NB: Observation by a psychoanalyst: The writer seems to know little about psychotherapy: what the latter does is validate the feelings of trauma, and provide empathy and support. How the person copes is best left to themselves and to whatever strategies, personal and collective they can creatively access or create. We all live through adolescence and early adulthood. What she describes – very eloquently- is the passage each generation has to go through and to deal with tradition. In other words no one can be “saved” from this, each generation has to go through such transitions and create their own alternatives – or not. DS

by Hannah Seo

Mimi Khúc began thinking about “unwellness”, or the idea that we all struggle to be “well”, more than a decade ago. At the time, she was a graduate student and a new mother struggling with postpartum depression. She didn’t have the knowledge or language to talk about what she was feeling – she just felt like a bad mother to her daughter Elia.

Now Khúc is a scholar of Asian American, gender and disability studies, who surveys and questions the forces that contribute to our unwellness. Her new book dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss melds many forms – scholarship, essayistic passages about her own pain and creative exercises – to spur readers’ own reflections on unwellness.

Mimi Khúc’s brilliant and unconventional new book, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss, is a vital contribution to such brave, careful remapping. Conventional wisdom, Khúc notes, tends to locate “mental health” in spaces with names like “wellness center” and “student counseling services,” as well as in more figurative spaces with names like “success,” “productivity,” “achievement,” and “positive thinking.” Khúc challenges these overly rehearsed lines of thought by positing what might seem initially like a paradox: “mental health” is in fact a life-threatening malady. Somewhat provocatively, the book’s opening pages argue that “what we’ve thought mental health is all along is actually killing us”—“psychology, psychiatry, clinical psychotherapy, university counseling centers, and popular discourses of wellness and self-care are all failing us, and their chief failures are along the axes of race and ableism.” According to Khúc, not only are “the existing industry and scholarly understandings of mental health” actively wounding—traumatizing—our “bodyminds” (to borrow a term from disability studies), but what we normally think of as mental unwellness can also, counterintuitively, be a site of healing, community, and deliverance.

“When you begin with the recognition that we are all unwell, that our unwellness is shaped by the structures around us, it changes everything,” says Khúc.

The book continues Khúc’s creative work on the themes of mental health, referencing a collaborative project called Open in Emergency, which included a “hacked” Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for Asian Americans, and a tarot deck reimagined to reflect Asian American experiences.

When we first tried to schedule a call, I had to postpone because I had a cold. “Unwellness calls,” Khúc wrote to me, in response. And it does, for many of us – more than we know or feel allowed to admit. We eventually did get together to discuss the structural nature of unwellness, how to acknowledge and rectify it and community care….

https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2024/mar/26/mimi-khuc-book-unwellness-health

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