Scribblings with Green Chalk

It seems like everyone is blogging about this. I found the article via Writhe Safely, which was the first blog I discovered about the problem we call psychiatry.

I wish this kind of writing had been when a close friend of mine was diagnosed with schizophrenia. That was several years ago and meant for him an instantaneous descent from respected member of the community to lunatic outcast. Ironically, we both lived right by the mental hospital: sometimes he was on the same side of the wall as me, sometimes he crossed over to the other. The awareness initiatives undertaken by the hospital — an annual “reaching out” day and exhibitions of patients’ artworks — achieved little with respect to thinning the wall. And in spite of art therapy there remained the grim reality of an underfunded institution — because in democratic Poland mental illness was still considered something of a luxury, as I infer from it being constantly shoved lower down the healthcare priority ladder.

Out of Polish cities, Kraków is said to be the most successful in terms of integration of mental patients into the community. I heard about a successful cafe in Kazimierz ran by a group of former and present mental patients. Apart from that one island of tolerance, elsewhere in the country a psychiatric diagnosis means social death.

A lighter sentence comes with admitting to depression. I remember the shame experienced by many of my college friends: they knew they were part of a wave but it was a wave of anonymous individuals. You knew that many of the people in the lecture room with you were on prozac but you had no idea who. It was already back then, however, that I decided to be candid about my issues. Saying it loud meant resisting deeply ingrained self-hatred. On the delicate balance of my issues, self-acceptance weighed more than being perfect in the eyes of others. The scales tips occasionally, yet I stick by that choice in spite of enervating responses from people who are often well-meaning even as they are unaware of the implications they make through their “good advice.” There are those who choose to believe I exaggerate the seriousness of my earlier condition, and those who approach me like a child and try to cajole me back into therapy as someone supposedly never able to fully return to society.

How romantic: to believe that madness insulates the person from real life. It is the “healthy” society that constructs the bubble, while the person in question sits inside the bubble of alienation perceiving how he or she is being treated. There is always a grain of lucidity, even in the darkest times, yet it is commonly overshadowed by society’s vision of madness and by fear.

The missing element for me is respect. I don’t know how attainable compassion is, I don’t know how possible it is not to alienate a person whose world is incomprehensible to others. But not to perceive and not to treat that person as less human would make a world of difference.

I’m not convinced about the appropriateness of the label “mad pride” and the allusion to gay pride. Unlike LGBT people, most people with mental and mood disorders suffer from a condition that sets them apart from “healthy” society in a way that is difficult to deny. Sexuality, in its identity-affirming and defining aspects, is worthy of celebration. But mental illness? Would that not lead to further fetishization? The mad genius myth has not saved anyone yet, only catalyzed pop-culture, so I don’t see how it could lead to a more realistic conception of mental illness all of a sudden. I am not up to theorizing mental illness; however, as I recall my own experience, I felt depression to be far from queerness and close to disability. I don’t want to even try to speak on behalf of other people. With regard to many mental conditions, I am absolutely ignorant. For this reason — and feel free to call me naive — what I am counting on with this New York Times article, is increased awareness about the reality of the lives of people touched by mental illness, finally a more open discussion of pharmaceutic hoaxes and manipulations, and, hopefully, a deep reconsideration of psychiatry. Above all and as always: a dialog.