tessa

‘the ancient “causes” of hysteria. The uterus was believed to wander around the body like an animal, hungry for semen. (…) The triad of marriage, intercourse, and pregnancy was the ultimate treatment for the semen-hungry womb. The uterus was a troublemaker and was best sated when pregnant.’

‘It was believed that hysteria, also known as neurasthenia, could be set off by a plethora of bad habits including reading novels (which caused erotic fantasies), masturbation, and homosexual or bisexual tendencies resulting in any number of symptoms such as seductive behaviors, contractures, functional paralysis, irrationality, and general troublemaking of various kinds.’

‘Scores of white women artists and writers were diagnosed as hysterics in a period when rebelliousness, shamelessness, ambition, and “over education” were considered to be likely causes. Too much energy going up to the brain instead of staying in the reproductive organs and helping the female body do what it was supposed to do.’

‘We must accept the interdependence between mind and body and recognize hysterical syndromes as a psychopathology of everyday life before we can dismantle their stigmatizing mythologies.” Who could ever claim that mind-derived illness is not true illness? Pain is not fiction.’

‘We know that the social toxins of living in a racist, misogynist, homophobic, and otherwise economically unjust society can literally make us sick, and that sickness is no less real than one brought on by polluted air or water. In actuality, both social and environmental toxins are inextricably intertwined as the very people subject to systemic social toxins (oppression, poverty) are usually the same folks impacted by the most extreme environmental toxins. And the people who point fingers and label others “hysterical” are the ones least directly impacted by said toxins.’

‘A friend on the phone tells me that a fever is the releasing of anger. I feel semi-human. I am haunting my own couch.’

‘And yet I still do not feel healed. And increasingly I am sure that I never will. Because there is nothing really to heal from. Or rather the thing I am trying to heal from is not a discrete thing, but part of something much larger and inextricable from my being. There is no post- to my traumatic stress, because the trauma and the stress are not individual events or entities that can be relegated to the past; they are instead one seemingly eternal and all-encompassing thing that is there always, for worse and **for better.’

‘the society in which we live is inherently traumatic. It causes mass death and homelessness and food insecurity and that causes people to turn violent. And those things cause mental trauma on a massive scale. And sometimes that trauma is intense and concentrated enough within an individual that we’ve decided it requires healing from—because without healing from it, we become incapable of making it through our days in normative ways; we can no longer work or function as part of the society that has traumatized us. Which becomes a problem for a society which requires functioning bodies and minds to perpetuate the very things we then require healing from. ’

‘And yet the solutions they propose are the same—to heal each individual back to theoretical stability. The New York Times, for example, right after listing all the systemic reasons college students are so unwell these days, argues this all points to a need for more therapists on college campuses’

‘What caused what we at first called shell-shock and now call PTSD was not the existence of violence, as that has always existed, but the technology that enabled that violence on a scale the mind could not assimilate—a scale so large that it forced the trauma to be processed on a timeline of years, causing the mind to essentially malfunction and produce flashbacks and dissociation and all the rest.’

‘Many people think the process of having and living with a mental disorder is chronological: you get an assessment, then a diagnosis, then some treatment and finally you’re in recovery.’

‘Regardless of going round, across, diagonally, inside and outside of the circle of mental hell, there has always been a time stamp on my recovery from other people. They expect me to eventually get better. For me, time stamps are unrealistic and unhelpful. I’ve learned to stop waiting for an end-date. I am not going to wake up one day and feel recovered or as if I am no longer mentally ill. ’

‘I just move through life carrying my mental illness in different ways: I have bipolar in a hopeful way, in a manic way, in a depressed way, in a hysterical way, in a joyful way. But the point is I will always have it.’

‘their book, they propose its-not-time, a form of [crip time](https://cdsc.umn.edu/cds/terms#:~:text=Crip time%3A A concept arising,differently than able-bodyminded folk.) that was developed by disabled people to describe our experiences and relationship to time. To simplify, rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet linear time, or how everyone else experiences time, crip time bends time as we know it, to meet disabled bodies and minds.’

‘I feel liberated in not constantly having to chase a state of wellness or the need for permanent recovery, because I know this does not exist. ’