I wanted to write an entry about mental illness, internet personas, diversity, identity and many other stuff, but couldn’t come to a conclusion.
So, here is my train of thought:
1 – Read a New Scientist article about autistic people offended by the way they were portraied in a website (Autism Speaks) from a charity.
2 – saw Amanda Baggs video, In My Language . Found it amazing that she could speak those two languages so well. Found it extra-amazing that, being so disabled, she was able to do everything by herself. Maybe she was lying?
3 – Found websites saying that she is a liar (like this ). Not autistic, but desperate for attention.
4 – Concluded that I will never know what is her situation, and it doesn’t matter. Autistic or not, she has serious mental problems. And I hope she finds a way to live with that and be happy.
5 – But I got a little uncomfortable with the whole autistic pride stuff and the idea that if you “treat” someone with these problems and they become less autistic, they lose part of their personality. (correct me if I got it wrong)
6 – Thought of many artists who were depressed or had serious mental illnesses. If they got proper medication and treatment, would they have been the artists they were? Virginia Woolf, Van Gogh, JD Salinger. Syd Barret…
7 – Recalled the case of a friend who took some Ritalin-like medication for some months and said he started to concentrate beautifully in his work and studies. But his creativity just disappeared. “You can’t have it all,” he told me. He gave up the medication and is a creative person again. But what if he had severe attention deficit, and not just a mild case?
8 – It led me to a story I read years ago (Witty Ticcy Ray, from “The man who mistook his wife for a hat”, by Oliver Sacks) about a man with severe Tourette Syndrome who became a high functioning but boring person when under medication and decided to take it only 5 days a week, going back to his old self, witty, great drummer and tourette-ic on weekends.
9 – And so what? No idea.
One of the symptoms of depression is low self-esteem – sometimes suicidally low. So I think ‘depressive pride’ is an oxymoron, like ‘intelligent design’.
Hmmm, that makes a lot of sense :)
Hmmm, that makes a lot of sense :)
(I’m not being ironic)
Agreed with Henry. “Depressive pride” equals “blog”, quite possibly.
Heh @ Maxine. I understand a little of depression, being frequently manic but (usually) only getting as far as the edge of the abyss on the down cycle. Some kind of creative outlet is good, and weblogs are easy to set up, run, and feel as if someone is listening — or cares.
Well, now that you put it that way, I think that the arts have been, in some cases, a big stage for the depressive pride. Some examples (among many others that come to mind) are some Smiths songs and books like Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther
But since we have antidepressants, I’m not aware of movements against “curing” depressive people. There are some people against medication, but they are never against treatment.
So why some people are against treatment for autism, deafness, etc etc etc?
i’m being treated for depression (successfully i hope) and it’s been a long, tough road. also, i’ve just started looking into autism because i get physical therapy (for arthritis) with autistic children. here is where i started: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/7395411/deadly_immunity
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it’s not much of a stretch of the imagination that big pharmacy and the government would get together and decide to do what’s best for them, not us.
i know at least one little boy who is recovering from mercury poisoning. if you think of your brain being “burned” (like skin) by mercury in vaccines, then autism isn’t a disease as a symptom.
Autism and mercury poisoning have different symptoms. They do both affect the brain; but autism is genetic (it can be affected by physical illnesses, especially epilepsy). The easiest way to get mercury poisoning is fish, not vaccines; there’s more mercury in a year’s worth of breast milk than in a year’s worth of vaccines, actually (a very small amount, easily processed out by the kidneys—don’t worry; breast milk is safe). Autism does intensify the problem if you are physically ill because autistic brains have a much lower stress tolerance. There are stories of kids who had, for example, celiac disease, which when treated allowed them to learn at a rate triple what they had done before. It’s important to have a good doctor who does NOT automatically blame signs of distress on the autism.
Anyway. Amanda Baggs is definitely autistic; she’s been featured on the New York Times and CNN, and her medical records have her as autistic from childhood. She has health problems as well, including migraines and a movement disorder… in other words, a very atypical brain.
With autism you often find abilities that are very much higher or lower than the average; for example, a child who is great at math but years behind in reading, or more dramatically, savant skills. It is not at all impossible that someone who is disabled enough to need an assistant would still be able to produce videos; there are quite a lot of skills that you don’t use for making videos that are required for activities of daily living, and if you don’t have them, you end up with severe disability.
I am aware of a few people saying she’s a fraud (one of them has made death threats against her); but every one of these people has been one who believed that autism could not possibly be compatible with a worthwhile life. I think it has more to do with the way her case challenges people’s assumptions about autism than any factual evidence. After all, if you accept that a very autistic woman is speaking out and telling people “I don’t want a cure; I want equal rights,” then that means you actually have to listen. You can no longer use autistic people as objects of pity—you have to consider them as people in their own right.