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 Mad Pride: Beyond depression, a demand for rights from mental illness sufferers
If there’s ever been an inflexible social taboo in human thinking, it’s “madness”. Now, Mad Pride Marches are happening around the world. Tens of millions of people are affected by mental illness. Recognition is overdue by any honest standard.
Mad Pride is about mutual support and rallies in support of rights for people with mental illness.
This isn’t exactly an over-publicized cause. It took 20 years for depression to finally get some general recognition as a disease. Nobody will ever know how much suffering was involved, how many suicides, and how much collateral damage was caused.
Society isn’t good at facing its problems.
Mental illness is the bottom of the heap, socially. It’s a problem other people don’t want, don’t understand, and don’t want to be associated with if they can help it. It’s hard to understand, hard to treat, and hard to relate to unless it affects someone close to you.
Now, the New York Times has put Mad Pride on the front page. That’s a step forward in social awareness, even if the really tough work is still to be done.
About 5.7 million Americans over 18 have bipolar disorder, which is classified as a mood disorder, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Another 2.4 million have schizophrenia, which is considered a thought disorder. The small slice of this disparate population who have chosen to share their experiences with the public liken their efforts to those of the gay-rights and similar movements of a generation ago.
Those 8.1 million people represent about 3-4% of the population. That’s a very lonely demographic, and each case is individual-specific. The prognosis is usually a management scenario, not a cure.
Support is where it can be found. Many people have to battle on alone. Some aren’t even diagnosed. Need I say that these people don’t have anything resembling a safety net. It’s hard to admit you need help, and harder to get the help you need.
“Take a pill” leaves a lot to be desired as therapy. For the poor, support is even harder to find. Add Big Pharma’s genocidal pricing policies, the irresponsible, obsolete health policies, and “tough” hardly describes it.
Mad Pride has to be seen as one of the few available mechanisms for making any sort of statement:
Mad pride events, organized by loosely connected groups in at least seven countries including Australia, South Africa and the United States, draw thousands of participants, said David W. Oaks, the director of MindFreedom International, a nonprofit group in Eugene, Ore., that tracks the events and says it has 10,000 members.
RECENT mad pride activities include a Mad Pride Cabaret in Vancouver, British Columbia; a Mad Pride March in Accra, Ghana; and a Bonkersfest in London that drew 3,000 participants. (A follow-up Bonkersfest is planned next month at the site of the original Bedlam asylum.)
David Oaks is no neophyte. His own experience reads like a massive obstacle course.
… Members of MindFreedom International, which Mr. Oaks founded in the 1980s, have protested drug companies and participated in hunger strikes to demand proof that drugs can manage chemical imbalances in the brain. Mr. Oaks, who was found to be schizophrenic and manic-depressive while an undergraduate at Harvard, says he maintains his mental health with exercise, diet, peer counseling and wilderness trips — strategies that are well outside the mainstream thinking of psychiatrists and many patients.
Treatment isn’t standardized. There are common medications, common problems, but the result is whatever happens.
Apparently expectations aren't too high.
If you get another disease, there’s a road map. Not for mental illness. The big ones, like schizophrenia and bipolar, were originally treated by medicine which was horrendously primitive by modern standards. Now, the technology is there, but the industry isn’t trying too hard. That 4% or so also isn’t a great sales demographic.
The internet has created online forums like the Icarus Project, a New York site which gets 5,000 hits a month. There are a lot of support groups which are more or less creating themselves. Icarus says it’s “Navigating The Space Between Brilliance And Madness”.
What, there’s another space?
There’s even Madness Radio, a massive page with so much content it’s hard to describe.
This is support where there was none. The hideous desert of mental illness may not yet be a garden, but there’s an awful lot of wildflowers showing up.
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“Take a pill” leaves a lot to be desired as therapy. For the poor, support is even harder to find. Add Big Pharma’s genocidal pricing policies, the irresponsible, obsolete health policies, and “tough” hardly describes it. For the poor, there is only family. -
@ Chris V. (cgull)
For the poor, there is only family.
Beautiful statement, cgull, thank you. -
Is this really a step forward? It's taken so long to break down the idea of mental illness as madness, with all its horrible history and implications, and now these people are restoring the word to public attention. There's still too much shame about mental illness; I don't see how having people take pride in being "mad" will improve things.
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@ Connie M (Catana)
Is this really a step forward? It's taken so long to break down the idea of mental illness as madness, with all its horrible history and implications, and now these people are restoring the word to public attention. There's still too much shame about mental illness; I don't see how having people take pride in being "mad" will improve things.
People didn't get Black Pride or Gay Pride, either, and certainly didn't like them when they began, but they've gone into the language. I think it's a reflection on the way this society processes information that it only seems to absorb it when hit with a sledgehammer. -
You have a point, Paul, about the need to hit people over the head to wake them up, but how you do it matters. Neither "black" nor "gay" carry the load of negativity that "mad" does. Certainly, blackness was once associated with evil, but that has pretty much faded, and black is also used in many contexts that are completely neutral. But I may be getting too nit picky about words, and mad pride will turn out to be a good thing.
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And this doesn't even go on to TOUCH the elements of mental illness that negatively affect our society:
Homelessness and Schizophrenia
Approximately 200,000 individuals with schizophrenia or manic-depressive illness are homeless, constituting one-third of the approximately 600,000 homeless population (total homeless population statistic based on data from Department of Health and Human Services).
School Shooters
A rare mental issue called cynical shyness.
Untreated Mental Illness leads to murder and violence in the family.
According to a 1994 Department of Justice Statistics Special Report, "Murder in Families," 4.3 percent of homicides committed in 1988 were by people with a history of untreated mental illness (based on 20,860 murders nationwide). The report also found:
of spouses killed by spouse - 12.3 percent of defendants had a history of untreated mental illness;
of children killed by parent - 15.8 percent of defendants had a history of untreated mental illness;
of parents killed by children - 25.1 percent of defendants had a history of untreated mental illness; and
of siblings killed by sibling - 17.3 percent of defendants had history of untreated mental illness.
Homicide is but one tragic result of untreated brain disorders. Other consequences are homelessness, victimization, imprisonment, suicide, acts of aggression upon family members, and increased economic costs to society.
So I'm not sure I'm cool with all the pride that goes along with "madness". People with these issues need to be in therapy. Family members need to be in tune with signs and symptoms.
There are free clinics to help these people, as well more commonly prescribed meds (at $4 at walmart!) at low prices, often gratis for homeless at ER clinics and free clinics, problem being, they won't stay on the meds.
Black pride and Gay pride - both are something to be proud of! Mental illness is not a pride, it is a disorder that needs both medicines and counseling, depending upon the disorder.
Without both, we end up with problems like we have and we write stories about and see in the news day after day.
Families - a source of support? More often than not, a source of hiding the issue and enabling the problem.
Good report Paul. -
@ Connie M (Catana)
You have a point, Paul, about the need to hit people over the head to wake them up, but how you do it matters. Neither "black" nor "gay" carry the load of negativity that "mad" does. Certainly, blackness was once associated with evil, but that has pretty much faded, and black is also used in many contexts that are completely neutral. But I may be getting too nit picky about words, and mad pride will turn out to be a good thing.
True, the negative element is about as negative as it can get, but let's face it, society's own negativity has been practically a written request for this. -
@ Nikki W (karateblossom)
And this doesn't even go on to TOUCH the elements of mental illness that negatively affect our society:
Homelessness and Schizophrenia
Approximately 200,000 individuals with schizophrenia or manic-depressive illness are homeless, constituting one-third of the approximately 600,000 homeless population (total homeless population statistic based on data from Department of Health and Human Services).
School Shooters
A rare mental issue called cynical shyness.
Untreated Mental Illness leads to murder and violence in the family.
So I'm not sure I'm cool with all the pride that goes along with "madness". People with these issues need to be in therapy. Family members need to be in tune with signs and symptoms.
There are free clinics to help these people, as well more commonly prescribed meds (at $4 at walmart!) at low prices, often gratis for homeless at ER clinics and free clinics, problem being, they won't stay on the meds.
Black pride and Gay pride - both are something to be proud of! Mental illness is not a pride, it is a disorder that needs both medicines and counseling, depending upon the disorder.
Without both, we end up with problems like we have and we write stories about and see in the news day after day.
Families - a source of support? More often than not, a source of hiding the issue and enabling the problem.
Good report Paul.
Cynical shyness? We have the mentality to come up with a description like that, and they're the ones who are crazy? I'm sure the hundreds of people who've died of that particular ailment would be overjoyed there's now a description.
I'd say people who can survive the sheer callousness of this social garbage dump have something to be very proud of indeed.
The Icarus Project, to me, is a reminder that people need more than meds.
They have to fight stress, as well as the other condition(s). Stress hormones are killers, and they're one of the things that the "take a pill" approach can't address. This is a much higher level of support, and a community they've never had before. -
Excellent reporting Paul. It's sad, but true, that mental illness is one of the few socially acceptable stigmas practiced in modern society. We have clever and PC terms for the overweight, mentally challenged, members of minorities and many other distinctive (as is not 'average') citizens of the world. For some reason terms like 'mad', 'crazy', 'troubled', etc. haven't been replaced yet. I doubt that there is a single person in the world that hasn't been effected by some sort of psychological illness / imbalance.
I prefer to adopt the perspective of Julia Sugarbaker—of 'Designing Women' fame—who said, "In the south we aren't ashamed of our crazies .... we proudly put them on display rather then hiding them in the closet." It's paraphrased as best I can remember, but the sentiment is certainly a valid one. Only by 'outing' oneself as 'mentally ill' can even hope to get the support needed.
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@ Sykos Masters
Excellent reporting Paul. It's sad, but true, that mental illness is one of the few socially acceptable stigmas practiced in modern society. We have clever and PC terms for the overweight, mentally challenged, members of minorities and many other distinctive (as is not 'average') citizens of the world. For some reason terms like 'mad', 'crazy', 'troubled', etc. haven't been replaced yet. I doubt that there is a single person in the world that hasn't been effected by some sort of psychological illness / imbalance.
I prefer to adopt the perspective of Julia Sugarbaker—of 'Designing Women' fame—who said, "In the south we aren't ashamed of our crazies .... we proudly put them on display rather then hiding them in the closet." It's paraphrased as best I can remember, but the sentiment is certainly a valid one. Only by 'outing' oneself as 'mentally ill' can even hope to get the support needed.
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