Editing Virginia Woolf (section)

== Mental health ==

Much examination has been made of Woolf's mental health. From the age of 13, following the death of her mother, Woolf suffered periodic mood swings.{{sfn|Garnett|2011|p=114}} However, [[Hermione Lee]] asserts that Woolf was not "mad"; she was merely a woman who suffered from and struggled with illness for much of her life, a woman of "exceptional courage, intelligence and stoicism", who made the best use, and achieved the best understanding she could, of that illness.{{sfn|Lee|1997a|p=171}}

Her mother's death in 1895, "the greatest disaster that could happen",{{sfn|Woolf|1908|p=40}}{{sfn|Bell|1972|p=40}} precipitated a crisis for which their family doctor, Dr Seton, prescribed rest, stopping lessons and writing, and regular walks supervised by Stella.{{sfn|Bell|1972|p=45}} Yet just two years later, Stella too was dead, bringing on Virginia's first expressed wish for death at the age of 15. This was a scenario she would later recreate in "Time Passes" (''To the Lighthouse'', 1927).<ref name="Gordon51" />

The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse, on 10 May, when she threw herself out of a window and she was briefly institutionalised{{sfn|Meyer|Osborne|1982}} under the care of her father's friend, the eminent psychiatrist [[George Savage (physician)|George Savage]]. She spent time recovering at the house of Stella's friend Violet Dickinson, and at her aunt [[Caroline Stephen]]'s house in Cambridge,{{sfn|Lewis|2000}} and by January 1905, Savage considered her cured.{{sfn|Lee|1997a|p=216}} 

Her brother Thoby's death in 1906 marked a "decade of deaths" that ended her childhood and adolescence. 

On Savage's recommendation, Virginia spent three short periods in 1910, 1912, and 1913 at Burley House at 15 Cambridge Park, [[Twickenham]], described as "a private nursing home for women with nervous disorder" run by Miss Jean Thomas.{{sfn|Pearce|2007}}{{sfn|Snodgrass|2015}} By the end of February 1910, she was becoming increasingly restless, and Savage suggested being away from London. Vanessa rented Moat House, outside Canterbury, in June, but there was no improvement, so Savage sent her to Burley for a "rest cure". This involved partial isolation, deprivation of literature, and force-feeding,{{sfn|Harris|2011|p=45}} and after six weeks she was able to convalesce in Cornwall and Dorset during the autumn.{{cn|date=June 2024}}

She loathed the experience; writing to her sister on 28 July,{{sfn|Woolf|1910}} she described how she found the religious atmosphere stifling and the institution ugly, and informed Vanessa that to escape "I shall soon have to jump out of a window".{{sfn|Gordon|2004}} The threat of being sent back would later lead to her contemplating suicide.{{sfn|Harris|2011|p=34}}{{failed verification|date=June 2024}} Despite her protests, Savage would refer her back in 1912 for insomnia and in 1913 for depression.{{cn|date=June 2024}}

On emerging from Burley House in September 1913, she sought further opinions from two other physicians on the 13th: Maurice Wright, and [[Henry Head]], who had been [[Henry James]]'s physician. Both recommended she return to Burley House. Distraught, she returned home and attempted suicide by taking an overdose of 100 [[grain (unit)|grains]] of [[Barbital|veronal]] (a barbiturate) and nearly dying.<ref name="Gordon52" />

On recovery, she went to Dalingridge Hall, George Duckworth's home in [[East Grinstead]], Sussex, to convalesce on 30 September,{{sfn|Bell|1972|loc=Vol. II |p=17}} returning to ''Asham'' on 18 November. She remained unstable over the next two years, with another incident involving veronal that she claimed was an 'accident', and consulted another psychiatrist in April 1914, [[Maurice Craig (psychiatrist)|Maurice Craig]], who explained that she was not sufficiently psychotic to be certified or committed to an institution.

The rest of the summer of 1914 went better for her, and they moved to Richmond, but in February 1915, just as ''The Voyage Out'' was due to be published, she relapsed once more, and remained in poor health for most of that year.{{sfn|Lee|1997a|p=347}} Then she began to recover, following 20 years of ill health.{{sfn|Bell|1972|loc=Vol. II |p=228}}<ref name="Gordon53" /> Nevertheless, there was a feeling among those around her that she was now permanently changed, and not for the better.{{sfn|Bell|1972|loc=Vol. II |pp=26–27}}

Over the rest of her life, she suffered recurrent bouts of depression. In 1940, a number of factors appeared to overwhelm her. Her biography of Roger Fry had been published in July, and she had been disappointed in its reception. The horrors of war depressed her, and their London homes had been destroyed in the Blitz in September and October. Woolf had completed ''Between the Acts'' (published posthumously in 1941) in November, and completing a novel was frequently accompanied by exhaustion.{{sfn|Bell|1972|p=224}} Her health became increasingly a matter of concern, culminating in her decision to end her life on 28 March 1941.{{sfn|Snodgrass|2015}}

She also suffered many physical ailments such as headaches, backache, fevers and faints, which related closely to her psychological stress. These often lasted for weeks or even months, and impeded her work: "What a gap! ... for 60 days; & those days spent in wearisome headache, jumping pulse, aching back, frets, fidgets, lying awake, sleeping draughts, sedatives, [[digitalis]], going for a little walk, & plunging back into bed again."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Woolf |first=Virginia |title=The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume II: 1920-1924 |publisher=The Hogarth Press |year=1978 |isbn=0-7012-0447-8 |location=London |pages=125}}</ref>

Though this instability would frequently affect her social life, she was able to continue her literary productivity with few interruptions throughout her life. Woolf herself provides not only a vivid picture of her symptoms in her diaries and letters but also her response to the demons that haunted her and at times made her long for death:{{sfn|Dalsimer|2004}} "But it is always a question whether I wish to avoid these glooms... These 9 weeks give one a plunge into deep waters... One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth."{{sfn|Woolf|1925–1930|p=112}}

Psychiatry had little to offer Woolf, but she recognised that writing was one of the behaviours that enabled her to cope with her illness:{{sfn|Dalsimer|2004}} "The only way I keep afloat... is by working... Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down. And as usual, I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth."{{sfn|Woolf|1925–1930|p=235}} Sinking underwater was Woolf's metaphor for both the effects of depression and psychosis— but also for finding the truth, and ultimately was her choice of death.{{sfn|Dalsimer|2004}}

Throughout her life, Woolf struggled, without success, to find meaning in her illness: on the one hand, an impediment, on the other, something she visualised as an essential part of who she was, and a necessary condition of her art.{{sfn|Dalsimer|2004}} Her experiences informed her work, such as the character of Septimus Warren Smith in ''Mrs Dalloway'' (1925), who, like Woolf, was haunted by the dead, and ultimately takes his own life rather than be admitted to a sanatorium.{{sfn|Gordon|2004}}

Leonard Woolf relates how during the 30 years they were married, they consulted many doctors in the [[Harley Street]] area, and although they were given a diagnosis of [[neurasthenia]], he felt they had little understanding of the causes or nature. The proposed solution was simple—as long as she lived a quiet life without any physical or mental exertion, she was well. In contrast, any mental, emotional, or physical strain resulted in a reappearance of her symptoms, beginning with a headache, followed by insomnia and thoughts that started to race. Her remedy was simple: to retire to bed in a darkened room, following which the symptoms slowly subsided.{{sfn|Woolf|1964|pp=75–76}}

Modern scholars, including her nephew and biographer, [[Quentin Bell]],{{sfn|Bell|1972|p=44}} have suggested her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods were influenced by the sexual abuse to which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected by their half-brothers [[George Herbert Duckworth|George]] and [[Gerald Duckworth]] (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays "[[A Sketch of the Past]]" and "22 Hyde Park Gate"). Biographers point out that when Stella died in 1897, there was no counterbalance to control George's predation, and his nighttime prowling.{{sfn|Gordon|2004}} "22 Hyde Park Gate" ends with the sentence "The old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia never knew that George Duckworth was not only father and mother, brother and sister to those poor Stephen girls; he was their lover also."{{sfn|Woolf|1921|p=177}}

It is likely that other factors also played a part. It has been suggested that they include [[genetic predisposition]].{{sfn|Boeira et al|2016}} Virginia's father, Leslie Stephen, suffered from depression, and her half-sister Laura was institutionalised. Many of Virginia's symptoms, including persistent headache, insomnia, irritability, and anxiety, resembled those of her father's.{{sfn|Lee|1997a|pp=72,102}} Another factor is the pressure she placed upon herself in her work; for instance, her breakdown of 1913 was at least partly triggered by the need to finish ''The Voyage Out''.{{sfn|Lee|1997a|p=321}}

Virginia herself hinted that her illness was related to how she saw the repressed position of women in society when she wrote ''A Room of One's Own''.{{sfn|Gordon|2004}}<ref name="Montross61" /><ref name="Hague259" /> in a 1930 letter to [[Ethel Smyth]]:
{{blockquote|As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does. And the six months—not three—that I lay in bed taught me a good deal about what is called oneself.{{sfn|Woolf|1929–1931|loc=2194: 22 June 1930; p. 180}} }}

Thomas Caramagno{{sfn|Caramagno|1992}} and others,{{sfn|Koutsantoni|2012}} in discussing her illness, oppose the "neurotic-genius" way of looking at mental illness, where creativity and mental illness are conceptualised as linked rather than antithetical.{{sfn|Jamison|1996}}{{sfn|Caramagno|1992}} [[Stephen Trombley]] describes Woolf as having a confrontational relationship with her doctors, and possibly being a woman who is a "victim of male medicine", referring to the lack of understanding, particularly at the time, about mental illness.{{sfn|Trombley|1980}}{{page needed|date=June 2024}}{{sfn|Trombley|1981}}{{page needed|date=June 2024}}