What do you think?
Rate this book
288 pages, Hardcover
First published September 13, 2022
N. C. Surya, who directed Bangalore's All India Institute of Mental Health in the 1960s, warned his colleagues that they were adopting Western theories as if they were universal truths. 'We will end up as ineffectual caricatures of Western psychiatric theory and practice, or reduce our living patients into a set of prestige-loaded foreign jargon,' he wrote. He did not accept the Western view of mental health as the 'statistical norm'. A healthy person, according to this view, is 'like any other John or Jean in the neighbourhood'. But Indian healing cultures were meant to raise the self to a higher ideal - detached, spontaneous, free of ego - rather than simply restore the person to a baseline called normal.
The book prompted Laura to begin reading about the history of psychiatry. She hadn't realised that the idea that depression was caused by a chemical imblalance was just a theory - 'at best a reductionist oversimplification', as Schildkraut, the scientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, had put it. Nathan Kline, Ray's onetime doctor, had been confident that 'we'll find a biochemical test or series of tests that will prove highly specific to a particular depressive condition'. But such a test never materialised. For more than fifty years, scientists have searched for the genetic or neurobiological origins of mental illness, spending billions of dollars on research, but they have not been able to locate a specific biological or genetic marker associated with any diagnosis. It is still unclear by antidepressants work. The theory of the chemical imbalance, which had become widespread by the nineties, has survived for so long perhaps because the reality - that mental illness is caused by an interplay between biological, genetic, psychological, and environmental factors - is more difficult to conceptualise, so nothing has taken its place. In 2022 Thomas Insel, who directed the National Institute of Mental Health for thirteen years, published a book lamenting that, despite great advances in neuroscience, when he left the position in 2015, he realised, 'Nothing my colleagues and I were doing addresses the ever-increasing urgency or magnitude of the suffering millions of Americans were living through - and dying from'.
“the book draws not only from conversations with them but from their diaries, letters, unpublished memoirs, poems, and prayers… It’s impossible to go back in time and uncover what baseline feelings existed before a story was told — when a person’s angst and loneliness and disorientation had yet to be given a name and a vessel — but I find myself searching for the gap between people’s experiences and the stories that organise their suffering, sometimes defining the course of their lives.”