Here We Go Again

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I am of course sympathetic to all mental health issues. I recognize that the treatment of mental health didn't really arrive until the 90s, with cognitive behavioral therapy and the rise of Prozac and its kin--medicines that actually work with minimal side effects--and that treatment before that was scattershot and unhelpful, and sometimes actively harmful. There also remains, to this day, a stigma against admitting to mental health issues of any kind, of receiving treatment or being in therapy, and that colors how people treat others with mental health problems.

Grant also that Sylvia Plath's singular ability as a writer is to remember--to describe something terrible with a precise and accurate metaphor so that whatever she's describing feels uncomfortably close. Towards the end of The Bell Jar, she does recognize this as one of her real failings--that people feel better when they can forget, and she simply can't forget.

But good lord what a piece of work. It's hard to watch someone throw away parts of their life, to know they know they are doing it, and somehow feel no sympathy or identification. Is it the illness or is it her? Either way, what a fascinating trainwreck and a person I would not ever want to have to know. She becomes more sympathetic once she's in the care of so-called professionals, but even this is colored: we hear a lot about ECT, and not a lot about what she was talking to the doctors about the rest of the time, though she occasionally admits there's a lot of that talking happening. Every interaction with another person is seen as through a pinhole, with a narrow focus on what they can do for her and how they think of her. Again, mental health issues and sympathy and all, but no thanks.

(I read some Rilke after finishing Plath's poetry and it felt nauseatingly fake, which I think is part of the spell. The idea is that the most unsparing, harshest version of the truth is the only real one, and anyone who works in a mode of kindness or sympathy or even respect for the beauty of the world is lying, or stupid, or a phony. I eventually snapped out of it--I like being alive, I like the world around me--but the spell is powerful.)