There is a standard media depiction of a "healed" person. Someone who has Gone To Therapy. I've noticed this in a few works recently. We often see them at the end of a story, maybe in a "ten years later" epilogue. They speak in a soft, serene voice. They have Accepted what they cannot change. They have let go of a lot, including most of what we see them actually care about in the story itself. They are Happy, At Peace, in some non-descript way. They bare little resemble to the person we were actually shown. They bare little resemblance to any person. We were shown, as we usually are in stories, an agent, a desirer, someone becoming. Now they have Become. And they look back on all that silly becoming as something childish that they have moved past. Fire, you know, fire is for children who don't know any better. To be Healed is to have your fire rightly extinguished; to not even miss it.
"DSM-5 seems to have no definition of happiness other than the absence of suffering. The normal individual in this book is tranquilized and bovine-eyed, mutely accepting everything in a sometimes painful world without ever feeling much in the way of anything about it." — Sam Kriss's review of the DSM-5 as a piece of surrealist literature
This review linked above was very enjoyable to read. The DSM-5 as a dystopian novel 👌
"Who, after all, would want to compile an exhaustive list of mental illnesses? The opening passages of DSM-5 give us a long history of the purported previous editions of the book and the endless revisions and fine-tunings that have gone into the work. This mad project is clearly something that its authors are fixated on to a somewhat unreasonable extent. In a retrospectively predictable ironic twist, this precise tendency is outlined in the book itself. The entry for obsessive-compulsive disorder with poor insight describes this taxonomical obsession in deadpan tones: “repetitive behavior, the goal of which is […] to prevent some dreaded event or situation"." 🤣
