Storytelling is Power

Trigger warning: suicide, sexual assault, bullying.

A few different articles about the connection between storytelling and suicide have come to my attention lately.

Lucia Lorenzi in her post "People as Pixels, Daughters as Data: Thoughts on the Tragedy of Rehtaeh Parsons' Suicide" discusses how the bullies that harassed Rehtaeh Parsons following her rape disempowered her by taking away her ability to tell her own story. This narrative hijacking is a common thread among the young woman who have recently taken their lives after rape and repeated bullying. The theft of authority over one's own life is a form of secondary traumatization, Lorenzi argues.

Dianna E. Anderson in her post "Other People's Reasons and Our Narratives: On the Appropriation of Suicide" discusses the way in which the stories of a person's suicide can be appropriated by other people to serve ends which do an injustice to the deceased. She critiques Emily Wierenga's post "The lost art of servanthood," in which Wierenga simplifies and thereby misrepresents the story of her grandmother's suicide in order to illustrate her point. Anderson argues that, by assigning motives to her grandmother that her grandmother almost certainly did not have, Wierenga denies her grandmother real personhood.

Doing literary criticism & theory has not usually been this politically charged or personally tragic for me, but one of the reasons I insist that narrative/text/story/language must be studied and taken seriously is for reasons like those above. When we communicate our lives, and so when we communicate ourselves, we do so through narrative. But in so doing we always necessarily cast those we know as characters in those narratives, and so we control their stories, too. These are deep problems, maybe intractable ones, but certainly ones that deserve our attention.

(This is also why I get cynical when people are gushy about "storytelling." Storytelling is an exercise in power. Having fun is permissible, yes, but take it seriously, too.)

Assigned readings: Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler; The Truth about Stories, Thomas King.

Being Unable to Value

A Note on Depression

Having depression is strange. It is likely the case that any mental illness will produce a breach in a person's sense of self, at least if they are self-aware enough to notice. What makes depression strange is that I find myself unable to value things. Or, more specifically, I am unable to trust my ability to value things. Because I am depressed I do not feel that many activities or goals are worth pursing. Activities that I may once have found satisfying no longer satisfy me. I suppose my seratonin levels are down. (I don't actually know that; I'm basing this on my rudimentary knowledge of psychology.) I am aware that my current feelings about certain things--for instance, my academic discipline, artistic endeavour, social encounters--are not the same as they would have been a year ago or will be a year from now. This puts me in a strange epistemological position; while I can trust my regular sensory and rational abilities (I'm not hallucinating or delusional), I cannot be sure my value judgements are accurate.

Because I cannot be sure what I will value in the future, I do not want to make many/any long-term decisions right now. In a lot of ways I have been stalling, waiting for treatment to start working before I look beyond my immediate treatment. However, I am reaching a place where I need to think about what my goals are. This period I am in is an opportunity to make changes in my life that will help me be a healthy, effective, and productive member of society. It seems I am in a bind: I find it difficult to make the value judgements that will be necessary for me to become mentally healthy again, which is a (perceived) requirement for making those value judgements.

In the last few years I have increasingly learned more about myself, a process which has made my own opacity to myself increasingly apparent. That is, by learning about myself, I realized that if I had anything to learn it must mean that I am ignorant about myself. Perhaps what is new is my realization that what I have to learn about myself is chronological as well as, say, unconscious. Being depressed has made very clear to me the fact that I am not who I was nor who I will be, and my decisions now will impact my life in the future. Normally I would see no problem in making those decisions according to my values in the present: I do not usually have a reason to suspect that my future values will be drastically different from my present values.  (I should clarify that I do not mean "values" in a moral sense but rather in the sense of gaining satisfaction from activities.) Right now, however, I do know that my future values will differ from my current ones. Further, those future values are inscrutable. Perhaps this bind is true at all times for all people, but it has only become apparent to me in these extraordinary circumstances.

Like No Other Animal on the Planet

I want to recommend the BBC Horizon documentary The Secret Life of the Dog, which explores the relationship dogs have with humans re: domestication. One of their theses (granted, not the primary one) is that humans and dogs co-evolved; our relationship with dogs has radically changed them, but it has also changed us--perhaps allowing for the agricultural revolution. Thanks to my reading of Haraway, this is something I now take as obvious.

However, the primary subject of the documentary is the way in which dogs are unique among all other animals in the traits they've developed which adapt them specifically to human interaction. For instance, when dogs look at human faces, they regularly look towards the left (so they look to the right side of the face), a trait they share with humans alone. (They do not look at the left side of anything else; left-biased expression is a human trait.) So they've developed a unique capability of reading human emotion and understanding human communication.

One of the more interesting segments is about the planned and systematic domestication of foxes as an experiment to learn more about domestication. Two things are remarkable: the first is that it was successful. While foxes may not be as incredibly domesticated as dogs are, it is nonetheless possible to domestic foxes to a remarkable degree. The second remarkable thing is that while the experimenters selected for behaviour, certain physiological traits followed: shorter legs, more white in the coat, curled tail, floppier ears. Specifically, the traits that physiologically differentiate dogs from wolves also developed in foxes over the process of domestication.

I highly recommend this video. The combination of clever scientific research, dogs, and mind-theory stuff will always interest me. The Secret Life of the Dog has an X-Files feel to some of it, which I found amusing; they play almost-eerie music when leading up to the sorts of things a really intelligent dog named Betsy can do which made me think of the psychic-of-the-week episodes, and of course the experimental breeding of foxes was reminiscent of the experimental breeding of clones that a certain Fox Mulder discovered. Perhaps this is why I considered wild sci-fi scenarios while watching the show: what if the next sentient life to exist on Earth was not AI but canine? And what other animals could we domesticate: lions? cheetahs? elephants? If we did domesticate them, what effects would that have on our own behaviour and development? In what ways (cognitively, behaviourally) would those domesticated animals differ from dogs? (I suspect that horses are another animal worth investigating re: domestication and adaptations uniquely suited for interaction with humans.)

Not Depressed Enough

A Note on Depression

On taking a medical leave from my studies for depression, I had the unpleasant and bizarre experience of trying to prove that I was mentally ill. To an extent the process felt like it might have been more of a formality than an actual determinant in whether or not I got my medical leave, but it still had a strange psychological effect on me. I had a number of appointments with representatives from different institutions in the university, including Health Services, Counselling, and Access & Diversity, and the purpose of these appointments was both to seek professional help overcoming my depression and to secure documentation to support my medical leave.  In other words, I was not just trying to get help from these organizations, but convince them that I had depression debilitating enough to warrant leave.

During this process I was highly conscious of the fact that the process is in place to prevent people from getting leave fraudulently in order to avoid the consequences of poor academic performance. I was aware that someone who, like me, was appealing to the doctors, counselors, etc. for documentation could be faking depression. So I worried about how to perform my depression persuasively. How do you prove that you have a mental illness? How do you show that you actually have an illness and you are not simply repeating the common symptoms of that illness for cynical ends? While I assume it would be difficult to fake it for long, I do not know that I spent enough time talking with those professionals for them to be really sure.

The epistemological problem of identifying real from false mental illness is not my main concern, however. Maybe because I also have anxiety issues, I became worried that I was not sufficiently depressed to warrant medical leave. While I was applying for leave I felt some of the secondary symptoms of depression (poor memory, poor concentration, low motivation, disrupted sleep, lethargy) very strongly, but I did not feel especially sad or melancholy. It became an issue not just of trying to prove to the officials that I was sufficiently depressed, but also an issue of satisfying myself that I was depressed enough to warrant a medical leave. I certainly did not feel up to doing much at all, but days would go by in which I was not particularly unhappy. If the weather was nice, I might feel positively enthusiastic. Even I was unsure of whether my inactivity was a moral defect (laziness) or a psychological one (the decrease in motivation and concentration consistent with depression). Whenever I felt happy for too long (ie. a few hours), I would begin to feel worried and guilty, as though I was committing the fraud I was trying to prove I was not committing.

As it turns out, I got the medical leave and my mood decreased dramatically in the next few weeks. What troubles me is that I was relieved about both events. Of course I should be relieved about getting leave, but it is probably detrimental to my well-being to feel that I should or must be unhappy or hopeless. Obviously the university's requirement that I document my depression is not entirely responsible for my worry that I was not sufficiently depressed, but it does feel like something a depressed person should not have to deal with. I'm not sure how to fix the system, but it is troubling.

Why I Do Not Like Telling People I Am Depressed

A Note on Depression

I see it is with you as with the birches:
I am not to speak to you
in the personal way.
Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

A comprehensive list of the reasons I dislike talking about my depression would be far too long, so I'll pare down to the most relevant.

1. This one only applies to blogging about depression. I was (am) hesitant to discuss my depression on this blog because I do not want to offend any IRL friends who might find out about my depression from this blog rather than from me. I also do not want anyone to feel offended because I am willing to write about this stuff when I'm not willing to talk about it. But I think both concerns are faulty because a. I cannot be expected to notify absolutely everybody about my depression and b. if I feel more comfortable writing about depression than talking about it, than that's how it's going to have to go. I don't need to justify my hesitation to discuss it with people in person. But I'm also probably not going to talk about feelings on this blog very much (see #2).

2. I never really want to talk about feelings anyway. By this I do not mean that I am actively unwilling to talk about them, but instead that I have just never felt the need to talk about feelings. Contrary to what some people might think, I am emotionally aware, both of myself and others. I admit my emotions to myself and take my emotions into account when making decisions. But I've never really felt like talking about them. I don't find talking about my own feelings very interesting and I usually assume that other people don't want to talk about my feelings, either. Maybe some of my disinclination is a gender role I'm performing, sure. But some of it is also that I don't equate self-expression with emotional expression. The self I want to express, generally, is the one composed of my decisions, not the one composed of my impulses. So when I want to reveal myself to people, I talk to them about ideas or books, I do thoughtful things, I help them and ask for help, or I do stuff with them. Emotions rarely have anything to do with it, at least not explicitly. But this means that I do not have much of a habit of talking about emotions, and since emotions are bound up with my illness, I can hardly talk about one without at least implying the other.

3. I am worried what people will think of me once they learn I have depression. I do not want people to think I'm weak, of course. That's not unusual. But I am weak, and I'm trying to admit that. What's even more galling than the idea that people might think I am weak is that people might fail to think of me complexly. I am probably being uncharitable, but I keep imagining that people have this complex, robust idea of who I am, yet as soon as they find out that I have depression they will start imagining that depression is the most important thing there is about me. They'll attribute all of my behaviour to depression. Then they'll probably not want to spend time with me because when they see me, all they'll see is depression. Who wants to hang out with depression? I know this is unfair, but becoming two-dimensional to other people still scares me, even more than appearing weak.

4. Of course, if we're being honest, most of my life and all of my decisions right now are impacted by my depression. In that sense I am kind of two-dimensional. So if we're being really honest, I'm afraid that I'll see myself as weak, as two-dimensional, as entirely defined by my misery, if I tell other people that I have depression. I do not want to see myself that way. It's easier to pretend that I'm OK if people don't treat me like I'm not OK (or if I'm not imagining that people are treating me like I'm not OK).

5. Weakness is a kind of power, and I don't want to wield that power over other people. I do not want people to feel obligated to treat me with particular kindness. Telling people I have depression feels like a kind of imposition. People might not be honest with me because they do not want to hurt my feelings. People might resent me because they feel like they have to do things for me they would not otherwise do. The kind of power weakness would give me is not a kind of power I am interested in. Of course weakness gives me other powers than just obligation: it could give me the opportunity to affiliate with people. That's a kind of power. But I can't access the second kind of power when I'm much too afraid of the damage I could accidentally to do my relationships with the first kind of power.

6. I don't know how to talk about depression! I am getting better at it, but in general I haven't figured out how much information is too much information. I don't want to make people uncomfortable; I don't want to violate social norms.

But you know what? I do want to violate social norms. I want to lessen the stigma of mental illness. I want it to be OK to not be OK. So I am going to try to talk about having depression more often. Or at least write about it.

Notes on Depression: A History of My Mood Disorders

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

I have depression.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about whether I would blog about my mental health, and it is with great hesitation that I have decided to go ahead with it. From my experience being depressed I have learned a bit about epistemology, about the mental health system, about myself. Since I am not yet cured I will likely have more experience and will likely learn more. Some of these topics should be discussed publicly and I guess that job is left up to me. I am not sure if this blog is the best place to discuss them--I have lost most of what core readership I once had, I am ambivalent about continuing with this blog at all and have been for years, I am not sure whether a semi-anonymous or poorly-anonymous platform is the best one--and I am not sure that now is the time to make these topics public. But I do not know of a better platform and I do not know that there ever will be a "good time" to release these ideas. Perhaps I will never generate enough writing (or good enough writing) to justify trying to publish a proper book on the subject. So I'll blog about it. (And, let me be clear, I am terrified by this decision.)

I have already written a number of notes on depression which I will post over time. For now, in preparation, I want to write a brief history of my mental health. (Do not worry; all of my other depression-related posts written to date are much shorter.)

Part I: Dysthymia

I have probably had a mood disorder for most of my life, but until recently I was unaware of my disorder because I never knew another way of being. I always attributed my unhappiness to my situation (high school, roommate problems, being romantically single, etc. etc.). Every time my situation changed (I started university, I moved, etc. etc.), I expected that the change in my circumstance would initiate a change in my happiness. It never worked. Finally I moved to Vancouver, and despite a very promising start my mood did not improve at all. I became more miserable than I ever had been before. I was so miserable that I felt I was sure I would not survive for much longer. When it got even worse I realized that in fact I would always survive. Somehow I had imagined that after a catastrophic implosion I would emerge from the ashes as a new and healthy person, but eventually it occurred to me that the accumulated damage might never annihilate me so efficiently. Instead I would just go on the way I was, but with increasing pain. The prospect of such a survival was so horrifying that I felt like that kind of life would not be worth living. That's not to say that I felt suicidal; rather, I became motivated to effect a change.

Around the same time I encountered the phrase "chronic low-grade depression," and for the first time I found a psychiatric term that adequately described my mental landscape. I had never entertained the possibility that I had depression because I knew the symptoms of depression and I did not have them. (While my diet was not the best, it wasn't disordered; I slept well enough; I had an excellent memory, decent concentration, and acceptable motivation.) Other mood disorders, including cyclothymia and bipolar disorder, also failed to explain my condition. So when I was re-reading an essay by Maureen O'Hara and Walter Truett Anderson and encountered the term "chronic low-grade depression," I was excited to find a term to describe me. (When I first read the essay, I was not looking for a self-diagnosis.) I Googled it and found the term "dysthymia," and while it does not exactly describe what I was going through, it was close enough that I felt I could act on it.

I went to UBC's Counselling Services in August 2011, was diagnosed with a mood disorder (Minor Major Depression, according to their schema), and enrolled in a mood disorder workshop. That workshop helped somewhat, but in October-November I was feeling like I still needed a lot more help, so I sought out a referral from Counselling Services and started seeing a therapist. Because I had a mood disorder since (from what I can tell) Grade Five or so, I needed to re-learn how to think. That takes time. With a deal of work, and the recognition that I probably had an anxiety disorder as well as a mood disorder, I felt healthy enough to stop my therapy in late February 2012. (My therapist agreed that I no longer needed therapy.) By the summer of 2012, I was happier and more emotionally capable than I ever had been in my life.

Part II: Depression

My first term of library school (September-December 2012) was a mediocre experience. I blogged a bit about my frustrations, perhaps tactlessly. I was bored for most of that term and struggled with feelings of arrogance. At the beginning of my second term (January in my program), however, I was no longer bored and superior but instead aggressively miserable. I felt out of place, I had difficulty connecting with the people around me, and I was constantly tired. I could not get to sleep at night, and then could not get up in the morning (or at least not as early as I wanted). I had trouble concentrating on my work and I was not motivated. I started skipping classes because I hated going so much (though I was a little bit sick too, so maybe "skipping" is the wrong word). I also began noticing that my memory was not as good as it usually was: I was forgetting assignments, and when I was counting collection after church on Sundays, I could not remember simple sums or do mental arithmetic.

I had started a vegetarian diet in January, so I suspected that some of these mental effects were a result of low iron or low vitamin counts. However, when I was discussing my symptoms and my dissatisfaction in my program with a priest (not the one at my church, but a UBC chaplain), she suggested that I might have depression. I thought it was unlikely because I had had a mood disorder before and this felt different: my frustration was clearly directed to an object (my program) rather than diffuse, and I did not previously experience the cognitive symptoms. However, in the first week of February, not long after talking with the priest, I had a catastrophic burn-out while trying to complete a work-intensive but otherwise innocuous assignment and I realized that she was right: I had depression, and this time it was not minor. Surviving the term was impossible given my mental state; before the month was out I would be flunking assignments.

I immediately stopped attending classes and told my supervisor that I was dropping out of the program (I had looked on-line and it did not appear that the university would grant leave after the add/drop date). He told me that dropping out was not the only option and helped me get started with a medical leave. In order to get that leave I visited a number of UBC services (Counselling, Student Health, Access & Diversity), which also helped me get started on treatment. I started seeing my therapist again (is there a way of phrasing that that is not parallel to a romantic relationship?). After a few rounds on the bureaucratic carousel, I finally got my medical leave. I am now looking for work, but my primary focus is on recovery. I am not looking to the future very much at the moment.

While I have been unable to get a professional diagnosis (that can only come from a psychiatrist, and the waiting list for psychiatrists is six months), all signs indicate that I have moderate depression. My bloodwork came back normal, so the problem is not chemical or dietary. I am not sure whether my depression is situational or clinical, but the former seems more likely. I now suspect that my program was not so bad after all and my incredible misery was a consequence of depression, but of course it is possible that I am not well suited to my program and the resulting stress caused my depression, at least in part. I still do not really know what caused this bout of depression, and I may never know. My treatment is on-going. I am hopeful that I will eventually be free of big-d depression, but I am not hopeful that I will ever really be free of mood disorders in general: it is likely that disordered mood will recur throughout my life.

There is of course a lot more to say about both experiences with mood disorders, and I will do some of that in later posts. Some of it I won't discuss with you at all because it is more personal. But I still think it is helpful to have this history written out somewhere in a reasonably complete form if I want to blog about mood disorders.

(My gratitude to Eve Tushnet, whose writing on addiction has encouraged me to write on depression.)