Writing the Body

News in Brief

2006-02-10T11:20:00.000-08:00

Today in AMNewYork (admittedly not the most reliable news source) there was an article about increased use of drugs and alcohol among teenaged girls. They describe a number of very relevant reasons girls have begun using drugs in such great quantities: to be liked, to fit in, to lose their inhibitions, to lose their weight. I found it interesting that we now include diet pills in our definition of drugs. But more on that later.

The article went on to say that adolescent marijuana users are five times more likely to experience a bout of major depression by the time they are 21. It implied (so that it practically stated) that marijuana (and other such things) is the cause of these depressions.

Now, I won't condone the use of drugs among adolescents and children. But this is ridiculous. They have completely ignored the fact that a very, very high percentage of drug users ARE depressives, and that's WHY they use the drugs in the first place! A huge number of cocaine users are bipolar. It's self-medication. To reverse the problem is to ignore it.

Geez.

2006-02-01T10:25:00.000-08:00

I have a lot to write down, here, but very little to say articulately. I tried to talk about China once already, but just wound up saying: "China. China China China. Yup. Good." A lot happened in China, and a lot has happened since I got back from China, and a lot is still to happen, and I'm a teensy bit overwhelmed with all of these little details.

So, as for China: Beijing airport is modern and sprawling, as they say. My luggage was lost or stolen somewhere along the way and Air Canada is presently processing a claim for monetary damages. For the first few days I had no underwear or clothing (other than what I was wearing) and our hostel was about as cold as the weather outside (only because our heater was apparently broken). And, of course, me being me, I got sick. Really sick. High fever, nausea, sinus infection, sore throat, the works. Me being me, I refused to admit how sick I was, and Josh and I repeatedly fought over what we were doing and when we were doing things. It went like this:

Josh: Let's go see the Great Wall!
Emily: Okay. Well...I don't feel so good.
Josh: Really? So bad you can't go see the Great Wall? We're in Beijing!
Emily: I know. But I don't feel good.
Josh: Are you sure?
Emily: Okay, fine, let's go see the Great Wall.

JOSH and EMILY exit hostel room. Outside is slightly colder than inside and EMILY immediately runs out of kleenex and becomes absolutely miserable and mopey. 20 feet from the front door she insists they turn around, after much insistence that it's all JOSH'S fault that they left in the first place. Which is certainly not the whole story.

That was Beijing. We did manage to get to the Temple of Heaven and Pearl Market (where they market more than just pearls, and we found me some overpriced socks). We also had several drugstore and clothing-finding adventures (most of which I cried through, due to pants fitting weirdly and being cold), found sore throat tea (bitter tea is best for sick people), rode on the back of a motorbike through a hutong, and got ripped off at a really beautiful tea ceremony.

So Beijing was really okay, if a bit rocky, but Qingdao went much better. Qingdao is lovely. Qingdao is peaceful. Within a few days of antibiotics I was pretty much back to normal, except for going through half a box of kleenex every day.

I'm going back sometime between now and July. Hopefully in May. We'll see whether I really make it through my information technologies/statistics class...

I haven't been paying attention to the world ("real world," I think they say, fingers making bunny-ear quotation marks), but for good enough reason.

I accidentally missed my first day of class (library class) on Monday. Whoops. But they haven't given me my money yet, anyway, so what's a girl to do?

This is what has happened:

Immediately after getting back from China, despite all my good intentions of catching up with the people I care about, I wandered halfway across the country instead. To interview for a PhD in English at a lovely, respectable Midwestern university. Thank God. I'm saved. As of the Third of February, I'm unofficially a graduate student - this, of course, is provided the dean rubber-stamps the department's recommendation to admit me. I am, of course, slightly paranoid (still) that something will go wrong...but what could go wrong?

New Religion?

2005-12-12T12:09:00.000-08:00

So, apropo to that last post, my mother gave me a new copy (DVD) of Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys for Chanukah.

With apologies to Gilliam and/or anyone who knows the script better than I:

At one point in the story the psychiatrist played by Madaleine Stowe has been confronted by the Bruce Willis character, who has been sent from the future to collect information so that the future scientists might be able to create a vaccine for a deadly virus that was released/is going to be released in 1996 (time is quite fluid in this story, obviously). Bruce Willis has, earlier in the movie, been arrested and then sent to the city psychiatric facility; since then he has escaped, gone back to the future, returned to the past, and kidnapped Ms. Stowe. As the story begins to unravel and events make less and less practical sense to her, she declares to her colleague that psychiatry is the new religion; they get to decide what's right and wrong, who's crazy and who's not, and what we should all do about it.

In case it hasn't been made obvious yet, I'm becoming more and more skeptical about our mental health system. I'm not sure whether I am, at this point, being called mentally ill because I have a chemical imbalance regulated by psychotropic medications, or because I am female. I'm very, very female (says Josh). I am overly sensitive and have this tendency to freak out about stupid things. And to create my own stress.

Right now, for example: I'm supposed to meet with a class this evening to do work I've already done. But I have two papers due this weekend, and I haven't really written either of them yet. Instead of making a decision about how much it's going to hurt my grades to skip this thing tonight, or working on the papers I haven't written yet, I'm sitting here blogging. Some things never change. I was that wierdo in your high school math class who actually went so far as to turn in her exam covered in angsty teenage confessional poetry instead of proofs. And they wondered why I wasn't doing better in school.

This isn't even particularly useful; I was going to write a gut-wrenching analysis of Gilliam re: hysteria, but...alas. Now I've guilted myself into writing about OPACs.

Silence

2005-11-11T08:23:00.000-08:00

To be still is the equivalent of a sort of death. "Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot...they suffer from too rigid a restraint, to absolute a stagnation..." (Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, 113)

When a person is repressed, silent, the body will take over the speech. The crisis state expressed by the hysterical body reflects the pain and disorder of the role the afflicted has taken or been forced to take. This is frequently described in Victorian literary narrative as being augmented by the Other's arrival - this Other may be an alternative self, a woman who is NOT subverted and so who is disruptive, or it may be a male figure who illustrates the non-subverted possibility. In some cases, as in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, the male figure who arrives is viewed quite negatively by the text, and rather than simply upsetting the status quo, he in fact changes the female character in some way, turning her into a New Woman who "so disrupts narrative that her inclusion sends the texts themselves into a crisis of control." (Claire Kahane, Passions of the Voice)

Finding the Soul

2005-11-11T07:38:00.000-08:00

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.