For the Sake of Argument
In the preceding paper I described how a member of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill (AMI), who definitely believed in the medical model of mental illness, was willing to entertain discussion "for the sake of argument" that proceeded from the assumption that the medical model is wrong.
In this section I am going to reciprocate. I do not believe "mental illness" exists in the sense that AMI and the psychiatric institution believe it does--that in some organic sense mentally ill people have brains that function differently than those of normal people--but let us suppose for the duration of this paper that they are right. Certainly the claims to scientific knowledge made by the psychiatric profession and reported in the media have made it difficult for us to be taken seriously as we try to claim the contrary! What are the implications for the psychiatric inmates' liberation movement and the things that we have said about psychiatric oppression if in fact those of us diagnosed with such labels as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, etc., really *do* have biochemical, bioelectrical, or neurostructural differences in our heads?
Let me begin with Kate Millett. Those of you who initially came to this site because of an interest in feminist theory probably know Millett as the author of Sexual Politics, and some will have read Flying and Sita as well. Millett is also the author of The Loony Bin Trip, a vivid first-person account of what it's like to be threatened at every turn with the prospect of involuntary psychiatric intervention, usually by her well-meaning and concerned friends and relatives. Millett, who had been diagnosed manic-depressive (bipolar), had been put on lithium to control her mood swings, and her saga begins shortly after she decides to stop taking it. Millett's social acquaintances learn of this and begin pressuring her to resume her lithium, dismissing her decision to quit the chemical as crazy behavior in and of itself. Soon, everything she says and does becomes a "symptom" to them and they conspire to have her involuntarily committed "for her own good".
Millet's account is a powerful read, and I've recommended it many times to various acquaintances and contacts. Interestingly, though, one of those who had prior knowledge of the behavior patterns considered to constitute manic-depressive disorder argued after reading a few chapters that "she really does have the condition". She had also read Millett's earlier feminist biography Flying and claimed that the book illustrates a moody despair and feelings of inadequacy and a fear of being out of control, and that this and other phases of her "bipolar nature" are also apparent in The Loony Bin Trip. I do not believe in bipolar disorder as a genuine medical condition and stated that documenting one's everyday feelings, including feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy, is a brave political act, and to turn around and attribute the feelings to bipolar disorder instead of circumstance and situation is to disparage her. That Millett can express herself in the cerebral and intellectually analytical voice is apparent from Sexual Politics, and I felt we should question why that voice is perceived as healthy and "sane" when the personal voice is considered symptomatic of mental illness.
And so we argued on at length about it. In fairness to my colleague, it would seem reasonable to suspect that the volatility and intensity apparent in Millett's writing found expression in other ways aside from her writing, and quite possibly disturbed and worried some people enough to have precipitated her psychiatric incarceration and diagnosis. (The tale of her initial confrontation with the psychiatrists is told in flashback section in The Loony Bin Trip. Although there were some decidedly political components to her incarceration--she was deeply involved in working towards the release of a politcal prisoner, and the people intimately involved in her life did not share her degree of commitment to that cause and found it strange--her account does at least partially support this interpretation, since from Millett's description it wasn't her political stand per se that disturbed them but what they regarded as her obsession with the matter, and her casual disregard for what they considered vitally important matters in her more immediate life. Therefore I think we can regard it as a reasonable assumption to have made). Let us pretend for a moment that we agree that Kate Millett's brain really does function differently from the brain of the ordinary person, in ways that are specifically correlated with powerful mood-swings--that the phenomenon caleld "bipolar disorder" exists and Millett is a representative of that phenomenon.
If so, we must acknowledge that Kate Millett--social theorist, author, artist--appears to be living a productive life as a creative person whose cultural offerings have enriched and challenged the rest of us, and that it is her wish, strongly and clearly enunciated in The Loony Bin Trip, that she continue doing so with her biochemistry and natural emotional and cognitive states free from psychiatric intervention. Therefore the premise of bipolarity fails to yield any evidence of a disorder. Millett, when chemical-free, did not assault or violate people; she did not at any time constitute a danger to the worried world around her; and, without touching at the moment on the question of whether or not it would have been anyone's legitimate business if she had, I shall point out that she also did not violate herself through neglectful or self-destructive behavior. The only danger incurred by Millett becoming (shall we say) an unlithiumed bipolar person at large and chemically unimpeded was the paternalistic response of people who felt they had the responsibility and the authority to stop her. And, as you will discover when you take time to read, she even handled that pretty well.
Gossip columnist LIZ SMITH reports:
"I'm sure I am a manic depressive, but I can't fix it because that's how I do my work...almost everyone I know is manic depressive, and if we started to cure all of it, we'd have no great art or great actors. Look at Marlon Brando. Is there something wrong? yes, clearly. Should we fix it? No. Give him another ice cream, buy him an island, and let him walk around in his underwear. Then, give him an acting job every once and a while." So says stand-up comic/actor/manic-depressive Denis Leary, in Time Out NY
PROMINENT FEMINIST SPEAKS
By Sherry A. Nelson
Finally, Feminist ex-inmate Kate Millett, author of Sexual Politics, Sita, and others, did the unexpected. Addressing audiences at Philadelphia's Giovanni's Room and Temple University on January 29, she spoke on the subject of lunacy and sex roles. And speak she did. Or should I say decry?
She lashed out at the mental health system and the notion of "mental illness". Citing Thomas Szasz, she made an analogy between the Inquisition and psychiatry's institutionalization of women. Conformity and passivity, she explained, are the prerequisites to mental "health" and the behavior expected in psychiatric institutions.
The absence of mental patients' civil rights and the oppressive conditions in mental hlspitals were elaborated on. Millett called for an abolishment of mental institutions.
Millett is currently working on a book, The Loony Bin Trip, which discusses the horrors of psychiatry. Let's hope that she, as a famous feminist, is taken more seriously than we "peons" in the mad movement are. I, for one, look forward to the potential interface between us and the feminist movement that Millett's work can help facilitate. And it's one that's long overdue.
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cartoon by David Oaks
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Hearing a Different Voice
Schizophrenia is considered to be a meaningfully different form of mental illness, perhaps attributable to a different set of brain-differences, and ideally responsive to a different regimen of psychiatric interventions. Such, at least, is the theory. In my own case, due to the fact that the shrinky-people in the second bin in which I was incarcerated had no access to the records from the first, the diagnostic call had to be made independently, and therefore, although I'd been diagnosed manic-depressive in the first mental hospital, I received a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenic in the second, in keeping with David Hill's observations of the low rate of diagnostic inter-rater reliability in the field. Regardless of such diagnostic clumsiness, though, the theory is that schizophrenia manifests itself through a different set of symptoms, usually indicative of a more profound deterioration in cognitive processes. Schizzies do not merely have to suffer mood swings and related difficulties coping with them, they are afflicted with the inability to discern reality appropriately, and end up with elaborately demented concepts of what is real, what has happened, and who they themselves are. They are often virtually impossible to understand, since on the one hand they do not communicate well and on the other hand the content of their attempted communications ranges from distorted to incoherent. And they hallucinate. They see things that are not really there. They remember things that did not really happen. And, in particular, they hear voices.
Despite legends of wards full of people who think they are Napoleon, the prevailing symptom that earns most people a speedy escort to the proverbial booby hatch is the hearing of voices. It is a dependably recurrent phenomenon. There are not that many people out there in the world who hear voices without current present people attached to them, and those that do seem more often than not to display signs of peculiar thinking processes, obsessions, alienation from other people, and a failure to acknowledge the "real world" that the majority of people take for granted as the baseline of human experience. This greatly encourages psychiatry and its proponents and apologists, since it seems to indicate that they are not simply incarcerating misfits and weirdos, but are instead addressing a specific mental disorder that has certain specific defining characteristics. Schizophrenia is a real mental illness, they say; it causes people to hear voices, and they need their "meds" in order to make the voices go away.
We know from reading the newspapers that hearing voices can be a very bad thing. We read of psychotics who murder because the voices told them they should, or of depressed people whose voices tell them they are no good for anything and should kill themselves. Less commonly, we might come across stories of people whose voices whispered encouragement to them when times were rough, telling them not to give up, or of inventors or mathematicians whose voices drop clues to the solutions to the problems they are contemplating, although such people are not generally identified in the papers as "schizophrenics". But, then, no one ever is, unless the story concerns a breakdown or an arrest. The defenders of the psychiatric status quo become highly annoyed when I point this out, claiming that I'm taking a dangerous and destructive illness and twisting the facts to make it sound like the only thing that's going on here is a vendetta against human individuality. And yet, for the moment I am granting that a genuine difference exists, and still I do not see the logic of their conclusions. I'm taking their supposedly "dangerous and destructive illness" and looking hard at it, and all I see is a plain old difference which does not seem to weigh in as completely good or bad. Certainly, I can see how hearing voices could constitute a problem, and if there are those people who are biologically predisposed to hear voices, many of them might indeed wish a cure for the condition.
Beth, who lived down the hall from my friend Laura, was a designated schizophrenic who heard voices. The "cure" came to the door one a month in the form of a public health nurse brandishing a needle full of Prolixin, which constituted her outpatient aftercare regimen. Sitting around the kitchen, as we all discussed psychiatry and other subjects, she stated that she missed her voices. She had grown accustomed to them over the years and her silent head felt wrong and lonely without them. In response to questions, she said the voices had never harassed her or urged her to do things she was morally opposed to doing. Mainly, they made wry and humorous observations on the moment-to-moment incidents of her daily life. She was cautious about refusing her medication, because she worried, with some justification, that this could provoke the psychiatrist into ordering her incarcerated again.
So What's So Bad About Voices by Jacque McMaster Socrates heard "voices" So I'm told So what's so bad about "voices"? Seems to me it's only when we ignore them that they get bad... The voice of conscience The voice of wisdom The voice of our spirit trying to be free The voice of love urging us on The voice of anger to spur us Socrates heard "voices" or so I'm told They counseled him They warned him In the end he died Don't we all But not in defiance of "voices," But in defiance of wrong So what's so bad about "voices"?
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Although, as I said previously, I received a diagnosis of schizophrenia myself once, neither my incarceration nor my diagnosis had their origins in me hearing voices, for I was not hearing voices at that time. I have ever, on rare occasions, been plagued with them, though. Mine were definitely of the unpleasant variety, telling me things that were uncomfortable for me to hear about myself or throwing facts and observations into my face when I would have preferred to have ignored them. I would have to say that they were honest voices, though, and they went away when I listened to them and acknowledged the matters that I had been avoiding. Like the voices in McMaster's poem, mine only got bad when I ignored them. I tend to think of them as a natural, healthy process, if not necessarily a pleasant one. If it should be true that, due to some biological built-in differences setting me apart from people who have not been diagnosed schizophrenic, I am predisposed to experiencing this process, I still embrace it as part of who I am. My voices have on occasion pierced my ego-thickened resistances and kept me honest about myself.
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Reading assignment: Rosenhan's "On Being Sane in Insane Places"
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Through a Lens, Darkly
There is a branch of the liberation movement that could be considered to be our analog of the Alliance for the Mentally Ill. I suppose it does not make any sense to refer to *any* branch of a liberation movement as "conservative", but the so-called "mental health consumers' movement" could perhaps be called "liberal" in contrast to which the more fervently anti-psychiatric wings could be called "radical". The constituents of the consumers' movement and its groups more often than not believe in "mental illness" and believe that some forms of psychiatric services and treatments do them some good, but they generally characterize the psychiatric profession as being heavy-handed and unresponsive to patients' perceptions of our needs and concerns; they often have concerns about the quality of the care they are receiving and whether or not dangerous treatments and drugs are being used on them without their knowledge. In general, they are organized in order to increase their own input and clout so as to have more say-so about what happens to them in the name of "mental health treatment and services", but, unlike the typical participant in the radical psychiatric inmates' liberation movement, they are not often of the opinion that psychiatric treatment and mental health labeling does the "mentally ill" no good at all.
In granting my temporary premise for this paper, that those of us labeled "mentally ill" actually do share a fundamental difference, I make it possible to position myself (if again only temporarily) in the midst of the liberal movement and its practitioners. Even if I decline to consider that difference an illness, let us suppose that I find that the field of psychiatry has something useful to offer me as a schizophrenic or bipolar person. I then have to interact with the mental health system and the people who comprise it. Certainly I am going to want to be treated as a person and not just a diagnosis! I am going to want to receive respect and acknowledgement for my own intelligence and knowledge of my condition, and to be spoken to on that basis, and not condescended to or lied to about my treatment plan. I am going to want to be taken seriously as a person who has taken the time to learn about my own condition.
These would seem to be reasonable goals, not much different from the wishes of medical-treatment consumers everywhere who have tired of medical practitioners' autocratic ways and who want to possess more knowledge and control of their medical treatment. The difference lies in the perception of the mental patient as a type of patient distinctively different from any other.
I am reminded of the experience of an acquaintance of mine who went into an outpatient clinic and explained to the nurse that she did not want to take her lithium because she had blood in her urine and suspected something was wrong with her kidneys, and she knew enough about lithium to know that lithium puts stress on the kidneys, although she wasn't sure if the lithium could itself be causing the bleeding. The nurses, as they usually did, praised her for reading up on her condition, but tried to reassure her that she should continue to take her lithium until and unless the psychiatrist said otherwise. She could not get them to call him over the telephone. After a long, protracted and increasingly less friendly argument about this, she finally managed to obtain from them a specimen cup and went into the bathroom and emerged with a pink cupful of bloody urine. As she recalls it, the nurse she had originally spoken to looked very surprised and turned to one of the others and remarked, "You know, I think she really *does* have blood in her urine, look at this! And I was about to chart her as manifesting paranoid."
Patients on the receiving end of other forms of medical practice may occasionally feel as if they have been reduced to their ailments, especially within the hospital, where one may be referred to and thought of as "the gall bladder in #217" or "Dr. Smith's chronic osteo". Nevertheless, if the "gall bladder in #217" begins pacing the halls, complaining of nervousness and an inability to sleep, it is fairly likely even on a busy medical-surgical floor that she will be asked questions to find out if she is nervous or scared of the surgery; the medications chart may be checked, perhaps to note that restlessness is a typical side-effect of one of her prescription drugs, or perhaps to discover that this could be a symptom of a more serious drug-interaction problem. If the "gall bladder in #217" explains that part of the problem is her noisy roommate's disruptive behavior, she can typically expect some sympathy and, depending on how crowded the floor is, possibly even an attempt to move her to another, quieter room. In other words, not every aspect of her behavior is reduced to being nothing more than a symptom of her diagnosed condition.
The psychiatric diagnosis, unlike the fabled rose-colored glasses, does not affect how the person wearing it sees the rest of the world so much as it affects how the rest of the world perceives the wearer; but, like those famous pink shades, it colors every aspect of what is seen, adding a pathological tint to every observable human manifestation. It is the lens through which we are viewed and judged distorted.
...I was a very bright child. I had an IQ of 185, and I spent a lot of time reading my myself. And my mother. . . had been in the in the mental hospital about a year before I was born, and . . . there were a lot of theories. . . still popular today. . . that so-called schizophrenia was inherited. So since I was a schild of a mental patient, and my mother couldn't care for me, I was put in a foster home. . .I hae a social worker coming into hour home every month, and since I was expected to be schizophrenic, she was looking for symptoms, and she soon found them. One of the symptoms was the fact that I liked to sit and read a lot. Another symptom was that when all the children used to come and tease me I would run away and leave my tricycle on the street for my foster parents to have to go get later. So when I was six, I was taken from my foster parents, taken to Bellevue Hospital and given 20 shock treatments.
-- Ted Chabasinski, as reported in "Electroshock Hearings in Berkeley"
This continual medicalization of our experiences and behaviors is a sore point for many people in the movement, and a recurrent theme in our demands and complaints. "We demand. . . an end to a way of thinking which calls our anger 'psychosis', our joy 'mania', our fear 'paranoia', and our grief 'depression'." [from the press release of the Ninth International Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression]
The Weird as Well as the Queer: Towards Carving a Space in the Pluralism
If this difference (the existence of which I personally continue to doubt) does indeed exist, we are not merely people labeled schizophrenic and bipolar and depressed, we actually are schizophrenics and bipolars and depressives--even if these categories are for each of us only one part of our social identity. "Different" is not in and of itself "bad" or "sick", and therefore the sweeping categorization of us as "mentally ill" still falls to the side as an oppressive social myth, but the difference, and the question of what society is to do with it *other* than pathologize it, remains.
Fortunately, in daring to acknowledge our difference while refusing the label "sick", we would not be the first, and I think there is much to be gained by looking at how other, similarly pathologized, people of difference have fought for inclusion in and expansion of the social mainstream of normatively healthy people.
The archetypal civil rights movement in the United States of a Different people seeking parity are the black (of African ancestry) people, who over the course of many years have risen up against racism and rejected the judgment assigned to their Difference that marked it as an Inferiority, and enunciated a demand for a multifaceted social equality. Other movements of other Differently people also judged inferior have tended to pattern themselves on that movement and borrow richly from its traditions, including, of course, the feminist movement.
I am not going to study either of these two, however, for the moment's inspiration and insight, for two reasons: first, with racism in particular, and, to a lesser extent, sexism, the raw unquestioned public enunciation of the out-group's intrinsic inferiority is not something that most people have grown up exposed to; and, second, neither racism nor sexism have depended in a broad general way on the notion that the out-group's inferiority consists of being "sick".
Another political movement, that of physically disabled people, would be a better choice, since it has had impact on public consciousness only in much more recent times, and has had to centrally confront a negative image as "sick", "helpless", and "pathetic" to secure rights and obtain access within our society. Again, though, I am not going to look here for inspiration either, partly because the new visions arising from the disabled people's movement are still fresh and unfamiliar to many people, and partly because the primary vision of the Differently Abled acknowledges a spectrum of abilities that exists among people in general and within each individual person but in a way that would be awkward for us to "borrow". If I were paralyzed from the waist down, I could direct people's attention to the fact that I am a complete person, not merely the absence of legs that walk, and that you should see how fast I can type or watch me play basketball with my team, but as a schizophrenic it won't be useful for me to argue that I am not merely the absence of a coherent mind because I'm so talented from the neck down! There are useful parallels, some of which I shall return to later, but for the moment there is a better template to which I wish to turn: the gay rights movement and its political struggles with heterosexism and homophobia.
For many people in America, it is not hard to recall a time when "homosexual" meant "sick", "deviant", "pathetic", and, definitely, "threat to society", and no other perspective was commonly heard. Like the "mentally ill", gay and lesbian people were taught to despise themselves, to the point that it was revolutionary to come out and publicly and openly declare that "this is who we are", and that to be this thing is okay, and, "no, we don't need a cure for it, thank you". The treatment of gay and lesbian people was not questioned or conceptualized as a massive and flagrant violation of people's civil rights as human beings. They were incarcerated, not for having committed any actual crime, but, rather, simply for being who they were. They were caused to live shadow lives often fraught with misery and danger as their access to opportunity, options, and ordinary safety was denied to them, and then the resultant quality-of-life problems were blamed on The Condition, with no acknowledgment of the role of the Stigma. And they were made an example of for the rest of us, something to worry about becoming, something you would not wish to have thought of you. In other words, a good parallel.
In preparation for this section, I read the recently published book Straight news : gays, lesbians, and the news media by Edward Alwood, which is an historical compendium of how gays and lesbians were portrayed by the media since mid-century in America, i.e., covering the period before and during the gay rights movement, and then on through the era of AIDS and into the present.
The gay and lesbian people have of course been us--i.e., labeled mentally ill because of their sexuality in and of itself. Mental health professions have on occasion recommended that they all be psychiatrized en masse.
In all of the following, I noted that what has been true of the experience of gay men and lesbians and their persecution is closely mirrored by the experiences of schizophrenics, bipolars, and depressives, too.
Silence about a person's being gay was normative--not only were gay people in the closet, but even if it was common knowledge that a given person was in fact gay, it was not so stated in print. The only time you read about someone being gay was when they had been arrested or otherwise became visibly socially compromised by gay-related behavior. That is, you might have read that Smith, a member of the City Council, was caught in a raid on a gay bar for allegedly soliciting sex from another man, (subtext: kiss that career good-bye!), but you would not have read that Smith, the popular gay member of City Council, today dedicated the new civic center at a ribbon-cutting ceremony. So about the only time you would ever know that you were reading about gay people was when they were in trouble for doing something allegedly depraved.
Media coverage was supposed to be "objective", which for a long time meant to "tell the news and tell it straight" , from an unquestioned heterosexual perspective which was defined as normative and neutral. This meant that in addition to risking the loss of employment simply because a news organization might not wish to retain a gay or lesbian reporter, a gay reporter's credibility on gay issues would be nullified, because it was thought that gay people could not be "objective" about the issue. So those who were media people often stayed in the closet, and had to be cautious about using their position to tell the watchers and readers of the media about news of meaning and impact to gay and lesbian people.
Various officials, fearing homosexuals as a horrible menace, felt they should be exterminated in order to lower the risk to the general populace.
As concerns about this menace would grow, the escalating outcry would result in escalating arrests of gay people, which in turn would fuel the hysteria in a vicious cycle reminiscent of a witch-hunt.
Individuals growing up gay would often live isolated lives, unaware that there were others like themselves, ignorant of "lots of company, that they weren't alone, that they were all right, that they were good people". Even long after there was a community and rights movement, gay people often had no awareness of it, and all that they ever heard about the "gay life" was that it was "sad and sordid" .
It was regarded as a kind and compassionate perspective to come to view gay and lesbian people as sick rather than wicked, to feel sympathy for them instead of hate, and to try to cure them.
As the gay rights / gay liberation movement began to build up a head of steam and draw some attention, its detractors received mainstream media coverage as experts as they counterclaimed that homosexuality "deserves no fake minority status...", that it is deserving of people's "fairness, compassion, and treatment", but we need to keep in mind that it is a "sickness", not a harmless "difference". When such articles appeared, they were not accompanied by counterpoint perspectives provided by gay rights / gay liberation participants, although on the occasions when coverage of gay rights events or viewpoints made it into print, there would always be a conventional opposing viewpoint provided "for balance".
People in the gay rights movement noted that much of the data being touted to prove that they were all miserable pathetic people was based solely on studies of institutionalized gay people held in jails or mental hospitals, and therefore was not in any way representative of the overall population.
Eventually, as most of us are aware, the gay rights movement succeeded in mobilizing its own constituency, and regardless of the fact that there are still to be found many people who loudly disagree with them, they have for the most part created a new America where people at least hear people saying that they are gay and they are proud and they do not wish to be cured or changed, and do not accept anyone's verdict that they are "sick". It is now a world where Smith of the City Council can be openly gay, and the newspapers will identify him as such, and report on him as he contributes to overall human accomplishments in creditable ways, and dedicates the civic center. If it is not yet a world in which no one need worry that they will be detained and incarcerated for no reason other than their sexual orientation, it is at least a world in which it tends to happen considerably less often, and is in most venues illegal to do so, and a majority of the general population believes that it *should* be illegal to do so.
One significant difference between the experience (and oppression) of gay and lesbian people and that of schizophrenics, bipolars and depressives that fascinates me a great deal is that, historically, homosexuality has been defined and reviled principally as a behavior, therefore a volitionally wicked or sick act, and in response a major wing of the gay rights movement has embraced the belief that theirs is an innate, built-in biological Difference that was not "caused" by any sequence of events or chosen due to some condition of moral depravity, nor can it be "cured" or "treated", but instead is, biologically and innately, who they are. For the psychiatrized, on the other hand, our historical definition by those who have defined and reviled us has it that we are inherently defective, that our brains aren't built right, either through genetics or random misfortune, that our emotional condition and the concepts that occupy our heads have little if anything to do with any sequence of events or political choices that we might have made, but instead is, biologically and innately, who we are. So, as you might expect, most of the people who comprise the psychiatric inmates' liberation movement reject the medical model of mental illness and embrace an interpretation of our cognitive and mental state that attributes what we think and feel to our individual histories and politics, including the outcomes of other people's reactions to us and our vulnerability to what they put us through. As I have reiterated repeatedly, I am definitely among them; I do not genuinely believe myself to be a "schizophrenic" because I do not believe such creatures exist aside from labeling, nor, for that matter, to I believe myself to be bipolar except in the sense that all people with feelings experience a range of feelings, and such is true of everyone else who has received that inauthentic diagnosis.
Unlike the gay rights movement, though, we have not managed to break through the walls of silence to the point that people are generally aware of our perspective. Strategically, then, I have begun to think that we might be beating the proverbial dead horse by trying to combat psychiatric oppression by exposing the fact that the illnesses they claim to be treating when they oppress us do not even exist. Perhaps in this political climate, we could accomplish more with a tongue-in-cheek inversion of what the mental health system says about us. They insist that we are schizophrenics, bipolars, and depressives, and are therefore sick and need their help. Maybe it is time that we unfurled a banner for schizzy lib and demanded equal civil rights, nondiscrimination clauses in hiring and housing, and equal access for the Differently Minded!