as small as a world and as large as alone

10:07am December 31, 2013

ateacupinastorm:

I feel like the problem with the “romanticising mental illness” thing might be that a lot tumblr sj-ers don’t actually consult crazy/disabled people about what they think or inform themselves about contemporary activism/thought in this area. 

So… they’re still working from a “medical model” approach to atypical neurologies- ie these things as illness/disease, something innately tragic to be taken very seriously at all times and cured/recovered  from. Rather than as an equal oppressed identity in need of acceptance. 

The handful of friends I truly love- all have rare, uncommon brains and it causes them all a hell of a lot of trouble and pain. However none of that pain seems to be in anyway innate or inevitable. It’s social intolerance and rigidity that seems to be most responsible.

I don’t apologise for thinking my friends brains are astonishingly beautiful and precious to me- yes, partly because they’re uncommon and if singing that from the rooftops is “romanticising mental illness” then so be it.

The other thing is there really is a faction of people with mental illnesswho think that way too, and their voice (not just on this issue, but on all issues pertaining to mental illness) tends to be the dominant one among mentally ill and crazy people, because it’s the closest to mainstream views on the matter.  They’re the ones who are most likely among all mentally ill or crazy people to get to speak at NAMI conventions and run ‘consumer-run’ organizations, and they’re the ones most likely to call themselves consumers rather than a ton of other words that exist.  They tend to believe that mental illness is just like physical illness (in fact is a physical illness), to refer to it as 'getting sick’ when they end up in crisis, to mostly follow their psychiatrists’ directions and encourage others to do likewise (except under a few circumstances), and to believe that psychiatry is mostly okay as it is except for a few kinks that need to be worked out.

There's nothing wrong with being a person who believes these things, mind you, it’s just that if you do believe those things you’re likely to be the ones everyone is going to listen to out of every possible type of person considered to be mentally ill, the ones with the most power in the c/s/x movement (and especially the c portion of that movement, sometimes even resenting that they have to say s or x additionally), the ones most likely to run the consumer-run mental health centers, the ones most likely to agree with involuntarily committing people from those centers, etc.  And as such to have more of a voice that’s going to get listened to, than anyone else in the community.  

(And in many cases, take steps that their voice will be the only ones listened to, and resent the voices of others, but not always.  Sometimes they assume that survivors and ex-patients and anyone who calls themselves crazy rather than mentally ill, is someone who wants to take away their medications or something, which is only rarely true.  It’s generally the big-name psychotherapists who try to get in with survivors and ex-patients and become ~dissident psychiatrists~, who want to take away their medications, not the survivors and ex-patients ourselves.  The ~dissident psychiatrists~ have tried to co-opt our movements to fuel their own feud with biological psychiatrists, but they’re no better than any other psychiatrists in their abuse of power.)

So these ideas don’t just come from people without any direct experience of mental illness, they’re sometimes fueled by a particular group of people who do experience it.  But either way, they don’t speak for all of us by a longshot.

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