Dear Maya,
Today, like everyday, I was glossing through the posts on a social media group dedicated to Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology. A lot of the scientific literature around mental illness seems to be revolving around the topic of whether or not you can genetically “inherit” depression, for example. Is it coded into the strands of your DNA or is it a product of your upbringing, or is it a product of simply how you think?
Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry, in practice, has very little to do with the “origins” of mental illness, simply because it’s not a useful way of thinking about it. If you present with a mental health ailment, it’s not very useful (or good) to hear that it’s because your genes are skewed. And so Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry are both intervention-based, in practice. Your therapist might be more invested in offering you practical solutions to your anxiety, than in extracting your DNA to study under a microscope.
One might argue that it is inherently necessary to study the “origins” of an illness before attempting to cure it. But for something as complex as mental illness, that literally lives within your own mind, I think it is necessary to first downsize it. The first aspect of doing that, for me, was dawning into the understanding that anxiety did not mystically “descend” upon me. The Universe did not conspire with my parents’ zygotes to decide to give me anxiety as a sixteen-year-old.
There were times when I started therapy when I was entirely convinced that I had anxiety because my third cousin has it too – it runs in the blood. There’s nothing I can do about it. It wasn’t a useful method of looking at a problem because that meant giving up all control and surrendering to medication. The truth is, even till today, the scientific community has no clear answers to how medication helps improve mood. It is true, however, that lots of people (including me) have benefited considerably from it, we just don’t know how.
There were also moments when I thought that it was because of my parents and their lack of problem-solving skills that I had developed anxiety. Maybe they were just negative people, or weren’t taught the skills by their own parents. Blaming others for the influence they had on my life did give me a semblance of temporary relief. But my problems were still right there, just where it all started. Could I possibly choose to erase my upbringing? No, not at all.
[TL;DR]
While acknowledging that it is entirely possible that this huge spectrum of mental illnesses could have genetic origins, I found that simply looking at them as products of slightly ‘misplaced’ perspectives could offer me a position of power over them. It’s like looking over a battlefield from atop a hill. It allows you to study the landscape and carefully strategize your plan of attack. And with each new conscious perspective shift, you get closer to hoisting that victory flag and reclaiming enemy territory, in the space of your own mind.
Dear Maya 