Medicating a Philosophical Problem

Posted Friday at 12:30 PM5 days

It bothers me to a significant degree that, more often than not, the first thing in any list of recommendations for the cures for psychiatric disorders is medication. The prevalence of the most societally persistent psychiatric disorders, such as depression and anxiety, reflects more on the structure of society and how modern life is incompatible with human needs rather than a large proportion of the population suddenly evolving to have significant biochemical imbalances in the past century. A primarily biological interpretation of a depressive disorder misses the point. It is not only a pattern of chemical production in the brain that can be chronic — a philosophy can be life-determining, persistent, and chronic, too.

I experienced a strange spell of chronic depression recently, which my therapist concluded to be an accumulation of low serotonin during winter, hormonal factors, and childhood trauma unconsciously modulating my thoughts and behaviours. I was crying several times a day consistently. I failed to concentrate on productive activities, except for some essays I compulsively wrote during that period in chase of brief emotional relief. My therapist suggested I change my medication since he concluded that this one wasn’t working as effectively.

But an odd thing happened. I realised that the source of my anguish was a persistent self-hatred, snowballing into an anxiety over having feelings of self-hatred in the first place. The thing about shame is that it compounds. You experience primary shame over the main thing, like your inability to concentrate, which causes you to experience secondary shame over feeling ashamed in the first place, further decreasing your already-fledging concentration ability. No matter how hard I tried to argue against the loud voices validating reasons to loathe myself, I couldn’t get close to believing it, which is another failure to add to the list of reasons why I am a failure! So, I had to change my strategy, and I did. All I did was imagine that I was temporarily inhabiting my best friend’s body: Would I have treated her the way I treated myself?

And then, my perspective shifted utterly. I absolutely could not, in any universe, imagine the vile beliefs I had about myself to be true about my best friend. I could not let her not eat for the whole day, and my disgust at the thought of disrespecting her like that motivated me to go out and buy groceries. I was about to buy instant noodles, but then I remembered that I never would feed my best friend unhealthy food, so I bought meat and vegetables instead. I was so focused on my ruminations that after queuing and with a full basket, the cashier asked for my card, only for me to realise that I had forgotten my card at home. This incident was embarrassing, and I usually would have blamed myself for it, but I could not imagine speaking that way to my best friend or that those harsh criticisms were valid.

It made me realise that we always view the world from tinted glasses, and there is no removing them. Humans are fundamentally subjective creatures, and our lens determines how the world ‘objectively’ appears to us. Art’s function is to make us aware of these other subjectivities. Indeed, my favourite artworks — like my favourite movies and books — usually remind me of all the possibilities, of the incredible capaciousness of art. There are so many ways to write a thing, so many ways that only I could write it. Over time, we start to narrow our thinking about what a piece of writing — what a particular story — can be and how it needs to be told. Partly, this is because we get attached to the most familiar narrative. We connect to the one we tell ourselves because it makes persisting easier.

The cause of this limiting of our range and scope is inertial: it is the narrative we have been told about ourselves and our stories, and so that’s the narrative we tend to speak. I’ve spent my whole life being prescribed narratives about my mind: how it should and shouldn’t be, what it should or shouldn’t do, and its value. Mainly, I have learned a lot from my culture, media, government, men on the streets of whatever city I’ve lived in, men whom I have loved and not loved, women whom I have loved and not loved — and what I have learned is how being emotional is hysterical, a truthful reaction is an overreaction, and that I should tailor the recounting of my experiences in a way to avoid causing men discomfort.

The degree to which this education has affected my life is impossible to overstate. It has defined my relationship to my identity, how I present myself to others, how I treat myself in private, my relationship with men, politics, art, food, clothing, money, and medicine. This internalised narrative about how my mind was supposed to function and its value has governed much of how I think of myself and what I have spent the minutes of my life contemplating and doing. The outstanding work of anyone’s life, I believe, is to attend to the project of its undoing, of discerning what thought processes are possible to undo, what must be lived with, and how to situate what must be lived within the mind and life, so that it does not do the work intended by its embedding: to undermine any power one might have that does not serve men.

So, here’s a challenge: Write about your personal experience the first time. Then, rewrite that experience, but you cannot use similar words or synonyms. Then, repeat that with another set of different words and synonyms. This method will train you to view things from different perspectives and broaden your subjectivities. You are, in essence, purchasing new glasses to view the world — and this, I argue, is what medication tries to achieve, only to crudely scratch the surface. Medication might remove your previous glasses but not give you new ones. Adopting new glasses requires an arduous journey, meticulous vetting of other potential glasses, and determining whether they fit you. Poor self-perception is not a biological problem — it is a philosophical one.

Almost everything I’ve ever written started with a secret, with the fear that my subject was unspeakable. Without expectation, writing about these subjects has not only freed me from that fear but from the subjects themselves and from the bondage of believing I might be alone in them. What I have also observed is that avoiding a secret subject can be its own kind of bondage. We are indeed monsters. And to deny the monstrous is to deny its beauty, meaning, and necessary devastation. Every personal author writes a history that could not be found in any other book. We tell the stories no one else can tell and give each other this proof of our survival.

While the question of who cares is an important one for every writer to ask themselves, embedded in my contemplation of it were more than twenty years of conditioning to believe that the subject of girlhood was not worth a few minutes of a reader’s time. It was a very meta experience, an example of the efficiency of social conditioning. Whenever this insecurity struck, I would ask myself whom I was imagining when I imagined that uncharitable reader. It was not me or any of the people who mattered in my life. It was that one guy I slept with who argued that the MeToo movement ruined men’s lives. It was that one guy who happened to be my regretful sperm donor. It was not anyone whose opinion I valued. It was not my intended audience. It was the people whose approval I’d been trained long ago to seek, whose stories I’d learned to value over my own.

The white man, being the ‘default’ interpretation of humanity, has his accounts extrapolated into the universal. In contrast, works written by women, queer, or people of colour are relegated to works of niche and particular identities. When produced by people of marginalised groups, personal written work is often labelled as ‘navel-gazing’. By labelling it navel-gazing and convincing us to police our own and one another’s stories, they have enlisted us in the project of our continued disempowerment. I don’t think it’s a stretch to wonder if the navel, as the locus of all this disdain, has something to do with its connection to birth, body, and the female.

Now that I have rooted that belief out of myself, my tolerance for it is at an all-time low and sinking. Former favourite books by French male philosophers are intolerable. Bring me your books about girlhood, queer families, and sex workers — I will read them all. And I kept writing. The process continually revealed new layers of conditioning, functions of my mind that prioritised the feelings and desires of others — sometimes total strangers — over my own. It is through that very writing that I was able to undo it further.

Being healed by writing does not excuse you from the extravagantly hard work of making good art. I laboured endlessly behind every essay I’ve written. But occasionally, I still fielded insinuations that I had gotten away with publishing my diary. When, in fact, writing about your personal experiences is not easier than other kinds of writing. To write an essay, I had to invest the time and energy to research and craft plots, scenes, descriptions, dialogue, and pacing — all the writer’s jobs. I also had to face some unpalatable truths about my accountability. Becoming a better person is often more challenging than writing a better book.

I prefer to read books that evidence this emotional confrontation with the self. I want to feel how the writer changed the page and how the act of writing changed them. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you. As Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet: “The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.”

Don’t tell me that the experiences of most of our planet’s human population are marginal, irrelevant, or political. Don’t tell me that you think there’s not enough room for another story about sexual abuse, motherhood, or racism. There is no writer’s block; there is only fear. And you can be afraid and still write something. No one has to read it, though when you’re done, you might want them to. The only way to make room is to drag all our stories into that room. That’s how it gets bigger.

You write it, and I will read it.

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This post was previously published on Writers’ Blokke.

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