Doctors All

I blame Oprah and her gurus Dr. Phil (what is he a doctor of?) and Dr. Oz.  Or maybe it's WebMD.  Or maybe it's the relentless advertising by pharmaceutical companies.  Or maybe it's the fear inspired health reports on the evening news.  Whoever is to blame, it seems that America is full of amateur doctors.  We are all a bunch of self-diagnosticians; oh, and we love to diagnose our friends and neighbors, too.  The only thing worse than a few million hypochondriacs is a few million hypochondriacs with web phones who type in their symptoms and who think they are doctors.

This faux-medicine shows up in my classroom in a way that may seem harmless, but which I think is subtly insidious.  It is not as dramatic as my intro, but I think it represents something negative about the way we see medicine in this country.  We love to diagnose the characters in the literature we read.  The narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" has postpartum depression; Roderick in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" is manic-depressive; Krebs from Hemingway's "Soldier's Home" has PTSD.  And I will admit I am as guilty as anyone of diagnosing and labeling.

My problem is not that these amateur diagnoses are "wrong," or unsupported by the text.  The problem is that these labels provide an illusion of knowledge which allows us to dismiss these characters.  And that is what happens.  Once we can label the problem the modern mind (student) believes that all these characters need is a pill and they would have been fine.  If we have a label that sounds quasi-familiar, because we have heard the term before somewhere, we can be comfortable feeling superior to the characters and dismiss them.

But we are not doctors or psychiatrists who really understand what postpartum depression is, or what a soldier who suffers PTSD is going through.  The label is an illusion; it is, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, "the worst illusion; it is the illusion of familiarity."  Once we have the label, we don't have to look closely at the character, we don't have to immerse ourselves in the world the author has created for us. We don't have to empathize.  Gilman and Poe and Hemingway and all great authors create fascinating characters who come alive on the page, and we prescribe them pills and close the book.  We are familiar with PTSD because we saw that feature on the news, we have no need of this story by some dead author (who happened to have witnessed a few wars up close.)

If you have read "The Yellow Wallpaper" you may see what I think is the final irony of my idea.  The narrator's husband is a doctor, and he thinks he knows what is best for her.  He confines her in the room with the yellow wallpaper, forbids her to write, tells her not to let her imagination get the best of her, treats her like a child; and in the end she goes crazy.  He knew what was best for her and he didn't listen to her complaints or suggestions, and she ended up crawling around a room like an animal believing she has escaped from the yellow wallpaper she had been trapped behind.  A hundred years later we come along and shake our heads; if only they had known about postpartum depression and given her a Valium and some antidepressants.  We don't listen to her either.