremely vocal about how much he resents the army for drafting him -- I think what he does repress is the Depths of that anger, because to fully express it to its genuine extent would be to do something so extreme that it would ruin his life. Therefore, Hawkeye's actions in GFA are a natural continuation of this conflict -- Hawkeye past the point of coping has left him with no choice but to finally express these emotions to their fullest extent for the first time simply because he Can't filter/compartmentalize them anymore.)

Ultimately, what I'm saying is that while Hawkeye is past the point of handling/coping with these emotions anymore, he isn't completely detached from reality when he does so. He knows what he is doind and why he is doing it -- he can trace a salient Point A to Point C despite the fact that he can't remember the speficics of Point B. He might not have driven that jeep through the club if he was "in his right mind", but that's only because he's usually capable of handling and venting out the emotions more acceptably, not because he's detached from what's happening. I think that's the core of his glib "That was strange" retort to Sidney invoking the crash in the hospital -- Hawkeye knows he did it and knows Why he did it, and even though it would serve his argument that he's perfectly sane well, he can't argue that point without risking putting himself into tangible legal trouble (which Hawkeye has always avoided despite his desperation to get out of the army due to threats similiar to what Clayton makes in 'For the Good of the Outfit', which is that the army is capable of completely ruining his civilian career beyond recovery if it chooses to).

And I do feel like the text supports this interpretation of events. For one, I find it notable that no one ever mentions anyone else being Hurt in this crash, and that Hawkeye never questions whether anyone was, which I think makes it almost guaranteed that no one Was hurt and that Hawkeye already Knows this. If he hadn't been fully aware of what he was doing, Hawkeye wouldn't have had the presence of mind to check to make sure no one was inside the building before he drove through the wall. The fact that he doesn't express any concern, to me, means that he already knew the club was empty. I think the most likely series of events is that Hawkeye went from his panic attack in the OR to going to the O Club in order to get drunk, and it was only after he'd gone inside and was ruminating in there alone that he became overcome with emotions he couldn't contextualize or handle, and then he left to go get the jeep.

Additionally, this interpretation would set itself up as a coherent parallel to Hawkeye's later choice to move the tank away from the camp after he returns from the hospital. Specifically, the way he delivers the "I don't know why I always have to take out the trash" line after he dumps the tank, and the way Potter and Mulcahy both immediately jump to the conclusion that this act is a backslide in Hawkeye's stability despite having no Real basis in this assumption. The fact of the matter is that -- as Sidney later agrees -- moving the tank was the single best way to handle the situation, it's the most rational move to make, and the only reason Potter hadn't already done it himself is because the Army haf irrationally given him the pointless order that no one was allowed to touch it. It's not only a callback to Hawkeye's previous impulsive act of destroying the Officer's Club (not an event we see, although I do think it's notable that the visual of Hawkeye driving the tank through the side of the Latrine is a direct visual parallel to what Hawkeye driving the jeep through the side of the O club would have looked like), but also as a callback to the show's original thesis statement being that The Army is insane, and it'll call You crazy for acting rational under its control.

I feel like Ginger's line in the episode 'Chief Surgeon Who' puts it best. When asked by a passing general, "Nurse, is everyone around here crazy?" she responds, "Everyone who's sane is, sir!". It's glib, but it's Righit. There's a reason why Klinger is never actually identified as Crazy despite constantly seeking this diagnosis, in contrast to several characters who are enthusiastic volunteers for the army Are called Crazy for their enthusiastic participation in the violence. There's a reason why Sidney in 'Hawk's Nightmare' explicitly identifies Hawkeye as "the sanest" person he knows Because of his emotional disruption caused by the war, and saying that if Hawkeye was crazy, he'd be sleeping like a baby. There's a reason why Flagg is never fired or demoted or called out for his behavior. There's a Reason why the General in the episode 'The General Flipped at Dawn' is given a promotion despite his clear instability. There's nothing 'sane' about a war, about the people who choose to perpeuate it, and who volunteer to fight in it -- wanting to get away from it is the only real rational response, and anything less is worthy of being called Derangement.

I also think that a woefully underexplored aspect to Hawkeye's understanding of events at the beginning of GFA is the fact that this is not the first time Hawkeye has been threatened with pscyhiatric incarceration that he knows to be completely baseless, wielded against him simply because he's vocal about hating the army and the fact that he was drafted into it. The episode 'Bananas Crackers and Nuts' tends to be disliked in the broader fandom due to the penultimate prank used to get back at Margaret, but the conspiracy against Hawkeye provides an enormous basis for the anger and frustration he displays in GFA, if what I've already outlined wasn't already enough. After all, if Hawkeye is experiencing his first genuinely hysterical emotional breakdown in his life, then it makes sense that he would contextualize this in the best previous frame of reference he has, which is that the people around him are trying to force him into psychiatric incarceration/treatment singularly because they find him annoying and inconveniently political and are Deliberately Lying in order to get him to shut up and kept out of thier lives because of this and nothing else.

The episode's ending prank's aggression towards Margaret is out of pocket, but it isn't exactly coming out of nowhere. After all, by deliberately getting Hawkeye sectioned in the 50s, they aren't just ruining his career for the rest of his life (there's a Reason why Hawkeye never angles to get out of the army on a section 8 the way Klinger does dsepite the fact that he's just as desperate to get out of the army as Klinger is), but the fact that they're trying to get him Incarcerated also means that he would be forced into Treatment as well, which in the 50s very often would mean ECT or outright Lobotomy, both of which were Popular at the time, meaning that Hawkeye isn't just looking at ruined career, but at debilitating permanent brain damage on a number of levels. Like, this is not a small thing that Frank and Margaret (and even the psychiatrist himself, who acknowledges that he knows Hawkeye was just stirring shit as a bit in their session together but continues to press for incarcerating Hawkeye regardless) are doing, and I do wish it got more attention for that.

So, with regards to GFA, it makes sense that Hawkeye's best understanding of what's happening is exactly what has happened previously, which is "Oh, the people around me are Lying to Do This To Me On Purpose", and the alien and uncomfortable and unusual ways everyone reacts to him through this episode only underscores this interpretation of events. After all, BJ spends the entire episode completely unwilling to relate to Hawkeye on any level (from practically throwing the phone to Mulcahy at the beginning, to obliviously spinning prose about how small his infant child is while Hawkeye is in the hospital, to refusing to give Hawkeye the proper goodbye he wants), and has Always been a big perpetuator of "Call Hawkeye Crazy to explicitly Dismiss him whenever BJ would rather ignore/repress whatever is happening instead of confronting it like Hawkeye is" throughout the show (see episodes like: 'Back Pay', 'Depressing News', 'Give Em Hell Hawkeye', etc.) The fact that everyone around Hawkeye very abruptly starts to treat him like he's insane and stops relating to him as a Person because he's shifted over to Mentally Ill in their minds (which is, in their minds, an entirely separate category, of course), then it Makes Sense that the only way Hawkeye would comprehend this shift would be as a Visceral and Deliberate Betrayal. Hawkeye's emotions about the army have always been treated as inconvnenient and annoying by the people around him (although it's certainly worth noting that Hawkeye's anger was previously understood and supported by other characters like Trapper, Henry, Radar, and Klinger in early seasons, but is increasinly dismissed by characters as the series continues, but more on that later), so this -- whatever restraints or sedation they decided to subject Hawkeye to while in transit to incarcerating him in Seoul -- just seems like another escalation of this treatment. Hawkeye wouldn'tinterpret this series of events as "Hm, Something must be actually wrong with me this time" because not only is no one explaining anything to him, but also because what he's doing in GFA is just a continuation of the anger he's expressed time and time again. He Would see it as "Hm, I've finally said it one too many times and now they've finally decided they've gotten tired of hearing it from me", and Because Hawkeye has made this transition from Person to Mentally Ill in the eyes of his friends, his frustration and upset at this betrayal isn't considered with any Weight, because Now it can be dismissed as Purely Paranoid, Just Another Symptom, furthering the claim that Hawkeye is detached from reality despite the fact that he Isn't, which becomes its own cycle of deliberate worsening the stress Hawkeye is under trying to understand and cope with this change.

Which is to say that the rest of the cast can dismiss Hawkeye's protestations as "He's detached from relaity and lacks insight into his behavior" without ever having to contend with their Own lack of insight into Hawkeye's behavior, and the possibility that it's driven in part by the fact that "At least one of these people doing this to me has specifically and deliberately put me in this position under false pretenses before once already" is a stone cold logical conclusion that it makes 100% sense Hawkeye would be operating from. Which is to say, I wonder if Margaret told anyone she's done this to Hawkeye before, or if she even remembers doing it at all. After all, she and Hawkeye are the Last characters from 'Bananas Crackers and Nuts' who are still present in camp in 'Goodbye Farewell and Amen' (Klinger was, of course, a recurring character in the first season, but wasn't present in this episode, which makes it safe to assume he wasn't witness to its events.)

You might be inclined to point out that this wasn't the Intention of the show's potrayal of Hawkeye's character arc in the show. Sure, point taken, but I'd counter that with the fact that Hawkeye doesn't really have a "character arc" in this show. Hawkeye is a character that remains largely unchanged throughout the course of the series (if anything, he even Mellows Out -- for example, contrast the season 1 episode 'Tuttle', where Hawkeye deliberately defrauds the military out of thousands of dollars, to the season 10 episode 'That Darn Kid', where Hawkeye seems insulted by the notion that he'd do something like defraud the military out of money). Instead, it's the Camp and the genre shift of the show as a whole that changes Around Hawkeye in a way that leads to him being read as increasingly unstable over the course of the series. As a Watsonian reading, this makes the most sense to be attributed to the more internal emotional and political contrasts of the characters around Hawkeye becoming numb tot he war, and finding it grating that Hawkeye refuses to become numb to it in the same way.

(You can also see this clearly in the disparity between the way Henry reacted to Hawkeye and Klinger's antics to the way Potter reacts to the same protests and outbursts. Henry always Discouraged Klinger's attempts to get out of the army, but often seemed to simultaneously admire his conviction and his creativity -- for example, his fond recollection of Klinger's attempt to paraglide back to the US with the "He might have made it if he'd had a better tail wind" line in 'The Trial of Henry Blake'. Potter, on the other hand, is much more critical and aggressive towards Klinger -- often outright threatening to have him arrested, court martialed, and imprisoned. Henry also always spoke fondly of Hawkeye and seemed to admire His conviction and dedication to his values, whereas Potter is much more likely to be dismissive to outright infantilizing in his responses to Hawkeye's stances -- for example, the derisive way Potter says "Having a toy to play with might just save you from permanently bunking in the loony bin" in 'Back Pay'.)

This is ultimately why I begin to struggle with interpretations of Hawkeye's character that deliberately diagnose him as Mentally Ill. I think there's something horribly grim in an insistence that his reactions in GFA are part of a History of unstable behavior -- something internal, something Individual, something Caused By His Brain -- rather than being a "reasonable" response to an utterly unreasonably horrific situation that Hawkeye was deliberately forced into against his will, and I think that the Mentally Ill label would only continue to perpetuate this violence against Hawkeye throughout the rest of his life. After all, being forcibly incarcerated and forced into 'treatment' (whether that Treatment is as benign as frustrating talk therapy he hasn't consented to or as extreme as heavy medications with permanent side effects, electroconvulsive therapy with permanent side effects, or outright lobotomy that he hasn't consented to) is just another genre of Being Held Hostage that Hawkeye is already a victim of as a draftee. Just because it's more Convenient to label Hawkeye as an unstable outlier rather than acknowledging the political, military, and traumatic situations that he was forced into that Directly Caused his emotional breakdowndoesn't mean it's Good or Just or Accurate.

Hawkeye doesn't change his political beliefs or how vocal he is about them, but his refusal to let go of his conviction even in the face of other people getting tired of it and beginning to view him as an aggressor because of it is what earns him a Mnetall Ill label as a politically fueld Punishment, not because of any inherent pychosis.

After all, like I've already spelled out -- Hawkeye's character has not fundamentally changed between 'The Pilot' and 'Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen'. From a purely objective point of view, there isn't a significant difference between Hawkeye dismantling the side of Henry's office to steal his expensive custom desk and Hawkeye driving through the side of an empty Officer's Club. The only tangible difference is that the latter lacks a punchline. Notably, however, the latter is framed as Alien in order to Other Hawkeye as Mentally Ill, and I think it's worth noting how the audience is just as encouraged as the characters to buy into this dichtomy.

Anyway, from a Doyalist reading, this shift is largely caused by MASH's genre shift from a Black Comedy Satire to a more Drama-based character driven comedy over time, as well as the general culture shift from the 70s into the increasing conservatism of the 80s. Hawkeye's character doesn't Change the same way Klinger's does, because Hawkeye has less leeway to be altered as the (white) Main Character, but his Role as a character begins to shift with the genres. He goes from being the Always Politically Correct center of the satire to needing character flaws to explore in a show more based around Drama. So Hawkeye shifts from being The One Who Is Right to being the butt of the joke because other "more grounded" characters think he's annoying or self-righteous, and make fun of/dismiss/call him crazy instead of engaging with the crux of what he's saying to them. For example, in the episode 'Adam's Rib's, Hawkeye's outburst about the food is a comedy beat but is crucially framed as Right -- Hawkeye is Correct to call out the food as being insult to injury, because the Army has trapped all these people in this camp without their consent and can't even be assed to give them decent food. Other character Know that he's right and respond to him accordingly, not just vocally supporting his riot in the mess tent, but also going out of their way to support and assist Hawkeye's effort to order ribs from Chicago to Korea. It's absurd, but it's treated as rational and positive. Contrast this to the episode 'Depressing News', where Hawkeye's monument is framed explicitly by BJ as just another crazy/quixotic waste of time, other characters may circle around his effort and quietly pitch in, but it's significantly muted, and even Hawkeye self-deprecatingly calls himself crazy for trying to prove his point about the waste and death and destructioin that the Army perpetuates instead having the same unapologetic energy that he'd had in the early seasons.

This is also why I find I strongly dislike 'Depressing News' specifically being used as "evidence" of Hawkeye having a manic episode as seen in Bipolar Disorder. It isn't that I have any particular beef with the interpretation of Hawkeye as Having Bipolar, it's that identifying the monument Solely as an act of mania feels Extremely like successfully ignoring Hawkeye's Point in favor of pathologizing his behavior and dismissing it all as symptoms without engaging with the political statement he's making (which is exactly what BJ is doing in the script, just with a slightly shinier veneer). I don't have a problem with people who choose to headcanon Hawkeye as Bipolar in a general sense -- I feel perfectly comfortable with people's interpretation of Hawkeye's fixation on getting the ribs to Korea in 'Adam's Ribs' as manic, although this might be influenced slightly by the way the episode treats these two incidents -- but I do think it's important to consider the political implications of calling a deliberate statement Hawkeye is choosing to make the result of irrational, impulsive behavior Rather Than a response to the sociopolitical environment he's being forced to live under.

Maybe this quote from Kiera Lyons' "The Neurodiveristy Paradigm and Abolition of Psychiatric Incarceration" puts it slightly better:

…psychiatry assumes that society does not cause distress in biologically normal people, who are considered biologically normal at least in part because they are economically productive. This assumption permits the conclusion that if a person is distressed to the point of unproductivity, it is because that person—not society—is abnormal. Thus, psychiatry’s commitment to biological essentialism not only masks the role of the constructed sociopolitical environment in creating distress but depoliticizes it by characterizing that allegedly irrational distress as induced by biological abnormality.

Psychiatry has always been used as a political tool to shut up dissidents. See: Ignaz Semmelweis, a doctor who was vocal about the importance of washing hands prior to surgery despite pushback from the rest of the medical community until he was committed to an asylum by his colleagues where he was beaten to death by a guard. See: the use of Schizophrenia diagnoses to dismiss the points made by Black activists as being baselessly paranoid and irrational during the fight for Civil Rights. See: diagnoses like Oppositional Defiance Disorder being used to silence and incarcerate people of color today. See: the historical diagnosis of Drapetomania wielded against slaves. And so and so and so and so.

Hawkeye's response to his involuntary psychiatric incarceration in 'Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen' does not happen out of nowhere with no context. He is a character who is already well-used to the intrinsic violence of his boundaries being considered an obstacle to ideal productivity and function. Hawkeye began the war as a draftee, held in the conflict against his will and given no choice about his presence or ability to leave, and Hawkeye ends the war as a victim of psychiatry -- held in a hospital against his will and given no choice about his presence there or his ability to leave. The locked doors of the psychiatric hospital are no different from the open tent of the Swamp. If Hawkeye (the patient) has a disagreement with the treatment (his presence in Korea), or objects to it, this is considered dissidence (a symptom) and therefore is seen as something not to be validated or respected. Thoughts, behaviors, beliefs -- these are all considered gold bricking (symptoms) if they are in opposition to Treatment (the Army) and must be broken down. However, compliance with The Army (Treatment) ((Violence)) (((killing and death and destruction and ophaning children and slaughtering civilians and destroying farmlands and economies and sending teenagers out to die in a conflict they have no stake in and kill as many people as they can on their way out and so and so and so and so and so))), is almost never seen as disordered or symptomatic or part of the problem.

"The fact that only extreme compliance is accepted by psychiatry is inherently violent and conditions people to accept abuse. Isolation and violence are not vectors of healing."

I don't forget, by the way, that Hawkeye's perspective of his "need" for psychiatric treatment changes over the course of the episode. After Hawkeye recovers the repressed memory of the baby on the bus, his tone shifts dramatically into a more timid and reluctant demeanor. He switches from being vehement that he's better off going back to the 4077th to help treat incoming casualities to being taken aback by Sidney's decision to send him back instead of sending him home. He becomes anxious and fidgety and hesitant when finally faced with performing a surgery. He identifies himself as not only previously, but actively "crazy" with more self-depricating conviction than we've ever seen from him in the series. To some extent, this is framed by the show as a Positive -- Hawkeye lacked "insight" into his condition previously, but now he has Gained "insight" and this hesitance as a result of this "Insight" is a net good he can now work to overcome.

It's just that I disagree with that.

After all, I think it's noteworthy that Hawkeye's memory of the child being killed on the bus does not intersect at all with his role as a Doctor or his ability to perform surgery. Hawkeye is not acting as a Surgeon when he demands the mother keep her child quiet, he's acting as an American officer in a warzone -- a terrified, unwilling one, certainly, but one all the same. I think it's interesting, then, that the recovery of this memory leads to a reluctance to perform surgery in Hawkeye. What is the intersection of thoughts there? It can't be the memory itself, so what is it?

I think it's the Fact that Hawkeye now identifies himself as Crazy that leads to this hesitance around surgery, not the trauma in itself. It isn't that the traumatic incident intersects in any way with his role as a surgeon to cause this anxiety, it's just Hawkeye no longer trusts Himself as an individual because he's bought into this narrative that everyone is pushing on him -- that he's Unstable, that he's Crazy, and that he Shouldn't be trusted to make coherent decisions for himself. In order to be Compliant with the treatment, Hawkeye is compelled to think of himself in these terms, it's Necessary -- according to Psychiatry -- for this to be the dichotomy he works under in order to make the work of 'Treatment' make sense.

It's not that I think Hawkeye didn't need to confront this repressed memory at all. Clearly, the imperfect repression was causing problems that directly interfered with his ability to do his job -- having flashbacks to something traumatic that you cannot understand or contextualize is not a good or easy thing to deal with. Yes, Hawkeye did need to recover and confront this memory despite his fear and reluctance to do so. It isn't that Hawkeye was perfectly alright before being hospitalized, it's just that the fact that insisting Hawkeye is Crazy for it is harmful and problematic. Yes, Hawkeye needed additional support and encouragement in order to process this trauma and integrate it in a way that keeps it from worsening his mental state, but No, Hawkeye did not benefit from the Sane-Insane dichotomy that psychiatry enforces in order to provide him that support. That is the core of the problem I see here, because Hawkeye's response to the situation isn't irrational, or detached from reality, or unstable, or confused, or baseless, or Mentally Ill. He was forced against his will to be present in a conflict he does not think is just or moral, he was in Korea against his will, he was on the bus against his will, he was hiding from people willing to kill him and his patients against his will, and in this moment of terror he acted out of a fear he has no ability to cope with, and as a result he wound up acting as a force of pressure that led to another innocent, terrified, unwilling woman to smother her own baby out of their shared fear of being discovered. What happened was completely horrific -- there is no coherent, "stable" way to react to this sitaution. If Hawkeye was able to shrug this onto his shoulders and carry it without a hitch, that would be an utterly insane response to what has occurred -- exactly as Sidney spells out in 'Hawk's Nightmare': "If you were crazy, you'd sleep like a baby."

Hawkeye's response to what happened on the bus is perfectly understandable, it's coherent, it's rational. It's a completely rational response to an utterly irrational situation. It Should Not Ever Have Been Allowed to Happen, and yet it did, and now Hawkeye is forced to deal with the fallout of it. The fact of the matter is that Hawkeye did need to work through this incident, but no part of Hawkeye's reaction deserved to be labeled Crazy or Mentally Ill.

[To be clear, my invocation of the words 'Crazy' and 'Mentally Ill' here are not meant to contrast Hawkeye as like, Neurotypical against a hypothetical Real Mentally Ill Person who does deserve this treatment. If this is maybe the first essay of mine that you're reading, let me be clear that I am Crazy. Instead, what I'm trying to do is invoke a sense of the way the other characters are biased against Crazy as a political category -- a person who can be dismissed as irrational and silenced and incarcerated without recourse. I'm not attacking individuals who choose to identify with psychiatric labels, but am attempting to attack the psychiatric System that sets up this dichotomy between 'Person who is Normal who deserves to be treated like a human being' and 'Person who is Abnormal who deserves to be dehumanized, objectified, and abused because we say so'. My critique is not meant to imply an argument of "Mental distress, disability, and neurodivergence aren't real", but that the psychiatric system's understanding and weaponization of these things is fundamentally Separate from these things existing as part of human variance. I'm not sure how clear I'm being if you don't have a pre-existing basis in reading anti-psychiatry theory, but I do encourage you to look into it further if you choose.]

Calling back to the Kiera Lyons quote above -- Hawkeye's reaction is normal, it's understandable, it's Rational. But under the pscyhiatric paradigm, it is forced to operate under the core presumption that if Hawkeye is distressed, it is because of a Personal Abnormality affected him as an Individual, rather than a societal and political environment that he's been forced into against his will. Hawkeye's reluctance in the latter half of 'Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen' isn't because he's Gained Insight and Realized that he's Unstable, it's because he's begun to buy into the false dichotomy that insists he's dealing with an Individual Flaw rather than the aftermath of a horrifically unjust tragedy. The fact that this perspective goes unchallenged is a natural consequence of the psychiatric paradigm they're operating under. Hawkeye has lost something, but it isn't any mental or emotional stability, it's his understanding of the situation as a whole. After 11 seasons and thee years of being stuck in this war, he's finally succumbed to the constant insistence that HE is the crazy one for being opposed to the violence and finding the army insane, and has lost trust in his sense of self and reality because of it.

Now I'll concede the point that Sidney is never the one pushing this dichotomy onto Hawkeye explicitly, outside of an oblique allusion to his behavior at the camp being abnormal enough to warrant intercecntion, but I do think it's significant that Sidney never Challenges this perspective either, despite having done so in the past. During the events of 'Hawk's Nightmare' in Season 5, Hawkeye spends a chunk of the episode vocally concered that his sudden onset of night terrors and sleepwalking indicates the possibility that he's losing his mind, but Sidney takes the time to directly dissuade this line of thinking and call out this dichotomy as false. He does the same thing in 'Bless You Hawkeye' in Season 9 -- he's continually reassuring and clear in his perspective that Hawkeye is having a rational reaction to his Environment and Circumstances, not experiencing an individual abnormality in brain chemistry or function.

Why, then, does Sidney not argue the same point in 'Goodbye Farewell and Amen'?

Well, I said it earlier in this essay: at some point during Hawkeye's breakdown, Sidney stops relating to Hawkeye as a Friend and Person and begins to interface with him Solely as a Patient. Sidney is no longer operating on a person-to-person equal footing with Hawkeye as a friend, he's operating as a Doctor to a Patient in a psychiatric context. In order to maintain this dynamic, he's Obligated to operate out of a sense of Superiority over Hawkeye -- Sidney is the one who has "insight" and Hawkeye is the one "without" is, Sidney is the Sane counterpoint to Hawkeye's Insanity, Sidney is functionally unable to still relate to Hawkeye as "the sanest person" he knows, because in order to operate as a Psychiatrist, the role necessitates that he alienate Hawkeye as Abnormal and Sick.

And honestly, I'd blame the setting for this more than Sidney himself. In previous episodes, Sidney has always operated by coming to the 4077th and having casual conversations with Hawkeye about what's going on, meaning that on a very fundamental level they're operating As Equals -- almost as if Hawkeye is asking for a Consult from another doctor rather than having an explictly established Doctor-Patient dynamic. In GFA, however, Hawkeye has been incarcerated in the hospital, and so in order for Sidney to justify holding Hawkeye in a locked room in a hospital against his will, Sidney has to maintain this perspective over him. That's the dichotomy that psychiatry operates under. It is much harder to justify taking someone's freedom and independence if you consider them an equal, so you Have to other them on some level in order to square this conflict with yourself.

I have seen posts in the fandom before talking about the tragedy of Sidney leaving at the end of GFA with the awareness that he has shifted out of the role of 'Hawkeye's Friend' and into the role of 'Hawkeye's Doctor', the grief he must feel for having to distance himself from that relationship that they had.

I have never seen anyone point out the horror of Hawkeye beginning GFA with the awareness that a person he has considered a trusted Friend is keeping him locked in a prison cell, is refusing to engage with him like he's a human being, and the tragedy of being forced to cope with this extreme shift in their relationship while simultaneously having to deal with the aftermath of an incredibly traumatic event, which is really just the icing on the cake that is the incredibly traumatic last three years of his life.

And I don't know... I think about that a lot.

...go back?