[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.
Thing of Things 
“pineapple-and-olives pizza”
Finally, food we can agree on!
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Don’t forget the eggplant!
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Ozy is anti-eggplant, and on that we disagree.
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One day I am going to fly across the ocean and eat pineapple and olive izzard with my alt. Because we are also, Ozy.
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Pizza for izzard and alts for also, sorry. Typing on phones is hard.
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Typing on phones izzard indeed.
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I like olives, but not pineapple or eggplant, on pizza. In the absence of pizza, I like olives and pineapple individually, but not olives and pineapple together or eggplant.
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I don’t think this sort of talk is really driven by a desire to police other people’s choices. I think it’s driven by a very justified fear of being pushed around by medical and educational bureaucracies.
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AFAIK, it’s unusual for adults who have not attempted suicide, self-harmed badly enough to end up in hospital or done something illegal to end up in the psych system. I agree that there is a lot of coercion of people in those three scenarios to have treatment they don’t want, also coercion of minors who may be fine with how their brains work.
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Edit: “to end up in the psych system unless they CHOOSE TO SEE A PSYCHIATRIST.” Because that’s an important distinction.
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Right, but what about kids?
How much control do parents really have when schools and doctors are telling them their child needs is mentally ill and needs medication?
Here’s is a conversation I’ve had:
Me: ADD is bullshit!
My friend: no it isn’t!
Me: They put me on Ritalin, and I’m pretty sure it was for the convenience of teachers, not for my benefit. I’m kind of pissed off about that. ADD is bullshit.
Friend: I’m on Ritalin now and it makes me functional. ADD is not bullshit.
Me: I guess my ADD was bullshit and yours isn’t then.
Friend: yup.
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@Lawrence yeah I agree that coercion of kids, prisoners and other vulnerable people is bad, I was not trying to deny that. I was trying to point out that some people think that expansion of dsm categories means they will have unwanted medication or accommodations forced on them, and that is unlikely for most adults. However there are important intersections between disability rights nd youth rights and this is one of them.
(Also I took retain if my own free will and it had side effects that made it not worth it. And other ADD meds are not approved in the UK yet so I am just doing my best. Idk.)
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A lot of things are illegal…
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I think part of the problem with mental illness denialism is the naturalistic fallacy. A lot of people have this mindset that natural equals good and unnatural equals bad. Therefore someone cannot be born with a trait that is potentially harmful to them. Under this world view attempts to treat mental illness are inherently suspect and “good” must continually be redefined to the point of meaninglessness. “So what if your unhappy. Unhappy is who you are”.
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The definition of “natural” used in the naturalist fallacy is almost always highly arbitrary and based on other preferences, so it’s not even really a naturalist fallacy, it’s just a solipsistic preference fallacy using ‘naturalism’ to justify itself.
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That quiet hands link was disturbing. Why the fuck would people think “quiet hands” is a good idea.
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As near as I can tell*, the foundational premises of classical Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) are the closest thing that actually exists to—get ready to laugh and then vomit, because this is some dark irony—a stereotypical “autistic geek’s empathyless worldview”:
1. Being scientific is the most important thing in the world.
2. Basing one’s methodologies on unverifiable assumptions is unscientific.
3. Other people’s emotional states are unverifiable.
Of course, other people’s frantic, hysterical screaming is verifiable, but that’s just another behavior to modify. Any belief that that behavior is a manifestion of pain or terror is just an unverifiable assumption.
And even if one were to grant such a belief, for the sake of argument, so what? With enough conditioning, the child will eventually smile and thank you for everything you’ve done for them. And any assumption that that thanks is anything but perfectly genuine is, well, unverifiable.
*Which, to be fair, might or might not be terribly near, when it comes to the original theory. But it certainly does a damn fine job of describing how at least some practitioners actually use it.
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That’s, like… Blue Sun level of horrifying.
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Yep.
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This is tangential, but on the topic of mental illness denialism, I can’t help but think of Thomas Szasz. He would go around saying “mental illness is not real.” When confronted with evidence to the contrary, he would retreat and say, “all I’m saying is that nobody should be *coerced* into psych treatments!” Which is a perfect example of a certain dishonest rhetorical technique that I won’t mention by name. And I fell for it for a much longer time than I care to admit.
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I think Szasz had a decent point that the medical model is not ideal for talking about problems of the mind. The problem was that he had no alternative, and no one else has come up with one, either.
At some point we’ll be in Queen of Angels territory and the question will be a lot more salient.
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I believe that Ozy didn’t want people referring to the technique without specific examples. Whether the technique is actually named is irrelevant; it’s a ban on a topic, not on a keyword. (Although personally, I would think that counts as a sepcific example.)
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Related: I’m bothered by the assumption that treatment’s effectiveness is binary: either it works, or it doesn’t. I take medication for conditions I have and although they help, they by no means make me “normal”. They just prevent my conditions from ruining my life and let me go about my day without it being awful. So when I display symptoms, people kindly fucking suggest, “I thought your medication was supposed to help? Are you sure it’s working?”
Yes, I’m sure, this is the best course of action. Just because they work doesn’t mean I’m 100% normal 100% of the time.
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Big Pharma wants to turn everyone into CORPORATE SLAVES of the CAPITALIST MACHINE!
This is actually true. It isn’t an argument against taking medication when appropriate and helpful, though.
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Apropos of your post:
“TWO months ago, the British Psychological Society released a remarkable document entitled “Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia.” Its authors say that hearing voices and feeling paranoid are common experiences, and are often a reaction to trauma, abuse or deprivation: “Calling them symptoms of mental illness, psychosis or schizophrenia is only one way of thinking about them, with advantages and disadvantages.”
The report says that there is no strict dividing line between psychosis and normal experience: “Some people find it useful to think of themselves as having an illness. Others prefer to think of their problems as, for example, an aspect of their personality which sometimes gets them into trouble but which they would not want to be without.”
The report adds that antipsychotic medications are sometimes helpful, but that “there is no evidence that it corrects an underlying biological abnormality.” It then warns about the risk of taking these drugs for years.
And the report says that it is “vital” that those who suffer with distressing symptoms be given an opportunity to “talk in detail about their experiences and to make sense of what has happened to them” — and points out that mental health services rarely make such opportunities available…”
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