Everywhere you turn lately somebody seems to be talking about the importance of mental health; online adds, television commercials, celebrities, politicians and a lot of other shit that generally makes me want to shake cocktails with the stuff beneath the kitchen sink are all gently reaching out and telling me that it's ok to be fucking crazy. In fact, last month was widely celebrated as Mental Health Awareness Month, and this all sounds just charming but the voices in my head still feel compelled to ask just what exactly we are being made aware of.
As kind and understanding as all these corporate sponsored allies' sound, they all seem to be part of a chorus singing the same narrative and that narrative generally goes that if you're sad you're sick and if you're sick there is no shame in seeking help from any federally vetted agent of America's Byzantinesque healthcare establishment. There are a number of problems with this narrative, the chief one amongst them being that it relies almost entirely on the biological illness model of mental health; the contrived but commonly accepted notion that any form of mental distress or neurodivergence is the result of some kind of chemical imbalance.
The reality is that this generally assumed notion is largely unsupported by any real substantial and verifiable evidence. This isn't to say that mental illness is necessarily a myth, it's just not a fucking illness, it's more of a response to trauma and some of us seem to be more traumatized than others. The biggest commonalities among the chronically distressed appear to be poverty and various forms of institutional disenfranchisement. Poverty alone has been shown by numerous statistics to be a direct pipeline to the asylum with individuals beneath the poverty line being eight times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than more affluent patients.
And we see these same trends accelerate even further among nearly every other variety of marginalized community as well. People of color are pretty consistently shown to have alarmingly high rates of depression, women are often diagnosed and drugged twice as often as men, and Queer people have substantially higher rates of suicidality than straight folks, with almost half of all consulted trans people such as myself reporting to have attempted to commit suicide in their lifetime. Just add the institutional abuse sustained for simply being autistic or otherwise neurodivergent and we've pretty much covered the entire mental ward.
The reasons behind this demographic epidemic really shouldn't be that hard to conjure and they have nothing to do with illness. To put it succinctly, it is fucking traumatizing to be anything but a wealthy, neurotypical, white cis dude in a world run by wealthy, neurotypical, white cis dudes and when said wealthy, neurotypical, white cis dudes make all the rules, anyone else who pushes back or even just gets bummed out is deemed sick and usually by the same institutions that we are being encouraged by MTV and YouTube to seek help from which (Surprise! Surprise!) are pretty much all run by wealthy, neurotypical, white cis dudes.
Somehow, none of the supposedly woke mass media campaigns for "Mental Health Awareness" talk about any of this shit. There is also zero effort to address the fact that the biggest comorbidity across all of these demographics of diagnosed Americans is being a survivor of sexual violence which every demographic listed above experiences at far higher rates because rape culture is a direct byproduct of marginalized existence under a post-colonial hierarchy.
And of course, there is no effort whatsoever to address patients' rights or the fact that many of the institutions we are being welcomed to seek help from are actually a major source of the trauma they deem to be an illness, with admission to impatient mental health facilities being directly associated not only with increased rates of trauma and suicide but with rampant rates of sexual abuse as well. (I have personally known two close friends who have been raped inpatient.)
Then there is the biggest taboo in the mental health conversation; the very uncomfortable question of 'what if we're not the sick ones here?' What if civilization itself, with all of its trauma inducing institutions, vapid celebrity culture, and increasingly invasive modes of technology, is the illness and the people they all insist are sick are actually the cure?
Speaking personally, as a lifelong anarchist, I can honestly say that my latest diagnosis, known as otherwise specified dissociative identity disorder, has taught me more about anarchism than any two Russian or German philosophers combined.
I spent most of my life in a fog, drifting aimlessly from one diagnosis to the next and from one medication to the next with shrink after shrink coming up with one excuse after another as to why I was so damn dysfunctional. It wasn't until I arrived at my own conclusion that my assigned gender identity felt like a prison sentence that shit finally started to come together. After coming out I increasingly began to exhibit all the symptoms typically associated with complex PTSD. This seemed to accelerate rapidly with my gender transition, during which a storm of vivid flashbacks revealed that sexual abuse at the hands of the church I grew up in forced me to suppress my gender identity at a very young age as a means of survival.
The result of repressing such a huge part of who I was at such a young age was the compartmentalization of the self into multiple identities and realizing this long-buried truth resulted in these identities abruptly coming to the surface. So, when Nicholas became Nicolette, Nicolette also became Agnes, Max, Ophelia, and Mona. Naturally, this has been an overwhelming experience with many, many, many, many complications. My identity became something too complex for any single personality to govern, so we became a collective. Then something really strange happened. My life began to make sense.
Every single day is a team effort, and every single alter has a role to perform in this effort. Agnes, the five-year-old who kept the abuse a secret and never forgot is our emotional base as well as the source of our sometimes-overwhelming empathy. It's very easy to dismiss her outbursts as tantrums but she has an unfiltered capability for comprehending our emotions without intellectual pretention. Max is the manager, the whip smart teenage prick who seems to be strangely immune to most of our more irrational impulses and paranoia. Ophelia is the nonverbal personification of our long tryst with disassociation who has the almost uncanny ability to calm us without ever uttering a word. And Mona is our merciless protector, tempered by decades of suppressed rage.
No one is in charge and any attempt by any single alter to take charge ultimately only results in more chaos. Order can only be achieved through decentralized consensus, and this takes a level of meditation that gets downright psychedelic. To an outside observer it probably looks like stereotypical insanity; one weird bitch engaged in lengthy conversation with herself, but this has afforded me the ability to be far more aware of the surrounding universe than I was when I passed for sane. Instead of just walking into seemingly random bouts of depression or anxiety, Agnes sees the triggers, Max coaches us through disarming them, Ophelia keeps us calm, and Mona kicks in if we encounter danger while we manage the situation.
There is nothing crazed or insane about this. Much like real anarchism, it is actually an extremely organized means of self-governance and it's one that would be totally impossible without every single member of the collective being motivated primarily by their own unique needs. The closest that any sane philosopher has come to explaining this kind of distinctly individualist collectivism is Max Stirner with his 'Union of Egoists' in which the system fails to become a truly functioning collective the moment that any member decides to put the others' needs before their own. Though, even this falls short of truly comprehending the fact that at its core true individualism is an act of collective love.
In my inner collective we are all in this because we love each other as much as we love ourselves, but we recognize that the only way to truly love and support each other is to give each member of the collective the room to define themselves through their own will to be unique. Call it emo-egoism or perhaps an inverted union of egoists but one thing that it certainly is not is mayhem and chaos and neither is anarchism, another system deemed mad by the institutions it renders irrelevant.
You see dearest motherfuckers, my dissociative identities are not a disorder, they are a pathological defense mechanism developed to defend my individual agency from institutional trauma, and I believe this to be essentially true of most so-called mental illness' which can be better described as forms of pathological post-traumatic survivalism or perhaps even a means of individualist evolution. I also don't believe that it is a mere coincidence that the population of these evolved egoists has exploded at a time when our trauma inducing civilization is on the brink of self-destruction.
With all these things considered, this system's sudden concern with 'mental health awareness' strikes me as a last-ditch effort by an abusive shepherd to convince his wayward flock to voluntarily subjugate themselves back at the barn but it isn't working. The barn is on fire, and we can all see the flames.
Call me ill all you want but I'm not the one who needs help. I don't fear the collapse of your precious "civil" society and its various forms of abusive governance. I have already developed the means to govern myself and you can too. All you have to do is stop listening to the gods and masters they've prescribed for you and start listening to the voices in your head.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* In My Head by Black Flag
* Madness by Muse
* Happy by Mitski
* Lithium by Nirvana
* The Crazy Girl by Black Flag
* North Poles by Samia
* The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails
* Rid of Me by PJ Harvey
* Paranoid by Black Sabbath
* My Body is Made of Crushed Little Stars by Mitski
No comments:
Post a Comment