madbook ~

MAINTAINING IDEOLOGICAL PURITY
Some people, when involved in social movements, get unduly preoccupied with how "pure" their point of view has to be |
     The following blocked quote is my response to a writer in one of many groups I sit in on but don't generally make comment | It's a "mental health/psychiatric surviors" discussion group | He questioned which was more important, combatting the myth of mental illness -or- seeking an end to the stigma against mental illness by pursuing equality through "empowerment" tools | The questioner was quick to criticize one social / human rights activist in particular | A statement was made that "...the notion of “stigma” and the efforts to combat it operates from the assumption that mental illness is a real entity which sits in a biomedical view of the world." | Personally, I find this premise as absurd as saying that prejudice against racial minorities is an artificial construct [something I do not believe] So, for once, I was prodded to respond | Here's my rant:

Elizabeth has asked our thoughts of a member's point of view that contrasted empowerment/stigma busting with [to oversimplify] the premise that there is "no such thing as mental illness" |
     Without making contrast, I felt compelled to respond with commenter's line of discussion by asking my own questions:
          1- Are there proper degrees of ideological "purity" and
          2- is there no such thing as Prejudice?
     However well meant, David comments lead down the road that has marginalized those esposuing causes for social justice for the past 30 years.
     One can try to be "purer" than everybody else, only to find that no one hears what one has to say.
     I've been familiar with Mind Freedom [as Dendron] since the 1980s. I find that it's a bit of a stretch to classify D. Oaks and other human rights activists of his calibre (and integrity) as siding with those who placidly go with the "broken brain" psychobabble perspective.
     Going the route of find the "purest group" ideologically seems, [no disrespect meant] an exercise in idle navel-gazing and an unproductive one at that.
     Each and every person who is now fighting for Human Rights comes from a different starting point. The psyche survivor movement is but a part of that fight for human rights, albeit the seat from where those on this group come to the table from | But when fighting for justice, a narrow perspective doesn't run the show | Those varied perspectives must be taken into account |
     The ability to interact with people of varying viewpoints, and to find some common point at which to work, seems more important than sitting back and waiting for everyone to convert to any one particular point of view.
     Human history will, ultimately, decide who and what was right and accurate. Those of us living with a segment of that history in our face, if we are honest, lack the ability to determine those things. Working with one another to acheive commn goals against oppression, whatever one chooses to call it, is more important than holding out until one's personal philosophical slant is dominant.
     So others have some idea where I'm coming from ~ it's absurd to deny that individual human beings never personally live with cognitive, perceptual intellectual, spiritual or psychic realities that are so much at variance with others than they would not be deemed irregular from the mass of humanity | If one wants to call these kinds of variants "menal illnesses" well, they will call then so anyway, regardless of one's dislike of the concept | If a person is living with such variants and he or she can manage in life without society coming to lock-em away, so much the better |
     But there are some who find such variant ways of seeing the world so disturbing as to cause them, individually, to freeze and become unable to function even to care for basic food/clothing/shelter needs. And when this occurs, the rest of us must step up to assist and provide solace and support.
     Society around the world has differing responses to this when it occurs | Most categorize and, yes, sitgmatize, those who experience those troubling realities |
     It is just as troubling to me to have someone deny these experiences as it is for me to see people being forced medicated, electroshocked, denied housing, food, dignity and, yes, stimatized for living an interior life so apart from those around them that what most of us recognize as a common socialy reality is -essentially- something alien and strange and disturbing.
     A "no-mental illness"-style purist, [any, ideological purist for that matter] in my own experience, can be just as heartless and uncaring as the folk who rush too quickly, for the blister packs of Risperidone, Abilify, Haldol, the ECT switch or forced institutionalization |
     We need to work together, not splinter into so many groups that our efforts are rendered ineffective | When that happens, then the Fuller Torreys, Sally Satels and Dr. Finks of the world have won | At least for the short term, in taking this rarefied stance, humanity continues to lose |
     As to minimizing combatting "Stigma" lets call it for what it is | Prejudice | Bigotry | Pure and simple | I challenge anyone who says that combatting stigma is just caving into the whims of the powerful | Replace the word Stigma with Prejudice or Bigotry and the comment becomes absurd | If one person focuses combatting prejudice rather than on promoting some other equally important point to address doesn't lessen the importance of the other point, it shows us what part of the larger battlefront that person is fighting on |
     And I must take issue with the statement that "...the human rights violations perpetrated by the psychiatric assault of labels and toxins is weakened - if not lost - when combined with consumer rights, ADA and pro-choice messages..."
     Take heed in the fact that the Amercians with Disabilities Act [for example] is NOT about accomodating to oppressors, but is a complex tool to force oppressive people to OBEY THE LAW about equal rights for all | And it was a set of laws gained by fighting for them, a fight that continues today | But...that a different discussion altogether |
     Hark back to my comments about personal cognitive or perceptual realities that some find disturbing. We all know people who haev been unjustly forced into "treatment" when nothing was wrong with them expect (perhaps) they lived in controlling oppressive families or groups, or that they were inarticulate in their discontent, but the experience of someone wrongefully incarcerated and forceby drugged, does NOT mean that the experiences of a man with a seizure disorder, or the troublesome and persistent psychic companionship of voices who drone on about a person's valuelessness or calling to disbelief everything around them, is something that the experiencer should just leave alone and try as best they can to ignore.
     Even if the premise for putting people on those drugs is not real [as the original author supposes] living with the long term and ongoing effect of being legally addicted to potent drugs that directly affect both the chemical and electrical operational components of the human brain is also real | Having one's cognitive, intellectual and physical abilities impaired by those drugs is real | The system, and psychiatry and society [by not questioning the practices] did this to people. Wishing this long history of oppression away because one doesn't like the fact that people are doing this does NOT help those now trapped in it |
     Each person's life experience is valid ~ and this includes troubling non-visible stimuli [something I suppose that the questioner has never experienced ...I hope he never has to] For any of us ~ using the premise of some vauge ideological purity based on one's own very personal and hence, limited [from a global sence] perspective as the sole rallying point of a movement is naive at best, and as arrogant as the war profiteers running the world these day at worst.
     To the poster, give it a rest | We all have to work together | Psychiatric labeling is real because it is with us | This doesn't make it valid; we continue to agree on this point, that writer and I | Prejudice, however, is also with us as are the lost opportunities, the discrimination in housing, employment and recognition as equal human beings | Even the fact that for some, the ability to travel to some places from the United States, IS A REALITY to some of those who have been labeled for years and who are still stuck in the system |
     When you walk away from the philosophical table or choose to ignore the DAY TO DAY DIRECT IMPACT of the actions of those in power on those long oppressed before become a latter day ideologiocal purist, you then commit yourself to the same blind path that Big Pharma and the powerful has committed itself to |
     Sorry. It's a messy package. But it's the whole thing that must be combatted and addressed. Not just the part that means sitting around tables full of books and meeting halls so you can look down from on high at the "deluded" who are merely fighting for their rights, which includes, the right to not be discriminated against because of deep seated prejudices and fears; fears that go far beyond the sphere of psychiatry and which permeate society in places that don't even realize or know about the profound influence of the social control freaks currently running the stage that is the world |

Sorry for the length of the rant | Hope my point has been made |

posted by Will Brady @ 14:33