Self-authorship, mad pride, lesbians

Gerda Lerner in her second volume on women’s history, ‘The Creation of Feminist Consciousness’ (1993), writes about Hildegard of Bingen’s coming to self-authorship, shown in her final series of mystical art works, in each of which she includes the figure of a nun writing on tablets in the left hand corner.  Women still struggle with self-authorship, putting ourselves forward is taking a risk of hubris anticipating that other women as well as men will tear us down and ignore us, not because they dispute the quality of our work so much as because they dispute our right to claim public stature as authors at all.  I am not talking about the industries and their commodification of art, writing, scholarship, activism, legal practice, any profession, so much as that which, as Lerner wrote at the end of ‘The Creation of Patriarchy’ (1986), puts women at the center (taking any issue from the perspective of how it is experienced by women) and gets outside patriarchal thought (questioning all systems of thought, including one’s own).

Readers of this blog will know that I can claim co-authorship of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and can demonstrate in particular my contributions to its most innovative normative standards.  They may also, from knowing me, or from some of my previous writings, know that I struggled first to minimize the significance of this authorship while retaining enough control within the ongoing work to continue developing the logic of what I had begun, then later to reassert and reclaim an authorship that was unique in relation to the issues that I addressed and in the constituency of survivors and users of psychiatry/ people with psychosocial disabilities that I represented in that process.  It was only when it became apparent to me that others claimed credit for innovations that pre-existed their participation, or had a mistaken view of equal contributions when their memories seem to have not retained key milestones in the process for which I had been uniquely responsible, or simply wished ‘everyone to get along’ and minimized – as I had myself – the aggression directed against me as a woman with a bare minimum of credibility from patriarchal institutions (being at the time a recent law graduate), a gender non-conforming lesbian, a survivor of being locked up as a madperson, upending two millennia’s worth of doctrine with a logical pathway that no one had seen before but that opened clear as day to my naive eyes.

Claiming ‘naivety’ is a trope of humility of mystics of both sexes as well as a way of deflecting frontal assault for the temerity of authorship by a woman.  I did experience my work on the Convention as a somewhat mystical destiny, having had a prefigurative dream soon after being freed from psychiatry in which I saw myself as a lawyer, never having considered law as a profession, and having left law school abruptly the first time I started in the 80s, having completed all but six months, then embarking on a kind of ‘rabbit hole’ journey that focused on self-healing, contemplation, self-knowledge, self-directed study and attention, which led me back to law school undertaken at a higher level of understanding and with some awareness of personal power, and which included my first thoughts putting together disability non-discrimination with international human rights to address psychiatric oppression.  Many kinds of synchronicity – meaningful coincidences and decision-points – affected my law school education, and shortly after I graduated I became aware of, and had and eagerly took the opportunity to become involved with, the inauguration of a process to draft a convention.

I had experienced during my time in law school, and reflected to a professor I spoke to,  that I was being erased or erasing myself, and that this wasn’t uncomfortable.  It wasn’t about becoming ‘a lawyer,’ it was something else that I believe was about becoming an impersonal public self to act within history, while letting personal aspects of identity, or who I believed I was, fade away.  It made space within me to allow me to focus on the ideas that I absolutely knew were the logical pathway, and that I kept checking with my sense of responsibility to the constituency – to not harm anyone or destroy anything that should be preserved, given that this was about destroying systemic practices that harmed us and that needed to be catabolized.  There was accountability to the board of the organization I represented, through formal and informal mechanisms, and I involved many people in our networks and in my personal circles in collaborative thinking and decision-making – and yet it was clear that the drive, the logic in its totality, the authorship resided in me.

There is still a sense of potential shame in saying this, a sense that I am sticking up my head like a nail to be beaten down.  I don’t think I could have done it if I hadn’t been female, a dyke, opening myself to the void and its creation of self and other and definition all at once.  I don’t think I could have done it with the male-paradigm creativity of bringing an issue to an international forum and raising it within the confines of possibility, or speaking out and promoting a new vision and collecting adherents.  I worked within a sense of historical time and creative energy, not expecting or anticipating next steps until they were already there, creating the tightrope I walked one as a spider spins out her thread.  Maybe that is why no one saw what I did as I was doing it.  My wife has always called it the ‘path-o-logic’ pointing to the mad quality of this creativity standing outside conventional norms.  I don’t know another ‘mad’ person who has claimed simultaneously to enter history, to bring the void to the conventionalities, which is what the CRPD has opened a pathway for.

And, maybe we are all doing it.  Gerda Lerner’s vision of authorship and how she sees the obstacles to it is still somewhat class-limited, it doesn’t take account of thinking by women, especially women of lower classes, that might be profound and worthy of engagement that simply was trashed, that wasn’t written down, that was burned, that was ignored, that was ignored, that was ignored.  As Judy Grahn wrote in ‘A Woman is Talking to Death,’ ‘I looked in the mirror and nobody was there to testify; how clear, an unemployed queer woman makes no witness at all, nobody at all was there for those two questions: what does she do, and who is she married to?’  Lerner also gives short shrift to lesbians (so far in my reading), saying only that some women ‘turned to each other for care and affection’ among those who escaped the general subordination not only to men’s control but to the material and sexual servicing of men.  While dykes it seems to me are self-authoring beings out of a void, who interact with each other in unpredictable and permeable ways, different entirely from the paradigm of yin/yang heterosexual relations (see eye-opening Sakhiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India, by Giti Thadani), and the paradigm of lesbian self-authorship not only as women alone against patriarchy but as women interacting with other women similarly inventing themselves against patriarchy, because they are drawn together, seeking fulfillment in each other and through their honoring of each other, has been important for feminism, at least as much as women in heterosexual relationships reinventing their own stance and honor between the sexes.

For Jewish women newly entering the emerging working class in Russia, Eastern Europe and then as immigrants to the United States, theory and analysis was thriving in the communist socialist collectives they took part in during their off-work hours (at least until they married); this is documented beautifully along with other dimensions of women’s lives written in Yiddish during the period in which that language flourished.  (We need to talk about Jews in history also; the background/foreground effects of Biblical history/Israel as nationhood narrative contrasted with exile among nations, as a people similarly exercising creativity from a position of non-identity or void.  Lilith is said to be ascendant in exile; as well as being the energy of autonomous female sexuality.)  Revolutionary women were among the prominent theorists; I have mentioned Alexandra Kollontai’s essay and should set myself to read some of Emma Goldman and Rosa Luxemburg, and I’m sure there are others I’m not aware of – to center women and step outside patriarchal thought as Gerda Lerner has challenged us to do.

My point in these last two paragraphs is that democratization of authorship is consistent with women’s claim and necessity of self-authorship.  As entirely predictable, when I recently posted a quote from Lerner on the need for women to assert ‘intellectual arrogance,’ a woman was right there to decry women becoming more like men.  How can we overcome silencing without confronting that which tells us it is ‘arrogant’ to speak?  As with lesbians creating permeable relationships into and out of the void, as mad people creating lives unaccountable to systems of normalization, it is essential to radically re-create all social relationships that have been based on dominance or shaped by ideologies of dominance of any kind (which as Lerner convincingly argues in ‘The Creation of Patriarchy’ is modeled on, reinforces, and always develops in interaction with, patriarchy), to be more like what we create in resistance from these positions of oppression.  Lesbian relationships based on desire of mutually autonomous beings each self-creating in resistance, are unique and cannot be replicated in our relations with men, in work comradeship, in platonic friendship; still as Audre Lorde said in ‘The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,’ we can and do use the same energy throughout the different parts of our lives.

Lesbian relationships require us to pay attention to women’s relations with each other completely outside anything to do with men.  Feminists have also looked at women’s class relations with other women.  Gerda Lerner addresses these differences consistently – the (upper class) ‘wife’ in ancient Near East patriarchy could own property including owning female and male ‘slaves’ but her sexual and reproductive power was owned by her husband, while lower class women would be sold into slavery or concubinage to pay off their family’s debts; in both cases women’s relationship to class is defined by their sexual relationship to men); she acknowledges that class differences have made it difficult for women to come to awareness of themselves as an oppressed sex, but does not deal extensively with the intra-sex cross-class relations, e.g. (as described in Nell  Irvin Painter’s biography) Sojourner Truth’s description of having been sexually abused by a ‘mistress’ as having been especially traumatizing because it was done by another woman.  The lesbian/feminist journal Lesbian Ethics made a point of addressing abuse in the mother/daughter relationship and philosopher Claudia Card takes as one of her starting points the existence of abuse within lesbian relationships.  But it is difficult to not only claim authorship but excavate claims and counterclaims and create the language for them among people who have been denied not only authorship but connection to one another unmediated by their oppressors.  (Alison Bechdel, the ‘Bechdel Test’ for movies – are there more than 2 women, do they talk to each other, about something other than a man?)  (Two lesbians, recently beaten up on a bus in the UK, after refusing to kiss for the titillation of a man.)  Our connections to one another have not only been circumstantially impeded, they have been actively suppressed, repressed, and punished.  Solidarity in response to male violence has paradoxically been more visible in the mainstream and in a sense more acceptable, more cognizable, than women being able to claim public (?) space to talk as women with other women, about pains caused within the community of women.  We don’t want men jumping on this, as lesbians we don’t want straight people using our imperfections to vilify us or, even worse, benevolently offering to fix us up if we would follow their advice.  Women claiming public space, lesbians claiming public space – public in the sense of being open to all women, or to all lesbians – while excluding those who don’t belong (men, non-lesbians, respectively) was marginal for the brief periods we have claimed it and now is being forced into hiding, into the impossibility of being public, once again through accusations of transphobia.

The principle of female autonomy I have proposed starts with a first principle for social/economic/political organization of ‘at least equal’ power of the two sexes (‘at least’ with a preference for women to avoid backsliding to patriarchy or women’s millennia-inculcated habits of deference) including definitional power and control over resources.  Sexual autonomy – autonomy of women as a sex – is claimed in all relations with women and with men – sexual, familial, communal, social, cultural, civil, economic, political, spiritual, meaning the freedom (individually and in collectives) to interact exclusively with other women in any or all of these dimensions/spheres, and (individually and in collectives) to interact with men in any or all of these dimensions/spheres on women’s own terms.  I think that this fits with Gerda Lerner’s call for women to develop new consciousness for liberation and the overthrow of patriarchy.  Lesbians, female-autonomous spirituality, female-only consciousness-raising groups, and much else that is female-only from sports teams to colleges to music festivals, are crucial to developing women’s consciousness of ourselves as oppressed and our resistance – both to patriarchal thought and to patriarchal practices and their extensions in the state, capitalism, colonialism, other dominance relations.  We are now facing a multiple backlash from the left (accusations of transphobia, undercutting and gutting women’s affirmative action, positive measures for advancement, safety and privacy within/against systematic disadvantagement and exclusion from public spaces at all levels and the at-will, continuous violation of our private spaces by men treating us – our sexed bodies, our attention, our capacities and powers – as public/private property), and from the right which seeks unabashedly to drive us back to ‘kinder, kuche, kirche’, even to the extent of blatantly justifying unequal pay for elite women (Heritage Foundation on the US Women’s Soccer team, won’t link to it, a recent article).  Yet women’s powers of self-authorship are stronger than ever before, challenging everything albeit in a cacophony of voices that are watched and algorithmed by corporate social media, maybe irrelevant to late stage capitalist oligarchy destroying the living planet, or maybe not, as women, starting with indigenous women and women of color, defend migrant children against yet another genocide in progress.

Sexual politics and arbitrary detention

Many of us cringe when we read some of the forward-looking legal decisions that find psychiatric detention to be arbitrary, because they are cases of rapists who have been civilly committed either instead of going to prison or after the prison term expired.

Where are the cases, and where is the outrage, on behalf of women who are doubly victimized by rapists and the psychiatric system that treats our anger, grief and disorientation as fodder for their human experimentation?  We talk about this, it is common enough knowledge that the concept of trauma-informed approaches in mental health originated in the advocacy of female survivors of psychiatry who wanted to be met with support and not revictimization.  Yet this response keeps the power and hegemony of the mental health system, including psychiatry, intact, assimilating both the politics and impact of rape into ‘mental health needs’, and carving out a specialty of trauma-informed care and avoidance of re-traumatization instead of squarely facing the primary victimization perpetrated by psychiatry equal with the primary victimization perpetrated by male abusers.  Intersectionality demands that we squarely face the double politics, the double violence, the double silencing and suppression and rendering of compliant female mental patients as a norm while isolating and ridiculing angry mad women with every vicious slur in the book.

I do not want rapists to be the poster children for my freedom.  Throw the book at rapists in a justice system administered by women, and do away with psychiatry.  What does restorative justice look like when it comes from an intersectional feminist critical disability and critical race perspective?  Including justice for the victims of domination and violence.  Including crying foul when speech of the victims is mis-labeled as violence, especially a trick of men used to silence women and by whites to silence people of color.

Let’s look at why the arbitrary detention of women who are doubly victimized by rape and psychiatry, women and men who are victimized by psychiatry who have not harmed anyone, women and men who are criminalized because of their race and/or disability and caught between psychiatry and penal system, why these acts of arbitrary detention are not so easy and clear for the human rights system to pronounce on.  I think it has to do with concept of civil rights vs economic/social rights, and the kinds of systemic and pervasive discrimination associated with sexual politics and to some degree with racial politics end up looking fuzzy to a system that wants civil rights to be black letter law, both categorical and procedural, rather than transformative and requiring work at many levels to uproot the violations.  Psychiatry as a system of human rights violations, mandated and delegated as a parallel state to enforce and reinforce the patriarchal family and its public/private divisions related to the marketplace, police and control subordinated ethnic groups and economic classes, is made invisible by its own operation, it cleans up its own trail of abuse by relying on the will of the general public to ignore what happens to those people who are made into ‘useless eaters’ and exploited for both their unpaid care of others and their economic value as objects of a paid system of control in the name of care.

The CRPD articulated the violations – detention on the basis of actual or perceived disability (mental health condition/label/diagnosis) is discriminatory, with or without any additional procedural standards and safeguards, since it is a regime that targets individuals based on a prohibited ground of discrimination.  Forced interventions that target the characteristics deemed to be actual or perceived disability for manipulation, control or eradication against a person’s will or without their free and informed consent are a form of discriminatory, disability-based violence and also violate the right to legal capacity and the right to control one’s own body and health.

Yet the CRPD could not name psychiatry as starkly as I do here, due to politics and perhaps steps in a necessary line of argument in terms of what could be achieved in that process, and also because the human rights system itself does not deal well with naming systems of oppression.  The CEDAW regime (treaty plus treaty body and its community of advocates) similarly cannot quite bring itself to name patriarchy or male supremacy as a system by which men exploit and expropriate resources from women and maintain a hierarchy by subordinating and violently oppressing women.

CRPD, in addition to struggling with this general feature of human rights, is a regime that comprises diverse and heterogeneous constituencies, which sometimes pull in different directions.  Survivors of psychiatry struggling to name our oppression accurately and create an accurate holistic picture of the problems and remedies face a situation similar to intersectionality; the reparations framework is most appropriate for us and yet it is politically still far off to name our oppression and our constituency independently as deserving of human rights subjectivity.  We fall between the cracks of the economic/social rights focus of disability rights measures such as reasonable accommodation, and civil rights with their paradigm derived from men’s public sphere of supposed procedural fairness, oblivious of race and class oppression and of hegemonic assumptions about ability that all intersect and overlap.  We also fall outside of the mainstream disability movement’s attempt at holistic conceptualizing of rights, independent living, despite our attempts (one example and another example) to utilize Article 19 to say ‘us too’.

Some lessons, tentative suppositions for future direction:

• Intersectionality is key for the human rights movement of users and survivors of psychiatry / people with psychosocial disabilities.  We have to explore intersectionality in real detail, with sexual politics, racial justice, class exploitation – how all these systems interact with one another and with psychiatry as a parallel state.
• Reparations framework makes the most sense conceptually to address past and present violations and prevent expansion of psychiatry in parts of the global south where it does not yet have a strong presence.  However, without political will among states and significant support among human rights defenders to become our allies, it will not be feasible.
• Naming psychiatry as a parallel state, as a system of oppression linked with patriarchy, class, racialization, and the state itself as an organized mechanism of legitimized violence – as one form of political organization that is not inevitable and can be dismantled and replaced – needs to take place openly.  We have to get out of the mental health discussions.  Although those discussions will continue to happen and will partially advance a CRPD compliant law and policy framework now that WHO has accepted that coercive measures should be abolished, it is not going to be enough.
• We have to think in all directions and dimensions to imagine what it will take politically for any country or sub-national jurisdiction to abolish the form of disability-based arbitrary detention that has been delegated to psychiatry as a parallel state.  This encompasses criminal as well as civil psychiatric commitment – known as forensic psychiatric institutions or security measures – and the entire regime of inpatient and outpatient commitment and coercive measures to enforce compliance with mental health treatments whether formal or informal.  It also links with increasingly worrying law and policy in the health field generally that aim to promote compliance with certain health-related behaviors (e.g. to quit smoking, reduce body mass, get a certain amount and type of exercise, get annual flu vaccines, etc.), and to remove health records and management of health care from our own control.
• We have to confront technological developments, law and policy on the horizon that go in the managerial direction in opposition to our personal autonomy and bodily integrity, and work and fight for both our freedom and the creation of workable, non-exploitative support arrangements and relationships to sustain each other in times that are hard and frightening.
• We have to name the oppressions accurately.  I thank Kathy Miriam and Ginny Brown for prodding me to accuracy on materialist feminism, Max Dashú for insisting on ‘sexual politics’ rather than ‘biology’ as the basis for gender critical feminism, and Nedra Johnson for her accuracy in naming ‘dominating sex class assigned at birth’ and ‘subjugated sex class assigned at birth’.
• Our anger can be either a good guide to where there is something missing in the dominant analysis, or a vicious bloodthirstiness that feeds on itself.  Labeling oneself as a victim and therefore entitled to get away with murder is not the answer; we see too many examples to have to enumerate and those who are in the dominating class are the most likely to use ‘victim’ excuses to their advantage.  Abolishing the insanity defense is one expression of this, to return to the prompt for this blog post, where I started in the first paragraph.  But we neither leave everyone to the mercy of a racist, classist, sexist and absolutist penal system without changing it, nor do we take up uncritically the cause of rapists as our comrades simply because they are put into a position of vulnerability as criminal defendants or victims of psychiatric incarceration.  Analysis and willingness to face hard things are both needed; small groups where we develop love and trust and tolerance among ourselves, in whatever configuration needed (for me lesbian-only or female-only is one starting point) create a base of acceptance to be able to move outward and have harder conversations without fear, and analysis developed and refined together allows us to conduct advocacy campaigns without hesitation.

 

Some resources on women’s double victimization:

WNUSP side event at CRPD Committee August 19, 2015

CHRUSP resources page (scroll down for ‘Forced psychiatry as violence against women’)

Hege Orefellen’s statement on behalf of WNUSP and CHRUSP in COSP 11, panel 2 on women and girls with disabilities (to be posted after it is uploaded on UN website)

 

Survivorship

It’s not unusual for strong women to deny that abuse has harmed them.  (Germaine Greer’s interview, and the piece on Claire Denis in the New Yorker.)   Refusing victimhood is powerful, life-affirming, says I am bigger than what hurt me – or even, I have always been bigger than that and it had no power to hurt me.  It denies victory to the abuser.  Yet it is paradoxical that these strong women are speaking openly about the experience of rape in a context where other women have opened the floodgates, and many of them are actively seeking justice against the rapists and talking about the impact of these rapes on their lives.  The choice to speak about an event suggests that it is meaningful to the speaker, and merits attention, while the denial of suffering refuses emotional connection whether of pity or empathy, allowing only admiration.

There has always been an aspect of voyeurism, and a distasteful appearance of catering to voyeurism, in any attempt to move public feeling and opinion to oppose injustice.  We use terms like ‘disability porn’ or ‘poverty porn’ to describe the salacious telling of stories with details of hardship and degradation at the hands of others in ways that objective the person and expose her private life to public view.  It implies that this person’s vulnerability is public property and that she barters her privacy for pity – or if her story has been stolen from her that she has no privacy that anyone else need respect.

But that is a conundrum for survivors of an atrocity.  We have the desire to bear witness.  We have knowledge that needs to be spoken.  The impact of rape, starvation, forced drugging, any form of torture or abuse, is not possible for many of us to deny.  All our experience is contextual, one atrocity may pale in light of another, and we bring whatever innocence and strength we possess to these experiences, sometimes discovering hidden weakness or hidden courage.  Audre Lorde’s distinction between poetry and rhetoric might be exactly this difference – telling our story to the extent it needs to be told, sharing knowledge, bringing forth what we have inside us, or instrumentalizing our story as a weapon or as currency for achieving social change.

Does law or politics demand that we instrumentalize our stories in ways that make us, or others, public property?  I think it is political processes of denial, resistance to change, silencing and suppression, and capitalist media, that shape the double and triple victimization of those who tell their stories of vulnerability in the face of aggression.  It is also a specifically patriarchal reinforcement of the public/private divide that treats women’s suffering at the hands of men as shameful; it is our fault for having been born female.  The only way out is to be as much like a man as possible by denying this specifically female suffering; they intend us to suffer therefore we will not and earn admiration by colluding with aggression, agreeing that it’s not a big deal and if a woman suffers more than we did it’s her own fault.

In relation to sexual violence, there is a specific demand to prove that we were harmed, because men have long deemed their sexual aggression against women to be natural, desirable, necessary and fun.  The assertion of harm is more than an attempt to seek justice for the individual, it demands a change in the overall politics and law that is brought to men’s sexual violence against women.  Similarly, telling our stories of being harmed by forced drugging and other psychiatric violence demands policy change because there is no way to achieve justice individually for the vast majority of us, given the permission that is built into the law for these acts of medical aggression against people psychiatrists select as ‘mentally ill’.

Being a survivor as such means that you did not die from the atrocity.  Like Irena Klepfisz said about the Holocaust (in the poem Bashert), there is no blame or glory simply for having survived or having not survived.  Once it is done, if it is done, you have to live with what you did and didn’t do, with what you learned about yourself and what you learned about other human beings.  Suppressing that knowledge, suppressing the emotions and the urge to bear witness not only to the atrocity but to the harm, coming to accept the inability of others to ever fully understand, is also part of the journey; so is telling and sometimes over-telling, seeking relief and finding moments of connection.  If survivorship is something active, if it demands action, a choice to live, to take what is offered, to affirm life grudgingly or joyfully, it always has a reference point, a vortex, a moment or process of change, that cannot be escaped.  That is the paradox, that survivorship returns to the scene and moves away from it all the time.

Survivorship does not have to be the biggest thing in your life; it might or might not be so depending on who you were when the atrocity happened, the nature of the atrocity, whether you affirmed life and self actively in the midst of the atrocity or got lost, etc.  On this memorial day when we can remember all the victims of our country’s wars, let’s also honor the victims and survivors of the dispersed wars and the wars of containment within our own country.  Let’s reject and deconstruct the public/private simplistic honor and shaming of patriarchy, and instead honor the victims and survivors as witnesses who teach us about human nature and justice.

***

what will you remember this memorial day?

you ask                                                                         and indrawn breath gets me again                                                 the leaves want to brush over this                                               for years i have tried to make the memory one like any other                     memorial day 40 or so years ago                                                 not wanting to know the exact number

green leaves                                                                     hot streets                                                                     white obliteration walking                                                       the breath keeps on when the soul is dead                                       or                                                                               what does it takes to convince myself i am not soul-dead

what will i remember                                                             the small mourning without a stone                                               the bright smile survivorship no room to mourn

second birth, come out fighting (again)

sad and cautious                                                                 green leaves hot and oppressive                                                 enter and be at peace                                                           no one will get you there but                                                   the memory will never fade

it’s in my aura my mantle my specific gravity                                   these                                                                           green leaves are cool                                                           it’s their place and not the city                                               somewhere                                                                       there is justice in my heart a song of power and peace                           and wrongdoing and love                                                         a tentative joy                                                                 a desire to spread my wings                                                     the trees all around stronger than i am                                         waiting for me to let go

(c) Tina Minkowitz 2018

 

Substantive equality – bold and cowardly versions

Reading Catharine MacKinnon on substantive equality in feminist law, I am struck by the difference between her use of that concept and the use to which it has been put in some disability law contexts.

For MacKinnon, substantive equality means that social hierarchy, social inequality, is taken into account when making and interpreting legal standards. Instead of the Aristotelian approach to equality, treating like as like and unlike, which as she righty points out is meaningless as a tool because it can give opposite results depending on what aspect of a situation are being considered, substantive equality looks at how a group, or class of people, is situated in society and what needs to be done to remedy systemic disadvantages, inequalities of power and resources, subordination, subjugation, oppression, exploitation. Substantive equality in MacKinnon’s approach is revolutionary for women, because it means going deeper than the question, ‘are men and women being treated the same in respect of a particular rule’ when men might not be a comparator class e.g. in discrimination related to pregnancy which only affects women, or in crimes of sexual aggression and exploitation where not only is there a disproportionate impact on women in numbers, the ideology of those crimes and their systemic character affects all women as a class and individual victims in ways that underscore and emblematize their sex-based oppression as women.

Formal equality as applied to women had meant that if men don’t suffer certain kind of disadvantage or if men believed it was trivial or inconsequential, it was legally non-cognizable as a violation of rights. Substantive equality meant looking deeper, acknowledging that women’s situation in relation to society as a whole was as a class being subordinated to and by men as a class, and looking for remedies for injustices related to this social inequality.

In the disability context, substantive equality has returned to Aristotelianism. The idea is promoted that, in order to treat people with disabilities as substantively equal to people without disabilities certain compensatory measures are necessary to bring them up to the required level. In other words, because of the ways that people with disabilities are unlike people without disabilities, treating unlike as unlike is required. That is not substantive equality in the MacKinnon sense! It is not equality at all but discrimination that is masking as a good deed, i.e. paternalism.

In the disability context,* the paternalistic facet of substantive equality is particularly directed against people whose actual or alleged disabilities lie in the realm considered to affect their mental capacity or decision-making. Reasonable accommodation and accessibility are compensatory measures not for impairment, not to compensate deficiencies of the individual, but to remedy and correct social failures to take account of how a subset of the population will use services or facilities, excluding them by deliberate or inadvertent policy. These measures properly understood are substantive equality in the revolutionary sense, dignifying disabled people as rights holders and not charity seekers. Yet perhaps because of lingering charity model attitudes about disability, policymakers sometimes wrongly invoke the concept of reasonable accommodation, or more often substantive equality, to claim that coercive measures for paternalistic purposes against individuals who are believed to lack good judgment about their own needs are necessary to bring the person to a point where they are (accepted by self-styled judges of good decision-making as) capable of exercising legal capacity.

This approach to substantive equality as paternalism was evident in Michael Bach’s advocacy on Article 12 in the Day of General Discussion several years ago, which posited three tiers of decision-making – independent, supported and substituted (called facilitated in his framework), into which individuals would be sorted by some entity acting as the invisible hand of god and unquestioned as to its own capabilities or right to make such classifications. My own contribution that day consisted of an equality-based approach starting with formal equality (absence of facial discrimination in the law or of any purposeful discrimination masked by facially neutral terminology), universally-designed protocol and legal doctrine, systemic accessibility, reasonable accommodation and personalized support to move from the most generalized levels to the most personalized. I believe that this is the way to ensure change in policy and attitudes so that the onus is not on individuals to conform to systems that systemically discriminate against them by acts of omission or commision – by deliberate exclusion or systematic failure to take their circumstances and perspectives into account at the levels of policy and design and legal norms.

(The capabilities framework of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum is commonly offered to elide the differences between a revolutionary approach to substantive equality and a paternalistic one. Without discussing that further here, I note it as a topic for further research and elaboration.)

Thus I would be more aligned with substantive equality in MacKinnon’s sense. MacKinnon is not opposed to facial equality, to eliminating laws that were made deliberately to subjugate women or based on paternalistic and oppressive stereotypes that disadvantage women and single them out for adverse treatment. Her substantive equality means going deeper into the meaning of equality and rejeting the Aristotelian rule that serves to perpetuate the status quo or to make whatever changes the status quo might deem allowable without actually changing the structure of power. What the misuse of substantive equality in the disabilities context means, is a denial or lack of understanding that the relations between non-disabled people and disabled people are relations of power: the power to exclude and to subject to intolerable conditions of life, the power to dominate social institutions and political discourse, the power to ignore, the power to exploit as surplus labor or subjects of experimentation and victims of a destructive service industry with its own institutional financial and professional interests, the power to suppress populations via the threat of the madhouse and mental illness accusations – both populations as a whole and women, people of color and political dissidents of any stripe whom society finds inconvenient, including survivor of psychiatric abuse activists, the power to incarcerate populations in institutions rather than equalize wealth and the genocidal implications and potential of such incarceration.

Militant disability rights advocacy for all was what unified us in the CRPD drafting and negotiations, isn’t it time that returned? I am challenging all human rights defenders, all academics in the disability and human rights field, NGOs, all those who claim in good faith to uphold the CRPD to respond to this call.

*Actually, discrimination as harm to oppressed group in the absence of a comparator class was a feature of the US case Olmstead v LC on right to live in the ‘most integrated setting’.  However, the term ‘substantive equality’ does not appear in the decision and paternalism is present in the qualifier that only ‘unnecessary’ institutionalization as determined by ‘the state’s treating professionals’ constitutes discrimination.

Tina Minkowitz (c) 2018

Vision of the world we want to achieve when we abolish forced psychiatry

 

Since the work on CRPD began part of the challenge re abolition of forced psychiatry has been ‘what is the positive, you can’t just be negative, against something.’  To me that made no sense, there have been plenty of abolitionist movements in history that are viewed unreservedly as positive.

Still – on legal capacity we made a clear distinction that allowed us to parse good from bad motivations in the impulse to reach out to someone who seems to be struggling.  We said that support in exercising legal capacity is a good thing, so long as it does not amount to substituting or negating the person’s own will and preferences.  That helped a lot to give people something to hold onto and envision.  People in the CRPD negotiations all kind of got the idea and started seeing supported decision-making everywhere in their everyday lives.

Abolition of forced psychiatry was itself a midway position that our movement developed to encompass people who want psychiatry and other mental health services, and people who want no part of that system.  ‘Have whatever you want so long as it’s not forced on me.’  But this doesn’t satisfy those who hear the critiques of the mental health system beyond force and want to imagine something that might be an unmitigated good and not only a grudging compromise.

I suppose many of us have been thinking and visioning all this time, and I’ve been listening and formulating also.

What I came up with, that has resonated with many people so far, is this:

-The vision is a world where we are all mutually accommodating each other’s craziness, and offering support, not control when needed-

I want

– a world, not a service or support (living in the community not as managed policy of inclusion but as mutual acceptance of diversity)

– mutual accommodation, not falsely objective ‘reasonable accommodation’ (reasonable accommodation makes sense in contexts that are hierarchical but not in communities)

– acknowledgement that we all have something to put up with in other people, and everyone has to put up with something to be around ourselves

– not said but for me implied in mutual accommodation, is that we might fight, we might conflict, but we don’t use mental illness accusations to win these conflicts

– also not said but implied is that we set limits, need to be secure enough in our world to set limits that reflect our actual needs

– this can be a learning process to keep discovering our actual needs, we are complicated

– if ‘it takes a village’ and it’s not managerial, we are going to be open to each other and care about what others in this interactive world are needing and how they are suffering

– this can’t be a demand that we appease, that’s not mutual – we do get to set limits

– but if we are offering support it’s support and not control

– control is not support

– people have a lot of love and warmth and kindness to give, and also some of us want a more forbearing approach – need to be sensitive to how to how your attempt to support is responded to

– it’s not about ‘support’ alone, it’s always about how we deal with conflicts + how we are responding to an actual need for connection and support of any kind

– restorative justice is related and linked, but for now seems a little bit separate, or else may be part of what i’m thinking is ‘implied in mutual accommodation’

*

In further discussion, there were two aspects of ‘restorative justice’ that were clarified:  one is reparations for victims of forced psychiatric interventions, and the other is a policy for changing how we think about crime and accountability.

For me reparations is the best framework to get us to the world where that vision actually exists, where we can all live in that way.

So, three components to an agenda for change:

-Abolition (of forced psychiatry, segregation and discriminatory detention, coercive paternalistic state interventions)

-Positive vision of a world we want to live in

-Reparations as the process to make it happen

This agenda is itself a vision since there is the question of which governments, when and how will put it into practice.  We are always looking for countries that might be close to something really changing, that could take that big step of the real ‘paradigm shift’.

*

When I mentioned restorative justice I was thinking of a different aspect, though they are linked – an approach to the way that society responds to acts of violence or culpable harm to any member of the community.  It’s nice to make the linkage with reparations for forced psychiatry, and we are actually going to be rather lenient on them all considered.  Even if we have some process of accountability we cannot possibly prosecute and punish everyone who has ever done forced psychiatric interventions.

And a contribution on restorative justice in the usual criminal context was provided by Fleur Beaupert, which I accept with thanks:

Fostering restorative justice principles in criminal matters in line with mutual accommodation in providing support across our lives, including by:

• Dealing with conflict and ensuring responsibility is assumed for harm caused, but also moving away as far as possible from punitive responses which replicate and exacerbate societal inequalities and oppressions.
• Making equal and non-discriminatory adjustments delinked from mental illness or incompetency determinations for anyone who can be considered as not having intended to commit an offence or having a justification for their actions.

(c) Tina Minkowitz 2018

Female autonomy

My introduction to feminism was women’s liberation.  ‘Do you agree with women’s liberation?’ a friend asked me, in junior high school in 1970 or 71.  I asked what it was and she explained that it meant a woman can do anything a man can do.  I thought about it a few seconds, and said yes.  It changed my life, to have the possibility of living as a full person in the world and not being required to be ‘a wife and a mother and…”

A slogan that I embraced and still remember from that time was, ‘A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.’  It says that, contrary to the ideology that told me I had to be a wife and mother no matter what else I might become, I exist in myself and have no need of a man to be complete and for my existence to make sense.  The ideology that paired up boys and girls in elementary school, that insisted on a ‘smartest boy’ and ‘smartest girl’ in my first grade class, I could overthrow as authority once it was ridiculed as absurd.

As it turned out, the premise of female autonomy expressed in the slogan appealed to me as a lesbian – on the sexual level as well as other aspects of life.  But the premise of existential female autonomy is important for heterosexual women as well, to know themselves as existing in and for themselves, before any relationship they may have with a male partner.  On the species level, as we know, both female and male are necessary for sexual reproduction, with distinct reproductive contributions and the female partner contributing the vast majority of labor and physical substance.  Yet this fact implies nothing about the political relationship between females and males, if anything it suggests the greater dependence of males on females.  Men’s subjugation of women is not natural, it is not implied or made necessary by any biological imperative, and to attempt such justification suggests a fear of lesbianism, or at least a fear that heterosexuality is not appealing enough in itself to sufficient numbers of women for the species to continue.

If the species dies out because women are free and do not desire men or pregnancy (or because men stop desiring women or lose their potency), maybe it means that the species does not need to exist any more.  Species existence depends also on many other factors, such as climate and war, in addition to reproduction.  It is immoral to enslave any individual or group of individuals to the aim of continuation of the species.

At the individual level, everywhere we look, we do not see heterosexuality dying out, or an end to women choosing to become mothers.  Women’s bodies are powerful in birth and the choice to risk one’s own life and health to birth another human should be honored with gratitude while not obligating any woman who is not so moved.

As a girl faced with coerced heterosexuality as the only option, I learned to deny and suppress not only sexual feelings for other females but a sense of myself as autonomous with respect to the world at large.  Not being ‘naturally’ as I was expected to be, and not being free to be me, the paradigm of female service to others allowed me a kind of space to fit within a gender role.  I didn’t have to serve men; serving humanity, or anyone in need, especially women or other girls whom I was naturally drawn to, was safe.

I don’t know if all the ways I felt ‘different’ as a child and have known myself as ‘different’ throughout my life can be explained by being a lesbian.  I don’t feel fully at home in lesbian community or in any community.  I don’t accept my difference as impairment either, though I have been disabled by being treated as such.  My difference feels more than anything else, like a sense of my actual autonomous being in a way that connects me deeply to a sense of harmony with the whole.  While I need connection it is much less than I have been taught to believe is natural, either for ‘women’ or for anyone.  The connection I need is often not with other humans, it is something else.  When I need connection may be the time when I most need to be alone.

Female autonomy as a principle encompasses all these levels.  Each one of us is an actual autonomous being, and can know ourselves as such.  Sexually, we have a right to come to know ourselves and to be free to connect deeply with other females without hindrance, and/or to connect deeply with males on one’s own terms.  Socially, familially, we also have a right to choose to connect with other females without hindrance, with males on our own terms, and in mixed spaces.  I could equally say we have a right to connect with anyone we choose, without hindrance and on our own terms – as a friend commented to me – but there is a reason to differentiate as I have.

Patriarchy, the system by which males extract resources from females, hinders us from relating to other females to the exclusion of males – whether on a sexual, social, familial, organizational or political level.  And the same system deprives us of the power and freedom to control the terms on which we relate to males.  We still live under this patriarchal system despite same-sex marriage equality and limited rights to use contraception and terminate a pregnancy, limited criminalization of rape.  The smashing of female-only identities (such as lesbian, mother), spaces (festivals, showers, shelters, health care, sports, etc.), and political movements (feminism/women’s liberation) tells us it’s time to wake up again.  The second wave didn’t free us, we didn’t free ourselves, patriarchy is enmeshed with racism, colonialism, militarism, capitalism.  Individualist freedom-seeking – ok, I did not have to become a ‘wife and mother and…’ – meets its limits not only in the glass-ceiling for any kind of achievement within a public arena, in the unrelenting march of male violence of all kinds – rape, police killing, war, psychiatric assault, in the failure to create possibilities for women as public actors outside the idea of middle class careers, inaccessible to large numbers of us, and I’m sure we can go on and on.

The ultimate collective level of female autonomy would be large-scale political organization.  There are and have been in the past societies where women and men are separate halves of the political structure, where collective decision-making and responsibility are separated based on sex (e.g. see Barbara A. Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas) or where women have a separate military structure within communal, egalitarian democracy (e.g. Kurdish women as described here).  How do we get there, and is it enough?  Do we want instead to envision something like the stories of ancient Amazons who lived entirely apart from men except for times when they would meet with a counterpart male society for trade and (for heterosexuals among them) sexual relations?  Do we want lesbian-only societies that adopt girls to raise?  In any case there is a need for cooperative and respectful men if we are to live in peace and stability, whether in mutual harmony or at least free from aggression.  I think it is worthwhile to think about the implications of a principle of female autonomy for large-scale political organization, especially in light of contemporary and past societies where this structural feature seems to foster not only women’s autonomy, authority and integrity but also men’s respect for the same.

The concept and experience of autonomy is different in a cooperative economic and social context, than in a competitive and exploitative one.  When we have competition and exploitation (as modern capitalist colonialist patriarchy) those in the subjugated classes are expected to submerge their autonomy for the good of the whole, while on the contrary the individual drive of the dominant ones is lauded and even deified as an engine of dynamism and creativity.  When we flag this and call for autonomy, separatism, self-love and self-determination, the dominant groups and their acolytes try to shame us back into our place, first by appealing to cooperation as two halves of a whole, then by elevating the altruistic values they have projected onto us as a superficial ethic for everyone without changing the structure of exploitation/subjugation.

I think that this holds true for economic classes, sex classes, and race classes.  You can consider what you know of recent history and see if you agree.

What I read and observe about autonomy in a cooperative economic and social context, and what I experience in small constrained contexts within capitalist patriarchy, is freedom to be oneself while remaining connected to a whole.  A sense of place, of relationship and responsibility to others that doesn’t preclude fights and sorrows, heartbreak and rejection.  I don’t want to live in any of the lesbian or women-only communities I know of, but I am a lesbian, married, at home in my own house and land that becomes center of the four directions for my world.

I’d like to fight for and work on cooperative economics and politics in my local area but am stymied by centrist politics stifling the possibility of even a radical naming of the problems (such as calling the Democrats a corporate party, or calling attention to the different material interests of health care providers vs people taking control of our own health care and autonomy).

Forced psychiatry is the antithesis of any kind of autonomy, reaching into the body to disrupt the brain and psyche, the sense of self-organization and possibility of wholeness. Being cracked and broken one can then know oneself as wholly outside what they can do to break us, but it has othering implications, and if I can’t relate to male-defined/mixed-sex generic madness discussions or to the view of madness itself as a thing rather than the content of what we are sad about or turning ourselves inside out on, well there aren’t many places to go.  The male-violence aspect of forced psychiatry helped me to know I’m a lesbian but also chilled my relationship to all social, economic and political institutions with the fear of being prey, building and reinforcing my Jewish heritage instincts and my  caginess to appease the abusers of my childhood.  Female betrayal put me into the hands of psychiatry and kept me there until they were done with me.  This is a feminist issue and an issue that could only be talked about among women, yet even then there are no words most of the time, no ground for it to be fully heard.  No place for the twisted ugliness of abuse to be surrendered and healed, it has nowhere to go.

It’s also far in the past now.  I am not a ‘person with a psychosocial disability’ in my daily life unless my ordinary craziness is diagnosable as it is, and I care to frame my life in this way.  I’m tired and don’t need or want the identity except as a link to survivorship, ex-mental-patienthood that will never escape me and that I don’t want to hide or dismiss.  Other communities won’t fully hold me or embrace me, and neither will this one now, because of the gender identity witch-hunts finally reaching us, in the end that becomes decisive beyond any other dyke-baiting, dragon woman force of nature misogynies.

I don’t think we necessarily need separate political structures in a formal sense in order for female autonomy to be put into practice and respected.  Separate political structures can be another Noah’s Ark scenario, male leaders and female leaders as ‘smartest boy’ and ‘smartest girl’, created as an arbitrary demarcation without a consciousness of ‘women’s business’ or women’s political autonomy and liberation from men as a principle and purpose.  Respect for female autonomy can start anywhere by consciousness-raising and practice where we claim public space, public roles for the power and space we take in the world by being single mothers, business owners and skilled tradespeople, teachers, anywhere we are acting from strength and not performance, standing in our courage and linking in solidarity with other women whenever we choose to for pleasure, for resistance to male expectations and entitlement, for nurturing ourselves and each other and building our strengths.  And with men learning to back off when we bar the door, or simply prioritize women, instead of treating it as a challenge or a joke.

I’m thinking of Kate Millett, who died during the time I have been writing this blog post.  Reading Flying which I had bought from Kate and never read before, thinking of Kate’s art and her open lesbian desire in art and writing, her erudition and plain speech, how her life and charm and needs and insight touched everyone who came to know her in person or through her work, and her life like mine and any of ours an open puzzle, not solved and worked with all we have at any moment in our full hearts.

I can’t answer the questions posed by my work and advocacy about how we should ‘deal with’ each other’s pain and violence to self and the pain and violence we cause to others, all these frustrations and concerns when we are too far away in our own lives to reach each other and give everything that our sister needs.  I know that life is hard for all of us whether we identify as mad or mentally ill or not, and while my mind does shut off to some of my sisters’ pains, that’s my limitation and not an excuse to have them locked up and tortured.  I am an abolitionist, bearing witness to what I survived and trying to make reparations possible.

Cooperation is needed between women.  Maybe some things work best with a focus, like Mary Lou Singleton’s wonderful interview calling for reproductive sovereignty – ‘abortion on demand with no apology’ – and women taking back control over abortions and birth control, learning again together to do these things for ourselves outside the medical/pharmaceutical industries.  What else can we do politically, cooperatively and collectively as women to take back our sovereignty over everything that is ours?

Can we cultivate female solidarity against male violence and harassment in public places?  Not posses or roving teams, just women learning to make eye contact with other women in public, to defend each other verbally or physically – similarly to how the left is now promoting for white allies to defend people of color against racists.  I don’t want to involve men in this for now – I want it to start with women connecting with each other to name the aggression, let each other know we see, it’s real, we have each other’s backs.

To take back our sovereignty over being in public space in our female bodies, to not be objects of protection by the state or individual males.  Take back the night marches were part of this but at least in the US reportedly came to be associated with calls for better policing, which is double-edged especially for communities of color, and for crazy and disabled women.

Political class solidarity among women is different than creating women-only communities that try to be all things to all women, or at least all things to a small group of women.  For me intentional communities raise way too many red flags about trying to meet expectations, worse than marriage since no fundamental emotional connection and potentially intrusive interpretations of ‘the personal is political’ as ‘everything in your life is up for political discussion by anyone who disapproves of it.’

To link it back with some other points, I think political class solidarity may be better suited to the way we live now in modern non-indigenous communities, rather than trying to create or re-create ways of living that imitate our heritage past or contemporary indigenous people as functioning societies with internal political, economic, and cultural self-sufficiency.  For those of us who easily get ostracized if we’re not the ones in control (looking at many of us), whether as crazy or as ‘not our kind’ in one way or another, maybe having our own homes is a priority and (re-)creating the political solidarity movement of women, i.e. the women’s liberation movement, from where we are.  In-person in cities, in small towns, online.  Why not?

Decisional dyslexia, and losing fear

Someone I love has dyslexia and I see how it affects her ability to navigate driving in a car or walking around in a city.  Which way to turn?  Left or right?  Does it mean that if I think I should go right, I should really go left?  And so on.

I realized that something comparable has at times affected me when I need to make a difficult decision.  It’s possible to lose my way, not because I secretly want something that I am ashamed of or because am not ready to have good things, but because of a cognitive or perceptual uncertainty that leaves me in a state of anxiety where I am likely to act quickly out of fear of doing something wrong.

Reading the book Spirited Lesbians, by Nett Hart (which should be known as a classic of lesbian feminism / feminist lesbianism), I was swimming through the chapter ‘Yellow’ where they (the book is written as ‘we’ and feels like ‘we’) talk about losing fear.

Sometimes as girls, our mothers try to protect us from rapists and other harms by teaching us to react to danger by telling authorities, calling home, doing the right thing that will get someone to come for us.  They didn’t teach us (mine didn’t teach me) to take care of ourselves out in the world.  To see clearly, look around for sisters, stand our ground, growl, or walk past stiff legged, raise our eyes and see where we are, who’s around, how we move.  Sometimes the best answer is, yes call home and have them come and get you.  But not always.  Sometimes home is where they will betray you into the hands of the violent state.

And, even with the best intentions home doesn’t take care of everything.  Reliable friends who love you don’t take the fear away.  Being in ourselves and for ourselves, knowing ourselves and our world, we act and do not second guess ourselves.  Second guessing is living with obedience, asking ‘what would jesus do’ or ‘how would my father/mother/sister think of that’ and it leaves us divided against ourselves.  Conscience comes not by internalizing shame but but externalizing justice.

Conscience is formed through living in community, acting in and on our relationships with other beings, human and non-human.  By attending to these relationships, not denying them and staying present with them, we can face the choices we have to make and the growls and howls and yelps we may need to express our truths, what we know.  We can also observe with increasing pleasure as others express their truths even if they contradict ours.

For me, all this is lesbian, lesbian feminist/feminist lesbian in origin, the principle of original female wholeness that is desire and self for itself as Nett Hart writes so beautifully in her book.  Don’t mistake what we’re talking about for patriarchal notions of ‘two vaginas for/from the male gaze’ – for patriarchy lesbians are nothing in ourselves, when we relate to each other and deny men we are a double negative.  For ourselves we are complete fullness, we are everything.

 

This connects to the ‘Double Female’ that Giti Thadani described in ‘Sakiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India,’ and to my exploratory writings on the theme of female autonomy as a first principle (including in my thesis Female Autonomy vs Gender Identity: A critical examination of gender identity in CEDAW jurisprudence and the Yogyakarta Principles).  It connects to my sense of intersectionality when I first explored it and tried thinking about the connections between feminism and abolition of forced psychiatry/ women’s oppression and psychiatric oppression, as a gap rather than a fertile space.  When we are ‘othered’ in the lesbian / feminist community itself, and have no secure home as lesbians in the psych survivor community, we find ourselves in multiply uncharted waters.  Some of us are uniquely alone and embrace that as a way of being in the world that does not have to be unsafe and is rather free to engage with all beings.  Nett Hart’s book acknowledges this also, that as lesbians swim upstream collectively and do not look at the banks but at our collective movement, some lesbians are in tributaries of their own also swimming upstream.  I love this recognition of the ways that we express our lesbian selves as part of a whole.

 

On defining mental health

Further reflections on defining ‘mental health’

This is written in dialogue with, and in partial response to the WHO Quality Rights training modules, version released in March 2017, in particular module 5 on ‘Realizing recovery and the right to health in mental health and related services.’ I am taking part in a review of these materials.  It is also written with appreciation to Sarah Knutson for our dialogues on mental health and  human rights.

1. Mental health, like recovery, is individual and subjective. It cannot be judged externally or with reference to any universal criteria.   Various ideas or visions or values of what anyone considers to be mentally healthy can be promoted and cultivated the way that ethical and spiritual values can be promoted and cultivated.   To attempt to universalize such criteria and judge others according to them is to impose hegemony of certain beliefs and values over others, and most importantly to create a hierarchy of those who are in a position to authoritatively proclaim the hegemony of these beliefs and values, and to judge others according to how well they meet the criteria.

 

2. For me, mental health is a sense of internal well-being and congruence with one’s own beliefs and values. This is an internal reference, my personal idea of what I would envision, or abstract from what it means to me to see some habit or pattern as mentally healthy or unhealthy.   Nevertheless, it is not for anyone else to take that from me and judge me according to whether they think I am fulfilling this in my own life.

 

3. There can be dialogue and interchange about what we consider to be mentally healthy, just as we can exchange views about ethics and spiritual beliefs and values. Such interchange is worthwhile but will never amount to, or should aim to create, an objective universal standard. In other words mental health is an aspirational personal value that can be meaningful in individuals’ lives. When used as a yardstick for one person to measure another, it is the enactment of a power inequality and hierarchy, contrary to the values that underlie CRPD Article 12, in particular what I have referred to as the incommensurability of persons or impossibility for one person to ‘assess the inner-workings of the human mind, and when the person does not pass the assessment, to deny him or her a core human right.’ (CRPD General Comment No. 1 para 15).

 

4. In my view, giving any hegemonic weight to such assessment in law or social practice is enough to deny the person the human right to be treated as a member of his or her community of equal worth and dignity as others. I consider that the logical implication of Article 12 is a radical mutuality and respect for worldview as developed by Shery Mead in the framework of Intentional Peer Support.   See Mead’s papers and other materials on intentionalpeersupport.org, and my papers CRPD and Transformative Equality, Rethinking Criminal Responsibility, Alternative to Functional Capacity, and Norms and Implementation of CRPD Article 12 on academia.edu, and blog posts ‘Decision-making and moral injury’ on madinamerica.com and ‘Guiderails and reparation’ on tastethespring.wordpress.com.   These values underlie the work that has been done since the 1970s on peer support as a practice of sharing, exploration and co-creation of knowledge by and for people who have been labeled by others as mentally unhealthy and denied our human rights on that basis.   To embrace the idea that mental health is individual and subjective, an aspirational value akin to spiritual and ethical values, reasserts our ownership of policy as well as legal norms in an area that has deeply affected us and that we have contemplated and studied to remedy the injustices that have been done.

choice — born wrong

Being isolated from others who have complicated feelings about their transition and being unaware of alternative ways to handle the feelings that led me to transition seemed to be the main factors that kept me from exploring negative feelings about this stuff. Without access to those, I think I would have continued transitioning indefinitely. It […]

via choice — born wrong

sharing this post by blogger b0rnwr0ng because it captures a similarity between transition medicine and psychiatry, as parts of the ‘medical industrial complex’ offering drastic solutions to emotional suffering.

Guiderails and reparation

Forced psychiatry functioned as a kind of guiderail in my life even though it was unbelievably destructive.  I mean that I was digging myself into a whole/hole, but losing my way.  I’d like to think that if I’d been born into a family and community where I was seen and encountered, where love meant taking emotional risks of truth and vulnerability, any such situation would have been seen and I would have been caught up in the arms of love and set on the path again.  Or to put it another way, that I would have had access to wisdom of elders, to my own inner knowing, to the teachings of the Earth and all beings that are given freely to us but non-indigenous societies have alienated ourselves from.

That even if I was lost, there would have been someone else or a whole body of community and wisdom that was there for me and that would reach out to me, that if they failed and I failed it was all of us together.  Not just the frightening lonely path and anxiety of being responsible for myself alone since no one was witnessing my struggle, even when I did reach out.  Or rather the only witnessing and response was to feed me to the psychiatric machine.

That machine destroyed everything I knew, almost everything of me.  It destroyed my illusions and it also destroyed what I had created in myself of value up to that point.  It would be nice if there could be guiderails, to turn my life around without violence, to destroy the illusions without destroying what was good.  And I don’t know whether what I mean is just elders and wisdom, or something more like a social custom or practice.  I don’t know if the instantaneous destruction of illusion had to go along with the greater destruction.  Or whether some other kind of guiderail would be kinder but also slower, and maybe of less power to create something different and new.  Whether I am who I am today, liking myself, because of the encounter with a violent, destructive force, and whether, when a person is struggling with her life path, with illusion and transformation, there is any way that some form of violence is not inevitable.  I wonder.  And whether there is a social responsibility to manage the violence, to create some outlet for it, to really manage the emergence of something new in its conflict with the old in and through one person’s life (which is a meta-social institution as it would be addressing something that relates to existing ones and a person’s relationship to them).  And I think that is more correct to say that society is responsible for meeting each such situation with the best kindness and wisdom it can offer, with risk of truth and vulnerability towards the person who is struggling.

What I experienced in psychiatry, the transformative power, is what was needed (from a teleological point of view or hindsight) to shift my reality and make me an activist who could shift the legal paradigm within international law, with respect to that destructive machine itself and the social forces and needs it has been serving.  I can say that and it doesn’t need to be a truth for anyone else, in the sense that I don’t need others to validate my teleological point of view which may as well be rationalization and my own creative imagination as anything else.  It also doesn’t speak to anybody else’s experience in particular so I cannot know how it seems to others, whether you also felt that the violence of psychiatry in your life was transformative in a positive way or allowed you to let go illusions and relationships that didn’t serve you.

It wasn’t as if this was all roses, it was years and decades of anguish, etc., deadening, weaving and knitting myself, growing and nurturing, etc.  But with hindsight and eventually, increasingly, moving more into my grounded body, I feel the parts of myself that know the path I’m on has been a good one, that I value who I am more than I value the self I lost.

Psychiatry is a particular thing, unlike other violent situations because it comes with an ideology of being what you need.  So there is the gaslighting that addressing the transformative nature of trauma in some of our lives, in this particular instance, feels like it is accepting the violence and the oppressor’s judgment of me.  Actually it is similar to when rapists and batterers say it’s just what you needed, but I suppose in the case of psychiatry society as a whole and law still believe this lie.  And this is where the nature of psychiatry, like rape and battering, as violence, makes it never acceptable as a guiderail.  Psychiatry is different not only because it claims to be good for us but because it specifically offers itself as a guiderail for troubled people.  So if its violence serves that function in some of our lives, how is that different from being grateful for abuse?

The difference is that we are not grateful for having been abused, we are grateful for the destruction of illusion and the opportunity to create new value.  Maybe this is making lemons out of lemonade, it is a creative act that knits past to present and future, at least I cannot separate the act that changed my life from the changed life I have, and I honor its presence in my life, I honor my experience of what took place without honoring the moral quality of the act or desiring it to take place against me or anyone else ever again.

The moral wrong of violating another’s personal boundaries, of playing god with their mind and body, of using violence to accomplish any purpose of good towards the victim, is what for me is key to understanding the harm of forced psychiatry as a guiderail.  And that seems pitifully inadequate to capture all the rest of what I have said and advocated for, the destructiveness, the intolerable harm that I am contemplating at a distance of almost forty years from my own experience and that current victims do not have the luxury of reflecting on but simply need it to stop.  It is likely that my reflection is about what I brought to the experience as much as anything else, that I was emotionally numb and psychiatry cut through the numbness and increased it at the same time, similar maybe to cutting as described by those who use it to deal with terrible emotional pain that can’t be let out any other way.

What I mean about moral wrong: I played with the idea of violence as being somehow necessary for transformation, until I figured out that kindness and risk of truth and vulnerability not only works better but creates the kinds of relationships I want to have with people.  I mean violence in a sense of deliberately “intervening” with another person or allowing someone to “intervene” with me to change the person’s mental landscape.  It’s harder and riskier or just more honest and vulnerable but in the end not really riskier, to be real and kind at the same time, to take a step back and take it slower, not to have to say everything I’m thinking, making space to hear what I’m not hearing and at the same time to allow and speak to the presence of disconnection or dissonance where I know we are separate and the separateness causes us pain, because there is a desire to be at one, a disjunction between my needs and yours or between our separate realities.  To feel the pain of separateness and be together in that pain sometimes.  Yeah not with everyone to the same degree, but the principle is the same I think.  And yeah I cut people off who are actively harming me or who institutionally or structurally are set up to harm me.  I do believe in and support and practice self-defense.

Psychiatry is this moral wrong a thousandfold or a millionfold.  Not just individuals playing with risk in ways that are harmful because they disrespect the other’s moral autonomy.  Though that bears repeating, it is especially disrespect for moral autonomy, as well as bodily and mental autonomy that characterizes psychiatry and again is probably similar to other forms of violence in this way but may not be as entrenched in law and societal thinking.  Moral autonomy as the choice to undergo certain experiences and to position oneself and relate oneself to a particular way of thinking or experiencing the world, and especially with regard to experiences that are transformative and that have destructive power.

I want to look at the transformative and destructive power inherent in psychiatry to link the coercive and legalized violence of psychiatry with the methods themselves.  If we look at what electroshock does and can do, what neuroleptic drugs and other psychiatric drugs do and can do, not from a clinical perspective that asks whether they are safe and effective treatments but purely from a scientific and experience inquiry that wants to know, what is this thing?  Those who have an interest in figuring out whether and under what circumstances any of these methods can be used positively, guided by respect for moral autonomy, by kindness, and by risk of truth and vulnerability, can possibly come to conclusions guided by “reason and conscience” (UDHR Article 1, recognizing reason and conscience as attributes of all human beings).

Coercive and legalized violence in psychiatry is unequivocally a moral wrong and I have addressed this before in ways that I hope are implicit, and explicit, here and do not have to be reiterated.  (Briefly: everything I have said about moral autonomy is by definition violated by forced psychiatry, by each act of forced psychiatry and by its existence as a social institution, custom and practice.)  And of course the legal response to this moral wrong has been addressed in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and its interpretation and application, see CHRUSP Resources page for links.

I return to the concept of guiderails in thinking about what I would wish for myself or another person navigating troubled times or troubled self.  It can be like the bouncing walls of a pinball machine, keeping you in the game, or it can be like ropes for climbing or staying on a narrow path, or something you feel and create at the same time.  I don’t know if there is a need for the walls of the pinball machine, to contain us in our lostness, or what that would look like and what it could be that is not violent, not a violation of our moral autonomy, not destructive of what is good in us.  I want the availability of something to reach out for, to hold on to, and I want the opportunity and nurturing forbearance as well as eager and warm embrace, to tentatively and then more strongly create my own guiderails, my own lights on the path that opens up in front of me.

I’m going to close with something related that spun off from my thinking about guiderails, on criteria for a restorative/transformative justice process.

It assumes a community in which individual and collective autonomy and separatism is respected and taken for granted, including female autonomy and separatism, and the separatism and autonomy of people of color, and is not treated by those excluded as a threat to group cohesion or solidarity.  I am thinking about potential ways to address conflicts in organizations and movements, as well as allegations of harmful conduct per se.  I am drawing on my readings and brief training in restorative/transformative justice and my thinking about gaps in what is described there.  I don’t claim particular originality for any of the concepts, but rather am putting together what makes sense to me as a whole process.  Each of the pieces, and how they fit together, could surely be the subject of more writing, but that will be another time.

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1. Prevent physical violence and harm, including physical and sexual aggression and deprivation of means of subsistence (food, water, clothing, shelter), and provide needed care and support, including assistance to end destructive relationships.

2. Ascertain claims, justifications, and counter-claims.

3. Affirm community for victims and also for alleged offenders.

4. Ascertain position of alleged offenders – acknowledgment, denial, justification, excuse, counter-claims.

5. Ascertain facts ensuring victims and alleged offenders and witnesses opportunity to be fully heard.

6. Address competing human rights claims on overall policy issues.

7. Address unfair rules, unfair process, and contextual discrimination.

8. Offer offenders guiderails for navigating path back to honor in the community.

9. Offer victims guiderails for navigating path back to wholeness.

10. Ensure that direct reparations are carried out by offenders and by community.

11. Ensure that community addresses its own responsibilities for harm, carries out needed actions on policy, and restores fair and non-discriminatory rules and processes.

12. End wider community relationships that are beyond repair or reconciliation.