‘Ik ben God en ik ben depressief’

Michiel’s declaration that he is God and depressed turns a slogan on his T-shirt into a joke about diagnosis, stigma, and the differences between patients’ inner lives. Its meaning shifts when Emma recalls it beside Beatrice’s account of losing her felt connection with God: what had made most of the group laugh now marks a painful experience that Emma had failed to understand.

The slogan in the morning circle

At two in the afternoon, the ward gathers for its daily opening in a messy sitting area. Linda, who had served as a kind of referee, has left; Iefke is at the doctor, and Iefke and Michiel are no longer speaking to each other. The atmosphere is so strained that the efficient pounding from construction of the new PAAZ seems to announce that the current ward is already becoming obsolete. In this subdued setting, attention returns, as it often does, to Michiel’s T-shirts.

When Leny asks what his shirt says, Michiel gives the slogan’s plain meaning: he is God and depressed. Beatrice springs up, dropping her knitting. Leny, rubbing her eyes, says the shirt cannot be allowed, while Celine bends over the papers to hide a laugh. The shirt’s irreverence cuts through the weary routine, but the room’s response makes clear that its humor is not shared by everyone.

Humor, stigma, and the double diagnosis

Michiel challenges the objection as stigmatizing. There are, he points out, plenty of people in the ward who believe they are God; he sees no reason he should be barred from wearing an apparently innocent message. He describes the combination as a double diagnosis, making the phrase work both as a joke and as a pointed challenge to the standards being applied to him.

He sharpens the argument by contrasting the ban on his shirt with Beatrice’s knitting. The work in her lap is a noose, and Michiel asks why his text should offend when she is allowed to spend the day making it. His retort exposes a real tension in the scene: the ward is trying to regulate expression, but the same meeting contains signs of distress that cannot be made harmless simply by treating them as routine. The slogan’s comedy depends on a collision between grandiose language and depression; the exchange around it reveals that the collision can land differently for different people.

Beatrice’s loss and Emma’s recognition

Later, Beatrice tells Emma that she no longer feels God. Her account gives the slogan a second, more serious resonance. During her first week on the ward, she received pills for the first time in her life; after three days, she says, her sense of God’s presence was gone. She went home believing that stopping the pills might bring that presence back, but it did not, and she eventually returned to the PAAZ. She remembers having felt God even while depressed and even after losing her child. Now, she says, she has never felt so alone.

Emma remembers Michiel’s shirt and the laughter it prompted from everyone except Beatrice. The remembered joke becomes evidence of Emma’s own failure of attention: she admits inwardly that she had never understood Beatrice and had never made much effort to do so. The slogan has not changed, but Emma’s understanding of its limits has. A line that could be enjoyed as a comic pairing of identities had sat beside a kind of spiritual loss that the joke did not register.

A phrase reframed by grief

When Beatrice asks whether Emma knows the feeling, Emma says she does not—not as far as she knows. She acknowledges that losing such a sustaining feeling sounds both precious and cruel, then suggests that perhaps its absence comes from depression rather than the pills. Depression, she proposes, can consume the energy needed to believe just as it can drain the ability to laugh, feel happiness, or love; perhaps Beatrice’s feeling could return if the depression receded. Emma touches Sergei’s scarf as she speaks, and the moment carries a dull pain of its own, though she does not claim to share Beatrice’s experience.

Emma then asks whether Beatrice has considered grief therapy. She recalls that Beatrice introduced herself to everyone by saying she had three children, and connects that wording to the death of Beatrice’s son. Emma refers to her own mother having experienced the same kind of loss, while carefully admitting that she has no children and cannot know what it feels like. Beatrice remains silent before answering that she does not know whether such a loss can ever be processed. In this conversation, the shirt’s pairing of divinity and depression gives way to a more difficult distinction: the same ward contains people whose suffering cannot be understood through a shared joke, or even through another person’s attempt at empathy.