Good intentions can become ugly realities. And nowhere is that clearer than in how we treat the mentally unwell.
America closed an overwhelming number of its psychiatric hospitals, because surely its schizophrenics didn’t deserve to be locked up like they were in prison? And so, many of them ended up on the street.
Disability activists encourage us to see autism as a superpower, to help erode stigma. And so, those with a profoundly life-inhibiting form of the disorder are erased from the awareness-raising conversation.
An anxious mother hears her teenage daughter say she’s developed multiple personality disorder, like the other girls on TikTok, and takes her to see a therapist. And so, pediatricians report, they’re overwhelmed with patients more likely to be suffering from social contagion than genuine illness.
In his remarkable new book, “All In Your Head: Illness as Identity, Trauma as Fashion, and the Desire to Be Disordered,” Freddie deBoer explores all of these uncomfortable scenarios. It’s not a memoir, but it is personal; Freddie has spent a lifetime suffering from bipolar disorder. Today, it’s our honor to print an excerpt from a chapter simply titled: “Disability Is Bad.”
It’s the story of how an admirable movement to demand that disabled people are treated with dignity has morphed into a conversation about pride and language and “disability joy”—instead of, say, needing more wheelchair ramps.
And therein lies a lesson for the newly empowered left. Freddie’s work—both in this book, and on his Substack—is a repeated, insistent reminder that a true politics of the left is not about shouting at people on social media, even if that’s more fun. It is about doing the hard, and not very sexy, work of legislating to make life in America fairer for the most vulnerable.
And to do that, you need to confront the reality of what their lives are like. — Freya Sanders
Disability is, by definition, a negative condition, an impediment, a hindrance, a harm. This is a basic, obvious, frankly boring point that should not be controversial for anyone in any context.
And yet, as a critic of modern attitudes toward mental illness, I have been consistently surprised by how much pushback I receive about this very simple proposition: Disability disables.
In the modern push to destigmatize disability, a laudable project in the abstract, we’ve managed to confuse ourselves into thinking not only that there should be no shame associated with disability, but also that disability itself is a positive condition.
Take Alice Wong, a now-deceased disability activist.
Wong, who was diagnosed at birth in 1974 with muscular dystrophy, has long been a hero to many in the disability rights movement for her emphasis on pride and autonomy among those with disabilities. These are, of course, beneficial messages. But Wong also repeatedly denied that disabilities themselves are negative conditions, and in fact engaged in a kind of disability-themed mysticism that held that certain disorders conveyed what can only be defined as supernatural powers. That’s not hyperbole. Wong often referred to disabilities as “magic,” and suggested this was not merely a metaphorical designation. In 2020, she co-founded a group called the Society of Disabled Oracles, which, as Ryan Zickgraf summarized, holds that “disabled people [are] holy priests possessing what she called prophetic perception: an ability to sense power dynamics others can’t see, and to perceive hidden knowledge from the past or the future.”
Wong may have taken this tendency to something of an extreme, but she was far from alone in asserting disability as a positive good. The psychology professor and disability pride activist Kathleen Bogart, who has written movingly of living with the rare neurological disorder Möbius syndrome, published an academic paper in 2017 titled “Disability Pride: Why Disability Is Not a Bad Thing.” In that paper, she writes that “many disability scholars, including myself, advise against using words that imply that disability is not desirable.” Bogart also writes that “social stigma is considered by many disability scholars to be the main cause of disability”—the cause of disability, that is, not an effect of disability.
How did we reach this point?
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