vignettes from a psychiatric history on #worldbipolarday

I can tell you about all the time I have spent among the thyme
thinking of the dark Thames that river I’ve seen
both in TV shows and up close
its dark waters inviting me to sink in its good-bye waves and
ink its darkness on my arms and there is a river dell I see
when I close my eyes and wonder what Virginia Woolf felt in her river
a wolf in me is ready to jump through (s)now and fall through the ice.
Sometimes it’s frenetic energy with a voice of reason that
falls flatter than the paper thin hospital gown that I wore,
highlighter butterflies on my wrists.
I can (out)pace the world, wield
every word as a razor sharper than
the knives I wanted to use for an off label use.
I can be higher than the hills I once wanted to die on
and still see the rivers from on high.

When I was a child, I loathed my psychiatrist. He made me take tests every time I visited him. He condescended to me. He diagnosed me with anxiety and ADHD (accurate) and denied that I was autistic (inaccurate). He told me to focus, focus, focus, also calm down. I ended up throwing child toys at him. He put me on Clonidine first, then more ADHD meds.

I later found out he is held in high regard in the area of ADHD.

Seven years ago, I went on a potent drug ostensibly as an adjunct for a depression diagnosis at age 16. I don’t know what the psychiatrist knew about being angry all the time at home and aggressive at school. The drug gave me uncontrollable urges to move, far different from merely wanting to stim. My mother called the psychiatrist to explain that I seemed to feel like a “Mexican jumping bean.” The doctor prescribed a muscle relaxant.  

I later learned the side effect was akathisia and could have been much worse.

When I told a psychiatrist years later that I was aggressive in high school, he nodded.  “Yes, that’s why they put you on it.” He was an autism specialist a second hospital found and seemed to agree with the decision to put me on it.  “Well, now that you’re not aggressive, we could probably take you off of it.” Besides the issue I had with medicating for compliance, I already had tried to go off it several times. . No psychiatrist ever told me there would be withdrawal, even with tapering, that would last for months.

Each time was so hellish from withdrawal that I asked for it again.

In college, one time, I objected to eating outside on the campus quad on the grass – some of my friends wanted to. They went anyway. I ditched dinner and left the dining hall, almost in tears. I sat near my dorm building. Another friend found me there and asked if I was okay. I wanted to lie, to keep pretending that my brain hadn’t been trying to kill me for the past several months, to talk in circles around my friend and the thoughts. Instead “I don’t want to exist anymore” burst out like Gusher fruit snacks breaking open. My friend took me to our dorm’s resident assistant, who got me an appointment with the campus psychiatrist  for the next day. She upped the dosages of the medications that hadn’t been working.

I pretended things were fine after that.

Fourteen months since college graduation. I’d been at a new job seven months. Six months since the first psych hospitalization. One month since the second. There were still people who didn’t know about them. My mother, who was in town, mentioned I had been published. We were at a lunch table with relatives. But the publication was on my experience with those hospitalizations. My cousin asked if they could read it and I realized a hole had been dug, pushing the conversation in a dangerous direction. “It’s something I don’t really want relatives to read,” I said. I pushed dirt back in the hole the same way I used to pat down the earth around flowers and herbs in the garden, alone.

I pushed dirt back in the hole the way I once imagined filling my early grave.

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The featured image for this post is a neurodiversity necklace from Spacerobot Studio for a reason. The need for neurodiversity and mental health movements to intersect is vital.

Not every person with a mental health disability has to see it through the neurodiversity framing, but we should be at times working together to push back against the narratives that frame autistic people, people with intellectual or cognitive disabilities, people with mental health disabilities, as inherently Other. Ableism manifests in different ways toward disabilities that have been categorized in different ways. But the end message is of Other.

As we approach Autism Acceptance Month, we should take care to remember that neurodiversity values all kinds of minds.

After Bell sterilized Carrie Buck, he was told “a hundred years from now… your descendants may well be proud.”

And other reasons Adam Cohen is wrong about eugenics and gene editing

On February 14, 2017, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and National Academy of Medicine (NAM) released a report entitled “Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance.” The report proclaimed that, with caution, limited clinical tests of genome editing should go forward. But human genome editing is controversial. Many international reports and laws support bans or limitations on genome editing.

The report departs from these internationally accepted ethics and laws, wrote the Center for Genetics and Society. (CGS). CGS is a science and bioethics group advocating “responsible uses and effective social governance” of human genetics. CGS put out official comments and a blog post on the report.  CGS also mentions the possibility of eugenics.

On March 17, 2017, Adam Cohen – author of Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck – began an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times with the words:

We entered a new phase as a species when Chinese scientists altered a human embryo to remove a potentially fatal blood disorder — not only from the baby, but all of its descendants…Last month, the scientific establishment weighed in. A National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Medicine joint committee endorsed embryo editing aimed at genes that cause serious diseases when there is “no reasonable alternative.” …But the committee was also right to support limited embryo editing. This time around, eugenics could be a force for good.

He concludes the op-ed with:

Again, that need not be a bad thing. Twentieth century eugenics has rightly been called a “war on the weak” — its goal was to stop people with conditions like Huntington’s disease from reproducing. Twenty-first century eugenics can enable people with the Huntington’s gene to have children without it. The new eugenics can be a war for the weak.

Cohen’s op-ed, as disability rights journalist David Perry notes, “seems to miss the lessons of the history he synthesizes in his book… Any eugenic gene editing process that is constructed in our culture will reflect the ableist reality in which they are created.”

Further, Cohen misses several other points.

Eugenics was not just state-sanctioned sterilization. Eugenics was not just about preventing “the unfit” from having children. It was, and is, also about immigration, “racial purity,” and eliminating the “mentally defective” population through any means – whether by institutionalizing people judged as such, sterilizing them, preventing their marriage, or in the case of the Nazis, also murdering them.  Eugenicists were not worried about the people with any kinds of hereditary conditions, real or perceived, and far more keen on eliminating the “threat” to the sanctity of American society and economics.

Cohen asks the question if eugenics can be used for good. A colleague told Dr. John H. Bell after Bell sterilized Carrie Buck, “a hundred years from now you will still have a place in this history of which your descendants may well be proud.” Eugenicists believed they had the superior knowledge to know what was best for society, doing public good, based on pseudoscience and their own intensely biased beliefs. They believed future generations would be proud of their work – future generations that contained no “mental defectives,” generations that had been altered by them.

Cohen said “yes” in answer to his question, that the new eugenics can be for people with genetic conditions – that eugenics can be used for good. But he acknowledges that future generations would be permanently altered.

There is no such thing as good eugenics, and Cohen misses that point by a wide mark.

A history of progressive ableism that remains today

For clarity: I know that other progressive activists do great work. This is an anti-ableism post. It should be interpreted in this manner rather than as anti-progressive. 

Introduction

Too often, progressives use ableism to accomplish their goals. I do not mean just using some words that many disabled people consider offensive.  I mean things like advocating for ableist gun reform laws. I also mean things like attributing people’s worst traits to mental health disabilities, like people do with Trump.

In the 20th century, progressives gained momentum. Progressives of this time were not the same as they are today, but the ableism is still around.  Then, the cause to rally around was eugenics. I am providing eugenics as a historical example of progressive ableism – and will point out how it still lurks in undertows of thought.

Historical example: The early 20th century and Progressive Era eugenics

Eugenics was a movement that gained some level of popularity in the early 20th century (and still continues in modern forms today). Supporters of eugenics wanted to prevent the procreation of the “unfit” and promote “better breeding.” Eugenics was popular with progressives, including reformers and activists, of the early 20th century.

The Eugenics Record Office (ERO), intended to serve as a hub for American eugenics research, was financed at one point by the Carnegie Institution. Teddy Roosevelt once wrote a letter to eugenicist Charles Davenport of the ERO about “degenerates” that said:

Farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum. Yet we fail to understand that such conduct is rational compared to the conduct of a nation which permits unlimited breeding from the worst stocks, physically and morally… Someday we will realize that the prime duty… of the good citizen of the right type, is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.

A reformer included Victoria Woodhull, a suffragist known for being the first woman to run for president (in 1872). Another was inventor Alexander Graham Bell. Several groups of feminist reformers, including the National League of Women Voters, had eugenics-based legal reform as part of their goals.

Stop making me have to defend insidious people from ableism

Bigoted actions and words from Trump are the result of bigotry. And bigotry is not a mental health disability, though people with mental health disabilities can also be bigots. We are people and vary in thoughts and opinions. But I’d really like prominent progressive activists to acknowledge this and stop making the case for Trump being crazy. That way, people with mental health disabilities won’t face as much ableism. And I won’t have to keep defending insidious people from ableism. 

I defend even people I loathe from ableism because public figure he may be, but attributing bigotry to disability hurts all people with mental health disabilities. And I do it also because when progressives pull out the “But no sane person would do that!” or “Trump is crazy!” lines, this is what they are saying:

Only crazy people can be responsible for such vile acts.

It’s the line of thinking that mental health disability must be responsible for acts society can’t explain, acts society considers terrible. The unintentional undertones of this speak of eugenics to me. Eugenicists of the past posited that many people, especially marginalized people, had increased rates of poverty and crime due to mental and moral “deficits.”

Today, mental health is blamed for everything, from mass shootings to having a poor moral compass – and Donald Trump’s actions and bigotry. Right-wingers and the GOP are the party of eugenics themselves, for sure, and I find that loathsome. But progressives should stop blaming mental health as they oppose damaging policies and actions.  

Related Posts:

• Stop calling Trump crazy
• Ableism on the Left
• Wrong does not mean crazy