Finding the Soul

In Ancient China when someone was very sick or dying, the shaman-priest would take his red flag up to the roof of the house and wave it into the night sky, crying out: "O Soul! Come back!"

This suggests that it is the soul's departure that kills us, not our deaths that cause loss of soul. Assuming one believes in such a thing.

The soul, the spirit, the humor, the self.

I have never taken a philosophy class. I heard the story about ancient Chinese medicine men in an art history class. Almost all of my knowledge of psychoanalytic thought comes from literary theory and independent study. I am not, though I once tried to be, a particularly learned religious scholar. In a sense I have no qualification, and thus little justification, to write this.

But I do know a lot about literary theory, and I do know how to research, and I do know more than I should about mental illness. (Sidenote: New York State is presently insisting that we instead refer to the field as "mental hygeine." To me this is far more offensive. It suggests that there is a cleansing process we can and must go through to become part of a majority society. The very idea of a "hygeine" is somehow wrong. But more on this later.)

The thing about mental illness and psychiatry is that we use these things to set behavioral parameters for ourselves - the DSM-IV-R practically legislates emotional norms. This is not a new phenomenon; this has been going on for thousands of years now. That said, I do not believe we should do away with the DSM-IV-R diagnostic guidelines, nor do I believe that we should get rid of psychotropic medication, hospitalization, or alternative therapies. Quite to the contrary: I take large issue with the fact that although lobbyists have succeeded in improving mandated insurance coverage for mental health treatment, the mentally ill still do not have equal rights to hospitalization, medication, and talk-therapy.

My insurance, for example, used by most NYC employees, provides for talk-therapy coverage on a rolling basis - that is, every ten appointments someone with this type of insurance must be re-evaluated to determine whether it is absolutely necessary for him to continue treatment. This insurance also has placed restrictions on the types of medication a psychiatrist can prescribe: the medications are limited to fluoxotine (prozac) and an early form of bupropion (welbutrin - this early form must be taken multiple times at set hours during the day for it to be effective, whereas the most recent form of bupropion is a once-a-day dose). It provides little coverage for mood stabilizers; the patient must be lucky enough to have a doctor who will battle the insurance company on the basis of the medication being necessary and the case being dire.

It gets worse.

Women (whose annual pap smears are not covered by this insurance policy) are far more likely, traditionally, to seek out psychiatric help. Partially as a consequence of this tendency and partially due to what has been traditionally viewed as an over-sensitive, over-emotional disposition particular to women which, when exaggerated, has been diagnosed repeatedly as hysteria (today this is borderline personality disorder), this results in women most often being denied appropriate medical care - rather perversely because of the diagnoses they are likely to receive when they go looking for help. A woman diagnosed as a borderline personality disorder will often not only have difficulty finding a doctor willing to work with her; her insurance will sooner or later most likely write her off as a lost cause. (To me this is the equivalent of having an eating disorder, being forced to take an antidepressant that makes you gain weight, and then become reactively depressed to your antidepressant.)

Anyway, the point is, as a friend of mine once so eloquently put it, we're screwed. Women are damned if they do and damned if they don't; we're told we're crazy when we don't act like men, when we express our emotions in a way that "society" doesn't believe is appropriate, and we're told we're crazy ("gender confused") when we do act like men.

I'm not sure I buy into this theory wholeheartedly, but it does strike a chord. When are we okay? When are we right? When are we behaving as we are supposed to behave?

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what Wuthering Heights is really about. It is also what Simone de Beauvoir was writing about, what Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid and Angela Carter have written about, and what now writers like Steve Erickson have begun to tackle on the larger scale of humanism.