Friday forever - memoirs of madness

157 Pages·2011·2.181 MB·English

by  Bradley Smith, Susan

Friday Forever
Memoirs of Madness

Friday Forever
Memoirs of Madness
SUSAN BRADLEY SMITH
Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing
Melbourne, Australia
Forewords by
JANETTE TURNER HOSPITAL
Carolina Distinguished Professor Emerita
Department of English
University of South Carolina
and
JILL GORDON
General Practitioner
Honorary Associate Professor, Medical Humanities
Centre for Values, Ethics & the Law in Medicine
University of Sydney
Boca Raton London New York
CRC Press is an imprint of the
Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
First published 2011 by Radcliffe Publishing
Published 2016 by CRC Press
Taylor & Francis Group
6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300
Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742
© 2011 Susan Bradley Smith
CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business
No claim to original U.S. Government works
ISBN-13: 978-1-84619-036-0 (pbk)
Susan Bradley Smith has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1998 to be identifi ed as the author of this work.
This book contains information obtained from authentic and highly
regarded sources. While all reasonable efforts have been made to publish
reliable data and information, neither the author[s] nor the publisher can
accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may
be made. The publishers wish to make clear that any views or opinions
expressed in this book by individual editors, authors or contributors
are personal to them and do not necessarily reflect the views/opinions of the
publishers. The information or guidance contained in this book is intended for
use by medical, scientific or health-care professionals and is provided
strictly as a supplement to the medical or other professional’s own
judgement, their knowledge of the patient’s medical history, relevant
manufacturer’s instructions and the appropriate best practice guidelines.
Because of the rapid advances in medical science, any information or advice
on dosages, procedures or diagnoses should be independently verified. The
reader is strongly urged to consult the relevant national drug formulary and
the drug companies’ and device or material manufacturers’ printed
instructions, and their websites, before administering or utilizing any
of the drugs, devices or materials mentioned in this book. This book does not
indicate whether a particular treatment is appropriate or suitable for a
particular individual. Ultimately it is the sole responsibility of the medical
professional to make his or her own professional judgements, so as to
advise and treat patients appropriately. The authors and publishers have
also attempted to trace the copyright holders of all material reproduced in
this publication and apologize to copyright holders if permission to
publish in this form has not been obtained. If any copyright material
has not been acknowledged please write and let us know so we may rectify
in any future reprint.
Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Law, no part of this book may be
reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the
publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at
http://www.taylorandfrancis.com
and the CRC Press Web site at
http://www.crcpress.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand
Cover photograph used with the permission of Walker Photography & Design
Contents
Forewords vi
About the author xi
Acknowledgements xii
Epigraph xv
Chapter 1 What I didn’t know: life in topsy-turvy land 1
Chapter 2 My fi rst babies, and the historical claws of illness 27
Chapter 3 New babies, and the sickening punishment of
genetics 49
Chapter 4 Love and other addictions 69
Chapter 5 Hunting home, chasing health 95
Chapter 6 The true shape of a pear 115
Foreword
In the middle of the journey of his life, Dante came to himself within
a dark wood where the straight way was lost. So savage and harsh
and dense was that thicket of grief and anomie that he had to ‘touch
bottom’, to descend deep into the inferno of his depression before
he could write his way out. He had to know it, explore its murkiest
recesses, analyze it. His guide was Virgil, poet of a prior literary
work of dispossession, dislocation and loss. In the Divine Comedy,
Dante rewrote the script of private trauma (exile, unrequited love)
and gave himself – on a cosmic scale – the happy ending that eluded
him in life. He was neither the fi rst nor the last to turn inward chaos
into a work of self-interrogation and art.
Many centuries before Dante, the lone survivor of an annihi-
lated community spoke of trauma so catastrophic that only poetry
could contain it. He who has felt it knows how cruel a companion
is sorrow to him who has no beloved protectors . . . and yet the
‘Wanderer’ in this Anglo-Saxon lament groped his way, line by poetic
line, to a stoic serenity. ‘That is why poetry exists’, Susan Bradley
Smith reminds us in her memoir, ‘to speak the unspeakable’. But the
unspeakable is like molten lava in a stoppered volcano: it cannot be
contained; it erupts; it insists on fi nding its way out. There is a long
literary tradition of constructing a ladder of words and using it to
climb from anguish to peace of mind. That tradition is bequeathed
to all as testament, consolation, and rescue route. Susan’s memoir
inherits and contributes to this distinguished lineage.
Happiness is benefi cial for the body, noted Marcel Proust, but
it is grief that develops the powers of the mind. Multiple griefs
battered Susan like a string of cyclones, one following on the heels
of another: the break-up of a marriage, the near-death of a child,
the recurrence of a rare genetic disorder in two children, major
geographic displacement. All these matters are right at the top of
the stress scale and are indicators of risk of clinical depression, but
they are also – in some sense – random and impersonal, experienced
by many. Add to these body blows an act of deliberate malice: a
crude, vicious, intentionally personal and grossly unjust attack on
academic integrity. The result in emotional terms is equivalent to the
onrush of Katrina on the vulnerable levees of New Orleans. One of
the many things that this memoir demonstrates is the inadequacy of
academia’s response to egregious violations of professional ethics.
Legal bases are covered as a matter of course and the accusations
against Susan were offi cially found to be false and malicious; but
acknowledging the mayhem that ensues from breaches in ethical
conduct is something all too often ignored by academic institutions.
Actual intervention to curtail the viral spread of slander seems to be
quite beyond the moral will of university administrations.
What happened might have destroyed Susan’s career and ren-
dered her seriously dysfunctional. For a time, that is exactly what
occurred. But Susan did what Dante did, what intellectuals and art-
ists have always done: she observed the dark places with an acute
and unsparing eye, she analyzed, she wrote her way out. She has
written with rigorous honesty and witty self-deprecation. She has
also written a memoir about the ethics of writing a memoir. Her
interrogation of the genre of confessional writing is as scrupulous
as her self-interrogation and she has followed the prescription laid
down by Yeats:
Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
Janette Turner Hospital
Carolina Distinguished Professor Emerita
Department of English
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC
April 2011
vii
Foreword
This is a crazy book. I wish it had been around 30 years ago. That’s
how long I’ve been working as a GP specialising in psychotherapy.
And that’s how long I’ve been wishing for a crazy book about
postnatal depression, instead of all the sensible ones. So many of
my patients have plunged out of sensible, ordered, well-managed,
intelligent lives into the mess of motherhood and found themselves
overwhelmed.
This book takes one unique experience and asks the reader
‘Could it be, could it have been, like this for you too?’ And I know
that the answer, from many of the women that I have seen, would
be ‘Yes – a lot of it was just like that. The details are different, but
the guilt, the regret, the bleakness, the ruminations, the obsessions,
and the other mad thoughts were all there for me too. Thank you
for telling me that I’m not alone.’
‘But what about the fact that I can’t think, can’t focus, can’t
remember anything – can’t really function?’ A single sentence cap-
tures one of the characteristic experiences of depression:
‘I opened the newspaper one morning and found I could not
read it.’
As frightening as that sounds, this is actually a reassuring book.
Not only for women who have felt like this, but for the doctors
and other therapists who believe that the way back to sanity can
be traced in a genuine effort to understand, as much as any person
can understand, another person who is suffering. There are lots
of ‘evidence-based psychological therapies’ (EBPTs) for mental ill-
ness – a Google search uncovers 73,000 entries and their inevitable
acronyms. EBPTs have their place; after all, the evidence says so and
I don’t doubt it. But if that’s all there is, then we might as well all
give up on any vision of a crazy, enriching, exciting, challenging,
accepting, engaging, mind-expanding world. We might as well all
be sensible, cautious, risk-averse, single-minded and brain-dead.
I’m reminded of Margaret Thatcher talking to Women’s Own
Magazine in 1987:
‘And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are
individual men and women, and there are families … people
must look to themselves fi rst.’
What Susan says in reply is roughly this: there is such a thing as soci-
ety and we can’t live without it. There are times when we are unable
to look after ourselves or to look after someone we love who is in
terrible danger when we don’t know what to do, and we need help.
Susan knew what she needed and what she lacked:
‘I would sit there and think about how I recently read
something about T S Eliot and his theory of the “auditory
imagination”, and how a poem can communicate something
real to us before we even understand it, and wondering
if therapists can listen to patients like this, in this special
kind of way. I would will them that special talent, as I sat,
choking on my despair.’
A sense of society starts with a ‘special kind of way’ of listening to
one another. It’s a message, not just for therapists, but for anyone
who wants to be part of a society. It starts with being quiet and pay-
ing attention. It just happens to be particularly important when one
is paying attention to another person who is ill or frightened or sad.
Along with that important message is the same message that
William Styron conveyed in Darkness Visible. Love is the key. For
Susan it was the discovery of her capacity to fi nd the place ‘where
love for my husband and love for children collide … The grace of
that shaking love, that is what shook my depression away’.
Friday Forever is a gift for anyone who has struggled with the
illness caused by depression, anyone who has wanted to help a
family member or friend, any health professional who wants to
ix