Why does she go on like this. I feel down too but have to keep going. If only she had will power. I don’t understand her…”
Disorders are never a part of an individual’s dreams. When it interludes into our lives our responses vary from rage to despair, conflicting as it dies with other aspirations, destroying all that we held dear, a mental battle follows. Each victim has to come to terms with the reality that this illness more than any other is a metaphor.
To have your mind and life within control once more becomes the object of living. Meditation and yoga, prayer and temperance, medicine and philosophy all find a place in this quest for the restoration of equilibrium and equanimity. But the single more important factor is support.
Even one relationship that remains undestroyed and unchanged represents the confidence that there is belief that things will be well again. A right balance of medication and therapy are crucially important but the support of friends, acceptance of a genuine kind are indispensable in rebuilding and living life once more.
Never gone
Ray Bradbury
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
Where the lines begin to blur
Since this photograph surfaced last week, it has been the centre of a lot of speculation on various mental health forums. While I have no way of establishing how authentic or old this photograph is (the EXIF data is not retrievable), or the veracity of the accompanying information that states that this incident took place recently at a state-run mental health hospital in West Bengal. The organization which posted the photograph removed it soon after which cast a big shadow on its origin. However it set me thinking about the nature of institutional violence in our country, especially in the mental health sector.
If you google for a history of societal attitudes towards mental illness, you will come across hundreds of articles on how the mentally ill were brutally beaten, tortured and confined. For example, a random search led me here:
Those considered lunatics were grouped into two all-encompassing categories: mania and melancholy. The only medical procedures centered around the idea of catharsis. Colonists believed to cure an individual it was necessary to undergo cathartic medical treatment, and to either catalyze crisis or expel crisis from the individual. Such medical procedures involved submerging patients in ice baths until they lost consciousness or executing a massive shock to the brain. Means to expel crisis from the patient included inducing vomiting and the notorious “bleeding” practice. The bleeding practice entailed draining the bad blood from the individual, unfortunately this inhumane practice normally resulted in death or the need for lifelong care; at best the odds were one in three that this procedure would actually lead to an improvement in the patient’s health.
We are in 2011 now, and a lot of progress has been made in the diagnosis and methods of treatment as well as societal attitudes towards the mentally ill. But throughout centuries of change, the image and role played by the institution remains enduringly pivotal: as a necessary but oppressive force that is resistant to change.
The photograph brings memories of similar incidents that have filtered out into the open in last decade. After the initial spark of disbelief and outrage from the general public, the stories soon found themselves buried underneath various other news headlines. Whatever be the public reception and scrutiny, this is a problem that keeps recurring in mental health institutions, and there is no bigger proof of this than the various testimonies of clients who are no longer under institutional care.
The abuse of power and the use of violence has been the subject of intense social and medical research leading to a whole movement where people from the medical as well as the non-profit fraternity have called for degrees of deinstitutionalization in order to provide better care and protection of the clients.
Actually no ‘civilized’ person condones violence but this is the paradox of growing up in a culture that internalizes violence as part and parcel of maintaining the status quo. It is very hard to communicate the dangerous consequences of violence as a method of “disciplining”. This crops up time and again when we discuss corporal punishment in schools, domestic violence within homes, as well using force in correction centres for juvenile delinquents. But especially so when it comes to the mental health sector where one often finds that the unpredictable nature of the illnesses can be extremely frustrating challenge for those who wish to be objective without losing their humaneness.
Trippy much?
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat. “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
On people who ‘whine’
I watched ‘Black Swan’ recently, and the film left me with mixed emotions. I haven’t stopped thinking about it, and going over certain parts of the film over and over again. The movie stays with you for a long time, if you allow it to affect you that way.
But this post is not a review of the movie. I want to go back to something a friend said while we discussed the struggle of Natalie Portman’s character Nina Sayers as a perfectionist, who is committed to her work so much, and the kind of breakdown she experiences. And then my friend said, ‘but she complains so much, she’s crazy, yes but I wanted her to just get over with it’.
I protested, loudly exclaiming that her illness was real, and the possibilities were very much that she herself does not realize that she is unwell. I don’t think my friend was very convinced, and maybe I did not do a very good job of explaining. Curiously enough, I felt emotionally very detached from the movie in the cinema hall, but felt a need to aggressively defend the character’s nature a week later.
Something similar happened with several members of a book club in Chennai, who thought that the protagonist of Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ whines her way through the book, because hey, she does have problems but so does everyone else in life.
Both the film and the book have a similar theme in the progressive deterioration and self-destruction of the protagonists as they grapple with their own and those of others’ crippling expectations and circumstances. Whether we choose to focus on the psychological issues in both the instances is irrelevant here, but what bothers me is this tendency in people to shrug off serious mental health issues as something “to get over with”.
Almost as if there were an internal switch, and you can switch it on or off at will.
Interestingly, while mental illness is still treated like a dirty secret in our times, there’s a certain morbid romanticism of the same in literary and cinematic portrayals. Images of the creative genius teetering over the edges of sanity in pursuit of their art is especially very tempting, with a certain kind of an ecstasy that we find in both the recovery or the destruction of such genius.
But that is the artist genius.
And then there is the everydayness of mental illnesses.
