We would - of course - like any encounter with mental illness to be as brief as possible
and, most importantly, to be isolated and singular. But the reality is that for many
of us, the illness will threaten to return for visits throughout our lives. It will be
a condition to which we will be permanently susceptible. So the challenge isn’t to learn
to survive only a one-off crisis; it’s to set in place a framework that can help us
to manage our fragility over the long-term. Some of the following moves, practical and
psychological, suggest themselves:
Acknowledgement
Being ready for a return of the illness will help us to calibrate our expectations and
render us appropriately patient and unfrightened in the face of relapses. We fell ill over
many years - our whole childhood might have been the incubating laboratory - and it will
therefore take us an age until we are impervious. We should expect to recover no more speedily
than someone who has damaged a limb and probably a good deal more arduously, given how complicated
a mind is next to a femur or a tendon.
Mental Management
We need to be rigorous with our patterns of thinking. We cannot afford to let our thoughts
wander into any old section of the mind. There are thoughts that we need to nurture - about
our worth, about our right to be, about the importance of keeping going, about self-forgiveness.
And there are thoughts we should be ruthless in chasing out - about how some people are
doing so much better than us, about how inadequate and pitiful we are, about what a disappointment
we have turned out to be. The latter aren’t even ‘thoughts,’ they have no content
to speak of, they cannot teach us anything new. They are really just instruments of torture
and symptoms of a difficult past.
A Support Network
A decent social life isn’t, for the mentally fragile, a luxury or piece of entertainment.
It is a resource to help us to stay alive. We need people to balance our minds when we
are slipping. We need friends who will be soothing with our fears and not accuse us
of self-indulgence or self-pity for the amount of time our illness has sequestered. It will
help immensely if they have struggles of their own and if we can therefore meet as equal
fellow ailing humans, as opposed to hierarchically separated doctors and patients.
We’ll need ruthlessness in expunging certain other people from our diaries, people who
harbour secret resentments against us, who are latently hostile to self-examination,
who are scared of their own minds and project their fears onto us. A few hours with such
types can throw a shadow over a whole day; their unsympathetic voices become lodged in
our minds and feed our own ample stores of self-doubt. We shouldn’t hesitate to socially
edit our lives in order to endure.
Vulnerability
The impulse, when things are darkening, is to hide ourselves away and reduce communication.
We are too ashamed to do anything else. We should fight the tendency and, precisely when
we cannot bear to admit what we are going through, we should dare to take someone into
our confidence. Silence is the primordial enemy. We have to fight a permanent feeling
that we are too despicable to be looked after. We have to take a gamble on an always implausible
idea: that we deserve kindness.
Love
Love is ultimately what will get us through, not romantic love but sympathy, tolerance
and patience. We’ll need to watch our tendencies to turn love down from an innate sense of
unworthiness. We wouldn’t have become ill if it were entirely easy for us to accept
the positive attention of others. We’ll have to thank those who are offering it and
make them feel appreciated in return - and most of all, accept that our illness was from
the outset rooted in a deficit of love and therefore that every encounter with the emotion
will strengthen our recovery and help to keep the darkness at bay.
Pills
We would - ideally - of course prefer not to keep adding foreign chemicals to our minds.
There are side effects and the eerie sense of not knowing exactly where our thoughts
end and alien neurochemistry begins. But the ongoing medicines set up guardrails around
the worst of our mental whirlpools. We may have to be protected on an ongoing basis from
forces inside us that would prefer we didn’t exist.
A Quiet Life
We should see the glory and the grandeur that is present in an apparently modest destiny.
We are good enough as we are. We don’t need huge sums of money or to be spoken of well
by strangers. We should take pride in our early nights and undramatic routines. These
aren’t signs of passivity or tedium. What looks like a normal life on the outside is
a singular achievement given what we are battling within.
Humour
There is no need for gravity. We can face down the illness by laughing heartily at its
evils. We are mad and cracked - but luckily so are many others with whom we can wryly
mock the absurdities of mental life. We shouldn’t, on top of everything else, accord our illness
too much portentous respect.
We should be proud of ourselves for making it this far. It may have looked - at times
- as if we never would. There might have been nights when we sincerely thought of taking
our own lives. Somehow we held on, we reached out for help, we dared to tell someone else
of our problems, we engaged our minds, we tried to piece together our histories and
to plot a more endurable future - and we started reading about what might be up with us.
We are still here, mentally ill no doubt at times, but more than ever committed to recovery,
appreciative of the light, grateful for love, hungry for insight and keen to help anyone
else whose plight we can recognise. We are not fully well, but we are on the mend and
that, for now, is very much good enough.