Incurable?
Recently, I started re-reading from the beginning a fanfiction series about therapy that I had been following for several years. Even if, as I described in a previous post , a recent chapter had left me worrying that depression is genetic and inevitable, the story overall is about recovery. The author takes a tragic hero who has a short, lonely and misunderstood life in canon, and gives him a chance to survive, get some much-needed help, and find happiness and love. I had found the story deeply inspiring. However, re-reading it, I noticed that in an early chapter , when the hero goes to his first therapy session, his therapist warns him that most mental illness can be treated but not exactly cured, and so treatment focuses on learning to function with it and minimise the symptoms. It struck me that if I were the hero, I would think at that point, ‘I’ve already “functioned” well enough to do my job for the past 17 years and help defeat an evil wizard, and I’ve h...