Part Four of Crazy Does Not Equal...
[Trigger warning for brief mention of rape, child sexual abuse, more detailed mention of self-injury, and brief allusion to suicide. Be safe.]
Full Disclosure: I have schizoaffective disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. I have suffered from one form or another of mental illness for most of my life, mostly depression in one form or another, anxiety, and various manifestations of PTSD. I am 34 years old, a cis woman, white and Cherokee, divorced, mother of one completely awesome daughter, bisexual with polyamorous tendencies, a proud bleeding-heart liberal, an eclectic pagan, and completely out of my tree.
I've always been hesitant to be open with people about my mental condition. Mental illness is still hugely stigmatized, and I don't want to be treated as if I'm somehow less than other people because my brain and mind are funky. But I've come to the realization that mental illness will remain stigmatized unless people with mental illnesses are open about their conditions and show the world that we're not what society would have the world believe.
People with mental illnesses are often stereotyped as violent, or, in contrast, figures of fun, to be mocked for “abnormal” behaviors. And if we're not to be feared or made fun of, we're childish and incapable of making our own decisions. Failing that, we're weak-willed or of poor character, often therefore leading to the conclusion that we're responsible for our conditions and could be “normal” if we'd just decide to be. On top of all that, we're often considered lacking in intelligence, which can be part and parcel of the “childish and incapable of making our own decisions” or “weak-willed or of poor character” tropes.
Someone of truly poor character is someone who is deliberately cruel, who lacks compassion, who harms the weak. Poor character is lying, stealing, hurting people, basically living without ethics, and I'm sure there are in fact some people with mental illnesses who are of poor character, just as there are plenty of people who do not have mental illness who are of poor character. But poor character and/or a weak will do not go hand in hand with a psychiatric diagnosis.
People with depression often hear things like, “Cheer up” or “Look on the bright side” or “Why are you so negative?” or worse yet, “Count your blessings.” I don't know about anybody else who's struggled with depression, but all of the above drive me crazier than I already am. If, in a depressive episode, I could cheer up or be more positive, don't you bloody well think I would? Nobody chooses to be depressed. Nobody wants to feel like that. Depression feels like pure hell, and if we could just cheer the fuck up, we would. It's just not that fucking easy. People with PTSD hear similar things. “Why do you have to dwell on the past so much?” drives me right up a wall. [TW: child sexual abuse and rape] Do these people think I want to have flashbacks of being sexually abused (as a child) and raped (as an adult)? Do they think I want to relive terrible, horrific events in my life? Do they really think I'm going through all this for fun? For attention? I know how to get attention. It's called talking. I talk to my family. I talk to my friends. I talk to my therapist. They all pay attention to me when I'm talking. I blog. People read my blog (and my guest posts at Shakesville) and make comments. That's attention.
But some people think that people with mental illnesses (and I've just mentioned the two with which I have the most personal experience) are weak-willed and/or “doing it for attention,” neither of which says much for a person's character. If you really think that people with mental illnesses are weak-willed, go back and read Sometimes Mental Illness Really Just Bites, and maybe, just maybe you'll understand what strength of will it takes to get through life with a mental illness, how hard the day-to-day can be. And believe me, the attention you get when your mental illness symptoms are out of control is NOT the kind of attention people want. Nobody likes to be watched constantly, or committed to a psychiatric ward, or drugged or restrained, all of which have happened to me. Nobody would do that to themselves on purpose, not even someone who is seriously mentally ill.
To clarify, I have put myself in psychiatric wards before, because I could feel things getting out of control and I knew I needed help to regain control. But being involuntarily committed is a world of suck.
[TW: Self-injury]
I used to self-injure, which some people think that people with mental illnesses do for attention. It's not. Again, the attention you get when someone finds out you've been cutting or burning or whatever the hell is not the kind of attention anyone wants. I hid my cuts. I tended to make shallow, small, but painful cuts that could be passed off as cat scratches if anyone saw. I picked at them to keep them from healing too soon, but I never let on what I was doing. I did it because the physical pain made the emotional pain easier to bear. It was cathartic. I haven't cut in over a year, and I don't see myself cutting any time in the foreseeable future, but I remember the relief of physical pain and bleeding. It just made the emotions easier to manage.
I've known quite a fair few self-injurers, and I don't think any of them does/did it for attention. They did it for the same reasons I did, to make the emotional pain easier to take, for the catharsis. People who self-injure are trying to cope with phenomenal loads of pain, often burdens they've borne for their entire lives or close to it. These are not weak people. These are not attention hounds. These are people dealing with HUGE problems, and they're doing the best they can.
People with mental illnesses are not weak. They are dealing with the day-to-day bullshit we all deal with, and with a whole lot more on a day-to-day basis. They are dealing with what I like to call musical meds (when one's psychiatrists are trying everything under the sun and then some to find a medication cocktail that works). They are dealing with symptoms that, like some kind of monster out of Greek mythology, try to drag them down every time they pick themselves up. They are often dealing with loads of pain from childhood or adolescence that would break a weak person.
A weak will does not go hand in hand with a psychiatric diagnosis, nor does poor character. It takes strength and character to live with mental illness. It takes strength and character to get through a day with the symptoms. It takes strength and character to pick oneself up again after yet another episode. I am a person with mental illness, I am strong, and I am not alone.
Showing posts with label disablism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disablism. Show all posts
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010
Crazy Does Not Equal A Joke
Part Three of Crazy Does Not Equal...
Full Disclosure: I have schizoaffective disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. I have suffered from one form or another of mental illness for most of my life, mostly depression in one form or another, anxiety, and various manifestations of PTSD. I am 34 years old, a cis woman, white and Cherokee, divorced, mother of one completely awesome daughter, bisexual with polyamorous tendencies, a proud bleeding-heart liberal, an eclectic pagan, and completely out of my tree.
I've always been hesitant to be open with people about my mental condition. Mental illness is still hugely stigmatized, and I don't want to be treated as if I'm somehow less than other people because my brain and mind are funky. But I've come to the realization that mental illness will remain stigmatized unless people with mental illnesses are open about their conditions and show the world that we're not what society would have the world believe.
People with mental illnesses are often stereotyped as violent, or, in contrast, figures of fun, to be mocked for “abnormal” behaviors. And if we're not to be feared or made fun of, we're childish and incapable of making our own decisions. Failing that, we're weak-willed or of poor character, often therefore leading to the conclusion that we're responsible for our conditions and could be “normal” if we'd just decide to be. On top of all that, we're often considered lacking in intelligence, which can be part and parcel of the “childish and incapable of making our own decisions” or “weak-willed or of poor character” tropes.
My last post not in this series was about how much mental illness can make a person's life really miserable sometimes. And yet people laugh (sometimes nervously) when they see behaviors that originate in mental illness. How many times have we seen a person with mental illness but without a home turned into a joke because zie interacts with zir hallucinations? The homeless person talking to the street lamp, Joon (in the film "Benny and Joon") "directing traffic" with a ping-pong paddle, Carl Lee (in John Gresham's novel A Time To Kill) pretending to catch invisible butterflies before going for a psychiatric evaluation, all played for laughs.
Before I continue, I want to clarify something. People with mental illnesses often laugh at themselves amongst themselves. I once heard a story about a person in a manic episode doing something quite extreme which was pretty amusing and was even more so when the person who did it told the story because zie has a gift for droll, witty delivery. The important point here is that this person told the story, making zirself the butt of zir own joke; that's acceptable, and honestly, the entire room full of people broke up laughing at the story. What would not be acceptable would be for me to tell this story and make this person the butt of my joke, because it's not my illness, it's not my life, it's not my story, and it's therefore not for me to play it for laughs.
Another part of this "joke" concept is that anyone with a wild sense of humor or who often displays zir sense of humor is "crazy" or "insane." How many times have we heard someone called "crazy" when zie is really witty, daring, silly, or just plain humorous? (Martin Lawrence's "You So Crazy" comes right to mind.) This is the ablist side of this trope; people with wild senses of humor may or may not have a mental illness, but they get tagged with a label that might not fit, because people just don't think about what it really is to have a mental illness. Other things get the ablist "crazy" or "insane" label, too, such as the use of "insane" to mean "extreme," as in, "That test was insanely difficult." It's ablist as hell, and it's insulting.
The reality of mental illness can be terribly frightening. When I have hallucinations, some of them scare me half to death. Hearing a voice that threatens you or tells you to kill yourself is not fun. Not sleeping for days is not fun. People in manic episodes have often ruined themselves financially, spending every penny they had and maxing out their credit cards. Depression is not funny; having to force yourself out of bed just to use the bathroom is pure misery, although to be fair, depression is less often made a joke than other sorts of mental illness. Tardive dyskinesia is not funny either; it's a series of physical tics that can result from years of taking psychotropic medications, but people laugh at it anyway.
The plight of the homeless person with mental illness is desperately sad, but no one thinks of that when they make their jokes. Honestly, the idea of being homeless scares me to death, because my own financial situation is wrecked due to years of fighting to be recognized as legally disabled and only by the grace of my upper-middle-class parents am I not in a shelter or on the streets myself. I've lived unable to afford my medications, getting samples from a kind psychiatrist, and I cannot (not to mention will not) laugh at a person with mental illness on the streets. It's too close to home, and it's not fucking funny. I can far too easily see myself in that situation.
A lot of stories of mental illness are funny. Life is funny sometimes, and for people with mental illness, some of the things we do are just plain amusing. For us, making a joke of our own lives, our own stories, our own behaviors is a coping mechanism; it's a common enough coping mechanism, really. Almost everybody makes jokes about themselves. But that doesn't make us a big fucking joke. I am a person with mental illness, I am not a joke, and I am not the only one.
Full Disclosure: I have schizoaffective disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. I have suffered from one form or another of mental illness for most of my life, mostly depression in one form or another, anxiety, and various manifestations of PTSD. I am 34 years old, a cis woman, white and Cherokee, divorced, mother of one completely awesome daughter, bisexual with polyamorous tendencies, a proud bleeding-heart liberal, an eclectic pagan, and completely out of my tree.
I've always been hesitant to be open with people about my mental condition. Mental illness is still hugely stigmatized, and I don't want to be treated as if I'm somehow less than other people because my brain and mind are funky. But I've come to the realization that mental illness will remain stigmatized unless people with mental illnesses are open about their conditions and show the world that we're not what society would have the world believe.
People with mental illnesses are often stereotyped as violent, or, in contrast, figures of fun, to be mocked for “abnormal” behaviors. And if we're not to be feared or made fun of, we're childish and incapable of making our own decisions. Failing that, we're weak-willed or of poor character, often therefore leading to the conclusion that we're responsible for our conditions and could be “normal” if we'd just decide to be. On top of all that, we're often considered lacking in intelligence, which can be part and parcel of the “childish and incapable of making our own decisions” or “weak-willed or of poor character” tropes.
My last post not in this series was about how much mental illness can make a person's life really miserable sometimes. And yet people laugh (sometimes nervously) when they see behaviors that originate in mental illness. How many times have we seen a person with mental illness but without a home turned into a joke because zie interacts with zir hallucinations? The homeless person talking to the street lamp, Joon (in the film "Benny and Joon") "directing traffic" with a ping-pong paddle, Carl Lee (in John Gresham's novel A Time To Kill) pretending to catch invisible butterflies before going for a psychiatric evaluation, all played for laughs.
Before I continue, I want to clarify something. People with mental illnesses often laugh at themselves amongst themselves. I once heard a story about a person in a manic episode doing something quite extreme which was pretty amusing and was even more so when the person who did it told the story because zie has a gift for droll, witty delivery. The important point here is that this person told the story, making zirself the butt of zir own joke; that's acceptable, and honestly, the entire room full of people broke up laughing at the story. What would not be acceptable would be for me to tell this story and make this person the butt of my joke, because it's not my illness, it's not my life, it's not my story, and it's therefore not for me to play it for laughs.
Another part of this "joke" concept is that anyone with a wild sense of humor or who often displays zir sense of humor is "crazy" or "insane." How many times have we heard someone called "crazy" when zie is really witty, daring, silly, or just plain humorous? (Martin Lawrence's "You So Crazy" comes right to mind.) This is the ablist side of this trope; people with wild senses of humor may or may not have a mental illness, but they get tagged with a label that might not fit, because people just don't think about what it really is to have a mental illness. Other things get the ablist "crazy" or "insane" label, too, such as the use of "insane" to mean "extreme," as in, "That test was insanely difficult." It's ablist as hell, and it's insulting.
The reality of mental illness can be terribly frightening. When I have hallucinations, some of them scare me half to death. Hearing a voice that threatens you or tells you to kill yourself is not fun. Not sleeping for days is not fun. People in manic episodes have often ruined themselves financially, spending every penny they had and maxing out their credit cards. Depression is not funny; having to force yourself out of bed just to use the bathroom is pure misery, although to be fair, depression is less often made a joke than other sorts of mental illness. Tardive dyskinesia is not funny either; it's a series of physical tics that can result from years of taking psychotropic medications, but people laugh at it anyway.
The plight of the homeless person with mental illness is desperately sad, but no one thinks of that when they make their jokes. Honestly, the idea of being homeless scares me to death, because my own financial situation is wrecked due to years of fighting to be recognized as legally disabled and only by the grace of my upper-middle-class parents am I not in a shelter or on the streets myself. I've lived unable to afford my medications, getting samples from a kind psychiatrist, and I cannot (not to mention will not) laugh at a person with mental illness on the streets. It's too close to home, and it's not fucking funny. I can far too easily see myself in that situation.
A lot of stories of mental illness are funny. Life is funny sometimes, and for people with mental illness, some of the things we do are just plain amusing. For us, making a joke of our own lives, our own stories, our own behaviors is a coping mechanism; it's a common enough coping mechanism, really. Almost everybody makes jokes about themselves. But that doesn't make us a big fucking joke. I am a person with mental illness, I am not a joke, and I am not the only one.
Friday, May 1, 2009
What Disablism Means to Me
In 1990, when I was in the ninth grade, the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed into U.S. law. I had to research it and write a paper on it for my English class. At the time, the conditions which now render me legally disabled (major depressive disorder with psychotic features and post-traumatic stress disorder) were present but not yet disabling (the psychotic features didn't show up until my late 20s, and the depression and PTSD were manageable at the time).
I hadn't been around many people with disabilities at that point in my life. My elementary school best friend Jessica had a twin sister named Bethany who was blind and severely mentally and physically disabled; Bethany could not feed herself, nor control her bladder and bowel functions, nor had she learned to speak by the time Jessica and Bethany were eleven years old. In ninth grade, my best friend was my next door neighbor, Suzie, who was legally blind; she was severely nearsighted and had been born without a certain type of nerve cell that enables humans to perceive color. She was about six months older than I, but attended the state school for the deaf and blind instead of the local public high school I attended. PaPa (the "a"s are pronounced like the a in apple), my maternal uncle's father-in-law, who, despite only a tenuous connection by marriage to me, always treated me like a granddaughter, had lost the lower portion of a leg and was losing his vision due to complications of diabetes. That was about the extent of my experience with people with disabilities at that time.
I don't remember any more exactly what I wrote in that paper; I no longer have a copy, either printed or electronic. But I do remember that most of what I wrote was about reasonable accommodation, like ramps for wheelchairs and the widespread availability of closed captioning and other adaptive technologies. I believe I said that it was only fair to provide reasonable accommodation, that to fail to provide reasonable accommodation was to disenfranchise people with disabilities. I don't think I was wrong, but I also realize in retrospect that I didn't quite get the whole picture.
Some years later, I remember telling a shop owner that he was in violation of the ADA because I couldn't get my (then infant) daughter's stroller through his shop aisles, so how was a person in a wheelchair supposed to shop in his store? (The stroller was narrower than most adult-sized wheelchairs.)
I remember at various times being on crutches for temporary ailments of the lower extremities and cursing the inaccessibility of public establishments and thinking, "Jeez, what do people who use crutches permanently do?"
I think those are perfectly valid reactions to an ablist world, but that's still not the whole picture.
It wasn't until I became disabled with an "invisible illness" that I really began to see. To look at me, you wouldn't think that I'm disabled. I can stand and walk without assistance. I wear glasses but that hardly counts as a disability. I can hear. I can speak and write clearly in English and Spanish, and I can read and comprehend French and Latin (never was too hot at writing or speaking French, and my Latin is VERY rusty). I can drive a car (even a stick shift) without adaptive technologies (other than my glasses). It took ten years, but I have a four-year college degree.
What I can't do is hold down a paying job. Some days, I am so depressed I cannot get out of bed except to use the toilet. Some days, I can get out of bed but I have to force myself to do it. Some days, I'm so afraid of people that I cannot stand to leave my house. Some days, I can't trust my perceptions, because my eyes and skin are telling me that there are bugs crawling on me. Some days (like today), I'm okay. Occasionally, I even feel really good. Because I can never predict from day to day whether I'm going to be okay or not, I can't commit to a work schedule. Before my condition became this severe, I worked 8am-5pm Monday through Friday (like "normal people"), doing clerical work. I can't do that any more. I'm working with my state Department of Vocational Rehabilitation to try to find a line of work in which I do not have to commit to a work schedule and therefore might be able to get and keep a job again.
What I've come to see and detest is the idea that if you can't (or for that matter, don't) earn a paycheck, what you do means nothing to the world at large (but the "don't" part is for a post on sexism, and that's not what this post is).
What I've come to see and detest is that if you differ in any way from the able-bodied norm, you're not real.
What I've come to see and detest is that if you're not in a wheelchair, or on crutches, or wearing hearing aids, or visibly different from the able-bodied norm, you don't count as disabled.
I'm sure that's STILL not the whole picture, but that's disablism, to me.
I hadn't been around many people with disabilities at that point in my life. My elementary school best friend Jessica had a twin sister named Bethany who was blind and severely mentally and physically disabled; Bethany could not feed herself, nor control her bladder and bowel functions, nor had she learned to speak by the time Jessica and Bethany were eleven years old. In ninth grade, my best friend was my next door neighbor, Suzie, who was legally blind; she was severely nearsighted and had been born without a certain type of nerve cell that enables humans to perceive color. She was about six months older than I, but attended the state school for the deaf and blind instead of the local public high school I attended. PaPa (the "a"s are pronounced like the a in apple), my maternal uncle's father-in-law, who, despite only a tenuous connection by marriage to me, always treated me like a granddaughter, had lost the lower portion of a leg and was losing his vision due to complications of diabetes. That was about the extent of my experience with people with disabilities at that time.
I don't remember any more exactly what I wrote in that paper; I no longer have a copy, either printed or electronic. But I do remember that most of what I wrote was about reasonable accommodation, like ramps for wheelchairs and the widespread availability of closed captioning and other adaptive technologies. I believe I said that it was only fair to provide reasonable accommodation, that to fail to provide reasonable accommodation was to disenfranchise people with disabilities. I don't think I was wrong, but I also realize in retrospect that I didn't quite get the whole picture.
Some years later, I remember telling a shop owner that he was in violation of the ADA because I couldn't get my (then infant) daughter's stroller through his shop aisles, so how was a person in a wheelchair supposed to shop in his store? (The stroller was narrower than most adult-sized wheelchairs.)
I remember at various times being on crutches for temporary ailments of the lower extremities and cursing the inaccessibility of public establishments and thinking, "Jeez, what do people who use crutches permanently do?"
I think those are perfectly valid reactions to an ablist world, but that's still not the whole picture.
It wasn't until I became disabled with an "invisible illness" that I really began to see. To look at me, you wouldn't think that I'm disabled. I can stand and walk without assistance. I wear glasses but that hardly counts as a disability. I can hear. I can speak and write clearly in English and Spanish, and I can read and comprehend French and Latin (never was too hot at writing or speaking French, and my Latin is VERY rusty). I can drive a car (even a stick shift) without adaptive technologies (other than my glasses). It took ten years, but I have a four-year college degree.
What I can't do is hold down a paying job. Some days, I am so depressed I cannot get out of bed except to use the toilet. Some days, I can get out of bed but I have to force myself to do it. Some days, I'm so afraid of people that I cannot stand to leave my house. Some days, I can't trust my perceptions, because my eyes and skin are telling me that there are bugs crawling on me. Some days (like today), I'm okay. Occasionally, I even feel really good. Because I can never predict from day to day whether I'm going to be okay or not, I can't commit to a work schedule. Before my condition became this severe, I worked 8am-5pm Monday through Friday (like "normal people"), doing clerical work. I can't do that any more. I'm working with my state Department of Vocational Rehabilitation to try to find a line of work in which I do not have to commit to a work schedule and therefore might be able to get and keep a job again.
What I've come to see and detest is the idea that if you can't (or for that matter, don't) earn a paycheck, what you do means nothing to the world at large (but the "don't" part is for a post on sexism, and that's not what this post is).
What I've come to see and detest is that if you differ in any way from the able-bodied norm, you're not real.
What I've come to see and detest is that if you're not in a wheelchair, or on crutches, or wearing hearing aids, or visibly different from the able-bodied norm, you don't count as disabled.
I'm sure that's STILL not the whole picture, but that's disablism, to me.
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