New Directions

I met Sumit the year I arrived in London to do my Masters way back when.  I didn’t really get to know him at the time—he was younger, a medical student and I was drawn more to the large group of Spanish-speaking students from places like Venezuela and Ecuador who lived in that residence along with over six hundred students from all over the world.  I spent the year exploring the history and literature of the Romantic era, feeling a bit jealous of those on my wing who were studying more relevant things like how to implement HIV prevention programs in Nigeria or weighty matters like attempting to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity.

A couple of years later I had changed to the History of Medicine and started to spend time in places like The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine which had the best canteen in Bloomsbury not only because of the food, but because it was always filled with fantastic people from all over the world.  It was then that I befriended Sumit and we started to spend  a lot of time together.

Sumit was one of the funniest and liveliest people around.  He was very different from a lot of the medical students I knew in that he was interested in the arts and liked to discuss good books. It was Sumit who got me interested in the History of Medicine promising me it was a fascinating discipline.  In those days the Wellcome Institute was the place to study such things.  At the time, one of the brightest lights in the field, Roy Porter, was there and he was legendary already. Over the course of his life he wrote or edited over 100 books and he was a fantastic orator as well.

After some time, I began to realize that while academia was fine, it demanded a level of specialization that did not fit with me.  I returned to Canada and began my writing career. My interest in the History of Medicine did not abate, however, and I continued to read widely in the field.

Sometime during the 1990s I discovered the world of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell and my life turned upside down.  Suddenly things that seemed inexplicable before began to make sense.  Lucky for me, Sumit had at this point started his studies in psychiatry and I had someone to share my new passion with. 

I visited him in England and he came to Toronto where we spent many hours discussing our respective interests.  Eventually, as we formed our own families and Sumit established himself as a psychiatrist in the United States, we fell out of touch for almost six years.

During those six years, things changed radically for me.  As a writer I began to be invited to give talks and I discovered my real passion was to teach people about our old stories and our myths.   I was fortunate in that I found Ann Kirkland and Classical Pursuits and I was able to lead trips for her to beautiful places like Mérida, Mexico and Sevilla, Spain.  Classical Pursuits taught me the importance of asking questions, of sitting with others and working your way together through the great texts.  My interests, though, gravitated more and more to the mythological and psychological side of things and I felt that I needed to form a group that would allow me to do this year round.  The Sophia Cycles was born, undergoing various incarnations until now.

In one of those synchronicities that always affirm for me that there is magic in the world, Sumit called me recently and we discovered, to our amazement, that having travelled down very different paths we had somehow arrived at the same place!

The idea for a book was born then.

Sumit

My journey began in London, and continued here in the United States. On the face of it, it’s a familiar story.  Young, second generation enthusiastic child of an ethnic family gets propelled into the profession of medicine. Only there is a twist in the story that has had seismic effects to this day. On a spiritual level, I’m now very thankful for it.

My parents had a rocky, sometimes violent marriage. I was a terrified witness to its awful consequences, stepping in to the theatrics of husband-wife conflict as a precocious referee.  After their divorce, my dad dropped off the radar, and my mom was in the throngs of depression. I was her solace, who would valiantly help ‘rescue’ her, and be her advocate. To this end, I was helping her write letters to attorneys to chase down my deadbeat dad for child support payments.

I was 13 and both intensely angry and intensely anxious  It was indeed a ‘lonely’ time for me, with some Dickensian undertones, in that I felt I had to fend for myself, while coming to terms with the fact that the world I knew (even if unpleasant) had been oddly obliterated thenceforth.

My rage at our family being left destitute by my father made me supremely ambitious. In true Don Quixote fashion, I ‘charged’ into my studies to help myself excel: first to a fancy private school, and then to medical school.   I saw a medical degree as helping right all that had been unfairly wronged against us—a heroic leap from cataclysmic past to a ‘secure’ future. Yearnings for a supra-ordinary ‘power’ therefore found their wellsprings in those experiences—the “I’ll show them!” attitude that would defiantly ‘kick’ society in its face when it would talk smugly about the children of divorced families—especially the added anger I felt at the stigmatization of divorce in Indian culture at the time.

In the midst of this, I found another, rather more nurturing, influence: my English teacher, who encouraged us to dissect the nuances of character in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, or Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. I loved it, and found that I was good at it. It was my comfort zone because I enjoyed finding out what makes people who they are: their inconsistencies as well as their “warts.” In fact it was those inconsistencies and inner vacillations that gave the characters their very humanity, allowing them to ‘jump off the page’, so to speak.

I befriended Béa while living in the aptly named International Hall of students, around the corner, and slap bang in the middle of the part of London littered with interesting book stores. The friendship, the phase, and the milieu lent itself to a wonderful journey of self discovery, humour, and friendship. She was “escaping” her trapped future in Canada; I had put my “trapped” life as a potential physician on hold. This lasted a few years.

During that time, I also became convinced I wanted to be a psychiatrist. By its very nature, it suited my “outsider” view of the world. Like watching a live court jester, I watched the theatrics of mania, including the poignant humor of patients with mixed manic symptomatology. I then became convinced of my calling.

After pursuing training at Cambridge, I left for the United States and settled at the University of Virginia. It was so Cambridge like in its small town feel that I felt “at home”, in an otherwise scary immigrant journey, away from everything I knew. I graduated and then specialized in Forensic psychiatry. No matter how much I enjoyed and learned from my residency, nothing really prepares you for the real world of managed care psychiatry. I became the proverbial cog in the corporate machine: a prescription writer, form filler, and biller/coder for the money-ness of medicine.

Increasingly I have again begun sensitized to my gut: this time, feeling a sense of unease at the dehumanization that the healthcare system inflicts upon us, both as providers and patients. Time spent talking to patients is simply not valued anymore, despite all that I have learned from the rich heritage of my professions’ centuries of knowledge and writings. We now use a manual called DSM IV in a rather ‘cookbook’ fashion. It is full of criteria, rules and algorithms for giving someone a “disorder”, but is scant in the way of meaningful description—a fundamentally flawed idea, if you ask me and many other mental health professionals.  Welcome to the mechanization of psychiatry in the 21st century (we might as well climb into our computer screens and stay there).

So I searched elsewhere, anywhere that would capture the vividness of those descriptions or moments when I felt ‘connected to’ or would ‘understand’ another human being’s state, either through experience or the written word: High and low, I searched: philosophy, then history, and finally stumbling upon novels, poetry and movies – all of which would communicate about character, personal distress and the daily vicissitudes of most humans, far more vividly than I had seen in almost decade of being a practicing psychiatrist.

Perhaps something in my own/others’ life journey, with that myriad of feelings and conflicts I and they have had to navigate through, resonated with what I have now realized: that to understand someone’s life and journey, facts and explanations are not enough. In our ‘Google-driven’ and ‘thirst for facts’ world, a ‘jewel’ has somehow been lost: compassion, understanding, but mostly important, being palpably aware of those ineffable and contradictory parts that make us who we are.

Psychiatry was beginning to make some strides toward this, then took a subsequent nose-dive, back into the tangible world of material science and disease. Excited by the new ‘toys’ of neuroscience and genetics, it again seems to have lost its historical ‘way’ at present. I now fear that unless we honour those aspects of a person’s life journey, institutions and professions such as ours will lose touch with humanity altogether. i.e. what it truly means to experience a human existence

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Sumit and Béa

Maybe we need to read the old stories together – make them match what our life experiences are revealing to us.  What if psychiatrists began to explore how the themes in their patient’s stories mirror those in our greatest works of art?  What if, as sometimes happens, a person listens to an ancient folk tale and suddenly understands, deep inside what is missing?  And what if that person decides to tell it to someone else, adding his own shading and weight and is changed again by telling it?

Once upon a time it was all story telling but that has fallen by the wayside as people tweet with abandon. 

The book we are working on is meant to remind us of the importance of the old stories; how the telling matters and how it can heal and wake us up.  Poetry, mythology, the classics and some modern transmutations of ancient truths, can enlarge us in ways we never knew.  All of the themes explored in these great stories appear every day in the therapist’s consulting room. 

We hope you will follow us as we explore these themes and experiences in our book.

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