Racism Is NOT A Mental Illness and It’s Damaging To Say It Is

 

Fuck this this is shit in all the ways it is shit.

Ok, now that I’ve got that out of my system I still make no promises that I will not continue to call it shit over and over again. Because this is a steaming pile of garbage filth feces, and I am not about to censor myself on the way that mental illness gets thrown under the bus time and again to make other people feel good, safe, and normal. The lives of the mentally ill are always seen as less than, wrong, and bad. This kind of bullshit is why even liberals are willing to discriminate against disabled and mentally ill people. I apologize in advance if this is ranty and angry but it has every right to be because this video is senseless drivel, but it’s exactly the kind of senseless drivel that I see coming out of the mouths of people I expect better of.

DEFINITIONS

Let’s start with facts. The video posits that racism is a PTSD like mental health problem because racists exhibit irritability, aggression, and hostility. Let’s talk about what it takes for something to be a diagnosis in the DSM, and why we have diagnoses. First and foremost we have diagnoses so that people can receive treatment. A diagnosis is supposed to help providers understand how they can help someone. Now right off the bat, this video’s suggestion that racism is a mental health problem or that we should treat it as a mental health problem makes very little sense because hey guess what it turns out a. almost everyone has some racist tendencies and b. racists respond to different types of treatment. Some people just need to meet a black person they like, some people need to confront their own traumas and history, some people appear not to be open to any kind of change. There’s no one reason that people are racist or a best practice for interacting with them. These traits vary wildly among racists, and there doesn’t seem to be a higher rate or intensity of them in racists than in the general population (or even associated with instances of racism. People can be racist with a smile on their faces while thinking they’re being kind). So strike one on why we should approach it like a mental health issue.

“Irritability, aggression, hostility,” those are not enough to make up a mental health diagnosis, and NOT EVERY RACIST shows those traits. They would have to be exaggerated beyond all the rest of the population, impact a person’s day to day functioning, and be unique to racists in some way in order to quality as a mental health diagnosis

The other major problem with suggesting that racism is a mental health issue is that in order to be considered a diagnosis, the symptoms have to impair functioning in some major area of life (work, relationships, education, etc.). Now there are some extreme cases in which this happens, but overall racists are pretty functional in our society. In fact, it turns out that you can be openly, disgustingly racist and still get elected president. Our society is one embedded in racism, so the idea that being racist or doing racist things or having racist thoughts will make it hard for you to function is laughable. This is what we’ve been taught all our lives. It only makes sense. In my experience, actively fighting racism is far less functional in our society than accepting the basic racist premises that we grow up with.

There are some other smaller problems, like the fact that not all racist people show irritability, aggression, or hostility (have you seen a sweet racist Minnesotan mom? I have), so if those are supposedly the defining characteristics of “racism”, why aren’t they associated with all instances of racism?

WHY DO PEOPLE DO IT

So factually it doesn’t make tons of sense to assert that racism is a mental health issue because the traits are not out of line with the rest of the population, seen in all racist instances, and don’t impair day to day functioning. What could be motivating this impulse that so many (mostly white) people have to say that racism is a mental illness? What are the larger impacts of this assertion?

The video seems to assert that this label helps us address racism better, because we can use “exposure therapy” a la the therapy for phobias. I personally think it’s a REALLY BAD IDEA to suggest that. First, there’s already a lot of gross misunderstandings about how therapy works, and how exposure therapy in particular works, to the extent that random people will just expose someone to their triggers and call it therapy. Saying that on a society wide level we can engage in exposure therapy by protesting and talking about our past traumas propagates these misunderstandings and suggests that any rando can do therapy. Additionally I don’t see why we need to label racism a mental health problem in order to be willing to talk about it openly and face it head on. We can do that anyway.

The video also seems to suggest that viewing racism as a mental health problem will push people to be more accountable. It says “don’t let your racist friend or uncle off the hook. You wouldn’t abandon them if they had a mental illness.” Now I have to laugh at this because mentally ill people get abandoned all the fucking time so that’s a fucking shitty appeal to people’s decency. But this also implies that people are racist through no fault of their own and we should address racism to help the poor innocent racists. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

STOP CENTERING WHITE PEOPLE DEAR LORD JESUS. The reason not to let racists off the hook is because they are actively hurting people of color. If that’s not a good enough reason for you, then you might be a racist. That’s it. We don’t need to save racists, they’re doing perfectly fucking fine. The more we cater to their fee fees, the worse off we’ll be.

Racism doesn’t HAPPEN to white people. White people CAUSE racism because it benefits us. The end.

SPLASH DAMAGE

Ok ok, so beyond being wrong, what’s so bad about saying that racism is a mental illness? Maybe it can help us understand the phenomenon better or give us ways to approach and change the problem, even if it’s not wholly accurate.

Well in addition to not actually being super helpful, calling racism a mental health problem is seriously hurting a whole lot of people. You know, those people who are ACTUALLY mentally ill. If you label things you disagree with or find offensive “crazy” or “mental illness”, you are part of the stigmatization of mental illness. You’re part of ableism.

Cruelty and dehumanization are not the same as mental illness. People with every diagnosis out there are capable of fighting racism and being good people. When you say that something you find immoral is a mental illness, you are implying that mental illness means violence, means treating people poorly, mean violence, means anger, means hostility. Sure, there are people who are mentally ill who do all these things, but this is the kind of rhetoric that suggests every school shooter has autism or every murderer was just crazy. It takes away people’s responsibility (the video gets it completely wrong on that front. Racism is not a behavior like drunk driving, it’s a belief system and it’s one for which you are responsible), while also opening up the door to mistreat mentally ill people because they are violent and dangerous.

Stop blaming bad actions on mental illness. I don’t appreciate being thrown under the bus so that you can feel like you understand your shitty friends better. It’s complete shit to equate these learned, chosen behaviors with the different way my brain was born.

tldr: it’s not crazy to be racist in our society. It’s not a fluke that so many people in positions of power are racist, it’s part of the system. Calling it crazy only hurts the mentally ill. STOP IT.

 

Childhood Surgery and Mental Health

When I was about five years old, I underwent a major invasive surgery. I don’t talk about it often because it wasn’t exactly dinner table appropriate: I had problems when I was a child with UTIs because my urine would reverse along my urinary tract if I didn’t pee. Yup, refluxing urine. Sexy. It had the potential to give me serious bladder infections throughout my life, and wasn’t responding to antibiotics, so in order to keep me from being in pain often and really fucking up my urinary tract, the doctor reimplanted my ureter to a better location so my urine would stay in my fucking bladder and out of my god damn kidneys.

Lovely right?

Now at the time it seemed like it was just an unpleasant experience. It happened and it hurt and I was utterly miserable for about four days of my life. I remember not really eating or sleeping at all. I remember puking a lot the first day because they couldn’t get my pain meds right. I remember peeing a lot of blood. That’s about it. I moved on. I continued my life and I didn’t think about it very often except that every time I drove past the Children’s Hospital in my city I shuddered and told my parents to get me away from the “Dreaded Hospital”.

Until a few months ago when my therapist asked if there was any trauma in my past. I shook my head, sure that my childhood was normal and safe. She pushed a bit, asking about violence or loss or surgery. Surgery? Surgery counts as trauma? Yes, apparently it does, and often leads to PTSD in children (particularly invasive surgeries such as the one I had and surgeries that require multi-day stays at the hospital).

I’ve spent some time poking around the interwebs looking for more information about surgery and trauma, about what sorts of effects surgery can have, about why surgery is considered a trauma, and I’ve been having a really hard time finding much qualitative information that might shed some light on the connections between my severe dissocciative tendencies, my depression, my anxiety, and my surgery.

As someone whose natural impulse about things is to learn about them, to get information, to explore them from every angle, having an event in my past that I cannot research is unsettling to say the least. But more than that, I find it worrisome that the only resources I can find for parents of kids who are going to be going through surgery seem to be geared either at sudden and extreme accidents or towards cancer.

It seems to me that once again mental health concerns are being ignored, even in a situation where someone is already receiving medical care and should be under close supervision of doctors. Why is there not a mental health professional involved every time someone goes under the knife? It’s a scary proposition, even if you’re prepped and feel fairly comfortable. In addition, based upon my own experiences, I would hazard a guess that even if a child does not show immediate signs of PTSD after a surgery, there is a possibility that it could affect their mental health in years to come. Having someone around to teach them strong coping skills and help them process the experience could save the medical industry lots of money in the future (imagine if they hadn’t had to provide me 3 years of eating disorder treatment. Huzzah!) and potentially lessen a great deal of emotional pain for people who have internalized lots of fear and anxiety without realizing it.

It’s becoming more and more clear with research into neuroscience and neuropsychology that the experiences that we have as children deeply affect our brains. Even a limited amount of isolation can affect a brain for years into the future. Surgery can be isolating, it can be painful, it can force a child to deal with mortality, it can be overwhelming, and it can be confusing. These things can change the brain.

Typically a kid is coddled a bit after something like surgery, so you might not see the effects right away: they would be supported, they would have their needs taken care of, they’d have mom and dad around. This means they’re not going to be in a high stress environment where they might need coping skills. It’s only when they’re put into a situation that requires coping skills, or even a situation that feels remotely like their surgery experience that those effects might begin to pop up.

This is pure conjecture on my part, because as I said before I couldn’t find much by way of information, but I suspect that having something like this in one’s past would significantly increase one’s susceptibility to mental illness in the future, as well as potentially create some intense anxieties or fears that aren’t totally rational. Imagine that I’ve been seeing mental health professionals for over five years talking about anxieties and depression, and never once did they think to ask me whether I’d undergone any sort of serious medical experience. It took until this year for someone to even consider that having that trauma in my past might be related or might help me understand. 3

Why are mental health and physical health so bifurcated? Especially given the research that we’re finding that suggests that our brain is deeply connected with all sorts of other body systems, and that we rely on the same chemicals and hormones for all sorts of things, why on earth aren’t we integrating our treatment of mental and physical health? Why aren’t we sharing medical records between our mental health care providers and our physical health care providers?

It’s hard to express how frustrated I am about this, as it feels like an important element of my own health has been hidden from me, as if a doctor had found a gene that put me at a severe risk for cancer and neglected to mention it to me (I do recognize that when I was 5 the research on neuropsychology was nowhere what it is today, so it’s not as if I’m holding a grudge, but rather just feeling confused and hurt that with more information I perhaps could have avoided some of the shit that has been in my life in the past three years). I never thought that this could be an important element of my mental health, but the moment it was mentioned it clicked into place.

The feeling I feel when I am bored, when I feel useless, when I feel alone, is the same feeling I get when I think of my surgery. It’s hard to explain the sense that comes over me when I remember those days because it’s so visceral as to be nonverbal. That says something to me about its importance in grounding many of my other emotions and experiences of emotions. I feel as if I’m wavering away from myself when I think about it, but I can see my body stilling, the panic bubbling through my chest. My teeth clench. I lose the sense of my whole body. I remember the dark, the night, lying in bed unable to sleep with no one there, no one to speak to, nothing to do. It feels like it won’t ever end, it goes on forever because I can’t do anything. It hurts. I remember how much it hurt. I remember trying desperately to stay awake when they were putting me under, a bit confused about what was happening, but knowing that I wanted to keep talking to the people around me. I don’t want to go to sleep, I don’t want to go to sleep, but now hurts and I just have to sit in it because there’s no way out.

When I think about that, it’s hard not to see just how badly that experience hurt me, how it told me that my body was probably broken, how it told me that there was something wrong with me and that the only way to be safe was to always keep my mind safe and perfect.

I just wish I had known that I could think about it or talk about it or process it earlier. I wish I hadn’t kept it tucked away for 17 years. I wish someone had helped me. I don’t know that there’s a taboo around surgery, but I certainly think there’s a silence around it. I wish there were more people talking about their experiences, more ways I could find some sense of community or solidarity.

If anyone has more resources about these connections I’d love to see them, but until then I simply want to say that if anyone else wants to talk or needs support I’d love to hear from them.

I’m Coming Out As Sex Negative

When I first came across this article explaining why the author is a sex negative feminist and how the reactions to that are oftentimes ridiculous, I found myself with the sort of feeling that someone who realizes they’re gay for the first time might have (perhaps I’m exaggerating a tad. I don’t want to steal that experience from anyone). But I did feel like I had finally found an understanding of the way I approached and felt about sex and a word for it and a reason why I had always felt out of synch with the people around me and their attitudes towards sex. It was a little bit like coming home: I wasn’t dirty or bad for having some negative thoughts about sex. I wasn’t a prude. There may actually be legitimate reasons to criticize sex from a feminist perspective!

 

You see I’ve always considered myself a sex positive feminist. What else would I be? I don’t think that people should be ashamed for having sex, and I myself have felt so negative around sex for so long that it only made sense to me that I should try to encourage attitudes that would make sex more positive and enjoyable for everyone around me. Sex is a good thing, everyone knows that! Consent is great. Not shaming people is great. Obvious. Self-explanatory.

 

Until I read this article. And I realized that maybe some of the reasons that I felt negatively about sex weren’t just that I’d had bad experiences with consent, but that the very nature of sexuality in a patriarchal culture is one that is political. There is a good reason that I had felt like sex was always a battlefield and that I was barely getting out alive and that’s because in many ways it is. The author does a better job of explaining why sex negativity is a worthwhile position than I can, as I’m just getting introduced to the term, but there is something I want to respond to in her article. She asks why it’s considered taboo or prudish to label oneself sex negative, or why sex positivity has become ubiquitous with mainstream feminism. I suspect I have a few answers.

 

The first and biggest answer is that sex has been used to shame and control people for a very, very long time. Not enjoying sex (especially as a woman) has been the status quo…pretty much always. Of course it feels like a radical act to suggest that women should enjoy sex, and it feels liberating and wonderful. When someone says they’re sex negative, people automatically jump to the idea that people should feel ashamed, people should not enjoy themselves, or people should not strive for positive and open sexual experiences. Because of all the shit in the past of sex, people are terrified of going back. Understandably. Sex positivity feels like the strongest barrier against shitty sex.

 

Unfortunately what this doesn’t take into account is the fact that even if you’re enjoying sex, there might still be negative aspects to it (such as continuation of patriarchal power structures). We can give people choices and still ask them to make responsible choices or hold them to higher standards. This response to sex negativity misses that sex negativity is TRYING to make sex better for everyone and trying to make society as a whole better for everyone by criticizing the things that make it fraught with patriarchal meaning.

 

And hand in hand with this fear of going back to the shame that we used to feel is the fact that when you have good sex you want EVERYONE to have good sex. Let’s use a different example. Let’s say you’ve been eating shitty Hershey’s chocolate all your life. You kinda know it’s shitty and that it comes from bad labor practices and then you finally get some nice free trade chocolate and it’s delicious and you feel AMAZING. You start telling your friends about this new chocolate. You start promoting your new chocolate. YOU LOVE THIS CHOCOLATE BECAUSE IT’S DELICIOUS AND TASTES AWESOME AND WHO DOESN’T WANT CHOCOLATE? It’s a fact of human nature that when something makes you happy you don’t really like other people criticizing it. Have you seen Steven Moffat fans when someone tells them he’s sexist? Point in case.

 

So anyway, you’re going around loving this chocolate and stuffing it in the face of everyone who mentions they might want chocolate and then someone comes up to you and says they don’t like chocolate because it made them puke once. Also even if it’s fair trade it might still be part of a bad labor market. Maybe they should give some of the money for that expensive chocolate to charity instead. And also chocolate is maybe more of a sometimes food.

 

This is not the best parallel in the world, but I think you all see where I’m going. Telling someone they should reexamine their sex life when they think their sex life is awesome and fun really feels like raining on their parade. You don’t really want to hear about it because you’re too excited and you don’t know why someone would want to criticize you for sharing joy. Even if the criticism is for the best possible reasons and completely valid, it still can feel really invalidating. Particularly when you’re enjoying something and someone else comes along and asks you to consider WHY you are enjoying it and whether or not your desires are really your own, it can feel as if they’re questioning your experiences and telling you that your enjoyment isn’t valid or real.

 

In addition, sex negativity questions an arena that many people think of as essential to human nature. I have heard many people say that everyone is sexual or that everyone should embrace their sexuality or they will not be happy. Sex negativity questions these assumptions, which are closely held for many people. It says that there might be people who are completely capable of getting turned on who choose not to because they don’t enjoy it. This is mind blasting for people who enjoy sex. Seriously. Many people cannot fathom the idea of someone who is asexual or even anti-sex. It’s like suggesting that someone might be anti-food. Because sex is so integral to personal identity, people who like it have a hard time understanding those who don’t (also vice versa, but liking sex is much more the default in our society). Questioning whether sex is a necessary part of human life is a really deep and personal philosophical question. It’s scary. Many people don’t want to get into it, and they feel as if their choice to be sexual is being attacked or shamed when others try to bring up other options.

 

And finally, many people don’t want to think of themselves as constrained by society or of their choices as shaped by society. People want to imagine themselves as autonomous, with free will. They want to think that their desires and preferences are their own. In many ways, that’s true, but desires and preferences don’t appear out of thin air. You may have some natural predilictions (no matter how hard I try I will never enjoy black coffee), but many of your preferences are shaped by the messages around you. That’s hard to hear. It feels like it takes something away from you. And perhaps it does, but in the end it gives you back the power to begin actively deciding what you want to do with the desires that you may not have chosen.

 

Overall, the immediate impression of sex negativity is that it wants to take away something really fun, take away your self-identity, and take away your choices. Many people have an immediate disgust reaction to this. I think we’d all be better served if we looked past the label and understood how sex negativity wants to give you back these things at the deepest level. It is not satisfied with simply saying that if something feels good you can do it. It wants to go a step further and give you more tools to explore and identify how you can make your choices positive not only for yourself, but for others in society and for future generations. Mind. Blasting.

Veterans and Hero Worship

A friend and I recently got into a bit of a tiff over John McCain and how much we should respect him. This led into a far larger fight about the military, military personnel, respect, and patriotism. And I had to use it as an opportunity to air my grievances against the hero worship attitude that most people in the U.S. have towards veterans. This article probably will offend some people, because the idea of questioning the respect and honor we give to veterans is unheard of. Democrats do it, Republicans do it, Libertarians do it…no one would think of demeaning those who fight for their country.

But I can’t help but ask the question…what’s so great about fighting for your country?

I’d like to try to break the question down a bit. First there’s the action itself. What is being a soldier made up of? Essentially the actions that define a soldier are violent: fighting and killing, taking things over, etc. There are some actions that soldiers undertake which are constructive, but generally those aren’t what we use as definitional of being a soldier. So the basic essence of being a soldier is killing or destroying. Those actions in and of themselves are not really things we generally feel are worthy of respect, so obviously the respect for vets doesn’t come from those actions in and of themselves.

Now I am the first to admit that actions aren’t just always bad or always good. Duh. Sometimes intention or consequence plays a role in determining the ethics of an action. So let’s look at intentions. Well the most obvious intention that people cite is “serving and protecting your country”. I’m just going to start with this one, and then move on to some others as well. I’m not entirely sure what is honorable about serving the country to be honest, and I honestly would like some kind of explanation for what is good about it. A country is simply a group of people, most of whom you don’t know. Serving that group of people can be a good thing, however we don’t seem to view it as a positive across the board. Public servants for example are rarely lauded for their service. And there are definitely instances in which serving and protecting the people who are part of your “in group” is distinctly a negative thing: think of racial violence or the mafia. So protecting and serving isn’t inherently a good thing either.

In addition, most of the recent wars we’ve engaged in have not been about directly protecting America. We have not been attacked by the countries we’ve invaded, and we have been in little to no danger. In general, those countries that we have invaded have not asked for our help, and have had mixed (if not negative) reactions to our presence there. So the larger mission of serving and protecting may not even be present at all in the recent wars we have engaged in. I find it hard to laud people for engaging in violent action when no one is being protected, and they really aren’t welcome.

In addition, there are many extremely negative incentives that some people have to go into the military. There are a disturbing number of individuals who join the military for explicitly racist reasons, like for the express purpose of killing those of a different color, or of “destroying the enemy” (read: the brown people). Some people join the military for money, for education, for “honor”, for family tradition, or all sorts of other reasons. Now I will add the caveat that there is definitely a racial and class element to a lot of people’s experience of joining the military, and in no way can I fault those who have few options and take the best option given to them. That said, I don’t necessarily think that ANY of these motivations for violence are good reasons for us to respect and honor someone, and I particularly don’t think that the very bad reasons among them (racism) are excused by the fact of “protecting and serving”.

 

So the intentions generally aren’t inherently honorable or worthy of respect either. Some people might think it’s honorable for a man to protect hearth and home, but I personally think it’s an outdated concept of honor that thrives on violence and patriarchy, and really isn’t worthy of our respect at all. Respect is earned by those who contribute something to the world, not those who destroy things in the world.

So what about consequences? Well the consequences of war are generally death, which is a bad one, I generally don’t think death is something we should respect people for bringing about. SOMETIMES it’s a better world (although this is nearly always arguable), but generally that “better world” comes at the expense of those in other parts of the globe, often civilians, often those we view as not as important because they’re brown. Even if it DOES improve the world (e.g. WWII), it comes at a huge cost of life and the mental health and well being of those who survive. PTSD is a huge consequence of war. Should we respect people for bringing these things about? I don’t necessarily think so. While I do think that the people who suffer through war should have our compassion and kindness for the difficulties they’ve gone through, and they certainly should have our support in dealing with PTSD or any other ailments they have gained during their time in the military, their actions themselves aren’t praiseworthy, the motivations for their actions aren’t praiseworthy, and very rarely are the consequences of their actions praiseworthy. In most cases, we barely break even in the consequences of war. So why do we continue to hero worship those who have fought? Why are they untouchable in political discourse, when those who are fighting poverty, hunger, child abuse, sexual abuse, or other clear ailments of society are ignored? I will never understand.