Geekerella and Doree are having an interesting conversation about mental illness in the workplace, a subject on which I’ve reflected often. I’m very open about being bipolar, and I manage around 45 people in a corporate environment; so far, although there’s no question the disorder has had a profound impact on me and on those who care for me, I am comfortable asserting that it’s had none on those who work for me; I think they’d agree. (You can ask Syd, if you want).
[As a note, most of the mentally ill people in my company are ‘closeted,’ so to speak, which is of course their right; as such, I am kind of the poster-boy for successful psychiatry and treatment, and field a lot of interesting and occasionally amusing questions about the subject. I’m not shy about it is because I’m stable and happy and not really concerned with what people who have an issue with mental illness think].
However, Doree notes something that bothers me limitlessly: the concept of ‘mad pride,’ a notion that arises out of the academic supposition that all forms of categorization and classification are in fact mechanisms of control and suppression.
Most of the ‘mad pride’ people I know aren’t themselves particularly ‘mad,’ so it’s quite easy for them to say things like, ‘What corporations and the US government call “mental illness” is really just a construct, a way of denying legitimacy to perfectly natural modes of expression. They say it’s not “normal” so they can pump you full of drugs like this is Brave New World and keep you in conformity with some flat, economically productive type of automaton.”
This, and I hope I hurt no one’s feelings, is attractively-phrased bullshit of the most invidious order. In repackaging sentiments sloppily culled from progressive movements and laying rhetorical claim to the mantle of ‘rebellion against suppression and conformity,’ the movement encourages people to abandon whatever reason they might normally exercise in considering what mental illness is.
Being afflicted with mental illness means you cannot be who you want to be, not that others don’t want you to be who you are. While I dislike the increasingly aggressive marketing of drugs for mental illness, which is accompanied by increasing rates of false diagnosis and false self-diagnosis, that problem has no bearing on the existence of mental illness.
‘Mad pride’ people love to speak in the flowery, impassioned style of poetic revolutionaries, and when I hear them talk about the ‘beauty of madness,’ the ‘transcendent passions of the skewed mind and its art,’ and so on, I always think: I hope they’re saving some of these words for the eulogies we’ll need them to deliver.
Here’s a less-attractive but factual counterclaim: untreated mental illness means suffering and death. Reading about Doree’s boss, I can’t help but wonder what will become of her; the statistics for untreated bipolar disorder aren’t good.
Having known people who’ve killed themselves, I don’t find the movement to be as ideologically amusing as I otherwise might; a bunch of kids running around hoping to redefine categories of human expression and behavior in accordance with a emotionally charged semi-utopian view of life sounds like college, and I remember all that fondly.
But getting mentally ill people off of their medicines, away from their doctors, and into some state of self-aggrandizing acceptance of their (of our) lunacy, is like taking IVs out of arms at your local hospital.
[Note: there are all sorts of interesting categorial and philosophical problems with ‘mental illness’ as such, and with the manifestation of it in different socioeconomic groups, and so on. I am not suggesting the issue isn’t problematic; only that ‘mad pride’ is largely garbage].
