Questions on Radical Mental Health (from Readin & Fightin #3)

“The client sitting in front of me is the reality created by oppression. I tell her I’m glad we are in this together. Strength comes because we are involved; we are figuring a way out, she and I. We are not crying helplessly; ours is not a cry in failure.”

―Quoted in “Voices of the Pioneers,” Lakshmy Parameswaran, Shout Out

Last fall I was asked to give a workshop on revolutionary organizing along with two of my friends, all 3 of us women of color. We were supposed to talk about what we’d each worked on in the two years since we graduated college. I sheepishly admitted that in the past year I’d dropped off almost everything I was working on and had been busy instead with therapy, adjusting to psych meds for the first time, learning how to be in a healthy relationship, and sorting out the psych diagnosis no one had told me I had. Most of the people at the workshop were college students, and I think they came expecting easy answers; instead I could only tell them my experiences of the past year and pose more questions. I told them about what it’s like to not have insurance and go to a state-run free mental health clinic: the front parking space is for a state cop car and there are cops walking around inside; you empty your pockets, go through a metal detector, and open your bag for a search when you go in; you often aren’t trusted with pills for more than two weeks at a time.

Despite all that my experience has overall been really positive. I feel better than when I first went in last summer, I am learning important skills and asking myself huge questions, and after being a little more pushy than I was raised to be, I am in therapy with a psychiatrist to work on things tailored to my diagnosis. I bump into regulars from Food Not Bombs, and we now have much deeper conversations over lunch about our mental health experiences. My zine-partner-in-crime and I have been stocking up on mental health zines for our distro. And as always, I’m taking something I’m supposed to be ashamed of and instead talking about it publicly.

So what does this have to do with women of color literature? For starters, oppression manifests itself in our personal lives in many ways, and in turn affects our health and access to caring for health or being cared for by others. Current national debates about health care, food access, and abortion rights make this pretty clear, but also have many subtleties. In the past year, for example, I have been thinking nonstop about the image of black women as everyone else’s tireless backbone and how this pressure keeps us from seeking help for our own mental health or admitting to “weaknesses”, and that is even if we have access to resources that may help. I am in therapy now for post-traumatic stress disorder, which comes from the 3 1/2 years I spent as a teenager in an abusive relationship, and being sexually assaulted many times in that relationship. I had pretty much no resources that I knew of to get out, and no knowledge of what abusive relationships are and how they work. I see my experience as completely linked to gender-, race-, and sexuality-based oppression/power (class has also played a part, more now than during the relationship). These are things I read about in the books this zine is about, but also things I live.

For women of color, the ways we navigate oppression as individuals and as groups informs how we are doing, and often becomes the setting of what we read and write.

In the workshop we gave, I mostly threw out questions I’m trying to find answers to. In this zine, I want to work out places to find possible answers. Some of those questions are:

• How are poverty and mental health linked in a vicious cycle?

• How can health and well-being become intrinsic parts of social movements?

• Why is there instead often a culture of overworking yourself for the sake of The Movement, and expecting others to do the same? How might this leave people behind who know they cannot do this to themselves? Who is it most likely to leave behind?

• How can we radicalize mental health? What resources do radical movements have, and how can we make the most of them in creating healthy movements?

• How can we move beyond judgment in taking care of ourselves? e.g. “I can work this hard without sleeping so why can’t you?” “I don’t take pharmaceutical drugs so you shouldn’t either.”

• How do oppression and privilege affect our access to health resources? How do they directly and indirectly impair our health?

• How do we stay positive (or at least not totally hopeless) in a world with so many messed up things happening?

I don’t intend to answers all (or any!) of these questions in this zine; they’re open-ended anyhow. They set up a context of questions I try to find possible answers for.

hey, other Aspies & Auties in the DC area!! wanna maybe join this group?

Um, quick personal-ish post but this is also relevant to the group. (This is Jordan, by the way. Hi again.) Basically just talking to folks on the autistic spectrum right now.

So, I was recently diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. Apparently I’ve been an Aspie forever and just didn’t know it because nobody bothered to think of that except me (eventually). Anyway, although I’ve been an Aspie for my whole life, things like having a name for and an identity with regard to my experiences, and finding out there’s a whole community of Aspies and Auties & other peeps (i don’t know all the terminology yet) and I finally actually belong somewhere.. that’s totally new to me, and overwhelming… but in a good, happy way, like a room full of puppies (or whatever good, happy thing you like). 

Anyway, I know that radical mental health has not been anywhere near good enough about prioritizing folks with disabilities, absolutely including folks on the autistic spectrum and other neurodiverse peeps — in fact, a former friend of mine (to whom I was also unfortunately an asshole a lot of the time because I wasn’t dealing with my internalized ableism - I’m so sorry E!) got fed-up enough with that and other ableism from some allistic members of The Icarus Project that he gave up on radical mental health altogether, which is completely understandable to me, but a fucking shame that it had to come to that — and there is absolutely no excuse for that. I want to try to change that if I can, as much as I can, partly with this group. I figure one way to start that is to have more people in the group who are on the autistic spectrum than just me so the group will be more diverse and there will be more different experiences talked about, and so on. I think it’d be great if this group were not just a radical mental health group, but a group that celebrates neurodiversity as well. But I know it’s a big thing to ask, and the last thing I want to do is bring other Aspies and Auties into a potentially fucked-up group of predominately (as far as I know) allistic people. I’m just kind of mulling over this.

To be honest, I’m incredibly hesitant to join groups (or do a lot of other things involving lots of human interaction) because it’s stressful as hell, and I’ve wondered to myself more than a few times, “What the fuck am I thinking trying to organize a group?!”. With that in mind, maybe if we get enough people, we could actually have a separate neurodiverse group of some sort, if that would be better, and then anyone who also wanted to go to the radical mental health group could do that as well. Just a thought. 

Also, if you don’t want to or can’t really deal with joining the group, I’d still love it if anyone has any advice for me with regard to making the group as welcoming to, supportive of and hopefully not fucked up toward Autistic folks as realistically possible! You can send a message on here, or email the group (dcradmadness AT riseup DOT net), or hit us up on Facebook or something (there’s a group called DC Radical Mental Health with a green leaf icon, that’s us). I’m the only one who checks these things as of right now, so you’ll probably just get me. If you just wanna definitely talk to me personally though, please feel free to drop me a line - asskickatron AT riseup DOT net, or hit me up on Tumblr at “dancelikeyrfighting”.

Thanks!!!

- Jordan, co-founder & organizer

if you are enrolled in social work school with the intension of eventually becoming a private practitioner, you probably think that you have a lot of earning potential. and you are probably a huge asshole.