The use of the word "psychotic" was offensive. You may think this political correctness gone mad, but if you are ill, or have been, you need words to describe your experience to yourself and to others. If for you these words are negative, you will hate yourself. Language can make or break your happiness. That is why mental health activists do not like psychiatric terms being used as abuse...
Maybe the clue is later on:
And please allow individuals an identity apart from their illness, so always say "a person with schizophrenia" rather than "a schizophrenic".
In fact, a lot of people with psychiatric illnesses don't follow Bray's advice when talking about themselves. "Bipolar", for example, is commonly used to describe people, rather than their illness - and many bipolars do this... bipolar people... people with bipolar disorder. Whatever.
On Google, "I'm bipolar" gets 247,000 hits and "I am bipolar" gets 235k, so that's about 500k in total. "I have bipolar" gets 576k - so "having" and "being" are about equally popular.Likewise for schizophrenia, "I have schizophrenia" gets 174k, but "I'm schizophrenic" gets 136k, and "I am schizophrenic" 31k - almost equal again. "I'm a schizophrenic" gets 465k, mainly because of a movie, however if you exclude those you still get over 100k.
So if mental health activists want to reform the way we talk about mental illness, it's not just the "them" of the general public who need bringing into line. But I've never been convinced that changing what words people use about things like this is a good way of changing minds: it's an easy way to create the appearance of doing so, but actually changing minds is hard, and I don't think language reform is even a good first step.
You don't change minds by telling people to please change, you make them change by showing them examples of why they're wrong. If your aim is to convince that schizophrenia happens to people and doesn't define them, a movie like A Beautiful Mind (or more recently perhaps Shutter Island, although it takes a lot of artistic license with the symptoms of psychosis) is worth a thousand word-changes.
25 comments:
Definitely left wing PC nonsense.
You ARE what you mind IS, very different that having a broken ankle of even (for the worst) a cancer.
I have a shizophrenic-paranoid neighbour (officially recognized as such an getting a disability pension for it) and I can guarantee that his illness is an integral part of "him".
P.S. Comparing Thatcher to psychotics is bit unfair to psychotics.
It's amazing how far the leftists will go to defend political correctness, this cognitive dissonance will eventually make them crash and burn (hoping so...)
Psychosis is a loss of contact with reality so, while not necessarily being used in the correct way here, it could be a meaningful and descriptive term of abuse, particularly if one were referencing Thatcher.
"Language can make or break your happiness."
If true for you, this is quite sad.
I totally agree. God I hate labels. I don't mind people labeling themselves if they find it helps them understand themselves and function better. But I hate labels being stuck on people for their entire lives.
The reality is, these labels aren't used to describe actual real "diseases". They are just symptom groups, meaning most people could find into many many different "disorders" and there is no real scientific way to evaluate EXACTLY what a person has because there is no actual disease for most of these disorders.
Considering the biological basis for depression is a theory in and of itself (although I think the reality the brains functioning and mood and mental health are related has been proven to varying degrees).
Subgroups of symptoms and behavior that tend to be linked together are useful only in that they are helpful to people.
What happens is that society doesn't like these symptoms and behaviors so it becomes important to define whether the person is "choosing" to be that way or is forced into it because of their "condition."
And here I ramble some more (which disorder is that? lol)
Healthy people often say things like "I'm schizophrenic/bipolar/OCD" in a flippant or half-serious way because these ideas are prevalent in pop culture. Should we be concerned about such usage as well? Incidentally this usage probably inflates your google search results by quite a bit.
"You don't change minds by telling people to please change, you make them change by showing them examples of why they're wrong."
have you ever tried convincing someone who believes in a personal god that it doesn't exist by showing them examples of why they're wrong? did it work?
No but to be fair I never said I was a miracle worker. Seriously though, when I have convinced people of things, it has been through examples, not through saying some variant of "You're wrong and it's offensive so please stop thinking that." In fact I'd be interested to know of any times that has worked...
I think part of the difference, with regard to how psychosis vs., for example, cancer, are referred to in these contexts, is that 'psychotic' is typically used as a term of ridicule, dismissal, and/or abuse - almost invariably directed at the 'psychotic' person, and their presumed net worth as a human being or a member of society. What is being stated is that someone should be hated, dismissed, or ridiculed for resembling a person in the active stage of a mental illness. The typical use of the word 'cancer' does not seem comparable. Hope that made sense.
By the way, I'm not a big fan of person-first language, either. I think it's a different issue, however. To whatever degree this is relevant, I'm autistic, and was briefly diagnosed as bipolar in the past (it never occurred to me to refer to myself as a 'person with bipolar disorder' - much less a 'person with autism'). Most bipolar people I've run into refer to themselves as such.
In the UK NHMDU and the leading mental health charities have found it both politically useful and financially profitable to campaign around mental health in the same way others have campaigned against racism.
It's not even a close fit but its the basis for the official NHMDU and charity driven anti stigmatist approach and its resulted in an uncritical political correctness and dishonesty that is nowhere more embarassing and obvious than when mental health patients - or survivors - eager to please their charity or NMHDU handlers adopt the party line and language to lecture the rest of us ( including other mental health patients like me ) in public.
The Guardian has a nasty habit of publishing this drivel to demonstrate how political correct it is whilst ignoring real disability discrimination that you can actually kick, like the Department of Health excluding all NHS mental health services - whether the patients using them are in-patients or outpatients and have mental capacity or not - from the Patient Choice agenda on the grounds that it may not always be appropriate to offer Patient Choice to some of them.
It's probably not always appropriate to employ middle aged black people who are partially sighted either ...but , well, I'm sure you get the point. Unfortunately the 1 in 4 anti stigma campaigners dont, cant or just plain wont. They need to invent reasons to be mortally offended.
As a mental health patient I don't have to pretend to be offended
about the use and abuse of language around mental health ( anyone notice Clegg using the term Potty today? ) nor do i feel the need to exagerate perfectly natural and proportional feelings of loss, sadness and grief over routine disappointments and unavoidable life events and deaths of loved ones to self-servingly misrepresent them as an epidemic of mental illness .
What troubles me about patients who feel the need to relentlessly push the NMHDU and mental health charity agenda is why they refuse to see how their uncritical and absolutist thinking harms other patients as well.
I support and campaign for Patient Choice in mental health because its a game changer that could never be imposed on patients, if they didn't want to choose they wouldn't have to someone else would obviously choose for them.
But to attack the satirical..boy, that's fucking cheap as its the most powerful weapon the powerless and truly marginalised have.
Neuroskeptic wrote:
"...You don't change minds by telling people to please change, you make them change by showing them examples of why they're wrong..."
Hmmm. Not ideally. I think that providing alternatives for people that validate the phenomenon they've observed, but allow them to acknowledge that their perception may have been incorrect is perhaps more effective.
Anyway, sadly, words are important to most people (because they believe them to be the height of communication), even though they are largely meaningless. My ex-employer was fond of throwing words such as "delusional," or "mentally ill" at certain of his employees. Needless to say, he was unqualified to do so. In essence, what he wanted to convey was that something that an employee might have to say was not to be regarded with any seriousness, and thus he chose to lambast them on a global basis.
The issue, then, may be partly to do with self-hate, as you suggest, but also, where these words have a negative connotation, being branded with them is perceived as affecting the way that others treat one. And that can be quite scary.
As I wrote: words are largely meaningless. Most people, the cartoon-writer included, would probably be unable to define "psychotic". And seeing as it has no meaning (it's not defined in DSM-IV, as I recall), that's hardly to be wondered at! Ergo, the word has no value, whatsoever, outside the meaning and intention of the person using it (eg, is it being used to denigrate?).
Matt
I know a number of people who walk around announcing to the world "I am bipolar" and "I am ADD." They wear these labels like a badge of courage. Mental health advocates who object to labels in cartoons are just plain nuts.
Anonymous 12:38: reminds me of Salvador Dali's line "I don't take drugs, I am drugs".
The point is that understandably no-one wants other people to define them by their diagnosis, because that tends towards seeing people as nothing more than a mental case when in fact, they are a person. But you are not going to solve that problem by badgering people into substituting "person with schizophrenia" for "schizophrenic".
Anonymous 23:14 - Interesting that you think the current anti-stigma campaigns are based on the model of racism - I've noticed that myself.
What I really don't like about this is that it relies on splitting the population into the "mentally ill" (or "mentally distressed" or whatever...don't get me started on that) vs the "normal".
The 1 in 4 meme is the "concrete proof" of this, 1 in 4 of us are mentally ill and 3 in 4 are mentally healthy. Rather like the population of the USA is about 75% white, 12% black... etc.
All of which implies that if you suffer mental illness is becomes a fundamental part of your identity. Now maybe some patients feel that way, if so, good for them. But I know for a fact that doesn't apply to 1 in 4 people and even many people who experience a severe mental illness don't feel that way.
The whole point of the de-institutionalization, Care in the Community movement was to avoid people becoming permanent patients and getting them back into normal life. Arguably the whole point of psychiatry is to make people able to live a normal life again, and you know you've succeeded when they're out there with a job, a relationship, etc.
But when people start defining themselves by their mental illness & thinking in us vs. them terms, as if "mentally ill" was a race, something has gone wrong.
I've experienced depression and my depression is a part of me. But "mental illness" absolutely isn't. I don't think I have much in common with someone who's never had a mood disorder but has had an eating disorder, for example.
Neuroskeptic wrote:
"...Arguably the whole point of psychiatry is to make people able to live a normal life again, and you know you've succeeded when they're out there with a job, a relationship, etc..."
That's interesting... That societal norm is certainly one that most would subscribe to (mostly because they couldn't conceive of anything else), but should a person be made to understand that they are abnormal, if that model doesn't feel like a good fit for them?
Also, why is it psychiatry's job to have everybody that it deals with see that this is a model that they should strive towards? Or, as you put it "to make" people see this as the thing they should seek to achieve?
I mean, don't get me wrong, here - I've no idea what psychiatry is trying to achieve. If it's "mental wellness" then psychiatry's failing in its objective. If its purpose is that of a guardian of the social order, then I think we really do need to question our priorities (and stop bullshitting).
Matt
A bit off topic, but you have to check this article out on the epidemic of psychiatric drugs. It would be interesting to read your opinion on it.
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/04/27/interview_whitaker_anatomy_of_an_epidemic/index.html
Gosh, what a tendentious lot of rubbish that article exposes. All the usual anti-psychiatry tropes, I was particularly amused by the claim that an epidemiological study into outcomes of patients off antipsychotics shows that patients with schizophrenia shouldn't be given them.
That level of fundamental failure to understand basic clinical research suggests that the rest of his book will be full of similar errors, especially as he seems to be claiming that the medical literature shows that antidepressants and other psychoactive drugs cause worse longterm outcomes than no medication. A finding that you'd think would be given rather more coverage in the field given how revolutionary it is, of course it is just possible that actually the literature doesn't show this and it is only a journalist who is unable to understand the literature properly that can 'uncover' these shocking findings.
I'm going to reserve judgement until I read the book... because it is hard to be measured and balanced in a short article. We'll see.
Well true enough, but I would have hoped to have seen at least a few caveats or modifiers, rather than making such bold claims as:
Adhering to studies published in prominent medical journals, he argues that, over time, patients with schizophrenia do better off medication than on it.
...they didn’t announce the 2007 outcome study for schizophrenia patients. In that study, the recovery rate was 40 percent for those off meds, but only 5 percent for those on meds.
...most of the leading academic psychiatrists act as consultants, advisors and speakers for [the pharmaceutical industry]. The problem is that psychiatry, starting in 1980 with the publication of the DSM-III, decided to tell the public that psychiatric disorders were biological ailments, and that its drugs were safe and effective treatments for those ailments. If it suddenly announces to the public that a long-term NIMH-funded study found that the 15-year recovery rate for schizophrenia patients was 40 percent for those off meds and 5 percent for those on meds, then that story begins to fall apart. By not reporting the results, psychiatry maintains the image of its drugs in the public mind, and the value of psychiatrists in today’s therapy marketplace."
It is pretty clear that, despite the obvious qualifiers someone who understood epidemiological data would have made (i.e. that those off antipsychotics are those who haven't needed antipsychotics for florid psychotic breaks - i.e. for less severe patients) the author is making the very bold claim that the data favours being off antipsychotics for schizophrenia. That is just a complete failure to understand the literature at anything other than a superficial level, and as such I can only conclude that the rest of the book is based on similar misrepresentations.
Hey pj:
Can you please get off your soap box and provide us with links to research studies that refute this author's claims? Please? If I want a sermon, I will go to Mass. Thanks.
Why do I need to go dig out studies to refute some journalist's claims? That he doesn't even understand what epidemiological studies can and can't tell us is sufficient evidence for me that I need pay little heed to his claims.
If you don't like that then maybe you could get off your soapbox to provide evidence to support his claims.
Hey pj:
With all due respect, WTF? His book outlines the evidence to support his theses. It is incumbent on you to refute them. You know, Science 101?
Not in the comments section of someone else's blog. Otherwise I could just say that it is incumbent on you and him to disprove the claims of the medical establishment in this comments section.
The world is filled with anti-psychiatry books, from the sensible (but often wrong) end with Bentall to the mad-as-a-box-of-frogs end of Breggin. Far from being incumbent on the medical and psychiatric professions to read and extensively document the flaws in all these books it is the responsibility of these authors to argue their position in the academic literature. They don't and can't which is why all these arguments are in books and not academic articles. I have read my fair share of anti-psychiatry books and I do not intend to give any more money to what is, in my opinion, an industry designed to provide self-justification to people who have already decided what they believe based on impulse and not evidence.
As I point out above, that article already reveals quite obvious flaws in his argument (do you even understand what the flaw is I'm talking about?) and so, just as with David Icke, I'm not going to waste my time buying and reading his book until someone provides evidence that he does anything more than make tendentious and unfounded claims based on misreading of the scientific literature.
Since it is far from incumbent on me to spend my free time writing book reviews in the comments section of someone else's blog in response to someone who seems to be a classic troll true believer I'm afraid you are just going to have to accept that.
pj:
I would have been happy to read your refutation on YOUR blog. But it's obvious you prefer to substitute slogans and insults for scientific debate. Thanks to you and your ilk, the anti-psychiatry crowd gets larger every day. Oh, and by the way, you remind me very much of another pompous ass who sometimes comments on this blog. Did anyone ever suggest that you might have a problem with narcissism? And, to sound like you for a brief moment, "Do you even know what flaw I am talking about?" LOL. Have a nice day!
I think another reason is people labeled with any kind of "mental illness" or "neurological disfunction" are more likely to identify with the condition, even be proud, even not consider it a problem or consider it to come with problems but to be a gift more than a problem.
You never hear someone who has diabetes say they're happy to have it and would never want it cured and they don't refuse treatment unless its for religious reasons. But you see that all the time with bipolar, adhd, autism,...
This is because illness in the mind is less clear cut. Even when science does manage to show a clear chemical causation it still hasn't proven a disease since "normality" also has a chemical causation. If someone feels like the benefits of their "disorder" outweigh the problems they're not going to see it as a problem(it might come with problems but on the whole they see it as positive). They might think they are more intelligent, more creative, etc. and be proud of this.
How do I know this? Because that's how I feel about having ADHD. I wouldn't be as creative if I didn't have it. If I watch a movie my mind will automatically analyze the plot to see what the producers might have wanted to symbolize. I don't refuse medication, I'm having a really hard time keeping up now that I'm taking 17 credits in college and have procrastinated but mean to get around to going to the campus neurology clinic to get a diagnosis(not diagnosed yet but its been obvious my whole life, just not a big problem until now, relied on caffeine before now). I'm still only taking it for studying and even then not for all my classes. Some of my classes involve a lot of creative thinking and I'm not about to take pills for those ones and mess them up.
I have my problems but other people do too. Most people have a problem being able to see the deeper meanings in movies compared to me and need "help"(in the form of a doobie) if they want to see it.
Post a Comment