Monday, November 12, 2012

MENTAL ILLNESS

I am struck by how symptomatic states often resemble the despair and descent of poetry. Last month I had an extraordinary break with normality and was toppled into hopelessness, placing my hands against the window with only a memory of what it was like to be outside. A horrible summer of self-incarceration came to a conclusion when, too, in a state of rage, I sped my car over a curb and destroyed it. I’d never been in this part of hell before, and was discovered in a dream in a bone-chilling location that I am at a loss to describe. In the current psychiatric rehabilitation program I am engaged with, I was surprised with recollections of my first recovery. Apparently, in something called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, there is something called ‘Downward Descent.’ I recalled the strange vertigo of anxiety that was routinely triggered by inappropriate and destructive relationships. Working with a Sullivanian therapist, there was the classic moment of transference where I reached out for her hand, realizing for the first time that it was available. In a dream, a ship in the distance headed towards a beach to rescue me from an entrapment in another ikon of therapeutic relief. In my current flailings about with a Nook, it has occurred to me that I should download En Saison en Enfer. Not infrequently it crosses my mind in more frivolous moments that I should open a travel agency. Receiving etheric instructions to adhere to draconian discipline in purges of valuables, eating habits, social interaction and even suicide constitute a harrowing journey into a complete loneliness also impossible to describe. In the PROS program, sadness is often referred to and the word ‘despair’ omitted. The searing pain in my solar plexus I experienced while in a profound, clinical depression could be referred to as an ache, and the melancholia afflicting Abraham Lincoln was diagnosed as ‘dystemia’, a mild but chronic state of sadness and dysfunction. The extrapolation of mental and emotional states into scientific and systematized terminology is something like the duodecimal system of librarians or the organization of the botanical world. It provides practitioners with an objectivity essential to diagnosis, but that can also divorce them from the suffering of their clients. I often feel, in the process of group sharing, an insight into the conflicts of my peers, helpless, all the while, to help them professionally. It is only when I dip into literature, when writing poetry or reading it, that I can touch on the thin membrane that separates scientific distance from the truth of experience.