In Plato’s Apology, written nearly 2500 years ago, he famously quoted Socrates as saying that “The unexamined life is not worth living”. Socrates’ words have resonated with me over the years, so much so that I recall using that quote as the opening line of my law school application statement. Although my essay didn’t address the issues of life and death central to Socrates’ declaration, it did address the importance I placed on living an integrated and examined existence, and how I felt that becoming a lawyer would contribute to my ability to examine and analyze, while also allowing me to serve and help others.
In recently reading Elyn Saks’ The Center Cannot Hold, a book about her living with and managing her psychosis and her diagnosis of schizophrenia, I was struck by her revelation that talk therapy had allowed her to see the meaningful side of her struggles. While mentally healthy people often find it taxing to examine and understand themselves, for people who struggle with mental health the examination can feel even more overwhelming. Early in my career, when I was earnestly trying to explain my client’s perspective to an older judge, he glibly dismissed my comments by saying “everyone getting divorced is crazy”. In retrospect, I think what he meant to say was that everyone getting divorced feels like their world has been shaken, and as a result they feel disequilibrated. In many ways the Consilium Process resulted from my observation that divorcing clients’ needs go beyond the scope of a Courtroom and the traditional framework of divorce, and to be most effective the process must attend not only to clients’ legal, financial and custody-related concerns, but also to their mental health and the long-term well-being of their restructured family. What makes the Consilium Process unique is the careful and thoughtful attention given to clients’ whole selves, with our focus on holistic listening and relationship building, and on moving beyond legal outcomes alone to rebuilding lives in meaningful ways.
Self-examination, and the role which it plays in developing a rich and varied life, seems central to the human condition. Yet this is not always a simple task, and mental illness in particular can wreak havoc on one’s ability to do that effectively. Although this can be a difficult process, self-examination can also be the ticket to helping someone struggling with mental illness to make sense of their place in the world.
Elyn Saks’ frank and illuminating journey lets us see how she made sense out of everything that happened before and throughout the course of her illness. In her book, she also talks about her struggle to accept the necessity of medication in treating her mental illness, and keeping her disordered thinking at bay. Through her telling, it becomes apparent that without the medication, talk therapy alone could not have helped her; likewise, medication alone would not have given Elyn the insight she needed to make meaning of and in her life. Just as someone who breaks a leg and has surgery may need medication to keep pain at bay before engaging in physical therapy to optimize their outcomes, our brains are complex organs that may need multiple supports to heal.
Elyn Saks readily admits the many privileges which allowed her to complete a philosophy degree at Oxford, graduate from Yale law school and ultimately become a law professor at the University of Southern California. But to me the most compelling part of her story was her statement that “There may be a substitute for the human connection- for two people sitting together in a room, one of them with the freedom to speak her mind, knowing the other is paying careful and thoughtful attention- but I don’t know what that substitute might be.”
With all the changes we’ve experienced during the past couple of years, perhaps it’s helpful to remember Socrates’ still relevant 2500-year-old insight is a constant.