I want to share my response to a question posed to me during yesterday’s online course (Charles Eisenstein’s Space Between Stories). The inquirer has a daughter that has been diagnosed with a particular mental disorder. She, the mother, however refused to believe that the story of mental illness, or pathology, was her daughter’s story; she suspected that there was much more to these disruptive experiences than our institutionalized clinical models allow us to notice. Deeply inspired by her courage, I wrote the following, which I hope also speaks to many others sending me messages:

I want to start first by honouring your courage, the soft embers of life aglow within you. Words couldn’t begin to describe how taken I am by your story, by your adventure, by your rapturous insistence on meeting the universe halfway, by your faith that there is something else to these mysterious experiences that our modern clinical models and stories of sanity aren’t telling. I felt that faith a couple of years ago when I witnessed what is called ‘brain shock therapy’ (more formally, ‘electroconvulsive therapy’) for the first time. I was being trained as a clinical psychologist, and I was led by my supervisor to a ward where a woman lay down in her bed, motionless and distant. There was no hair on her head. The doctors shared her ‘history’ with me – which, in practical terms, is what neatly fits into boxes large enough to contain words to inspire confidence in a diagnosis. She suffered from a debilitating form of depression, which was a symptom of schizophrenia. The doctors concluded that she needed electroconvulsive therapy. So her hair was cut off, and the contraption was placed on both sides of her head. I remember thinking, in that moment, just before the machine was turned on (and just before she started shaking violently on her bed), how utterly dehumanizing it was, how culturally embarrassing it was to shave a woman’s head in Igboland, and how there had to be something else about the whole experience of mental illness that I had missed. Needless to say, I looked away. I couldn’t bear to watch her as if she were an object – as if all that was happening there was merely the administration of a treatment that ‘works’.

My experience set me on a journey that took me from my convenient chair as a young psychotherapist-in-training, to the wards (where, in defiance of hospital protocol, I slept for a few days in order to listen to the stories of in-patients), and then to the feet of Yoruba shaman-priests. It was from them I heard the first strains of the music that was struggling to be heard within me – a story that drew my attention to the ways nature-culture shapes our experience of deviance and trauma, to the deep pain and hidden psychic trade-off in absolute rationality, to the awkwardness of sanity and normality, the inadequacy of mental healthcare systems (and mental health as a category), and to the sacredness of falling apart. I am still confused about many things, but I resonate with what you say. I do think we are witnessing what might be a resurgence of plural ways of experiencing the world – a ‘neurodiversity’, if you will. Modernity became for us all the banishing of sensuous ways of being alive, and the reinforcement of the story that we are singular, final, boundaried, and – at heart – rational creatures. My culture teaches me that we straddle the porous boundaries between many worlds, that spirits inhabit our blind spots, that trees listen to conversations, and that darkness holds profound promises for new ways of being alive. It sounds strange, but maybe it is strange because we haven’t met our own souls, and because we are so estranged from the preposterous beauty in being alive that we think survival is all we’ve got.

Those shamans told me stories about people who would be considered ill – stories that painted these precious people as avatars, as prophets, as stern voices from realms we cannot conceptualize. They laughed at me when I spoke about pills, categories and nosological systems designed to situate our understanding of these experiences and approach to treatment in reductionistic terms. To them, a ‘mad’ man cannot be known in terms of little categories or physiological states alone. That is because there is so much happening beyond the ‘human’ that it would be nonsensical to even try to think in those terms. For me, their wisdom opened me up to the nonsensical, to realms beyond logic and rationality, beyond normative cause and effect relationships, beyond easy notions of time and space and agency. Beyond convenient ideas around what change means, what ‘problems’ are, what being human suggests. They may not have said it with these words, but they showed me that there is dignity in falling apart.

In a sense, dear friend, I think many people around the world are now occupying this space between stories, these borderlands of emergence. We are bleeding. The material conditions of our globalizing order teaches us to see this bloodletting as trouble, as something that calls for a fixing, as a breakdown of order, as pathological. So we try to patch things up. That’s why ‘western’ models of health are largely focused on reducing your experience of symptoms – hence, big pharma. Modernity cannot stand the outlier explanation. But we bleed nonetheless. And as we get more porous, as our membranes become tired, and as we become more and more uncomfortable ‘in’ these conceptual categories and metaphorical wombs, we are opening up to a ‘larger’ world. We are sensing the dying of leaves, we are picking up frequencies of rocks, of prancing deer, of dancing auroras, of ebbing waves, of yawning moon. Our cultural apparatus cannot yet make sense of these ‘other’ languages since they don’t fit the Great Syntax of our times. What might be needed today are seditious, breakaway cultures that gravitate towards listening to these ‘voices’, instead of shutting them out; embracing the disruptive slowness inspired by these conditions instead of taming them. What we might need are new visions of wholeness: mental health is no less problematic than mental disorder. We need to see our bleeding as some kind of inter-subjective menstruation – the kind of bloodletting that prepares for new life. We need circles to share these ‘wounds’ – not as things to be magically resolved or ‘healed’ with chants of ‘love and light’, or banished with new age expertise – but as gifts of be-ing (which also contain within them the seeds of destruction and new cycles of life).

I have a daughter, and I don’t know what I would do if I had to be where you are. It’s easy to share these stories, but quite another matter entirely to live them. Let me say that I do not wish to ‘shrink your problem’ with my words; this is not only because I am hesitant to see it as a ‘problem’, or because I am trying to decolonize myself from the vision of a world parsed neatly into problems and solutions, but because the throbbing vitality of what you have is a story that has no immediate circumference or obvious center. And thus, in a way, speaking to it introduces some sort of violence to it. For all its worth, I hope my sharing ushers you into a more restful place, into a place of awe – where you recognize that your daughter is in ironical ways hospicing you and slowly re-enchanting you with a more enriching experience of life. A non-western proverb says: “Name the colour; blind the eyes.” We are collectively blinded by our own categories of thought, by our own imperatives of change, by our own manufactured sense of urgency. The world is rich and wild and wonderful. Thanks to you and your daughter, I believe that even more fervently. ~ Adebayo Akomolafe

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