An Illness, Inherited?

EDINBURGH — I spent many months, as a fetus, in a mental institution, listening to the world shuffling outside. I don’t know what meds were administered to me in that developing stage. I lived in the belly of a woman I would never know. But my relationship with something dubiously entitled mental health was already established.

I grew up in public care, in a series of foster placements, children’s homes, adoptions, hostels; by the time I was 16 I had moved around 30 times. I had no memory of ever meeting anyone I was related to or even seeing a photograph of them. All I knew, thanks to a social worker, was that one parent had at one point been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

The social worker tried to explain schizophrenia to me. She drew a cat and said that if I was schizophrenic I would not see a cat, I would see a lion. I thought that sounded excellent. Every book I loved transported me to a world where wardrobes were portals and trees could talk. Also, I wanted to be like someone, even if that someone had a disease. I didn’t know anyone who looked like me, or shared my DNA in any kind of a way.

But I was told not to tell anyone that I came from a crazy person or nobody would speak to me. I was advised to say I had been put in care because my biological mother had a more socially acceptable illness: They suggested cancer.

I knew in my bones that it would happen to me one day. I didn’t realize I already had it — a deep sadness, not stepping on the cracks, counting polystyrene squares on ceilings in classrooms, trying not to breathe in a way that would be noticed, digging my nails into my fist so hard they left marks and having flashes of thoughts that made me think I was a monster. Nobody would have known. I was bright, funny, good at storytelling and sports; it was not obvious at all to the outside world.

Recently I had a bout of severe depression. It shocked me. I thought I was so beyond it. In truth it had been showing itself for years. If I denied it perhaps it would go away. It made me think (as William Burroughs said) that every person has inside him a parasite, acting entirely to his disadvantage.

I saw a psychiatrist who informed me that I had obsessive-compulsive disorder. A touch of Asperger’s syndrome that possibly just flared through stress. Severe depression. I was told that my lifelong obsession with existentialism was a result of a brain that has never produced enough serotonin. My amygdala is abnormal. My basal ganglia rebellious. My prefrontal cortex would like a vacation in a more gentle place than this world is ever going to allow.

I am sure at least half of this is connected to the way I was raised. That constant sense of insecurity. The ceaseless moving. The being a stranger in houses with people I did not know, whom I had nothing in common with, whom I had to appease or move on. We are given messages about who we are in life, and in public care those messages were often not good.

I think about Masaru Emoto, a Japanese doctor of alternative medicine, who claims that human consciousness can affect matter. He placed two jars of rice in a room and his students said hate to one and love to the other, until, the story goes, the first one turned brown and began to decompose at an accelerated rate. According to a 13th-century account of Frederick II, a Holy Roman emperor, he wanted to see where language came from, and so he arranged to have babies raised who would never be spoken to. At all. Not even once. They were fed but that alone was not enough to sustain them and it is recorded that they died.

We are frightened by people with mental illness. Try to think of it like a broken leg. The words you write on the cast might help that injury heal.

Early Hindu and Punjabi scriptures portrayed mental illness as a channeling of sorcery or witchcraft. Socrates had hallucinations and his own demon, yet he also considered mania a positive source of prophecy and poetry. Pythagoras heard voices, Florence Nightingale had severe depression. Job and King Saul, Nebuchadnezzar, all a bit mental. One of the first psychiatric wards was built in Baghdad in 705. They treated patients with baths, drugs, music and activities. How utterly clever of them. Lunatics were named after Luna, and it was thought they had been moonstruck by the goddess. A mass dancing mania was reported in the Middle Ages. I raise them Acid House and early Rave. I raise them gospel churches and shopping centers, our collective need to stand among others.

By the Enlightenment, mental disability was seen as the domain of wild beasts. Its sufferers were chained and treated with contempt. What would that kind of treatment do to a bowl of rice? What does it do to a human heart? To an injured brain?

We are long past the Enlightenment, but mental health services remain underfunded, misunderstood. One in four of us directly experiences mental health problems. Yet somehow we still fear. I bought into that. A fear of my own illness. Yet our bodies want us to heal. My injured brain was telling me I had to change how I thought.

So I did. I bought a record player. I made a vow to brush my teeth each morning and not check emails until after I had breakfast. I decided to go out to dinner during episodes of severe derealization. I said I would not wait for my illness. I took train journeys where I thought I would not be able to stand at the end of them because my exhaustion was so severe it seemed I would have to just go to sleep on the floor. I told people.

Am I well? I am better than I was before.

I have avoided the subject of mental illness for so long in so many ways. I did not choose it, but it is in me, it is part of my DNA. I don’t resent this and I find it a fascinating thing to explore, the things we inherit, whether eye color, temper, taste, a predilection for anxiety. I still don’t particularly know where I came from, and if I was to inherit anything I would have hoped it wouldn’t be an illness. But perhaps what I go through is more environmental than genetic. I have a child now and I watch him and occasionally wonder what he may have to deal with in this life. I can’t know. All I can do is give him love.

Lydia Lunch recently said that pleasure is the ultimate rebellion, and so I am taking it, in the small moments, holding my child, feeling ill but still seeing friends for dinner, going to work. I don’t need to understand everything. I just need to offer myself empathy when I feel terror, or the closeness of death, or the sadness of this world, or when I wake in the middle of the night.

---

Jenni Fagan is the author of the novel “The Panopticon.”