Beautiful but Not Broken, but Not Beautiful
Written by: Vedant Gunda
Edited by: Iniya J
Graphic Design By: Vedant Gunda
Where one loses oneself in the mind, disturbance and possession become mysterious.
There is something very unsettling about seeing a person transform into someone they do not seem to recognise.
Voices change. Actions become erratic. One withdraws themselves from everybody, speaks to objects that nobody else can see, thinks frightening thoughts, or engages in actions that seem alien to their personality. Human beings have always sought explanations for such experiences.
Before the emergence of modern fields like psychology and psychiatry, people relied on the supernatural for explanations. Possession became one such answer; a spirit took possession of their body, a demon took control of their soul, or some curse had been put on him. According to the belief systems of their societies, a person under these conditions was no longer themselves.
In contemporary times, one may understand many of these actions within the context of psychological disturbances such as psychosis, dissociation, serious mood disorders, neurological disorders, and other such ailments.
But a question remains: what if the supernatural is really a matter of the psychological? And what if a person’s cultural and spiritual experiences cannot be so easily dismissed?
The answer is not as simple as either side might prefer to believe.
The mind can be a scary thing. Mental disorders do not necessarily mean feeling depressed or sad. Mental health conditions can take the form of confusion, paranoia, unusual changes in personality or behaviour, hearing voices that others cannot hear, seeing things others cannot see, believing that people are out to get one and watching their every move, and losing touch with reality.
These things may seem frightening to an observer. For the person experiencing them, these feelings are even more terrifying.
Imagine believing that somebody is following you when nobody else can see them. Hearing an inner voice that seems to come from somewhere beyond yourself. Believing that all the actions taking place around you carry some secret meaning directed specifically at you.
Telling such a person, “That’s not real,” may seem logical from the outside. But their experience of it is real. That distinction matters.
A hallucination is not simply a situation where someone is “making things up". A delusion is not necessarily a conscious deception. Mental health disorders affect how one thinks, feels, reasons, perceives, remembers, and even understands reality.
This is yet another reason why the term “mentally broken” is so hurtful. Someone who experiences a mental disorder is not an inferior human being. Something is happening within their mind, and there is a difference between experiencing a condition and being defined by it.
And then there is possession.
Possession belongs to a different realm of understanding.
According to many religions and cultures around the world, possession is the effect of an outside supernatural power that takes control of the person. There is an enormous variety of descriptions in various traditions. For some of them, it involves spirits, demons, ancestors, or other mystical creatures. Some practices involve driving out or communicating with such entities.
For the believer, possession may be a literal interpretation rather than a metaphor.
The problem with possession is that it is not something recognised by science as a condition for a diagnosis.
There is no generally accepted scientific test that establishes the supernatural’s entrance into one’s body. Consequently, when unusual behaviour is observed, medical professionals usually start searching for psychological, neurological, physical, and environmental reasons.
This does not mean that one’s spiritual views are unimportant. It means that spirituality and a medical diagnosis answer different questions.
Spirituality might ask, "What does this experience mean?"
Medicine asks, "What is causing this experience, and what can we do to help this person?"
These questions can coexist in some cases.
The real trouble starts when these two explanations get mixed up.
Psychosis could manifest itself as hearing voices or experiencing what feels like communication from an external being. A family might interpret this as evidence of possession. A religious community may reinforce this understanding. And therefore the patient will receive rituals instead of the needed treatment.
On the other hand, a person might have an extremely profound spiritual experience and automatically be labelled “mentally ill” because the experience is out of sync with that of ordinary reality.
Both approaches can be harmful. The first may lead to seeing illness as some form of spiritual punishment. The second may result in viewing the spiritual as inherently pathological. Thus, the question posed should not be "Is this individual possessed or mentally ill?”
The better question is:
“What is it that this individual is going through, and what is the basis for the different explanations being offered?”
Humanity has spent thousands of years trying to understand the brain without knowing nearly enough about it. Perhaps we should be careful about declaring that the devil has entered the room every time someone's brain behaves in an unusual way. But people are more than their diagnoses. And there is a risk the other way around as well.
Modern-day society tends to think that when something is named clinically, it has solved the mystery of the person experiencing it. That is not always so; a diagnosis can describe a condition, but it cannot describe the whole person. Their illness is a part of their life experience. It is not their entire identity.
This is where the first half of the title becomes important: Beautiful but Not Broken.
A person is not broken simply because something inside their mind is hurting.
But not beautiful either.
There is a modern tendency to romanticise suffering. We turn depression into poetry. Trauma becomes an aesthetic. Mental health conditions become a quality which supposedly makes a person “interesting.”
The tortured artist becomes a deeper one. The unstable genius becomes more fascinating. People are described as beautiful because their suffering is assumed to have given them depth.
Yet, suffering does not have to be beautiful for it to be relevant.
Mental health conditions can be ugly. They can be draining. They can ruin relationships. They can make simple things seem insurmountable.
They can frighten family members and make a person feel as though their own mind has become their enemy.
When suffering is described as “beautiful,” its painful aspects can become easier to overlook.
In other words: Beautiful but Not Broken, but Not Beautiful.
An individual can remain human without their experiences being romanticised or glorified. Their experiences need not be broken, and their suffering need not be beautiful.
The person underneath the explanation.
Perhaps the biggest mistake is becoming so preoccupied with the explanation of a phenomenon and forgetting about the person undergoing it.
Whether it is understood as an illness, a spiritual disturbance, possession, trauma, or anything else that a person can't describe, there is a human being underneath all these explanations, and they should be treated like one.
Not a monster.
Not a spectacle.
Not a demon.
Not a diagnosis.
Not a beautiful tragedy.
Not a broken object waiting to be repaired.
But a person.
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