Why reasons needn't be ascribed for poor mental health

A few days ago, Baek Sehee died.

- MANU JOSEPH

She was 35. Her memoir about her suspicion that she was mentally ill, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, sold more than a million copies in several languages since its publication in South Korea in 2018. Her family did not disclose the cause of death, a silence that now commonly implies something dark.

The book, which mostly contains her conversations with an unidentified psychiatrist, is a rare insight into two contradictory entities—the mind of a person who was mentally ill, and the mind of someone who was not ill yet went for therapy. Both these people emerge from Baek’s description of how she feels in her effort to figure out what was wrong with her. This is not because she was ill sometimes and not so at other times. The contradiction is created by something else, and it frames the limits of ‘psychoanalysis.’

It is the nature of the modern world to expect an effect to have a cause. Often, in abstract matters, the reasons, though logical, are wrong. Often, there is no reason.