Mental Health Narratives - Onstage and in Therapy
Recently Michelle Munson and Sarah Narendorf were interviewed for NYU's online publication to discuss their research about mental health narratives in young adults. Essentially, their work reveals that allowing a patient to give her own descriptors for her mental illness, how it affects her, and what treatment will be effective will lead to greater client success.
While they say more research needs to be done surrounding their findings, Munson and Narendorf call on mental health professionals to "be a guide" in helping clients understand their narratives, and to give those narratives as much weight as the diagnosis itself.
As Narendorf succinctly expresses the bottom line, "The point is: how these young people are thinking, and feeling, about the condition matters."
A Mental Health Narrative on Public Display
Shortly after reading Munson's and Narendorf's thought-provoking piece, I heard an interview with comedian Hannah Gadsby that I couldn't turn away from. Listen to the interview by The New Yorker Radio Hour.
My ears perked up at her name, as Gadsby plays my favorite character on Hulu's "Please Like Me." Hannah, her character's name as well, describes her desire to get back on mental health medication because she "can't wait to be beige again" - quite resonant if you've ever been on the rougher end of depression.
Here's a quick back and forth between Hannah and Rose, another character struggling with mental illness, to give you some context and more beautiful analogies:
H: You take medication to get yourself out of a dark hole but you end up just in a display home on an empty street.
R: I want to get off the medication, Hannah. I I don't want to spend the rest of my life feeling the same way at a friend's wedding as I do at their funeral.
H: You know you feel like you're ready to come off medication because the medication is working. You know it stops working when you stop taking it.
R: Yeah, I know.
H: The thing is, I just took myself off my medication. And I'm fucked. Like, fucked. It's bad. I've started hitting myself again.
R: What? Hitting yourself?
H: Yeah, we've all got our things. You try and kill yourself. I tenderize.
R: Hannah! Oh, I'm so sorry. What can we do about that?
H: It's fine. I'm taking my meds again. I'll be beige inside soon enough. Just really hurts to know that I need to take pills simply to function. Really painful. I can't wait to be beige again.
In the interview with The New Yorker, Gadsby discusses talking about her real life onstage. How she can't play fast and loose with content so poised to re-traumatize her every night she's on tour. Gadsby brings up the unsettling fact that she is always heckled right after saying she's been sexually assaulted. How she had to adjust her actual telling of her narrative to not allow as much room for that verbal violence.
Changing Hindsight
By telling the story every night, Gadsby relived the trauma every night, and then had to 'interrogate her own story' to figure out what to make of the pieces. In the end, Gadsby expressed her thoughts on why it's important for her to address her story, essentially saying "you can't change what happened, you can't repress it, but you can change hindsight." In other words, you can try to view your narrative in a way that makes life more livable.
There's a clear tie between needing to take control of your narrative as a mental health patient and taking control of your narrative as a public speaker trying to educate and better the world. Gadsby's anecdotal discussion of controlling her own story reinforces Munson and Narendorf's important research.