David Foster Wallace, describing the teeth of a patient in a mental ward in Infinite Jest. I took this sentence as a probable sign that Wallace had been depressed, because the indifference to matters of personal hygiene that characteristically attaches to mental illness is not the sort of thing bragged about by the fashionably despairing, let alone the seriously suffering. Our soppy society may lionize the “mad,” transforming our pitiful emotional dysfunctions into sublime, romantic, quasi-artistic poetry, but it never accepts bad breath.
There is nothing new in observing that we tend to inflate the severity of our problems, reclassifying ordinary human phenomena as medical conditions to lend them an air of unimpeachable seriousness. We no longer respect the sorrow or the joy of common life; we must experience depression or mania. We are not neat or fastidious; we are “OCD about things [sic].” In a world which worships science, it is natural that we appropriate scientific language to describe the most minor proclivities. Allan Bloom noted this with his usual precision: I said in quoting it:
As soon as medicine bestows a title on something -pain, despair, obesity, abusiveness- it is instantly removed from the realm of judgment… and [it] becomes a sacred experience beyond interrogation, worthy of infinite deference. Hence (1) the competition among the hysterical and the young to legitimize their sorrows and sufferings by getting them ‘named,’ and (2) the increasing incidence of hard-to-test problems, like mental illness.
Everybody Cares posts dozens of excellent quotes about mental illness each week on Psychotherapy. Not surprisingly, it is not from contemporary clinicians that one sees many resonant quotes; rather, it is from the founders of psychology, who were as much philosophers of mind as scientists, and from artists, poets, novelists, and the like. It is these groups who have succeeded in telling us about depression because they do so in honest, human terms.
In reading their reckoning of madness, one feels mostly horror, and this is as it should be. I am not ashamed to be mentally ill, and on the very few occasions I’ve been treated unfairly because of bias I’m comfortable defending myself. At the same time, nothing irritates me more than “mad pride” and the sentimentalization of mental illness. I loathe the handsome actor with the solitary tear rolling down his barely-schizophrenic face in the Oscar-seeking biopic whose moral is that “insanity is just a beautifully different way of looking at the world,” as I resent the crusading activist who tells us that drug companies are enforcing cultural conformity to make money, unconcerned that when the sick go off their medicines they risk dislocation, damage, and death.
The confluence of these phenomena, (1) artistic romanticization of mental illness, (2) the misguided work of amateur philosophers to undermine categories of mental illness, and (3) the universal tendency to exaggerate our pain as we relate it to others, must make the practice of psychology and psychiatry incredibly difficult.
Sometimes, I’ve doubted whether I’m really ill, whether I haven’t just excused my moral weakness with complex and persuasive representations of a disorder I might not have, whether perhaps I’m not ill at all but just unique. But all I have to do when concerned is recall the shockingly repulsive state of affairs before I was in treatment, and for that indicator I can thank Wallace.
