Sunday 18 February 2018

I'm not mad, but I'm not not mad either

18 February 2012: that's when I had my first session with my doctor. Today is the first day of year seven of this analysis, and there are no signs of it concluding any time soon.

As I went around today I took some pictures of things I was looking at when I thought about what this epic investment of time, money, emotion and thought has been like



  

This one already went on insta today sorry for cross-posting

 S



As I've said before, I was very sick when I started, but I recovered within a year, and then it became not about staying alive, but about making a life that's liveable. Yay, seriously, a nice big unironic YAY for an encounter that exchanges hysterical misery for ordinary human unhappiness!

It seems so obvious to me that this is what psychoanalysis does and is for, and that I am patently not any more unwell than 'the next person'* , that I'm always surprised to be reminded of the enduring assumption that therapy is for sick people and therefore anyone in therapy must be sick. And then, sometimes, the stigma around mental illness comes into play.

The worst instance of this is connected with that bad business in the workplace last year. My manager, who left suddenly in the middle of the year, as you'll remember, had been making work intolerable for me and my doctor provided some medical certificates, on letterhead that stated her name but not her field. But my manager googled the doctor and then the manager let it be known that I was seeing a shrink. I now report to someone who's solid, but who did receive that information, and when I have once or twice temporarily lost my rag about workplace issues, it's been attributed to 'my mental health status' in a way that is deeply irritating, if nothing much worse than that.

The doctor has a couple of times given me leave to invite significant people in my life into our sessions and she has explained to them what I've just said. It helped: both these people had been attributing things I was doing or saying to symptoms of whatever illness they thought I had, and they didn't keep on doing that afterwards.

The way I see it is this: everyone is, at a minimum, neurotic and/or hysterical. These are the responses human beings have to civilisation. Those of us who have the rare good fortune to be aware of our condition, to accept that we're not and never will be 'normal' or 'sane', and to understand it a little, well, we are maybe a bit better equipped than we would be otherwise to tolerate life and perhaps even to do so without perpetrating further rounds of unintended harm upon others, especially upon our children and other vulnerable people. I understand and accept, for instance, that I have obsessive and dissociative tendencies. Under bad circumstances these tendencies are amplified, I have retreated inside them, and I have been in danger. Dissociation in the extreme is psychosis and schizophrenia, but in a benignly mild way it is also at play in aspects of myself that are useful and good. A very pragmatic example of this is that I have always been very good at 'getting along well' with people who are challenging, aggressive, unstable or otherwise difficult. This is an incredibly useful capability in my work. I also think that the durable interestingness of prose fiction for me has a lot to do with the splitting of perspectives rendered possible by the historical development of the English novel. I suppose I'm just saying that personality disorder is only a matter of degree and you are better off to know as much as possible about yourself than not to. Hardly controversial right.

If there is a negative consequence to undergoing a long-term psychoanalysis, for me it's that it gets hard to hold off applying what you know about how people operate in circumstances where it is critically important to do the opposite - to take someone at face value, to refrain from empathising, to interact with them strictly by the social rules governing the context. Again that manager is a useful example: it was very clear to me why she was acting as she was, and also it was clear that she was pretty unaware of her own psychopathology. So this was a risky situation. Things like that - knowing more than you should - these are the costs of analysis (well, that, and the approx $55k it's cost me in actual money).

(new post today on relentless positivity)

* To test the validity of this assertion I clicked the Next Blog button up there. So, you tell me.

2 comments:

elsewhere said...

I think you're very right about everyone experiencing some pathology as part of everyday ordinary unhappiness.

I have always refrained from mentioning in workplaces and to people I work with that I've had close relatives who've suffered from psychosis (to the extent that it has periodically mucked up everyday ordinariness for them) in case some of my behaviours that might not be liked are attributed to mental illness. It's a cliche to say this but there's so much stigma and lack of understanding around mental illness, and reading your story only reinforces that these misperceptions have not gone away.

lucy tartan said...

Annoying as it is to be informed that so-and-so is concerned about my mental health, if they didn't have that to be concerned about they'd find something else.