| Jul. 9th, 2009 @ 04:11 pm On Magical Madmen and Making the Bed. |
|---|
Current Location: Morningstar Hall
My disposition:  aggravated
My tunes: Crimson Glory -- Where Dragons Rule
This is liable to be jumbled and not really coherent, because it was hewn out of a much longer piece, but I've spent three days trying to clean it up enough to post, and I don't think I can do much more with it without starting over, so here it is.
So, about that Feministe post about respectful language I mentioned the other day. In the comments were some interesting discussions of mental illness. I'm going to take on a few of these over the course of a few entries and talk about some things I don't see talked about very often.
The first comment we are going to look at is by Sophonisba and says:
"It is a damaging and persistent myth that particular types of mental illness come with built-in compensations in the form of increased creativity, intelligence, and connections with god knows what all. . . . It is true that a lot of unhappy or ill people are smart or creative or both. But this doesn’t mean that the goodness or badness of depression or schizophrenia becomes all a matter of perspective."
When a person happens to fit that creative-yet-mad profile – and sometimes even when they don't – the magical madman trope gets trotted out as evidence that It's Not All That Bad, Really. It doesn't matter what our illness has stolen from us, we are Special.
While it works like that for some people, for a lot of us it does not. Even those of us who do have such "gifts" can't always control when they come and go. Perpetuating the myth of the gifted madman does no favors for those of us who reap few benefits from our madness. Yet people continue to pass it down, even other mentally ill people.
Essentially functional but still mentally ill folks may attribute their ability to function to their creative efforts, and in turn attribute their creativity to their illness, but it is entirely possible that it's the other way around.
Their madness informs their creative work on a deep level, a level that might seem inaccessible to sane people – or less-functional mentally ill people – thus fostering the idea that it is their madness that makes them so extraordinary. And while that may be true in some cases, it's not true in all. If it were, all mentally ill people would be gifted in proportion to their relative level of craziness, which is clearly not the case.
In not-very-functional people the cycle of creativity is often arrested before it can begin. Mental illness causes lack of creativity by making it impossible to do anything. It becomes impossible to unblock creativity or resume normal functioning until the illness is naturally abating.
If a person's creative life resumes in a rush and they suddenly feel better, they are likely to attribute their improvement to increased creativity even if that is not the case. This is a natural mistake. The moment one turns the corner and becomes potentially able to make a recovery is invisible. Actions are not invisible. It is often the first action taken after recovery becomes possible that is mistaken for the cause of the recovery itself.
Someone on my f-list – I am so sorry, but I don't remember who it was –called this the "make the bed moment." You try every day to get up and make the bed, and you fail because you are depressed. But one day, you say "Fuck this!" and even though you really don't want to, even though you still feel depressed, you make that bed. And after that, things get easier.
It's tempting to say that you got better because you made the bed – and there is some virtue in faking it until you make it, depending on what you are faking and what kind of illness you are dealing with. But for those with severe problems, the fact that making the bed doesn't actually help, or the fact that they cannot even try to make the bed, is symptomatic of their illness.
There are always going to be people who can consistently make that fucking bed. Does that mean that making the bed – faking it – will always resolve depression? No! Any person who suffers chronic pain – emotional or physical – has good days and bad days. Yet even on bad days, the mentally ill are expected to live up to the example set by an ill but high-functioning person on a good day.
Do the challenges associated with any illness, disability, or obstacle, cause people to grow stronger? Absolutely, yes, they do. But as Sophonisba so astutely points out, "this is a good thing about human beings, not a good thing about disabilities," and she is absolutely right.
And it is not simply a matter of choosing to look at it otherwise.
"The insistence that whether a thing is good or bad depends on how you look at it will give a lot of us nasty reminders of being told that we can be happy if we work at it. That being happy is a matter of seeing the bright side of things, not focusing on the negative."
"I believe in the right of all people to self-define and to be the ultimate authorities on their own lives, but I do not believe that we experience pain as pain, misery as misery, and powerlessness as powerlessness merely because we have been 'trained' to do so."
A poorly-comprehended yet fundamental feature of mental illnesses is just how little control those of us who suffer from them actually have. By and large it is not possible to think one's way out of depression: the inability to do so is a critical part of what defines it as an illness necessitating treatment.
Yes, there are behavioral techniques that will help put the brakes on the out-of-control train of our psyches, but those techniques require major overhauls to our most fundamental thought processes and patient self-evaluation and observation, often over the course of several years.
It is far more complicated than just looking on the bright side.
The pain that we experience is real pain. The misery is real misery. The powerlessness is real powerlessness.
Calling us "gifted" does nothing to offset that, even if we really are gifted. Insisting that it should be enough, or insisting that if we just managed to look at it right, all the bad would turn to good and it would all stop hurting, is cruel.
I have had people tell me they envy my bipolar disorder because they wish they had what I have. They mean the creativity, of course.
The insomnia, the suffocating depression, the inability to care for myself financially and sometimes even physically, the suicidal ideation, and – currently – the complete dearth of creative output are not, of course, what they imagine coming with the territory. But they do. I deal with the bad parts of this nearly every day. The good parts don't manifest nearly as often.
I'm not lucky to be this way. This is not a gift. My creativity does not offset the pain I experience. I have known completely uncreative people, not bipolar, who are happier than I will ever be. They don't seem to miss the creativity they do not have.
I absolutely miss the sanity I haven't got.
I suppose what I am saying here a lot of you know already. But I don't hear this talked about that much. "Lighten up, snap out of it," is advice given to mentally ill people all the time, even by other mentally ill people, and we all know it's shitty advice. Yet people persist in offering it.
The idea that we are all gifted, that our madness is somehow elevating, is an attractive but ultimately flawed idea. Just like the advice to "lighten up," it ultimately denies the mentally ill person's ability to define their experience honestly, on their own terms, and indicates a fundamental disregard for the mentally ill person's perception of their own madness – another persistent problem.
Those two things, the ability of each of us to decide what our condition means and how it affects us, are absolutely fundamental to a humane understanding of mental illness – fundamental to an understanding of the mentally ill as human beings, first and foremost. |
|  |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
shadbrat's Friends Page
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
confused
amused
blah
confused