I saw one of my favorite X-Files episodes the other night. It’s titled “Monday.” Mulder goes through the day repetitively doing the same things, including fumbling his chance to thwart a bank robber who blows up the bank and everyone in it, including Mulder. See the Wikipedia for a full spoiler alert but I’m going to spill the beans here anyway.
A lot of people think the idea was stolen from the movie “Groundhog Day,” which I’ve never seen. Actually, it was stolen from a Twilight Zone episode called “Shadow Play,” which I have seen.
“Monday” got good reviews overall, which is saying a lot. I never got the part about how a bank robber (Bernard) who can only land a job mopping floors would be smart enough to build a bomb jacket.
That said, the scenes are mostly everybody going through the day doing the same things over and over. Mulder and Scully both meet Bernard and his girlfriend Pam, who was always waiting outside in the getaway car and is the only one who remembers what has happened each and every time, which is about 50. Pam thinks Mulder is the key to disrupting the endless cycle. She has been trying to get Mulder to change what he does every time he walks in the bank just to cash a check and interrupts Bernard in the process of robbing the bank.
Mulder never gets it right away, but does wonder aloud that he’s getting a sense of déjà vu. Déjà vu is the sense that an experience is something you had before but could not have. The medial temporal cortex triggers the false memory and, normally, the frontal lobe says, “No, this is not a memory.”
Eventually, Mulder gets the idea of repeating to himself over and over that Bernard has a bomb and changes his approach by giving his gun to Bernard and telling him he knows he has a bomb. This approach is based on the assumption Bernard will walk out without setting off the bomb because Mulder will let him go without trying to arrest him.
Then, Scully brings Pam into the bank, and Bernard almost surrenders to Mulder, until he hears police sirens—and tries to shoot Mulder but instead kills Pam because she steps into the path of the bullet. He gives up and doesn’t set off the bomb. Pam changed the ending and notices just before she dies that it never happened in any of the previous enactments.
There’s the brain-based definition of déjà vu and then there’s a more mundane definition, both of which are in the Merriam-Webster dictionary on the web. The mundane definition is “something overly or unpleasantly familiar,” mainly about situations that happen repeatedly (“here we go again”).
We all recognize the second definition. We sometimes say or do something which we would not if we just recognized that it’ll trigger a pattern of events we would like to avoid. Something has to change in order to interrupt the pattern.
Psychiatrists and psychotherapists are usually experts in helping people change repetitive, maladaptive patterns of thought and behavior.
Medications can be helpful, for example in the repetitious thoughts and behaviors of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Some cases of that may respond better to a combination of psychotherapy and medication.
One of the challenges is that there are not enough helpers to help those who need it. Another challenge is that the ones who need help often don’t recognize they need it. That’s called lack of insight.
The cycle of lack of insight and unpleasantly familiar, repetitive patterns sometimes resulting in explosive consequences is ubiquitous in our society.
Can somebody please bring Pam into the consulting room?
Go Retire Psychiatrist 