Many people who suffer from some form of mental illness have a story that some analysts of autobiography have come to call chaos narratives. Studies in autobiography are now classifying this very popular genre into many sub-types. Autobiography and its several forms of life narrative, memoirs and diary, are arguably the most popular genre of writing of the last several hundred years.

One sub-category of the genre of life-writing is this chaos narrative. It is written after the excesses of the chaos have gone; the experience of the extremes of the chaos are incompatible with the writing or the telling for some. To put this another way, it is difficult to write the story while in the midst of some of the more extreme parts of the experience. People like the famous dancer Nijinski, among others, have placed their experience in a written context during their suffering.

Those who are living in the midst of mental illness episodes are now telling of their experiences more and more in recent years as they come-out. Their stories are often bizarre, but in this crazy world their stories are only one of many kinds of traumatic, bizarre and extreme forms of suffering that the world is drowning in at present.

Telling and, even more so, writing is a way of taking control and creating order, thus giving an account of what was once experienced as chaos, but now has a framework of meaning. To some extent, as a famous psychiatrist Dr.Victor Frankel once put it, suffering ceases to be suffering, the moment it finds a meaning. That is partly true and even if it is entirely true it is not always seen that way by the sufferers. Writing can be therapeutic but it does not eliminate all pain all the time. This is only saying the obvious. We get the stories of chaos narratives on TV and there are more and more of them on the internet at mental illness sites which can be of great value to sufferers.-Ron Price, Tasmania

I would warn anybody not to try reading any "chaos narrative" until you are sure that the resolution of its story, is actually worthwhile.

That is, you need to question, has the chaotic mental process, really found reason for suffering, in which suffering is reduced simply by its cause having been found to be, either worth enduring, or actually a phenomenon belonging to some other time/person/place, and/or both?

Because if the reason that is found in the chaos narrative, that enables the narrative to have become started, (by the way, I fully agree that no narrative can commence until its resolution exists, because without the resolution existing, the chaos in the mind, can not clarify into a desire to express it: that is the basis of why all people at all times, and in all cultures, seek to have a story to tell, and why all cultures hold belief in reality through stories that are circular, thus after death is rebirth etc.), is a reason which is not possible to manifest in your own circumstances, then reading the chaos narrative, might enable chaos, without enabling the resolution

Here is an example:

There is a trick that some mentally ill people use when they tell about their illness, of attempting to impose the mental conditioning of the illness, upon those whom are normally sane. It was done to me in childhood by some mad American schizophrenic family, which caused trouble for me ever since, and it took many years to figure out the extent to which everything bad happening to me, were things that I had taken into my life from in their lives, rather than what originally belonged in my own story. They have a habit of describing me as having their own foibles, and they seem no more guilty than that, but they do like to tell out their stories as though there is resolution, when there never has been any real resolution. They worst one they landed me with was about being given a house, but that then it was lost to another relation. Now some ten or so lost opportunities to purchase a house later, it all falls into place.

However, for the sorts of people who tend to do that to their acquaintances, writing down their narrative can become the proof of the pudding, because if when they write, it drives them into despair and insanity, then they prove that they were who was taking a wrong advantage over others, and had no real way inside the stories they were purpoting to live. Whereas, if a resolution manifests itself eventually, even when that resolution was not obvious at the start, that is the proof that the mental estrangement is recoverable, and was probably caused in the first place by having been abused.

This thread is certainly not getting any clearer!

Oh thank heavens for that Bronwyn! I thought it was just me!