best, Marta
Carrol Cox wrote:
> Marta speaks of "ableism," and partly in reaction to multiplying "isms,"
> I've been reluctant to adopt it. But it is looking better and better. The
> slogan (before the civil-rights movement pretty much killed it) of happy
> taken-for-granted racism in the United States was "free, white, and
> twenty-one." Squeaks and howls about "political correctness" are mostly
> mourning for this lost paradise of racism, in which one could
> unselfconsciously preen oneself on the moral superiority of whiteness. As
> Doug's comment brings out, Reese exults in his freedom from illness just
> as the white racist exults in his/her white skin. I think we should
> accept Marta's proposed ism, and award it the same honor we award
> blatant racism and sexism. One might add, that even for those who are
> helped by exercise it takes a good deal more than a couple of laps around
> the block to have any effect. My merely personal experience is that it
> takes around a minimum of five hours of aerobics and at least two hours
> of weight lifting a week to be of much. A minority of those suffering
> from depression find that exercise is counter productive, and a somewhat
> larger minority find that it has no effect either way. (It was Reese's
> easy assumption that he possessed knowledge denied to the rest of us poor
> slobs that provoked the diction of my first post.)
>
> A few more observations. I have been trying in all my posts (not wholly
> successfully) to introduce a new 'rule' into the manual of political
> correctness, and it is a rule that entails some rhetorical clumsiness. I
> speak of those who suffer from depression, those with schizophrenic
> illness, etc, *not* of "depressives" or "schizophrenics," terms which are
> as ridiculous as "TBers" or "Fluers" or
> "Coldites" would be. (In the 19th century and earlier people did
> regularly refer to "consumptives," the implication being that infection
> by tuberculosis wiped out all other human features. "Consumption" had a
> closer relation to the symptoms of tuberculosis that "depression" has to
> the symptoms of depression.
>
> On describing unipolar affective disorder to those who have not
> experienced it for themselves. Actually it can't be done. When other
> members of the local DMDSG complain of this, I point out (and they all
> agree) that within a week or two (or even less) of pulling out of a
> period of depression, we ourselves can no longer imagine what it's like.
> The experience of infantry combat seems equally resistant to description
> for those who have not experienced it -- but our culture has at least
> taught us to *believe* where we cannot imagine in the case of combat
> veterans, while the inability to imagine leads to the denial that the
> experience exists in the case of depression or other mental illnesses.
>
> On DSM-IV. Undoubtedly some of those diagnoses will be found to be false.
> I rather hope that that fate befalls Borderline Personality Disorder --
> when made a remark about that diagnosis to my therapist, she remarked
> that it might be a psychiatrist's way of saying "Fuck you!" to a patient.
> The changes in it are not only in respect to changing medical knowledge,
> but also reflect social forces, e.g., insurance or disability
> regulations. You can't get disability unless you have a named illness.
> Hence it becomes crucial that conditions be named even if medical
> knowledge does not really justify a given name and diagnosis. The blame,
> if any, for this should not fall on the psychiatrists offering what is a
> social/political necessity. There can also be a placebo effect in naming,
> as there may be in ascribing a cause even when a cause is not known. My
> therapist tells me she has some patients who demand to know *why*. There
> is no answer to this in most cases, but if the demand/need for an
> explanation is insistent enough, she will offer something. The purpose of
> therapy is not in any case "cure" but aid in enduring. Good therapists
> accumulate a large stock of gimmicks which the patient can use for
> self-manipulation.
>
> Some mention should be made of SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder. This
> form of depression is easily relieved: you need a few hundred dollars to
> buy a special lamp, then spend about 30 minutes a day in its light from
> early November through February (longer I suppose if you live in Canada
> or Siberia). There couldn't be a better example of a mental illness
> (often an extremely severe one that can lead to suicide) that is
> obviously "physical" than SAD. It is caused only by insufficient
> daylight; it is "cured" only by special lighting. Since complaints of the
> "Winter Blues" are widspread, it is possible that almost everyone suffers
> from SAD to varying degrees. (People near enough to the equator would
> never know they suffered from it, unless they went north [or south] for
> the winter.) While my own unipolar is not primarily SAD I've begun to
> suspect I suffer from it marginally -- I had noticed all my academic life
> (as student and teacher) that the fall semester was rockier than the
> spring semester. I intend to buy a lamp this year and use it.
>
> Carrol
>
> P.S. Without realizing it, Reese has an idea by the tail but only by the
> tail when he speaks of an illness that predates psychiatry. His intended
> point is of course mere nonsense. It's as though he were to announce
> triumphantly that gravity existed before Galileo and Newton came along.
> BUT there almost certainly *are* social elements in most, perhaps all,
> mental illnesses. And there are certainly modes of production (sets of
> social relations) within which depression would be less, or more,
> difficult to endure. And that which is relatively easy to endure is not
> so apt to be remarked upon, identified as a distinct syndrome, and
> labelled. The invisible relations which hold capitalist society together
> (and which make the future such a tyrant over the present) almost
> certainly intensify the pangs of depression, whether or not they cause
> it. PTSD is (though just how is not known) one definite cause of
> depression, and the fact that more women than men suffer from abuse
> sufficient to trigger PTSD may be one element in the larger number of
> women patients. But then this is complicated by the fact that such
> attitudes as Reese's (which unfortunately are not confined to berserk
> libertarians) can cow men into not admitting, even to themselves, that
> they suffer the ailment. Real men don't have psychic problems -- they
> just get drunk.
-- Marta Russell author Los Angeles, CA Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract http://www.commoncouragepress.com/russell_ramps.html