Trump and the Language of Mental Health around his Bigotry

A conversation that I wasn’t entirely enamored with occurred on Twitter recently regarding Donald Trump and mental health. This was between writers, journalists, and people with mental health needs (or people who fell into more than one of those categories) who agreed that Trump “doesn’t have the temperament to be President.” They disagreed about “whether [they] needed to frame temperament-issues in terms of mental health.” David Perry wrote about this – whether it was advisable to frame Trump’s behavior through a mental health framework. He presented varying arguments from multiple sides of the discussion. Some of the arguments included, several in response to each other:

• argument 1: not talking about Trump’s mental health would increase stigma via silence on mental health
• argument 2: “if he were dxed would… agree with you,” and that it was the armchair diagnosis speculation and use of “insane” as insulting that bothered them.
• argument 3: temperament isn’t the result of mental illness
• argument 4: mental illness is not a reason to be unfit for public office
• argument 5: Trump isn’t right in the head and not even politicians are that self-centered
• and it went on with other points, some that could be categorized under others.

I am quite inclined to agree with Finn of Expectedly that “Wrong does not mean crazy.” Finn wrote:

Trump’s disgusting plans are not the result of a mental illness; they’re the result of deep-set, unbridled bigotry that he’s exploiting to worm his way into the White House… The Republican Party as a whole deserves to be blasted… But this isn’t about mental illness; it’s about entrenched white supremacy, racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Christian supremacy and other prejudices.

People need to stop claiming that politicians – and their supporters – whose political views differ from theirs as a sign of a mental illness, as though people can’t hold different political beliefs without considering them rationally. This stereotype also comes with the insinuation that mental illness necessarily means the lack of agency required to arrive at a reasoned political decision, which is grossly untrue.

Discussing Trump’s mental health status is kind of getting into the territory where people will use it to say that people with mental health needs can’t be effective candidates for public office if they choose to run. People are also so eager to blame bigotry on mental health needs. It helps people, in my opinion, distance themselves from the thought that they could ever be bigoted about anything (when I don’t know one person who hasn’t screwed up in that regard at least once).

So, sure, being erratic and lying a lot could be a sign of mental health needs, but that doesn’t mean it’s the reason for things like Trump being a bigot. I’d like to make the point that people with mental health needs are people with many varying viewpoints on the world – so if a person with mental health needs is a bigot, I would argue that the mental health needs are most often a coincidence. I know people with mental health needs who have done less than pleasant things – even, perhaps, said hurtful things about groups of people – in the middle of any sort of episode. I have had episodes where I’ve said less than stellar things, though I don’t think I’ve ever said bigoted things because of an episode – but I think it’s too easy to write Trump off as being a delusional, pathologically lying narcissist.

Finally, I really, really don’t think that talking about it in this context will lead to less stigma. In certain contexts? Remaining silent about mental health needs absolutely can increase stigma, can result in mental health needs being the bogeyman in the closet, a family’s dark secret, you get the drift – and I also advocate for the consent of the person in question. Even though Trump is a political figure and thus invites judgment, I feel like discussing it in this context invites severe judgment on people with mental health needs. It links bigotry to mental health needs because Trump is such a bigot that if people think Trump + mental health needs, they are going to start associating mental health needs with Trump-type bigotry.

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Everyone, particularly other people with mental health needs – and especially those with particularly stigmatized diagnoses like bipolar I/II/NOS, schizophrenia, or any mental health need involving psychosis, for instance – is welcome to weigh in on this. Read the comment policy before submitting a comment; I moderate comments. 

Using People with Mental Illness as Clickbait Hurts Us

Bad articles on the problems we face can hurt and kill people. Write better.

Dear everyone, including myself: We deserve to be alive. We have the right to self-directed services and whatever works best for us. We deserve to be alive. Stay alive. Stay alive.

I have been on medication for a long time, first for ADHD, then anxiety, then depression. I have intermittently had periods of wanting to die since age 14. My most recent full-blown crisis landed me in the hospital. It was not a question for my friends whether they still wanted me alive, even as I lay bare every problem and feeling I was having. They wanted me alive.

Dear everyone, including myself: We deserve to be alive. We have the right to self-directed services and whatever works best for us. We deserve to be alive. Stay alive. Stay alive.

A study in the British Journal of Psychiatry stated 

Evidence suggests that there is an increase in suicides following media reports of suicide, which is frequently referred to as copycat behaviour or as the Werther effect… The risk is thought to depend not only on reader characteristics,2,3 but also on media content. 3–5 

While the author of a certain xoJane article did not report the person’s death as a suicide, she left open the implication with a “supposedly” and the method of “supposed” death. She wrote an article that openly told us what we should do and tried to tell us how much she thought our lives were worth. It was a grim reminder of some people’s mindsets, but we do not have to bow to her desires.

With that knowledge, writers, know you are writing about people who deserved to be alive, and your audience are people who deserve to be alive, and your audience includes people who may already be prone to suicidal ideation. You are responsible for encouraging us to die if you write a sensationalized drama with explicit details. That is not a thing to take lightly or relish. It is a thing to make you hold yourselves accountable in your writing.

Dear everyone, including myself: We deserve to be alive. We have the right to self-directed services and whatever works best for us. We deserve to be alive. Stay alive. Stay alive.

What do we do instead? What do I do instead? My friend wrote on how to talk about suicide, and about taking care of ourselves and each other in advocacy-based communities, which see a lot of burnout and stress. We should demand that people write more responsibly, as per what my friend gathered information on. We should take care of each other when they don’t. I will try to stop writing so much about things when I’m off work. We should set healthy boundaries for each other but still show support.  

And writers should stop writing sensationalized dramas about mental illness, regardless of whether it’s about suicide. Writers of all kinds, this applies to you. These are our stories and our lives, and we want them respected by all, not showcased as some kind warning story, some kind of pity-narrative, some kind of revenge-story, some kind of sensationalized odd horror feature story. You can hurt people. Take some accountability. 

Dear everyone, including myself: We deserve to be alive. We have the right to self-directed services and whatever works best for us. We deserve to be alive. Stay alive. Stay alive.

People with Mental Illness Deserve to be Alive

Originally published on Medium

XoJane recently published an article about someone with schizoaffective disorder’s death being a blessing. Outrage ensued. The author’s name became anonymous. The editors of xoJane, at least temporarily, locked their Twitter profiles, then released this apology:

How #MHM2016 Misses the Mark

 There seems to be an assumption behind many mental health campaigns, like the #MHM2016 one – for Mental Health Month – that mental health care is all people with mental illness need. There is an unwavering focus on access to care. Okay. That’s great for people who want mental health care. I mean, I see a psychiatrist and a therapist. I take medication. Cool. In some ways I am a model citizen with mental illness. But when people talk about access to “treatment,” and people “needing treatment,” and “the plight of the mentally ill” and “mental health awareness,” this is what people mean, I think:

1. Access to to treatment is more important than issues like stable housing, co-occurring physical health conditions that can be managed so we don’t die at our average age of fifty-two, and a source of income.
2. People need access and should have treatment whether they want it or not, because they need it for their own good.
3. Access to treatment will fix all the problems and manage the mental health needs well.
4. People with mental illness belong in the hands of psychiatrists and doctors.
5. Coercive/involuntary treatment and/or hospitalization.
6. Awareness!!! The tragedy of mental illness!!!

My reactions to these:

1. Stable housing, is, you know, kind of necessary to begin thinking about treatment. Instead of being homeless, or bouncing from place to place, and worrying about all the things that come with that.
2. Stop. The baseline for any treatment should be self-directed.
3. See number one. We need community supports, adequate physical health care, stable housing.
4. How medical model of you. We can be fixed just by doctors, clearly! Tell that to my brain after a psych ward visit, and years of psychiatry and therapy.
5. See number two.
6. We are not broken – at least, not that you can decide. We are not tragedies. Many of us would take magic cures. Many of us wouldn’t. More than that, mental health awareness campaigns are aimed at getting us into treatment where we “belong.” We become whatever our diagnosis is, to be fixed. Alternately, we are prone to being mass shooters in the public eye. When your campaigns focus on treatment, it makes us seem broken and people are likely to believe we need treatment before ending up mass shooters.

The Shaming of People With Mental Health Needs

A recovery-ish narrative is fine for people who want it. The story featuring Eric Walton and his mother is something more than that, though. Filed under “inspired news” in the Washington Post, it describes the blessing of his diagnosis and his new medication that finally worked, which came after his mother publicly shamed him in a blog post called “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother.”

Yes, as he was age 13 and hospitalized for undiagnosed bipolar, she compared him to a serial killer, scared he would turn out like Adam Lanza, the shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Why air this on the internet? To give a face to the pain, apparently, but why add more trouble and shame to someone who was dealing with a lot already? Too, it reinforced the notion that “mentally ill people are mass shooters!!!!”

It reminds me, of course, of the very public way many non-autistic parents of autistic children post videos of their children’s meltdowns and toileting needs to “share the experience of autism” (autism is a developmental disability, not a mental health need, but the parallels are striking)

Also, we know there needs to be more support for parents. Really, most people (except apparently the government or people who fund services, mostly) have grasped that. But needing more support does not equal getting to publicly share your children’s hygiene needs or meltdowns or outbursts or personal details. It is, in fact, possible to advocate with some level of dignity for your child. Really, most self-advocates for disability and mental health understand that parents need more support and also want the best outcomes for people’s children, albeit sometimes with major disagreements about how to proceed to gain these best outcomes.

There are many things wrong with the story.

There are many things wrong with portraying this public shaming as acceptable.

Too, the Internet recently turned its attention to Jake Lloyd, the former child star who played Anakin Skywalker in “The Phantom Menace,” part of the Star Wars franchise. Recently released from jail into a “psychiatric facility” because of schizophrenia – or, should I say, society’s preference to put people with mental health needs in coercive treatment in hospitals, away from sight.

The internet did so in a way that tore him apart and treated him like a spectacle, broken and mentally ill and in desperate need of a 24/7 psychiatric hospital. Naturally, they will treat him when he emerges not as a survivor of a coercive system but as a broken shell, stigmatizing him beyond what my words can express.

People should be able to talk about psychiatric hospitalization without shame and also to tell of the problems inherent to the system.

I almost walked into my therapist the other day outside the Metro. No, he’s not my therapist. He was my therapist. I burn with shame and want to run across the street to get away, but the light is red. He works in the psych ward.

On the same day, someone who climbed a sequoia tree and remained there for twenty-four hours during an episode of psychosis’s story appeared on someone’s Facebook newsfeed as a prop for HR 2646, the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act. The man who climbed the tree is now in jail and faces $50,000 bail. His mother apparently wants to fight for the Murphy Bill because the legal system is blocking her efforts to get him psychiatric treatment.

Dear everyone: stop using people with mental illness as your props. The Murphy Bill would cut the funding to community-based programs that help people with mental illness find homes, legal programs that protect their rights, among other things. What the Murphy Bill does is force medication and treatment in psychiatric hospitals. It is a plan that does not fix the broken health care system. 

Of course, people with mental health needs in crisis mode are lucky if they not victims of police violence, especially people of color with mental health needs. This is also a major issue that should be spoken of more often and structural reforms pushed for.

But the public shaming of people with mental health needs also needs to stop. A coercive and dehumanizing psychiatric treatment system needs structural reforms as well, as I have written about extensively, before we push people into it. And lastly, if someone does enter that system, they should be free to talk about it without being shamed, without being treated like an unperson and like they are broken, to blog about the problems with the system and be listened to instead of being written off.

The people who need to be invited to the mental health conversation table are those thought to be the least able to communicate about it. We should treat people with mental health needs as people. Because people like me (perhaps not dealing with it as visibly), and people who are more visibly dealing with mental health needs, are people.

the world is larger than my recycled words

How do I feel? The world is larger than the recycled words I can spit out to try to convince people of disabled people’s value. On December 2, I started my second day of work; on December 2, gunmen shot up Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, CA. It was the second mass shooting of the day. Inland Regional Center served people with developmental disabilities. I followed a new routine, too tired in the evening to draft a blog post as my newsfeed exploded with the news.

Speaker Paul Ryan announced his intent to push for the Murphy Bill. The shooters shot up a center to serve people with developmental disabilities. The Murphy Bill intends to curtail the rights of people with psychiatric disabilities.

On December 2, I also received an action alert in my inbox from the Arc. The Senate was about to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act – parts that have helped people with disabilities. On December 3, my Facebook trending topics switched to Planned Parenthood as the Senate bill passed their version of the bill to federally defund Planned Parenthood. A sidenote was that the bill also repealed the Affordable Care Act, which has helped many people with disabilities. President Obama is expected to veto the bill.

People expressed shock and sorrow that someone would do this to a center that serves developmentally disabled people. People fawned over the woman who thanked an autistic person for decorating a cake. Representatives and Senators tweeted heartbreak about San Bernardino. They’ve done their good deed now, right?

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Please explain to me how it is a good deed to be objectifying autistic people into inspiration porn for decorating a cake. There are far more extreme examples, like having to hold a Day of Mourning: Remembering Disabled People Murdered by Caregivers because so many people murder the people they are supposed to be providing care and/or support for. Then explain to me how people can express shock that someone shot up a center that serves developmentally disabled people.

Please explain to me how it is a good deed to tweet heartbreak about San Bernardino when Congress just decided to repeal key provisions of the ACA that would materially help disabled people. Help, rather than just fawn over someone decorating a cake and think they’re helping, or assigning buddies in class to that poor disabled kid, or whatever.

Congress is moving the Murphy Bill rapidly through. H.R. 2646 is the, as Ari Ne’eman put it, “perversely named” the Helping Families In Mental Health Crisis Act.

The Murphy Bill would fundamentally strip people with psychiatric disabilities of their rights. It would

• strip HIPAA rights for anyone in treatment with a doctor or therapist for mental health needs,
• strip a great deal of funding for and place restrictions on the portion of protection and advocacy agencies (P&As) that serve people with mental illness (program is called PAIMI)
• H.R. 2646 will provide more federal funds for institutionalization. This will mean less focus on

       community-based services.

• This includes cutting the budget for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)’s community integration projects.

• H.R. 2646 will also encourage states to allow forced-medication programs. These would be through court systems. The best way to help people get mental health treatment is to reduce stigma, make it available, and provide support. The solution is not forced treatment.

It was introduced in the wake of Sandy Hook in 2013 to manipulate the public. Don’t let them.

Call or write your representative today. Tweet at your legislators. Find your rep at http://www.house.gov/representatives/ and then use the generic contact us form. Call to the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your representative and ask them to oppose the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act (HR 2646).

There is a federal relay service for d/Deaf peoplelisted at the bottom here  http://www.house.gov/content/site_tools/accessibility.php

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Explain how the Murphy Bill helps anyone with disabilities. Explain how fawning over a cake helps people with disabilities.

Explain how the “good deeds” work then.