Psychiatry’s Brainchild
Editor’s Note
Lauren Slater was a troubled kid. In her early teens she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, which she describes as the mental illness professionals least like to encounter. Borderlines are often manipulative and needy, marked by anorexia, substance abuse, self-mutilation and suicide attempts.
In her essay “Three Spheres,” published this past November in In Fact, a collection of essays from the US journal Creative Nonfiction, Slater recalls her illness eight years after her recovery. But her perspective has changed. She is now a psychologist visiting a patient at the hospital where she had been admitted about every other year between the ages of 14 and 24. As the memories flood back, she realizes that while she may have moved on, she will never be completely free of her past.
“I am not that girl any longer. I tell that to myself as I ride up the hospital’s elevator. I found some sort of way into recovery. But I know, have always known, that I could go back,” she writes. “Mysterious neurons collide and break. The brain bruises. Memories you thought were buried rise up.”
While Slater may have recovered, a phenomenon she attributes to antidepressants and writes about in her 2000 book Prozac Diary, many search their entire lives for that miracle cure. It is that desperation that drives them to try ever more radical treatments such as electroshock therapy and psychosurgery.
Danielle Egan’s story about an Edmonton man’s anterior capsulotomy, “Magical mystery cure”, is an honest examination of what many call a very troubling procedure. Who is to say whether Bruno’s quality of life was hurt or helped by the controversial brain surgery? Bruno himself is not certain, and his is the only opinion that really matters.
And that brings me back to Slater. If there is a miracle cure for the many diseases of the brain, I believe it will be discovered by people like her, people who have seen the illness from both sides and who understand that the goal is not make it go away, but to see it more clearly.
“Mental health doesn’t mean making the pains go away. I don’t believe they ever go away. I do believe that nearly every person … has the same warped impulses, the same scarlet id as the wobbliest of borderlines, the most florid of psychotics. Only the muscles to hold things in check—to channel and funnel—are stronger. I have not healed so much as learned to sit still and wait while the pain does its dancing work, trying not to panic or twist in ways that make the blades tear deeper, finally infecting the wounds,” she writes in “Three Spheres.”
“Still, I wonder. Why—how—have I managed to learn these things while others have not? Why have I managed somehow to leave behind at least for now what looks like wreckage, and shape something solid from my life? My prognosis, after all, was very poor. In idle moments, I still slide my fingers under the sleeves of my shirt and trace the raised white nubs of scars that track my arms from years and years of cutting. How did I learn to stop cutting and collapsing, and can I somehow transmit this ability to others? I don’t know.”
Patricia D’Souza editor@thismagazine.ca
