Radical brainmeats
May 26, 2007 at 10:11 pm (academia, activism, carnival of radical action, class, disability, feminism, health, immigration, mental health, multiculturalism, race and racism, relationships, self-involved blather, theory, thesis)
It seems like most bloggers I read are also heavily active in campaigns for political and social change. My own involvement in activism has been so sporadic that I feel like a fraud claiming to be an activist. I’m not nearly experienced enough with activist work to feel entitled to the appellation, although activism is something I desperately want to do.
When I started working on my thesis I strongly believed that theory could be empowering and support social change…. now I’m not so sure. I’m well aware that the class and caste privilege I enjoy underwrites whatever manage to think, understand, or express politically. There are times when I feel that the intellectual pursuits of studying, discussion, and theorising are a waste of my time, and I should be out there working hard for social change. But I’m also well aware of the obstacles to my doing that.
A few weeks ago I went along to a mental illness discussion group at university. Student campaigning around mental illness has been pretty much non-existent, which is something people are addressing now. The discussion was led by a woman who’d been diagnosed with a mental illness, and recently had a very nasty experience with the mental health system.
The nexus of issues — mental health, social justice, and activism — is very confronting for me. In the discussions at university, I haven’t mentioned that I’ve been diagnosed with a mental illness, and I’ve been in and out of the mental health system since I was very young. For me, depression is still something I treat as private, almost secret, and a matter of managing my own time and energy. This is because I’ve felt an intense amount of stigma around it from a lot of circles, especially left activist circles.
My latest bout of serious depression began in 2003, a few months after the USA invaded Iraq. I was heavily involved in campaigning against the invasion, doing something almost daily, which stirred up a lot of intense emotions. One of those was frustration at the way the campaign was organised.
As an independent activist working with people belonging to socialist parties, I had very little say in campaign strategy. At the same time, I was tokenised as a woman of colour in a white-dominated movement; I was urged to make speeches at rallies and forums, but because I wasn’t part of their organisation I couldn’t contribute at the caucuses where each faction determined how they’d vote. The parties that trumpeted loudly about justice used me personally — they’d assign a member to make friends with me to woo me into their organisation, or at least into voting along party lines. Yet most of the work I did was handing out leaflets and putting up posters.
Ironic that the period of time that I was most heavily involved with politics was also the time when I felt most pressured, alienated and dehumanised. A few months later I was in the grip of some of the most intense lows of my life.
Since then I’ve dallied with the mental health system again, and ultimately rejected it as a means of defining or addressing my mentality.
These are experiences that have led me to really doubt that thinking is such a magnificent thing that ideas can transcend social boundaries and set humanity apart from everything else. Part of my middle class (although not wealthy) upbringing was a belief in the power of good ideas to make a difference, and to overcome material obstacles to their realisation. Like most ideologies, it operates in such a way as to deny its material underpinnings. It underlies a liberal humanist model of agency that marginalises anyone who doesn’t have the means to realise their ideas: women, people of colour, working-class people, peasant-class people, disabled people (including the mentally ill), queer people, trans people, and anyone else whose oppression markedly reduces their ability to access and use resources.
I think mental illness, in some ways more so than race and gender, breaks the liberal humanist model of agency in fundamental ways. Agency, according to the liberal humanist model, is based on rationality, the cornerstone of consciousness. Mental illness is by definition the evacuation of the capacity for rationality in a human being.
Internet discourse about itself holds that the internet is a sphere of pure ideas, where inequalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, etc. don’t matter. What matters are the quality of your ideas, evaluated by rational minds all made equal by freedom of speech and equal access to the means of communication. In an environment like this, emotions are unnecessary. In many ways, this is the same belief academia has about itself.
Women of colour know it’s different.
Now I’m going to discuss some things that came up in the recent conflicts over Jessica Valenti’s book Full Frontal Feminism. I do not want to discuss the book, and any comments criticising me for my position Re: Valenti or the book are neither welcome nor relevant. I have nothing to say about either of them. I do not read Valenti’s site, Feministing, and I have not read the book. That’s because I live in Australia, where the book is unavailable, and I find Feministing too US-centric to be worth my internet time. I realise how debate about the book has spanned several blogs, posts and threads, but I do NOT want it to be brought here. Comments about it will be edited for irrelevant content.
Moreover, this is a safe space for women of colour to talk about their concerns. Specifically, the way that subtle racism and sexism marginalise us and affect our mental health. Comments that aren’t about this topic will be closely scrutinised.
Recently a number of women of colour have talked about the hurtful effects of internet discourse about this book on them. The ways that woc have been positioned draw on the ideology of the rational liberal humanist agent and relegate the concerns of women of colour to a space outside that model.
The fact that this has been accomplished through doublespeak, contradiction, evasion, and outright ignoring woc doesn’t affect the integrity of the model. By nature, the dualism of the model ensures that criticism mostly travels in one direction, and the material inequalities behind that duality are ignored.
What does this mean for woc?
For activism, it means a lack of discursive space in which to raise concerns and have them addressed.
But discursive spaces reside in minds. Minds which have a personal, emotional, mental, and neurochemical substrate, all of which are affected by discourse. Not having any language or concepts to express one’s concerns leads to a chronic lack of hope. And hopelessness leads to depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses.
Recently Jenn of Reappropriate and Vox Ex Machina (amongst others) posted about this CNN article on Asian American women’s suicidality. The article takes a social perspective on the relationship between race, gender (although not class or sexuality), and mental illness, subtly bringing to light the inadequacy of individualised models of mental health care which do little to address the needs of Asian American women.
While some women in her study did seek help through counseling and prescription drugs, most of her subjects were ambivalent or even negative about counseling. “They felt the counselor couldn’t understand their situation. They said it would have helped if the counselor were another Asian-American woman.”
These women found help through their religious faith, herbs, acupuncture, or becoming involved in groups that help other Asian women.
This brief quote doesn’t do justice to the resourcefulness of women of colour in dealing with the emotions, and the durable effects of oppression on our mentalities. Leaving behind completely the dualistic model of rational agency, I’ve found that women of colour have much more practical, grounded and holistic ways of conceptualising and dealing with social problems. For women of colour, both political consciousness and personal life are not separate, and it’s not possible to be disinterested or detached from them. Instead, woc have a reflexive and measured understanding of our own lives and can move between high theory and daily practice without compromising ourselves on the grounds of lacking objectivity or rationality.
And by that I mean that we can do, and do do more with our brains than thinking along abstract lines or evaluating evidence according to abstract criteria. For woc, emotions aren’t a sign of intellectual deficiency. They’re a tool for creating social changes that make our lives better. As such, they aren’t outside the realm of what can be worked on progressively. Emotional skills are part of creating social change.
That compares pretty poorly with the ideology of rationalist supremacy, by which I thought I could defeat my demons with good ideas.
For me, my depression transformed after I started the reading for my thesis. Being able to critically evaluate the reasons I’ve been made miserable by other people through a lens of race has helped my self-esteem and sense of myself in the world. And in that time I’ve rigorously rejected the individualistic models of mental illness that the mental health system produces by re-evaluating how certain experiences I’d had in the mental health system were indicative of a kind of violence done to people to make them fit into therapeutic models.
When I was young I went to an extremely racist school. Unfortunately, it was also a very small school. Racist slurs were de rigueur — children have a habit of picking up on any difference and bring rather nasty about it. But the school administration and the mental health system were complicit in that racism. It’s not only that experiences of racist ostracism were ignored by the counsellors and therapists years later, but that counsellors were called in to assess me while it was happening — because I was being disruptive — while the bullies were left untouched.
Later, when I was a day patient at a youth psychiatric centre, another patient — a loud boy who had an anxiety disorder — called me a “curry muncher” and I was assigned to an anxiety therapy group (with the same boy) when I lost it and yelled at him for it. The reason his comment was problematic wasn’t, as the (all white) psych nurses framed it, because it hurt my feelings. It was problematic because it underscored the racial and cultural alienation I felt in Australian society, and the double shame — of being brown among whites, and of being mentally ill amongst Indian people — that caused me.
To be fair, the mental health system isn’t as vested in a model of rational agency as other parts of society. But it has its own models of pathology that marginalise the concerns of women of colour and do violence to them (through aggressive medication that saps the capacity to act, and by restraining and restricting freedom of movement and association).
The disempowering effects of the mental health system compounded my depression, leaving me unable to confront the challenges I needed to meet in the past few years. I called it “activist burnout” but that was just one of many things that combined to make me nigh useless for two and a half years.
And because of that long hiatus from activism I don’t have the experience I need to fulfil all the responsibilities I’m taking on in my new activist projects.
But even though I feel so negatively about the mental health system, I still feel ashamed about my mental illness (which is why it’s taken me months to finish this post!). Because I’ve rejected the models of the mental health system, I don’t have clear guidelines on how to judge my capacities to deal with stress or get work done. Activism involves tensions and exhilarations that overwhelm me, and just the emotional rollercoaster could lead to mental exhaustion and depression. I’ve had to abandon easy, predetermined answers to my problems for a process of groping around in the dark to get my bearings (let alone navigating with success). This is possibly why I write about this topic so much!
Although I’m combating the elitist ideology that all problems can be fixed with good ideas, it’s good ideas that have helped me feel more empowered; it’s the ideas of women of colour that have supported me and inspired me to get to work on the anti-racism collective. While the doctrinaire belief of Trotskyists that a final revolution will solve all the problems of the world, ever, fuelled my passion for activism before, now it’s the practical relationship-building skills that women of colour have fostered that are helping me the most.
That’s why I read the blogs I do, and am doing the things I’m doing. And, selfishly, why I wanted to start the carnival. Because I’m learning from amazing people and we can change the world.
nosnowhere said,
May 27, 2007 at 3:38 am
great post. i’m really impressed that you wrote about this topic in such a personal way, on a blog (something that i am really terrified of doing). i identified with a lot of it. thanks for it.
hymes said,
May 27, 2007 at 4:43 am
Years ago, when I became involved in advocacy for human rights in the mental health system, I had the idea that the left would be on our side. I had already discovered that women’s centers and lesbian groups weren’t particularly on our side, but I then discovered the left as a whole in the U.S. was very much against us as well. It was and is a very hard reality to deal with for me as someone who was raised a leftist.
I wish I had answers for you other than to take good care of yourself and in your own time, work to get rid of undeserved shame for your time in the MH system. Getting angry about it can help and the anger can fuel your activism in time.
Good luck to you.
belledame222 said,
May 27, 2007 at 7:41 am
Great post. Per the intersection of mental health and politics–it’s something I think about a lot as well.
I agree that the mental health system(s) is not helpful for everyone, and in fact has a dark side. Nonetheless, therapy’s been a lifeline for me (unipolar depression, among other, less definable shit to work out), and it’s where I’m feeling my calling at the moment.
I think that part of the problem wrt left politics is not just the distrust of The Man/State, but also a general distrust of introspection; as you say, the materialist legacy. That part, I really find problematic. It’s one thing to critique the psychiatric system; it’s another to suggest, as I’ve seen done, that the entire model is pointless, that the only form of acceptable consciousness-raising is a specifically politicized one (usually with the theory built right in), and (at its worst) that everything is reducible to political analysis. Which, ime, makes for a huge mess when it comes to, say, basic conflict resolution.
But mostly: I really do believe that the subjective world is at least as important as the material world; and yes, there’s space for collective work there as well, it doesn’t have to be and shouldn’t be solipsism.
Fire Fly said,
May 27, 2007 at 11:44 am
Nosnowhere: Yah, this was somewhat difficult to write. It’s not as personal as the topic gets for me, but it was personal enough to make me think.
It’s important to think about, IMO, though. And I’ve found that talking about it with woc elicits a lot of similar responses: “me too! I never thought to examine it this way until now!”
Hymes and Belledame: I wish the Left had better ways of dealing with subjectivities. The political analysis is usually really poor when it comes to the complexities of the human brain. Socialists are the worst at it, but I find that queer activists and feminists are somewhat better, as there are established ways to apprehend the politics of human biology.
bell hooks argues that black liberation movements have too often ignored the psychic harms done to people of colour due to racism, because they want to emphasise the resilience and resourcefulness that poc face in racist situations to counter the pathologisation of poc’s psychic lives by the psychiatric system. This can sometimes be empowering, but other times it’s empty triumphalism.
But yeah, in general, ignoring personality means horrible dynamics in organising.
BTW, I don’t think it’s up to me to judge how someone fixes themselves, so long as they’re not hurting other people. If that happens through the mental health system then it’s because of good luck or strategic navigation through its murky waters.
sassywho said,
May 27, 2007 at 11:46 am
great post, thank you for writing it. here in the US the mental health system is very much white/hetero-centric, and because of that it’s seen as a luxury/white persons disease. clearly that is not true, and clearly people are shamed into not talking about it, not identifying it, and under-served.
more voices need to be heard.
zooey said,
May 27, 2007 at 1:46 pm
Great post. I have very similar experiences of encountering the so-called progressive left and the mental health system, but haven’t had the courage to write a public post on it. I am so inspired by this post,my friend. You gave me so much to think of.
The First Carnival for Radical Action « The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum said,
May 27, 2007 at 3:29 pm
[...] in this post, Fire Fly discusses the impact that agitating for social justice can take on mental health in a personal and enlightening way: The nexus of issues — mental health, social justice, and [...]
brownfemipower said,
May 29, 2007 at 1:33 am
well, i was really really lucky to begin my organizing life in the arms of some really amazing woc. I was in the middle of a mental breakdown, W* and i were suffering (as always) from the strains of being chronically poor, I was dealing with some severe physcial issues, and I was living in flint (which is one of the most dangerous cities in the u.s.) without a car, so I’d literally spend weeks at a time only coming out of the apt to go to school.
and I couldn’t figure out why i was depressed and unable to sit through class without crying or get my school work done.
When I talked with my woc friends (all of whom were organizers, all of whom had depression) I told them, all I want to do is lie in bed, read harry potter, and cry! and to my surprise, they were like, then lie in bed, read harry potter, and cry! it’s ok to do that!
And over the course of time, i started to realize–since I was a small kid–it is NOT been ok to do what I need to do to help myself feel better–it has NOT been ok to slow down and let my body collapse–as a migrant worker–my body belonged to the system–to the work–and I had been working non-stop since i was 12 years old.
but it took somebody telling me it was ok to stop before I could actually do it.
it reminds me of your words when you say that counselors tell you that you “have hurt feelings”–when what it really is is that you’ve been totally erased.
what i needed was not information on how to “fix myself”–what i needed was permission to stop. permission i had never gotten, even as a child.
anyway, i’m not really sure where the hell i’m going with this. it’s just what i thought about having read your amazing piece.
kiita said,
May 29, 2007 at 10:59 am
Thank you for this post. Lately, I’ve also been thinking about the mental health system, academia and writing. Blogging about my own depression has actually connected me with other bloggers. So I especially appreciate this: “now it’s the practical relationship-building skills that women of colour have fostered that are helping me the most.”
Carnage « She who stumbles said,
May 29, 2007 at 1:40 pm
[...] the state, activism, mental health, health — Fire Fly @ 1:39 pm In my post entitled ‘Radical brainmeats’ I mentioned “a woman who’d been diagnosed with a mental illness, and recently had a very [...]
magniloquence said,
May 30, 2007 at 8:23 am
This is an awesome post. I’m crashing right now and can’t really string together anything more to say about it… but it’s a topic that really interests me.
Sudy said,
June 2, 2007 at 12:48 am
Just beautiful.
VCubed said,
August 1, 2007 at 4:19 pm
Thanks sister, you are not alone, as you well know.
I’m Puerto Rican - Black, Native American and Spanish - lots of activism in college as a single mom older student, 1st gen university. The intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality almost ran me over at my first college, a state college in Washington state (what a therapeutically green and earthy, lake-and-ocean blessed state!).
When my ghetto-born New Yorker butt got into grad school in Stanford, land of Hoover Tower - a huge concrete penis featured on campus with a collection of sometimes the last copy of radical lit in it that I lusted for, but you couldn’t wander the aisles to access nor borrow without leaving personal records, long before bar codes - I lost it completely.
The utter alienation and no respite except in our multicultural student groups and in Stanford’s neighboring social science laboratory, East Palo Alto - a once secluded black farm town, then magnet for migrant workers - sent me right over the edge after so much prep work among mostly white students and white people in Washington, learning about all the ways all my people around the world were being abused.
At Stanford, after saying to a white female rich campus psychiatrist that I relate to the white-punk Boom Town Rat’s song “I don’t like Mondays” where a depressed female student mounts a tower and begins shooting everyone, I was handed anti-psychotics with no medical evaluation or follow-up, then anti-depressants, then anti-anxiety meds. It began a greater descent that culminated with me telling Condoleeza Rice, then-Provost, that she was a sellout in front of a huge group of Latino Stanford students. Trying a neighborhood counseling center in rich white Palo Alto only landed me a 25-year professional white woman who broke down weeping and said she didn’t know how to help me.
I just plain can’t do conflict arenas much anymore, except in short spurts or in electronic correspondence. Even my astrological chart says this is my natural environment, that a lot of interaction with people is just too damn stimulating. I help in the Obama campaign for President of the US, mainly electronically in media response and local strategies, only because it’s so positive, and his book Audacity of Hope on audio soothes me so, gives me such a sense of possibility now and in the long-term.
Everyone’s different. We don’t all have to be gregarious, cheerful, pragmatic, or acclimated to a culture of violence and indifference. Accepting my limits and taking them as a gift, as the best way for me to be to read and write and communicate, has done more to sooth me than years of therapy and failed chemical remedies.
I don’t punish myself for being imperfect anymore, like for smoking to keep my anxiety down, even, and you’re a social pariah in California if you smoke, believe me - yet another convenient social divider between whites and upper class and the people of coor/poor/disabled who still smoke. Every time I’ve stopped smoking I’ve had a total emotional breakdown. A therapist opined I may be swallowing my sorrow with the smoke, and when I don’t smoke the dams break and I cry everywhere and anywhere, anytime, endlessly, to the point of hyperventilation and collapse. I also noticed in a pain management clinic that tons of people in chronic pain smoke as a coping mechanism. If my choices are a bad habit with long-term health effects or being locked up and sedated again, freaking out my whole family, I’ll take a smoke. I take SAMe, too, a natural amino-acid that reduces inflammation, cools the liver and mellows my anxiety, though it’s bad for bipolars, best for blues/anxiety chronics.
I’m arthritic to beat the band now, in poverty after all that education because I can’t work anymore. Besides my chronic pain and limited mobility now, I was deemed weird ’cause I just refused NOT to cry on my way to work if I had to step over a young Native man laying in the street with his pants around his ankles and a needle behind his knee, scenes of despair and loss like war detritus all along the way. If that labels me with a personality disorder, so be it. My people are emotional people. Caring and being forced to ignore it and go on to survive, and crying over it, is not a disorder, in my book.
I even see some depression and physical chronic problems as part of historical memory, as bell hooks so lovingly acknowledges. Memory is in the bones, so mine hurt. It makes the pain more understood on a deeper level, and more manageable with a spiritual focus. If I took the painkillers that are all they offer in America’s lousy healthcare system, I’d be dead from the blues. My father used those pills for his suicide at 46. I’ve outlived him, so my way’s better for me.
Stay vulnerable and coping anyway. It’s a victory in and of itself, and totally human, imho. And it beats being oblivious, really. You’ll always hurt some, but you’re doing great things. I feel like I’ve met a kindred soul, thank you.
The First Carnival of Radical Action « She who stumbles said,
September 4, 2007 at 12:34 am
[...] in this post, Fire Fly discusses the impact that agitating for social justice can take on mental health in a personal and enlightening way: The nexus of issues — mental health, social justice, and [...]