Manu Joseph: Why examining mental health can be pointless beyond a point

The book, which mostly contains her conversations with an unidentified psychiatrist, is a rare insight into two contradictory entities—the mind of a person who was mentally ill, and the mind of someone who was not ill yet went for therapy. Both these people emerge from Baek’s description of how she feels in her effort to figure out what was wrong with her. This is not because she was ill sometimes and not so at other times. The contradiction is created by something else, and it frames the limits of ‘psychoanalysis.’

It is the nature of the modern world to expect an effect to have a cause. Often, in abstract matters, the reasons, though logical, are wrong. Often, there is no reason.

Baek believed she was ill. She had looked up her symptoms and concluded that she had ‘mild’ depression. She just didn’t feel good most of the time. She could feel it physically. Now, she had to explain to the doctor what that meant—why she did not feel good, why she thought her mental health was poor, and even what the underlying causes might be.

In doing so, she painted a portrait of a person who was almost like anyone else. For instance, she had low self-esteem, she exaggerated anecdotes to make them more interesting, lied about little things to make herself look good, worried about her beauty and her weight, wished to do well at work, watched her attraction for a man fade when his interest in her rose, hated being alone and at the same time wished to be alone. And when she got drunk, she said silly things.

These were among the reasons she gave to explain why she thought she was not mentally healthy, perhaps unaware that most of the world was this way. At one point, when Baek says that she gets drunk and acts silly, the psychiatrist says that is normal.

Baek: So, I’m all right?

Psychiatrist: You’re all right. When we’re drunk, we loosen our hold on our own minds. We call this ‘disinhibition’.

Baek also gave ‘causes’ for why she was this way. Her father used to beat up her mother and her sister was “manipulative." These ‘reasons’ emerge from popular culture, influenced by what Sigmund Freud wrought—the idea that the subconscious has an effect on a person’s behaviour. (If you look at our stories before Freud, including religious epics, there is no psychoanalysis of a character, no explanation of why a person is this way, except for magic. Freud altered how we told stories.)

Throughout the memoir, the psychiatrist suggests to Baek that she is alright. And there is wisdom in it because there is nothing that Baek says, except the fact that she is even saying it, that suggests she is very different from anyone else. And sanity is, after all, a majority condition. (For instance, psychiatrists normally don’t consider spiritual faith a delusion because belief in magical things is considered a part of human nature.)

But Baek was not alright. She was diagnosed with ‘dysthymia,’ a depressive disorder. In ascribing ‘reasons,’ she connected all that was normal in her to poor mental health. She was not alright because she felt it within. And that was all there was to it.

The imagination that there were reasons for how she felt made her condemn all that was okay with her. In this, the world was not entirely innocent. For the over-articulation of some ‘concepts’ greatly contributes to people examining themselves a bit too much. Consider ‘low self-esteem.’ This label has within it the meaning that it is a problem in need of correction. Maybe it is, in fact, the sign of a healthy mind.

In most people, ‘low self-esteem’ might just be appropriate esteem; and many of them, especially the poor who haven’t heard of such a label, would likely have the humility and humour to take such a self-evaluation well. The problem with the world is that, in glorifying ‘exceptional’ people, it has diminished a fundamental right, which is the right to mediocrity, the right to be an ordinary person. The problem is not ‘low self-esteem,’ but the pain that accompanies it. This pain is not really about esteem; it is the same river of misery that runs in some people that appears to cause various pains with different labels.

In Baek’s case, she took what was a normal fear in many people as another piece of evidence for why she felt broken. And in trying to ‘cure’ what was essentially not a problem, she probably strayed far from what may have helped—for instance, physical exercise. Her psychiatrist asks her to do it. Baek promises she will, which means she was not someone who exercised regularly. It is not clear if she did manage to do it.

The worst aspect of the ‘reason’ mania in mental health is how reasons are ascribed to a person’s final act, of suicide. Instead of calling it a consequence of poor mental health, various people exploit such a death for their own ends, creating even more phoney reasons for suicide.

As a result, today a person’s misery is accepted only if she dies. Imagine if I wrote this about the memoir of a woman who had not died. She would have faced derision, as Baek probably did when she was alive. She finally found gravitas because she died, and probably in a way the miserable are expected to.

The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.’