Julie de Waroquier, Inner Worlds
The New Statesmen is hosting Mental Health Week – a series of articles posted on their blog ‘exploring and debating mental health issues.’ Earlier this week, the blog included a piece by the novelist Rebecca Wait, titled The darkness beyond language.
‘When I was seventeen I began to get ill. Then words failed me. I couldn’t articulate what was wrong, so I couldn’t ask for help. By the time I turned eighteen, I was very unwell, in the grip of something I couldn’t name and couldn’t explain. Depression became, for me, the darkness beyond language.’
I’ve been thinking for a while about the language that we have for mental illness. How we approach it, and contain it, not only in literature, but also in life.
Julie de Waroquier, Inner Worlds
Julie de Waroquier, Inner Worlds
When I’m asked what this blog is about I say happiness, wellbeing and looking after our mental health, but then I hesitate before I mention those other words: ‘mental illness’. It’s not yet possible to talk about this subject without also talking about stigma. The language of mental illness is alienating–it’s a world few want to enter. It is associated with spaces, ideas, and situations that have no place in the neatly framed world, in ‘normality’, in the working week and the leisure weekend. There is little pause for grief, anger, any feeling that can’t be restrained; and there’s absolutely no place for insanity, madness, and hysteria. Which brings up those other words that are around: ‘mad’, ‘insane’, ‘crazy'. These feel like a lexicon that we’ve left behind, but they come up again and again in the writings and conversation around mental illness.
So what is a more appropriate language of mental illness? Its something this blog is grasping for, and that is so central for how people view their situations, and themselves. Including Rebecca Wait, who in her piece for The New Statesmen describes how it was language in the end that helped to pull her back together:
‘Language helped me out of this precarious state. I’d found hope before in learning to call depression by its name, to categorise the horror as an illness. Now I wondered if a similar approach could help to take the sting of fear out of what had happened – I would make myself look it full in the face, force myself to put it into words. I began to see language as a weapon. Tying something up with words, forcing it into the shape we’ve made for it, allows us to contain what might otherwise be vast, formless and threatening.
So the year after I graduated from university, I wrote a novel. I called it The View on the Way Down, in a cheery nod to my younger self. It’s not just a novel about depression – it’s also about silence and secrets, and the cost of loyalty. But the experience of depression is at its heart, and writing the novel was both difficult and wonderful in equal measure. It felt like a way of regaining control. It felt like a way of saying to the illness, I see you. If you come back, I’m ready for you. Next time will be bad, but it will also be better.’
Julie de Waroquier, Ex-pressions
Julie de Waroquier, Ex-pressions