(State of CI: Noticing a theme? Mad Pride Day is today. In the upcoming days, the world will be seeing celebrations of neurodiversity, creative maladjustment and destigmatization, as well as declarations of freedom, worth and value from those society has labeled sick or abnormal. MFI has more information here. )
Neurotypical (or NT) people have neurological developments and states that are consistent with what most people would perceive as normal in their ability to process linguistic information and social cues. While originally coined among the autistic community as a label for non-autistic persons, the concept was later adopted by both the neurodiversity movement and the scientific community. ~"Neurotypical", Wikipedia
There are a lot of things out in the world to be scared of. Angry dogs, drunk drivers, fire, floods, nuclear war, people bigger than you, guns, global warming, microbes, monsters, scorpions, getting caught, pandemics, violence, loneliness, uncertainty, fear itself. But ask me what in this perpetually level-orange world scares me the most, and the answer is this: the fact that many people believe that the inability to cope with society's arbitrary standards strips an individual of basic dignities and rights to self-determination, and that frustrations, fears, struggles, perceptions, and beliefs outside the accepted patterns of collective thought and reality render one incapable of making healthy choices for oneself.
The good folks at the Treatment Advocacy Center think that involuntary treatment of the "mentally ill" is an awesome idea even if the people are not endangering themselves or others. The first two bullets under their Mission Statement make this clear - they believe that the mentally ill need other people to make choices for them and that waiting for them to become a danger before forcing treatment is wrong. They claim that "people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder cannot think clearly" which is a completely inane statement for a few reasons:
1.) People with what is referred to as bipolar disorder have "flat" periods during which they are asymptomatic, so even if they were "cognitively impaired" during episodes, they would not be complete morons all the time
2.) John Nash, Ted Turner, Mark Twain and Winston Churchill; among others
3.) A large group of schizophrenic, bipolar, and others with different minds manage to maintain a few collective communities, run on anarchist principles, which organize events, create publications, and otherwise display the ability to "think clearly"
Other claims made by the TAC include:
"we don't take away rights, being crazy already does that." So if you can metaphorically show that someone is already "not free", it's okay to continue to take away their freedoms! I'm off to steal from people in wheelchairs and violate the privacy of blind people because I'm not taking their civil rights, their disabilities already have! It's like robbing a poor person.
"Involuntary treatment hasn't been shown to be harmful." That's why the CIA guys giving LSD to subjects without consent got pats on the back. Nobody has issues getting locked up and given mind-altering drugs against their will. You wouldn't have a problem with it, would you? Oh, and all these people are liars.
"The mentally ill are violent" This ignores some basic cause-effect issues - for example, those who don't take their meds may be more violent in hospitals/jails because other people are trying to force them to do stuff that threatens their sense of safety. Try and force me to down some beer and we'll see where my elbows end up (hint: your soft parts) but does that mean non-drinkers are violent? It also ignores studies like these, muddies their main point ("force-treat the nonviolent ones"?) and acts as a scare tactic.
Especially chilling is the fact that the words "will" and "rights" as applied to the mentally ill are in quotation marks here. Think about the implications of those quote marks around the "wills" and "rights" of other human beings.
There's a bigger issue here, but it's for another post, and that is the diagnoses themselves - the question of who gets to decide what's rational and what's delusional; what behaviors are healthy and which are not. Most people would agree that stepping in to save a life is good, but what the TAC is advocating is forced treatment for people who are simply not functioning within the parameters of the world we have set up for ourselves. They want everyone to see the world their way, and are threatened by alternate perceptions of reality or society. They think limiting forced treatment to "violent" or "dangerous" people is not enough. We have come up with arbitrary labels like "bipolar" or "schizophrenic" to apply to certain thought patterns and behaviors, and we have collectively decided that they aren't going to fly in our world. People who do things differently are broken and flawed - nevermind that the expectations placed on them are entirely artificial constructs of society. If schizophrenics ran the world, the TAC guys would have a pretty tough time. (Stay tuned for a full-fledged post on this.)
Moral of the story: think like us, or we will make you.
Scared yet?
If you think this has nothing to do with you because you haven't been labelled or diagnosed, MindFreedom has this to say: This movement is open to ALL, whether or not you have personally been labeled by the psychiatric system. Mad Pride is really about Human Pride. Yes, given humanity's track record, Human Pride may seem daunting. Mad Pride celebrates how each person's eccentricities, passion, uniqueness and freedom makes you truly human. Do not allow our very humanity to be pathologized by a corporate mental health system that has gone out of control! Celebrate YOUR Mad Pride!
If you want to see what people have to say on both sides of the debate (or take action), here are some organizations that lean against forced treatment:
(Mind the sensationalism and the ironic Church of Scientology connection)
And here are some that favor it:
(also note all the police support of the TAC)
I'm having a difficult time finding more independent organizations for this section, as all searches lead eventually back to the TAC and all their "affiliates" are really just localized or specialized offshoots of their own group. They and NAMI appear to have monopolized this issue. Hm.
1 comment:
the point at which my dad was diagnosed with bipolar was the point at which he became bipolar, "uncontrollably"
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