she asked.
“Not formally but so many of us have gone through it that a volley of emails serves the same purpose, I think”
“Really?”
“Yeah, you remember my German friend, who came over for Thanksgiving?”
“Yes”
“Well hers was precipitated by her identity crisis. When she discovered herself as a man in a woman’s body, the social unacceptability put a constant pressure on her that she could not handle. To top that, none of women she liked reciprocated her affections so she became an outcast in all facets of her life.”
“That’s sad.”
“Yeah. And then one of my very dear American friends was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and just went through a series of hospitalizations because of self-harm incidents spurred by fear of abandonment and perpetual paranoia.”
“Wow. And then there’s me of course, your Japanese friend, who has battled with depression as long as you have and been on death row at least thrice.”
Smiles. “Well there’s a couple of Pakistanies too, who I went to art school with. Both bipolar and one on medication for life now.”
“This is turning into an international club of people with mental illnesses.”
Laughs. “Yes, so it seems but you know, the odd thing is I did not know of each of their afflictions until I had my last episode. You somehow sixth-sensed it. The American girl just randomly shared her own life. The friend from art school, I dreamt of and wrote to, and it turned out the dream was true. The German I knew from long before, but she was always the most tenacious of us to not have hurt herself ever, despite her inner turmoils and baseline depression. It is almost as if, because noone in my geography could relate to my predicament, a support network of similar experiences just grew out of cyber space all around me.”
“What about your psychiatrist?”
“He prescribes medication which I know I need and am doing well on, but doesn’t offer psychotherapy or even cognitive behaviour therapy. He doesn’t help me scramble back to life by reasoning with myself, he focuses on neutralizing the chemical imbalance in my brain that caused the episode, but he doesn’t not address the emotional ramifications of having gone through the episode and having lost a lot of myself on the way.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. My psychiatrist lets me talk about a lot of things but we never work around them either. I miss my therapist in the US too.”
“Plus there is the taboo factor: here attempting suicide is a legal crime because it’s a sin against God. Mental illness in particular is only understood as insanity not as treatable diseases with specific medical basis.”
“It’s different in Japan. It’s still associated with the traditional hara kiri in that it is a death of honour; but yes, mental illness as a whole is not very well-received because of the stoicism that is ingrained in the Japanese psyche.
Anyway, I best be off now. Take care and keep writing. Love you.”
“Love you too sweetie. Bye.”
