Denial of Competence

Posted on December 9, 2005 in Reading Stigma

People who suffer from debilitating and stigmatizing disorders like to compile lists of famous people who had their disease. And other people who believe in Creativity and Insight Only for the Sane and the Strong, do their best to deny that any influential human being could so suffer, particularly when it is suggested that the Great One was mentally ill.

I’m not always impressed with the attributions of mental illness myself. When a support group leader told us to be proud because Alexander the Great was bipolar, I was dubious. On the other hand, sufficient research has been performed into the lives of more recent artists, writers, and leaders by competent observers (e.g. psychiatrists and psychologists) to convince me.

In Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Kay Jamison challenges a writer who just doesn’t want one of his poetic idols — in this case Percy Bysshe Shelley — taken down by the “smear” of mental illness:

[Harold] Nicolson….defends Shelley from charges of insanity by arguing that Shelley was perceived as mad simply because he was different, and objects strenuously to the fact that Shelley’s schoolmates at Eton described him as “Mad Shelley”: “The facility with which English schoolboys attribute insanity to anyone who is not perfectly attuned to their own herd behaviour has always struck me as curious and distressing.” This is certainly a legitimate, and common, complaint that can also be leveled against biographers, psychologists and psychiatrists who equate differentness with psychopathology. But Nicolson goes on to engage in another common, but far more questionable, biographical practice: He attempts to make many of Shelley’s odd behaviors seem much more normal than they probably were. “It is customary,” writes Nicolson in discussing Shelley’s hallucinations, “for very gifted writers to see spectres and to hear voices calling.” This is surely is open to debate , and certainly Shelley’s friends found his behavior — as he did himself — both odd and disturbing. Nicolson then gives an example of one of Shelley’s many rather strange perceptual experiences: “Shelley saw a baby rise from the sea and clap its hands at him…it is clear from the writings of his friends that these sounds and visions were not of infrequent occurence.” Similarly, Nicolson gives Cowper, who not only attempted suicide repeatedly, but also spent a distressingly long time in an insane asylum, a relatively clean bill of psychiatric health (especially in light of his well-documented bouts of madness):

Twice in his life he almost succeeded in hanging himself and now was only saved by chance. Yet although Cowper had twice to be put in confinement, or at least under supervision, he enjoyed long intervals of perfect sanity, during which he composed much excellent poetry and was happy in a quiet tea-party sort of way. It cannot be said that Cowper was ever a demented maniac: the worst that can be said of him was that he was sometimes sadly confused in the head.

It’s an old dirge sung over our living bodies: no good can come of mental illness. When it does, it must not be mental illness.