I’m super excited about getting this article finally out into the world. I approached my university’s student magazine (the controversial, infamous and occasionally un-PC Tharunka) with the piece, and they’ve agreed to publish it in this year’s last edition. High fives all around.

It takes a strong, if not comfortably batty woman to affirm, “If I’m going to be miserable and sad, I might as well look glamourous whilst at it.” Sad but pretty, and depressingly alluring – crazy women are a modern fascination. It’s more than a vivid fascination with watching a burning wreck; there’s a beauty in the breakdown. It’s an assertion American writer Elizabeth Wurtzel makes in her neo-feminist non-fiction book Bitch, in one of her long winded but equally enrapturing chapters regarding the glamourisation of mental illness. Or, rather, the attitude towards an emerging open door policy on public discussion of mental diseases. Whether she was deducing that an air of “elegantly wasted” is merely the new riguer de jour, or that the beauty in the breakdown is simply an about face to mask some inner shame, is not entirely clear. However, the first point Wurtzel makes – that depression is the new black – shouldn’t be disregarded. Countless tell-all autobiographies line the shelves, as former drug addicts, murderers, and victims of abuse relay a life’s worth of confessions for the publishing world to capitalise upon.  We’ve got Maryan Hornbacher’s Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia; Toni’s Don’t Tell Daddy and an accompanying sequel detailing the incestuous rapes she was forced to endure at the hands of a frightening father figure; Sickened, a tale of a Manchausen’s By Proxy Childhood; Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s first book and autobiographical account of drug use, depression, suicide attempts and manic episodes; the list goes on and on. And readers devour these books; they’re enraptured by the pain of others. It’s almost as if these confessionals have the same impressiveness and air of authenticity as a doctor’s certificate. These autobiographies are like a Phd in life suffering. “I am a qualified battler,” they appear to be saying. “I have a case of the crazies, I’m loud, proud and out of control.”

Once upon a time mental illness was kept hush-hush. The inflicted were labotomised, with the removal of the frontal lobe ensuring the inflicted kept their mouths shut. Institutions kept the unconventionally morbid thinkers locked away, thus stigmatising a life-threatening disease and leaving other sufferers with a feeling that something just ‘aint right up in the top paddock. Alienation abounds, the viscous cycle continues. But where keeping mum was the trend when something was amiss with mother dearest, when society’s pretty poppies really failed to dazzle and wilted in the public view, open dialogue is now favoured over sweeping all the mess under the carpet. Let’s talk about our problems, we say. Let’s hold hands, join support groups, write novels about our inner conflict and psychotic dialogue.

Let’s take Sylvia Plath for example. The famous American poet was popularised and lauded for her confessional style prose throughout the 1950s, earning her place in publishing history, ordaining her emblematic of women’s literature. Plath gained a level of fame and relevancy her husband Ted Hughes never attained. Hughes does indeed have claim to a thrown of his own inside the literary sphere; he ranked 4^th on The Times 50 Greatest British Writers since 1945 in 2008, and was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until he died in 1998. It is not a question of whether his collection of works was better than Plath’s, nor can the feminist argument regarding Hughes’ treatment of his wife really account for his smaller fan club. Deflecting blame for Plath’s suicide onto Hughes cannot be causal for the longevity of Plath’s work. But they do advance bibliophile favouritism towards her. Plath admirers label Hughes a heartless and brooding murderer, a talented killer without a tangible weapon, skilled in the arts of suppression and manipulation. Equipped with his upper hand in his and Plath’s emotionally volatile relationship, he is accused of accelerating the untimely death of a beloved patron saint of suffering. An alleged womaniser, apparently completely unfaithful to all of his wives, Assia Wevill even details his domestic tyranny in A lover of Unreason, an autobiographical look at Hughes’ mistreatment of his mistresses and bona fide partners. Plath’s highly depressed and insane behaviour (the poet was said to bathe at strange hours at other people’s dinner parties, and accounts of her biting fetish have also surfaced over the decades) romanticise her condition. It is without a doubt that her condition was the vehicle behind her famous works. Yes, Plath can attribute her success to insufficient serotonin levels. What’s your reason?

However, perhaps it’s not that these confessions are overly eager to embellish the disease, or eagerness to portray a striking similarity to the infamously disturbed Sylvia Plaths or Courtney Loves or Billie Holidays or Zelda Fitzgeralds. Maybe a desire to appear special, somewhat fragile and delicate and ultimately more complex, is not the driving force behind these biographical experiences. Perhaps an unwillingness to suffer in silence, and instead publicly support those who too share whatever affliction it may be is what’s actually behind all these confessional publications. You are not alone; I am damaged too. Human beings seek companionship, whether it’s congregational mourning such as African traditional bereavement, or a good bawling with friends over a packet of Tim Tams.

The scenario could possibly be that mental illness is a fact of life. With 45% of Australians aged 16-65 suffering from a mental illness at any point in their life (ABS, 2007), one could conclude that that big black tunnel’s getting a lot more cosier. The “over-diagnosis” of mental illness is something explored in Wurtzel’s first novel, the autobiographical Prozac Nation.  Is it comforting to find reprieve in the company of other medicated beings? Or is it a blow to our natural coping mechanisms, squandered and left to whither away after chemically-induced serotonin levels become naturalised, replace our instincts, and eventually become the norm? Is normal human emotion is now medicalised sadness?

 “Part of the appeal is stepping into someone else’s soap opera, but that’s not necessarily an exploitative thing,” says Rachel Hills, Phd student at UNSW. “People long to know what it would be like to live life in someone else’s shoes – that’s part of the appeal of any autobiography, or even a novel. I think it can be read as a display of empathy. There’s also the obvious appeal to people who are experiencing the same issues: many sociologists argue that when people feel different in some way, they will seek out narratives that help them make sense of their experiences.”

Mental health was a major issue at the last election (which, at the time of writing, we’re still in the middle of), with vigils held all over Australia by activist group Get Up! in support of a better mental health scheme. The big black dog doesn’t have to be the elephant in the room (nor the headline of every magazine).

Photo credit: Payton Guerra