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juushika(Trying to catch up on a backlog of posts today, in order to keep my brain occupied. Expect your flist to be flooded, and all due apologies in advance.)
When I was at Reed (the second of the two colleges I attended), in an English class while discussing an author's mental illness, a classmate made a comment along the lines of: It's a good thing they didn't have Prozac back in those days, or this author wouldn't have written such good books. The comment was offhand and half-joking but it hit me hard and it has, obviously, stuck with me to this day. I tried then to respond but I was over-emotional and largely incoherent, and since I was responding to an offhand joke with serious discussion I seemed to be blowing the whole thing out of proportion.
This post: On Magical Madmen and Making the Bed by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
naamah_darling, is what I wish I had been able to say then.
I can't go back in time and give it to my classmates, but I can give it to you all now and that's far better than nothing. And I ask you please to read it, because even if this seems like a little thing to you, even if you don't understand why such an offhand comment could make such an impact, trust me that is is a very big thing for me.
Because nothing justifies the suffering that comes with mental illness. Whether or not madness comes with some sort of bonus like creativity, whether or not suffering makes one stronger, whether or not mentally ill people are wonderful or produce wonderful things: nothing justifies suffering, nothing makes it okay, nothing allows you dismiss it in an offhand thoughtless comment.
Because also when you dismiss suffering, you dismiss the sufferer. You say that his experience means less than your judgement of it.
Because the offhand remarks you make about "crazy" people may not be so offhand to the crazy person sitting three chairs over. When my classmate brushed aside one man's potential lifetime of misery, I had just transferred schools because I had had a wretched experience at my first college, I was eating rarely and missing many of my classes because I was petrified of leaving my room, I was self-harming, my grades were plummeting, I had a limited social life, I was on the verge of taking a leave of absence and, eventually, dropping out of school—in a word, I was depressed (and agoraphobic, and anxious, but depression was what ruined me). That is what mental illness does: it makes you suffer. To varying degrees, in different ways, it causes pain. It isn't something that happens to dead white men or something which disappears in the course of a joke: it's something that happens to someone that you know, someone who may be sitting beside you.
As you know me, and I was that commenter's classmate.
What my classmate said wasn't intended to be cruel, but that's just the point: thoughtless harm still hurts, and the only remedy is to encourage thought. So I ask you to read, and to think. This request isn't directed at any one person, and I trust that most people reading this understand or have already considered where I'm coming from. But there's never a bad time to stop and remember to respect the experiences of others.
When I was at Reed (the second of the two colleges I attended), in an English class while discussing an author's mental illness, a classmate made a comment along the lines of: It's a good thing they didn't have Prozac back in those days, or this author wouldn't have written such good books. The comment was offhand and half-joking but it hit me hard and it has, obviously, stuck with me to this day. I tried then to respond but I was over-emotional and largely incoherent, and since I was responding to an offhand joke with serious discussion I seemed to be blowing the whole thing out of proportion.
This post: On Magical Madmen and Making the Bed by
naamah_darling, is what I wish I had been able to say then.I can't go back in time and give it to my classmates, but I can give it to you all now and that's far better than nothing. And I ask you please to read it, because even if this seems like a little thing to you, even if you don't understand why such an offhand comment could make such an impact, trust me that is is a very big thing for me.
Because nothing justifies the suffering that comes with mental illness. Whether or not madness comes with some sort of bonus like creativity, whether or not suffering makes one stronger, whether or not mentally ill people are wonderful or produce wonderful things: nothing justifies suffering, nothing makes it okay, nothing allows you dismiss it in an offhand thoughtless comment.
Because also when you dismiss suffering, you dismiss the sufferer. You say that his experience means less than your judgement of it.
Because the offhand remarks you make about "crazy" people may not be so offhand to the crazy person sitting three chairs over. When my classmate brushed aside one man's potential lifetime of misery, I had just transferred schools because I had had a wretched experience at my first college, I was eating rarely and missing many of my classes because I was petrified of leaving my room, I was self-harming, my grades were plummeting, I had a limited social life, I was on the verge of taking a leave of absence and, eventually, dropping out of school—in a word, I was depressed (and agoraphobic, and anxious, but depression was what ruined me). That is what mental illness does: it makes you suffer. To varying degrees, in different ways, it causes pain. It isn't something that happens to dead white men or something which disappears in the course of a joke: it's something that happens to someone that you know, someone who may be sitting beside you.
As you know me, and I was that commenter's classmate.
What my classmate said wasn't intended to be cruel, but that's just the point: thoughtless harm still hurts, and the only remedy is to encourage thought. So I ask you to read, and to think. This request isn't directed at any one person, and I trust that most people reading this understand or have already considered where I'm coming from. But there's never a bad time to stop and remember to respect the experiences of others.
