The suffering Olympics in mental illness

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There are many mental health issues out there. Some of them actually cause others – i.e., people who have disorders defined by a lack of empathy, ignoring others’ boundaries, etc., – to commit abuses which give other people depression, anxiety, PTSD, etc. If you put together all the people who have “mental health” issues, you’re actually talking about a pretty complicated and diverse group. Add in the fact that some nations disagree about how to classify some illnesses/disorders, and that there may even be good cultural reasons for this, and it’s a big mess.

Here’s the thing: when you consider that some people with mental health issues are actually causing other people to have mental health issues, it becomes obvious that you can’t support every member of the community equally at every moment, in every context. Consequently, there’s a situation I keep running into with blogging. To give you some examples:

  • A commenter who insists every thread in which s/he participates should become about his/her mental disorder, and if we refuse to derail our discussion onto that, we are bad allies. (Emotional blackmail.)
  • A commenter insists that because s/he has a mental health issue, we should allow her to say racist and classist things because the hell with our non-white, non-middle class, etc., writers and readers. (We’ve also had people of color insist on being allowed to say racist and classist things.)
  • A commenter insists “America does it wrong” (I call this one Eurosplaining since it’s almost always Europeans who do this) and we must all go by his country’s take on various mental illnesses.
  • A commenter strongly believes an outdated theory (like, “all men are capable of raping you if you provoke them enough”), and when we offer them studies, data and facts which suggest otherwise, they refuse to hear it because they were raped/abused and this is the personal narrative they’ve developed to cope with it and we all need to go along with it to protect their feelings. The hell with our male readers and writers who are repulsed by the idea of pushing someone to do something they don’t want to do.
  • A commenter insists that his mental illness and the accommodation of it is more important than anyone else’s. Sometimes these people have been networking so exclusively in circles that deal with their own disorder – understandably – that they unthinkingly interpret “What about the rest of us?” as if it’s coming from people without mental health issues as opposed to people with different mental health needs.

You probably can’t imagine how painful it is to deal with these people. They are usually in genuine pain. They may not realize they are being selfish, but they are. For years, we would just keep talking to them, trying to get them to see that theirs was not the only sound position, that their needs were not the only ones to consider. But in many cases, it just kept going south – they’d bully, or hurl abuse, or bring in a posse of supporters to agree with them. The only response was to bully back or give up, and that’s when the good commenters – the ones who cared about others – left.

So we learned not to respond more than once or twice. If they showed no sign of seeing, or even trying to see, any view but their own, we learned to ban them right then and there before things got more abusive. Before other readers got hurt by reading their comments. If someone’s beating the crap out of someone else, you don’t stand by watching and say, “Poor beater – he can’t help it because of his mental disorder.” No, you stop the abuse: that is always the priority. The rest, you sort out later.

And that is our policy. If you are making others feel intimidated or like their problems are unimportant next to yours, then you get banned. There just isn’t another way to deal with this issue.

Rapists: the Jeckyll and Hyde thing

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This essay tells the first-person story of a big woman who is made to feel physically beautiful for the first time in her life. She’s been made to feel beautiful in other ways by other men, but it’s always been despite her looks rather than because of them. Not so with this guy. She sleeps with him. Then on another visit he makes her uncomfortable by ignoring her boundaries in various ways, and as she rebuffs him he attempts to rape her. She finally bites him on the arm to get him to leave. And the point is, she is so shaken by the experience that she distrusts a man she meets later, who also seems to genuinely like her looks.

Her story is not my point. What I want to examine is this comment:

How did Dr. Jekyll become Mr. Hyde? It couldn’t be booze, because there was that at the bar in the hotel where they met. This story, while poignant, is very odd. Also, the notion that a fat woman can never be loved both for who she is and how she looks is simply not credible. There are plenty of fat fetishist men out there, even web sites.

There’s a lot wrong with this comment, and I’m going to start at the end and work back to the most important one. First, being “fetishized” is not being loved. Second, she never said a fat woman can’t be loved for how she looks, just that she hasn’t experienced that.

But most importantly, the Jeckyll and Hyde thing is not odd at all. It is so common, in fact, that people call it the “Jeckyll and Hyde syndrome” – go ahead, copy that into the search engine of your choice and see what I mean. People who are abusive – whether they’re rapists, or the type to verbally abuse you, emotionally manipulate you, or take over your bank account – are typically good actors. They have to be – otherwise they’d be seen clearly for what they are and jailed (if appropriate) or shunned by all the people they want to impress. They learn to wear the Jeckyll face in public and the Hyde comes out in private.

But they also learn to show you the Jeckyll face for a while, until they’ve got you where they want you. This could be two dates, a whole courtship, however long it takes to worm their way into your will, etc. And then suddenly you meet Mr. – or Ms. – Hyde. But, if Hyde judged things correctly, by then it’s too late for you to easily extricate yourself from the damage they’ve done.

It’s called conning and I’m not sure why people find it “odd” that rapists engage in it. But sadly, one of the best defenses against a rape accusation is “We’d previously had consensual sex.” It’s effective because too few people understand that the vast majority of rapists are as capable of impulse control as anyone else. They aren’t compelled to rape – if they were, they’d do it right in front of cops in the town square if that’s where the urge struck (what the law calls irresistible impulse to determine legal sanity). Rapists simply like to rape, so like most of us with our hobbies, they take steps to create situations in which they get to do what they enjoy.

Rapists often operate just like people who worm their way into someone’s life just to get their money. Whether it’s someone marrying for money or cozying up to an elderly person in hopes of inheriting a buck or two, these people often have no affection at all for their target, but they will feign affection convincingly to get what they want. Many rapists, particularly the ones who avoid capture, are con artists.

Can someone explain to me why this is such a mystery to so many people?

Discussion: care taking and the wage gap

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Anytime there’s a discussion about the wage gap between men and women, someone blames pregnancy for it. The argument goes something like this: “Well, you ladies take off all this time to have babies, so of course you miss out on promotions.”

They say it like women are taking time off from work to get caught up on their soaps. Of course if you were absent a lot for some totally frivolous reason, you would have no right to complain if you miss out on raises or promotions.

But the two main reasons women miss work, or take a few years out of their careers, is (a) to give birth, (b) to raise kids and (c) to take care of elderly or disabled family members.

But another point is that none of these reasons women miss work are strictly for their own benefit. Caring for the elderly or disabled benefits not only the person being cared for, but the whole family. Nurses and care homes are expensive, and may not be ideal for a variety of reasons. A woman who misses work to take care of someone this way is performing a self-sacrificing act for the greater good. Surely this should not be rewarded with less pay and fewer promotions on the job.

Giving birth and raising kids are also not frivolous things that only benefit women. Men also want children. Men cannot possibly become fathers without a woman, at some point in the process, going to the trouble of incubating a baby for nine months and then giving birth.

And governments want people to have babies; this is evident by the way in which they totally panic every time the birthrate slips a percentage point or so and start offering people all sorts of incentives to make more babies, quick! So even when a woman has a baby on her own just because she wanted to, she is still doing something her government encourages and would in fact panic if enough women like her weren’t doing it. (Well, if she’s white at least – government stereotypes about women of color having children is a whole other discussion.)

So why should women be penalized for doing something that both men and the government want them to do, and that everyone criticizes them for not doing?

Why portrayals of men as domestic buffoons are a feminist issue

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Chlorox has just pulled a web piece which depicts a new dad as taking a half-naked kid out in the cold and having no idea why it’s crying; compares men at home to “dogs or other house pets”; shows fathers letting kids eat off the floor and smear Play-Dough all over their faces; etc.

Gender discrimination is bad, no matter which gender’s on the receiving end of it. But that’s not the only reason to take issue with ads like this which show men failing horribly at basic domestic tasks. You’ve got to ask yourself why these portrayals existed long before feminism, and then the answer becomes clear.

Portrayals that reinforce the idea men are inherently bad at women’s stuff are primarily designed to pressure women into doing traditional female chores. That is, we shouldn’t ever expect an adult male partner in our household to change a diaper, tend a child, clean a toilet or prepare a meal. We should roll our eyes at the buffoonery and Just Do It All Ourselves.

That’s the real purpose of these portrayals, and that’s why until very recently, they’ve been laughingly tolerated by men. The slight downside of looking foolish was well worth the tradeoff of getting out of “women’s work.”

The reason men are increasingly resenting these portrayals now is that many of them are actually willingly sharing household responsibilities with their wives and female partners. Some of them are actually single fathers, at least part-time. Because they’re not trying to escape responsibility for household work, these guys reap no benefit from being portrayed as incompetent at it. When they see these portrayals, they can see only the downside of looking silly – and that’s a good thing.

But it’s important to remember that the real purpose of these portrayals is to help men escape responsibilities for the homes they live in and the children they father. It promotes the idea that we should tolerate irresponsible men instead of expecting all adults to share in the responsibilities they take on.

Angelina Jolie sharing her mastectomy publicly

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Angelina Jolie, upon learning she had a rare genetic marker that indicates especially high risk for breast and ovarian cancer (the latter of which took her mother’s life at age 56), decided to have a preventative double mastectomy to reduce her risk of breast cancer from 89% to less than 5%. Then she decided to let the world know, and the criticism began. While it’s okay for people to debate things like who should or shouldn’t get this type of surgery, the criticism I’m talking about went something like this:

She’s just looking for attention. Really? For someone wanting attention, she goes to a lot of trouble to elude the press. By simply not expending that effort, she could have enough attention to potentially overwhelm the most attention-needy among us.

The concern trolls. These people are deeply worried that the doctor scared her into this unnecessary surgery, and now she’ll scare other women into it. The implication being that women are irrational creatures, easily manipulated, and once manipulated they like to convince everyone else to join them. Somehow… I dunno, I mean, a lot of people of both genders can be “scared” into trying a fad diet, for example, but getting a body part removed? Even the most dedicated trend followers are going to think twice about that one.

She’s ugly anyway, so it’s fine with me that she did this. Translation: “I am entitled to her body as public property, but since I didn’t want it anyway, it’s okay that she changed her appearance. Had I cared about her appearance, my entitlement might well have driven me to follow her around and harass her about how she could dare do this thing TO ME! Because that’s who it’s all about, ME ME ME!”

Just eat more broccoli and teh cancer can’t get you: “Living a healthy lifestyle is a far better way to reduce risk then maming [sic] yourself with no guarantees.” I don’t believe this idea is born of ignorance or confusion. I think it comes from the same place as, “If you dress conservatively, you can’t be raped.” It’s denial, plain and simple, born of a deep psychological inability to cope with the random unfairness of life.

This is one of my favorites, a comment from the NYT piece:

“I do not think there is a direct link between gene fault and cancer, rather an indirect one. We have genes that can go awry from exposure to man-made toxins, and then cancer develops.”

Hmm, that almost sounds plausible. Maybe this person is in medical research?

So a better strategy would be to go the alternative way (it is rather ridicolus that the natural way is now called the alternative way) and avoid those toxins: eat organic food, breath fresh air without exhaust and other pollutants, drink clean water, live in a wooden healthy home without exposure to chemicals from furniture (impregnated with fire-retardants), get your sleep etc etc.

Wait, this isn’t sounding so medical anymore. First, this is how absolutely every human lived until a few hundred years ago, so how did they get cancer?

Second, if it was that simple, George Burns wouldn’t have lived to be over 100, and two guys I’ve known who were super fit health nuts would not have keeled over dead from massive heart attacks in their 40s or 50s due to genetic factors. Sometimes the genes just win, and you don’t even need to work in medicine to notice that.

… However, if there is such a thing as a direct link between gene and cancer, I still think one should live health, the way nature intended, without such surgery.

Aha – so even if you’re wrong and the gene means exactly what Jolie’s qualified physicians said it means, she still should just eat more broccoli and hope for the best rather than do something that is proven to reduce the risk to under 5%. Unlike your “healthy lifestyle.”

Those natural breasts are also part of you bodys defense system.

Huh? I can only assume s/he means the lymph nodes which are often removed in breast cancer procedures because they’re so often where the cancer is.

It makes me wonder that no other comments that I have read share my point of view.

It should make you wonder. Specifically, whether you’re making the slightest bit of sense, or are in fact totally uninformed, married to unfounded assumptions, and not at all concerned about how many people might suffer if they read your comment and mistakenly think you know a breast from a lymph node.

I am a computer programmer

Of course you are. So shut up. I’m a blogger, and you don’t see me saying I know what’s best in medicine. Get over yourself.

Once again, we see that a woman cannot dictate her own body choices without the concern trolls and beauty police and general narcissists crawling out of the woodwork to get themselves some attention.

Newsflash: women are not stupid. We can read and stuff. And even the more daft among us can’t simply go to doctors and order a double mastectomy through the drive-in window. Doctors actually, like, go over various options with us and stuff. By sharing her story, Jolie has informed the general public:

  • There’s this whole other way certain breast cancer risks can be detected, and if your family tree indicates it, this testing might be appropriate for you. Also, if you know someone in this situation and they are talking about this option, this is not a “crazy” idea you should be trying to talk her out of. It’s a viable option based on real medical data, and it deserves a doctor’s opinion on whether her case merits it, not yours.
  • That any mastectomy, whether preventative or after the fact, does not reduce your womanhood, and can now be done in such a way as to barely change your appearance (“small scars”). And that even if it does change your appearance, survival is far more important.
  • That it’s okay to put your health and health anxieties ahead of anyone’s perception about your body and their entitlement to it.
  • How romantic partners (and, for that matter, friends and relatives) should respond – with support and reassurance that they are more concerned about keeping you alive than about any change in your appearance.
  • How expensive the testing is. She doesn’t directly mention that insurance doesn’t always cover it (nor that quite a lot of Americans don’t have insurance). But based on what she’s shared, maybe more women with cancer in their families will inquire about this and complain if their insurance refuses to pay for it. Do insurance companies prefer paying for chemo, radiation and/or mastectomies later, or just the mastectomies now?

I personally see no reason to doubt Jolie’s motives, but then I don’t get my kicks by sitting around passing judgment on people. I think she’s simply provided something for people to think about. Unlike her critics, she’s provided real medical data and sources to explain her decision – and when you do that, something really neat happens: you enable people to look at your case and think, “Cool, but this clearly doesn’t apply to me” as well as “Oh, I think I need this!”

In sharing this, Jolie is just empowering people with information about a rare condition. The only reason it’s so controversial is that it has to do with her secondary sex organs. People need to get over this; it’s embarrassing.