Dear NeuroDiverse Comrade:
Dear NeuroDiverse Comrade:
I'm sorry you found what I posted to be offensive. I totally respect your right to speak out and fight back against the marginalization you get subjected to in our difference-intolerant society. You're tired of the attitudes that get doled out to people who have a mental illness diagnosis. I get that.
But -- speaking as a person who has received enough official psychiatric diagnoses to collect them like postage stamps, including bipolar, paranoid schizophrenic, and borderline -- we need to have the right to decide for ourselves whether our difference is a pathology. And while I don't mean to dismiss whatever efficacy you've gotten from the treatments your doctors have provided, we do get to critique the medical-model interventions that have been pushed at us, sometimes without our having the option of refusing.
Let's backtrack in history just a bit, shall we?
GAY PEOPLE were considered not only immoral and perverted, but mentally ill. Being gay was a pathology, a wrongness of how the mind worked, messed up if not necessarily willfully deficient in morals.
WOMEN, straight as well as lesbian, were often told that if they had any issue with fitting themselves in to the patriarchal society and its expectations and limitations, well, the problem was within them.
TRANS people, of course, were long thought to be suffering from a pathological "gender identity dysphoria", and regardless of whether our society's approach to accommodating their condition involves helping them transition or instead trying to reprogram them, we start with defining them as mentally disordered for thinking of themselves as a gender that doesn't match their body.
And GENDERQUEER and NONBINARY and GENDER NONCONFORMING people have had both forms, too, sometimes having our very existence defined as a pathology and at other times our reaction to how we're treated and regarded defined as a pathology.
Designating us as mentally ill has long been a part of dealing with the inconvenient and problematic. It pinpoints the location of all social problems that involve us as being inside us. It says we aren't oppressed, nor are we understandably traumatized by our social situation . It says nobody is going to understand us any better by listening to us and empathizing with what we have experienced, because we don't make sense, our brains themselves are messed up and full of misbehaving neurons.
It's a belief that grew out of the desire for a disease model for all human suffering. We had become very good, very effective, at dealing with infections and physical maladies, things that could be studied by reducing things to symptoms and causes within the body's own processes. It was hoped that all human pain and suffering would turn out to boil down to that model.
It's also cheaper, a concern of insurance companies and public policy makers who have budgets and cost containment to consider. Pills are a lot cheaper than open-ended counseling, let alone the prospect of social upheaval and structural social change.
But you wish to lump me in with people who blame you for failure to achieve milestones of success. "Oh, you don't understand that I have a mental disability. Since you question the legitimacy of mental health treatment, you clearly think we're all fakers and malingerers and we should just dust off our asses and get over it. Well shut up, we have no time for your privileged hateful cluelessness. You need to quit spouting your bullshit about how it's all just capitalism or patriarchy or whatever, because you're just victim blaming even if you're too dense to see it!"
You're particularly upset that I challenge the claims that the mental health industry makes about its pills. You don't want to hear that studies show that the brain compensates for psychiatric pharmaceuticals if you keep taking them over a long period -- that the drugs that inhibit reuptake of neurotranmitter chemicals cause the brain to maintain fewer receptors or to produce less of the chemical, and the drugs that try to limit certain chemical reactions tend to cause the brain to increase its sensitivity to those chemicals. Which makes the drugs have less effect while creating a physical dependency on the drug that can make it difficult to withdraw from it.
Well, statistics can't tell us that that's necessarily how your body is reacting to what you take. Statistics don't work that way. Research can show that a tendency exists but not that it will happen for everyone the same way. Perhaps psychiatric medication does wonders for you. I'm no one to question what anyone else finds useful or helpful in their search for ways to cope with their situation.
But we are opposed to involuntary modification of how people's minds work, and that means not only opposing direct forced treatment but also misrepresentation of the medical facts. Medical consent has to be fully informed consent. And despite decades of claiming that mentally ill people have a chemical imbalance in our brains that their perfect pills fix, the way that insulin fixes diabetics' inability to produce their own insulin or the way that people without working thyroid glands need to take synthetic thyroid, it just isn't so. Schizophrenia is not a olanzapine deficiency disease. Bipolar is not a lithium deficiency disease. Depression is not a zoloft deficiency disease.
That doesn't mean they don't help you or that you should not take them if they do, but drug companies and doctors lie to patients -- they oversimplify and they misrepresent, and they do not trust patients to make their own medical decisions -- and nowhere is that a more prevalent pattern than in the specific area of mental health.
So no, I am not going to simply let you classify me as a privileged non-disabled asshole, and I'm not going to hide in the corner and stop representing the concerns of activist psychiatrized people.
-----
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
I am very sweet, I am very pretty, jaguar says so.
I'm sorry you found what I posted to be offensive. I totally respect your right to speak out and fight back against the marginalization you get subjected to in our difference-intolerant society. You're tired of the attitudes that get doled out to people who have a mental illness diagnosis. I get that.
But -- speaking as a person who has received enough official psychiatric diagnoses to collect them like postage stamps, including bipolar, paranoid schizophrenic, and borderline -- we need to have the right to decide for ourselves whether our difference is a pathology. And while I don't mean to dismiss whatever efficacy you've gotten from the treatments your doctors have provided, we do get to critique the medical-model interventions that have been pushed at us, sometimes without our having the option of refusing.
Let's backtrack in history just a bit, shall we?
GAY PEOPLE were considered not only immoral and perverted, but mentally ill. Being gay was a pathology, a wrongness of how the mind worked, messed up if not necessarily willfully deficient in morals.
WOMEN, straight as well as lesbian, were often told that if they had any issue with fitting themselves in to the patriarchal society and its expectations and limitations, well, the problem was within them.
TRANS people, of course, were long thought to be suffering from a pathological "gender identity dysphoria", and regardless of whether our society's approach to accommodating their condition involves helping them transition or instead trying to reprogram them, we start with defining them as mentally disordered for thinking of themselves as a gender that doesn't match their body.
And GENDERQUEER and NONBINARY and GENDER NONCONFORMING people have had both forms, too, sometimes having our very existence defined as a pathology and at other times our reaction to how we're treated and regarded defined as a pathology.
Designating us as mentally ill has long been a part of dealing with the inconvenient and problematic. It pinpoints the location of all social problems that involve us as being inside us. It says we aren't oppressed, nor are we understandably traumatized by our social situation . It says nobody is going to understand us any better by listening to us and empathizing with what we have experienced, because we don't make sense, our brains themselves are messed up and full of misbehaving neurons.
It's a belief that grew out of the desire for a disease model for all human suffering. We had become very good, very effective, at dealing with infections and physical maladies, things that could be studied by reducing things to symptoms and causes within the body's own processes. It was hoped that all human pain and suffering would turn out to boil down to that model.
It's also cheaper, a concern of insurance companies and public policy makers who have budgets and cost containment to consider. Pills are a lot cheaper than open-ended counseling, let alone the prospect of social upheaval and structural social change.
But you wish to lump me in with people who blame you for failure to achieve milestones of success. "Oh, you don't understand that I have a mental disability. Since you question the legitimacy of mental health treatment, you clearly think we're all fakers and malingerers and we should just dust off our asses and get over it. Well shut up, we have no time for your privileged hateful cluelessness. You need to quit spouting your bullshit about how it's all just capitalism or patriarchy or whatever, because you're just victim blaming even if you're too dense to see it!"
You're particularly upset that I challenge the claims that the mental health industry makes about its pills. You don't want to hear that studies show that the brain compensates for psychiatric pharmaceuticals if you keep taking them over a long period -- that the drugs that inhibit reuptake of neurotranmitter chemicals cause the brain to maintain fewer receptors or to produce less of the chemical, and the drugs that try to limit certain chemical reactions tend to cause the brain to increase its sensitivity to those chemicals. Which makes the drugs have less effect while creating a physical dependency on the drug that can make it difficult to withdraw from it.
Well, statistics can't tell us that that's necessarily how your body is reacting to what you take. Statistics don't work that way. Research can show that a tendency exists but not that it will happen for everyone the same way. Perhaps psychiatric medication does wonders for you. I'm no one to question what anyone else finds useful or helpful in their search for ways to cope with their situation.
But we are opposed to involuntary modification of how people's minds work, and that means not only opposing direct forced treatment but also misrepresentation of the medical facts. Medical consent has to be fully informed consent. And despite decades of claiming that mentally ill people have a chemical imbalance in our brains that their perfect pills fix, the way that insulin fixes diabetics' inability to produce their own insulin or the way that people without working thyroid glands need to take synthetic thyroid, it just isn't so. Schizophrenia is not a olanzapine deficiency disease. Bipolar is not a lithium deficiency disease. Depression is not a zoloft deficiency disease.
That doesn't mean they don't help you or that you should not take them if they do, but drug companies and doctors lie to patients -- they oversimplify and they misrepresent, and they do not trust patients to make their own medical decisions -- and nowhere is that a more prevalent pattern than in the specific area of mental health.
So no, I am not going to simply let you classify me as a privileged non-disabled asshole, and I'm not going to hide in the corner and stop representing the concerns of activist psychiatrized people.
-----
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women's Studies once they come out.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
I am very sweet, I am very pretty, jaguar says so.