Side Effects of Living: An Anthology of Voices on Mental Health

By Edited by Jhilmil Breckenridge and Namarita Kathait

‘This book is beautiful and it is brave. We can only salute the courage with which all these writers have let us into their lives, to give us a glimpse into the multiple worlds of what we have described and stigmatized as mental illness. Read them.’—JERRY PINTO, author Em and the Big Hoom and Murder in Mahim

There are different sizes of bodies. There are different shades of the mind. There are different states of mind in distress. Side Effects of Living presents the words and verses of survivors, writers, poets and artists, who are struggling with a mental condition or have watched their loved ones suffer. Through first-person life experiences and moving poetry, they attempt to destigmatise mental health issues, as they describe what happens when the mind gives in—or gives up. Why does it happen, and can we do anything about it?

Refreshingly honest, always uplifting, this collection urges us to reject the shame and blame that often accompanies mental illness.

About the Author
Jhilmil Breckenridge is a poet, writer and activist. She is the founder of Bhor Foundation. Her areas of work include mental health, domestic violence and trauma. She vociferously opposes forced psychiatry, supports the rights of persons with psychosocial disability and advocates for compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). Breckenridge is currently working on her PhD in the UK.

Namarita Kathait is a poet who performs spoken word poetry on stage. She has done her Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Westminster, UK, and English Literature from Delhi University. The co-founder of Bhor Foundation, she firmly believes in poetry’s power to heal. Her poems reflect on mental health, loneliness, and relationships in the digital age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Speaking Tiger
• Release date: Apr 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9789388874779

Book preview

Deb

Preface

The idea for this book came over a shared bowl of Maggi noodles in an alley in Hauz Khas Village after an open mic event where Namarita and I had performed. On a wintry day in Delhi, as the evening dropped her shawl over the monuments and the green-tinted lake in the background, we sipped hot tea from paper cups and spoke about our own journeys, mine through incarceration in a mental institution in the capital, and hers, of growing up with a mother who had severe schizophrenia. Although we had met a couple of years back, while pursuing our Masters in the UK—her first MA and my second degree as a mature student—we had never really opened up to each other about our past. As we got deeper into our conversation, the Maggi tasted spicier, the tea sweeter. Then, in a noisy autorickshaw, on way to the nearby metro station, I told Namarita, let’s write our stories and collect others’, let’s do a book together! That’s how this project took root in 2016, moving through Delhi traffic and pollution, the bustle of street vendors, the sound of evening azaan outside the busy Green Park metro station.

Bhor Foundation, the not-for-profit trust we set up a few weeks later, had not even figured in our conversation at that time. We were focused on the book and our vision—that we have to change attitudes, we have to stop hiding our stories, we have to stop being ashamed of our past. This project led to many conversations and in October 2016, around World Mental Health Day, we formally launched Bhor, in Hauz Khas Village at a friend’s studio. Suddenly, it was all very real.

This anthology took a lot of time and energy. Curating creative expressions and impressions of mental health (stories, poetry, art) was difficult—Namarita and I were not just living in different cities, but in different countries. She had a full-time job and was a full-time carer, the eldest sibling, in a home that was not quite normal, whatever normal is. I, on the other hand, had just embarked on a full-time PhD in the UK. But we were committed to doing the book—whether we had a publisher or not, whether there was interest in it or not. We persevered because we were convinced that the world needed to hear our stories and of others like us. We announced a general call for entries on our website. We extended the submission date a few times. We called for contributions from outside India. We even considered including entries in regional Indian languages, but then decided against it. Slowly, the book took on our energy and people started sending in their work. Some stories made me cry. Some had me nodding my head in solidarity. We both knew we were on the right track.

We decided to pick real stories by real people, not just creative writing or poetry about pain. With mental health acquiring a fashionable label, of late there are many #MeToo’s around. By the time we got together in July 2017 to brainstorm on the submissions in Burari, a small village in the hill state of Uttarakhand, where Namarita was teaching, we had developed a clear understanding of the kind of narratives we wanted to include in the volume. For a fortnight, we worked, discussed, debated, and discarded. Although there was no publisher on board yet, we had a strong feeling that the book would find its right home. If nothing, we would self publish under the banner of Bhor.

We were delighted when Women Unlimited and Speaking Tiger accepted the book, after discussing it over a series of emails. Originally, it was poetry heavy, because both Namarita and I are poets. Prose was a small component. (Maybe that was why we had received quite a few we can’t market this book rejections.) When the publishers suggested we consider tipping the balance of the contributions in favour of narratives, we decided to go for it. We have deliberately chosen to go with the slice of life approach for the stories because not all of them can be neatly tied up or have happy endings. And isn’t that how life is?

In its current avatar, the book brings together first-person life experiences, moving poetry, and also a little bit of art, in an attempt to provide a few answers and help destigmatise mental health distress. Through the stories of survivors, writers, poets and artists, those who have suffered or those who have watched their loved ones suffer, we have tried to make sense of what happens when madness descends, why it descends and what we can do when it does. Is it the result of a chemical imbalance; is it a virus that attacks only a few? Why do some people seem more prone to depression, anxiety and other mental health distress? And can we do anything about it?

We don’t have all the answers. But the one thing we do know is that the world can be a cruel and hostile place, and perhaps certain people are more sensitive than the rest. Rather than labelling, locking up, stigmatising, isn’t it up to us to make the world a kinder, more empathetic, inclusive space? And, maybe, if we view madness through the trauma lens, i.e., look for a plausible reason behind a person’s condition, or ask if something happened to cause her/him to act in this way, we would be able to gain better insight into the different states of mind.

There are different sizes of bodies. There are different bodily illnesses. There are different shades of the mind. There are different states of mind in distress. The key is to realise that there is no one normal. The key is to understand that the body and mind create their own balance, with time, care and the right therapies. And perhaps, most importantly, no one can cure another; they will begin to heal when they choose to do so, themselves.

I also believe—and this belief informs a lot of the work I do—that society wants people to conform to one normal; this in itself takes away from what defines us as humans—our complexity, our diversity. To be human is to be open to pain. Pain can create reactions in us, depending on the circumstances. And this is normal. But society and, in particular, the medical fraternity wants to pathologise the human condition. For instance, by prescribing the amount of time one can grieve after experiencing loss. Or by specifying how long one must feel upset before moving on after a divorce. Any aberration and one acquires a label: clinical depression, bipolar disorder, etc. This is why we decided to call the book, Side Effects of Living (the title of a piece by young writer, Bijaya Biswal); it reflects the thought behind curating this anothology and the works that are a part of it.

Grief and trauma reside in both the body and the mind. Most western approaches address the mind through therapy and medication. Trauma can surface years later, perhaps even inter-generationally. It is essential to allow spaces for people to grieve, hurt and heal in their own ways, in their own time, without the ableist lens of a capitalist society which decides on behalf of everyone else.

The time to change is now. The time to be human is now. Side Effects of Living is for people who have felt alone, experienced trauma or struggled with a mental health condition. It is for caregivers and families. It is for the people who are left behind when a loved one commits suicide. We hope that by baring our lives so openly we can start taking away from the shame and blame that often accompanies mental illness. Let’s be vulnerable together. Let’s embrace all the different shades of minds and bodies. Let’s be human together. Living comes with risks; let’s see what the side effects of living can be!

Jhilmil Breckenridge

Learning to Live in Non-Consensual Reality

Jayasree Kalathil

Reflecting on why he became a writer, the Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe said in an interview in The Paris Review:

There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail—the bravery, even, of the lions.

These words have resonated with me ever since I’ve tried to make sense of madness and find ways to tell its story.

As a mad person writing about madness, people have often asked me for my recovery story or illness narrative. I don’t have one. I continue to have experiences that have been diagnosed as mental illness and understood as mad, but the story of these experiences does not follow the symptoms-illnessrecovery trope. For me, the story of madness is in the meaning we make of it. The meaning I have finally come to make of my madness is predicated on the socio-political contexts of my life, my immediate communities, and the politics of the normal and the pathological that define our lived worlds and reality.

As long as I can remember, I have experienced voices and visions not shared by others around me, but entirely real to me. Some are fleeting but others are persistent, like the snake-vision, Pachalippaambu, a wise old soul who counsels me but sulks like a diva when I don’t listen. Other visions are more malevolent, like the Kurathi sisters, nomadic fortune-tellers, who make unannounced appearances to pass judgement on my existence. Psychiatry believes that these voices and visions are symptoms of mental illness. But it was, I believe, the loss of a trusted and protective voice-vision that first plunged me into mental distress.

When I was very young, a funny, self-confident female voice-vision whom I called Ushachechi was my constant companion. Despite being considered outgoing and naughty, as a child I existed in an almost constant state of fear. I was terrified of the dark, where spirits like the Brahmarakshas, Yakshi and their malevolent brethren loomed; of being alone when one false step could get me entangled in the grips of a dark wizard, a Durmanthravaadi; of losing my mother—I was convinced her death was imminent and unstoppable. I did not know how to deal with the constantly fluctuating emotional weather at home, where one moment enveloped me and my sister in the warmth and love of my parents, while another unleashed a hurricane of violence, as my father, an ex-serviceman, slipped into alcoholism. Through all this, Ushachechi protected me. When I was seventeen, without warning, this voice-vision left me. Unable to handle what I experienced as abandonment, amidst the continuing turbulence at home, I started cutting myself. These were mild attempts to start with, but without Ushachechi to protect me, the Kurathi sisters took over. Self-harm became a permanent coping mechanism when my first serious relationship also became tainted by alcoholism and violence. By my late twenties, I had been given several psychiatric diagnoses including depression, borderline personality disorder and schizoaffective disorder.

Growing up in small town Kerala, people who heard voices or saw visions were not entirely unfamiliar. The Velichappadu, one who threw light on problems, the oracle who mediated between the gods and their devotees, was revered in our local culture for his abilities of accessing voices and visions. There were ordinary people, too, who heard voices and had visions—in temple yards, under the banyan tree, in the bustle of the market and the bus-stand—but these mad people were not culturally welcomed like the Velichappadu. Sometimes we gave them food and clothes, at other times shooed them away or even beat them. One of them lived across the street from us on the veranda of the post office (a story fictionalised in my book, The Sackclothman). Madness, we believed, was the result of karma, or a curse passed on from generation to generation. Or it was a medical illness that required treatment. Be it divine punishment or genetic abnormality, madness was bad stock and we did not speak of it. Thus began my sense of being mad.

The violence I witnessed at home had a major impact on my emotional growth. I rebelled against what was expected of me as a good Hindu/Nair girl: well-behaved, studious, on the way to a job, marriage and children, traditional yet modern. I was bisexual and my formative relationships with women had to be secretive by necessity. I had started developing a keen sense of injustice in gender relationships and the roles attributed to women within them. I did not quite know how to express it and turned all of that angst inwards, self-harming and writing bad confessional poetry.

In my early 20s, I left home and moved to Hyderabad to do my PhD. There, I found a vibrant feminist community and got involved in the women’s movement and the students’ movement. It opened up a space for critical thinking about gender, caste and sexuality, and also the phenomenon of madness: its representations in literature and popular culture, treatment in psychiatry and psychology, relevance for women’s subjectivities, foundational constructions within ideas of normality and pathology. It was not always easy. While we talked about the pathologisation of women’s bodies and how the medical system configured and treated women, discussions about our mental health were fraught, especially when talking from an experiential point of view.

While we engaged theoretically with questioning psychiatry and the power of reason over unreason in a Foucauldian way, there was little engagement, in a practical sense, with understanding the experiences of people going through mental distress. When Bhargavi Davar, the pioneer of mental health advocacy and survivor movement in India, organised the first national conference on women’s mental health in 1996, people split into two groups: one proposing a feminist social constructionist questioning of psychiatry, and the other asserting its objective scientific validity. Between these oppositional positions, the lived realities of mental distress went unattended, despite some moving presentations about these experiences.

The medical model pathologised women’s experiences and offered medical solutions: institutionalisation, medication, Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). The feminist model questioned this pathologisation, focusing on the social and cultural constructions of madness. But, crucially, in those early days of critical public discourse on madness in India, we had no solutions to offer to those who continued to experience distress. Pathology or social construction, what do you do with the experience of distress? Notwithstanding everything I was learning about critiques of madness and its medical, socio-political and cultural management, this question remained.

As I went through more personal turmoil, including the break-up of a relationship and its legacy of violence, the frequency of my self-harm increased; so did the voices and visions, about which I did not speak openly, even in these enabling spaces of feminist solidarity. I tried to take my own life three times. None of the diagnoses that I was rapidly accumulating made any sense. The medication ironed out the texture of my being, and I frequently omitted taking them in an effort to hold on to the shades, shapes and shadows within. I was still looking for answers that would help me understand and cope with the everyday reality of my own madness.

At the national conference mentioned earlier, I had presented a paper on how women writers use the space of their writing to explore madness. I later went to Pune to speak with some women I had met at the conference. We shared with each other our writings and the stories of lives lived in the midst of the confusion of different realities,