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the Breaking free from mentalism STRAND VICTORIA UNIVERSITY`S STUDENT NEWSPAPER vOL. 55 iSSUE 3 • Oct. 1 2012 • WWW.THESTRAND.CA
in university spaces:
An interview with the Mad Students Society BY PAULINE HOLDSWORTH & MUNA MIRE
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fter their DisOrientation event “Resisting Mentalism: Becoming an Ally to Mad People” on Sept. 18, The Strand sat down with Elizabeth and Alisa from the Mad Students Society (MSS), a community-based organization that runs peer support meetings and engages in Mad Pride advocacy and activism. The Mad Movement works to counter oppressive and mentalist actions and attitudes that erase, sensationalize, misrepresent, or commit mental or physical violence against mad people and/or those with mental health concerns. Mentalism was coined by community member Judi Chamberlin, and refers to discrimination and oppression experienced on the basis (or on the perceived basis) of mental health, disability, and madness. San(e)ism is often used to refer to these forms of discrimination, but, Elizabeth explains, saneism is a term that
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“We wonder if it’s necessary, or ‘in their best interests.’ People sometimes don’t think of these things as discrimination because they think of them as care.”
comes out of law and is beginning to be used in social work, while mentalism is “the term our people use to name that experience.” “Our movement happens in ways that are not visible to outsiders. A lot of it is small and small-looking,” says Elizabeth. As a community-based movement, Mad Pride works to foster relationships and friendships and may not look overtly politicized to people unfamiliar with the community. “What’s so political about crazy people getting together to do mutual support?” she asks. Part of what does make mad pride political is that it opens up the conversation around alternatives, making room for building communities and connections in addition to seeking to reform the psychiatric system. It acknowledges and incorporates the experiences of psychiatric survivors as well as current consumers of psychiatry or traditional therapy, and it serves as an example of
“how to be with difference,” especially in progressive spaces. In conversations about social justice and equity, mental health concerns are often left out of the picture. In particular, problematic attitudes and actions towards people experiencing mental health disabilities are often framed, paternalistically, as care rather than coercion, even when they involve forced institutionalization. “That’s still part of the conversation about mad people—things are done to us ‘for our own good’,” says Elizabeth. It’s a question about who has access to your body, who gets to dictate which public spaces you’re welcome in and which you’re not, who you’re allowed to interact with, and which services you have access to. “We wonder if it’s necessary, or ‘in their best interests.’ People sometimes don’t think of these things as discrimination because they think of them as care,” she explains. For many, including some of those within the mad community, understanding the connection between madness and pride can be challenging. “The pride piece is hard. And it doesn’t look how people think pride looks. Pride involves shame sometimes. It can involve wishing you were different in moments, and still being glad of who you are—but having these moments where you just wish life was easier, and you just wish you could get to school when you can’t and everyone else can. It can still involve that frustration, and you can still really want to be yourself,” says Elizabeth. And it’s hard, too, she says, because “you’ll think, does that mean I must not want to never be depressed, and never have a panic attack? Is that what pride is, that you want to have panic attacks and experience depression? That’s not what pride looks like for most people. It’s about celebrating our existence, about celebrating the fact that really depressed people exist, crazy people exist, people who have very different experiences with the world exist.” “The best thing that worked personally for me in terms of shame was to really get to know a bunch of crazy people. Getting to know a community, getting involved, can really help you see the strengths, the beauty, the talent, the creativity, the brilliance—all of those beautiful things,” says Elizabeth.
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here’s a real need to bring these conversations to university spaces, where administrative and bureau-
cratic systems aimed at mental health and wellness often run the risk of posing barriers in their efforts to offer support, or of underestimating the difficulty students face trying to access these services. Mental health campaigns on university campuses are often aimed at promoting “awareness” but stop at that, which raises the question of who that awareness is for, and what it’s supposed to accomplish. “The students with mental health concerns already know they’re crazy. They know what depression looks like, they know what the warning signs are,” says Elizabeth. If these campaigns are for students without mental health concerns, they “further a culture of monitoring.” It’s a culture “that says we perpetually check and see who is having mental health concerns, and then if you do, this is what you’re expected to do about it. So it can further alienation from the campus community, it can further a sense of not belonging on campus, it can further a sense of difference, and it does very little to provide alternatives or positive steps you could take,” she says. Campaigns that hold up awareness as one of the university’s most important goals also work on the faulty asumption that support services are readily available and accessible to students. This is an assumption that runs counter to students’ lived experiences with month or year-long wait lists, discriminatory support workers, and convoluted bureaucratic systems that require run-around instead of providing support. “If you can’t see them at a certain time, or if you can only see them briefly and then they kick you out, or if you can’t see them while you’re on a leave of absence, or while you’re a part-time student, or while you’re at the hospital—there are ways to do that better,” says Alisa. What’s missing from people’s awareness is an understanding that some of these spaces are highly inaccessible and that students often struggle when navigating these systems
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“People see different kinds of support as being useful to them. You can have pride and take drugs. You can have pride and go to therapy.”
—not the simple truth that mental health concerns exist. Another crucial gap in traditional awareness campaigns is their lack of recognition when it comes to students’ experiences with poverty and financial difficulty. “When you’re talking about disability, or talking about psych services on
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“Getting to know a community, getting involved, can really help you see the strengths, the beauty, the talent, the creativity, the brilliance—all of those beautiful things.”
campus, there is a limited understanding of poverty in those spaces. People don’t realize that students might be using food banks, or that students might be experiencing homelessness. They might be couch surfing, they might be set to run away,” says Elizabeth. And since the conversation in campus health centres often centers around medication, there’s a sense that the only financial barrier standing between students and their treatment plan is a drug plan or lack thereof, she explains. Particularly in a climate of austerity, conversations about mental health and cost become increasingly complicated. “If you’re talking about mental health as a burden, if you’re talking about services as being very expensive, then the conversation changes. It’s not about justice, it’s not about people - it’s about money,” says Alisa. These conversations also misplace the reason these costs are incurred, attributing them to what people “lack” rather than workplace discrimination. “The high statistic of people with disabilities not being able to access employment isn’t really about disability, it’s about workplaces not being accommodating places, and not valuing people’s skills, and not having jobs where people can thrive and enjoy their lives,” she says. And even when advocates turn that conversation around and think about the burden of discrimination rather than the perceived burden of disability,
SEE ‘MENTAL HEALTH’ ON PAGE 3