Veronika Decides To Die

Psychiatric hospitals have a long, complex, and often sinister history. Institutions have historically been used to silence and remove minority groups from the public while supplying unwitting and unwilling test subjects for medicinal science; These abuses often go unnoticed until far later, due to the secretive and high-walled nature of these institutions.

Psychology as a field has often gone hand-in-hand with these practices. For example, before the Civil Rights Movement, schizophrenia was often seen as a harmless condition that primarily affected middle-class white housewives and was treated with barbiturates. During the Civil Rights Movement, protestors and activists who were arrested on flimsy charges were subjected to intense psychiatric questioning to diagnose them and remove them from the public via psychiatric hospitals. This resulted in a hugely disproportionate number of Black men being diagnosed as schizophrenic, thus shifting the popular view of schizophrenia to a condition that is violent, erratic, and dangerous. (Lane, Christopher. “How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease: An Interview With Jonathan Metzl.” Psychology Today, 2010.)

Because psychology is Western medicine, opinions and verdicts on diagnoses tend to be exported from the United States and Europe to the rest of the world. Due to the intersection between racism and ableism, schizophrenia is popularly viewed as a violent and dangerous condition. The exploitative and abusive history of psychiatric care is present in Coelho’s own narrative, where medical malpractice, highly questionable “cures,” and the profit motive abound.

Psychologists today approach mental health through the biopsychosocial model. The biopsychosocial model contends that mental health rests on three factors: Innate biology that may suggest the wiring of the brain and nervous system, creating neurodiverse conditions like autism; the psychological aspects of an individual, such as traumatic events of the past that may shape how the brain behaves and acts; and the social aspects of mental health, as humans are socially determinant creatures (important aspects of our identity are linked to society and the people around us).

Veronika Decides to Die is an allegory for finding meaning in life. Coelho focuses solely on the social aspect of mental health, neglecting the wider and more structurally rooted implications of the biopsychosocial model. This leads Coelho to paint with a broad and inaccurate brush while discussing mental health. For example, the novel does not portray schizophrenia in a genuine light, as Coelho’s characters resolve their mental health issues with epiphanies about life.

Depictions of mental health within the novel, and Coelho’s use of mental health as a plot device, should be approached as an allegory for exploring authenticity in the face of purposeless conformity. This is why “insanity” in the novel is often linked to a more authentic way of living, while “sanity” is regarded as a socially constructed (and spiritually harmful) reality.