Last night Mark came to bed and Pepe wasn’t there between us. He brought Poupoune into the bed as a substitute, but she isn’t as soft and snore-y as Pepe was. Mark broke down in inconsolable sobs. “I miss Pepe!” “Pepe didn’t want to die!” “He was so happy on his walk.” “He was so helpless. I looked after him!” … and finally, “He needed me.” I cried too, because I was sad for Mark.
 
Today we talked about why he is so much more affected than I am. One reason is Mark’s greater experience of loss, having lost both parents as well as his country and old friends. Intellectually he thinks the decision was probably appropriate, but he feels it to be painfully wrong.
 
Another reason is my own experience of suffering. I spent years trying to get my depression taken seriously so that I could get effective treatment for it, only to be repeatedly told that as long as I could function a little bit that I wasn’t depressed enough—probably not depressed at all. I got treatment after having lived in a dysfunctional relationship for years because I didn’t have the financial or psychic resources to leave; having become unable to do any kind of work; having lost contact with my friends; and having been reduced to walking the sidewalks with tears streaming down my face. As long as I wanted treatment I was denied it. When I no longer wanted it, when I had given up all hope and wanted only to die, it was suggested that I was possibly depressed and would I consider accepting treatment for depression?
 
I am still angry today at having been forced to suffer as much as I did, forced to endure completely unnecessary losses, in order to qualify for intervention.
 
Mark may be projecting his own sense of abandonment, but I am also re-enacting my own story, this time re-written to include the recognition of suffering and need given promptly and lovingly, without begging.

I spent an evening with a friend who’s been struggling. She was depressed and very lucid.

I think I really like depressed people. Not so depressed that they just lie there pretending to be dead and wishing that pretending would make it so – those ones I just want to kick. But depressed enough that we can have interesting conversations about bad things without having to invent a happy ending for everything. Depressed enough that we can comfort one another without feeling patronising or patronised.

Kathleen’s site is a resource for designer-entrepreneurs in the “sewn product” field. She’s passionate, extremely bright and rides her hobby-horses (pattern cutting and lean organisation) with the single-mindedness that is the gift of Asperger’s syndrome. She wrote the book that you can buy through the site – and that is used as an essential text in fashion schools all over North America.

This particular entry documents the application of a business management approach to a potential domestic crisis.

Just got back from the Festival International Nouveau Cinéma Nouveaux Médias Montréal.

Saw Stormy Weather, a lovely story about mental illness and comparing Belgian and Icelandic ways of coping. The Belgian psychiatrist wants her patient to stay with her, in Belgium, where she can live forever in a well-funded hospital with lots of pleasant, well-spoken, polite and slightly dysfunctional patients and be tended to by trained professionals who restrain her kindly and reluctantly when necessary, addressing her as Madame when they regretfully have to sedate her. The patient’s husband loves her and wants her to live at home with him in Iceland where there is no psychiatrist and no treatment. He’s a little dingy himself and would totally lose it if his wife were taken away from him and institutionalised. (This is a terrible movie about psychiatry, by the way. In real life it’s not nearly so either/or. Hospitals are largely for keeping mentally ill people safe, or for evaluating them (both short-term propositions), or for offering outpatient care (a longer-term proposition). There is absolutely no reason a mentally ill person like the woman in this movie couldn’t be evaluated in Reykjavik and sent home to her family and GP with some prescriptions. And no, psychiatrists do not work by selecting a single patient out of the hospital or treat them by taking them shopping and on extended field trips. If a patient is well enough to handle going into a store without freaking out they probably don’t need to be hospitalised. Also, in this fantasy Belgian hospital mental patients were allowed to stay in bed as long as they wanted to. Not in any psychiatric ward I’ve ever known!)

But, whatever, yes it’s a terrible movie about psychiatry but still a lovely movie about mental illness, and coping, or not; and about the burden of trying to act as if everything were okay when it isn’t. Highly recommended. Even if you have no interest in mental illness, the Icelandic scenery is beautiful. (Plus it meets the Alison Bechdel lesbian criteria.)

A little while ago I mentioned Matchstick Men in the context of a theme of older men paired with much younger women that had become rather tedious. Well, Matchstick Men starts out as a totally refreshing movie about mental illness. I was thrilled to see Nick Cage up there on screen representing me: visibly unhinged, dependent on meds, and getting by. Even getting by rather well. Then the dénoument ruins everything. Go ahead and see it anyway: it’s rather more likely to be playing in a theatre near you than Stormy Weather is.

Does anyone have any suggestions for movies about mental illness? Or psychiatry? I don’t want a movie where mentally ill people are simply mildly eccentric and flourish when someone is nice to them. Someone who flourishes is not ill.

I never saw Girl, Interrupted. How was that?

[originally transmitted by e-mail October 14, 2003]