You also learn that his traumatic amnesia was complicated by his belief that he was directly affected by whatever was on television. The news events -- especially family tragedies -- affected him deeply. Hospital staff and doctors tried to restrict his viewing to reduce complications, but that decision only seemed to depress him. Instead they reinstated his television privileges and tried to use the emotions he displayed about news shows in his therapy. Perhaps, they reasoned, some family tragedy had produced the traumatic amnesia.
For the past month, Mr. Wilcox repeatedly complained, "the sky was falling." He made objections most strenuously when confined his bed at night, or the mornings upon awakening. He pointed towards the ceiling and walls and maintained, "There's trouble here, trouble from the sky." On several occasions he had to be restrained forcibly with drugs. This all occurred during the month that the Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded in the sky over Cape Canaveral, and videotape replays of that event had been aired on the news constantly. Given Wilcox's past history of responding emotionally to tragedies, doctors and nurses interpreted his statement "the sky is falling" as a reference to the Challenger disaster. But perhaps that was not all there was to it. Taken alongside his unwillingness to go to bed at night, his complaints about an impending tragedy could have had altogether different meaning: perhaps the "sky" was a reference to perceived structural defects in the walls and ceilings of his room. Indeed, it could be that Wilcox was trying to direct attention to the actual physical deterioration of his room. That he was a mental patient with a history of placing himself in current news events may have only lead those charged with his care to dismiss allegations as "crazy."