Mental health from the inside

Deirdre Maultsaid's poem1 struck a warm chord within me, despite its icy cold message. It reminded me of a poem by Sylvia Plath entitled Tulips,2 which provides an impression of mental health from the inside.

Plath's clear, vivid and personal images remain stamped in my memory: she describes a self that is lost, scared and bare, a nobody, longing for empty peacefulness held within white, impersonal, institutional walls of observing eyes that do not shut. I can still gain access to the hollowness of her stark impressions of mental illness and its system: the previously calm air now filled with the loud noise of dangerous tulips that talk to her wound, swab her clear of the little smiling hooks of her family and deprive her of oxygen, leaving her faceless and extracted from a country far away as health.

For those in the grasp of mental illness, an outstretched hand can be interpreted as a cold, automatic, clinical reflex to a symbolic gesture from the outside. However, if it is accompanied by empathy and sympathy, its warmth can stir a glimmering soul, becoming an essential part of a more genuine and humane response to the significance of the truth of one's mental illness from the inside.

Sylvia Plath took her own life on Feb. 11, 1963, 2 years before her poem2 was published.