Category Archives: ableism

On Medicalizing Mental Variation

[Because John Harper requested it and I am incapable of denying my viewing public.]

A lot of times when people talk about mental illness and neurodivergence, they’ll be like “how do we know we’re not just turning ordinary human variation into mental illness? People who are really just sad will be considered depressed! Creative kids will be diagnosed with ADD and become Ritalin zombies! All the nerds have Asperger’s these days! Shy people will be diagnosed with social phobia! Big Pharma wants to turn everyone into CORPORATE SLAVES of the CAPITALIST MACHINE!” (Okay, that last bit might just be my tendency to read dumb articles on AlterNet.)

The thing is that that line of reasoning is based on two premises:

1) The only way we have of dealing with mental illness is medication.
2) The purpose of mental health care is to turn weird people into normal people, instead of to turn non-functioning people into functioning people.

I want to be clear that those are not totally unwarranted assumptions. A lot of times people don’t get mental health care other than meds. A lot of times people get mental health care that tries to turn them neurotypical instead of a neurodivergent person who can cope. (See also: quiet hands.) But that’s a sign of the mental health system failing.

I mean, I personally know one person who was on meds to the point that he didn’t have feelings for a decade, and another person who says if she hadn’t started meds when she did she’d be dead, so I’m pretty aware that this is a complicated situation. Psychiatric medications can have nasty side effects; some of them are addictive; some of them may or may not just be placebos; they’re often very expensive.

But you know what? If an adult who is not hurting anyone has decided, in consultation with their psychiatrist, that their life is better with meds than without them– it is not your job to police them. Other people’s emotional health? None of your business! If your life is more fulfilling with occasional periods of depression, that’s your business, but you do not get to subject other people to depression because you like it, any more than I get to subject people to pineapple-and-olives pizza because I like it.

There’s always this weird sort of “then they will drag you off into the MENTAL HEALTH CARE CAMPS!” undertones to this particular kind of mental illness denialism. You know, generally if people are fine with being social phobic they don’t go to the therapist for it, so the issue doesn’t come up; the vast majority of people diagnosed with social phobia are upset about being socially phobic and don’t want to be socially phobic anymore. And it’s really fucked to be like “people shouldn’t treat something that’s making them unhappy because I don’t want them to.” Fuck you, who says you get an opinion? (Of course some people who are fine with being socially phobic are coerced into going to the therapist anyway, particularly if they’re young– in which case I say the therapist ought to help them get those assholes off their back.)

There are lots of ways to deal with neurodivergence other than medication. Somebody who’s sad a lot can learn CBT skills that allow her to deal with her feelings better. That easily-distracted kid can get extra time on tests so he can show how much he really knows rather than feel stupid because of his inability to concentrate. A girl with autism can learn not to be ashamed of her stimming or her interests. That is the exact opposite of getting rid of difference: that’s accommodating difference, instead of paying lip service to diversity and then treating everyone as if they’re neurotypical anyway.

I do not think that people should not have access to things that make them happier and more able to cope because they’re just a little bit different. Like. You must be This Crazy to get help! If you are Insufficiently Crazy then you just have to solve your problems with Willpower because that totally works.

A lot of times after neurodiverse people get mental health treatment we’re still neurodiverse. I still have borderline personality disorder, I just know that when somebody is on vacation and doesn’t talk to me for two days and my brain concludes that they hate me forever, it’s probably not actually because they hate me forever. I still have massive abandonment issues! The important diversity I’m adding to the world by constantly being convinced that everyone is about to leave me is still here.

…And more to the point, I still have the awesome parts. I still get the intense joy at relatively small stimuli and the tremendous gratitude whenever people are kind to me. Similarly, someone with ADD still has creativity and energy and hyperfocus if they learn how to cope with being disorganized and forgetful and bad at starting things. Someone with autism can still have splinter skills if they get an AAC device. If someone is trying to treat the neutral or awesome parts of a condition, the problem is not that the person got diagnosed with the condition, the problem is that that person is fucking trying to fix things that don’t hurt anyone.

Short version: making people happy is good! Valuing normality over happiness is fucked! Helping people meet their needs actually promotes human diversity! That is all.

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Gifted Kid Syndrome

Society is set up in favor of people with brains that more closely approximate the “average” brain, at the expense of those of us with brains that are fucking weird; that’s basically the idea of neurodiversity. A thing I think is potentially important is that “brain that’s fucking weird” doesn’t just include people whose brains are broken or different-but-still-good; it also includes “brains that work better in some important way.”

For instance, think about kids who have, for whatever reason, more academic aptitude than other kids.* The “gifted kids” (ugh, I hate that word) and particularly the kids who always wound up at the top of gifted class.**

There’s a stereotype of the smart kid not having a lot of friends, and in my case and the case of a lot of people I know, that’s true. If you’re good at academics, it’s probably at least in part because you love academics (or at least part of it). You also, once you get at a certain level, have absolutely no one to share your love of academics with. When I was in third grade, I was reading Plato’s the Republic; my peers were playing Pokemon. I’m not saying that I was better (both occupations are entirely useless except for entertainment purposes), but it makes it terribly difficult to make friends if you want to talk philosopher-kings and they want to talk Pikachu. At the same time, while all my peers were out socializing I was… alone. Reading Plato. Because Plato was more interesting than whatever the people in my class were getting up to.

This means I was alone a lot, obviously. Because I was alone I never really learned a lot of really basic social skills you’re supposed to learn when you’re young. (I theorize that this is behind not just former gifted kids with poor social skills but also the geek social fallacies, most of which are about Not Excluding People Like We Were Excluded.) I felt like I was the only person in the world who loved the things I loved, which is a terribly lonely thing to feel. And, well, when kids see someone who’s weird, who doesn’t have a lot of friends, and who has rather poor social skills, they tend to bully them.

Adults don’t help either. There’s a natural tendency when someone is good at academics to praise them for being good at academics, which means that a lot of gifted kids (including me) wound up defining ourselves as The Smart One. This interacts really badly with social exclusion, because it’s really easy to conclude that the reason everyone keeps excluding you is because you’re better than them. That way lies arrogance and a rather unpleasant personality.

At the same time, if you define yourself as Smart, there is going to come a time when you’re Not Smart. When you meet people who are smarter than you, or you  have to suddenly start working at a class. This can induce low self-esteem, depression, and general emotional crisis, because if you’re The Smart One what happens if you aren’t smart anymore? (Bad things. Especially if you’d already decided that you’re better than people because you’re smarter than them and suddenly they’re smarter than you.)

Classes, up to a certain point, are really easy for people with a lot of academic aptitude. You learned it the first time the teacher went through it, but she has to spend the whole hour reviewing it because no one else is as quick as you– for that matter, you might have learned it last year when you taught it to yourself. This means that a lot of people get bored and disengage from classes, which can (oddly) lead to very poor grades and the classic “but you test so well!” syndrome.

If classes are easy, it’s really easy to coast through on native ability, which means you don’t learn how to study or work hard. When suddenly you have to work in class, you haven’t developed the study habits that you need. You’re used to getting to play around on Tumblr or work on your own projects, and now suddenly you have to reread the textbook and make flashcards? And, of course, you suddenly feel stupid because Smart People don’t need to study.

Anyone else have thoughts/experiences about being one of the quote-unquote gifted kids?

Possibly related: The problems with being smart, which offers a different perspective on some of the stuff I’m talking about here.

*Obvious Disclaimer: it is way better to have a ton of academic aptitude and a society that isn’t really set up to deal with people with a lot of academic aptitude than it is to have no academic aptitude and a society that isn’t really set up to deal with people with not very much academic aptitude. In the latter, you get a sucky situation and society makes it worse; in the former, you get something awesome, and there might be shit related to it, but at least you still get academic aptitude. However, we can talk about problems that are not The Worst Problem (TM). It is allowed.
**Other Obvious Disclaimer: this is a generalization that won’t apply to everyone– in fact, most of it doesn’t apply to me. And it’s based on my observation of myself and other former gifted kids, so it is not scientific in any way.

An Introduction to Neurodiversity

Neurodiversity is essentially the radical notion that not everyone has a brain that works the same way. The concept of neurodiversity originated in the autistic rights movement, possibly because autism is one of the easiest-to-see examples of “not broken, just different,” but it applies much more widely.

Some people have brains that work better than other people’s– they might be able to grasp mathematical concepts much more easily or easily visualize complex three-dimensional shapes. Some people have brains that work less well than other people’s– they might feel sad constantly for no reason or constantly hate themselves. Some people’s brains work better in some ways and worse in other ways– ADD has benefits (multitasking like whoa!) and downsides (“where did I put my keys again?”). Some people’s brains aren’t better or worse at all, just different– for instance, autistic people or trans people.

The problem for all these groups is that society is set up for the norm. People assume that neurodivergent people work the way everyone else does, and that when they object to a food or physical touch or a room they’re just being fussy and need to learn to put up with it. Schools and workplaces are often very reluctant to offer accommodations that will help people do their work because it would be “special treatment.” Friends, family, or romantic partners of neurodivergent people are often complemented about how brave and strong they are for putting up with neurodivergent people. Lots of people think of neurodivergent people as monsters, with “awwww so inspirational” condescension, or as neurotypical people who are just pretending to be neurodivergent. All of this creates a lot of unnecessary trouble for neurodivergent people.

Here’s the thing: people are different. Different people have different needs. For instance, I need people not to yell at me, I need classes that move relatively fast, I need to have directions written down instead of told to me verbally, and I need specific training about how to deal with my emotions. As long as these needs are met, I’m fully capable of talking about things I did wrong, not getting bored, following directions, and not exploding into a sobbing pile of “I AM THE WORST PERSON ALIVE.” My needs are not any less real because they are different.

People’s refusal to acknowledge neurodivergence hurts people. Neurodivergent people are very often told that they’re lazy or broken instead of being taught coping mechanisms for their neurodivergence. Even when they’re taught coping mechanisms, they’re often not about having a happy and functional life while neurodivergent, but about how to pretend to be normal so you don’t threaten or upset people.

Incidentally, that also provides a neat solution to the whole “but we are overmedicating people and medicalizing ordinary variation!” problem. Medicalizing ordinary variation is only a problem if you think the purpose of treatment is to make people normal. So you have one side going, “We’re fine with you turning those people normal, they’re really weird! But some of those people you’re diagnosing with things are practically normal already. We don’t want everyone to be totally the same, just same enough that we don’t feel threatened or have to change anything to accommodate them.” And the other side goes, “Yes, but if we try to make all the people normal, then we get more money! Braindrugs for everyone!”

Telling people their experiences are real, helping them find people who are like them, teaching them coping mechanisms for their neurodivergence (which may include medication, but doesn’t always), helping them find accommodations… all of those are good things which the mental health system could do. Sometimes it even does them.

Finally, one of the big mistakes people make with the neurodivergence model is that they assume that because a lot of the trouble that comes from being neurodivergent comes from lack of accommodation, ableism, stigma, and other badnesses, therefore all the trouble that comes from being neurodivergent comes from those things. For some people, this is true.

On the other hand, there are lots of neurodivergences that lead to people hurting themselves or others, losing touch with consensus reality, or being unable to function in everyday life even with accommodations, and those pretty much suck balls. (Those are the ones I call “mental illness,” usually.) It is okay to acknowledge that some ways people are different suck; it’s not okay to treat people worse because of it.

What It’s Like Having Borderline Personality Disorder

Obligatory Disclaimer Things
1) I am one person with borderline personality disorder! I am not the expert! This is just what it feels like to me, given my background, coping mechanisms, etc. Also I have comorbid generalized anxiety disorder and social phobia; someone else who has different comorbid Brain Issues (or, like, no comorbid issues at all? which is apparently a thing for some people) will have a different experience. You should not assume that all borderlines have the same psychology I do. People with BPD who have different experiences than me are welcome to share in the comments.
2) Please note that I have borderline personality disorder, and I will be reading the comments. So if you say that people with BPD are empathyless abusers who are incapable of love, you are saying that to me. I will delete your comment and then I will probably go cry because Jesus, people.
3) While this should not be super-triggery, I do go into some detail about the mental processes of a person with borderline personality disorder and mention suicide and self-harm. 

To me, borderline personality disorder feels like it has three different aspects: fear of abandonment, lack of a self-image, and really really wild mood swings.

The fear of abandonment part is probably the part that ends up hurting other people the most. I literally have panic attacks at the thought of not having any friends; I am desperate to keep everyone from hating me or being upset at me because if they do they will leave me and then– well, it’s kind of hard, as a borderline, to complete that sentence, because the only answer my brain tosses up is “and then everything will be awful and hurt forever and you will probably stop existing.”

Every conversation I have feels like a tightrope walk where if I say the wrong thing then I will be abandoned forever. I’m manipulative, sometimes, like a lot of borderlines. I need attention and validation; if I’m not reassured often that someone likes me, I’ll tend to conclude that they hate me. I get very clingy and needy and then run away because oh god I’m too clingy they will hate me now. I test people a lot. Do you say hi to me if I don’t say hi first? Do you notice if I look sad and ask if something’s wrong?

There are a couple of things I do when I think someone hates me. The first is to frantically propitiate them: to be kind enough and smart enough and sexy enough and do everything they want and never ask for anything that might inconvenience them and then maybe– even if they don’t like me– they’ll just put up with me. The second is to hurt myself (if I’m hurting they will pay attention to me!) or the person who hates me (if they stay with me even if I’m hurting them they must really like me!). The third is to decide that I don’t like them and so I am not upset that they want to leave me. I am really good at that. I don’t even have anyone I’m currently in contact with whom I’ve known for more than two years.

Like a lot of borderlines, I’m bad at the concept that people still exist when they’re not in contact with me. I forget people when they’re not around. If I have things that belong to someone, I can remember them, which is why I tend to collect presents that people I love have given me. I’m also bad at the concept that people can be things other than “perfect paragons whose feet I should kiss” and “scum of the earth.” You’re perfect if you love me, and you’re scum if you might leave.

Another big thing in borderline personality disorder is… well, the DSM calls it “affective instability,” and your more poetical psychologist-types call it “having no emotional skin.” I feel everything more intensely than a neurotypical person does. A cute picture of a sloth can leave me so happy I’m incapable of forming words. A C on a test can make me suicidal. (Lots of borderline people get into really intense rages; I don’t. In fact, I can count the number of times I felt anger not at myself on one hand. You see, anger is a bad emotion and it will make people mad at you and then they will leave.)

Like a lot of borderline people, I’m impulsive as hell. In the moment, the feelings are so intense that you can’t imagine not wanting to destroy all your possessions to punish yourself for being such a bad person. The idea of waiting a few minutes to see if it still sounds like a good idea is ludicrous. After all, the feeling is so big, surely I’ll feel it for the rest of forever. (This, despite the fact that my emotions rarely last ten minutes.)

Since little emotions are incredibly intense, big emotions are even more fucking intense. I dissociate under stress, which means that everything stops feeling real to me; I’m lucky, because at least I don’t have severe paranoia or psychosis. On the other hand, when nothing is happening to make me feel anything, it all feels kind of sad and empty compared to the big feelings that I normally have. That’s another reason I get impulsive: anything to feel.

The third thing is unstable self-image, which I developed a really good coping mechanism for, so I don’t experience it as much as a lot of other borderline people do. Most people… kind of know who they are. They have a sense of self. Borderlines don’t. Some of them end up clinging on other people for a sense of self, or rapidly changing everything about themselves. Me, I have labels. People have told me that I’m a geek and a skeptic and a feminist and kind and loyal and tough and smart and poly and queer and genderqueer and forgetful and flaky and shy and obsessive and so I have all these words and they kind of pin down who I am.

I said “people have told me” deliberately. I don’t know how to know things about myself, other than people telling me. I tend to stare at personality questionnaires going ??? and then having to ask if the answer fits me because I have no idea who I am. I also get very distressed when people contradict each other about my personality traits because how will I know who I am if people disagree about it? 

Sex Addiction Does Not Actually Exist

Other things which also do not actually exist: love addiction, shopping addiction, food addiction, porn addiction, Internet addiction, video game addiction, gun addiction, or any other kind of non-substance-related addiction.

Of course people can have compulsive, self-destructive, or otherwise problematic behavior related to sex, shopping, food, porn, video games, etc. There are people who use sex to get attention or to numb their pain. You can have a problem related to sex that needs treatment; hell, for that matter, you can have a problem related to sex that ruins your life. But they’re not addiction. The addiction model just doesn’t work to describe non-substance-related compulsive behavior.

There are some people in the poly-kinky community who spend a lot of time thinking about and having sex. They go to munches and orgies and the Folsom Street Fair; they’ve had tons of casual sex and dozens if not hundreds of partners; they have to hide large swathes of their lives from bosses, family, and ‘nilla friends; they have Serious Opinions about figging. It happens. But it would be absurd to consider happy. functional people with friends and jobs “sex addicts” just because their hobby happens to be sexuality.

Similarly, not everyone who occasionally masturbates for two hours is a porn addict, and not everyone who really loves food is a food addict. Nevertheless, Cosmo is talking about how ice cream is totally the same as crack you guys and Christian websites talk about addictive sexual sins. Newsflash: you don’t have to be addicted to ice cream or masturbation to want to do it a lot. People like masturbation and ice cream because they’re fun.

On the other hand, I am prone to self-destructive sexual behavior: that is, I tend to assume that my sexual partners hate me and have sex with them because the only reason anyone would put up with me is for orgasms. (For the record, my partners do not believe any of this.) But because my self-destructive sexual behavior usually comes up in long-term romantic relationships, I won’t get diagnosed as a ‘sex addict.’ In fact, the happy kinkster with Serious Opinions about figging would probably be classified as a sex addict, and I wouldn’t. That’s just fucked up.

The addiction model also offers a standard cure: abstinence. Sex addicts stop having sex; video game addicts stop playing video games; food addicts control the amount they eat. But abstinence isn’t always the solution.

To talk about my sex example again: the solution was not “Ozy stops having sex with long-term romantic partners.” (I mean, I did end up stopping having sex with my long-term romantic partners, but that was an entirely unrelated issue.) The solution was “Ozy learns to reality-check zir beliefs about relationships and to communicate zir needs for attention and validation.” The problem wasn’t my dysfunctional sexual behavior; that was just the symptom. My problem is that I keep fucking concluding people I love hate me based on no evidence. If I’d just stopped having sex with long-term romantic partners, I would have found some other horrible dysfunctional way to try to keep people I love from hating me– and I would have missed out on all the totally functional relationship sex.

And for a lot of dysfunctional and compulsive behavior, the same thing is true. Sure, there are people who play video games instead of sleeping as a dysfunctional anxiety coping mechanism. But you’re going to get a lot farther teaching them how to deal with anxiety than you will stopping them from playing video games. Sure, there are people who spend twelve hours on Tumblr because they’re depressed and numbing themselves, but Wellbutrin will help a lot more than not going online ever again.

I mean, obviously, you might treat the guy who spends twelve hours at a time on Tumblr for his depression and then he won’t spend twelve hours at a time on Tumblr anymore. But that’s a side effect, not the goal; the goal is for him to not be depressed. If you treat his depression and he’s like “actually, all my friends are on Tumblr and my hobby is creating humorous gifsets, so I’m going to continue having Tumblr marathons, thanks,” that is also okay. (Compare this with addiction, where if you treat someone for the underlying issues that make them take heroin and they keep taking heroin, the treatment was probably not successful.)

Furthermore, I don’t think that what gets classified as “addictions” is accidental. I sleep a lot when I’m depressed, sometimes fourteen hours a day; being alive hurts and I don’t want to kill myself so I just want to be conscious as little as possible. One time I lost my job because I kept sleeping through work. But no one has ever come up with the idea of a “sleep addict.”

The things that get called addictions are things that some people feel are Wrong but other people keep doing anyway. Marry diet magazines and high-fructose corn syrup and you get food addiction. The demise of old sexual standards in the wake of the sexual revolution? Sex addiction and porn addiction. The kids and their new technology that the grown-ups are scared of and are sure must be bad somehow? Video game addiction and Internet addiction.

So you don’t get “sleep addicts,” because there are very few moralists talking about how evil it is that some people want to get ten hours a night. That’s unfair to people who genuinely do have self-destructive behavior that no one thinks is Wrong, and to people who just like Wrong Things a lot and really do not deserve a bunch of people calling them addicts for it.

My Mental Illness Is Not About Your Boner

Tumblr decided, in its infinite wisdom, to show me this article. (Which is apparently two years old? Whatever, it’s not like BPD stigma has changed much in the past two years.) The subheading includes the phrase “the mental illness that can lead to wild sex.”


["dis gon be gud" gif]

It’s pretty standard stigmatizing nonsense. This one dude has a girlfriend who is really great in bed, but she also cuts herself and screams at or attempts to break up with him over minor disagreements. Ozy flinches in recognition. Pop stars are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. The phrases “femme fatale” and “intoxicating womanchild with a dark side” occur. It is explained that some common traits of borderline patients include a history of child sexual abuse, eating disorders, self-consciousness and a need for control, and giving doctors boners.

Not kidding about that last part. An assistant professor of psychiatry named Peter Freed says, “Though it hasn’t been studied, there is a sense among doctors that many patients tend to be attractive, which can trigger a vicious cycle. Being beautiful induces the world to treat you like an object, which naturally gives rise to questions about whether you are loveable, which in turn makes you long for confirmation.” I just… I literally have no response to that.

I mean, it’s pretty excellent to be classified as a femme fatale. Here I am, with hairy legs and boxer shorts and an Existentialists Do It Pointlessly shirt with a hole in one of the armpits, but apparently I’m goddamned Catwoman because of my diagnosis. I don’t even have to put on lip gloss!

On a more serious note, talking about how awesome and uninhibited borderlines are in bed is really disturbing. One of the symptoms of borderline personality disorder is impulsive and self-destructive sexual behavior. (Well, okay, impulsive and self-destructive all kinds of behavior, but sex is perennially popular.) “I’m a bad person so I should punish myself by having unprotected sex with a stranger!” “If my best friend’s girlfriend has sex with me then she must REALLY LIKE ME because otherwise she wouldn’t hurt Best Friend so much.” “I’m going to have sex I don’t want and that makes me feel sick and dirty and violated inside so that my partner won’t hate me.” “Everything hurts and the only way I can fill up the emptiness inside is fucking.”

I literally do not have words for how fucked up and creepy you have to be to write an article about how hot it is when women have a mental illness that leads them to have sex they don’t want. I mean. It saves so much energy, doesn’t it? You don’t have to abuse them! Their brains already emotionally abuse them for you! You get all the sweet, sweet coercive sex and you don’t even have to face the guilt in the morning!

It’s just the Madonna/Whore dichotomy all over again. The Whore is wild and uninhibited, she doesn’t have any of those silly ‘boundary’ things, when you fuck her your toes curl and your hands tingle and you see God. But unlike the Madonna, sweet and kind and pure, the Whore also happens to be a psycho bitch. She cuts herself! She takes drugs! She screams at you when she thinks you’re with another woman! For further examination for this interesting sociological phenomenon, I’d like to direct you to Buckcherry’s Crazy Bitch:


[Lyrics.]

Except, you know, we’re sciencing it up! Because there is an actual psychological diagnosis that if you bend, spindle, fold and mutilate it enough kind of looks like “psycho bitch slut.” And then we get to write a whole article in Newsweek, purporting to educate people about borderline personality disorder, about how psycho bitch sluts are terrible. But also sexy? So you will want to sex them up?

But, you know, I am a person, not a misogynistic archetype. I spend the vast majority of my time neither fucking men senseless nor being a psycho bitch at them. In fact, most of the ways my mental illness manifests have nothing to do with fucking men senseless or being a psycho bitch at them. And I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s true of most people with BPD.

When I break down crying over not being able to hang up the laundry properly, it is not about your boner. When I get upset when my boyfriend leaves the house to check the mail because he might never come back, it is not about your boner. When I stop talking to my parents and family because I am irrationally terrified of them, it is not about your boner.

The articles about what my illness is like? Shouldn’t be about your boner either.

Mental Health Awfulness In The Wake Of The Newtown Shooting

I am this close to declaring that unless you are mentally ill, a person with a degree in psychology or a mental-health-related field, or a major part of the support network of a mentally ill person, you are not allowed to talk about mental health. The only thing that’s stopped me is that a lot of members of those groups are saying terrible things too.

General memo: if you only care about mental health care in the wake of a shooting, you seriously need to question yourself. There are far more mentally ill people who hurt themselves than mentally ill people who shoot up a school. Mentally ill people are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it. Only talking about mental health after a shooting implies that you don’t care about mental illness when we’re being hurt; you only care about it when we’re hurting neurotypicals.

Furthermore, there’s a certain cluster of disorders that people tend to conclude turns people into monsters: personality disorders, schizophrenia, psychosis, bipolar disorder, autism, probably a couple I’m forgetting. In the wake of incidents like the Newtown shooting, people will always talk about people with these disorders as if they’re Scary Alien Monsters Without Empathy Who Will Probably Hurt You.

First of all, we don’t know what mental illness Adam Lanza had, or even if he had a mental illness at all, so it’s a bit inappropriate to be demonizing people. Second, most people with these illnesses are not violent. (In fact, even the link between psychosis and violence is muddy.) Third, does it not occur to anyone that talking about how people with certain mental illnesses are Scary Alien Monsters Without Empathy Who Will Probably Hurt You makes it more difficult for people with those illnesses to get the support and care they need? If you think being diagnosed with schizophrenia will make you a Scary Alien Monster Without Empathy Who Will Probably Hurt People, you are going to drag your feet about getting diagnosed… and that means you’re not going to get the help you need.

To talk about some specific examples of fail (warning: these are really, really horribly anti-people-with-mental-illnesses. Read at own risk)…

I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother: No, you aren’t. I understand that it can be really frustrating and occasionally terrifying to deal with a child with mental illness, particularly one as virulent as Michael’s. But seriously, who the fuck compares their child to a murderer and talks about their “evil eyes”? And then fucking includes a picture of their child and the child’s name? (For reasons of preserving my faith in humanity, I’m going to hope it’s a pseudonym.) Why would you do that? I really don’t have a hell of a lot to comment on this that hasn’t been said better by Sady Doyle  and Thursday, so go read those posts instead.

Piers Morgan’s Awful Guest: Okay, look, dude, preferring to be by yourself can be a sign of Asperger’s, but it can also be a sign of everything from social phobia to Avoidant Personality Disorder to just being a fucking introvert okay. Autism does not mean that you’re “lacking empathy,” it means that you are bad at reading social cues and intuiting things about others. You can still feel bad that other people are in pain even if you’re bad at telling when people are in pain. Autistic people might be lonely and anxious and even suicidal sometimes, but that probably has something to do with gentlemen like you assuming that autism can help explain why someone shot up a school. Also, I have no idea how you leaped from suicidal depression to shooting up a fucking school, but I’ve known a lot of fucking suicidal people and it has not occurred to one of us to shoot up a school, so maybe there is a different factor here.

Gunsville, USA: Apparently, a lot of shooters are on different kinds of medication, including SSRIs, tetracyclics, tricyclics, benzodiazepines, sedatives, Benadryl, and pain medication. This is sort of like saying “look! Some of the shooters took cough syrup, some took antibiotics, some took Vitamin C, and some took Viagra! Therefore cold medications cause shootings!”

I mean, Jesus. Who would expect that a disproportionate number of mentally ill people are on meds, or that discontinuing or switching medication might cause problems for some people?

The author diagnosed Adam Lanza and Holmes with “Medication Eyes,” which combined with the I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother person above, is starting to make me wonder if the DSM-V should include Ocular Delusional Disorder, the delusion that you can figure out someone’s psychiatric history by looking at their eyeballs.

It also includes the following sentence:

He said he thinks the main problem is that “crazy” people are no longer institutionalized because all of a sudden hey have “rights” to live under bridges and be as schizoid as they want to be. 

1) Does… does this guy know how expensive mental hospitals are? Who is going to pay for locking up all the mentally ill people? I thought that the conservatives were all about Fiscal Responsibility and Not Universal Healthcare, but apparently that goes out the window when there’s a possibility of locking up mentally ill people.

1a) Takimag, aren’t you supposed to be libertarian? What exactly is libertarian about lifelong imprisonment of people who have done nothing wrong?

2) How is this going to work exactly? There are shooters who never had contact with the mental health care system… are you going to give everyone a complete mental health workup at age eighteen, repeat it each decade, and lock up the people who fail? Who are you going to lock up? Just people with psychosis or schizophrenia? All mentally ill people? People with mental illnesses that you believe turn them into Scary Alien Monsters Without Empathy Who Will Probably Hurt You?

3) Of course the prospect of being involuntarily imprisoned for life will not remotely make people reluctant to seek mental health care or more willing to lie about any symptoms that might get them locked up.

4) I don’t think “care in the community” was particularly well-implemented either, but that’s not because it’s a bad idea. It’s because they kind of forgot the “care” bit and just left people to their own devices. Caring for people outside of mental hospitals whenever possible is a good plan; not caring for people at all is not.

5) WHAT THE FUCK WHY DO YOU THINK IT IS OKAY TO LOCK UP PEOPLE WHO HAVEN’T DONE ANYTHING WRONG WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU

Unhealthy Relationship vs. Abuse

Trigger warning for abuse, naturally. Moderation note: I describe my relationship with my parents here; I have absolutely no interest in your advice about what to do. It’s meant to illustrate my point, nothing more.

My relationship with my parents is… fucked up.

I’ve been mentally ill since elementary school, but after a few failed attempts (including one threatened suicide) to explain that something was wrong to my parents, I spent nearly a decade hiding that I was mentally ill and pretending to just be a fuckup who, like, chose to fail all zir classes and not have any friends.

So the revelation last year that I was mentally ill… in fact, that I was mentally ill enough to attempt suicide and be Baker Acted… well, it understandably came as a shock to them. They’re neurotypical, most of the people they have experience with are neurotypical, they have no idea how to cope with me. They’re overwhelmed, they’re worried, they’re afraid that they’ve been terrible parents, and they want me to stop being unhappy. So they ended up freaking out a lot and making some truly questionable decisions.

Not to mention that on a very fundamental level they have yet to grasp that mentally ill people have different needs than people who are not mentally ill. So if I ask my parents not to give me a hug when I’m crying because physical touch is literally physically painful to me, their response is fifteen minutes of “but I was just trying to help! I love you and wouldn’t do anything to hurt you! How can hugs hurt you, you’re supposed to like hugs when you’re sad!”, being over-dramatic and self-congratulatory about how they are NOT HUGGING ME LOOK HOW GOOD THEY ARE, and then forgetting a week later.

Of course, this situation could be straightened out if I explained to them what my mental illness means and what they ought to do. Except… my brain already believes my parents are Scary People Who Will Hurt Me. My instinct is to avoid whenever possible, placate when not possible. This is not a mindset conductive to setting boundaries or making them upset, the way I’d have to to point out that they’re treating me in a way that hurts me. So I am literally unable to give them the information that would help them.

This relationship is clearly unhealthy, because it leaves one half of the relationship in an anxiety attack every time zie contacts zir parents, and the other half concerned about why their child is suddenly SO DISTANT. But I don’t feel like it’s abusive. Abusive implies that there’s fault, that there’s an abuser and a victim; my relationship with my parents just involves some people with needs that cannot be fulfilled in the same relationship.

I think there should be space to say that a relationship is unhealthy without saying that it’s abusive. I like “unhealthy.” It doesn’t imply judgment; it reminds us that there are a lot of situations where no one is clearly at fault but everyone is unhappy. And you know what? Just because it’s not abusive does not mean that it’s okay.

I also think the construction of “unhealthy relationship” might help some abuse survivors, because it gives them a space to recognize that their relationship is fucked up when they’re not ready to admit yet that it’s abusive.

I’d also like to give permission to people in unhappy relationships to end their relationships. I think a lot of us tend to assume that we can only end relationships, or certain kinds of relationships like marriages or family, if People are doing Wrong Things. But if a relationship makes you miserable, you don’t have to stay in it. Not wanting to be in a relationship with someone is enough reason not to be in a relationship with them.