I see some pretty damaged people
sometimes in my line of work. Over the course of several years of
teaching, I’ve moved from the public schools to working with Aboriginal
students coming directly off Canadian reservations, where
suicide rates are the highest in the world,
the most frightening and horrific sorts of substance abuse are the
norm, and even communities that number in the hundreds have multiple
gangs. Then I moved into adult education in the downtown core of my
city, and besides being slightly older and more ethnically diverse, my
student population didn’t change much. Good, well-meaning people, with
scary high incidence rates of alcoholism and drug abuse, depression, and
dealing with problems that the middle class, by and large, doesn’t have
to deal with.
But that’s a gross approximation, because I have a few students who
have had every advantage that birth can give — stable middle-class
homes, supportive parents, even decent academic ability — who have
somehow ended up in the same mess as everyone else I work with. It’s no
surprise when someone is born into poverty and alcoholism and follows in
the footsteps of their parents. We know there’s an inter-generational
cycle that is remarkably hard to break (though my students are making a
real effort to do so). It’s puzzling, though, when someone has every
apparent reason to be successful, but isn’t.
Not too long ago, John Scalzi wrote a piece about prejudice, entitled “
Straight White Male is the Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.”
If life is a videogame, he explained, then having a visibly different
ethnicity, gender identity, or orientation, makes everything in life
harder. But if Scalzi has covered the whole spectrum of what it means to
be a visible minority, that still leaves us with a myriad of invisible
disadvantages that some people deal with. Like mental illness.
Anyone who’s ever spent considerable time in a hospital knows that
when you don’t have your health, most everything else fades in
importance. The worst I’ve had to deal with is a few days of flu, but I
can extrapolate from there, and when I take the time to think about it,
I’m very grateful for my general good health. But we don’t get mental
illness in the same way. If you’ve never been depressed (I mean
clinically depressed, not irritated or sad), never been crippled by
anxiety, never felt overwhelmed by your emotions, it’s likely to not
even occur to you that that happens to people.
I’m not suggesting, of course, that people haven’t heard of these
things, but our bodies and brains are big bags of hormones and
chemicals, and if you’ve hit the chemical jackpot, it’s pretty hard to
empathize with someone who didn’t. We have healthy, stable emotions,
self-confidence, the ability to weather life’s storms — or we don’t.
There’s an implicit assumption, I think, that everyone experiences
things, feels things, the same way that we do. We rationalize after the
fact, thinking that getting over a difficult situation, or leaping over
one of life’s hurdles, is simply a personal choice. But there’s an
emotional substrate to everything we do that ultimately comes down to
neurochemistry — not life experience, and not personal choice.
There are people I work with for whom anxiety is such a crippling
affair, even very low-stress situations become impossible for them. It’s
easy to say “get over it,” but that’s like telling a person in a
wheelchair to get over it and walk already. There are people who become
mired in depression and despair, and if you’ve never felt that way, you
don’t know why they don’t just look on the bright side, maybe, or do
something about their life to make it happier. But if they could do
that, they wouldn’t be depressed. So many of the mentally ill end up on
the street because of our ill-conceived beliefs about agency and choice.
It’s hard to get outside our own head, which is why I think mental
illness is so little understood, despite awareness efforts from mental
health advocates. Until I started spending day in and day out watching
people attempt, without success, to change their brain chemistry by
sheer force of will, I didn’t appreciate what I had. Life is easy for me
because I was born with the right mix of chemicals. And not only do we
ascribe a sort of guilt or laziness to those who lack such advantages,
we even look down on those who proactively adjust their balance with
prescription medication.
People living with a mental illness are already playing life on hard mode. We don’t need to make it harder.
I am so pleased to share with you the great news that today, March 11,
2013, the EU's sales ban on animal-tested cosmetics went into full
force. This means that cosmetics and cosmetics ingredients tested on
animals can no longer be sold in Europe, even if the testing happened
outside the EU. If cosmetics companies—including those in the U.S.—want
to reach the 500 million consumers in Europe, they will no longer be
able to subject animals such as rabbits, rats, and mice to tests such as
force-feeding, dripping chemicals into rabbits' eyes, and rubbing
substances onto animals' abraided skin.
