Interview with Scherezade Siobhan Author of “The beautiful elsewhere”

Scherezade Siobhan is a leading neuropsychologist trained in Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy. She frequently conducts lectures, sessions, seminars on neurodivergence. She is Currently based in Mumbai. She is also the creator and curator of the Mira Project, a global, cross-cultural dialogue which uses storytelling to dismantle gendered violence and street harassment. 

Frontlist: While writing your book, you must have explored some emotionally challenging or negative spaces within your storytelling. How did your skillset as a psychologist help you deal with those moments? Did they affect your emotions and mindset during the writing process? How did you overcome this?

Scherezade: I am an existential psychotherapist as well as a person who lives with clinical depression. A significant part of my professional discipline involves the pursuit of making the unconscious conscious. As a result, I was prepared for the impact when certain demanding parts of the book brought repressed memories to the surface. Memories that had long been buried, much like an impacted third molar – you knew it was there because it hurt from time to time, but you were too afraid to extract it on your own.

Whenever I'm asked where I'm from, I often say, 'several elsewheres' because of my upbringing, ethnicity, and family history. In therapy, people often evoke the image of another 'elsewhere' they wish to imagine for themselves, a place where their survival, recovery, and ensuing struggles are accepted with fewer judgments. It feels as though we are all in search of this elusive elsewhere. I tried to find it quite literally; I journeyed halfway around the world from India to write this book. While surrounded by the serenity of Scotland's vastness, I came to realize that sometimes, this 'elsewhere' is not a physical location; it's an experience, a direction, or a community. It's a form of belonging that not only helps you discover the answers but also faces them. It might reinstate your faith in life, in living, and in the potential to not only overcome the difficulties you're facing but to thrive despite them.

As a psychologist and psychotherapist, I am trained to maintain a degree of neutrality and observation. However, as a writer, you need to engage and immerse yourself. Writing a book like this is akin to a full-body contact sport. You can't sanitize the process by remaining on the sidelines. To do justice to each story, you must peel back layers upon layers. Some of the layers you end up peeling are your own. This is how embracing radical vulnerability works its practical magic.

Frontlist: Is your book aimed at destigmatizing the taboo surrounding mental health in society? What insights or strategies does it offer to empower individuals to openly discuss their mental health concerns and find the courage to do so?

Scherezade: The book is largely a memoir that juxtaposes my own struggles with clinical depression and PTSD against the backdrop of navigating a bittersweet journey as a practicing psychologist/psychotherapist. This could be perceived as a dichotomy or a taboo in itself – a wounded healer. I faced a tortuous battle when I first started experiencing signs of a depressive spiral as a teen. For a long time, mental health practitioners themselves never admitted to the mental health challenges they faced. The attempt to humanize these difficulties is as empowering as it is cathartic. I am writing at the intersection of evidence-based training and lived experience as a survivor using the same service I provide. The introspection attempted in this book is a scrutiny of how wellness and illness are often presented as simplistic binaries and compulsively individualized globally and locally. That is the debate at the heart of this book – how much blame and isolation are assigned to those who live with a mental health condition, disorder, and/or illness? Also, there is a necessity to trace the conversation about mental wellness in our larger social and cultural trajectories, not just biological, individual ones. The taboo against mental health in India begins with the distorted image of a homeless person, lost, chattering incoherently at a traffic signal. I have heard of this image invoked in several workshops and group sessions I have conducted. It's 'Us vs. Them'. We don't want to be like 'them'. This is an unfortunate stereotype that is incredibly divisive and has its roots hooked into the hard soil of dogmatic views perpetuated for a long period of time. Even with the advent of social media and many million digital highways transporting information towards and away from us, I still sit with people in family therapy who are deathly afraid that their loved one will become this stereotype. When we speak about destigmatizing mental health, we have to devote time and effort towards alleviating the fear attached to perceptions of mental health and illness. This is further exacerbated in India because it is entwined with caste, class, gender, and sexuality.

The book offers itself as either an empathetic witness or a sort of catalyst for catharsis. In its stories, people speak of loneliness, abandonment, and hopelessness, so you find a mirroring of your own experiences, but then it also shows the potential for acceptance, recovery, rewiring of curiosity and joy, finding community, and celebrating ourselves for who we are, not just what we can or could be. It is not prescriptive in the sense of a clinical practitioner offering cookie-cutter solutions, theories, or analyses. It is a form of witnessing – others and self. Interspersed with facts, research, and scientific backing, its pulse is woven into authentic storytelling. More than anything else, my endeavor is for the readers to find a friend within these pages. A story, a person, an event that rings close to home and therefore normalizes the otherwise imperceptible quarantine of living with a mental health condition.

To make room for the 'I' being imprecise, unfinished, a work-in-progress, and to borrow from acclaimed anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, a testament to the fact that "the self is made, not given".

Frontlist: How did you choose the stories or issues you felt needed to be discussed in your book? Were there specific criteria or personal motivations that guided your selection process? 

Scherezade: The process is a confluence of sorts where the personal or the individual meets the universal. The one constant refrain echoing through most therapy rooms and discussions I have witnessed is that the world seems to be alone together. Loneliness is pervasive and even more so when someone struggles with a mental health condition. We want to be loved at our weakest. People often feel isolated within the seclusion of their own individual experience not knowing that there are others who may not be the same as them but deal with similar turbulence and anguish. Beyond the disorder-disease binaries, everyone wants to be seen and heard while simultaneously dealing with a knot of disclosure cinched around acceptance. The stories I have picked were guided by a desire to help alleviate the loneliness of psychological distress. In these pages, people might find someone like themselves. It is said that we are more likely to offer empathy to others before we can express self-compassion. Perhaps this will help the reader discover that fount for self-compassion by feeling empathetic towards the person on the page. Others might find the language to finally disclose what they deal with on a regular basis. Still others might find the lens through which they can consider another's life and its complexities beyond the limitations of deductive reasoning. Maybe we can finally see why "Oh cheer up!" is not the best response to someone fighting a depressive spiral. Or that when family members use derogatory "nick names" for kids (as is common in India), it can leave a lifelong imprint.

Therapeutic interactions can be an assembly of contradictions. To exist is to confront these contradictions. I chose stories that represent the not-so-neat representations of sanity and distress. To me sanity is a word that can and should be reclaimed as a state of belonging, not just a psychiatric label. My book wants to create a sense of belonging. I am personally more inclined towards highlighting those narratives that are underrepresented, othered and/or pushed outside the margins. Stories about male childhood abuse, intergenerational trauma coloring mother-daughter relationships in single parent families, the devastation wrecked by casteism on a young boy's relationship to the sense of touch; these stories are essential and yet rarely dived into when we discuss mental health.

I am not the creator of all these stories. I am, however, a collector and an interpreter. In a poem, Katie Ford writes - "Don't say it's the beautiful I praise. I praise the human, gutted and rising".

This was the motto. To praise the unevenness that contours our respective beings.

Frontlist: Your book addresses the intersection of mental health and cultural/societal factors, such as the Indian family structure and masculinity. How did you navigate these complex dynamics in your writing? Were there specific challenges or considerations you faced when exploring these themes?

Scherezade: Health can't exist in a vacuum. Especially mental health. In India, mental wellness and illness are not just punctuated by, but actively compounded by sociocultural and socioeconomic factors. The first clinic I attended for my observership almost over a decade ago was attached to a well-known multi-specialty hospital. However, the entrance to the psychiatry ward and OPD was distinctly separate and almost cloistered. The reason: people didn't want to be seen entering or exiting that wing because of stigma attached to visiting a mental health service. In the last several years, internet has enabled access to more information and resources, but certain sociocultural factors continue to exert pressure on our psychosocial wellbeing.

When someone comes in with a case of clinical depression, we discuss their history, their story, and their journey up to that point where they have come to see me. That story is often situated on a spectrum. It carries the voltage of family dynamics, financial freedom or burdens, undesirable inheritances attached to gender, class, caste, religion, and other markers of identity. More and more we are starting to acknowledge the role these components play in the presence, emergence and severity of mental illness and psychological distress/disorder. The challenge is breaking away from a hardwired model dedicated to states of "illness" and states of "wellness" to see what is going on with a person on an emotional and experiential level. I am trained in evidence-based behavioral medicine and yet over years, I have learned to integrate poetry, novels, anime, gaming and philosophy in equal parts with psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience to build a secure sanctuary with and for my therapy clients. 

For example, when speaking to men about childhood abuse – physical, emotional and/or sexual - a lot of survivors fly under the radar because they may not satisfy the standard criteria for being diagnosed with a depressive or anxious disorder or even post-traumatic stress. That doesn't mean that they haven't been molded by those experiences or might suffer without ever finding the space to acknowledge the harm. How does one treat an injury when the injured party either believes that the injury is a necessary part of their identity or that it is a form of validation?

What I had to wrestle with was the realization that just like inside the therapy room, I don't always have shipshape responses or a foolproof method and so the storytelling for this book wouldn't be fastidious or embody some sort of quote-a-minute wisdom. This book would exist to the degree I could risk telling the tender, tangled-up part of my own two decades long struggle with mental wellbeing. And we will learn to make space to talk about our stressors, triggers and messes without drowning in shame or doubt.

Frontlist: Were there any stories or topics you found particularly challenging to write about, and if so, how did you navigate those challenges? Did you encounter any moments that required special care or consideration in your approach to ensure that the content was handled sensitively and effectively?

Scherezade: I think writing about the experience of violence both personally and in therapeutic observation is always the most difficult. Violence is corrosive beyond the immediate encounter. Grief is rarely easy to compartmentalize despite the popularity of the Kubler-Ross model. Grief from violence is a revolving door for so many people. It comes in waves and floods us long after we have survived the storm. As a survivor of intimate partner violence, remembering and writing (with a degree of lucidity and occasionally, detachment) about the specific incidents, moments, and events when I felt most helpless, hopeless, and unmoored both within myself and in my therapeutic practice was tough.

There is no clarity that can be offered in the aftermath of senseless violence. At least I haven't found it yet.

There is no question of silver-lining anything there because even if you come out of it stronger, the strength is accumulated due to your own perseverance, the support you get and not because you were subjected to violence.

Judith Lewis Herman, one of the foundational figures in trauma psychiatry and the writer of "Trauma and Recovery" mentions how the will to forget and the need to recall is the central dialectic of trauma. Especially trauma that is tied to abuse. I experienced this first-hand as do so many other survivors.

What helped me was the courage and also, the vulnerability I witnessed in other people who have survived what I have. The access to good mentors who are my supervisors in my own field and act like my personal rock of Gibraltar.

You need a dedicated consciousness to write about violence while also not giving into a punitive mindset. It is the hardest thing to do – to come out of experiencing violence and still not wanting to respond with violence. Transformative justice is a framework I use in my community work and also as an educator. It focuses on helping the survivor and fostering an environment for harm reduction. I used its principles to shape my approach for the book as well.

I wrote the most difficult chapters of this book in one of the safest places I know – The University of Stirling. It helped to be in a place where I had access to a pond, where the ducks and swans reminded me of the necessity to be lazy under the sun on a good day. Also, that sometimes you have to lose the way in order to build a path.

Frontlist: On World Mental Health Day, what advice or message would you like to share with your readers? Additionally, as a psychologist, could you shed light on the approach or discipline you personally follow to maintain your own mental well-being?

Scherezade: I feel very underprepared whenever I have to offer advice!

It goes against my orientation as an existential psychologist because we are explicitly reminded during our training that our job is not offer advice. I think I have become a tad advice-aversive!

However, what I would like to share is that if you ever feel like you are submerging, trust your survival. Life is lived in hours, not in years. Let the bigger picture fall apart for the moment. Try to make it through the smaller moments. Make it through this hour, then the next one and then the one after. Don't give up on yourself because you are worth the effort. One of my favorite short story writers, Cynthia Ozick says – "Trust the aftermath".

I use this as a personal mantra of sorts. Every thought is not an instruction. Every feeling is not a command.

When I go through an acute depressive spiral, I spend more time with animals. Feeding a horde of community dogs and cats in my vicinity has been the best choice. Finding something outside of yourself, outside of the hamster's wheel of never-ending responsibilities and expectations is the antidote. Little things like a tail wag or a purr has the potency to pull me out of a dark place.

Very often the way out of a depressive episode is conveyed as some explicit door you can't miss. I have found that this is usually not the case with me. Illustrator and writer Mari Andrew calls depression "jet lag of the soul". And I have slowly learned to also frame my depressive phases as a form of revolt or a protest against "too muchness" of the world around me. I no longer interpret my sensitivity as my sabotage. I also have fully leaned into the power of letting things go. I am ok with empty space than heaps of clutter. Befriending myself has been a balm.

Apart from that, my granddad once told me that figs are essentially inverted flowers; they grow inwards. Maybe some of us are human figs!

There is no perfect way to flourish.

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