“We are not
transparent to ourselves. We have intuitions, suspicions, hunches,
vague musings, and strangely mixed emotions, all of which resist
simple definition,” write Alain de Botton and John Armstrong in Art
as Therapy, a book that was
published toward the end of 2013 and that echos some of the ideas
that American author and essayist, Siri Hustvedt, had already been
toiling with for a number of years.
A
native of Minnesota, Siri Hustvedt taught creative writing to
inpatients at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York from
2006 to 2010 with the firm believe that writing could bring about
healing.
“I
discovered that writing truly does have a therapeutic value for
psychiatric patients. I saw it in my classes, and I have been
thinking through why it has the benefits it does. I believe these
benefits are achieved by all forms of artistic practice,” she says.
But
why would a novelist with a PhD in English have an interest in
psychiatry and what it means to be a patient with mental illnesses,
what he or she has to go through?
For
almost as long as she can remember she's had to cope with migraines,
with their unpredictable and blinding pain, which in turn made her
become interested in anatomy and physiology from an early age, and in
2006 she suffered a seizure from the neck-down – she recorded her
experiences in The Shaking Woman or the Story of My
Nerves. And it's been her unabating curiosity, her desire to make the world question the boundary between normal and abnormal, that made her become a jury member for the Dr. Guislain Award, which is presented every year to people or organizations who make an effort to break the chains of stigma linked to mental illnesses. The Award was created in 2012 and is an initiative steered by the Dr. Guislain Museum in Gent, and Janssen Research and Development. The jury receives nominations from December until April, with the winner announced in October.
“The
award has not only been given to art therapy causes,” Mrs. Hustvedt
says. “It has also been given to individuals or groups that foster
the diminishment of stigma still attached to mental illness
everywhere, although in some cultures it is far worse than in others.
It is crucial to understand that suffering from a mental illness does
not make people stupid or ignorant. There are other causes for those
afflictions. In fact, countless people with psychiatric diagnoses are
creative and original. No doubt, this truth comes from both the
physiological realities of their illness and from their experience as
marginal in a given culture.”
But
life can be complex, some of its aspects often too difficult to
grasp. Clear and simple rules are marred with exceptions.
Contradictions abound.
She
explains to me that in her classes there were always patients who
were relieved to be in the hospital. There were others who couldn't
wait to get out.
Why
do humans have trouble dealing with ambiguity, I ask her.
“What
a deep question,” she exclaims. “I think ambiguity is
uncomfortable. It is like an itch in our thought processes and the
continual scratching of that itch is annoying. We want it to end. We
want certainty because it brings calm. Embracing ambiguity is
important because it means being open to new thoughts, and it keeps
us humble in the face of the astonishing complexity of human
experience.”
Finally
I ask her about suicide, a topic she's written about. Can an
initiative like the Dr. Guislain Award help reduce the number of
suicides?
“Suicide
is very difficult to parse. My intense reading on the subject left me
in awe of the complexities involved. To be blunt: despair and suicide
are linked, but despair like happiness is not a permanent condition.
For people with mental illness who are also suicidal, the right word
at the right time or some form of dialogue or intervention can and
has prevented a person from taking her or his own life. So, yes,
initiatives matter.”
