Michiel's slogan T-shirt

Michiel’s slogan T-shirt is more than clothing: its changing messages let him make mental illness, stigma, and the ward’s rules visible in the everyday life of the PAAZ. The shirts provoke laughter and objections, but their force changes with the scene—from a joke against depression, to a dispute over what may be worn, to a phrase Michiel borrows from the narrator. The recurring garment gives words usually discussed as symptoms or rules a public, wearable form.

Slogans in the ward

One of Michiel’s shirts carries a sarcastic message about whether depression could possibly like its wearer. Its words remain legible even when Koos, a lively Jack Russell who has just been mistaken for a dead monster, paws enthusiastically at the fabric. Michiel laughs while the dog licks his face and scrabbles at his T-shirt. The comic scene makes the slogan part of an ordinary, affectionate interruption rather than a clinical declaration: the phrase and the dog’s exuberant body briefly share the same small space.

At another afternoon day opening, Michiel’s shirt declares its wearer both God and depressed. The message lands in a ward where some patients believe they are God, and Michiel argues that excluding his shirt would itself stigmatize them. He calls the combination a double diagnosis, turning the language of psychiatric classification into a punchline. His claim is deliberately provocative, but it also exposes an awkward boundary: a phrase can be treated as harmless humor by its wearer and as offensive by others in the same room.

Dress, rules, and confrontation

The shirt becomes the focus of a staff intervention during a tense period on the ward. Linda, who had acted as a kind of referee, has left; Iefke and Michiel are no longer speaking; and the residents sit through day opening in a disordered lounge while construction of the new PAAZ rumbles outside. Celine bends over the papers to hide a laugh as Leny, tired and direct, tells Michiel that the shirt cannot be allowed. The disagreement is therefore not an isolated joke: it unfolds amid strained relations and the sense that the ward itself is changing around its residents.

Michiel counters the objection by comparing his shirt with Beatrice’s long blue knitting project. He says his message is innocent, while Beatrice is allowed to spend the day making what he calls a noose. Beatrice is offended and insists it is a scarf; the exchange converts the T-shirt into one side of a broader argument about what the ward tolerates and who gets to define an object’s meaning. Leny distinguishes between the two disputes: Michiel may raise concerns about Beatrice’s scarf with the psychiatrist, but he must take off his shirt. When he starts pulling it over his head, she calls after him to do it in his room, not there. The garment is at once an expressive joke and something subject to institutional limits.

After the staff have gone, Michiel takes off the shirt in one movement and walks toward the kitchen door with it. He stops when Iefke appears in the doorway wearing shorts for gym. Her pale, scarred legs stand in stark contrast to Michiel’s long, tanned back. He stares coldly at the stripes on her legs, and then leaves without speaking. The account does not explain what he thinks, but the scene places the shirt’s earlier defiance beside a silence charged by the sight of Iefke’s scars. The garment is no longer the center of a verbal contest; its removal immediately precedes a moment in which nobody can easily speak.

A borrowed message

Later, the narrator finds Michiel back in his room, wearing a light-grey shirt whose message she recognizes as her own: the words urge people never to believe what they think. She points out that the text belongs to her, and Michiel raises an eyebrow at the suggestion that the shirt itself could fit her. His answer treats the borrowing lightly; he admits that the nurses apparently let him keep it on and jokes about taking a good idea from someone else.

The recognition stirs a complicated response in the narrator—relief, anger, sadness, and happiness—before the sight of the shirt brings a laugh. The moment does not establish why Michiel chose to wear her words, but it changes the shirt’s role in the story. His slogans have repeatedly made him conspicuous by challenging the ward’s expectations; now the message on his chest comes from the narrator, and she recognizes it as hers. The clothing carries language between patients, shifting from a site of public dispute to an unexpected point of recognition. Across these appearances, the T-shirt links humor, institutional control, and the fragile possibility of connection without resolving the conflicts that surround it.