Two decades later, the year I did turn forty, now a grown woman with a family, and a house, and a dog, I was reminded of that promise.
I was in my car listening to the ABC, and was surprised and delighted to hear them roll out a radio documentary about a radical Australian doctor called, you guessed it, Claire Weekes. I was amazed!
In all my years of recommending her books to friends and their kids and strangers on the internet, I had never ever met anyone who had heard of her, or of her theories around ‘nervous suffering’. Her name, it seemed to me, had been forgotten by history. But this doco proved otherwise. I learned that, in certain circles, Dr Claire Weekes is still regarded as one of our most influential pioneers in the discussion and treatment of mental ill-health. Long before words like mindfulness or cognitive behavioural therapy were popular, there she was, walking the talk. My sense of her as progressive had been correct. I learned while listening that not only was she the first woman ever to receive a doctorate from the University of Sydney, she was also a singer, a soprano, who had once been awarded a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship and travelled alone by boat to London to study zoology. And I learned something else new: something I don’t think I’d ever heard her disclose despite now having read every single word of hers that I could get my hands on. I learned that the reason she was able to empathise so brilliantly with her patients was because once—after a long convalescence—she too had suffered from a severe case of ‘bad nerves’, and this was the very technique she used to cure herself.
That is why she could speak so confidently about recovery.
Dr Claire Weekes really was the OG—original gangster—of mindfulness.
I used to wonder if there was a name for whatever it was that was wrong with me. I suspect there are quite a few names a psychiatrist could have given to the set of quirks I lived through when I was twenty-one, and still sometimes have flares of to this day.
But the truth is, I didn’t want to hear it. I was too scared. I thought that when a doctor gave you a diagnosis, that was it, you were stuck with it for life. I thought that if I gave it a name, it would change the way I thought about myself. I thought names were cages.
I think about these things rather differently now.
Today, I think of the names we give mental illness more as a shorthand to describe the weather pattern our mind is stuck in at any one time. These names are not used to describe a sunny day; they are used to describe the storm. These days, when I think of ‘diagnosis’, I just think of it as a word or set of words explaining what’s happening for us right here, right now. They say nothing of the strengths, or sunshine, the gold in them hills. They’re just here to help us predict the kind of weather pattern that might be ahead; which route we should take, and what we should pack if we want to stay dry.
I have a prediction of my own; one that will either sound really obvious, or a little bit rude. But the truth is, on paper, as lists of symptoms, it’s sometimes hard to tell one mental illness from the next. There’s a whole lot of Venn diagram going on. The medications that help for one, often help just as much for the other, and the truth is, we don’t even know why they help, just that they can. Even when two people with the same illness are given the same medication, their reactions to it can be vastly different. It’s all a bit crude, really. The stigma remains.
My prediction is that within the next few decades, we will have found a much better way of talking about, thinking about, and treating what we currently call ‘mental ill-health’. As our understanding of brain science, genetics, epigenetics, well-being, empathy, creativity, and the thing we call ‘brilliance’ continues to develop, we will begin including in our conversations not just the storms, but also the sunshine that always follows rain. I am in no way attempting to glamourise mental ill-health—not for a single second. What I, and perhaps also you, have observed many times is that the traits we think of as indicative of mental ill-health often just happen to exist in concurrence with the very same traits our world thinks of as genius. Name for me a genius who has never known suffering? Name for me a human you admire who has never known suffering. You can’t. They don’t exist.
What seems obvious to me is that so-called illness and so-called strength are somehow related, are woven fine, in the same way love and grief are woven fine, in the same way sunshine and storms are woven fine. We need to keep striving to invent better, clearer language through which to have this conversation, and I believe we will, and I want people like you, and me, to be part of that development.
So, yes, the story I used to tell myself about mental health and the one I tell myself now are very different.
Looking back, do you know what I wish I’d done then?
For a start, I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time and energy feeling ashamed. There really was no need.
I wish I’d tried harder to find a therapist who ‘got me’—someone who (to steal a quote from my friend Ilka and her father Terry) could act like my ticking clock in a thunderstorm.
At the very least, I wish I’d taken just one of those bloody sleeping tablets and gotten myself a good night’s sleep much sooner than I did. (Paranoid thinking can be such a drag!)
7
The thing about grief
The thing about grief
