In the wake of my thinking about the portrayal of mental health and illness in the books I read, I had dinner with a former supervisor. She’s a mentor to me, and I love spending time with her. It just makes me a feel a bit more at ease after we’ve talked.
The conversation turned, as it often does, to books. We’re both avid readers with similar taste in books. We were discussing Wally Lamb, and she expressed her frustration that She’s Come Undone was called “a woman’s book,” as if Dolores was supposed to speak for women on the whole. When in reality (well, ok in fiction, but you know what I mean), Dolores was a woman with a lot of struggles who likely suffered from borderline personality disorder. The concept of that being “a woman’s book” reinforced the notion that all women, at least all white women of a certain level of economic prosperity (not that Dolores was rich by any stretch, but her character could afford to attend college and had a benefactor that paid for her expensive and extensive private mental health treatment), were hopelessly neurotic. After over a hundred years of progressive thought in mental health and feminism, we’re back to Freud and his hysterically blind housewives…doesn’t it always come back to Freud?
The whole idea of a difference between a man’s experience of mental illness, or even mental normalcy in a relative sense, and a woman’s experience has been fodder for researchers and theorists for decades. But it gave me pause to think about it going in the opposite direction… do we under-pathologize serious issues for women because it’s simply “how we’re built?” Is it harder to acknowledge and accommodate a range of normal for men because of socialized roles, leading to a greater use of diagnosis to make it concrete and understood, while women just languish in having “woman issues”? Is a greater amount of emotional lability, depression and anxiety considered “normal” for women than men? And is everyone always going to continue to blame everything on our goddamn hormones?
But there are, of course, two sides to every coin. I found Dolores’s voice to be authentically female, but I also found it authentic from the perspective of someone who is suffering from a serious mental illness. I like to think I’m not conflating the two, but it made me wonder how it was received by people outside of the mental health field or without a lot of experience with those suffering from mental illness. Is that what they thought “normal” looks like? IS that what “normal” looks like? Am I the one with some serious questions to answer about my perception of the disruptive quality of mental illness, and therefore, the need for my services? Do I over pathologize to remain relevant?
It reminds me of when I was in high school and desperately seeking to be hipster and literary. I read beat poetry and painted my nails black. I adored Sylvia Plath, and I must have read The Bell Jar a thousand times. In my adolescent experience of the world, that was what it meant to be a young woman, and Plath just GOT ME (said in the most melodramatic, overly teenage ton possible). I now know how sick Plath was for most of her life, and how tragically her story ended. But to my 16 year old self, that was my normal. Who am I to say Dolores isn’t someone elses?
The bottom line is, of course, that there are no answers to these questions. People don’t seek therapy because they’re diagnosed as “mentally ill.” They seek therapy because they feel they need something: support, medication, help solving something they’re stuck on. None of those things change based on a 5 number code on an insurance form or a page from the DSM. And while it can be helpful in conceptualizing treatment and gaining clear outcomes, diagnosis is just a label, albeit one that come loaded with questions and judgments. It doesn’t really matter if Dolores has borderline personality disorder or is like any other woman. What matters is that help and hope are found for those who are dealing with the same issues as she was. And I hope Lamb’s work inspires some women to see that there IS someone “just like them” and find redemptive power in his words.
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