Outspoken psychiatrist Yiangos Mikellides tells THEO PANAYIDES of the cowardly approach to life by Cypriots and how the mind is a biochemical entity
It’s wrong, of course, but looking around the packed waiting-room outside the office of Yiangos Mikellides – something of a TV celebrity, and certainly the best-known psychiatrist in Cyprus – you can’t help but check out the various people waiting for the doctor, and wonder what they’re here for. What’s the story with that silent teenage girl, looking shy and withdrawn as her Dad arranges her next appointment with Yiangos’ secretary? Depression? Anorexia? What about the yuppie-looking couple sitting on one of the couches, chatting amiably like a pair of diners waiting for dessert? Clearly, Yiangos deals with a wide range of problems. Later, as I’m leaving, the lift opens to reveal a clearly handicapped – special-needs – man in his 30s being led to the office by an older woman, presumably his mother.
The décor in the waiting-room isn’t guaranteed to soothe these anxious spirits. There are African masks, and a rather garish painting of a boy eating watermelon beside a pile of other watermelons. The window blinds are a multi-coloured patchwork, with red and gold the most prominent colours. On one wall there are two paintings, stylised renditions of Yiangos himself in a pensive pose. The two paintings are identical, but the top one is ever-so-slightly crooked. I instinctively straighten it – then wonder if it might be a trap, to spot the obsessive-compulsive.
On a table in the middle are piles of books. Some are work-related (one is called Psychiatry For All) but also available, for sale at €9 each, are Yiangos’ own books which have nothing to do with psychiatry, being collections of his newspaper columns, mainly for Politis. I knew he wrote, but had never really checked out his work. I skim the books at random – they’re called De Profundis, Volume 1, 2 and so forth – and I’m taken aback by the tone: the columns are rants, eloquent and funny but seething with satirical rage. “The ambalatoi [crazy people] and the European Union” goes a typical title. Cyprus is “an immature, hypocritical society with no democratic tradition,” claims one chapter, going on to pour scorn on named politicians. (I later find out he’s been taken to court twice for libel by prominent persons, winning his case on both occasions.)
I remember the books a few minutes later, sitting behind a pair of double doors in Yiangos’ office, face-to-face with the man himself. He’s portly, bearded, eyes drowsy and a little bloodshot. He’s 63. His shoulders are hunched (he’s apparently quite tall and gangly when standing up), his expression saturnine, a cigarette clutched between his fingers. He has a tendency to glower; he mumbles answers in a low staccato, quick spurts of talk that melt into a jumble on my tape-recorder. He doesn’t seem grumpy, just disinclined to chat (to be fair, it’s his lunch hour). Sometimes he laughs, uproariously. We talk in Greek, with frequent digressions into English – he lived in the UK for about 20 years – and coarse Cypriot dialect, making much of what he says untranslatable.
Does he ever find his strong views getting in the way of his work as a psychiatrist? After all, some of his patients might feel –
“What strong views?”
Well, for instance, in his books. Didn’t he call Cyprus society immature and hypocritical?
“Isn’t it true?”
It might be true, I point out, but not everyone would say that.
“Really? Go take a walk outside.”
Well at any rate, not everyone would write that.
“I write it.”
Why?
“Because I don’t care, basically. I don’t care what people will say. I care about the truth – what’s really happening. I mean, whatever you do, what’s really happening is happening. You understand what I mean? Whichever way you say it – nicely, politely, roughly – it’s still happening.”
‘What’s really happening’, at least on our dodgy little island, is crisis and ineptitude, according to Yiangos – sexually, emotionally, politically, financially. He seems both disgusted and fascinated by the modern Cypriot. I notice a video screen behind him, showing the people in the waiting-room (there’s a closed-circuit camera) and wonder for a moment if he likes to observe them, like an entomologist looking at his insects, but in fact there’s a practical reason for the camera – “not for policing reasons,” he makes clear, but just to keep things flowing and ensure it doesn’t get too packed out there.
I assume that patients come to talk about their problems, so he tries to ensure that sessions don’t run too long – but in fact I’m wrong, because that’s not how he works at all. He’s not a therapist. He’s been a psychiatrist for the past 30 years, but all that’s changed in that time (he says) are the drugs he prescribes. “Without drugs, we’re redundant,” he insists. “Mental illness is biochemical illness. Meaning that its cause is biochemical abnormality, and its cure is biochemical treatment.”
But doesn’t the person’s psychology come into it?
“Kolokouthkia me tin rigani!” he snaps, a Cypriot euphemism that translates as ‘nonsense!’ (though a pedant might translate it as ‘courgettes with oregano!’). “Psychology is over, it doesn’t exist anymore. There are no [psychological] treatments anymore – Freud’s treatments, which were very romantic and interesting, they don’t exist.”
So he doesn’t believe in psychoanalysis?
“It’s over,” he replies. “It’s there as an issue, but no longer as a practical treatment.”
I thought he talked with his patients, I say, sounding a little disappointed. I thought they worked things out.
“Yeah, right!”
Yiangos insists his job is “rewarding and interesting” – and of course it takes skill to prescribe the right drug for the right ailment – but it does sound a bit clinical, viewing people as medical problems. It may be significant that, despite his celebrity (mainly from TV talk-shows, playing Dr. Phil to Elita Michaelides’ version of Oprah Winfrey), he lives quite an isolated life in a large house in Pyrga where “I work, I have goats and so on. I’m basically a farmer”. He reads, writes his newspaper columns – four articles a week in various papers – and maintains his collection of around 1,300 archaeological artefacts (the biggest on the island), some of which he inherited from his father and grandfather.
Does he even like people? Of course, he replies: “I love communicating with people; I’m extremely communicative”. He likes going out and being approached by fans, he likes “show” – but he also admits he leads quite a sparse social life, and hates going to parties. But didn’t he just say he likes give-and-take? Yes, but not in that way; he prefers to do it “in a shy way. I’m a shy person, anyway.”
He may be shy, but he speaks his mind. Why don’t more people do this? “Cypriots are cowards,” he replies. “Whether it’s our genes, or our history – a very cowardly people. Shit-scared. And they brown-nose, and kiss ass, and brown-nose…”
Yiangos is in rant mode now: “I think, as a race, they’re cowards. They’re like women. Don’t you hear their voices?” Excuse me? “Their little voices. Eee eee eee,” he adds in a whimpery falsetto. “They won’t seek confrontation, they won’t say ‘Mikellides, you’re an idiot!’ – it’s all ‘oh, Mr. Mikellides…’”. He used to hear it with his father, a Nicosia pharmacist whose voice literally changed when he went to meetings with big clients. “I’d say ‘re Andrea, what’s happened to your voice, re koumbare?’ It became softer. He became more of a kiss-ass”. He prefers the English working-class, adds Yiangos, who’ll “beat you up in two seconds flat” – and of course it must be significant that he lived in Britain between the ages of 17 and 40, giving him an outsider’s perspective on his fellow countrymen.
The Cyprus he remembers from his childhood – he was born in Nicosia but grew up partly in the village of Yialousa, where his family came from – was a different place. Was he happy then? “It was the best time of my life,” he replies simply. “It was a happy life, a free life let’s say. It was a life without demands, without…” he pauses, trying to find the words.
“It was a straight life, you know what I mean? It was fields, donkeys, pilgrimages, churches, priests” (even though he no longer finds any solace in religion). “It was a sweet life.” A simple life? “It was more intellectual than now,” he demurs, “it wasn’t simple. You thought a lot, but your thoughts weren’t petty. My feeling nowadays about the people who surround me,” he adds darkly, “is that, if we were back in those days, I’d have them all executed!”
Fortunately, he laughs – but a few minutes later he’s Mr. Angry again. “Right now we’re 24 hours away from financial catastrophe!” he declares, “and they’re all playing pello,” meaning hiding their heads in the sand. ‘They’ are his hated nouveaux-riches, the Cyprus elite and of course the politicians. An expletive follows, then a dig at a well-known MP whom he calls a “kolokos”.
“They don’t try to understand that all these houses they’ve built with loans and so on will collapse like a house of cards if there’s even a mild economic crisis!” he expostulates. “After all, we have no manufacturing, we don’t produce anything. We just run after the Russians and kiss their ass, and the Archbishop meets with them and gives them medals!”
Does he find these things reflected in his patients? All those random people in the waiting-room? Yiangos shrugs; there’s some depression and psychosis, he admits, but Cyprus isn’t too afflicted with psychological problems – at least not yet. The main thing he sees (and he sees it more and more these days) are patients who can’t afford to pay, just because they have no money. But it’s all so dysfunctional. Even sex is dysfunctional.
“Sexually, the Cypriots are a mess,” he claims – though he doesn’t seem to distinguish between sex and marriage. “To have sex, you need to have a dowry,” he explains, i.e. many (or most) Cypriot marriages are based on money. The cash supplied by Prospective Father-in-Law makes all the difference to whether or not you marry little Katerina – but “from the moment you marry Katerina for money, from that moment the sex is finished.” But what if you like her? “With all the oppression you get from the father-in-law, even if you like her a little it’ll fade,” he replies. “If you like her a lot, then OK, but…” he shrugs to indicate the remoteness of that scenario.
We could go on all day – but the video screen shows the waiting-room outside filling up again. More unhappy people looking for solutions. Does he ever feel like a witch doctor, I ask (a little mischievously). Does he ever sense patients coming to his office as they might approach the tribal shaman, a magic man with magic potions? He pauses, not entirely displeased with that suggestion. “I wouldn’t go to that extent,” he says finally. “But I do have a role in Cyprus society. A stabilising role.”
Anything else? Anything he’d like to tell the world? “I don’t have a damn thing to say to any pezevegi [bastard],” he snarls playfully, doing Yiangos the Punk again. We shake hands, but I blurt out ‘I hope you start loving people more someday’ as I take my leave – I’d meant to say ‘Cypriots’, but it came out wrong – and his face falls. He assures me that he does love people, and I’m sure he does. No-one could spend all day for the past 30 years talking to that random parade of humanity – silent girls, yuppie-looking couples, the neurotic, unstable and handicapped – unless they loved people, even if they didn’t always show it. Yiangos Mikellides is no misanthrope. He’s just such an ornery old goat.
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