In search of lost time

September 19, 2024 11:13 AM

Give me books, stories, media, anecdotes, anything, about people who went through a long and protracted period (5 years to decades at least, the longer the better) of severe mental health that caused them to withdraw and isolate from life and society. Topics like dealing with the aftermath, coping with feelings, rebuilding, etc.

I'm interested in people who feel like they woke from a coma*, rather than people who went on long benders or series of self-destructive escapades. Ideally stories on missed or lost youth and feeling like there was no gap between childhood and middle-age, but I'm open to others. I know the first tag is depression, but it doesn't have to be any particular diagnosis.

*I'll take stories about waking up from actual comas too, I suppose, if you can convince me they fit the theme here.

posted by wanderlost to Health & Fitness (11 answers total)

One of my favorite authors on his Rusperidal experience.
posted by novalis_dt at 12:48 PM on September 19

The Noonday Demon is my favorite writing on severe depression
posted by CancerSucks at 3:31 PM on September 19

Francis Spufford's The Light Perpetual is a wonderful novel about a number of unrelated people and their post-war British lives, one of whom suffers badly as the result of his long-term mental illness.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:53 PM on September 19

Piranesi
posted by Phssthpok at 5:26 PM on September 19

John "Beautiful Mind" Nash, 40+ years. He went off the rails with schizophrenia and endured a gruelling series of treatments. The Nashes eventually moved back to Princeton where the University was sufficiently tolerant to allow Nash the run of the campus. He regularly hung out in a corner of the library and at a particular table in the canteen when he wasn’t talking to invisible people. This gave him a reason to get up in the morning and a familiar place in which to operate. He started to talk maths again to students and faculty. Nash believed that he thought himself well as his endocrine equilibrium changed with age. “I emerged from irrational thinking, ultimately, without medicine other than the natural hormonal changes of aging”
posted by BobTheScientist at 10:27 PM on September 19

The film Andrey Rublev (1966)? It's not exactly 'mental health' as how we'd call it today. If you haven't watched the of this classic, then at the risk of spoilers, I'd say it really is a story of profound suffering and grief, mental exile, and regeneration. It's very long, raw, and powerful.
posted by runcifex at 2:04 AM on September 20

This recent story in the Australian ABC might count?

Daphne Robinson is making the most of her freedom after spending more than two decades in medical and mental health institutions.

She has fallen in love with making a 900-kilometre round trip using public transport from her hometown of Mount Gambier to Melbourne on the same day.
posted by freethefeet at 2:18 AM on September 20

A catatonic woman awakened after 20 years. Her story may change psychiatry.

(May be paywalled, archive.today link if so)
posted by staggernation at 4:42 AM on September 20

Janet Frame's three-volume autobiography, An Angel At My Table, is the story of a woman who, through family tragedy and misdiagnosed and poorly treated mental illness, lost, as she put it, "The years of my twenties." She eventually became an acclaimed writer. There's an excellent film of the same title by Jane Campion. I could go on and on about how much I love Frame's writing, and the courage with which she came out about her mental illness at a time when that was almost impossible to do.
posted by BibiRose at 4:43 AM on September 20

Hmm, maybe too many criteria listed. I'm opening it up to wider stories about "lost youth," like escaping a cult or something that makes one feel deeply they missed out on parts of life or growing up. I will allow things like alcohol/drug/sexual addictions if the person was alone in a room every time or something.
posted by wanderlost at 12:24 PM on September 20

How about the painter Henry Orlik?
His paintings are amazing and enchanting
posted by 15L06 at 3:06 PM on September 20