Notes on a Nervous Planet(27)
Hope
THERE ARE SOME factors affecting our mental health that are genetic, and down to an individual’s wiring or brain chemistry. But we can’t do much about the things handed down to us in our genetic code. What is more interesting are the transient aspects, the triggers that change with time and societies. These are the things we can do stuff about.
Other eras have had their own particular mental health crises of course. But the fact that every age has struggled with its own particular problems should not make us complacent about our own culture.
And the great thing about this – the liberating thing – is that if our anxiety is in part a product of culture, it can also be something we can change by changing our reaction to that culture. In fact, we don’t even need to consciously change at all. The change can happen simply by being aware.
When it comes to our minds, awareness is very often the solution itself.
The detective of despair
I THINK THE world is always going to be a mess. And I am always going to be a mess. Maybe you’re a mess, too. But – and this bit is everything for me – I believe it’s possible to be a happy mess. Or, at least, a less miserable mess. A mess who can cope.
‘In all chaos there is a cosmos,’ said Carl Jung, ‘in all disorder a secret order.’
Mess is actually okay. As you will be aware by now, I am trying to write about the messiness of the world and the messiness of minds by writing a deliberately messy book. That’s my excuse, anyway. Fragments that I hope together make a kind of whole. I hope it all makes sense. Or if it doesn’t make sense, I hope it makes nonsense in ways that might get you thinking.
The problem is not that the world is a mess, but that we expect it to be otherwise. We are given the idea that we have control. That we can go anywhere and be anything. That, because of free will in a world of choice, we should be able to choose not just where to go online or what to watch on TV or which recipe to follow of the billion online recipes, but also what to feel. And so when we don’t feel what we want or expect to feel, it becomes confusing and disheartening. Why can’t I be happy when I have so much choice? And why do I feel sad and worried when I don’t really have anything to be sad and worried about?
And the truth is that when I first became ill, at the very beginning, I didn’t even know what I had, let alone what might be triggering it. I had no understanding of the hell I wanted to escape, I just wanted to escape it. If your leg is on fire you don’t know the temperature of the flames. You just know that you’re in pain.
Later, doctors would offer labels. ‘Panic disorder’, ‘generalised anxiety disorder’ and ‘depression’. These labels were worrying, but also important, because they gave me something to work with. They stopped me feeling like an alien. I was a human being with human illnesses, which other humans have had – millions and millions of humans – and most of them had either overcome their illnesses or had somehow managed to live with them.
Even after I knew the names of the illnesses I had, I believed they were all stemming from inside me. They were just there, the way the Grand Canyon was just there,a fixed feature of my psychic geography which I could do nothing about.
I would never be able to enjoy music again. Or food. Or books. Or conversation. Or sunlight. Or cinema. Or a holiday. Or anything. I was rotten now, to my core, like a, like a, like a (there are never enough metaphors for depression), like a diseased tree. A diseased tree whose girlfriend and parents say, over and over, ‘You’ll get better. We’ll find a way and we will get you better.’
And, of course, there were different remedies. I tried the diazepam a doctor gave me. I tried the various tinctures a homeopath gave me. I tried the recommendations of friends and family. I tried St John’s Wort and lavender oil. I tried sleeping pills. I tried talking to telephone helplines. Then I stopped trying. I had a nightmarish time on diazepam and an even more nightmarish time coming off diazepam. I should probably have tried taking different pills, but – judge me if you will – I didn’t. I wasn’t thinking rationally. Complicating the situation was the fact that I was scared – I mean, terrified beyond anything I’d ever known – of trying more pills, or of seeking more help now that nothing had worked.
When I mentioned this in Reasons to Stay Alive a couple of people thought I was making a statement against pills, so I will say here, as clearly as possible: I am not against pills. Yes, there are all kinds of issues with the pharmaceutical industry and the scientific research is still a work in progress (as scientific research, by its nature, tends to be), but I also know that pills have saved many people’s lives. I know of people who say they could not survive without them. I also believe there would be medication out there that could probably have helped me, but I didn’t find it. I don’t believe pills are a total solution. I also believe certain misprescribed pills can make some people feel worse, but that is the same with anything. You could get the wrong pills for arthritis or your heart condition. And to say that pills aren’t the only answer is common sense. They rarely are. If you have arthritis, yoga and swimming and hot sunshine might be helpful and pills might also be helpful. It’s not an either/or situation. We have to find what works for us. Also, in my case, I was traumatised, and wasn’t even close to thinking straight.
At that time, trying things that didn’t work only made life worse. As I said, there may well have been the right treatment out there for me – talk or medication – but I wasn’t lucky enough to find it. I wasn’t brave enough to seek it out. The pain was as much as I could bear to just about stay alive. I couldn’t risk a gram of difference, that was my logic. Every day felt like life or death. Not because the pain wasn’t bad enough to keep going back to the doctor, but because it was too bad. Writing that down, I realise how ridiculous that sounds, but that was my reality then. Everything I had tried to combat the turmoil inside my head had failed. And, to be honest, the doctors I had encountered hadn’t been that understanding. I sincerely believe that things have moved on in lots of ways since the turn of this century.