About Unconscious Ableism Around Mental Health

November 12, 2024 3:57 PM

We have had previous Metas around ableism and conflicting needs here on the grey. And we've gotten better on how we discuss mental health. But as someone living with a mental health condition, it appears that many discussions that implicate mental health on Metafilter are still touched with a lot of stigma: I would like us to do better still.

I think that we are getting better at understanding neurodivergence when it comes to things like autism, or ADHD - ways that people process the world differently. We are getting better at how we understand depression as a condition rather than a choice, for example. But discussions of some of the more stigmatized mental health conditions - levels of anxiety high enough to prohibit work, nonconsensus realities, paranoia, borderline personality, severe post traumatic stress - still wind up often displaying a lot of the stigma expressed in the broader world, as well as some common myths and misunderstandings.

Some misunderstandings I have seen here on Metafilter -
- that people who have these conditions can't function without medication
- that people who have these conditions are inherently destructive or 'dangerous' to 'normal' people
- that people with these conditions are displaying personal weakness when they don't 'cure' themselves or act in ways considered appropriate to people without mental health conditions
- that people with these conditions shouldn't have access to support or resources until they are 'cured'
- that people with serious mental health conditions need to be institutionalized or at the very least have long residential inpatient periods
- that family members should separate themselves from people with these conditions for their own safety

While seeing some recent comments has spurred me to make this MeTa, I am specifically not linking to any individual comments because I don't want to make this about individuals, but rather broadly about how we discuss these issues overall. I know that seeing these types of comments hurts me, and makes me feel as though the people in the discussion do not see me or the people I live in community with on a daily basis - both medicated and unmedicated- who have caused me, overall, far less harm than people part of the dominant and normative majority living without such conditions. I would like to ask us to try to consider this and reframe our thinking.

posted by corb to Etiquette/Policy at 3:57 PM (8 comments total)

Godspeed to you for starting this thread, but for what it's worth I agree. In particular, I'm always bothered by the idea that choosing to care for a family member or loved one with a mental health condition is somehow inherently demeaning, enabling, or sad. No one should ever be forced to become a caregiver, but sometimes I feel like it's treated here like it's never a positive choice or something done out of love.
posted by capricorn at 4:51 PM on November 12 [13 favorites]

Every time the mental state of the incumbent US president comes up I brace myself. Yes he is a horrible person, yes his actions have and inevitably will do untold harm to billions of people and the planet as a whole. But by connecting all of that shittiness to his mental health it both reflects harm onto people who live with those challenges and excuses his choices. It’s like when people make fun of his weight, grooming, or posture. These things have no correlation to morality. Political threads will continue to be incendiary I assume, so maybe the occasional reminder about that would be wise.
posted by Mizu at 6:34 AM on November 13 [7 favorites]

corb, thanks for starting this discussion.
posted by brainwane at 7:25 AM on November 13 [1 favorite]

Thank you for starting this thread. I'm already so exhausted seeing the mental-health ableism.
posted by maryellenreads at 8:42 AM on November 13

I thought about my comment last night and remembered that recentering discussion on caregivers is a constant pet peeve in mental health conversations. So I wanted to quickly come back and clarify what perspective I'm coming from: I am/have been the person with the mental health conditions, not the caregiver.
posted by capricorn at 9:46 AM on November 13 [3 favorites]

(is it dumb not to have noticed what you're talking about here in threads? i understand corb not wanting to call out specific examples...but is this stuff happening over in ask? on the blue?)
posted by mittens at 9:56 AM on November 13 [1 favorite]

I need specifics to this post. I'm not sure if you are referring to generalizations about people with mental health conditions or specific statements about individual situation. Generalizations about any wide group of people are not great, and tend to lead to poor discussion quality. However, the "misunderstandings" you specify are not universally false - they are often true in specific situations [1]. Further, at least Ask MeFi tends to have those specific situations pop up more than common, given that folks in more or less reasonable situations rarely have a need to post to an internet site about their situation.

It's not useful to generalize folks with mental health conditions broadly. It's also not useful to ignore the effects of mental health on other perople.

[1] with the exception of the "personal weakness" statement and the possible exception of the "no access to support/resources" (stated as possible because I'm not sure what the context is for that).
posted by saeculorum at 10:04 AM on November 13 [2 favorites]

So from what I've seen, I've seen this happening both in Ask and on the blue, and in a number of ways. Yes, generalizations about wide groups of people, but also assumptions about individual people's mental health conditions and what are needed for them that aren't directed by the impacted individual and are largely unsympathetic to the affected individual.

So for one example, I see a big difference between a person with a mental health condition saying, "I personally can't function without my medication" and someone talking about another person with a mental health condition saying, "They need to be on medication." Medication is one way that some people find helpful, but is not universal, and there are many disability rights activists that find the effects of psychiatric medications worse than the benefits they receive, or don't think that they are necessary.

Some also view mental health conditions as situated “not as faulty brains, but in the context that we live in a world that is not healthy for us.” So for example, in such situations, there is a question of whether the focus should be on removing or mitigating the oppressive structures that cause additional harm, or whether the focus should be on the person with the mental health condition to adjust themselves for the oppressive structure. The assumption that it should always be the latter is, in my view, itself an ableist assumption.

So for example, if someone with a mental health condition feels that engaging in capitalist work is harmful to them, feeling that being 'functional' should require their participation in that work I would think would be problematic.
posted by corb at 5:10 PM on November 13