I’m committed this winter to too many expensive building projects at once. As the balloon of my bank balance drifts ever lower towards the waves, and the crests of red ink lick the wicker of my basket, I’ve realised something has to be thrown out.
Thus it was that last week I found myself in London’s Hatton Garden. Tucked into my little knapsack was my passport and a couple of one-ounce mini bars of gold I had bought after the last banking crisis, and stored in an old kettle. It was late afternoon, and dark. Hatton Garden is a strange street, lined with jewellers and bullion dealers, and peopled by all types – customers and security guards, lovers window-shopping for engagement rings, plump foreign gentlemen padding around like small bears in black leather jackets, and skint citizens with family jewellery to sell. Men of means mingle with spivs. Posh meets trash.
Just because medicine has found no physical cause for a condition doesn’t mean it’s ‘only’ in the mind
And something strange happened. That knapsack goes everywhere with me, feels part of me – and was hardly heavy: an ounce of gold doesn’t weigh much. But now I became acutely conscious of it, felt it there, felt the eyes of others (I imagined) noticing it, and me. How easily could I be ambushed? A fellow brushed my arm and asked if I wanted to buy some weed, and I almost leapt from his touch, looking around in near panic. Was he distracting me before others pounced? Now almost everybody looked suspect – that greasy-looking white guy in a zoot suit, the (surely?) furtive expression on that black guy’s face. The smart lady in fake fur and too much gold – was she an accomplice? Suddenly I felt an almost overwhelming urge just to run.
For me, paranoia is an old friend. I remember at school being terrified that a group of boys were ganging up on me. Nobody was. I remember at university experimenting with LSD and walking down a suburban road where every voice I heard seemed to be saying my name. I remember my friend Ahmed, convinced a death ray was shining through a hedge outside his window (I explained it was a porch light – ‘Of course,’ he replied, ‘they would disguise it as a porch light!’) – until they took him away. I remember gaining altitude in a small plane over Hawaii, strapped to the professional parachutist with whom I was to experience freefall, and wrestling with the crazy notion that he was not buckling us together properly and this was a plot to kill me; and feeling sick not with fear of the jump, but of his intentions.
But I’m blessed with one saving attribute. The rational side of my mind never quite deserts me, but stands apart, quietly insisting that I’m not thinking straight, and must keep my head. And I mostly do.
For all, therefore, that I’m by disposition prey to the grumpy old codger’s suspicion that people are making it up, and these ‘mental health’ snowflakes just need to pull themselves together and get a grip, I do know this is sometimes cruelly wrong. Mind and body are inextricably linked. With sorrow I think of my late, sweet, bubbly cousin who developed myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and languished, exhausted and in awful pain, until she could take no more. Four out of five victims are women and, my god, Sally wasn’t imagining it, though no bodily ‘cause’ or brain malfunction was ever identified.
My own observations suggest that mind is part of body, not a ghost in the machine. No more than ‘good health’ is rationality a stable state; and ‘mental balance’ is precisely the right word for sanity, because it’s a delicate and relative thing, easily tipped, sometimes into eccentricity, sometimes catastrophe.
I’ve just been watching a remarkable video, recently posted on YouTube by the husband of a friend: a young man I’ve never met because, for seven years until recently, he sank into a long, deep and terrible malaise – utterly incapacitated by something nobody could explain, but which attracted the terminology of ME and CFS.
If you have a little time, do watch it: www.spectator.co.uk/louis. It would be 20 minutes you won’t regret, especially if, like me, you’re prone to grunting ‘all in the mind’ as though that means ‘fake’. I won’t sum up Louis’s experience: he can speak for himself. But I was struck by his report of release from the malaise: accompanied by spasms of violent, uncontrollable shaking.
In his palpable intelligence and sincerity, Louis carries me utterly; and I have never heard a more compelling account of these maladies. I keep an open mind, however, about Louis’s own suggested explanation: that bad things that happened to him in youth – things he had never properly come to terms with – conspired to return in adulthood, knife in hand, to ambush him both physically and mentally. Maybe. But billions who have never suffered such an attack could – were this to happen to them – identify comparable horrors from childhood as the cause. Why him but not them? Are suggestions of a genetic link significant? My own submission would be that these are things we simply don’t yet understand.
But on two other thoughts suggested by Louis, I’m sure he’s right: firstly, that mind and body cannot be placed in separate silos, and just because medicine has found no physical cause for a condition doesn’t mean it’s ‘only’ in the mind; and secondly, that acronyms like ME and CFS may one day be proved to have been umbrella terms lumping together quite distinct illnesses we can’t yet classify. Older readers may remember that when we were children, unexplained aches were solemnly diagnosed as ‘growing pains’.
Had Louis lived in 1st century ad Palestine, those violent fits of shaking that signalled his release would have been seen as the miraculous casting out of demons. I don’t believe in demons or miracles, but are we any closer now to understanding than were Jesus’s disciples? Louis’s experience persuades me that the beginning of understanding is to accept that we don’t yet understand.
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