Undertake The Quest: About Literature and Mental Health
Friends,
It’s been a challenging summer and a demanding year, but the good news is that mental health awareness is on the rise, and there’s now a new national mental health hotline (988) available for those who need to reach out for help. I’ve mentioned my own anxiety disorder (combined with depression and OCD) in these pages before and this time it’s got me thinking about our cultural safety nets for those with mental illness ranging from this new hotline to free Youtube segments to widely prescribed antidepressants, anti-anxiety narcotics and anti-psychotics. It’s also got me thinking about two titles: Demon Copperhead, the new novel by Barbara Kingsolver, and David Copperfield, the classic by Dickens on which Kingsolver’s new book is based.
The hero of Demon Copperhead is a red-headed boy named Damon Fields (aka Copperhead) and the reason he came to my mind in regard to mental health awareness is that he serves as a classic example of a person with limited resources trying to medicate himself after a number of traumas that wipe out his family of origin (his mom overdoses on Oxycodone at the very outset of the opioid crisis of the late 90s). He is then forced into the foster system and through two further-traumatizing foster homes and then out on his own in rural Virginia and Tennessee. If you’ve read David Copperfield, you’ll recognize the parallel sets of events. Just like David, Demon has the good luck of finally locating a far-flung relative – his estranged grandmother, Betsey Woodall – who has sufficient resources to look after him for a time. Both books are relevant to our current mental health crisis because both are scathing examinations of the safety nets in place to help those who have survived traumas. In David’s case, the only safety nets are harsh, militant boarding schools, and in Demon’s it’s a foster system that pays a foster parent a small monthly stipend ($500) to board a child who they only took in because they desperately need money.
Kingsolver’s main deviation from the Dickens’ model comes in the book’s second half in which Demon runs up against a new adversary and that is the opioid crisis. While playing high school football, Demon suffers that classic injury of the romantic hero i.e. a leg wound. This not only connects Demon to the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King and the search for the Holy Grail, but it also addicts him to the painkiller he’s prescribed in plentiful doses: oxycodone. Once Demon is dependent upon prescription medication, this is when his situation becomes similar to that of someone being medicated for a mental illness. Those of us who take these medications sometimes start to think that our dependency on the medication is one of our problems, that our need for the drugs is a problem, and we try to stop taking them. So there’s a lot in Demon’s experience that is relatable to the person who suffers from illness related to trauma or PTSD. The medication is a necessity for Demon so he spends a large part of his time either suffering because he can’t find any or getting high on anything that comes his way including crystal meth.
It's worth noting that both books are massively long, which shows how faithful Kingsolver was to the original. In fact, her book counts out to about 133 scenes which puts it in the league of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White at 154 scenes. Like the Dickens original, Kingsolver’s book is written in the hero’s authentic voice, a voice that is a dense pastiche of rural Virginian vernacular.
One thing that is abundantly clear is that we took a sudden leap forward in drug production in the late 90s. Suddenly Prozac was available, but unfortunately so was Oxy. It was at this time that I began taking Paroxetine for depression and Clonazepam for anxiety (and zolpidem for sleep). So I am familiar with the effects and side effects of some of the drugs Demon is abusing including alprazolam (Xanax).
But what I’ve experienced with medication is markedly different from Demon because Demon falls down the rabbit hole of painkiller addiction. One thing that Kingsolver’s book makes clear is that something went badly awry with pain control in the late 90s. Doctors and drug manufacturers finally gave in to public demand to produce more effective painkillers including oxycontin, oxycodone, and hydrocodone just to name a few, and the opioid crisis was born.
So Demon finds himself on a hero’s journey in which he must find a cure for a wound. But first, he must find a cure for the cure (oxycodone) which has simply proven to be another incurable wound. So he has to keep looking. And Kingsolver gives him the room – lots of pages – so he can keep on looking. Which is really all that anyone recovering from trauma really wants is some kind of therapy, some useful drug, that might grant us the ability to keep on looking for a cure. We’ve all sustained some sort of a wound, usually while quite young, and then we spend large portions of our lives on a quest for a cure. Like all aspiring heroes, we seek out mentors (parents, teachers, therapists, counselors) who will help us to cross thresholds and to find allies (medications) that will make us strong enough to pass tests and face down enemies. At some point, like all good heroes, we must enter the “inmost cave,” endure the supreme ordeal, (think Luke Skywalker in the cave on the planet Degoba) and then try to seize the “elixir,” after which we hope to experience a resurrection. The elixir might be seen as a better, more healing medication or it might be recovery itself. Of course, none of this is assured. Quests sometimes fail. But the mere fact of the existence of therapy and medications and their growing availability means that more of us are able to undertake the quest and fight the dragon for possession of the elixir – and some days the fight alone can make the rest of the experience of a mental illness bearable.
A series I like right now is “Break Point” on Netflix, a terrific insider’s look at pro tennis. It might appear to be about what it takes to be top 10 in pro tennis, but it’s really about being top 10 at anything.
For any new readers: My new novel, Tania the Revolutionary, is available on Amazon for Kindle and paperback or Barnes & Noble for eBook.