Monteverdi: Orpheo

Monday morning and I'm bunking group to drink coffee and read anther great American beat novel. I ate a whole meal last night and slept for twelve hours, and I didn't, I really didn't want to spend my newly discovered vitality on being miserable, upset and exhausted, which is what group always makes me. I've been working every evening this week. Again, I fail to find any sort of balance- from not working at all I go to working every day without any space in between, and I can't figure out how you know when you need a rest or a holiday, unless it's when you are physically incapable or moving your body anymore. Like I can't figure out how you know when to eat unless you are shaking and your blood sugar is so low that you can't walk downstairs because your depth perception has gone peculiar. Black and white thinking is an innocuous sort of phrase, and it would be fine if it was just thinking but it's a big think for simple words. It's what happpens when the world and everything in it fails to make sense to you. It's not just people love you or hate you, it's that you are either full or empty, running or stationary. It's a very physical thing, and until you have tried to live like that for a week you don't know how diibilitating this disorder can be.

The fact that people can manage the miraculous balancing act which is health, mental and physical, without even thinking about it seems to me impossible. At the moment, I have to do everything consciously. I have to go through all the steps, asking myself what I want, what I need, what the situation is, what other factors are in play, what the repercussions will be, how I will feel tommorrow- writing the whole thing down if necessary. Deciding to eat or sleep is a process which can take fifteen minutes of reasoning and a few minutes of medtative analysis while I try and work out if I am hungry or tired. Don't even get me started on things like aranging to meet people. Things like that entail days of agonising and days afterwards of mental self-flagilation and often it just seems easier not to bother.

It seems hard to believe that recognising physical signals and knowing when to respond to them and how are things that you learn, but they are, and I am. And my god it seems hard. To carry the balance simile a little further, what I lack is any sense of true. One knows instinctively, through whatever cunning thing the inner ears and brain do, when you are the right way up, and when you aren't, and when you are safe and when you are about to fall, and what to doo about it. There is a similar instinct in almost all other areas of life, from the basic to the complex, from when to eat to when to love to when to be happy. And how much. The how much is often the problem. If you lose your balance your ears tell you how far to right yourself so you don't go too far the other way. I'm like one of those toys with a round base that swing constantly and frenetically in action and reaction from one side to the other and round and back constantly on the brink of toppling over completely. Whatever the emotional equivalent of my inner ear is is fuckt, basically, so instead of knowing how far I've fallen and how far backwards I need to go I have to measure the distances, do the maths, then measure again and hope I got it all right and then travel backwards and try aand assess whether I am upright because there is nothing external to tell me.

The nothing external is the other problem, and that's where your traditional new-pilot-in-clouds metaphor comes in. If there's nothing to tell you whether you are the right way up then you are liable to fly out of the clouds upside down, except there is no outside to these clouds, There is just smoke and uncertainty. I have no idea which direction I am facing most of the time. So I'm taking a morning off, and reading cheerful books about starving men and drinking coffee because I sat down for three quarters of an hour last night and decided that that is what I should do. Put like that I say, jesus, just give me a gun so I can shoot myself. Being alive should not be this much hard work.

Some programme on radio 4 about old manuscripts

I feel that I should be making more actual factual about my day posts to make this blog more interesting. I don't think that would make this blog more interesting, since my days are about as moment to moment interesting as Waiting for Godot without any of the jokes, the metaphysical implications, or the icecreams in the interval. Still, I am resolved to try, but not today- like Aquinas I say God, make me good, but not yet. I promise to try factuality and fun next time, though, if you promise to put up with one more post about being miserable and suicidal. What jokes! What larks we are having!

I was reading through some old notebooks today, from a few years ago when I really was a bit peculiar in the head and when I tried to kill myself a few times in a way which obviously failed unless I am writing thins from a bed BEYOND THE GRAVE while drinking beer out of a MUG MADE OF GHOSTS. Even when filtered through the depressive paranoid but oh! so illuminating ramblings of my own notebooks what I remember of that time is fragmented. Mainly, I remember being utterly dislocated from my life and the world, feeling like I was behind glass, or in aspic, and at the same time unconnected from my body and unable to feel anything at all. Now, I recognise this as the fairly mundane but unpleasant and weird phenomenon of dissociation, which is a sign that I need to go somewhere safe and work out what's up with me and then do something about it. Back then, I thought it was a pretty sure sign that I was already dead, which just goes to show how you can get up in the morning with a tricky but curable mental health problem and end up Sylvia Plath by lunchtime.

What became clear from all this reminiscence on good times past which wasn't at all clear when moment to moment living was so unendurable that dying wwas truly all I wanted is that suicidal thoughts and intentions aren't any different to other symptoms of depression- sleeping a lot, or drinking, or eating weird foods covered in salt (although that last one might just be me)- and those in their turn aren't any different from symptoms of other illnesses, like rashes or spots or having achey joints or palpitations. Suicidal thoughts are the symptom of depression which will kill you like having your throat swell up is the symptom of a nut allergy that will kill you- it's what makes it a potentially fatal illness and not, for example, whinging and self-obsession, and the chances of it being fatal just get higher if you are afraid to talk about it, though the rather nasty little catch 22 is that part of being depressed is being afraid to talk about it. Just like if you eat nuts and your throat swells up and you don't mention it to anyone you are more likely to die than if you just go to casulaty and get your shot of adrenaline or whatever it is they shoot into you if you eat a nut, if your brain goes weird and you start wanting to kill yourself and you don't mention it to anyone you are more likely to die than if you go to hospital and get whatever it is you need to sort yourself out.

The further difference between the two is that if you eat a nut and don't tell anyone because you don't know what's happening and your throat is too tight to talk and you're scared and as a result you die then people (they! mind the paranoia gap) probably wont say you killed yourself. They'll say it's a tragedy you didn't know you had a nut allergy and wasn't it a dreadful accident and a pointless waste of life. If you succumb to depression, on the other hand, the general consensus is often that you somehow had a choice; that you could have fought harder- you should have told someone, or seen what you had to live for. Also, you shouldn't have acted on your thoughts, you should have controlled them- but suicidal thoughts aren't controllable, or at least they aren't controllable immediately, without theraoy or medication or some combination of the two. ILet's get even bigger and say that the mind isn't controllable- as anyone ought to know if they have ever been too excited to sleep even when they wanted to sleep, or walked on stage and felt a big old urge to wee from nervousness, or been in love with someone unfortunate. Saying that someone with severe depression shouldn't kill themselves isn't at all like saying they should try and see the bright side; it's like saying someone with pneumonia should just try a little bit harder to breathe and while they're at it should stop their lips turning blue and come down to dinner because everyone else you know manages to do it every day even Aunt Mabel and she's ninety four and only has one leg.

There is a hideous disparity between the way we as a society deal with physical illness and the way we deal with mental illness. That's mainly regarded as a truism. What we don't do is think very hard about why that should be. I don't think it's just to do with prejudice. I think it does have a lot to do with fear, but I don't think it's fear of the mad- I think we're getting a little bit past that now, although you wouldn't think it if you heard what respectible news programmes had to say, quite casualy, about personality disorders (and that's a whole other rant). I think it's to do with fear of the mind, and, specifically, about fear of our own minds. A hundred years of Freud, and the idea of the subconscious- of a bit of the mind- a bit of our minds- that isn't transparent and controllable, still scares the shit out of us. Accepting that suicide is the tragic outcome of a fatal illness opens the way to the closing of choice. The idea that we don't, always, have the choice what we think or feel, or the choice to act on those thoughts and feelings. If we see suicide as either weakness or madness then we never have to think what the act might say about each one of us- we never have to see our minds as things that we don't automatically understand.

The most terrifying aspect of being diagnosed with a mental illness is realising that your mind is not a transparent arbiter of truth. You don't know it just because it's yours: like the body it has a surface which you know and an inside or underneath which you don't. That's a hard thing to accept, bringing with it as it does the idea that truth isn't a simple matter of seeing and perception isn't just about receiving and processing (which we should all know if we'd read our Kant but alas the youth of today). Truth, trust and choice become infinately more complicated if you accept that your mind isn't a thin shimmering thing the entirety of which is within your view and conrol. Ultimately, we have to challenge the idea, legacy mainly of Descartes (the Greeks never had it), that the self is located solely in the mind while the body is functionally dispensible. Personally, I also blame Descartes for the fact that in 2007 people still seem to think that psychotropic drugs work by magic- look, man! you put a pill in your mouth and it comes out in your mind! cool!- and don't take it as a total piece of obviousness too stupid to mention that emotions and brain chemicals and what you eat are all linked up. If we could only stop seeing ourselves as divisible and understand that mind and body and self are an unholy and inextricable trinity, then perhaps we could stop seeing physical illness as divisible into the present tense curable and the future tense curable while mental illness is divisible into weakness and voodoo. Then we could do something about the appaling mortality rates for mental illness. One in ten for BPD. If that was nut allergies we'd be writing to the Times.

Billie Holiday: lady sings the blues

In therapy this week I had one of the sudden flashes of understanding which therapy can bring you at times and about which it is easy to be derisive if you haven't needed them, or experienced them, or known what it's like to seek a cure for something which is invisible and in your head. They aren't Freudian flashes; they aren't dark and sudden dream revelations; not realisations that your brother stold your doll when you were six and now you fuck everything that moves in revenge or out of a desire to get your doll back. These flashes are usually quite simple, and in retrospect seem self evident; they are more like the tying up of threads, or the untying of knots- two things which were unrelated suddenly knit themselves together and you see why something is. These moments are rare in my experience. Most of therapy is the constant chipping away at the ways you think about yourself, and it you only see it working later, when you look back in suprise and see how far you have come. But the odd moments when something suddenly makes sense make you feel like you have achieved something fast, even though usually what you have achieved is seeing a new way in which your behaviour is pretty much completely futile.

The session was long and hard. I started it in tears, and ended it in tears, and there were quite a lot of tears in the middle too. I've been feeling a particularly pernicious hate towards myself lately. It's partly that my mood has cycled back into depressed again, and partly that a lot of things feel like they aren't going very well in my life at the moment, but I have been feeling like a faliure, a waste, a lazy lump of nothing. I have been feeling like nothing will ever change. Like I will be forever unhappy, alone, chaotic, without the qualities other people have which make them personalities, which give them souls. I have felt myself to be souless. I have felt myself to be loveless. I have felt myself to be lonely and unlovable, have felt that the centre of my being is rotten, and that, more to the point and worst of all, it's all my fault. As a result I haven't been eating. I don't mean that I haven't been eating properly, or that I haven't been eating three meals a day. I mean that I stopped eating anything, at all.

In amongst trying to explaiin this (badly) to my therapist, and crying a lot and sniffing repellantly, and being in all ways a miserablist snotbag, I understood suddenly what it is that people get wrong about eating disorders.

It is true that eating disorders as I understand them (and my own, if it even gets dignified with that name, has always been mostly latent, a last resort when all the other ways of quietening my thoughts have gone away) have very little to do with getting thin and nothing at all with getting beautiful. It is also true that the prevelance of size zero models in the media is very bad for eating disorder statistics. These two points often seem to be set on opposite sides of debates at present, and that to me seems wrong. The link which is disturbing is not the link between thin and beautiful, but the link between thin and happy, and eating disorders are all about being happy.

The thing is, if you feel that you aren't loved, if you feel flawed and failing, then you look for a way out. The impulse towards health is incredibly strong, but also terrifyingly easy to subvert- in myself, the impulse towards health has almost lead to my death, and that's the somewhat bitter irony in personality disorder based mental illnesses. When things are bad, people look for a way to make them better, and the horrible thing about the media culture at the moment, the awful, glib cruelty of this consumer society, is that it gives the impression that thinness and happiness are the same thing, so that you can attain one by striving for the other. If you look through celebrity magazines (and they used to be a secret vice of mine, before they started making me so angry I wanted to be physically sick all over their glossy entrails, so I know what's in them) what is notable is not the copy which says that thin is beautiful, but the images which say that thin is happy- pictures of thin, happy celebrities in love with nice clothes, and fat, miserabe celebrities in rehab with tracksuits.

Eating disorders aren't about the need or desire to be thin. They aren't about emulating celebrities. They have bugger all to do with girls (and, increasingly, boys) being told that the ideal is thinness. People with eating disorders aren't dim, and they aren't shallow, and this sort of reductivity is not a little insulting. On the other hand, the mind, and particularly the unhappy mind, is a very simple thing. It will latch on to something which it thinks will relieve the awful grinding moods, and it will take a lot to unlatch it, because the mind also has a tendency to blame itself, to think that if it isn't happy, then it just isn't trying. The thing it latches onto might bbe quite simple, but there's a supersitious thing going on in the human psyche that's hard to undo with education, and it comes out when a person is in pain. If you've never been depressed then think of times you have experience physical pain- wouldn't you have latched on to anything if you thought it might take that pain away? If someone had told you that not eating would make the pain go away, wouldn't you have done it? Of course, no one would tell you that, because it would be criminally negligent as well as grossly stupid, but while we are open enough about physical pain to sell analgesics over the counter, we don't talk much about pain in the mind and pain in the psyche. Too many children grow up not knowing how to salve unhappiness and make themselves feel better. Without a learned, healthy path the drive to happiness will make its own, and if thin and happy get linked then it's easy to see why it might forge that way. The tragedy in watching someone with a severe eating disorder is not watching someone starve themselves in an effort to achieve bodily perfection, but watching someone desperately unhappy try to make themselves happy, and fail, and try harder, and fail harder. It's the will to life and health getting it all wrong again. If you look at it like that, it's so sad it almost takes your breath away.

It was something like this that I understood, suddenly, while howling my way through another miserable therapeutic hour. I'm lonely and unhappy just now, and I want to do something about it, and somewhere in me there is something which says that if I were only thin then I would be happy and I would be loved. And so I stop eating. And of course I know it isn't going to work. I know it isn't going to bring my mother back from the dead or give me a dad who isn't a flakey, crazy alcoholic, but those things don't matter in this context- they're complicated, analytic needs with subjects and objects which come from the conscious mind trying to work out what would make me feel better. The drive to happiness isn't really conscious and it certainly isn't complicated. It's very simple, and it's very strong, and it's very hard to reason with when it's decided on its particular method, and it's why some people will starve themselves to death because they think it might work, and it's why I have cut my skin so badly I look like a tabby cat, and it's why people will eat until they can't walk, or drink until their livers disintegrate, or work until their families fall apart.

Somewhere, I think, our whole society had its will to happiness subverted so badly it's lost all sense of how you get to be well. That's quite broad as staements go, though, and might have something to do wwith the fact that I'm a bit depressed myself right now and tend to think the world iis failing horribly and about to, you know, fall apart or something. You don't have to agree with that one. On the individual level, though, understanding what lengths people will go to in an attempt to be happy might give us all a better understanding of mental illness.