Synaptic

“Illness vs. Identity” shows Hannah’s skill in animating critical writing with creative elements. Her opening uses imagery to clarify the problem her argument will resolve, and she drives the thesis forward with questions that a reader needs to resolve. Like a strong narrative, an original argument allows the reader to discover something new. Hanah’s closing thoughts on how social perceptions of mental illness (and the identities of those suffering from mental illness) are constructed through language changed the way I read the two texts she explores.

-Joshua Dolezal

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A bald woman in a pink t-shirt. A cane and sunglasses. A nervous tic, rocking back and forth. Eyes too close together. Eyes too far apart. Too messy. Too neat.

Many kinds of illnesses have physical characteristics that we can identify the moment we set eyes on them. Many of them will be the only thing we ever know about that person. Most of the time, we won’t ever imagine what is beyond that one thing—the person’s family, job, hobbies, or sense of humor. They have become their ailment.

Mental illness can do the same thing. Conditions like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) don’t always have physical tells that would give them away in a grocery store. Once we do know they exist in a person, however, it gets harder to see anything about them in a separate light. Once again, their identity has been overshadowed by their illness.

Where does that leave them? Chances are, the illness has already pervaded their own thought processes to the point of obsession. Letting it pervade their interactions with others will only make matters worse. If and when they find an effective treatment and can emerge from the shell of their malady, their healthy identity will be so lost to themselves and others that the difficulty of recovering multiplies. This is the norm, but an effective response to mental illness will combat the symptoms without wiping out the person’s identity.

Losing one’s self to sickness is a common theme throughout narratives of mental illness. In Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s national bestselling memoir relating her experience with chronic depression, she tells her friend Paris, “I’m the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background” (53-4). Later in the same conversation, she says she is “becoming more and more invisible, getting covered over more thickly with darkness” (54). The darkness she describes is her depression, which, even at her young age of thirteen, has overtaken her sense of self. In The Hundred Hearts, a novel by William Kowalski, the protagonist Jeremy Merkin suffers from PTSD. He faces some of the same problems as Elizabeth—for instance, during his first panic attack he says, “I feel like I’m on Jupiter” (Ch. 1). Taken with Elizabeth’s comment about being lost in space, this suggests that people with mental instabilities sometimes feel as if they don’t relate to anyone in the human race. Towards the end of his story, Jeremy is reflecting on who he was before the explosion in Afghanistan that caused his disorder, saying, “that Jeremy doesn’t exist anymore. He died five years ago…and the world is better off without him” (Ch. 19). In both cases, an identity is lost, not only to Elizabeth and Jeremy, but seemingly to the world.

In that light, being or feeling lost to the world, especially to family and close friends, is another theme common in these two narratives. Elizabeth convinced herself that anytime she had a “freak-out” while she was with her friends, they got increasingly annoyed with her until they decided she “wasn’t worth the trouble” (108). Elizabeth is able to grasp when this is her fault, but it only perpetuates her guilt and causes her to retreat further away. Another time she faces that isolation is when Rafe, her college boyfriend, leaves her. She comes to terms with the fact that he was only attracted to her “emotional rawness,” in part because of his own savior complex, but more because that was all he ever knew of her. When he broke up with her, he left her “alone with [her] depression, having exhausted him and every other last resort [she] had” (217). Similarly, one of the most insightful lines about PTSD in The Hundred Hearts comes with a memory of Jeremy’s grandmother Helen. In a conversation about her husband Al’s deployment, she admits, “He wasn’t always like that. Before he went away, he was a lot of fun. The Al I married went away to Vietnam and never came back” (Ch. 4). If someone had loved Jeremy as Helen loved Al, they likely could have made the same observation about him. However, even after being back from Afghanistan for five years, Jeremy hasn’t formed such bonds—his pot dealer is his best friend.

Elizabeth Wurtzel, on the other hand, has several intimate relationships, yet she still can’t connect with anyone without centering the relationship on her depression. The bonds she does form act as shields from the rest of humanity rather than a step towards reintegration. In fact, she describes the worst part of her depression as “a sense that all human connection was elusive, was the province of…the happy people on the other side of the glass wall” (215). Her feeling of alienation is as strong as a physical barrier. It is only after the failure of every romantic relationship, every folie á deux, Elizabeth initiates that she realizes individuals with depression “cannot possibly be rescued through the power of anyone’s love” (215). Jeremy goes a step further in his belief that human interaction will ultimately lead to identity erasure. On a sidewalk in New York City, he stops and thinks, “Humanity is a river…and I am a rock. If I stand here long enough, they’ll just wear me away, and I’ll disappear” (Ch. 13).

How then do we, as a society of people at all points of the mental health spectrum, confront the problem at hand? How do we hang on to the identities at risk and revitalize them? Should we change our interactions during and after an experience with mental illness, or treat our friends and loved ones the same as ever? And how should one recovering from a debilitating ailment renew their own identity?

Naturally, these questions necessitate answers on a case-by-case basis, but Wurtzel and Kowalski provide insight toward that end. One very obvious answer is the fact that Prozac Nation itself is a memoir. It was a way for Elizabeth, a born writer, to explore and express who she was before, during, and after the nadir of her depression. Near the end of the memoir, she recounts, “It took me a long time to get used to my contentedness. It was so hard for me to formulate a way of being and thinking in which the starting point was not depression…because depression is an addiction” (292). Like any addiction, depression was hard for Elizabeth to quit, but as her healing process dovetailed with the writing process, she discovered a renewed identity in authorship.

Jeremy Merkin’s answer to the question of identity is not so heartening. His therapist suggests that if he can remember what happened the day of the explosion, a day that has been erased from his memory, it will give him the closure he needs to recover from his disorder (Ch. 7). But then he does remember—“It was a crime. He’d tortured and executed an unarmed prisoner” (Ch. 19). Suddenly, Jeremy is faced with a new identity that perpetuates, rather than heals, his instability. He only did such a thing, he rationalizes, because “he’d given up any thought of ever going home again” (Ch. 19). Now he is home, and he could be labeled and convicted as a war criminal. He wonders how he will ever go on from this point, how he will ever live a normal life while denying his ugly past.

One of the hardest parts of Elizabeth’s recovery process came when she realized, “I had fallen in love with my depression…I thought it was all I had” (289). She believes that the odd, often inappropriate effects of her illness were what people liked best about her. It comes as a shock to her when her friends admit “they excused this behavior as a sad flaw. It wasn’t what they liked about [her] at all” (290). Elizabeth is struggling here with the thought of returning to society as someone without depression for the first time in a decade. However, mightn’t the transition have been easier if her friends had come to her earlier with their affirmation? This is where the burden is divided. A person whose identity seemingly begins and ends with mental illness is easy for others to overlook. That is not to say they ignore them—instead, they refocus all interaction on the illness, whether or not that is what the person needs. During the recovery process, then, outsiders may pressure someone, with a so long neglected sense of self, to the near-impossible feat of recovering their identity as it was ‘before.’ To address this paradigm, our society needs to change the way we think about those with mental illness. Even writing this, I have struggled to shake the “us and them” dichotomy that pervades the culture.

Jeremy Merkin is different. His inability to reenter the workaday lifestyle stems from sources much larger than himself. For one thing, the place he calls home—Elysium, California—is not somewhere he even wants to fit into again, as he observes, “there is no middle ground in Elysium, no one is just sort of anything” (Ch. 12). Compare this to Elizabeth, who finally finds solace “in-between…a life where the extremes are in check” (293). Without that comfortable middle ground to return to, Jeremy simply doesn’t return mentally. Another factor in Jeremy’s disorder is the army. In boot camp, groups of men are stripped of their individuality and built back up as a single unit. But when three members of the unit are “smithereened,” and others get shot, taken prisoner, or shipped off to a hospital, there is no ‘reboot camp,’ if you will (Ch. 1). There is no time for the men to adjust to life as an individual again—they just get thrown in the middle of it, maybe with a family, maybe completely alone, and are expected to survive.

Just as Jeremy’s search for identity isn’t as successful as Elizabeth’s, the conclusion of his story isn’t as fulfilling. Shortly after he has uncovered the truth of his war crime, a brain aneurysm kills him. Even then, Jeremy has not escaped the war. In the novel’s epilogue, we learn that his version of the afterlife starts back in Afghanistan, with villagers and fellow soldiers he knew in life. The novel ends without any closure between Jeremy and his family—many loose ends are left dangling—but the final moment where he joins his platoon at the Helmand River is reminiscent of an earlier scene. He had been drawn to that river while he was still alive, stationed in Helmand, and realized, “in that moment with Smarty by the river, he hadn’t wanted to be a soldier anymore; he just wanted to be Jeremy” (Ch. 14). Perhaps Kowalski’s point in having him return to the river after his death is a wake-up call to society: there are people among us who will not regain their identity until they die. They will be called soldiers or criminals or some other lifelong label, and nothing else. What are we doing to help them?

There is a movement in the special education field for ‘person-first language.’ This is the simple act of saying, for example, “person with disabilities” instead of “disabled person.” The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association claims, “to have may imply possession and to be may imply identity.” By the same token, saying Elizabeth Wurtzel is depressed rather than saying she has, deals with, or suffers from depression is at least part of what causes society to confuse mental illness and identity. Using person-first language is not only more respectful to people with mental illnesses, but also lessens the power of the illness itself in the context.

Of course, this simple change is not a panacea. On its own, it cannot heal mental illness or reaffirm the identity of every human being who suffers from it. But gradually, it would change a paradigm that plagues our society. The way those with mental illnesses think about themselves is affected by how society thinks about them, and the way society thinks is a result of language itself. In the end, the simplest individual changes, diffused throughout the population, are often the most powerful and enduring.

Works Cited

Folkins, John. “Resource on Person-First Language.” The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, December 1992. Web. 13 March 2015.

Kowalski, William. The Hundred Hearts. Toronto, ON: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2013. Kindle file.

Wurtzel, Elizabeth. Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America. New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1994. Print.