Haunted Houses

As I approach with caution and even with a certain amount of dread my next book, the title not yet decided upon, I’m reading a lot of recent books on the topic of what we call, warily and uncertainly, “mental illness.” I’m struck by the fact that all the recent books I’ve been able to find so far are written by white men. Now I’ve come upon a book written from the other point of view: Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022). It’s significant that the word “stories” is in the title for it is often our stories, as onlookers, that describe undefinable states, stories that may eventually replace or at least expand what a jacket blurb (by a male doctor) calls “our neat narrative as Aviv rescues the radiant meaning of lives formed in extremity including her own.”

Here I discovered for the first time an idea I’ve been revolving in my own mind: that the past, and the settings and people of the past, are crucial. Aviv called these inescapable influences “haunted houses,” opposing to the “Wal-Marting of American Psychiatry,” which seems to focus on “a state of disconnection” leading to “the doctrine of the abyss.”

Each generation, she writes, tries to “de-spook” its inherited haunted house, usually composed of buried generational myths—although sometimes it is a literal house where those myths are enshrined. At last we escape the presumptions of white western medicine with the story of Bapu, an Indian woman who abandoned her responsibilities for her family by falling in love with the god Krishna and devoting herself to a life of wandering. Aviv builds a convincing argument that the cause of her “illness”—if it was that—was not chemical imbalance, trauma, or any of the other orthodox explanations: the problem “wasn’t located in her mind so much as in the space that she shared with three generations, the problems of one generation morphing into the conditions of the next.”

This is a radical explanation for us women writers who often attempt to explore long-ago tragedies that most prefer to bury in silence. Family life depends on silence. Writing of her son to his uncle, Babu says, “When Karthik grows up, he may want to go down the path of philosophy. No one should force him into family life.”

I’ve known some of these haunted houses, literally or in the minds that are imprisoned in them. This is particularly likely to happen in the case of beautiful old houses that symbolize status. By longing for this status, we may find ourselves ensnared in the hidden problems of the people who lived there, and later suffer the alienation and isolation of so many Cassandras. Nobody wants to read the stories we are compelled to write.

Renovations don’t help. These ghosts are not material. And yet they are often represented by corporeal remains, like the doomed queen, Mary Antoinette, whose hairpins were recently found lodged between the floorboards of her apartments when they were finally “restored” and opened to the public.

Often when I teach writing, I run into something that seems almost like terror under the pleasantness with which women greet their teachers. What am I asking these strangers to do?

Aviv, who writes beautifully, expands her argument to include all those who are dismissed by the medical establishment as “other,” beyond help and perhaps not worthy of it anyway. This includes all black women and the marginalized poor. It even includes Aviv, who was told by her white male psychiatrist that perhaps she spent so much time writing emails because she felt isolated; she blamed herself for being “inhuman.”

We are facing a crisis in understanding as well as in treatment as some of these “others” resist diagnoses and medication. Our streets fill with the homeless who are abused by individuals as well as by a system that seems to exclude them from humanity.

In Women