Our tragic views about mental health

 When I was a teenager, we all learned that we could tell people about our experiences with serious illness — unless that illness was a mental illness.

I followed the newspapers when Sen. Thomas Eagleton was forced to withdraw as the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1972 because he’d sought treatment for depression. That old news was reviewed last week when Sen. John Fetterman sought treatment for depression.

It reminded me of a letter that the writer James Agee wrote to the Rev. James Harold Flye in 1941. Here’s a paragraph that strikes me as tragic:

 

Psychiatry, and for that matter psychoanalysis still more, interest me intensely; but except for general talk with them — which I would like — I feel reluctant to use either except in really desperate need. I don’t yet feel in desperate need, and suspect in fact that I’ll probably pull out of this under my own power. Yet I realize I have an enormously strong drive, on a universally broad front, toward self-destruction; and that I know little if anything about its sources or control. There is much I might learn and be freed from that causes me and others great pain, frustration and defeat, and I expect that sooner or later I will have to seek their help. But I would somewhere near as soon die (or enter a narcotic world) as undergo full psychoanalysis. I don’t trust anyone on earth that much; and I see in every psychoanalyzed face a look of deep spiritual humiliation or defeat; to which I prefer at least a painful degree of spiritual pain and sickness. The look of “I am a man who finally could not call his soul his own, but yielded it to another … ”

 

Agee eventually changed his mind and sought the help of an analyst. But for a long time, he realized that he was self-destructive and didn’t know why. He realized he was hurting himself and others. And he manufactured arguments against getting help.

If you are looking back and thinking about his life, you see pain — to himself, wives, children and other loved ones. And you hope others get help, whatever the rest of society thinks.

• Source: Letters of James Agee to Father Flye; New York: Bantam Books, 1963, p. 116.