Madness and Tolerance

I just finished my friend Helen Taylor’s memoir love lay down beside me and we wept. It is a dissection of her depression which took her as far as a very nearly successful suicide attempt. I knew from meeting her that she is a perfectionist, and that her inner critic wants to tell her that she’s never good enough. She told me this in a rather cheery voice while we were on a writing retreat in Nice. She keeps a notebook to remember things and is very, very clever at working around the short term memory damage due from the electroshock treatments, which she told me saved her life.

Many of us have this inner critic somewhat, but it her case, she couldn’t accept her own fallibility. She qualified as a doctor, and that insane boot camp that doctors go through (being on call for far too many hours to make good decisions) means that she made mistakes due to 1) exhaustion and 2) being a newly qualified doctor without enough experience. It was intolerable for her to make mistakes and have so little agency sometimes to help people, so she left clinical work and got a doctorate doing research in tropical diseases.

That was the beginning of her retreats from things that were too much for her. The second part came after meeting and marrying what seems like a wonderful man, and then going through all the processes that couples go through before beginning IVF treatments. She lost what turned out to be her only chance at a child after three months or so of pregnancy. That began the spiral. She was institutionalized for a bit over a year with severe depression, and in the end had a series of electroshock treatments. These appear to have begun to help and she was let out of hospital, where some months later she still tried to commit suicide.

She came out of that without injury, but after having been obsessed with her own death for so long, she was left with nothing else to do but live. (Reminded of Dorothy Parker’s Resumé: Razors pain you; Rivers are damp, Acids stain you and drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.)

She ends the novel with a plea for others to ask for help if they recognize themselves in her story. I would say that people need to remember that the head is real. When folks say dismissively, “It’s all in your head” it’s like saying to a cancer patient, “It’s all in your breasts (or prostate or wherever)”. But it can affect everything. The brain is just as real as every other part of your body, and illnesses there require the same respect and treatment as illnesses anywhere else in the body.

I also believe that sometimes you can have something like a sprained ankle but in your brain, a mental illness (due to stress or a traumatic event) which can be less severe but still might need treatment, or at least rest. If you run a marathon on a sprain, you can seriously injure yourself. If you run a mental marathon on your stressed brain (i.e. added stress to the system, continuing trauma etc), you can cause permanent damage.

In any case, this is her second published work. She self publishes, as far as I can figure out, which is a fine way to go.

I was on a road trip and finished her book, so I added in a Philosophize This! on tolerance, which was appropriate. The memoir was about someone who was intolerant of herself and her weaknesses. Both gave me a lot to think about.

The weather is cool today, but the last few days were uncomfortably hot. I’ve finally taken off Foro’s winter sweater, though, and he’s happy.