Rethinking Mental Illness

This post contains the transcript and audio recording from a panel session I participated in at the virtual 2022 International Symposium on Autoethnography and Narrative (ISAN). I originally posted it for paid subscribers, and I’ve edited the audio to share it with our whole Substack list. The panel session I participated in at ISAN, “Resilience, Trauma, and Suicide,” was moderated by Talia Aygun on January 5, 2022. The presentations from our panel included: * Autoethnography of a Japanese Suicide by Hayate Hosenji * “I’m Happy I Helped”: A Critical Meta-Autoethnography on a Field Relationship by Jennifer Sink McCloud * Narrating “Suicidality”: What Happens to Our Stories by Kristina Shrank Dernbach * De-registration and Suicide Prevention: A Poetic Representation by Porsotam Leal * Rethinking Mental Illness: Dąbrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration by Chris Wells Since we were allowed to choose either audio or video, I did an audio recording. In the fall of 2021, I wasn’t up for making videos of myself. The transcript below is an edited version of the audio presentation, which I’ve made available as the voiceover for this post. On the day I recorded it without a script in November 2021, I had not yet recovered from NAGC 2021 in the days before, and my mother was in the hospital. I regretted putting it off until the last minute, but it was worth the effort. I enjoyed participating in ISAN 2022 very much and hope to return next year. Dąbrowski’s theory of positive disintegration is a theory that I discovered while working on an autoethnography about intellectual giftedness and mental illness (Wells, 2017). I was 40 years old when I started it, and I had a tremendous amount of personal data that I examined. I started writing a journal when I was 16, so by the time I was 40, I had produced a lot of words. I also had letters, school records, medical records—and I sent off for more medical records. Because I was hospitalized a number of times during my 20s. I used qualitative data analysis software to analyze my personal data. First, I had to scan all of my journals, and I did 1989-1999. The idea of typing them—since they were handwritten—felt so daunting that I thought it would be best to just scan them. But I have to say that eventually, I did end up typing them, too. And it was about half a million words that I coded. When I was doing my literature review, I was searching for giftedness and intelligence. But I was also searching for intensity—especially emotional intensity. Because when I interviewed people who'd known me when I was young, the word “intense” kept coming up over and over again. I hadn't really thought of myself as intense. But the more I worked on autoethnography, the more I realized that I hadn't really been that aware of myself—not nearly as much as I thought. I can say that as someone who's written in a journal for a long time. It's one thing to write in your journal about what's going on in your life. In order to really learn from it, you have to read the journal, see what happened, and use that information in order to grow and change. This is a process that I consider self-education. I'm much more mindful now about using my writing to grow and change than I ever have been. But it's thanks to autoethnography that I've made many realizations about myself. And one of them is that I'm not really mentally ill at all. Dąbrowski’s (1996) theory gave me a whole different framework from which to understand and view my experiences. I first discovered it in a chapter called “Emotional Giftedness: The Measure of Intrapersonal Intelligence,” written by Michael M. Piechowski (1997). When I read this chapter, I did not love it right away. That's an understatement. I couldn't even deal with the idea that I had been so wrong about myself. It's hard to explain what it was like to see myself in his words, but he was describing what I had been through in such a positive way—calling it emotional giftedness. And I wasn't ready to even think that I wasn't broken. I had basically been trained to see myself as mentally ill because I’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And when you're bipolar, you are encouraged to pay attention to your moods and self-monitor so that you can become aware—Oh, is this hypomania? Am I not sleeping enough? Am I talking too fast? Are my thoughts racing? Or you worry that you're becoming depressed. I was always on the lookout for signs of a manic or depressive episode. Bipolar disorder was only one of my diagnoses. Also, I have ADHD, and I have been diagnosed with panic attacks. I had other diagnoses, too. During the autoethnography, I really wanted to nail down exactly what was wrong with me. But I also wanted to understand more about my giftedness because I didn't ever think about the word “gifted” after graduating high school. Even though I was identified as a highly gifted kid. Nobody ever really told me what that meant. No one ever said—“Hey, Chris, this is more than just an academic label. This is an essential aspect of who you are. And it's always going to matter throughout your life. You're always going to feel a little bit different than most other people, and this is why.” They never told me anything about what it meant to be gifted. That's my work now—to help people see that they're not broken. Instead, some of these challenges that we see as problematic—such as being too intense or being too much—are really signs that we have the developmental capacity to allow us to change and grow in a sort of accelerated way, which is part of how Dąbrowski saw it, anyway. This is a deep, rich, complex theory. And even though I've been studying it for the past five years, I haven't come to the end of it. I think I could spend the next 40 years studying it and not come to the end of it. That's how deep it is. When I started the autoethnography, I never knew the impact that it would have on my life. It's been incredible. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.positivedisintegration.org/subscribe