Tomorrow morning, my stupid apartment will be turning off the hot water until Friday. They had to do this during a snow storm.
Yesterday, I read a really great article about how we mourn. It largely centers on the diagnosis and centralization of grief and how over time, mourning has become a personal pursuit instead of a group activity. "To lose someone was once to be swept into a flurry of rituals. In many nations -among them China and Greece- death was met with wailing and lamentation among family and neighbors. Some kind of viewing followed the cleaning of the body." At some point in our society, grief has become a disease rather than a natural reaction to the feeling of loss. I found this article especially interesting considering the many medical retractions and revisions that have been published in the past week- last week a British medical journal, The Lancet, retracted a 1998 paper that stated vaccines may be unsafe. This week, the psychiatry's encyclopedia of mental disorder was revised. We are a nation of disorder. Every emotion, ailment has a title, a syndrome, and a treatment. It is so strange that even mourning has become a psychological disorder. I think the privatization of grief has come from the population shift. We used to be a country of communities instead of individuals. In China, I always had a community, a body of family members close by but prosperity, while great, has caused us to separate. Individuals have lost the community and this shift has made us believe that our grief is at once singular and exclusive.
I wonder what anybody has to say about pre-grief. What do we do when we begin mourning the death of someone before it has happened? What do we do when we know for certain that someone will die in the immediate future?
the notion of every emotion being labeled and diagnosed as a disease is very disturbing, especially because it's true. last semester, i started displaying symptoms of bipolar disorder, but ever since going on a steady regimen of magnesium and other essential vitamins and minerals, i feel better than ever. i'm pretty sure it's not a placebo effect, but i'm not sure if the symptoms were due to magnesium deficiency.
ReplyDeleteand about pre-grief: i'm sure psychiatrists would label that as anxiety and prescribe you a medication that would probably do more harm than good. emotions are healthy--they're what we're *supposed* to feel--it's just a matter of some people being more sensitive than others.