The Nexus of Science and Soul: Forming a Life Narrative After Mental Illness

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.” Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis [1] 

To have experienced delusions, psychosis, and suicidal ideation is to be Undermined by one’s self [2]. 

There is a nauseous strangeness to the experience, a fracturing of identity that seems beyond comprehension and elucidation. 

How does one piece apart one’s identity? 

Are the thoughts they are having really their thoughts? Are they the being experiencing their thoughts? What is the origin of the grandiose self-deceits of mania and castigating wounds of the inner-narrative of self-hate that pours inward with depression and suicidal thinking? 

The trajectory of Recovery from behavioral health issues has many stages. If a pharmaceutical intervention is needed, it will take a set amount of time to quiet the physical organism and regulate the system to abate the cacophony of symptoms. But that is just the beginning. 

Life narratives have changed. For many… “The destination and map…used before were no longer useful.” [3] 

The hospitalization, diagnosis, and medication regimen are unknowns that now dominate the new life narrative and the patient/person is thrust into an existential turmoil to understand this life in terms of the past, present, and future. 

Medical sociologist Arthur Frank’s book, The Wounded Storyteller, discusses this place where you can lose subjectivity in your own illness narrative. 

He describes it as the Chaos narrative. 

 The Chaos narrative is a place where “consciousness has given up the struggle for sovereignty over its own experience.” [3] It is a place where the body’s dysfunction is immediate, otherworldly, distant, and seemingly unknowable. It is experienced by cancer patients who lose the ability to associate with the inner parts of their bodies that are trying to kill them. It is the dissociation from the physical body that neurologist Oliver Saks, MD, writes about in his book, A Leg to Stand On, when he loses the ability to connect physical ownership to his own leg in a London hospital. [3] 

In behavioral health issues, the dilemma of such existential fracturing can be more global as the “chaos” is more difficult to localize. What part of the physical body is “Undermining” me? 

Where does the problem lie? 

What part of me is my Mind? 

How does one work on one’s self in totality? 

And what life lay ahead for a person with this diagnosis, a history of numerous hospitalizations, and a prescription for psychiatric drugs? 

What part of “me” is trying to Undermine-kill-banish “me”? 

My lectures to medical professionals looking to increase medical compliance and better overall outcomes often center on learning to translate this “existential illiteracy”[4] and offer narrative skills to help guide people from this chaotic place. 

It is imperative to intercept these feelings of fracture and displacement to allow the person you are working with to create a concrete set point to begin this journey of life change. 

That is what we are talking about here. 

Not a treatment plan but a life plan. And one should acknowledge how dynamic it will be day-to-day to create new maps for this changed landscape and new goals adjusted to the new life order, to unify the person’s existence and discuss the dilemma of being on guard against an intruder that lives below the skin. 

To be diagnosed with a behavioral health issue, especially bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or schizo-affective disorder, is to be labeled with an illness that is considered a forever condition that carries its own concrete “societal rhetoric” [3] of illness, of being unwell. It is a “narrative surrender”[3] to a clinical lexicon that disallows subjectivity. 

That’s why discussions of medications should also be discussions of identity, being, and existence. Of narrative cogency in the face of catastrophic illness and exploratory narrative processing to find meaning and purpose in a life afflicted and infected by these myriad disorders/diseases, etc. 

A decade out from my last acute hospitalization and near-lethal suicide attempt, I can wonder at what lurks beneath my skin and when and if I will be Undermined again. I have moved through my episodes of illness and suicidality in great detail and have gained an existential, spiritual, psychiatric, and physiological fluency. 

I attempt in my work as survivor and medical school faculty member to bridge the frenzied, chaotic, divine, and dangerous phenomenological experience of madness, suicidal acts, and extreme trauma symptoms to create a more universal and holistic picture of this life, thus allowing more conduits for connection, treatment, and Recovery. 

It will be at the nexus of science and soul that full Recovery blooms, with both parties involved looking to gain fluency in the other’s operational language.  

References

1. Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. NY, NY: Bantam Classics, 1972.

2. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. NY, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.

3. Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 2013.

4. Arauz, Eric. An American’s Resurrection. St. Louis; Treehouse, 2012.

Eric Arauz, MLER, is an international behavior health consumer advocate, trainer, and inspirational keynote speaker. He is a faculty member at the Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Department of Psychiatry, the Vice-Chairman of the current New Jersey Task Force on Opiate Addiction in citizens 18 to 25 years old, and a person with the lived experience of bipolar I disorder, PTSD, addiction, and suicidality. He is the SAMHSA 2012 "Voice Award" Fellow and the author of An American's Resurrection: My Pilgrimage from Child Abuse and Mental Illness to Salvation.  

The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the blog post author, do not constitute medical advice, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Psych Congress Network or other Psych Congress Network authors. Blog entries are not medical advice.