Before and after darkness

Book review - No Straight Thing Was Ever Made: Essays on Mental Health

In her essay, “Two Deer in the Headlight”, included in the book under review, Urvashi Bahuguna recalls the disintegration of a romantic relationship and her response to it: “For the first year after we split up, I went to workshops and writing retreats. Everywhere I went, I described my life (in essays, poems and free-writes) in a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. It was how I thought of myself — half in the before (still defined by being with you) and half in the after (still figuring out all the possibilities that being without you opened up). What I learnt in the first months after you was invaluable to my mental health, to my recovery, to the construction of an evolved self.”

A similar narrative structure governs the book. It begins with the sentence: “After six years of being immersed in the language of mental illness, coping and recovery, I sometimes forget that I was once someone who didn’t know what the various mental illnesses are and how common some of them are.” And, a few chapters later Ms Bahuguna recollects how this prevented her from writing for extended periods of time, and how, with therapy, she was able to recover — her health and her ability to write.

Mental health should be a serious social and economic concern for India, but there is very little conversation around it. The World Health Organization estimates that the burden of mental health in India was 2,443 disability-adjusted years — the number of years lost because of illness — per 10,000 people, and the economic cost between 2010 and 2030 would be $1.03 trillion. A February 2019 Lancet study says, “In 2017, 197.3 million people had mental disorders in India.” One in seven Indians were suffering from mental illness, but, as the study noted, “a systematic understanding of their prevalence, disease burden, and risk factors is not readily available”. The Covid-19 pandemic would have expanded these numbers substantially.

Indian literature in English is also almost a barren space when it comes to mental health. A few books come to mind — Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom (2012) and The Illicit Happiness of Other People (2012) by Manu Joseph in fiction; and Shreevatsa Nevatia’s How to Travel Light: My Memories of Madness and Melancholia (2017) and Side Effects of Living (2019), edited by Jhilmil Breckenridge and Namarita Kathait in non-fiction. It’s All in Your Head, M (2020) by Manjiri Indurkar, who is a close friend, is a memoir of surviving the trauma of rape. 

Ms Bahuguna’s book is an essential addition to this short list.

Her condition, described by doctors as “major depression”, is detected when she is a postgraduate student in the UK. “In September 2013, I have just arrived at graduate school in England,” she writes in the titular essay early in the book. “I sob so hard at the end of my first full day that my body shakes as I lie in the sheets of the bed and breakfast on Earlham Road.” A friend at the university advises her to see a doctor when Ms Bahuguna reveals that she is overwhelmed by the course and unable to sleep at night. In another essay, “When You’re Very, Very Tired, You Can’t Throw Your Tired Away”, the writer describes her condition as an indescribable fatigue.

This depression-induced fatigue extracts a cost. “The desire to write, to do anything but lie in bed, ebbed away,” she writes in her essay, “Buoyancy”. “When I did manage to put my resistance aside and attempt, I found I did not have anything to say except — I am tired, I am tired. The wisdom, with writing, is that one must write from one’s core. But what lay at my core at the time was anger, fatigue, and profound reluctance.”

In the same essay, she describes a friendship as a source of strength. The friend is identified as S, but her identity is immediately evident to anyone familiar with Indian poetry in English and publishing. “S sent me submission calls, contest announcements, names of publications to which I should submit work,” Ms Bahuguna writes. “Even as I was uncertain about re-entering the literary world, her messages allowed me to re-familiarize myself with it. …S rarely ever mentioned her wins—big or small.” S also advised Ms Bahuguna to put together a manuscript of poetry, which would become the 2019 book Terrarium that I reviewed for Business Standard.

“With the help of research and therapy, I was beginning to manage my illness differently,” writes Ms Bahuguna, describing the process of recovery, “recognizing that there were responses and restorative activities that were within my control. I did not want to be helpless.” The journey from the helpless graduate student weeping in her B&B to the writer of the well-crafted, erudite essays of this book is one filled with pathos. If you are lucky to have escaped the pincer grip of mental illness, read this book to learn about it; and if you are engaged in your own process of recovery, this is sure to provide you with hope.    

The writer’s novel Ritual was published last year; he teaches journalism at O P Jindal Global University