Storied Mind

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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. It tells the story of a young woman who experiences seizures and hears strange voices. These have long terrified and confused her, but eventually she comes to interpret the suffering in purely religious terms.

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.

Related posts:

1. Dreams, Depression & Spirituality – 2
2. Changing Belief, Discovering Purpose in a Work Life
3. Fighting Back – 1: Changing Belief about Depression
4. Lincoln’s Adaptation to Depression
5. Depression and Suicide – Back from the Edge