Dr. Rajesh Bhola
India
Oct 04, 2013
India
Oct 04, 2013
Often
people come to me feeling that their lives are meaningless. Last week I
met an old friend after many years. He narrated a very painful story of
how his son had been diagnosed with cancer – first identified in his
leg and subsequently in his lungs – and finally died at a tender age of
17. My friend had sold his flat in order to meet the medical expenses
over four years. He finds his life is empty and deprived of any meaning;
he also feels mentally sick and highly depressed. We all are sometimes
challenged to the extreme. There are many different challenges: some may
be physical, brought on by diseases like cancer; some are mental – like
a loss in business; some are emotional, like a split in the family; and
then there are spiritual challenges from within our own selves. In such
moments of crisis, across time and space, many people have sought
solace in religion – which has taken up healing as one of its principal
objectives. Though today no major faith would regard itself as a
substitute for medicine, all of them continue to stress faith’s ability
to heal - and most have spawned ‘healing sects’.
The confrontation with mental sickness has brought out the best and the worst in religion. To
eschatological faiths such as Hinduism and other Eastern religions, the
triumph of good over evil is an ultimate ideal. Yet, impatient for this
ideal, faith may attempt to hasten its coming by resorting to
witch-hunting, heretic-burning and religious persecution; and, in the
process, lead to the exploitation of children and young women. Evil
is elevated to an object of obsession and negative worship – an
‘anti-god’ to be exorcised at any cost. To this mode of thinking,
nothing more clearly manifests the presence of evil than mental sickness
and emotional instability. Naturally inclined to regard mental illness
as the work of strange spirits, humanity has been all too ready to
interpret it as a symptom of satanic possession. When families stand
at the crossroads and fail to get a correct direction, they remain
highly vulnerable and fall prey to such religious doctrines.
In
regarding mental ailment or depression as symptomatic of the diseased
general condition of humankind, faith makes a relative distinction
between the sick and the well, and calls attention to a deeper, less
obvious level of selfhood. In the eyes of faith we are all diseased and
salvation must lead to the healing of the self. Yet, religious healing
never simply coincides with an ordinary cure, even for those whose
physical or mental health is fine. If the true disease lies beyond the
obvious illness, the cure also must reach beyond the symptoms. Only suffering can convey the feeling of insufficiency, without which the human person experiences no need for salvation.
The condition of the mentally ill keeps alive the awareness, both of
the self’s hidden depth and of its insufficiency. It is an object lesson
that aids us in finding the meaning of our most private and most
painful experiences. In the same spirit, modern thinking tends to regard
a person’s religion as the sum total of his or her mental inadequacies.
This view may contain more truth than its contemptuous holders suspect; for, without
an awareness of basic inadequacy, no genuine awareness of transcendence
can exist. Yet it loses sight of the fact that religion is not a
desperate attempt to cope with matters that cannot be handled otherwise,
but a positive vision in which personal suffering is needed for
spiritual growth.
To
regard the mentally diseased merely as “cases” for psychopathology is a
convenient way of escaping the message about the fragile condition of
the mind. In selfhood, the primary distinction is not the one that
divides the sick from the well, but that which separates the developed
from the undeveloped. The more complex the self, the more refined its
awareness of itself and the more imminent the threat of mental disorder.
Existential psychiatry has revealed the universal significance of
states of mind, which we have all too lightly brushed aside as “sick.”
Mental ailment resulting from mental anguish is inherent in the nature
of a self that is both interior to it and exterior to others. In its
essential duality, the self is constantly torn between the mode in which
it knows itself and the one in which others envision it. The inner self
feels threatened by the outsider’s look. As a safeguard, it hides in
the self and tries to conform entirely to the way that it imagines the
outer self appears to others. It avoids being, in order to escape
self-destruction. In severing appearance from reality, the self creates
an outward persona, a mask, which no longer reflects the inner self and
which may eventually replace it. The cure of this illness cannot consist
of a return to the ‘normal’ (which drove the self into hiding in the
first place), but to the achievement of a new synthesis of selfhood.
All
faiths share a close interest in the various forms of self-alienation.
They keep the believer constantly aware of the alarming facility with
which the self may disturb or destroy its own fragile synthesis. Their
interest is not fortuitous, for the salvation that religion promises,
presupposes an unsatisfactory state of being that must be remedied.
Indeed, religion stands so badly in need of that preliminary feeling of
alienation that one may well wonder whether it does not itself create
the very condition that it wants to remedy. This attitude, I
believe, has its roots in the profound religious concept of human
alienation. The existence of religious health resorts, the expulsion of
evil spirits and the sacramental prayer for the sick - these practices
signify far more than a surpassed stage in the history of medicine. They
symbolize that salvation itself is healing, and that all healing is
part of the redemptive process. This connection is particularly valid
for mental sickness. When confronted with the mentally ill, all
religious men and ‘godmen’ first wish to liberate the afflicted, before
curing them; other illnesses are directly treated. The mental patient is
a captive, closed up in an unreal self and, like the deaf and mute,
unable to relate. He is in despair; he cannot reach out and be in touch
with his own transcendence. He needs to be cured, loved and assisted,
before anything else; and the primary assistance consists of healing -
whether the healer is a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a physician, an
occupational therapist or a counsellor.
Let
us enjoy the companionship of those in mental anguish or mental
instability. While our lives are disrupted by various illnesses and
other afflictions, they are even more challenged by the embarrassment
and shame that we feel about some of them. Though we are all acquainted
with suffering and feelings of self-estrangement, our ordinary objective
ways of articulating them make it easier to suppress, rather than
express, the experience. Let us not be in flight from the suffering in
our lives; and let us enjoy those pleasures that are available to us. It
is not really suffering that is challenging; the psychological pain, of
being in flight from the reality of our lives, can be far more
disabling.υ
Dr. Rajesh Bhola is President of Spastic Society of Gurgaon and is working for the cause of children with autism, cerebral palsy, mental retardation and multiple disabilities for more than 20 years
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