Evolving Thoughts

Psychiatric Tales

This comic book, which is on psychiatry in general, looks very good. Click here for an eleven page excerpt on schizophrenia. I can vouch for the accuracy of this: I once had a staff member fall victim to the disorder and my manager behaved like she was a potential ax murderer and made her leave (illegally, I might add), although I was hoping to look after her as she took her meds and learned to deal with the problems. I could not understand my manager’s response, but I came to realise that it really does have that stigma in general society. I had previously shared a house with a gay schizophrenic, who was fine until he was bashed (for being gay), when he had a bad episode. His meds kept him stable, but social attitudes made his life really difficult (both being gay and being a “schizo”).

I think it has something to do with religious moralism, really. There’s a presumption, in my country at least, that nothing that you do or say is beyond your control, and you are responsible for being crazy. I think it is a religious thing. I have heard people tell schizophrenics to “snap out of it!” I’ve heard them say this to autistics and Aspergers kids as well. Some of these were teachers at a school that specialised in autistics and Aspergers kids.

H/T Kate Devitt.

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Comments (3)

  1. This looks very good. I’m glad you posted it.

    One of the problems I have as an advocate for the mentally ill (and my work with various advocacy organizations in the past) is that my son is the exception to the rule. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic, very much in the minority, who lashes out because he’s afraid he’s being attacked. Most of the mentally ill are not violent, my son can be, which makes it difficult when I’ve presented, because people want to know my personal experience, not the facts and statistics.

    Unfortunately, when it comes to news and media, the exceptions are going to sell more advertising slots than the norms.

    You’re right, I think a lot of this is religious. We aren’t very far out of thinking that this is some sort of demonic possession that can be cured with an act of faith. I actually had a priest tell my son if he stayed still and prayed his hallucinations would go away. For years my son felt like a failure because it didn’t happen.

    People seem to think that diseases of the brain are somehow fundamentally different from diseases of other organs. It’s good to see that epilepsy is finally being treated as a medical condition (I remember when it wasn’t). I hope that with more quality information getting out (like this comic book) that eventually people will understand that “mental illness” is a physical illness, not a moral flaw.

  2. I think the problem goes deeper than religion.

    From religion we get this dogma that the Real You (I hope you appreciate that I’m avoiding the use of scare quotes ;-)) is this immaterial thing that exists independently of your physical brain — so why should it be affected by mere mis-firing neurons? (One would think that millenia of experimentation with various chemical intoxicants would have been sufficient to disabuse us of that notion, but apparently not).

    However, I think that religion only serves to canonize our naive intuitions about the nature of personhood. We ascribe conciousness — an inner life of experience — to others as a generalization from our own experience. When someone else can’t see what to us is bloody obvious — whether it’s something mundane like “Sarah Palin is a nincompoop” or psychiatric like “The scarey things you are seeing/hearing are not really there”, it compromises that ascription. It tends to push us towards either revoking the other individual’s personhood, or casting their misperception as a moral fault. But note: this is not religious as such; it is an aspect of our social psychology.

    One other thing: we’re all afraid of being sick, injured or disabled — but we are most afraid of losing our perception of ourself as a person. Mere bodily injuries — however distressing — we perceive as being separate our personhood. Even paraplegics and ALS sufferers can find ways to communicate, and thus demonstrate that there is still someone in there. But the idea of serious mental disease or injury, something that robs us of basic cognition or the ability to share consensus reality, terrifies us. And like everything that terrifies us, it makes us uncomfortable around examples of the feared phenomenom (because they remind us that it could happen to us, too). Hence, we fear and ostracize the mentally ill.

  3. Treating insanity as a moral failing has a long tradition, but the contemporary emphasis on blaming the victim has a more prosaic explanation, at least in the United States. Back in the 60s and 70s, concern for the civil rights of the insane provided ideological cover for drastically reducing the number of patients in asylums. In theory, outpatient care and support services were supposed to minister to the hundreds of thousands thus released to the outside, but in practice the net effect was to allow states and localities to save a tremendous amount of money by simply allowing the psychotics to wander the streets and sleep under bridges. Of course, emptying the madhouses filled the prisons, and the prisons turned out to be even more expensive than the madhouses—there’s a kind of wretched justice in that—but in the meantime we could explain away our collective callousness by promoting the idea that insanity was just criminality and the crazy have it coming.

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