[Still on the plane.]
Yesterday I was talking to a parent of a young adult with psychosis, when, near the end of our conversation, she asked me where she could find a published version of my “story.” (“It would be so powerful…” as I’m often told.) As I’ve indicated many times in the past (here on my blog), I feel deeply ambivalent not about self-disclosure in a general sense, but certainly about particular forms of narrativization (including the “first person account”). This ambivalence obviously stems in large part from my position as an academic and ‘social sceintist’, but also, I’m beginning to realize, from an almost painful introspective obsession with the thousand ways in which “illness” and “recovery” can be (and perhaps inevitable are) spun; the difficulty of telling an honest story when the subject of one’s discourse is so profoundly over-determined.
“For an entire year I could barely motivate myself to take a shower, to drink, to eat,” I find myself telling her: “year three of “schizophrenia”, the worst year, but also the turning point.” This is the truth in a basic sense, but was it despair, ‘negative symptoms,’ laziness, psychosis (….) that paralyzed me so profoundly? Still talking to her, I begin to wonder if, in labeling my experience as “psychosis” at all, I am implicitly claiming a false solidarity with her son (and so many others)? To what end?
‘I had all but given up hope,’ I continue, ‘for all those years I did not think I could cope with anything, didn’t think I would ever be able to read again.’ ‘Ironically, returning to school helped enormously,’ I add, but simultaneously reflect on the extent to which this is only one version of the story. Did things get easier simply because of time or luck, had I learned to ‘cope’ better, was it the ‘valued social role’ of the graduate student, or is the whole narrative merely a retrospective fiction? Can I or can’t I just be honest about these complexities, or is there some unspoken ‘contract’ between us, by virtue of which we both understand that my role is to embody the future-recovery of her son..? Or simply confirm the ‘validity’ of psychosis as a thing-like thing, as something coherent, enduring, surmountable because others have surmounted precisely and exactly ‘it’?
A while later, a young voice hearer describes his voices (overwhelming, abusive), then wishes aloud that there were such things as positive voices. Oh, there are, I say, and then think, “do I report mine….? Should I mention Eleanor Longden, suggest listening to her TED talk; or perhaps speak more generally about the prevalence of positive voices? Which would be more compelling, more effective, more honest…? And then (if it’s all a partial fiction anyway), what is my motivation—does the fiction serve him, myself, am I stroking both of our egos in some sad, small way? Do I even believe that what we’ve experienced is, in any way, the ‘same’: parallel, analogous, shared, translatable? Or, conversely, is it selfish not to play the archetypal ‘guide,’ to instead insist on my difference, to insist on the fiction of “psychosis” as a singular entity?
Yes, yes, I know: all narratives are fiction, all fiction is autobiographical, and even the most self-critical preoccupation with ‘the truth of the event’ is at least a little sophomoric. I nevertheless cannot shake my discomfort, nor fully articulate why so many other forms and types of narrative (of love, of death, of war) do not seem to bother me, while testimonials of psychosis, mania, depression almost ubiquitously do.
The narratives also bother me .The narratives that helps or even can lead to healings or cures or relief are the ones that interests me. The academic community generally thinks cures are impossible( a cure?).They are absolutely dead wrong.I cherish the long struggled for multifaceted cure I know that came out of direct mentoring and life experience ,studying others life experience and my own reflections. Far more valuable and accurate then anything coming out of Harvard ,Yale etc. But no one wants to listen and learn.” Oh I’m so happy that this works for you”.After all it took Dr. Lister 50 years and his own self induced death to convince his contemporaries to simply wash their hands between surgerys.And I am not even a licensed anything but have been given various psychiatric labels.It would appear to be absurd to listen to me. I heard unwanted voices for over 30 years.I hear them no longer. It was not a “spontaneous remission”. Testimonials ? If you where driving down a strange road during a terrible storm and came to a fork in the road, a rag dressed stranger standing at the fork waving your vehicle to the right. Would you stop and ask a question?If you did would you believe it If you were told the left fork leads to a terrible washout and is unpassable.What would you do? After all this man is “just” giving you a testimonial.Can a certified ,labeled madman not only ruminate about madness but offer reliefs from the suffering of it not dreamed of even in universitys? I definitely say YES! But will he be believed? We both know the answer to that. And of course my discoveries are only one approach with the lantern of first do no harm constantly lit to lite my way and rule out the absurdities others so eagerly embrace. Your posts are valuable. thank you , fred
Since I’m interested in narrative from a rhetorical perspective (meaning, in a broad sense how individuals and communities construct meaning, make decisions, and act), and having some personal experience telling “my story”, I thought I’d chime in. Narratives can be powerful and disruptive, but too often they can reify existing patterns of meaning. Part of this is that in constructing our own narratives, we draw on the cultural resources of narratives we have at our disposal. We have definite templates in our culture (perpetuated by the media in the news) and in order to be published in any kind of traditional media platform (through a major publishing house or on a major news blog or site) one often has to then frame one’s story in a way that supports the perspective of that publishing format (too often a dominant perspective). In order to write a disruptive narrative, well, how does that work? How not to end up on the Foucault hamster wheel, were we keep on being an instantiation of, and so a reinforcer of, the larger institutional discourse? How to write a different story when the stories are all the same? How to get that story out there to do work of disrupting and complicating, when you have to find a way to get it out there, then have people actually read it? How do you complicate and disrupt when even if you could get that story out there (say, self published) but if it doesn’t fit with what people expect or want to read, to get them to read it? Then to engage with it? These are all huge questions that I have no answer to, but I think that they are worthwhile and something I’m working on through my dissertation. I think one of the ways we can do this is to realize that we can construct meaning in the moment (you decry this later in your post as “sophomoric” but actually is a very important rhetorical concept) and that at any moment we tell a story, we can [re]construct it. It doesn’t have to be set in stone a certain way, and we aren’t “hypocrites” by changing it later. We can have a continually evolving story that shifts and shapes and is meaningful at the moment of its creation and reception. Locking ourselves into a story and never revisiting it reinforces dominant perspectives about what stories are and how they work, and prevents us from finding nodes of disruption and prevents the collaboration that takes place of the moment of telling the story between the speaker and the listener/rhetorical partner. The problem with many stories of psychosis or mania or depression is that, well, we’ve heard them all before. They are generic and tend to reinforce cultural assumptions/values about mental illness. “The manic abuses drugs, finds 12 steps and accepted she can’t work that high paying job. The manic is oversexual, gets herself into trouble and lives with the consequences of her actions. Isn’t she so grown up? Thank my pills! I’m miserable but at least I can hold down a job, aren’t you glad you aren’t me?” These stories, ultimately, get so shaped by the dominant perspective represented by the media that in the end the personal uniqueness and personal meaning is lost, any chance for disruption is swallowed up in making sure everyone else feels that society is sitll running according to plan because this person with mental illness is doing what they are supposed to be doing….which is making other people feel better about themselves. Isn’t there some other way of telling our story? Can’t our stories share something, indicate a shared experience, but at the same time capture the uniqueness of each person’s journey? Does it have to be about grand themes of struggle? Over-arching themes of war or struggle, deep meaningful observations about childhood? What about all that in between? Does “i struggled to get out of bed for a semester” have to end up with “now I have a degree”? why? I am sorry now that I am rambling….but I am working through this issue as well!
Thanks for these great comments, Jeannie. I wholly agree with you and think that at least some of my concerns/worries stem from my experiences working across disciplines–i.e. the critical way that narratives might be read by individuals/scholars trained in lit or rhetoric are going to be very different from the way they’re read by psychologists or MH researchers in the social & health sciences…
But I also think it’s great that there are now more of us willing to think meta-critically about first person narratives and their sociocultural influences and effects. I’m thrilled that you’re doing work in this area too!