Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process

ELEVEN: Food for Thought

Eleven food for thought caterina eppolito, ma, mfa 117 in all my years of practicing therapy, I have never had a client say that she or he wants to begin therapy to become more creative. On the other hand, I have had a client who began treatment because he was too creative. A child told a panicked teacher that he heard voices. When I worked with this child, I found out that these voices were just a creative adaptation of imaginary playmates. Like my clients, when I entered treatment, it was not to become more creative. In hindsight, my mind had become far too creative; its unconscious creative solution to the shock of my father abandoning his family was for me to develop anorexia in my late adolescence. To understand how creativity and psychotherapy are related, you have to go beneath the surface of my poetry, just as you must look beyond the surface presentation of anorexia to know that it is not about weight or physical appearance. To understand how psychotherapy enhanced my creativity, you must understand more deeply the illness for which I sought treatment. Like the threads of the three fates, the anorexia, psychotherapy, and creativity are intrinsically tangled. By twenty-three, I had been hospitalized, had sought treatment, had received a BS degree in psychology, and had earned an MFA in creative writing. By then I thought that the disease was behind me. But before I left treatment, the clinical director of the program did not sing my praises but almost scolded me, “Deny it if you want. I’ll be seeing you again. The anorexia is ingrained in your mind.” In that moment, I hated her for saying it. I didn’t like the idea that she was telling me that I was not cured; I was merely in remission. Then, glancing up from her chart from her faux leather chair, looking at my academic background , and almost as an afterthought, she casually remarked, “Poetry, it figures; writing can’t get more anorexic than that.” I looked up in shock at the metaphor that compared my poetry to a destructive disease. How dare she compare my writing to an illness! Now, I realize that therapists often try to make metaphoric connections between the person’s diagnosis and the client’s life, believing that the illness is a physical manifestation of a mental process. Then, it was a revelation I didn’t want to hear. For five years I had worked hard to rebuild my life from the devastation of the illness. I had returned to college , earned a master’s degree, moved across the country, and rebuilt relationships. While I was free of its blatant physical manifestations, it never occurred to me that I could still be psychologically a closet anorexic. Like being a dry drunk, I still had the same mental processes that I’d had when I was ill; I merely sublimated the obsession into a more positive, socially acceptable form—poetry. While there is no doubt that writing poetry is more positive than being anorexic and dying, my therapist pointed out that this clever defense mechanism allowed me to be rooted in my disease. After all, the symptoms of restriction, the drive for perfection, obsession, and need to control were all there. Poetic form is an anorexic form of writing. Literally, poetry is the thinnest form of writing. Poetry is so thin that by its very definition it cannot fit across the page. So instead of restricting calories, I was restricting words. Instead of controlling what was left on my plate, I was controlling what was left on the page. Instead of spending hours trying to rid myself of extra food, I was spending hours fiddling with words trying to rid myself of verbal excess. Still there was that obsessive drive for perfection with each additional revision. Poetry is as full of forms as anorexia is filled with rules. Just as there were self-restrained rules to eat only certain foods, there were poetic forms using rhyme and meter that ruled out certain words and allowed others. Certain formal forms, like the sestina or the sonnet, had such strict, regimented patterns that it seemed crazy to try to imprison my emotional expressions within them. In the beginning, anorexia is not about emotional expression; it is about emotional restriction. One of the first things an anorexic person learns in treatment is that the disease isn’t about the food or the weight...