Requiem: Religious Belief and Mental Illness
Posted by JohnD
Some Rights Reserved by Zenera at Flickr
In writing about heightened states of mind I’ve experienced, I keep wondering about what they mean, what they are. Are they signs of a spiritual reality pushing into the midst of the everyday world? Or are they artifacts of mental disorder? The first time I had such an experience, as a college student, I thought I was going crazy and even wrote a poem about this episode of “madness.” It was only six years later when I had a similar experience – which I accepted without doubt as spiritual – that the earlier one took on new meaning as having that same quality. I was no longer afraid of it and didn’t have to push it off as a bizarre and crazy moment. Instead I came to focus on such experiences as part of a way to find healing in the midst of depression as well as deeper insight into life. Spiritual experiences could be one more way to struggle through a chronic condition. But could the experience of depression be another force like spirituality that can terrify but also push me to new awareness? Could the sheer suffering of mental illness be experienced in a spiritual way?
That’s the question behind the quietly intense German film, Requiem
The film sharply etches the clashing social and cultural meanings that she has to choose from. At first the girl tries to separate herself from her strict Catholic home and defies her overprotective mother, who viciously fights her daughter’s attempts to move into the broader world of a university in another city where she is free to make her own choices. But after her more indulgent father helps her to get to the university, the seizures and voices and obsessive behavior return. Her friends become alarmed and try to get her to seek help. But she does not see her state in psychological or medical terms. She believes that God is somehow singling her out and seeks the counsel of the parish priest. Surprisingly, he does not accept her ideas and advises her to seek medical attention. He is deeply concerned about a young woman who is imagining that her soul has become the battleground between God and the Devil. But she is outraged at his disbelief. A younger priest attacks the secular views of his colleague and persuades the girl and her family that she is possessed and needs to undergo exorcism to cast out the demon within her.
At one point, the girl’s close friends at college decide to take her to a mental hospital after a serious seizure, but the one who is driving her there decides that he just can’t send her to the “looney bin” and takes her instead back home. There she starts a series of exorcisms which over time exhaust her, and, we are told in a coda, she dies after these repeated ceremonies. But the final image we have of the girl shows her as happy, fulfilled in the knowledge that she is serving God’s purpose, that her suffering, like that of her patron Saint Teresa, is part of her destiny. We might take this as a tragedy, as an attack on misguided, barbaric Church practices, but the filmmaker has not tried to frame the story in that way. And what rivets my attention is the happiness the girl obviously feels as the sense grows on her that her suffering is given meaning as part of an extraordinary, if mysterious destiny. The focus of the film is this inner realization she achieves about the meaning of her own experience. Though she doesn’t approach it this way, I think of it as her choice.
And it is strangely true in this changing and fractured culture that we do indeed have to make a choice. For a long time, I’ve had a relativist view that all approaches to healing have value and that each of us winds up with what works best for that individual case. But today, I’m feeling so deeply that I just don’t believe fully in any of the treatments or explanations. There is much more going on than any of them can capture. So after decades of combat, all the treatments having failed, I have to figure out how to live with it – every day. What am I going to do today to get on to tomorrow? I wind up without a fixed or even stable way of understanding and living the condition. On any given day, though, I’m working on a particular strategy, and I’m working hard with that one. No, it’s not like, if it’s Tuesday, this must be spiritual insight day. It’s more like following different drives inside me, like waves of excitement and near-certainty that I ride for a while until each one crashes out its energy. I do envy the certainty of the girl in Requiem, and the sense of fulfillment she seems to achieve, but I sure wouldn’t want my core belief to kill me.
I think it was R D Laing who said that mystics swim in the ocean and schizophrenices drown in it.
My much less poetic version of this is: wholeness is the guide to separating out crazy and mystical. If the visions, voices and so on are part of a story of growing wholeness then they are divine, if they are part of a long term story of disintegration and lessening then its the crazies.
“So after decades of combat, all the treatments having failed, I have to figure out how to live with it – every day.“
Do you ever fear you will spend a lifetime figuring this out? Toss caution to the wind, before the wind ceases to brush your face as it passes you by.
Evan – That’s a wonderful summary and great common sense. What intrigues me about the Requiem story – and this was based on a true incident – is that we don’t know if she would have drowned in that ocean. It was the treatment that killed her, after all, and discussion tends to focus on Church practices, not on her inner condition.
Stephany – More great (un)common sense! I guess I should get back to writing about connecting with life in simple ways! What I’m getting at in this post is not so much the figuring out part but the daily struggle to do something – anything – to stay functional and feel OK. It would be nice if total recovery were to happen, but lacking that it’s on with trial and error, trial and partial success, etc.
John
I saw a movie last year with a similar story line, although I can’t remember the title I don’t think it was this particular one.
A friend of mine’s late father was schizophrenic and possessed the ability to foretell future events. He did it time and time again. It makes you wonder and question how much more open the supposedly ‘mentally ill’ brain really is.
Good post. It gives one pause to think whether the mentally ill mind is just one that works a bit differently. There has to be some reason and cause for the disorder. Perhaps we’re all just geniuses in training. :)
Bipolarchica – I know, I can’t wait until I graduate from training school! On this subject, you might check out the articles Therese Borchard links to on Beliefnet Beyond Blue, especially the NY Times article on Mad Pride (May 11). The main theme is the therapeutic value of blogging, but the Times piece mentions the whole movement to erase the stigma of mental illness. Anything to keep illness from being a source of shame, let alone a link to evil, helps.
Zathyn – It is amazing how the mind can at the same time get mixed up and find one path of brilliant clarity. The trouble is that both get to be seen as symptoms, so the helpful mental activity is ignored as just another characteristic of sickness. There is another film I know of called The Exorcism of Emily Rose, but it doesn’t capture what’s going on in the girl’s inner states – it’s more about the trial of the priest.
John