I’m taking a day off. I’ve been working on Empire of Dirt solidly since last Friday. It’s ironic, isn’t it. I cheerfully say in a post that I struggle to work on weekdays because symptoms are worse, then go on to spend the next few days writing constantly. I’m about a third of the way through Empire now and as much as I’m loving it, I feel like a day off.
I was coasting about the internet, and happened across an article that led to Leslie Chapman’s blog on psychoanalysis. That brought me to a post about ‘the truth of depression‘. He was commenting on yet another article that interviewed people on the subject of their depression, and was curious that none of them appeared to be interested in why they became depressed.
This is entirely an opinion piece. As a good skeptic I would usually look to study after study to back up my thoughts, but I just thought I would throw this out there because it is pertinent to something I’ve been looking at in my own life recently, as I’m in therapy and that therapy has been very much about the “why” behind my own disorders.
There are two points that are relevant here. The first is that as mental illness and mental health issues have become more prominent, there has been a tendency to refer to a chemical model, a model that says it could happen to anybody, that it’s nobody’s fault. Why? I think it’s reflected in something somebody said to me when I admitted I had DPD with generalised anxiety.
“What? You mean you’re just crap at dealing with stress, then?”
Unlike physical illness, mental health problems come with this massive unsaid thing: that it’s a personal failing. That you’re somehow weak, inadequate, can’t cope, fall apart when the chips are down. You’re unreliable because you’ll fold up and break when it gets hard. We still live in a society that values being emotionally a bit distant (some people will claim we’re all public emotional wrecks, but that’s on TV and in magazines, I don’t think it’s necessarily prevalent everywhere).
This kind of toughness, this “don’t talk about it” attitude where you’re regarded as brave and strong if you are dealing with terrible things by never mentioning them and getting on with stuff as though nothing has happened, is what makes it difficult to talk about mental illness. The solution big organisations wanting to promote a more open and accepting attitude have come up with is to emphasise mental illness as a chemical, physical, neurological problem.
If it’s essentially another organ gone a bit wonky, and nobody could be expected to do anything about it, then it isn’t the sufferer’s fault, they can’t be seen as a failure. I still feel, deep down inside, that I should be tougher, that the free-floating anxiety and depersonalisation is a bit like epic failure as a human being. It’s not helped that occasionally I run into people who take exactly that attitude. And it’s simple: they don’t know why I have it.
That leads us to the second point. It’s not easy to talk about, or to explore, why. There are whys. There are things, buried in your past, in the way you were raised, in things that happened to you, that you learn not to talk about. Even when, in therapy, you finally do open the door to that place, it can be hard. It took me sixteen sessions to discuss why. The real why, not to superficial why.
These are not the kind of things that you can discuss with somebody who hears you mention that you’ve had depression, anxiety, or even DPD (they usually start with “What the hell is that, anyway?”). They aren’t the kind of things you chat about in the pub, with just any old person. They are frequently things that leave deep open wounds that never properly heal, wounds that you carry around with you, trying to avoid touching, things that evoke feelings of humiliation, worthlessness, even hopelessness about your future.
From a developmental standpoint, and as my therapist says, there’s nothing wrong with going through these things and coming through them with mental processes that don’t work brilliantly, or that lead you into mental illness. We all react differently to things, and when I said I had read of somebody who’d been through something similar to me and seemed to be fine, she said, “She’s probably hiding it, just like you did.”
You need a safe space to even start talking about these things that may have led you into whatever you’re struggling with now. I think there’s a reluctance even to start because if there’s one thing about mental health problems that seems universal it’s the feeling of being a failure, and we worry that looking into the causes is going to lead to us being branded, for all time, with that big red F.
After that, you carefully pick friends you can discuss things with. When I made my choice, I think my friend saw what was coming and paved the way for my ‘confessional moment’, as it were, by introducing the subject himself. The relief was immense. Somehow, it normalised it for me and made it something I didn’t have to fight with anymore. And that is part of recovery.
As much as the big campaigns want us to talk about mental health and share our experiences, we’re always faced with the fact that we’re very vulnerable when we do it, and that some things we just cannot say to just anybody. As much as it is great to start discussing mental illness and change the stigmas associated with it, there are some things that you just don’t want everybody to know. And that might well be your real “Why”.
The screen capture gives you an idea of what it looks like. I don’t usually write with the Inspector open, but I do if I need the document notes. Scrivener is as good as you make it, and the more you use the facilities, the more you benefit. As a standard practice, I lock out the left-hand pane, which contains the chapter summaries. This makes it much easier to check what happens in each chapter.
Very early on in the developmental stages of Empire I considered writing it entirely in LOLspeak. Imagine a post-apocalyptic world entirely populated by cats in search of a cheeseburger.
