youarenotyou:

conjuringseed:

intending-to-burn:

gotmagicwithoutwands:

onlinecounsellingcollege:

There are some easy tools that anyone can use to cope with their feelings of anxiety. They include:

1. Learning more about anxiety: This will help you to understand what is happen when you start to feel increasingly anxious. First, remember that we all feel anxious at times. It can help us to prepare for and cope with hard tasks – such as sitting an exam or teaching a class. However, it leads to problems when the danger isn’t real yet our body is signalling a high state of alert.  

2. Learning strategies that help us relax: The two most common strategies for relaxing and unwinding are calming down our breathing and muscle relaxation. The former involves taking slow, gentle breaths (breathing in through the nose, pausing for a few seconds, then breathing out slowly through the mouth, again). The latter involves learning how to tense and relax the different muscles - and then repeating this until our stress levels fall.

3. Actively challenging our anxious thoughts: When we’re anxious and tense we often see the world as a threatening and hostile place. This usually reflects faulty, negative thinking where we jump to conclusions or expect the worse to happen. This is out of proportion, exaggerated thinking which is unrealistic – and makes us feel uptight. A strategy for helping is replacing faulty thinking with a more realistic and accurate approach. This necessitates us challenging our automatic thinking so we see things in a clearer, less distressing way. Of course, it takes practise and effort to shift our change anxious thinking – but it’s worth the effort in the end

4. Facing our fears: One of the best ways of dealing with our fears is exposing ourselves to what makes us feel afraid. For example, if you avoid being with people as this leaves you feeling anxious then the best way forward is to simply face your fear.  You could make a list that goes from “least to most scary” - and then reward yourself each time you move a level up the list.

Note: In many ways, it just takes practise and a conscious decision to not be beaten by anxiety!

Okay, I need to rant for a moment.  While I’m sure that this post is well intentioned and may apply to some people who experience issues with anxiety, it also reads strongly as an “it’s all in your head” argument throughout much of the passage, which is something that I, as someone who has both Bipolar Disorder and Generalized/Social Anxiety issues find deeply disturbing and offensive.  Yes, relaxation techniques might help a bit, but anxiety episodes and/or attacks are not something someone can calm themselves down from in many cases.  If you feel that your anxiety is out of your control, by all means, please speak to a mental health professional and discuss options, including talk therapy or medication.  

I personally have several sets of circumstances that provoke a very strong anxiety reaction (though usually not full on attacks) and that reaction is in no way under my control.  Not being able to find something (due to significant short term memory damage/loss issues), feeling isolated or cut off (ie. cell phone battery running dead when out in public alone), and many other factors can provoke an anxiety reaction even though I take a maintenance medication for my anxiety.  I do also use a case by case basis medication as needed.

So if relaxation works for you, that’s all fine and good, but if it doesn’t, please don’t buy into the idea that you should be able to deal with it if you just think about it and calm down.  Mental Illnesses and disordered behaviors are often caused by real, physiological issues in how the neurological system and neurotransmitters work.  They are not things that you can think your way out of.

Reblogging for the commentary, because when we saw this post we got really pissed off as sufferers of panic disorder. We wish some deep breaths and saying “It’s not really anything to be anxious about” was enough to make everything all better.

^ yep.

loooool @ #4. exposure therapy is NOT something a person should be doing on their own, that is very dangerous advice. these things are good tips for like, mild, day to day, common anxiety that doesn’t impair a person’s functioning, but absolutely useless for anyone with moderate to severe anxiety disorders including PTSD (which has been proven to structurally change the brain.) and srsly as a person who has had debilitating anxiety for most of their life, it has only gotten worse as i’ve gotten older. i thought i could deal with it on my own and refused to take medication and continued forcing myself into situations that gave me extreme anxiety, because i’d heard so many times that this was the One Way To Cure Oneself, except it didn’t cure anything. i barely got through high school and couldn’t keep a job to save my life. and it never got easier, it only got worse. panic attacks, dissociation, paranoid delusions, the whole deal, and it got way, way more severe after PTSD. like i would pass out or throw up if i was around other people. i would start hallucinating. i would be unable to hear anything because the voices of people talking would turn into this loud buzzing. for over a year. trust me, i fucking TRIED but there was nothing i could do about this until i started taking meds because it’s a goddamn chemical problem. and eventually, i stopped taking them (again) because shit like the OP wrote has caused me to internalize so much victim blaming ableist nonsense about how i just need to try harder. this time, the anxiety was so bad i wound up drinking alcohol every time i needed to leave the house. in the end, i dissociated so badly for over a week that i unknowingly walked into oncoming traffic when i forced myself to leave the house because i thought i could “fake it til i made it”. so yeah anyone who thinks that anxiety is something we can control can fuck right off.

Yeah, all this commentary. Bolded just above is mine. Telling myself that everyone experiences anxiety is pretty meaningless when I have PTSD and don’t know where the fuck I am. It would be totally false to tell myself then that everyone goes through that, because they don’t.

Exposure therapy can work but needs to be done really carefully and in a controlled environment. And again, that’s not shit I’m gonna just try on my own and assume that my upbeat attitude will make it okay.

I really hate this accusation about how your anxiety comes from how fucked up you falsely think the world is. That’s really unhelpful when plenty of people’s anxiety is caused by the fucked up things that happen in a fucked up world. My shit comes directly from structural oppression. Like lack of resources and criminalization of people of color. What good would it do to tell myself the world isn’t that bad? That shit happened, and keeps happening, and it makes no sense to pretend it isn’t the case to sooth my own anxiety.

Like was said above, putting all this emphasis on people just trying harder to get better, as though things larger than them don’t also need to be fixed, or as though fucked up things aren’t happening around them, is really limited and really dangerous. Maybe this is self-help for stress out suburban white kids, but I don’t know a whole lot of people whose shit this applies to.

fuckyeahlatinamericanhistory:

EXISTENTIAL ANGST GAME STRESSFUL: thegoddamazon: daniellemertina: karnythia: Ever notice how there’s no…

crankyskirt:

weexist-weresist:

thegoddamazon:

daniellemertina:

karnythia:

Ever notice how there’s no mention of the psychological damage done to communities of color by colonialism, imperialism, or slavery? No mention of any syndromes that might be created by an ongoing message of genetic & social inferiority constantly beings spoonfed to kids? Gee, I wonder why there’s no discussion of the long term harm that could be done to a community as a result of systemic dehumanization & oppression.

I was just thinking this the other day. Between the media/ educationally inflicted messages of our inferiority there has to be some psychological ramifications. I know sociology has words like “internalized stereotype threat” and “internalized racism” (although that is only discussed when a black person literally hates other black people when there is far more to that).

I find it interesting that people have theorized about the psychological ramifications of rich people who don’t get attention from their parents, or people in unfulfilling white collar jobs, but NOTHING about the dehumanizing effect of the combination of poverty & blackness. Or just blackness.

They’re afraid of what effects the inescapable truth they are destined to uncover will have on the world. Better to keep the masses ignorant than have them aware that their lives are not okay.

Here are some links to get some discussions started:

Racism and Asian Mental Health

Mental Health Problems More Common Among Kids Who Feel Racial Discrimination

Racial Battle Fatigue and Blacks

Muslims and Mental Health

Depression Among Minority Children

Racism and Mental Health of Children

Poverty Goes Straight to the Brain

Model Minority Myth + Stress

Mental Toll of Racism

Asian Women and Suicide

this list is accessible articles, a quick scholarly search yields thousands of complicated studies for brainiacs who are interested

Reblogging for personal interest in psych resources for marginalized groups. This is a damn good list to begin digging.

Why Do So Many Latina Teens Attempt Suicide? A Conceptual Model For Research.

I’d also add a lot of bell hooks’ more recent work, specifically Killing Rage and Rock My Soul (both of which I read and liked a lot, much more than a lot of her writing). Other books of hers about mental health and self care are Sisters of the Yam, Salvation, and All About Love. She cites a book a lot called Black Rage, a psych study of anti-black racism published in the 1960s. I have a thrift store copy but haven’t read it yet to vouch for it.

At least 10 times a day. I live with a psychiatric disability. (via microaggressions)

Or else, “Don’t listen to them, they’re just crazy” or any variation on that dismissal.

imaginalfreqs:

readnfight:

and how can I make it stop?

He should seriously be in a mental hospital. But you know, the dominant culture / corporate music industry LOVES to put psychopaths on pedestals, give them lots of money, and a microphone. And our youth are the first to listen to this shit. #crazyy

I don’t like Eminem because his shit is oppressive. I don’t want to argue against what he says with other shit that is oppressive, in this case putting down people based on mental health. “He’s crazy” is absolutely not why I want to see his popularity end; his sexism is. Just like I don’t want to see people make money and fame off of misogyny, I don’t want to see people locked up in mental hospitals against their will.

In fact, some really amazing MCs have talked about dealing with mental health issues, especially if you include addiction and alcoholism, and that’s not a reason to trash them; if anything, I want to see far far more space made in hip-hop for talking honestly about mental health.

youarenotyou:

Seriously though, the absolute biggest reason I don’t get involved in local activism is because of shit like the Icarus project. It really fucking sucks that I can’t find people to organize with because they don’t take my disabilities seriously. Because, apparently, if you want to be radical at all (and I’m using that term really loosely) you have to subscribe to the dangerous fucking bullshit rhetoric that the Icarus project encourages. The Icarus project wants you to believe that mental illness isn’t real, that people who are diagnosed with MI have “gifts” and that pharmaceutical medications are bad. Two minutes on their website and I’m directed to guides on “How to come off psychiatric drugs” and how “Friends make the best medicine”.

Here’s a quote that really demonstrates how much they romanticize mental illness (which they of course put in scare quotes, because it’s not real):

Participation in The Icarus Project helps us overcome alienation and tap into the true potential that lies between brilliance and madness.

And this isn’t isolated to IP. The ENTIRE radical left loves to talk about how depression is the natural result of a consumerist, alienating culture and that corporations are trying to control us by pathologizing personality traits and shoving drugs at us. I’m always hearing about how untreated mental illness produces ~artists~ and we’re really trapped creative souls that have been indoctrinated by capitalist society; our magical gifts to humanity are repressed under all those psychiatric drugs.

Hi, I have mental illnesses. They are real and part of my activism is trying to convince people of that, which is fucking exhausting because actually, the dominant culture already teaches people that relying on meds is weak, that MI is all in your head, that we all just need to exercise more, take more vitamins, work less. People already believe this nonsense without “radical mental health” people like the Icarus Project and its followers preaching more ableist bullshit.

I need to take medication if I want to continue to be alive. That isn’t because of capitalism, or because I’ve been brainwashed by the pharmaceutical industry, or because of some deep desire within me to be a more productive worker/citizen. It’s because my brain works differently than other people’s. It’s because without medication, some of my conditions will worsen and cause permanent brain damage, delusions, and even suicide. Is the pharmaceutical industry problematic? Yes. Is psychiatry oppressive? Yes. Does society need to change to better allow people like me to operate within it? Yes. But none of this means my mental illnesses aren’t real or that they’re actually a gift that needs to be harnessed. None of this means I don’t actually need medication. None of this means I should be shamed for being dependent on pills.

I mean, I’m generally very quick to talk about how considering doctors “the ultimate authority” is wrong and hierarchical; that the way we view, discuss,  and diagnose illness is flawed; that the pharmaceutical industry is primarily interested in making money, not helping people; that having a personality disorder doesn’t mean I’m cursed or flawed. But The Icarus project works against me.

If you have mental illnesses and consider them to be more valuable than harmful? That’s great! You want to avoid psychiatric drugs? Go ahead. But to try and speak for all people with mental illnesses - and to encourage people to stop/avoid traditional routes of treatment - that’s fucking dangerous.

Here’s a radical notion: Stop demanding that I justify my need for medication. Stop speaking for me. Stop telling people with MI what’s best for them. Stop equating mental illness with a toxic society/culture. Stop dismissing science and traditional treatments. Stop invalidating me when I fucking talk about my experiences.

There’s just no room in radical communities for people like me. And they won’t let me forget it.

 The Icarus Project needs to admit that it is pretty much only about bipolar, and even within that, they need to limit themselves to people with bipolar who can live with it. If they want that to be their focus, to work on celebrating and helping people celebrate being able to live with things labelled as mental illnesses, that would be a very rad project.

I wrote about this before and don’t wanna go totally into it again, I really don’t have the energy, speaking on mental health, but I think the main problem is their scope. They’re speaking for way too many people who are dealing with way too many different mental health issues. I don’t know what it’s like for someone who is bipolar, so I’m not gonna tell them that they should or shouldn’t be on meds, that they should or shouldn’t see it as an illness, etc. I can only say what my own shit is like; I would never want to tell someone else what they should be doing with their mental health based only on my own.

And, yes, I totally agree with the way that they want to bring societal issues into mental health. Things like racism and sexism affect my mental well-being every day. Would I be out of line to assume that most people involved with the Icarus Project are white? So I think I can assume racism affects most of us preeeetty differently. And being bummed that the anarchist utopia only exists within your white punk anarchist house, and that it would spread if only everyone got into composting—that’s not the same as being depressed. That is being bummed about something.

I read their zine Friends Make the Best Medicine a month or so ago, to see if we wanted to add it to our library. (We didn’t). I was pretty insulted by it for many of the above reasons. If people can use their mental state as a gift, more power to them, that rules. I myself am going to be asking for stronger meds, and was in the hospital last week, and am probably going to be in the hospital again soon. It is really not helpful for a zine to tell me that maybe I just need more (white anarchist) friends.

I wrote in my zine (which I have been meaning to put online, but I don’t have internet at home anymore) about looking for ways to make radical mental health actually work, and mostly what I think it takes is incorporating mental health into social movements and social forces into mental health, and also leaving people free to decide what works best for them, and then respecting their judgement.

Also, I use illness in quotes sometimes not because I want to say that mental illness doesn’t exist, but because I don’t want to label someone else’s shit an illness. I want that judgement to be up to them. I haven’t been sure whether to even identify my own shit as an illness, although the past 6 months it’s been pretty clear. Maybe it’s semantics.

(via feministrobot-deactivated201203)

I’m in the stage of writing my zine Readin & Fightin #3 where I’m finally getting quotes all in one place and diggin back through stuff. I’m splitting it half on education, half on mental health, and how those come up in women of color literature. And it just so happens that I have been reading two books by bell hooks that are entirely about both those things. I know there’s often critique of bell hooks by other radical women of color because she sometimes lets white people off the hook (which happened from time to time in the two books I’m reading) and because white feminists use her as a token woman of color perspective so they can claim diversity (happens a fair amount, but I’m not sure she’s the one to blame). BUT despite that there’s a lot of stuff of hers I’m reading that really nails what I’m trying to work on in my zine. And I just watched Black Is, Black Ain’t and she is THE BOMB in that.

Here’s quotes:

Black supporters of the civil rights struggle for desegregation of schools did not take into account the way our self-esteem as black students would be affected when we were taught by racist teachers. … Black schools were locations where our self-esteem as black students was affirmed. This was not because all our teachers were black, but because the majority of them were politically astute about the impact of racist thinking on black self-esteem and chose to counter that. “Standards,” Teaching Community p. 69

Education as the practice of freedom affirms healthy self-esteem in students as it promotes their capacity to be aware and live consciously. It teaches them to reflect and act in ways that further self-actualization, rather than conformity to the status quo. “Standards,” Teaching Community p. 72

The segregated schools of my past were the locations where many black folks first were affirmed in our longing to be educated. That affirmation was crucial to our academic development. Yet segregated schools today, particularly in our public school system, function merely as reservations where students are housed, disciplined, and punished, or taught that they cannot achieve academically. “Standards,” Teaching Community p. 79

Until this culture can acknowledge the pathology of white supremacy, we will never create a cultural context wherein the madness of white racist hatred of blacks or the uncontrollable rage that surfaces as a response to that madness can be investigated, critically studies, and understood. Denying that rage is at times a useful and constructive response to exploitation, oppression, and continued injustice, but it creates a cultural climate where the psychological impact of racism can be ignored, and where race and racism become topics that are depoliticized. Racism can then be represented as an issue for blacks only, a mere figment of our perverse paranoid imaginations. “Beyond Black Rage,” Killing Rage p. 26

Placed in positions of authority in educations structures and on the job, white people could oversee and eradicate organized resistance. The new neo-colonial environment gave white folks even greater access and control over the African-American mind. Integrated educational structures were the locations where whites could best colonize the minds and imaginations of black folks. “Teaching Resistance,” Killing Rage p. 109

Emphasis on racial uplift, though crucial to efforts to intervene on and challenge white supremacy, nevertheless created a culture of shame wherein any aspect of black life that could be seen as evidence of mental disorder, of pathology, had to be hidden or viewed as utterly aberrant. It is this untalked-about culture of shame that has made it practically impossible for African Americans to acknowledge the ways in which living in a white supremacist society and being the constant targets of racist assault and abuse are fundamentally psychologically traumatic. For black folks to acknowledge that we are collectively wounded by racial trauma would require severing our attachment to an unproblematized tradition of racial uplift where that trauma had been minims in the effort to prove that we were not collectively dehumanized by racist oppression and exploitation. … To break with a colonizing mentality, black folks must acknowledge the need for racial uplift even as we also engage a politics of resistance that can address the psychological trauma we experience. “Healing Our Wounds,” Killing Rage p. 134-135

workingpooranarchist:

A really awesome, super fast easy read that I CANNOT RECOMMEND HARD ENOUGH:  I’m Crazy  by Adam Bourret.  It’s a short graphic novel that deals with the author’s experiences as a young queer man living with OCD and other mental health issues.  And it’s totally fucking amazing.  It’s a great, accessible read that describes incredibly well what it’s like to have OCD, what it’s like to want to commit suicide, what it’s like to have intrusive thoughts that you fear will manifest, and it intersects those experiences with his relationship with his boyfriend and his family in a way that is beautiful and sweet and adorable and real.

Read it if you can find it!  Seriously, super worthwhile.  (I was lucky enough to meet him at a bookfair a couple years back and traded him some zines for a copy of it— actual best trade I’ve EVER made, serious)  Last night my anxiety was reallyfuckingbad and after I calmed down enough to function a bit I reread it and it helped me feel a lot better, less lonely and fucked in the head.

Thanks for the recommendation! This sounds good, I’ll try to find it.

Ugh, anarchists on facebook, please stop the shit about how someone’s problematic or violent behavior can only be explained by “mental illness” and then making fun of people for being “crazy” and therefore violent. Srsly we’ve been over this. I want to say that I know you know better and trust that I mean it.

Apparently this isn’t even the first time I’ve had to tag things anarcho-fail cause the tag just popped up. So shape your shit up!

I’m sorry, WHAT, all around:

PHOENIX – One of the Arizona shooting victims was arrested Saturday and then taken for a psychiatric evaluation after authorities said he took a picture of a tea party leader at televised town hall meeting and yelled: “you’re dead.”

James Eric Fuller, 63, objected to something Trent Humphries said during the forum taped for a special edition of ABC’s “This Week” with Christiane Amanpour, Pima County sheriff’s spokesman Jason Ogan said. Fuller was in the front row and apparently became upset when Humphries suggested that any conversations about gun control should be delayed until all the dead were buried, KGUN-TV in Tucson reported.

Fuller was arrested on misdemeanor disorderly conduct and threat charges, Ogan said. While Fuller was being escorted out, deputies decided he needed a mental health evaluation and he was taken to a hospital, where he remained Saturday evening.

The hospital will determine when he will be released, Ogan said.

Fuller was one of 19 people shot at a Safeway store Jan. 8. Six people died and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords remains in critical condition with a bullet wound to the head.

Fuller described the shootings as “a bad crime drama” in an interview on CBS’ “The Early Show.” He said he felt a bullet that hit his knee but didn’t know he had also been struck in the back. Fuller, a naval air veteran, drove himself to Northwest Hospital after being shot, according to the Arizona Daily Star. He was later taken to University Medical Center where he was released two days later.

The show was videotaped at St. Odilia’s Catholic Church in Tucson. Victims, witnesses, emergency responders and some of those hailed as heroes after the shooting discussed the tragedy.

The special will air Sunday on “This Week” with Christiane Amanpour.

Whaaat. Dude survives this shooting, says, “You’re dead” to a tea-party dude a few days later, and gets locked up in a psych hospital against his will?? While they’re talking about gun control on a station called KGUN. I’m sorry, what the f. Let people grieve. Let people deal with their traumas, don’t traumatize them further by arresting and institutionalizing them. Shit’s a mess.

Good post at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blog by a guest blogger about the ways stories in the media get twisted and pulled out of context, this is an excerpt:

In the days following the shooting, the public reaction was unified in its condemnation of [Lovelle] Mixon. With just a handful of biographical details to complete their portraits, people decided who Mixon was. He was a cop killer, a monster. Unhinged at the very least, everyone agreed. Though not to his family he wasn’t.

Of course there are very different racial dynamics at play; Mixon was an undereducated poor black man with a criminal record. Loughner, a 22-year-old white man living in an Arizona desert town, may have been immersed in the politics of white nationalist groups.
  
We want a narrative so badly. All I’ve got right now is that we should watch our language closely, be mindful and respectful. The public officials and commentators who need to remember that most may not. But I think we already know the lessons Loughner’s shooting can offer. We already know political discourse in this country has reached a crazed, ear-splitting pitch.

I’m reblogging this because I want to think about so-treu’s commentary. I’m not sure how I feel about it. It makes me uneasy, but then again, so do most things these days.

I think as always I want to see this be complicated. I don’t want to say that people’s mental health always makes them violent, I don’t want to say that people’s mental health never makes them violent. Dealing with mental health issues in a violent world, and in a world that wants you to fail, is hard to say the least. And like I touched on answering this question earlier tonight, I want to leave space for people to have very different feelings toward their mental health.

My mental “illness” (I said earlier I don’t like that word, at least for myself or to assume to use on others, but if other people want to use that for themselves I will absolutely respect that) feels like a draining struggle, one that I am hoping to get over someday but also that feels like it is going to suck me under. Even still, I try to see ways it might affect me positively. But then I’ve known other people with other mental “illnesses” who feel much more positively about them, and who have harnessed their brain functioning for creative output or a different insight, or whatever, or who see it as a hurdle but something they can live with.

Also, with regard to the study, I don’t really find it surprising that white people don’t see people of color as fully human or deserving of empathy. I think that’s pretty predictable. I guess what I’m saying is, I get that maybe the aim is to pathologize white supremacy, to say white supremacy is a mental illness, or something that gets in the way of decent functioning. I don’t really know if that’s a necessary step, and I don’t know if that approach would be helpful. It might just be alienating. But I’ll be thinking about it.

So as with everything…. I think it’s complicated. And I want that to be okay. And I will be thinking about what so-treu wrote below, and how that might help complicate this.

Also here is a link to the study referenced.

so-treu:

dinokitten:

adorianmode:

I’m mentally ill.

The most violent thing I’ve ever done is fight with my sister, fights where she was almost always the aggressor.

Mental illness and violence are two very different things that have very little to do with one another.

And if you think that shooting someone is axiomatically proof that the shooter is “deranged” or “unstable” or “psycho” or anything along those lines, unfollow me right fucking now, because when you say that? You are hurting all people with mental illness, including me.

Well, not all of them. I’m mentally ill (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder) and I have very violent tendencies as a result. Other people on here can vouch for this. I do agree that not all mental illness causes violence or violent tendencies, but some of it does. I was not like this before I developed PTSD, and now I am. That says something, I think. Blanket statements like the above can lead to untruths — while I am sure that very, VERY many mentally ill people are not violent, it’s important to acknowledge that some of us are.

augh i don’t even know what i’m trying to say here. I just feel like… it’s not going to help anything or anyone if we pretend that mental illness NEVER CAUSES VIOLENCE EVER. Because it does, sometimes.

oh god i’m just going to shut up and never speak again

you know what though? ^this. and im sure i’m gonna get shit for it, but i really can’t get down with the whole “crazy is a slur and shouldn’t be used ever” position. because as several people have pointed out, incuding dinokitten here, “crazy” and violence are not always mutually exclusive. ilykadamen says it amazingly so i’m just gonna copy and paste:

You can be crazy “with depression” or “with alcoholism” or “with an eating disorder” (I can claim at least 1-1/2 of the three; two, if I weren’t in denial) and you can also be crazy with “No, but for real:  Why shouldn’t I torture, rape, and kill people?—No, I mean, give me a logical reason.”  Have you ever had that argument with somebody?  Yeah, well, I HAVE.  Turns out the definition of “logic” for such people is “suggest to me even one scenario in which this might negatively affect me—so I can refute the likelihood of it ever coming to pass.”  May you never, ever, EVER meet up with that brand of crazy.  I mean it.  Even if I hate you, I mean it.

It’s too broad a word, crazy.  This term fucking sucks, okay!  It means too many things!  It’s unsuitable to claim as an identity until we clear some shit up!  Which fucking kind of crazy do you mean?  Because yeah actually, there is a kind of crazy you can have that is going to make me go, “Okay, fine, but YOU HAVE TO STAY OVER THERE, away from me.  Love you, but get the fuck out.”

and i keep returning to radicallyhottoff’s point that it’s about compassion and multiplicity of the definition of crazy . and how in communities of color, for example, you’ll hear things like “white people done lost they minds.” especially these days. and it doesn’t sit well with me, the idea of going up to a person who has been historically marginalized in ways not only relating to color class gender but also of mental health (for ex the idea of black women being pathologically, irrationally angry) and being like YOU SHOULDN’T USE THAT WORD. because one, that’s missing the point, and their positionality, but also because it that moment it seems obvious that they’re not referring to people with bipolar disorder, or depression, etc. they’re referring to whiteness and the sick way that it has ordered the world so that it is constantly at the center of it. there was a study that was released within the past year about how when white people look at a white person doing something, then look at a poc doing the same thing, their brains don’t recognize them as human. certain signals that were sent to the brain with white folks were absent when they looked at colored folks. (and im mangling the results of this study horribly, but i can’t find the actual study right now but if anyone knows what im talking about i’d appreciate a link) and you can’t tell me that’s not a form of mental illness, i’m sorry. to look at a human being and NOT be able to recognize them as human? how is that NOT crazy?

i’m not saying that crazy isn’t ableist, or that it can’t be used as a slur. it can and it does. but i think that there’s more than one definition, and that there’s a danger of taking away a potential tool of critique for whole communities if we don’t recognize that. and im thinking of my folks specifically, and how we can call george bush and the tea party crazy, but if someone dares refer to that one family member with mental illness as crazy that somebody is getting snatched up with a quickness.

We’re too quick to use “mental illness” as an explanation for violence.

By Vaughan Bell Posted Sunday, Jan. 9, 2011, at 12:52 AM ET

Shortly after Jared Lee Loughner had been identified as the alleged shooter of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, online sleuths turned up pages of rambling text and videos he had created. A wave of amateur diagnoses soon followed, most of which concluded that Loughner was not so much a political extremist as a man suffering from “paranoid schizophrenia.”

For many, the investigation will stop there. No need to explore personal motives, out-of-control grievances or distorted political anger. The mere mention of mental illness is explanation enough. This presumed link between psychiatric disorders and violence has become so entrenched in the public consciousness that the entire weight of the medical evidence is unable to shift it. Severe mental illness, on its own, is not an explanation for violence, but don’t expect to hear that from the media in the coming weeks.

Seena Fazel is an Oxford University psychiatrist who has led the most extensive scientific studies to date of the links between violence and two of the most serious psychiatric diagnoses—schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, either of which can lead to delusions, hallucinations, or some other loss of contact with reality. Rather than looking at individual cases, or even single studies, Fazel’s team analyzed all the scientific findings they could find. As a result, they can say with confidence that psychiatric diagnoses tell us next to nothing about someone’s propensity or motive for violence.

A 2009 analysis of nearly 20,000 individuals concluded that increased risk of violence was associated with drug and alcohol problems, regardless of whether the person had schizophrenia. Two similar analyses on bipolar patients showed, along similar lines, that the risk of violent crime is fractionally increased by the illness, while it goes up substantially among those who are dependent on intoxicating substances. In other words, it’s likely that some of the people in your local bar are at greater risk of committing murder than your average person with mental illness. 

Of course, like the rest of the population, some people with mental illness do become violent, and some may be riskier when they’re experiencing delusions and hallucinations. But these infrequent cases do not make “schizophrenia” or “bipolar” a helpful general-purpose explanation for criminal behavior. If that doesn’t make sense to you, here’s an analogy: Soccer hooligans are much more likely to be violent when they attend a match, but if you tell me that your friend has gone to a soccer match, I’ll know nothing about how violent a person he is. Similarly, if you tell me your friend punched someone, the fact that he goes to soccer matches tells me nothing about what caused the confrontation. This puts recent speculation about the Arizona suspect in a distinctly different light: If you found evidence on the Web that Jared Lee Loughner or some other suspected killer was obsessed with soccer or football or hockey and suggested it might be an explanation for his crime, you’d be laughed at. But do the same with “schizophrenia” and people nod in solemn agreement. This is despite the fact that your chance of being murdered by a stranger with schizophrenia is so vanishingly small that a recent study of four Western countries put the figure at one in 14.3 million. To put it in perspective, statistics show you are about three times more likely to be killed by a lightning strike.

The fact that mental illness is so often used to explain violent acts despite the evidence to the contrary almost certainly flows from how such cases are handled in the media. Numerous studies show that crimes by people with psychiatric problems are over-reported, usually with gross inaccuracies that give a false impression of risk. With this constant misrepresentation, it’s not surprising that the public sees mental illness as an easy explanation for heartbreaking events. We haven’t yet learned all the details of the tragic shooting in Arizona, but I suspect mental illness will be falsely accused many times over.

I hate how the media does this, over and over again, and how it becomes popular discourse. Everyone becomes a pop psychologist, thinking that because they saw an episode of Dateline about bipolar one time, they know all about it and are now gonna diagnose people with it and that’s that.

Before this happened I was hearing similar things in the work I’m doing around police brutality, where some people in our group have been saying stuff about how the cops that have been beating people up must be mentally ill, they’re veterans who came back from Iraq and have PTSD, etc. But as far as we know, they’re only as mentally “ill” as you could consider the power-tripping and delusions of grandeur of being a cop as being mental “illness” (I hate that word btw). And I have PTSD, but I haven’t gone on a spree of hunting down rapists and kicking their asses—I mean, I wish!, but what actually happens is that PTSD makes me hide out in my room and makes me scared of everything, not that it makes me violent.

Also, because people see mental health as an individual’s issue—which I would argue it isn’t—when discourse writes someone off as mentally “ill” as the explanation of violence, there’s no need to dig deeper. So in this case, there’s no need to look at race and class tensions in Arizona that are flaring up, because the guy is assumed to be schizophrenic because he wrote some weird shit on the internet.

Oh god, I’m at the library downtown and a lady is scolding her 10ish-year-old daughter for being sad when she has nothing to be sad about. She isn’t asking why she’s sad, she’s just telling her not to be. She’s giving her all the old lines about, “You’re not living in a shelter. You have cable TV. There’s kids in Africa and kids all over the world who don’t have a place to live. Don’t be so emotional.” This is what she’s saying verbatim, I’m typing while I listen to her. And she’s wondering why her kid is now crying in public when she’s saying stuff like that. Let your kid be emotional, that’s great!

ETA: I should also note that they are black, because I remember hitting the realization some time in high school of how I’d been told things like, “There’s kids starving in Africa!” and how that comparison was a place where some sort of solidarity could be happening, but instead I was being told how much luckier/more fortunate/better I was for being born black in America instead of black in Africa. It made me furious, like I’d been cheated out of an opportunity for solidarity instead. (I was really interested in pan-Africanism and its application to other places when I was in high school. Okay, I still am.)

dancingonembers:

“i think the idea of a ‘mental health day’ is something completely invented by people who have no clue what it’s like to have bad mental health. the idea that your mind can be aired out in twenty-four hours is kind of like saying heart disease can be cured if you eat the right breakfast cereal. mental health days only exist for people who have the luxury of saying ‘i don’t want to deal with things today’ and then can take the whole day off, while the rest of us are stuck fighting the fights we always fight, with no one really caring one way or the other.”

—

Will Grayson, Will Grayson by David Levithan (via alliterate)

In college I took an entire mental health semester. Basically I picked classes that wouldn’t have a lot of homework & wouldn’t be too hard, and I got off campus as much as possible, and I slept enough, and went to therapy once a week, and knit & sewed while other people wrote papers, and started gaining back all the weight I’d lost from feeling awful with PTSD shit. And it still wasn’t enough. So then I took a mental health senior year where I did all those same things except therapy, but also moved off campus, skipped class a lot, stayed away from campus when I could, barely got my school shit done in time to graduate, … still wasn’t enough. In the meantime I’d cut myself off from things & babied myself just to get by. Two & a half years later I’m still in the same spot & frustrated.

Mental health days are really just a brief vacation. Maybe they should be a day to be thankful for the decent state of your mental health, if it can be restored just by taking a day to skip work.

(via dancingonembers-deactivated2011)