Why reasons needn't be ascribed for poor mental health

A few days ago, Baek Sehee died. 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.

- MANU JOSEPH

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.

Baek believed she was ill. She had looked up her symptoms and concluded that she had ‘mild’ depression. She just didn’t feel good most of the time. She could feel it physically. Now, she had to explain to the doctor what that meant—why she did not feel good, why she thought her mental health was poor, and even what the underlying causes might be. In doing so, she painted a portrait of a person who was almost like anyone else. For instance, she had low self esteem, she exaggerated anecdotes to make them more interesting, lied about little things to make herself look good, worried about her beauty and her weight, wished to do well at work, watched her attraction for a man fade when his interest in her rose, hated being alone and at the same time wished to be alone. And when she got drunk, she said silly things.