This reflects an attempt to write an article on the management of psychological disorders in wartime Ukraine. This attempt looks like a failure. But isn’t it fair to account for one’s failures, especially in academia? Isn’t that the only way to understand them, to turn them into something else?
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It started with a desire to reach out.
Having been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in 2018, I often find it difficult to get on with my day-to-day life. Yet, all I have to do is get up in the morning and manage myself through an objectively regular day. If I feel threatened, it is by something deep and invisible. Not by tanks. So I started to wonder how people with a psychological disorder and a much harder life than mine could get on with their own day-to-day lives.
And I thought of Ukraine. There are many other unstable and violent environments around the world I could have thought of – there’s no shortage of them at the moment. I didn’t think of Ukraine because of some misplaced western pity, fueled by powerlessness. I didn’t think of Ukraine because it would make a picturesque subject. But I thought of it for reasons, which, I concede, were largely irrational. And yet, isn’t that something common in research? Having one’s first questions and investigative intuitions more or less knowingly rooted in one’s subjective experience?
My brother has studied in Krakow for two years; he’s made friends with a Ukrainian fellow student whose father was killed by Russian soldiers during the Kharkiv retreat. He has worked as a volunteer for the refugees’ welcoming in Krakow for a few months, which he gave me glimpses of. My father works with a Ukrainian waitress in our small family restaurant. And there are my Eastern European – Romanian – origins. Or the fact that I have met Ukrainian writer Iya Kiva at the Tbilisi International Festival of Literature, where I was a guest last June. Or the fact that since the start of the Russian invasion, I have been reading Ukrainian literature: Andrei Khurkov, Evguenia Belorusets, Pavlo Arie, Serhiy Jadan.
Were those reasons sincere? Yes. Were they good reasons? I don’t know.
I felt I had to get in touch with potential subjects through someone I knew; it seemed easier to establish a relationship of trust through an intermediary. I hadn’t really thought about the framework or the proportions of my inquiry yet. I just wanted to make contact. I tried my close circle: my brother’s friend; the waitress who works with my father; a Russian-born author I know a little, who has been involved in welcoming Ukrainian refugees to Berlin. I introduced the Synapsis journal with its positions and recurring issues, then myself – as a writer and researcher in the Humanities, diagnosed with BPD. Then, I presented my project as clearly and reassuringly as possible:
“I would like to interview a small number of people suffering from a psychological disorder – like myself. I would like to ask them how their pre-existing disorder was affected by the war, and how they have been dealing with it for more than a year. I don’t yet know whether the article will take the form of a long interview with one person, a mash-up of several interviews interlaced with some writing of my own and/or articles previously written on the subject, if there are any… It will depend on the answers I get. […] If you agree to participate, the interview could take any form you’d like: I could email you my questions and you could email me back; I could email you my questions and you could reply via Whatsapp vocals; we could have a Whatsapp video chat or a Zoom/Teams chat. Anything that suits you best. Please note that you may also be anonymized if you wish to.”
In each of these attempts, I hit a wall. In one case, I got no answer. In another, I was given the phone number of a person who turned out be diabetic – and therefore did not fit the profile. In the third one, the person who had agreed to share several suitable contacts with me withdrew at the last minute, stating that she didn’t feel comfortable giving out the information of people she was otherwise working with. I then tried to broaden the spectrum of my contacts. Somewhat candidly, I thought I’d write to those Ukrainian authors I had been reading for a year – writer to writer, I guess. I did via Messenger, using the same protocol. Some read my messages, some didn’t. None of them answered.
By this point, I was getting more and more puzzled by how hard it seemed to establish contact with potential subjects. All enwrapped in my enthusiasm and still convinced of the value of this project, I think I forgot the very fact that people might not want to participate in it. They might have an already complex life, in which they didn’t need to stir more complex things on purpose. They might have lost track of this stranger’s message because it was no urgent priority. They might have other things to think about.
In a somewhat desperate attempt not to abandon my article – desperate, because it twisted my initial intuition to address only people through someone I personally knew – I wrote to French charities for Ukraine and on various “Support Ukraine” Facebook pages. Again, no answer. I started doubting the whole project. Was my message clumsy in a way I could not see? Was it not clear or reassuring enough? Or was my inquiry stalling for reasons I couldn’t fathom?
These attempts were carried out over several months.
Finally, I got somewhere thanks to Iya Kiva, the writer I had met at the Tbilisi literature festival last June. She had told me she would pass my message along to her relations: three persons had reacted, saying they were willing to participate in my project. I had been so focused on making contact with potential subjects, that I was suddenly at a loss when presented with some. I sent each of them the same questionnaire:
- What is the nature of your mental health condition?
- Have you been diagnosed? If so, when and under what circumstances? Has this diagnosis had an impact on your life? If so, what kind?
- What would you say about the way mental health issues were perceived in pre-war Ukraine? What representations do Ukrainians have of mental disorders?
- What would you say about the way the pre-war Ukrainian government handled mental health issues?
- What impact has the invasion of Ukraine had on your mental health condition, and more broadly on your mental health?
- Since the beginning of the war, has it been possible to keep receiving medical care? If so, by what means? If you’re taking a treatment, have you been able to keep accessing it?
- Do you feel like, since the beginning of the war, your mental health condition has been treated as invisible / neglected / denied? Or has it rather been given extra attention and/or extra care?
- Is there something you feel you haven’t said already, and would like to add?
Waiting for the long-anticipated answers to my questionnaire, I was suddenly plagued by doubts. What legitimacy did I have to ask these questions? Would I be able to process the accounts I was about to receive? Would three accounts be enough to build up a knowledge about the daily experience of psychological disorders in war-torn Ukraine? Or were three too much, and should I rather have conducted an in-depth interview with one subject only? Again, I had been so obsessed with the desire to make contact – to feel someone, out there – that I only then realized there was something unclear about my position.
Two friends I confided in about my article project provided me with very precious insight regarding this particular issue. Sharing my project with them allowed me to state simple facts.
I am no expert on Ukraine, nor on the war in Ukraine.
I’m not a sociologist nor a psychologist, and no one expected me to process the data I would receive as one.
I am a playwright, poet, and PhD in Theatrical Studies. In my dissertation, I traced the history of a fluidic paradigm interweaving the imaginary of magnetism, electricity and spiritualism (including animal magnetism and curative electricity, both deriving from the medical field), and studied the way in which 19th-century theater seized upon it.
During my PhD, I worked on archive material (plays, articles by drama critics), and not on living subjects. Being interested in the matters of invisible circulations and contacts between people led me back to the 18th century, and the history of animal magnetism and hypnosis. It was not a rejection of the contemporary or of human subjects; merely a fascination for this paradox of studying intense sensations of life through a material that was no longer alive.
However, since I started contributing to the Synapsis journal in 2019, I’ve been dealing with contemporary sources and interviewing artists about health issues.
For years now – both as an artist and as an academic –, I have been concerned with health. I have been producing thoughts and texts about the vulnerability of body and mind, eating disorders, delirious thinking, loneliness coping mechanisms, and the delicate welcoming of joy amidst all of this. I have been questioning the necessarily relative and contextual dimension of medical normality. All of this granted me some legitimacy to collect these accounts.
I should assert my halfway position between the writer and the academic.
I should stand by the fact that the precise topic of my article – managing a psychological disorder in unstable living conditions – concerns me (and therefore touches me) personally.
Another unresolved matter was the production of knowledge. I clearly felt that three individual cases – out of millions of Ukrainians – would not be enough to get a grasp of mental health issues on a country scale. And if there is one thing I’ve learned in my years as a PhD student, it is that you should not force fragmentary data into a general truth. So, what should I do with the material I was going to get? What cohesive shape would I be able to give it?
The answers got through, and everything was put back into question.
Of the three subjects (A, B, and C), A and B had a psychological disorder (both chronic depression, and one of them a suspected bipolarity), but C was autistic – which doesn’t fit into the same category, since it’s known to be a developmental disorder of neurological origin. Of the three subjects, A and C had been diagnosed (online! which is fairly uncommon in France), and B had been experiencing depressive states and having suicidal thoughts, but had not (yet) turned to professional help. Of the three subjects, C gave extremely concise, factual answers (one or two lines each time) while A shared rather intimate details of their life (i.e. accounts of their relationship with their partner, or of their partner’s own mental health situation) in objectively long answers (in one instance, more than a page long). The material I had collected was valuable on an individual level, but almost impossible to rhizomize. And to top it off, no general idea could really emerge from the answers to my questions. I’d either gone too far, or not far enough.
I must also add that I became obsessed – in a way a writer would be – with a few isolated sentences, rather than seeing an interest in the general material.
“I don’t understand why I should live in such a world.”
“We are bound to become a nation of traumatized people.”
“I only mentally register that some event is good, but not emotionally.”
And finally, there was this one passage that left a strange, dizzy, lingering impression on me.
It was what B answered to Question 5 :
“I began to get tired very quickly. I had serious problems with concentration and memory (both long-term and short-term). I began to feel that I simply had no energy, especially […] intellectual […]. Even now, after a year and a half of full-scale war, I have great difficulty forcing myself to read. There was a period when I slept for a very long time, much more than the physiological norm, this lasted for several months. In general, drowsiness began to really interfere with normal functioning. I also have more frequent depressive episodes, when I literally fall out of normal functioning for 2 weeks or more, because I simply don’t have the strength to do anything. At the same time, I can only lie down and listen to some audio or video materials on topics that interest me. It also became very difficult for me to communicate with people. It seems to me that it is also a matter of lack of strength. I react poorly to noisy conversations around me, and my head starts to hurt, although headaches generally do not bother me.”
Rather than commenting on it, this account gave me the impulse to create something together with B. I felt like taking pictures of them in their living environment; pictures of their unmade bed and of the dark circles under their eyes. I felt like I should make a performance of keeping watch while they slept, reading them stories aloud to try and reach something that couldn’t have been reached otherwise. Those creative impulses were sincere, but they might have appeared totally inappropriate to someone who hadn’t signed up for some weird artistic experimentations with a stranger – a stranger who might seem completely unbothered with the seriousness of what was being shared. I didn’t push it any further.
On the whole, it was pretty clear that those accounts could only be treated as three individual bubbles; three subjective postcards written in a given space and time; three incomplete maps filled with blanked spaces. They could never form a coherent landscape. The only way to treat them seemed to go further with personalized questions addressed to all three subjects, thus continuing the discussion by bouncing off their first response.
An incomplete new round of answers (as I write this, B has not written back yet) got through, and everything was, once again, put back into question.
C’s account, which had been clear and concise the first time around, was again clear and concise. All their information was obviously interesting, but since it remained very factual, it felt like drops in a very large bucket, which I neither knew how to fill, nor exactly what to fill with. I couldn’t find a sensitive grip on anything.
After enthusiastically embracing their participation in my inquiry, A’s follow-up answers were surprisingly defiant and antagonistic. Whereas they apologized for the length of their answers the first time around, they now felt blamed by my comments on their thirst for sharing. They discussed almost every of my questions’ phrasing, rejected my offer to take part in an exercise (writing one sentence each day so as to give me a glimpse into their everyday). The whole thing felt quite hostile, which left me bewildered.
What was I thinking? That I could engage with people on the other side of the world without any risk of misunderstanding about the protocol of my inquiry, the content of my questions, or the formulation of my thoughts? And above all, before properly establishing a relation of trust? But how could I have done that, when it had already been so difficult to reach out in the first place?
So, where am I now? Nowhere, really. But I guess it’s not the same nowhere I was when I started this project. Through what appears to be a failed investigation into the management of psychological disorders in wartime Ukraine, I actually learned a lot.
I’ve learned that being full of good intentions is not enough to see something through.
I’ve learned that as far as research is concerned, closed doors will be just as interesting and thought-provoking as open ones.
I’ve learned (well, I already knew this, but I’ve learned it again) that research is a process made of hypotheses, findings, failures, backtracking and attempts, and that this process doesn’t necessarily go your way: it goes the facts’ way.
I’ve learned how delicate it can be to position oneself towards living subjects in the context of a research in the Humanities, and how the “failure” of such a research would need to be systematically reconsidered as a finding when applied to such sensitive material as the human being.
I’ve learned that maybe it is impossible to build something coherent out of our contemporary shattered reality, which can only produce bits, fragments, and splinters.
***
I would like to warmly thank Aurélie Raidron and Eva Genicot for their invaluable insight into this article project. I would also like to thank Lilith Todd, Managing Editor at the Synapsis journal, for the valuable exchange we had on this article prior to its publication.
Cover Picture by Pauline Picot