Extreme mood swings, inability to write, and other headfuckery

So i haven't been posting much lately, despite the fact that there have been a shitload of things i've wanted to post about (actually, that seems to be true of a lot of bloggers at the moment... January weather?). Partly, this has been because of the fairly extreme mood swings i've been having, accompanied by a general, all-pervasive feeling of pointlessness, partly because of something which Danechi of Stimming With Rainbows of Every Design described absolutely perfectly in a recent post:

I spend a lot of time intending to write. I think of a topic that piques my interest, and I plan that when I have time, I'll blog on that topic.

But when I actually go off to write on that pre-determined topic, I freeze up. The best way I can describe it is that when I first think of the topic, the word pathways open up and I can follow them down and make a coherent post. Of course, I'm either not at the computer then or I'm trying to get something else done, so that doesn't happen. Then five or more hours later when I'm finally attempting to write it up, I'm on a whole other island and maybe there are other paths and maybe there aren't, but regardless, I'd have to do a lot of leaping across impossible gaps to get to the island with the first path. After a few days, I *might* reach it again (certain islands are frequented more often than others), but there's no guarantee.

In a way it's kind of reassuring to know that someone else experiences writer's block in the same sort of way that i do, and that it is (possibly) an autistic thing, rather than something unique to me... doesn't make it less frustrating, but somehow makes it more "acceptable"...

...altho, i'm having massive trouble seeing anything about me as "acceptable" at the moment - i've spent probably most of the last few days feeling like i am utterly worthless to the world, a burden on and shameful to everyone i know, and only capable, no matter how i try, of taking from the world and never of putting anything useful into it. Like i'm a complete parasite, a mockery of humanity, an infinitely hypocritical monster with no possible claim to absolutely any of my/its decisions or actions being justified in any way - in fact, the pure fact that something is being done by me, rather than by someone else, makes the action inherently unjustifiable, even if it is something that i would have no ethical problem at all being done by others. In fact, the other day i spent several hours so overwhelmed by such thoughts that i was literally lying on the floor, unable to summon up the motivation to move, even to eat (let alone cook), because "wasting" food to keep me alive felt utterly unjustifiable.

This is one end of the mood swing, and then the other is the fantasy - and even while feeling it, i think "how dare someone like me even fantasise about stuff like that?" - of being part of a community, connected to all sorts of radical ideas and movements and connecting them all together, being loved and appreciated by the people i love, being part of intellectual discussion which goes into such radical uncharted territory that it extends the frontiers of human thought and knowledge, being almost exhausted by all the utterly awesome things that my mind - maybe my mind alone - can connect together - then lapsing back into despair because i will never, ever get my head together enough to truly connect it all...

And on top of all that, there's the sexual frustration, the social frustration (combined with feeling like, as the completely ethically unacceptable, selfish, hypocritical, take-and-never-give person i feel like i am, i don't even deserve a social life, and in fact deserve to be laughed at even for wanting one), the cold of winter which i neither can nor deserve to escape from, and a totally irrational but sometimes totally overwhelming desire to be held. :(

And then the feeling that, well, i have no right to feel this needy or this despairing, when people like Amanda and Elizabeth (and shitloads of others, just the first 2 examples that came to mind) have real shit that they have gone or are going through, to which nothing i will ever go through in my life, as someone with all kinds of unearned privilege (white, male, (at least superficially) straight, no significant physical impairment, good education, etc) could possibly compare.

I think i am someone with negative natural authority. As in, someone with natural authority has the ability to make others see what they say as true and reasonable, and to follow their suggestions for how to do things, without any sort of coercion, just because they are able to present them as sensible, self-evident and rational. I am the exact opposite - anything i say, even if it is exactly the same in substance as what someone else might say, is, by definition, unreasonable, and any suggestion i make, regardless of what it is, is a completely ill-thought-out, laughable, unworkable suggestion, which no one in their right mind would follow.

- so, of course, it's fucking difficult for me to feel like it's worth me writing anything in this blog, if anything i write is automatically unreliable, distorted, misrepresenting the truth, so far out there that no one could possibly believe it, etc etc, just because it's me who wrote it... and no one's ever going to read this anyway...

Some of the mood swing aspects of all this might be because of some of the supplements i've been taking (St John's Wort and Korean Ginseng) - while i'm never convinced that any of them are more than placebos, i've taken them in previous winters and thought they might have had some positive effect, so i picked some up when i saw them cheaply in a local supermarket, and finished the bottles (one a day) last week, so i dunno, maybe some of the extreme depression/fatigue/cognitive twistedness might be due to coming off them... so, i've bought some more and taken some today. I don't like to attribute chemical causes to thoughts that seem to derive completely logically from the circumstances of my life, though - i can't help feeling that treating symptoms with chemicals/supplements/whatever is simply cheating myself when what i need to solve my problems is to turn my life around - but right now there doesn't seem to be any acceptable way to do that...

(well, there is the one thing i've attached a little nugget of hope to, which is the meeting i have booked with Colin Barnes at the Centre for Disability Studies in Leeds, on Friday 8th Feb... but i have absolutely no money, and i just looked up train ticket prices, and the cheapest return from Birmingham to Leeds is fucking £45 - which is twice what i thought it would be, considering that a return from Birmingham to London, an only slightly shorter journey, is £15... and when i told one friend she offered to pay for the ticket, but i feel guilt about that...)

This post really hasn't come out how i wanted it to; i'm not sure if it's coherent at all, but i think i'll post it anyway. If anyone who knows me in real life is reading this (probably unlikely, i know, but still), i'd appreciate (even if i don't feel like i deserve) them to call or email me, because i was lifted out of this depression for at least a few hours yesterday just by the sound of a friendly voice, but there are only about 3 friends who i know i can call just because i want to hear from them, and only so often i can call them. Apologies for the serious doublethink headfuck. Maybe i'll get it together enough to be able to write something meaningful tomorrow...

One piece of good news

Well, most of what's going on at the moment seems to be pretty depressing - i keep hearing about avoidable deaths of disabled people, harassment, discrimination, institutional abuse, organisations of disabled people succumbing to corruption and/or incompetency, and other stuff, plus my head's not in a good state for reasons i don't really have much motivation to write about. But at least this is one piece of good news:

Doctors refuse to perform hysterectomy on girl (Times)

Teenager is refused hysterectomy (BBC)

I think the mother makes the nastiness of her views pretty clear in the BBC article. When even Scope is against something because it's so blatant a violation of disabled people's rights...

Anyway, i'm happy that Katie Thorpe hasn't set a precedent for this kind of nonconsensual body modification in the UK. I can't even be bothered to respond to the wankers commenting on the Times article...

Blogging Against Aversives

OK, so i missed this on the day it was supposed to happen (as i always seem to end up doing with these kinds of blogswarms) because i had been busy with unrelated stuff and not checking blogs as often as usual in the previous week. But it's fucking important, so i'm collating the posts on it from other disability blogs, plus a bit of ranting of my own...

Blogging Against Aversives, hosted at Uppity Disability (a blog i hadn't known about before now), is in response to the, hopefully now fairly well-known, horrific treatment of autistic and otherwise disabled pupils/prisoners at the Judge Rotenberg Center. "Aversives" is a harmless-sounding euphemism for the torture of disabled children and young adults with such methods as electric shock devices, being tied up or handcuffed for periods of hours to days, and being forced to throw food away instead of eating it when hungry (although, as Amanda Baggs points out, the flagrant and "exotic" horror of the tortures at the JRC do not necessarily make it any worse than the hundreds if not thousands of other "total institutions" out there which torture disabled people in subtler ways).

Disability bloggers who have posted for BAA include (in no particular order):

Andrea's Buzzing About
Stirring The Pot
The Strangest Alchemy
The Gimp Parade
Last Crazy Horn
Big Noise
Growing Up With A Disability
Not Dead Yet

When i first heard about the JRC, the only parallels that sprung instantly to my mind were from fiction; i was reminded of Bolvangar from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, Larkhill from Alan Moore's graphic novel V For Vendetta, and of course the archetypal fictional depiction of a psychiatric total institution, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest; the closest comparison, however, was probably the near-future slave plantation run by a fundamentalist Christian militia in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents. However, the JRC is all too real; we live in a world where reality is horrific enough that the response of many people when confronted with it is to refuse to accept it and to insist that it is lies or fiction.

(There is a huge thread on the JRC from 2006 here, and it was in the news recently for an incident in which 2 teenagers were punished with electric shock devices as a result of a prank call.)

The JRC is not unaware of the exposes of its atrocities all over the internet; either Matthew Israel himself, or some pro-JRC individual using his name, has been going round posting comments to anti-JRC posts on blogs directing people to a PDF on the JRC's website supposedly in response to bloggers writing about what goes on there - for example, on Last Crazy Horn's blog as linked above. He was doing this before the BAA blogswarm, as he posted the same comment (which i deleted, as i do all spam) to my post here.

Veralidaine at Stirring The Pot posted a response to his comment here. (I don't believe her post is going to get any kind of specific response, as Israel (or whoever he pays to trawl the web for criticism of his institution) seems to be essentially spamming, by posting the same "comment", or rather link to his PDF, to every blog that mentions the JRC.) My response, if i felt it was worth anything to post a response, would be nowhere near as polite.

If the things that are done to people in the JRC were done to prisoners of war, there would be an enormous international outcry about it, with headlines in every major newspaper in the world. If they were done to political dissidents by a "Third World" regime, there would be UN sanctions, calls for boycotts of that country's exports everywhere, high-profile campaigns by charities such as Amnesty International, and if that country contained natural resources that were potentially valuable to rich Western states or multinational corporations, and was withholding those resources from them, then it would be used as a pretext for a war against that country.

If I had an army, then i would invade the JRC with it, kill every member of staff without mercy ("Only Following Orders" is no excuse), and burn the entire place to the ground. Sadly, i don't have an army, and in any case "having an army" would probably corrupt me into something as bad as the JRC, so in reality, i probably wouldn't do any such thing, and so such fantasies are unltimately futile. And, of course, i'm opposed to the entire concept of "armies". Fictional solutions only work in fiction. Hell is another fiction as far as i'm concerned, but if it was real, then Matthew Israel would deserve to burn there right next to Josef Mengele.

There are online petitions and letter-writing campaigns to shut the JRC down. I don't generally believe in the effectiveness of such methods; I don't know, however, what actually will get the JRC shut down. Even the legal challenges happening now in the US courts, while they have a slim chance of actually achieving that aim, seem to have been prompted by bad publicity rather than by any actual principled opposition to the methods of, even less the fundamental ideology behind, the JRC. However, i think exposing the fucked-up shit that really happens in such places genuinely does have at least some effect, at least in terms of making people aware that this kind of thing doesn't just happen in dystopian fiction coming from dark or wild imaginations, but in reality, and that it being ostensibly "for their own good" in intention doesn't make it any less wrong - as C.S.Lewis said (i think the quote is from Mere Christianity, but it's about 10 years since i read it, so i'm not certain; i got it from Falling Off My Pedestal):

"Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busy-bodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

May the Judge Rotenberg Centre fall, whatever it takes for it to do so, and those in bondage within it become free.

The Master's House

Everyone needs to read this, because it is MADE OF AWESOME.

To be honest there isn't really anything else i can say about it that it doesn't say itself, except that it's absolutely essential reading for anyone with even the vaguest interest in feminism, anti-hierarchy, anti-capitalism and the intersections between them.

There's an incredibly long and high-quality comment thread as well, which is the equal of any discussion thread on communities such as Barbelith.

The Ring cannot be used against the Dark Lord, because it is from him and of him, and anyone who uses it will end up either serving him or becoming him. The Master's tools cannot be used to demolish the Master's house. Lots of stuff i could spin off that, including a critique of campaigns for the "right to marriage", the relationship between the disability rights movement and certain charities who claim to be "campaigning for equality", government- and corporation-funded "technofixes" for global ecological crises, etc etc, but those will in all probability be the subject of future posts.

I think i need to start a "favourite quotes" and "favourite pieces of writing" page or link list...

Lack of activity recently has been due to a strange form of writer's block, which has been allowing me to start writing lots of posts, but not to finish them. Hopefully i'll manage to turn some of those drafts into publishably comprehensible posts soon-ish...

Really good discussion on autism and disability as identity

I'm not going to say loads about this, i'm just posting here with the intention to spread it, in case there's anyone who reads this blog who doesn't read the blogs it's already on (which, to be fair, is probably quite unlikely... but you never know)...

Joel at NTs are Weird wrote this post called "Welcome to the Disability Community", on how many within the autistic self-advocacy community don't fully understand the social model of disability, and thus, in his (and my) opinion erroneously, don't identify as "disabled", seeing that as a negative label when in fact being part of a wider disability community can only benefit the autism acceptance movement.

(This is an attitude i see too often at places like Wrong Planet, and one of the main reasons why i don't post there much any more. I'm possibly going to post a link to these posts there tho, and see what kind of debate it engenders...)

Amanda at Ballastexistenz posted this inspired by Joel's post, and linking (in her original post and in the comment thread) to other autistic writers within a consciously pan-disability movement such as Cal Montgomery (Cal's and Amanda's writings are, IMO, pretty much equally tied as the best disability writing out there... whether the position both of them share as having both neurological and physical impairments has anything to do with that, i'm not sure, but i think both are incredibly good at pointing out not just the interesectionality but the essential unity of different impairments within a social construction of disability).

Amanda's post created (as her posts nearly always do) a discussion thread of extremely high quality comments; i commented, basically to agree with Joel and Amanda and to make a couple of points about language, but there's little i can say about the subject that Joel and/or Amanda haven't said already.

Of course, some autistic bloggers haven't agreed; ABFH posted her response here. I want to post a response to ABFH, but haven't quite worked out exactly how to tackle her points. (I usually agree with ABFH on nearly everything else, the only other major exception being her support for Barak Obama, but that's an issue for an entirely separate post.)

Anyway, this is just a pointer to those posts...

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...