'Mad Pride'
The excellent Psychotherapy tumblelog linked to an article on so-called ‘Mad Pride,’ a movement which argues through the liberal use of romanticism and lyricism that mental illnesses are less crippling organic diseases which lead to ruin or death if untreated than marvelous alternative configurations of the psyche which a less conformist society would celebrate.
I’ve written about this subject twice before, but at the risk of being redundant: there is without question a tremendous problem with over-diagnosis of mental illness (as there is of under-diagnosis, incidentally). This is less a function of facile collusion between evil companies and greedy doctors than a reflection of America’s predilection for technocracy and medicalization, which we might paraphrase Hamlet in describing: if nothing is but thinking makes it so, in an objective and post-industrial world nothing is without technocratic thinking saying so, preferably in jargon.
Sadness is meaningless; only depression suffices to communicate how severely I mourn my deceased cat. Or perhaps I am bored in class and daydream of ultraviolence and fast cars; three decades ago I might have made a fine mechanic, but in the 21st century parents feel everyone must be a white-collar professional, so Adderall is needed stat.
Etcetera. The desire to have a lexically-inviolable, sacred excuse from a priest of our new church is powerful, and doctors err, and companies attempt to make money. Excessive diagnosis and faddish disorders come and go, and while it is no light matter it does not justify the literary leap Mad Pride activists make, which reflects a terrible poverty of understanding.
Taking as a departure point the fallibility of diagnostic processes, Mad Pride advocates sentimentalize mental illness as a poetic, associative, richly experiential mode of human existence that is under attack from reactive, repressive forces of social control; they cite their skimmed copies of Brave New World and deploy the alluring language of the academic to condemn “the codification of psychical norms and the enforcement of society’s expectations through psychopharmacological punishments.” They imagine that in a free enough world, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and depression would be accommodated and accepted and even desired: after all, think of how many artists have been insane!
To call this bullshit is almost charitable; it is something much worse: it is the exploitation of the diseased by the lyrical, the erection of platforms and podiums on the backs of the homeless alcoholics and the hallucinating mental cripples and the stricken and fearful among us all. That some of us with mental illness cheer along makes this not better but worse: it is like preaching to alcoholics that perhaps total abstention isn’t really needed. This intellectual crusade against “mainstream society” comes at the expense of people for whom medication means life and lack of treatment means despair and death.
As I have said before, I hope they save some of their wise words and soaring emotions for the eulogies they’ll need to deliver, unless they can find it in their hearts to leave us alone and protest an injustice that is actually occurring. It’s not as though there’s a shortage of them, and meanwhile in the world of consequences doctors and nurses and families do not need further difficulty in persuading those like me to accept that the brain -like any other organ- can be dysfunctional enough to require treatment, and that mental illness isn’t an identity but in fact an obstacle. It bars one from formulating the identity one feels within oneself, hemmed in by the ‘spectacular’ topography of aberration and damage, buried underneath witless moods and unfriendly delusions.
Note: the author of Psychotherapy was not advocating ‘Mad Pride,’ just noting it; none of this is in opposition to him or his work.
