Normal Crazy vs. Crazy Crazy

In yesterday’s NY Times magazine, Bruce Stutz in his article “Self-Nonmedication” writes about his midlife breakdown, how he went on antidepressants, and then the horrific experience of withdrawals from them.

I wrote the following email:

Hello Bruce,

Thanks for your lovely article, for your clarity and honesty. A beautiful description of a
classic radical life transition complicated by fear and ignorance and then medication.

I have so many questions for you:

What if, when you were going through that craziness, your psychiatrist had said that what you were going through was not only normal but an essential brain reorganization? What if he/she had said that you were in the process of a “system upgrade” and that in a year or so you would be at a higher level of functioning, that it is not just normal but something to welcome?

Without the fear and as an observer of your own process–something that you are obviously very good at–I suspect that the experience would have been very different.

I flipped out for a while when my children were 4 and 2. We had a mortgage-free oceanfront home with pool and hot tub on Maui, great work and friends, world travel. Everything. And I was nuts. I was ready to leave it all for a man with nothing but the time to listen to me. Fortunately, I freaked him out, I really didn’t want to blow out my life, and my husband has an amazing sense of humor. My husband and I both grew up and moved on, much better off because of the experience.
This is my take on it all:
We are medicating people at 6, 13, 19, 25, postpartum, on and on.
A loss of sense of self is considered a disabling disease. Adolescence is pathology.

A loss of sense of self is the normal process of metamorphosis from one stage to the next. Okay, some transitions are more radical than others. Some you sail through and some are so disorienting that you blow out your marriage, home, and life’s work.

But, if someone had told you that the mind chaos you experienced was not breakdown leading to death but a creative breakdown that will lead to a higher level of functioning, then what would your response had been?

It’s the fear and the diagnosis of permanence that is freaking people out. Craziness in
any form is seen as permanent. Medication, the answer.

This pervasive medicalization of normal processes has been tackled before. Kubler-Ross did it for death and dying. La Maze did it for childbirth. Now someone needs to do it for the natural, painful and disorienting processes of life transitions.

I’ve written about it in Chapter 9 of my book Men Are Easy. It deserves its own book.
I’m considering just pulling out descriptions like your’s–One could argue that Betty Friedan’s “problem with no name” was a classic description of mothers/women in transition–and asking the questions.

Once you see life this way, so much makes sense. We are not machines with broken parts. We are complex evolving systems living within complex evolving systems of family and society. With a few shifts of perspective, the entire picture changes.

I’m inspired.

Aloha,
Lynn

Does this make sense to you? Have you had similar experiences?