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.
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.
posted by tattybluetrees at 4:09 PM
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