Lying (22 page)

And still. You want to know. What are the real facts about the condition I call epilepsy in the story.

All I can give you is this. I take anticonvulsant medication daily. I have had auras all my life. I have had several symptoms that doctors have diagnosed as consistent with temporal lobe epilepsy. However, diagnosis itself is a narrative phenomenon, because the same symptoms that doctors saw as epilepsy in one era of my life, they saw as borderline personality disorder in another era of my life, and then as post-traumatic stress disorder in yet another era, and as bipolar, and as Munchausen’s, and as OCD, and as depression and, once, even, as autism. Autism!

All I know for sure is this. I have been ill much of my life. Illness has claimed my imagination, my brain, my body, and everything I do I see through its feverish scrim. All I can tell you is this. Illness, medicine itself, is the ultimate narrative; there is no truth there, as diagnoses come in and out of vogue as fast as yearly fashions. Line up all the DSMs, the book from which mental health professionals draw their diagnoses, and you will see how they have changed, how they
have radically altered from decade to decade, depending upon the Zeitgeist. In this time, right now, in psychiatry, there is a quiet revolution taking place concerning depression. The current story is that depression is a disease springing from a biochemical imbalance. The new story forming is that the evidence for a biochemical imbalance is very poor indeed, and depression may in fact have negligible chemical origins. And so the pendulum swings back.

Therefore, despite the huge proliferation of authoritative illness memoirs in recent years, memoirs that talk about people’s personal experiences with Tourette’s and postpartum depression and manic depression, memoirs that are often rooted in the latest scientific “evidence,” something is amiss. For me, the authority is illusory, the etiologies constructed. When all is said and done, there is only one kind of illness memoir I can see to write, and that’s a slippery, playful, impish, exasperating text, shaped, if it could be, like a question mark.

Lauren Slater has a master’s degree in psychology from Harvard University and a doctorate from Boston University. Her work was chosen for
The Best American Essays/Most Notable Essays
of 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999. She is the winner of the 1993 New Letters Literary Award in creative nonfiction and of the 1994 Missouri Review Award. She lives with her husband and daughter in Massachusetts.