I have suffered from schizophrenia for more than 20 years. It makes me angry when activists trot out the "schizophrenics aren't more violent than the general public" line because it's so obviously untrue. When I was in the midst of my delusions, I acted out in horrible ways, and I know a lot of schizophrenics who have done the same. Stigma is basically a "luxury concern," something you are free to worry about once your illness is under control and you are trying to re-integrate into society. The emphasis should be on getting people the treatment they need (whether voluntary or not) and not on forcing the public to be more tolerant of a population that often acts out in bizarre and dangerous ways.
The failure to address and prevent crimes committed by schizophrenics has disastrous consequences for schizophrenics.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3612963/ This article cites some staggering stats from the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics about the percentages of prisoners with schizophrenia and similar disorders. Around 10% of federal prisoners and almost a quarter of people in local jails met criteria for a psychotic disorder, with schizophrenia the most common. There seems to be some disagreement about these numbers from other sources, but every source I looked at indicates schizophrenics are far more likely to be incarcerated than the average person. I think the solution probably involves more civil commitments to mental health institutions and semi-supervised group home type living situations. I’ve been in the mental hospital as a patient. It’s a really lousy place to be, but it’s safe, treatment is provided, and it’s a lot less restrictive than a prison. I don’t think prisons are the right place for most schizophrenics, especially ones who don’t even have a good understanding of why they did what they did.
I'm President of National Council on Severe Autism and wish to say - you took the words right out of our mouth. Thank you for pointing out this dangerous trend to sanitize language in a way that can only undermine the actual needs of individuals and families suffering with severe neuropsychiatric disorders. The autism world has become overrun by a vocal minority on a crusade to wipe out accurate language in an effort to "reduce stigma" and, in essence normalize completely abnormal development and behavior. Stigma is the least of our community's concerns. They need their dire realities — aggression, self-injury, fecal smearing, screaming, and all the not-pretty stuff — to be top of the agenda. Saying "everything's dandy" betrays our children and their suffering.
At the age of 18 I got handed a folder filled with clippings about this "Asperger's syndrome" that my mother and grandmother decided I had. Never got an adult diagnosis but I am in the 97th percentile as far as intelligence goes.
Yeah, I'm really smart and have an excellent memory for little details; I also get paralyzed by indecision when I spill a drink, lose track of objects as soon as I set them down, and seem to be magnetically attracted to anything that will bruise me when I move about the house. I'm fortunate and even so it's not all roses. Those poor bastards who lack my gifts but have even worse disabilities shouldn't be so poorly served.
Another thing that needs to be pushed back on is the idea that “lived experience” automatically trumps scientific evidence.
Part of the problem here is that, within these “shallow allyship” circles, we’ve elevated the personal narrative to be the highest form of truth, where questioning of such narratives is discouraged as bigotry.
Which is of course problematic if the individuals giving the personal narratives are not representative. But how can they be representative? Having a voice in these allyship spaces is itself a mark of privilege. If you’re a nonverbal autistic, you have no voice by definition. So the “personal narratives” of autism are dominated by the people who build a positive identity about their cute and creative neurodivergence. Trans activism is dominated by trans individuals who are surest of themselves, living activist lives. Black Lives Matter is dominated by relatively well off and educated black people. And so on and so on.
The plural of anecdote is not data, and this is especially true when the anecdotes are drawn from a self-selected subclass not representative of the group they claim to speak for.
“I don’t have any great ideas about how to fight back against this type of shallow allyship.”
I think a good place to start is to reject concepts like “allyship”. All allyship is shallow. It’s a term awarded for nodding at the right moments. It’s meaningless.
What work that needs to be done is going to be done by people with skin in the game and medical professionals paid to figure something out. Everyone else needs to get out of the way or donate money and then get out of the way. Anything that smells like earning points is a net negative.
Shallow allyship also seems like an appropriate name for GLAAD placing Jesse on their so-called "Accountability Project" list. Jesse depicted current problems with the state of transgender health care. He was targeted as a bigot for reporting on that issue, assumedly as an outsider of that community.
I am currently rereading Randy Shilts's "And the Band Played On." In it, Shilts decried the gay leaders who refused to call for the closure of bathhouses in San Francisco or put a ban on blood donation from those in high-risk communities at the height of the AIDS crisis. Such potentially life-saving moves were seen as stigmatizing. Comforting fictions have led to many destroyed lives throughout history.
It needs to be endlessly repeated: the biggest issue facing people with psychological disorders is the symptoms of their psychological disorder. Sure people with Avoidant Personality Disorder face stigma, but curing stigma isn't going to give them friends. They lack friends because talking to people (even very supportive ones) comes with an endless thought of "they hate me. They only keep me around to not hurt me".
We should aspire to love and care about people enough that it’s okay if they are mad at us for a little while.
I’ve often wondered by what leap someone thinks it kinder to let a schizophrenic person die uncared for on the street than to risk their temporary ire by taking them in and caring for them until they hopefully become well enough to make a decision. Yes, that’s fraught with risks but if the only other solution is to let someone waste away outdoors in a cardboard hovel we should figure it out.
This was a really good piece. I wish we had better options here but you put words to something I hate, which is when people turn their face away from something they don’t want to see and call it kindness.
Isn't this just a symptom of the broader phenomenon of designating some humans as a special class (the ones needing "allies"), and therefore outlawing any criticism of that group, or pathologising of their culture or behavior?
If you suggest that a screaming mentally ill man on a subway platform is a problem, you're just a bigot - and the focus is now on why you are such a bigot, not on this crazy person acting dangerously around trains.
We are allowed to handwave in a general way about "mental illness" when someone's just shot up a school, but not to take the next step and suggest that actually involuntary commitment for some might be a good idea.
Many people probably remember the horrible incident where a young man was dismembered and eaten on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba. The podcast Dark Poutine did an in-depth report on the case which is worth listening to.
The man who had committed the act was in the midst of a psychotic break and suffers from schizophrenia. He was under the delusion that the other man was an alien who was trying to harm him, and the only way to save himself was to do what he did. This was a case that attracted plenty of attention, since it was such an unusual, unpredictable, and brutal murder. On top of that, it generated a debate within Canada about how to deal with people who commit acts of violence in a psychotic state.
The courts deemed him not criminally responsible due to his lack of mens rea, and he was released into a psychiatric care facility instead of a prison. He started treatment for schizophrenia and was placed on medications, and from the accounts I’ve heard, stopped having delusions. One journalist did an interview with the man a few years later, detailing his thoughts on the incident and what his life has been like subsequently (link is here: https://steinbachonline.com/local/a-conversation-with-vince-li).
I am a bit of a bleeding heart, so I know a lot of people might roll their eyes when I talk about this. I feel terrible the victim and his community, but i also feel sad for the perpetrator and his community. I cannot imagine the pain of knowing that you committed an act of horrible violence in a state of psychosis, and knowing that people around the world see you as a monster because of it.
I worry that if we simply try to deny the fact that schizophrenia can cause people to be violent, we are doing a disservice to the very people we’re trying to defend. We’re saying that this man, who was an engineer with no previous history of violence, was not driven to kill and eat a man because he was experiencing a break from reality, but because he had malicious intentions. Now imagine the implications that would have for people with these types of illnesses. Rather than giving them the treatment they need to function properly, we’d be punishing them and placing them in situations that would be unlikely to improve their conditions. We know that with proper treatment and medication, many people with illnesses like schizophrenia can function in day-to-day life, and we’d be denying them that opportunity.
When we say that schizophrenia can cause people to have violent incidents, we are making a distinction between the “unwell self” and the “functional self.” We are giving people with psychotic symptoms the ability to say “this is not who I really am, and if i was able to control it, this wouldn’t be happening.” I find the implications of the “schizophrenia doesn’t cause any violence” to be cruel and uncharitable for the very real people who struggle with that exact issue. If we want people to get the treatment they need and reduce the stigma directed at people with an illness like schizophrenia, we need to acknowledge the true harms of the disease.
Thank you for addressing this. My mother is schizophrenic and on monthly injections to control it. She can barely talk, is incontinent and not motivated to keep herself clean. I am frustrated that because she is controllable with drugs she is largely ignored, by health professionals and guilty because I didn’t advocate for better years ago. I am the only person who wants to name the condition and talk about it.
Fantastic piece. (I thought deBoer's “Gentrification of Disability” was excellent, too.) I wish it were more common to state the obvious: We should avoid stigmatizing people with mental-health disorders while still working to help alleviate their symptoms. It troubles me that the refusal to do so may be having an impact on how researchers carry out and respond to studies like this meta-analysis.
To readers interested in a qualitative but still reportorial look at both schizophrenia and autism I'd recommend chapters 5–6 of Andrew Solomon's 2013 book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. While Solomon's book as a whole is focused on parents and children who differ from each other in extreme ways, the several chapters that discuss particular disabilities are relevant to this discussion. Solomon interviews many families dealing with these disorders. He offers an excellent picture of what these families experience without too much pandering to the celebrate-everything style of activism that dominates online and activist discussions today. Although I'm not personally persuaded by his use of "identity" as a helpful category, the book offers so many specific depictions of families' lives that I think it's still very much worth reading. The chapter on schizophrenia, in particular, is unforgettable, and I've had many occasions to call it to mind since I read it some years ago.
This isn’t a counter argument, but it is a caveat.
Bipolar disorder may not need allies and it certainly doesn’t need to be romanticized, but society could, indeed, benefit from a much greater awareness of how it plays out. There are an astonishing number of suicides (as well as criminal behavior that is attributed primarily to alcohol) that are the result of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
I would have put up with a few insufferable books by privileged, attractive young authors if it had led me to pick up from general cultural osmosis an understanding that an endearingly “crazy drunk” I was close to was, in fact, dealing with an undiagnosed mental illness that might kill him in a very ugly (and awful for his family) manner.
As for autism, a greater awareness of Aspergers is, I’d argue, a clear net positive.
The question Freddie and Jesse have to address is this: Are they treating something very distasteful (romanticizing mental illness for book deals, applying a moronic gloss of affirmation and positivity on a pathology) as invariably very harmful when it’s simply offensive and annoying?
Clearly suppressing information about schizophrenia is harmful and shouldn’t be done.
The other stuff can be both infuriating and obscene, but “awareness” (as flaky as it sounds and as suspect as the motives of many of its proponents may be) is often helpful.
Brings to mind this Hannah Gadsby essay about her very-special-and-interesting autism. Amazing celebrities now get to launder their narcissism as social justice.
At one point she makes sure to note she does not “identify as nonverbal”. She has made millions from public verbal performances.
There is a bit in her post-Nanette special where she says that autism is not a disability except that the world makes it difficult for people with it to function.
Her point seems to be that antivaxxers are wrong to be worried about their kid having or getting autism. She says autistic people (I guess the verbal-identifying ones) should be included in the conversation about vaccines. Seems like it could muddy the message a bit.
"But I do think it’s important, as futile as it seems, to endlessly hammer home the point that those claiming to speak on behalf of “marginalized people” are often doing so in a strikingly superficial and counterproductive manner."
Yes, like putting up a yard sign, proclaiming one's virtue....
I have suffered from schizophrenia for more than 20 years. It makes me angry when activists trot out the "schizophrenics aren't more violent than the general public" line because it's so obviously untrue. When I was in the midst of my delusions, I acted out in horrible ways, and I know a lot of schizophrenics who have done the same. Stigma is basically a "luxury concern," something you are free to worry about once your illness is under control and you are trying to re-integrate into society. The emphasis should be on getting people the treatment they need (whether voluntary or not) and not on forcing the public to be more tolerant of a population that often acts out in bizarre and dangerous ways.
The failure to address and prevent crimes committed by schizophrenics has disastrous consequences for schizophrenics.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3612963/ This article cites some staggering stats from the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics about the percentages of prisoners with schizophrenia and similar disorders. Around 10% of federal prisoners and almost a quarter of people in local jails met criteria for a psychotic disorder, with schizophrenia the most common. There seems to be some disagreement about these numbers from other sources, but every source I looked at indicates schizophrenics are far more likely to be incarcerated than the average person. I think the solution probably involves more civil commitments to mental health institutions and semi-supervised group home type living situations. I’ve been in the mental hospital as a patient. It’s a really lousy place to be, but it’s safe, treatment is provided, and it’s a lot less restrictive than a prison. I don’t think prisons are the right place for most schizophrenics, especially ones who don’t even have a good understanding of why they did what they did.
I'm President of National Council on Severe Autism and wish to say - you took the words right out of our mouth. Thank you for pointing out this dangerous trend to sanitize language in a way that can only undermine the actual needs of individuals and families suffering with severe neuropsychiatric disorders. The autism world has become overrun by a vocal minority on a crusade to wipe out accurate language in an effort to "reduce stigma" and, in essence normalize completely abnormal development and behavior. Stigma is the least of our community's concerns. They need their dire realities — aggression, self-injury, fecal smearing, screaming, and all the not-pretty stuff — to be top of the agenda. Saying "everything's dandy" betrays our children and their suffering.
At the age of 18 I got handed a folder filled with clippings about this "Asperger's syndrome" that my mother and grandmother decided I had. Never got an adult diagnosis but I am in the 97th percentile as far as intelligence goes.
Yeah, I'm really smart and have an excellent memory for little details; I also get paralyzed by indecision when I spill a drink, lose track of objects as soon as I set them down, and seem to be magnetically attracted to anything that will bruise me when I move about the house. I'm fortunate and even so it's not all roses. Those poor bastards who lack my gifts but have even worse disabilities shouldn't be so poorly served.
Another thing that needs to be pushed back on is the idea that “lived experience” automatically trumps scientific evidence.
Part of the problem here is that, within these “shallow allyship” circles, we’ve elevated the personal narrative to be the highest form of truth, where questioning of such narratives is discouraged as bigotry.
Which is of course problematic if the individuals giving the personal narratives are not representative. But how can they be representative? Having a voice in these allyship spaces is itself a mark of privilege. If you’re a nonverbal autistic, you have no voice by definition. So the “personal narratives” of autism are dominated by the people who build a positive identity about their cute and creative neurodivergence. Trans activism is dominated by trans individuals who are surest of themselves, living activist lives. Black Lives Matter is dominated by relatively well off and educated black people. And so on and so on.
The plural of anecdote is not data, and this is especially true when the anecdotes are drawn from a self-selected subclass not representative of the group they claim to speak for.
“I don’t have any great ideas about how to fight back against this type of shallow allyship.”
I think a good place to start is to reject concepts like “allyship”. All allyship is shallow. It’s a term awarded for nodding at the right moments. It’s meaningless.
What work that needs to be done is going to be done by people with skin in the game and medical professionals paid to figure something out. Everyone else needs to get out of the way or donate money and then get out of the way. Anything that smells like earning points is a net negative.
Shallow allyship also seems like an appropriate name for GLAAD placing Jesse on their so-called "Accountability Project" list. Jesse depicted current problems with the state of transgender health care. He was targeted as a bigot for reporting on that issue, assumedly as an outsider of that community.
I am currently rereading Randy Shilts's "And the Band Played On." In it, Shilts decried the gay leaders who refused to call for the closure of bathhouses in San Francisco or put a ban on blood donation from those in high-risk communities at the height of the AIDS crisis. Such potentially life-saving moves were seen as stigmatizing. Comforting fictions have led to many destroyed lives throughout history.
It needs to be endlessly repeated: the biggest issue facing people with psychological disorders is the symptoms of their psychological disorder. Sure people with Avoidant Personality Disorder face stigma, but curing stigma isn't going to give them friends. They lack friends because talking to people (even very supportive ones) comes with an endless thought of "they hate me. They only keep me around to not hurt me".
We should aspire to love and care about people enough that it’s okay if they are mad at us for a little while.
I’ve often wondered by what leap someone thinks it kinder to let a schizophrenic person die uncared for on the street than to risk their temporary ire by taking them in and caring for them until they hopefully become well enough to make a decision. Yes, that’s fraught with risks but if the only other solution is to let someone waste away outdoors in a cardboard hovel we should figure it out.
This was a really good piece. I wish we had better options here but you put words to something I hate, which is when people turn their face away from something they don’t want to see and call it kindness.
Isn't this just a symptom of the broader phenomenon of designating some humans as a special class (the ones needing "allies"), and therefore outlawing any criticism of that group, or pathologising of their culture or behavior?
If you suggest that a screaming mentally ill man on a subway platform is a problem, you're just a bigot - and the focus is now on why you are such a bigot, not on this crazy person acting dangerously around trains.
We are allowed to handwave in a general way about "mental illness" when someone's just shot up a school, but not to take the next step and suggest that actually involuntary commitment for some might be a good idea.
Many people probably remember the horrible incident where a young man was dismembered and eaten on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba. The podcast Dark Poutine did an in-depth report on the case which is worth listening to.
The man who had committed the act was in the midst of a psychotic break and suffers from schizophrenia. He was under the delusion that the other man was an alien who was trying to harm him, and the only way to save himself was to do what he did. This was a case that attracted plenty of attention, since it was such an unusual, unpredictable, and brutal murder. On top of that, it generated a debate within Canada about how to deal with people who commit acts of violence in a psychotic state.
The courts deemed him not criminally responsible due to his lack of mens rea, and he was released into a psychiatric care facility instead of a prison. He started treatment for schizophrenia and was placed on medications, and from the accounts I’ve heard, stopped having delusions. One journalist did an interview with the man a few years later, detailing his thoughts on the incident and what his life has been like subsequently (link is here: https://steinbachonline.com/local/a-conversation-with-vince-li).
I am a bit of a bleeding heart, so I know a lot of people might roll their eyes when I talk about this. I feel terrible the victim and his community, but i also feel sad for the perpetrator and his community. I cannot imagine the pain of knowing that you committed an act of horrible violence in a state of psychosis, and knowing that people around the world see you as a monster because of it.
I worry that if we simply try to deny the fact that schizophrenia can cause people to be violent, we are doing a disservice to the very people we’re trying to defend. We’re saying that this man, who was an engineer with no previous history of violence, was not driven to kill and eat a man because he was experiencing a break from reality, but because he had malicious intentions. Now imagine the implications that would have for people with these types of illnesses. Rather than giving them the treatment they need to function properly, we’d be punishing them and placing them in situations that would be unlikely to improve their conditions. We know that with proper treatment and medication, many people with illnesses like schizophrenia can function in day-to-day life, and we’d be denying them that opportunity.
When we say that schizophrenia can cause people to have violent incidents, we are making a distinction between the “unwell self” and the “functional self.” We are giving people with psychotic symptoms the ability to say “this is not who I really am, and if i was able to control it, this wouldn’t be happening.” I find the implications of the “schizophrenia doesn’t cause any violence” to be cruel and uncharitable for the very real people who struggle with that exact issue. If we want people to get the treatment they need and reduce the stigma directed at people with an illness like schizophrenia, we need to acknowledge the true harms of the disease.
Thank you for addressing this. My mother is schizophrenic and on monthly injections to control it. She can barely talk, is incontinent and not motivated to keep herself clean. I am frustrated that because she is controllable with drugs she is largely ignored, by health professionals and guilty because I didn’t advocate for better years ago. I am the only person who wants to name the condition and talk about it.
Fantastic piece. (I thought deBoer's “Gentrification of Disability” was excellent, too.) I wish it were more common to state the obvious: We should avoid stigmatizing people with mental-health disorders while still working to help alleviate their symptoms. It troubles me that the refusal to do so may be having an impact on how researchers carry out and respond to studies like this meta-analysis.
To readers interested in a qualitative but still reportorial look at both schizophrenia and autism I'd recommend chapters 5–6 of Andrew Solomon's 2013 book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. While Solomon's book as a whole is focused on parents and children who differ from each other in extreme ways, the several chapters that discuss particular disabilities are relevant to this discussion. Solomon interviews many families dealing with these disorders. He offers an excellent picture of what these families experience without too much pandering to the celebrate-everything style of activism that dominates online and activist discussions today. Although I'm not personally persuaded by his use of "identity" as a helpful category, the book offers so many specific depictions of families' lives that I think it's still very much worth reading. The chapter on schizophrenia, in particular, is unforgettable, and I've had many occasions to call it to mind since I read it some years ago.
This isn’t a counter argument, but it is a caveat.
Bipolar disorder may not need allies and it certainly doesn’t need to be romanticized, but society could, indeed, benefit from a much greater awareness of how it plays out. There are an astonishing number of suicides (as well as criminal behavior that is attributed primarily to alcohol) that are the result of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
I would have put up with a few insufferable books by privileged, attractive young authors if it had led me to pick up from general cultural osmosis an understanding that an endearingly “crazy drunk” I was close to was, in fact, dealing with an undiagnosed mental illness that might kill him in a very ugly (and awful for his family) manner.
As for autism, a greater awareness of Aspergers is, I’d argue, a clear net positive.
The question Freddie and Jesse have to address is this: Are they treating something very distasteful (romanticizing mental illness for book deals, applying a moronic gloss of affirmation and positivity on a pathology) as invariably very harmful when it’s simply offensive and annoying?
Clearly suppressing information about schizophrenia is harmful and shouldn’t be done.
The other stuff can be both infuriating and obscene, but “awareness” (as flaky as it sounds and as suspect as the motives of many of its proponents may be) is often helpful.
Brings to mind this Hannah Gadsby essay about her very-special-and-interesting autism. Amazing celebrities now get to launder their narcissism as social justice.
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2022/mar/19/hannah-gadsby-autism-diagnosis-little-out-of-whack
At one point she makes sure to note she does not “identify as nonverbal”. She has made millions from public verbal performances.
There is a bit in her post-Nanette special where she says that autism is not a disability except that the world makes it difficult for people with it to function.
Her point seems to be that antivaxxers are wrong to be worried about their kid having or getting autism. She says autistic people (I guess the verbal-identifying ones) should be included in the conversation about vaccines. Seems like it could muddy the message a bit.
"But I do think it’s important, as futile as it seems, to endlessly hammer home the point that those claiming to speak on behalf of “marginalized people” are often doing so in a strikingly superficial and counterproductive manner."
Yes, like putting up a yard sign, proclaiming one's virtue....