I have a special interest in reading books** about how people live with mental illness, after the death of a beloved friend last year. Andrea Sachs' interview this week with Elyn Saks was illuminating.
One thing I learned is that medication doesn't make the illness go away, it just allows her to recognize the thoughts for what they are:
Q: Do you still experience schizophrenic symptoms?
A: Even today, with all the treatment and all of the medication, I still have transient psychotic thoughts, probably daily. Where a thought like, I've killed people, comes to my mind and I just say, oh that's your illness acting up.
Here's the link to the full interview
** if you read this blog to find out what I'm interested in acquiring, I should mention I only read these books, I don't acquire them.
*** the title of Elyn Saks' book is a line from one of my favorite poems.
Three points if you can name the other book I loved that uses a line from this poem as its title.
5 comments:
Heard a scary interview on NPR yesterday with a war correspondent/writer whose name I didn't catch. His premise was that all war correspondents are mentally ill like him. I believe he was saying the job was akin to a death wish.
At first Terry Gross was her usual, congenial, bubbly self. Then she became very quiet, serious. Didn't hear the entire or end of the interview, but it was chilling. Made the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up.
Was it Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe?
Is it Yeats?
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I wasn't going to comment on this. I've changed my mind. Mental distress can become unbearable. It can disable, or it can inspire. The Davidic Psalms were often the product of mental stress.
I believe moments of clarity and perspective can come out of one's distress and suffering ... and depression means real suffering.
I am not against medication; so understand my next comment in that light. Our ancestors found consolation in areas we often overlook: Religion, music, handwork. These help me most.
Impudent Weed
By Rachael de Vienne
Impotent flowers destroy worlds
With their beauty.
They breathe and reproduce.
They fill the dead spaces and sunder rocks.
They grow on graves, not caring.
They give their seed to the air.
They are poor parents but fertile.
They wilt and dry, but out last me.
It is Yeats, and the book is Robert Parker's The Widening Gyre, the first Spenser novel I read. Then I went back and read them all in order starting with The Godwulf Manuscript.
I stopped buying Parker books some years back, and now I've stopped reading them.
I have sympathy for authors who create an incredible series and then, with each book, have to improve on the last. When they don't it's understandable, but it's a disappointment.
Maybe these falls under the headline "problems my authors would like to have."
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