Hi,
Trigger warning: the material below contains references to suicide. Please close this page if you find this topic disturbing. If you need help, or someone you know does, please know that you don’t have to suffer in silence. Please seek professional help. You can find a list of resources at the bottom of this newsletter.
I have just started reading one of the books most frequently recommended to people struggling with depression: Man’s Search for Meaning, by the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. The cover says that the book has sold 12 million copies. On the back cover is this rousing description: "this remarkable tribute to hope offers us an avenue to finding greater meaning and purpose in our lives".
Apart from being a person with a long history of depression and a mental health journalist, I am also deeply interested in the history of the second world war. No amount of educating yourself on its horrors is enough, and I regret discovering Frankl’s book, with its intense – and intensely honest – account of life in a concentration camp, so late. We owe a huge debt to this beautiful man, who gave us lines like: "Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance."
That said – do I appreciate that someone, I don’t remember who, asked me to read this book to "get some perspective" on life? Hell no. I mean, what were they even thinking?
How could I even come close to comparing my life with someone who lived through the Holocaust? How can someone already struggling with guilt, gaslighting and impostor syndrome – and fighting a voice in their head that says their suffering isn’t "significant" enough given all the terrible miseries in the world – read a book like this and find greater meaning and purpose?
And so I have to say this: I respect the intent of whoever recommended Frankl’s book to me. As a journalist, student of history, lover of incisive writing, and hater of bigotry, I am happy, even grateful, that I picked it up. But I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who is struggling with the reality of their suddenly diminished quality of life on account of a mental illness – lest it make them clam up, even despise themselves and their relatively mundane pain.
In fact this ties in with a broader observation I have about "survival literature", especially the mental health subgenre: most books that gain literary eminence of some kind have two common themes – their authors tend to have spent some time in a psychiatric institution, or they have a history of serious self-harm.
I have read and admire many of these books for the wisdom they contain as well as the authors’ craft. But the reality is that the vast majority of people living with mental health problems will never see the inside of a psych ward or try to kill themselves. Where are the stories of high-functioning depression? Does the publishing industry ignore them because they don’t meet a certain "minimum pain" parameter and are hence deemed not "motivational" or "saleable" enough?
Should a person coping with mental illness be expected to live up to a socially acceptable standard of "heroism"?
In conclusion, I want to ask you: do you think it is important to maintain a sense of proportion while recommending "inspiring" books to someone struggling with depression? When was the last time someone gave you a book to motivate you or vice versa, and did it help? Write to me. And please share this newsletter with your friends and ask them to sign up so we can think of such knotty questions together.
Until next week.
If you have been affected by any of the issues in this article, this website provides contact details of free helplines around the world.
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