The Thing Itself Is The Abuse

The headline of this recent BBC story is "Stroke victim was misdiagnosed as mad". While reading it was pretty scary (especially as temporary aphasia can also occur in autism, and in fact i experienced it (albeit only for a few very brief periods) in my teens), it follows a certain pattern that annoys me: in describing the horrible treatment that Steve Hall experienced when "misdiagnosed", it implicitly suggests that the same treatment would be appropriate and acceptable if he actually was "mad".

It reminded me of this case of a woman who was put in a men's prison because she was percieved to be a transsexual woman (and, therefore, in the eyes of the police who arrested her, "really a man") - and of similar cases i've heard of where gender-ambiguous-looking women have been refused entry to women's toilets or other single-sex spaces where they were thought to be MTF transsexuals. As nodesignation says:

The police don’t question the practice of regularly placing trans women in situations where they will be raped. They only lament that they accidentally subjected a non-trans woman to the violence that they regularly subject trans women to. I would assume that as this story gains traction the emphasis will be about how horrible that a woman who was not trans received such mistreatment. That much is clear already from the fact that there are so few stories on trans women receiving this mistreatment despite being its being a regular occurance.

It's not the inherent wrongness of the treatment that is discussed, it is the supposed "horrible mistake" of subjecting someone to that treatment when that person actually turned out to be not a member of the category of people that it's considered acceptable to do this sort of thing to. No thought is given to why it's supposedly "acceptable" to do it to people who are in that category, despite the fact that, in both cases, the reporting of the incident blatantly begs the question: if it was horrible and inhuman and inacceptable to do this to one person "by mistake", what is it to do it to a whole "Othered" class of people deliberately?

It was, and in some places still is, common for autistic people (particularly those who don't fit certain aspects of the commoner autism stereotypes) to be "misdiagnosed" as "schizophrenic", leading to institutionalisation, forced drugging, etc. Similarly, many non-verbal autistic people (who are/were nonetheless capable of communication through other means) are or were "misdiagnosed" as "mentally retarded", again leading to institutionalisation and other abuses "justified" by the "fact" of their supposed incapacity for rational thought or communication. On autism message boards and other communities, these cases tend to be talked about primarily in terms of the horribleness of the "misdiagnosis", often with comments to the effect that "I/you/ze should never have been treated like that, because I'm/you're/ze's autistic, not schizophrenic/mentally retarded/whatever", or seeing the case similarly to someone who was acquitted of a crime after new evidence proved them not guilty, as if to be found to be autistic rather than some other diagnostic category "after all" is what makes all the difference. Even if the people making these sort of comments don't realise it, they're implying that it would be OK to do all those things to someone who actually is "schizophrenic" or "mentally retarded".

(Let's not, here, get into the fact that i actually don't think anyone is "schizophrenic" or "mentally retarded", as i don't think either of those terms is a useful diagnostic category at all... regardless of the label used, if something is unacceptable to do to anyone, it's unacceptable to do to anyone...)

Similar stuff goes on when people who are cognitively "normal", but who have physical impairments (particularly ones such as CP which affect speech) are harassed or discriminated against because they are "mistakenly" assumed to be mentally impaired, and express outrage at having been categorised as such, often asserting their intelligence or educational qualifications in response - implying that harassment or discrimination would be justified if they really were mentally as well as physically impaired (see, for example, Cal Montgomery's fantastic article "Critic of the Dawn", particularly the beginning of the first and the 8th part of the second section).

In the BBC news report, a "spokesman for the Aphasia Alliance" said: "People with aphasia are often wrongly pigeon-holed as stupid... However aphasia does not affect intelligence..." - clearly motivated by a desire to render the particular category of cognitively disabled people he is employed to "speak for" a "respectable" category, because they're not really mentally impaired - again, as if it would be acceptable to mistreat people if they did have the "beyond-the-pale" category of impairment.

I recently found this quote at Rad Geek People's Daily (it's one of the rotating "frontispiece" quotes). While i was surprised to see it coming from who it comes from (he was one of the political philosophers i had to study in the first year of my Politics with International Studies degree, and i remember him as an arch-conservative and one of the least pleasant writers, both in opinions and in style, i ever had to study), it makes it pretty clear (well, apart from the fact that i actually can't identify 3 things that make up the "all three" in the second paragraph) where these kinds of critiques fall far short of logical or ethical consistency.

To prove, that these Sort of policed Societies are a Violation offered to Nature, and a Constraint upon the human Mind, it needs only to look upon the sanguinary Measures, and Instruments of Violence which are every where used to support them. Let us take a Review of the Dungeons, Whips, Chains, Racks, Gibbets, with which every Society is abundantly stored, by which hundreds of Victims are annually offered up to support a dozen or two in Pride and Madness, and Millions in an abject Servitude, and Dependence. There was a Time, when I looked with a reverential Awe on these Mysteries of Policy; but Age, Experience, and Philosophy have rent the Veil; and I view this Sanctum Sanctorum, at least, without any enthusiastick Admiration. I acknowledge indeed, the Necessity of such a Proceeding in such Institutions; but I must have a very mean Opinion of Institutions where such Proceedings are necessary.

I now plead for Natural Society against Politicians, and for Natural Reason against all three. When the World is in a fitter Temper than it is at present to hear Truth, or when I shall be more indifferent about its Temper; my Thoughts may become more publick. In the mean time, let them repose in my own Bosom, and in the Bosoms of such Men as are fit to be initiated in the sober Mysteries of Truth and Reason. My Antagonists have already done as much as I could desire. Parties in Religion and Politics make sufficient Discoveries concerning each other, to give a sober Man a proper Caution against them all. The Monarchic, Aristocratical, and Popular Partizans have been jointly laying their Axes to the Root of all Government, and have in their Turns proved each other absurd and inconvenient. In vain you tell me that Artificial Government is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! the Thing itself is the Abuse!

—Edmund Burke (1757), A Vindication of Natural Society

Ballastexistenz has many, many incredibly powerful posts that are essential reading on the subject of institutionalisation, and why it's never acceptable, but one of the best is this one, in which Amanda Baggs contrasts the well-known horrors of the Judge Rotenberg Center with the subtler horrors of "nicer" institutions. Just as, in the case of the recent scandal over the prank-calling incident at the JRC, it was not this "abuse" of the electric schock treatment, but the entire treatment regime itself, that was the abuse, it is not just the particular forms of torture practiced at the JRC that is an "abuse" of an institutional system, but the whole institutional system, the whole concept of institutions in which to incarcerate people categorised as "Other", which is abusive at its core.

I had a friend as a teenager who lived in a local authority-run "children's home" (actually for 14-18 year olds) type institution (she wasn't classified as "disabled", although i'm fairly sure she wasn't neurotypical), in which many of the same techniques of oppression and dehumanisation used in disability institutions were commonly used. However, she failed to recognise the inherent wrongness of that type of institution, insisting during the many heated arguments we had about the subject that the staff who had physically abused or pettily taken rights and possessions away from her were just "bad staff", and that others there were "good staff", and that the "home" itself was fundamentally a "good" place. Possibly it was clearer to me, on the outside, than it was to her, on the inside, that it was not "corruption" within Social Services that was the problem, but the entire set of premises on which the concept of "Social Services" was based.

Of course, this argument applies to a whole host of other things: "anti-war" activists and commentators who stop short of being full-blown anti-militarists, for example - those who argue that the Iraq war is wrong, but would have been right if there actually had been weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; a certain category of "gay rights activists" who argue that gay people are not promiscuous as they are stereotyped as, but just as likely to have stable, monogamous relationships as straight people (thus implying that it's acceptable to shame or discriminate against people who are promiscuous); apologists for the oil or nuclear industries who accept that certain particularly blatant examples of environmental destruction were wrong, but insist they were "anomalies" rather than part and parcel of inherently polluting industries; the examples could, in all probability, go on for ever. It's the fundamental basis of the anarchist argument against all government, not just "bad government", and one of the main reasons i identify as an anarchist.

Whether or not we want to adopt an overarching political/philosophical label like "anarchist", however, all of us who fight, with actions or words, for any oppressed groups and against oppression need to actively oppose the hypocrisy of outrage at people being "mistakenly" treated like they are members of a "supposedly OK to exclude, abuse or oppress" category, when the real outrage should be that such a category even exists. The thing itself is the abuse...