Some Double Standards are OK.
The World Cup is on and I am enthralled. International football is my favorite sport, but there are precious few opportunities to care about it on a major level. The United States are a decent team, and we have a strong side going in to the cup and today’s first match against our primary foil of the past decade, Ghana. I’m excited and optimistic, especially after the self-destruction of Portugal against Germany only an hour ago. I think we have a chance to advance.
The world cup has also occasioned an outpouring on twitter of vocal attraction for the footballers by a large subset of the women I interact with there (along with a few of the men, including myself – I deeply appreciate a fine set of abdominals on a man). In a few backchannel conversations, I’ve asked, “Why is it OK for women to openly drool over male athletes, but it’s distasteful for men to drool over female athletes?”
Now, let’s be clear. Men drool over female athletes all the time, and we’re encouraged to by media and corporate culture. It’s not forbidden in any way. But in ‘enlightened’ circles, it’s often frowned upon. It’s seen as objectifying. And the athletes are seen as being prized for their sexiness, rather than for their talent and achievement. Whereas, I have seen no condemnation of women when they objectify and sexualize the male soccer-stars – other than an occasional, “You wouldn’t like that if a man talked that way about a woman!”
But I’m OK with this double standard. It is basically acceptable for women to openly objectify male athletes, and it is somewhat distasteful for men to openly objectify female athletes. My reasoning behind coming to this conclusion (which I am not necessarily arguing that anyone else needs to adopt), comes from those conversations with women that I’ve had in private, and from a description that my sister once used in a similar discussion.
The fundamental issue for me is that we already live in an asymmetrical society when it comes to expressions of sexuality. Women are sexualized (often involuntarily), but expected not to be publicly sexual. Men are allowed to be both. And male sexuality is laced with aggression in a generally positive way, while aggressive female sexuality is usually seen negatively. And so, (and this analysis came from a discussion with @scitrigrrl) when women objectify a soccer player, there is an aspect of claiming the right to be openly sexual, staking territory. Whereas, when men openly objectify a female athlete, we tend to just be reminding people we have dicks. Which is rarely forgotten.
There’s another wrinkle that I tend to see. The male players lusted-after by women are simultaneously admired for their attractiveness and for their skill. Whereas when men lust for female athletes, skill and accomplishment seem to be orthogonal to desirability. See: Anna Kournikova. The male desire seems, largely, to be focused on strict physical appearance. And that seems to make it more menacing. Male objects of female attraction are rarely (though not never) in danger. Whereas female objects of male desire routinely become subjects of male violence.
So, is there a double standard in how women can express sexual attraction in public towards athletes and how men can? Yes. When women do, it usually seems harmless, fun, and sporting – I rarely, though not never, hear of objectified men feeling uncomfortable. But too often, when men express such attraction, it seems menacing, overly aggressive, and a means of asserting dominion – and objectified women frequently report discomfort with the attention. And I think that sometimes, especially young men think that this double standard represents an injustice. In fact, I think it represents the correction of injustice.
History and biology are asymmetric in these circumstances. The rules governing the acceptability of sexual expression are too. And I think that men should be accepting of that. I think we benefit from curtailing the menace and aggression our own public sexual expression, and I think everyone benefits from an environment in which women are more freely able to express theirs.
Why Aren’t R03’s Worth It?
Over at Complex Roots I’m discussing the value of R03 level grants. (1-2 years, $100,000 total funds)
Alcoholism vs. Cancer: Remission and Reactions.
There was some discussion last night on twitter about talking to kids about alcoholism and discussing how the disease has impacted families. I wasn’t especially involved in the conversation, and didn’t follow all of it. But I have discovered that alcoholism and addiction have not missed the twitter science community. They don’t miss any community. In part because so many people are susceptible to addictions. In part because one alcoholic, one addict, impacts so very many people.
I feel like I want to announce, I am available to talk to people about alcoholism! Is that ego? Do I have something worth saying? Would being an alcoholic in recovery willing to speak openly about what it is like to be an alcoholic in recovery mean anything to people? There are a lot of things we talk about in AA meetings that make us laugh but which are really not funny to other people. Crimes we commit. Horrors we see and do. Should those things be presented in other contexts? Should I mock-up a faux-grave mournful and contrite attitude? I don’t know.
But one question that got asked that I found interesting was again about how alcohol is different from cancer. I wrote once about it here, but this time the question is different. As @tehbride says in the comments on that post, people continue to view alcoholism differently from other diseases even when the sufferer is in remission. People view cancer survivors as heroic battlers who overcame a terminal illness, but we often continue to see alcoholics in recovery as teetering on the edge of relapse, weak-willed and suspect.
I know nothing about cancer. I’ve never had it. I’ve only had one person close to me be diagnosed, and her outcome was never in doubt from the moment of her diagnosis. While there’s doubt about how much a positive attitude influences outcomes in cancer patients, praising people for courage and commitment during the grueling process of cancer treatment seems fair and reasonable to me. Going through potentially-fatal ordeals and coming out the other side with one’s psyche intact is impressive.
But alcoholism is different. And in this case, it’s different for a couple of important reasons. At the core, alcoholism is different because of its behavioral component. Both the disease and the treatment (at least naively) are behavioral: we drink alcohol and we get drunk; we stop drinking alcohol and we stop getting drunk. Anyone who’s read this blog long, or has any alcoholic in recovery in their life, knows that it’s more complicated than that, but at the coarsest level, that’s true.
Alcoholism is different because we don’t beat alcoholism. People beat cancer. Physicians and surgeons beat cancer. Pharmacists beat cancer. They do it all the time. I didn’t beat alcoholism. I still have it. I’m not in control of it. I haven’t defeated it. Alcoholism beat me. I lost. We don’t fight alcohol, or we lose. We have to give up, and surrender. If I were fighting alcoholism, I’d be drinking. It is through surrendering to my disease that I have found a way into remission. I am an alcoholic. I no longer have to drink.
But I have found that many people, especially those who have been present for most of my journey, do, in fact, praise me and my efforts. I don’t want to deny that recovery from alcoholism is a lot of work. I’ve worked like hell at it. But it is still not to my own credit. There’s no victory here. There is simply maintenance. Sometimes I’m vaguely uncomfortable with praise. Sometimes I really love it and want more. I have a complicated relationship with recognition.
When a cancer patient enters remission, we seem to tell them, “Go! Be free and happy and love life and live to the fullest!” When an alcoholic enters remission, we seem to tell them, “Glad to see you’re doing better. Do you really think you can never drink again? Are you cured now? Do you miss it? How long do you have to go to those AA classes?” Or the worst, the deeply condescending, “Good for you!” the way you’d praise a toddler for shitting in a plastic bowl. I’ve only ever gotten that from social work students. I wanted to tell them to quit their studies, immediately.
And you know, I’d usually rather have the questions than people telling me that I bravely battled a terminal illness and won. Because my disease has gone nowhere. It is patient and cunning. And thinking I’ve defeated it is the first step back towards active alcoholism.
So, how should you treat the alcoholic in your life who has found recovery? However it feels right to you. We don’t, in general, try to dictate how other people react to us. Trying to dictate how other people behave leads us to resentment. And resentment is fatal to alcoholics. But it’s ok to be suspicious of an alcoholic in early sobriety: we’ve probably been lying to you for years and years. It takes time for us recover our sense of honesty and our ability to see the harms we’ve done.
Once time has gone by, if we’re putting our lives back together and addressing the damage we’ve done? You still don’t have to forgive us. You don’t have to accept us back. But if you want to, and if you can? Then treat us as you would anyone else. And feel free to ask the questions. Most of use will be happy to share our experience, strength, and hope.
Dust.
The first thing is a jolt. Pablo thinks a coach has slipped the ruts and maybe fallen sideways in the front of the house. Then the ground rolls and shudders. He looks up from his turtle beans to see his mother’s eyes. They are enormous. The chair he sits in scrabbles at the floor, rattling and sliding like a dog with long nails. The clay bricks show cracks as Pablo becomes aware of the noise. He has not heard it before. A cataclysm. A wrenching noise and the shattering of earthenware pots that clatter to the floor.
He hears his mother screaming. It has not occurred to him to be afraid until now, with his mother’s voice calling out – words he doesn’t hear – over the walls cracking. She grabs his arm. Too hard. It hurts him. She pulls him under the table and curls her body around him. She is whispering into his ear. She invokes the virgin.
The table shudders as the roof collapses onto its thick wooden surface. A porcelain nativity falls from its shelf and shatters. His mother’s prayer shifts to Pablo’s name saint. The ceiling is down and a wall follows. The table leg splits. Its corner crushes his mother’s shoulder. She cries out. Pablo imitates her.
*
When he wakes up he feels the dryness of the brick dust all around him. His mother is sleeping. She breathes rapidly, her breath tickles his ear. He tries to wake her, but his back is to her and he doesn’t want to use his elbow. He tries to squirm free from her grasp, but he cannot. The dust chokes him and he coughs; a spasm that reveals a deep pain in his side.
He struggles again and his mother coughs. She has awoken, but he cannot turn his head far enough to see if her eyes are closed or open. He knows she is awake because she is whispering, but inaudibly.
“Mama?” he calls.
“Pablito, be still.”
“What happened?”
“It was a tremor.”
Tremor sounds like fear. The earth did not feel fearful, it felt angry. Or sick.
“Is it over?”
“I hope so. I don’t know.”
“Can we get up now?”
“I can’t move, Pablito. The table is too heavy to move. The roof has come down on top of us.”
“What will we do?”
“We wait, little boy. How do you feel?”
“My side hurts.”
“I am hurting too.” His mother’s words are soothing, but there is fear and pain in her voice.
*
Pablo doesn’t know how much time has passed. The darkness is oppressive and he would cry but his mouth is too dry. His eyes are smeared shut with dust. There is a scratching noise and then he hears a man’s voice call his mother’s name. The voice is loud but tired. His mother does not hear, or cannot answer. Her breathing is shallow and empty. Pablo yells back at the man.
“We are here under the table.”
“Pablito?” Pablo recognizes the voice as Don Nelson, a local missionary.
“Don Nelson, it is me! My mother is sick!”
Pablo realizes his voice is thin. Don Nelson cannot understand him.
“Please, Don Nelson, help my mother. She is sick.”
Pablo hears bricks being tossed aside, and the scraping of broken tiles. Then there comes light, and new air. Pablo hadn’t realized how poisonous the air had become until the new air is colder and clearer, with less dust. He coughs and calls again. He sees the man’s pale hand. It touches his face. He sees Don Nelson’s face with its brown moustache and straight white teeth.
“Pablo, you will be out soon. Here is water.”
He passes Pablo a jar of water, which Pablo drinks from. His mother is not moving.
*
Pablo is crying. His heart is sore. He sits beside his mother who is still asleep, breathing shallowly. Her arm is broken and her ankle is crushed. Her foot twisted backward where the wooden beam from the center of their home had fallen on her, a great split log of dry acacia. A doctor has come, injected her with clear liquid from a syringe. Another needle is in her unbroken arm, with a thin plastic tube and a bag filled with another clear liquid.
The cut in Pablo’s side has been bandaged, a long strip of white cotton wrapped around his belly. People keep passing by and telling him how lucky he is. He does not feel lucky. He holds the broken head of the lamb from the porcelain nativity. No one can tell him where his father is. Don Nelson is gone, looking for other children in the broken homes.
As Pablo looks around, there are no places left like he remembers them. Everything is shattered. Everything is dust and red bricks, broken open to show the old straw inside them. Now that he is someplace that they say is safe, he is more afraid than before. Before he could not see the damage to his mother’s body. Now he sees the twisted limbs, the collapsed shoulder. She has been asleep for as long as he can remember.
Many other people lie on beds. Noises that frighten him. Other people praying. Doctors bustling from one place to another. When Pablo looks back at his mother, her eyes are open. They are frightened, wide. Her lips move but there is no sound. Her good arm, the one with the tube, reaches for him and he clutches her fingers. Then her eyes relax but do not close.
Pablo squeezes her hand and calls to her. She is silent and her lips do not move. He is confused, momentarily. He looks around but no one seems near. He climbs on to her cot, lays his head against the breasts he used to suckle, though he cannot remember it, and folds himself into her receding warmth.
Writing is Hard. Grief Abounds.
Most of what I do is writing. I write papers and grants. I write two blogs. Probably half my waking life is spent pounding out sentences at a computer. But I am not a writer.
I’ve written before about wanting to be a writer. I feel like I’m better than halfway-decent at putting words into pleasing sequence. I can generally find a way to express myself. I’ve worked hard at it. I love to play with words the same way I play with piano keys. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But I can usually find a way to say what I’m trying to say.
For a while I really thought I could be a writer. A full-on, drunk every day, tragically wasteful writer of ideas and glories. I thought that while I scribbled on notebooks in coffeeshops chainsmoking. Writing lugubrious prose and baleful poems. It was abominable.
I sat down once with a colleague of my great uncle’s. A professor and gentleman. A scholar. I told him I hated graduate school. I wasn’t cut out to be an engineer. I wasn’t my uncle. He asked me what I wanted to do. I told him, “I think I could be a great writer.” He told me, “Great writers don’t say they’re going to be great writers. Great writers just write, because they have stories to tell.”
I knew immediately he was right. I was not a great writer. I am not. I will never be. What I was was a depressed, lonely, alcoholic young man. It took me a while to appreciate the gift he gave me by telling me what I wasn’t. I stayed in school. I finished my degree. And now I write. And publish. No great works. But useful articles.
Yesterday I learned that that man has died. He was about 88 years old. I saw him last fall, when his grandson gave a concert of his original compositions. He was spry and healthy and engaged. He remained so until he died suddenly, having fallen ill only a few days before. I hope I am as fortunate to live well, be loved and productive, and die peacefully without anguish.
I don’t know if he was right about great writers. Probably too heterogeneous a group to make blanket pronouncements like that. But he was right about me. I am not a great writer. And by steering me from that ill-conceived fantasy, he helped guide me to the productive career I now enjoy. A fine man. A fine scholar. And a fine mentor. I’ll miss him. I’m grieving.
But this is the sort of death that ends a life worth celebrating.
Desperately Lonely.
I was a virgin until I was twenty-five. I was never any good at attracting attention from women from puberty. I spent about 12 years of my life desperately wanting a girlfriend. Longing with stupid boyish lust. I made humiliating abortive attempts. I rejected the women who were interested in me. Sometimes on purpose, because I didn’t like them as well. Sometimes not realizing what I was doing. Once, in high school, I have since discovered, the girl I liked liked me back, but I was too much of a coward to find out at the time. And I was lonely for all those years. I imagined I wanted a family. A wife. But I can see now that what I was looking for was a body. Access to physical affection. While that wasn’t clear to me at the time, it was perfectly clear to any woman I focused my interest on.
And so women didn’t like me much, in general. I was creepy. I was lustful. And the lust was out of precedence. It’s perfectly fine to be lustful, of course. But when seeking romantic companionship it can’t be the thing a young man leads with. I imagined myself the perfect gentleman. I couldn’t understand why women seemed to like boys who treated them badly. Because I had a confused definition of how to treat women. And I generalized. I lumped women in to monolithic categories designed to describe them as elements of sets rather than as individuals. I didn’t know how to identify humans as humans. I looked for women I found attractive, and then tried badly to woo them, imagining myself some poet. I shudder at my malformed attempts now. I was a terrible combination of pathetic and overbearing. I always thought there was some hope I’d get what I wanted, so I didn’t know how to stop a doomed pursuit.
And so I felt shunned. Vile. Humiliated and useless. But I never blamed women for that. I felt essentially as if they were right: I was too awful to love. So they were only doing what was natural in rejecting me. It was proof that I was where I belonged: alone. Eventually, I met a woman who liked me. But I drank. I drank away several relationships. As a suicide drunk I met the sort of damaged people who fall for suicide drunks, and I married one of them. It didn’t go well.
In sobriety, I’ve learned to be me in a much more effective way. I’ve learned to express who I am, rather than just what I want. I’ve learned to look for partnership, rather than for just what I can take. It has made it much better. Now, I have a fulfilling relationship because I know how to give as well as receive. I know how to respect. I know how to understand people as people, instead of as objects able to please or disappoint me. I’m very grateful that I lived in a time when there weren’t internet groups dedicated to ranting about misogynistic loneliness. I might have been easily seduced. I would have loved the reinforcement of other men telling me it was all the cruel fault of heartless women. I always looked for reasons I wasn’t to blame for not having what I wanted.
I write, of course, about the terrible atrocity in California. A young man, hatefully convinced that women were the cause of his problems, goes killing. A crime fueled by the culture we live in that constantly portrays women as objects of conquest. As owing physical affection. Lacking autonomy. Possessions. All this senseless hatred. Amplified by the loose communities so easily assembled online, organized to hate without consequence. Or rather, organized to inspire exactly this consequence, and then deny responsibility. I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t have an answer.
But I wish I could talk to the young men who feel the way I felt. I wish I could tell them how I learned what I learned. How to acknowledge the basic contempt for women in the way they’re behaving, and learn to express themselves in a productive way. Many women are afraid of us when what we want from them is only physical. They are afraid because when we don’t get what we want from them, sometimes we kill them. I hear it already: “Not all men!” Yes, of course. Not all men. But too many. And here’s the thing: there’s no way to tell until it’s too late. When we act in entitlement and anger and misogyny, women fear us because we are dangerous. When we act in lust toward women we don’t have a mutual relationship with, women fear us because we are deadly.
So, how does a man who wants to be with a woman discover a woman who wants him? How do we establish the mutual relationship where our desire may be appropriate and welcomed?
We need to learn our own selves. We need to understand our own desires. Dan Savage has such glorious advice for men who can’t seem to find companionship: Stop trying to get it now; start working on getting it for yourself in two years. To do that, look at yourself. Discover what you enjoy. Invest time and energy in something productive. Join groups. Join groups not because there may be women there, but because the group is formed around a topic you have interest in. Get better at something. Find people who are good at that, and explore with them. Make it about the thing. Not about you, not about meeting a woman. When we are comfortable in our selves, my experience is that we are eventually appealing to others. Other people. We will build friendships. The chances are good that we will find ourselves among potential romantic partners who know us. For whom our attraction is welcome. Talk to them. Listen to them. Learn who they are. Discover if you like them personally. Discover if they like you personally. Accept, graciously, that they have the right not to. Trust me: we do not want romantic or physical entanglements with people who do not like us.
But the first thing. The first thing. We must un-mire ourselves from hate and anger and entitlement. We have to recognize women as persons. Roger Ebert, in reviewing a concert-film by Andrew Dice Clay, said that Clay “…seems to think of women as things to masturbate with.” Too many men – and I believe it’s far, far more than any of us are willing to admit – have exactly this attitude. We need to separate ourselves from men who think like this, who talk like this. Who hate, vociferously. That aspect is contagious. Because it is seductive to hate what we can’t have. It is seductive to lash out against things that don’t please us. It is seductive to blame the faceless other for what we feel we deserve, for what we see others attain. But hate is a spiral. Obviously, someone who can be pushed to mass murder has more wrong than loneliness. But the misogyny in those spaces is dangerous long before it ends in murder.
I was lonely for a long time. I know the deep shame and isolating misery of that. But the cause of that loneliness and that shame and that misery was me. I am entitled to no one’s affection, in this world, no matter how much I want it. But women are entitled, though they have been stripped of their right too much and too long, to security and autonomy and peace and all the liberties we take, as men, for granted. All the security and autonomy and peace we take, as men, from women. They are entitled to that. Recognizing that right is one crucial step, my lonely, angry young man, toward discovering a wider world. One where your affections are more likely to be received gladly.
Willingness.
There was a conversation today on twitter that I briefly and unproductively contributed to. I say unproductively because I was making points I hadn’t really thought through and don’t really feel passionately about. So when others countered them, I folded up and shut up. I didn’t really know what I’m talking about. The conversation was about teaching class and whether students should use laptops and phones and such. I generally say no. I think writing notes is the better way to go.
To which @namnezia replied:
.@Dr24hours @FitAcademic @labroides Why not?? Because what works best for you must work best for all your students?
— Namnezia (@Namnezia) May 19, 2014
It’s a good point (and a wide-ranging conversation worth reading) and one I don’t really have an answer for except that, it’s important to learn do do things someone else’s way in life. Coddling students with extra time and “whatever works for you” and teaching them that they’re all special snowflakes is, I think, doing them a grand disservice if it isn’t balanced by a hefty dose of, “You have to be willing not to get your way a lot of the time. You have to be willing to take instruction. You have to be willing to fit in to a system before you can change a system.”
I find myself thinking of this in the context of sobriety. We alcoholics tend to enter the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous suffering from monstrous distortions of ego. Heroic and brilliant (in our own minds) one moment, abased and worthless (again) the next. As long as we cannot control the riot of this ego, we find it very difficult to recover. Recovery from alcoholism requires, in my experience, a willingness to listen to people who know more than you, and do things that they did. To do them the way they did them.
It’s not so important exactly how one does the steps, I think. There are definitely more and less thorough and effective attempts, but the actual process isn’t so important. It doesn’t matter that you write or not for every step. It doesn’t matter if we do our fifth step with your sponsor or someone else who is on board with the program. It doesn’t matter if we pray the particular prayers of each step. I know sober – happily, strongly sober – people who did all these things differently.
What’s important is that we do the steps the way someone else leads you through them. We submit to someone else’s greater understanding and guidance. We do what we’re told, even when we think it isn’t the best way. Because we need to rely on things outside ourselves to recover. We don’t have the strength, the fortitude, the guts, to get ourselves sober. Because being sober doesn’t require guts or fortitude or strength. It requires surrender and willingness. We need to understand that we can’t fight. We can’t battle. Addiction always wins. We relent, and let go, and the rage and fear and shame dissipate.
Most students will be going on to get jobs in institutions and corporations. They will have bosses and rules and requirements. Usually that are not open to discussion. Each of these young professionals will believe they have a better way to do things. That’s human nature. We all believe we can improve our surroundings. And most of us are probably right. But systems can’t allow everyone to make their own changes to procedure and protocol. Because then standardization and process suffer, and products fail. In medicine, and engineering, and research, that can mean people die.
We all have to learn to do things someone else’s way. We can battle and fight and struggle. We will, usually, end up making only ourselves unhappy. Or we will be excluded from our choice of career or activity. Once we have demonstrated that we can participate in a system as it is effectively, then we can usually ascend to a position where we can have some influence upon how a system evolves.
But what we learn is often less important than how we learn it. And learning to do it someone else’s way can be a critical path to success. Always taking our own road, in my experience, leads to oblivion for the vast majority.
Supporting the Mentally Ill.
I’ve been writing and thinking more and more about depression lately, and my basic countenance has been becoming more morbid. I think the stress of the spring and all my new house problems have begun to take a toll on me that is affecting my mental state. So I’ve made an appointment to talk to my physician about it. I’m finding myself feeling obsessive and angry and unfocused. Even in the presence of solutions and progress on the real-world things that are bothering me. Things are, objectively, going reasonably well. And yet I’m frustrated and flummoxed. That means it’s time for a more sophisticated intervention.
We all want to support the people in our lives who struggle with mental illness. As I’ve made repeatedly clear, my depression is a minor and treatable. I know what to do with it. I don’t need much support other than the people close to me acknowledging that it exists and being reasonable in their expectations for resolution timelines. And everyone in my life is amazingly supportive and patient, and I am privileged that way. Not everyone has that.
But I’ve noticed that when talking about mental illness, especially depression, people are very fond of saying that they’ll “be there for [me].” I’m not sure I know what that means. Usually, I take it to mean that people will listen if I feel like I need to talk. They’ll make time to see me if I want to be around people. That sort of thing. And that’s very nice. But it isn’t a treatment for depression.
When I first, many years ago, sought out a therapist for my then-baffling mood disorders, I told her on the very first session: “I feel like I’m betraying my friends by being here.” Aren’t my friends supposed to be the support network who sustain me in difficult times? My family? My partner? People who have taken an interest in my well-being and livelihood? Well, yes, of course, sort of. Having understanding and buoyancy from those people is valuable. But it isn’t a treatment for depression.
Being depressed is like being in the wilderness with a compound fracture. The support of friends can save lives. Friends can lift you up, and carry you from where you lay bleeding for the wolves and bring you, perhaps, to where treatment is possible. It’s agonizing and miserable, even if you want the help. But it isn’t a treatment for the broken leg. It just gets you out of the woods. The leg needs professional treatment, anesthesia, surgeons, physicians, radiology, plastics. A cast. And a lot of convalescence.
My friends and family are wonderful, and my partner is a blessing of the sort I can’t begin to describe. But none of them are a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor. And that is what I think I might need right now. Helping someone with their mental illness, being there for them, is wonderful and can save a life. But it can’t fix them. I think a lot of people feel guilty if they can’t repair the depressive, the alcoholic, in their lives. But I think that’s buying in to a stigmatizing vision of mental illness.
Want to help a depressed person in your life? Drive them to a psychiatrist. Let them know that it’s ok to take the time they need to follow their physician’s instructions. Be patient. Don’t be insulted when they get help from an MD that you couldn’t provide. Being there for a person with mental illness doesn’t mean trying to replace treatment. And it doesn’t mean enabling them to avoid treatment. It means helping them get the right treatment for their condition, and being understanding about the process of recovery.
Depression’s Blurred Features.
My friend Mark CC has an excellent post up on depression. I’m no neuroscientist, as my many neuroscientist friends will tell you. But what I believe about mental illness from being a sufferer of several, and from having those many neuroscientist friends, and having a psychologist and psychopharmacologist for a mother is this: everything is physical. Our emotions and our minds and our mental health and our consciousness. All of it is the consequence of the chemistry and physics of the brain. We certainly don’t understand how it all works yet, and we probably never will. But there’s no mystical “self”. It’s just three pounds of jelly digesting sugar and oxygen.
I have been diagnosed with major depression. I am not currently depressed. I have not had any serious symptoms of depression in several years. Shortly after my divorce, feeling I was slipping back into my old miasma of vague dread, I took a course of citalopram. It did its job and I haven’t taken any since. I’ve taken SSRIs periodically throughout my adult life, never for very long (six months, maybe, at the longest) to control what I would describe as a minor case of major depression. I’m never suicidal. I’m never unable to function. I’m just grey and lifeless and obsessed with fear and misery and loneliness.
And, of course, alcohol. My depression was absolutely co-morbid with my alcoholism. But the tweet that struck Mark so badly was, honestly, at least vaguely appropriate for me. (Though I will absolutely condemn it as a general comment – it’s risible.) I was, in a perverse way, pleased in my depression. I loved the Palahniuk-esque self-destruction of it all. The deliberate misery. The sense that I was wasting something valuable. I had this pathetic fantasy that I was a writer, and that being a writer meant being drunk and depressed and misunderstood. Well, I may have been drunk, and I may have been depressed. And yeah, maybe no one understood. But there was one thing I certainly wasn’t: a writer.
Depression has so many different manifestations. Mine was never all that severe. Along with my drinking, I lost several years of my productive life to it. But my depression was, obviously, mostly a consequence of my alcoholism. It is simply not possible to consume the quantity of alcohol that I did and not suffer depressive effects. But, I was also a depressed child long before I drank. I have been anxious and forlorn and lonely and obsessed with death and misery from my formation in the womb.
But, when I am sober, my depression responds behaviorally. It responds to exercise. To productivity. I am able, most of the time, to exert some control over it by forcing myself to do the things that I know it responds to, and then it responds to them. I know that not every depressed person’s depression allows them that privilege. My depression has responded to medication in such a way that I don’t need to continue taking medication chronically. Which is wonderful, because the medication has side effects that are unpleasant for me.
I don’t write much about my depression. Because it’s resolved for now. It can and probably will come back. Especially if I am injured and can’t exercise, or something along those lines. I write more about my alcoholism because writing about my alcoholism is part of the treatment for it that works to keep me sober. The best way for me to manage my depression is to stay sober too.
This is a long way to go to come to the point: we’re all different. Mental illness is different in different people. It has idiosyncratic expression, and different treatments work or don’t. When people like that tweeter make broad, asinine comments like he made, they’re committing a bigotry. Assembling a massive cohort of individuals, each bafflingly unique, into a grey sludge of uniformity. It’s easy to make that assemblage. It allows us to simplify. To aggrandize ourselves as having an answer. But it’s not true.
Every mind its own lattice of connections and inferences and consequences. Maybe my depression is explainable as a self-indulgent obsession with grandiose misery. It’s still physical. It’s still the consequence of the physics and chemistry of an obviously ill-formed brain. But I know how to change it. I know how to treat it. And the condemnation of fools is not part of my regimen.
New Blog!
Did you know that I have a new blog? Don’t worry, Infactorium isn’t going anywhere. I will continue to write here regularly. But the more sciency-stuff and a lot of the academic stuff will now be published over at Complex Roots, a blog on the Scientopia network. Today, there, I’ve bridged the gap between these two spaces with a repost of a commentary I wrote for the newsletter Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Weekly back in March, on the nature of medical evidence and how it relates to 12 step programs, in my opinion. Please go take a look!
Infactorium 