I just finished reading the book The Revolutionary Road to Me: Identity Politics and the Western Left, by Chetan Bhatt. I have a lot of thoughts about how Bhatt’s arguments for universalism from particularized standpoints (as I understand it) relates to feminism, a movement that he doesn’t explore fully – mainly as it has been undermined by queer politics, and somewhat in relation to identitarian forms of anti-racism.
For now, I want to focus on survivor identities, particularly as survivors of psychiatry. We have been accused of defining ourselves negatively in reaction to those who victimized us. We did take on as a collectivity, first a users-and-survivors identity, then ‘people with psychosocial disabilities.’ The first was a coalition in essence, bringing together everyone who had been victimized by the psychiatric system or who was using it and wanted certain rights as a user which they didn’t have. WNUSP’s statutes also brought in people who had experienced ‘madness and/or mental health problems’ but who may not have ever used or been traumatized by the psychiatric system. So we represented a constellation of issues that were sometimes in tension – need for alternative understanding and supports, system reform and alternative services, and reparations and redress, emphasizing an end to the systematic and legalized human rights violations. We understood the issues to have bearing on one another and the coalition as being of people who all stood in the same basic relation of relative powerlessness to the forces that oppressed us – the psychiatric system, the state, and society in their stereotyping, misplaced fears, and targeted abuse and discrimination.
The concept of psychosocial disability was adopted to place us on an equal footing in the disability movement, and it created a different kind of identity. Despite disability being theoretically understood as a social construct, there is always the underlying reference to impairment, and an implication that this is an inherent aspect of the person rather than a state of mind that we are passing through, that is always changing. Many of us struggle with this from different perspectives – for some it conflicts with the aim of recovery or the concept of mental health problems as a health condition for which one might seek treatment. For some like myself as a survivor, the implication that there is something about me that sets me apart from the rest of humanity just because abusers used pseudo-scientific labels to have me incarcerated and administered mind-numbing drugs is offensive and demeaning. I do not accept this identity label, because the social model meaning that I have advocated for, which can include those of us who are impacted in the present by abuse in the past at a time when we were struggling and given demeaning labels that we reject, never sticks in anyone’s minds long enough to be what they hear in the term ‘person with psychosocial disabilities.’ While they may still hear simply ‘crazy’ or ‘mentally ill’ when I say ‘survivor of psychiatric institutionalization’ or attribute my rejection of the labels to denial and deem me an untrustworthy narrator for that reason, at least it is clear in my own mind and value system and my present-day advocacy.
We identified as part of the disability movement for strategic reasons. We didn’t necessarily have to take the term ‘psychosocial disability’ but many use it now by preference and they can bring their own understanding to it. What is useful for survivors is to say, even if we were all the things you said we were, it wouldn’t justify the mistreatment. Disability non-discrimination politics joins with the concept of mad pride, which we had developed as analogous to the liberation movements of the 60s, especially Black pride, to say that if we are different from other people it is not a reason to fear us, segregate us, confine us, alter our minds and brains against our will. As disability, we join with others who are similarly feared and shunned and pitied because of differences others perceive in them, and who are at times also treated paternalistically and segregated away from society because they are deemed unproductive and expensive and therefore a burden on others. For me as a survivor, the disability lens helped to understand and frame as acceptable the experience of life crisis as a result of both family dysfunction and social dysfunction that led to people in my life seeking help from the psychiatric system to remove me unless or until I could perform socially again.
The bitterness I carry against the systems that converged to drastically change my life by lasting harm is huge and profound. It has at times poisoned my ability to enjoy life and find peace – and it has also given me the gift of anger, of self-knowledge and knowledge about the world I live in and human capacity for evil, including my own. It has led me to do the work I do which has given survivors hope and tools throughout the world and which I hope will one day lead to true abolition so that the trauma can be put to rest and repaired as a historical fact that can be healed once it no longer menaces anyone.
There is another thing I want to say about survivor identity and personhood. While we and others in the disability movement critiqued the liberal idea of isolated, encapsulated personhood through our promotion of ‘supported decision-making’ or support in exercising legal capacity as a permissible and useful, even necessary, means for many people who have been deemed incapable of manifesting their will in ways that can credibly relate to the issue which they must decide, we emphasize that support is always subordinate to the person’s own decisions and that the supporter’s will and understanding do not merge with that of the person who is making the decision. Personhood does not have to be conceptualized as encapsulated or isolated in order to be autonomous; autonomy within all our relations is essential to understand ourselves as the equals of others and to relate to them accordingly. Here I mean by autonomy, both one’s own self-recognition and self-assertion as a person different from other persons, and others’ recognition of and respect for this fact.
Chetan Bhatt’s reference with approval to the African concept of ubuntu, that we are persons through other persons, resonates here, and it also does not go one-way; when others deny me this recognition, when they see me as subhuman or inferior or less than themselves, I can effect change by developing self-consciousness autonomous from their negative view of me, and emerge into those relations to challenge and upend the subordination. But I usually will need the support of others – a circle, a movement, trusted friends – who together develop this consciousness and emerge as persons for each other, which we can then assimilate and metabolize for ourselves to emerge into our own full lives. This was the genius of feminist consciousness-raising and has also been true of the organizing and educational dimension of workers’ movements, Black consciousness, and others, including the survivor movement. It is not to negate the possibility of individuals developing such autonomous self-consciousness – that is unavoidable given that we are human and we feel pain and resentment, however much we may feel we have to hide or suppress it. But the collective dimension gives us a political voice that we do not have as individuals, and it also enriches our individual understanding and creates new culture and relationships that we also value and work to maintain.
Women as women also have had to fight for social and legal recognition as persons, and feminism has developed its own varied ways of understanding the self and personhood, which I am familiar with as background but would need to research again to describe faithfully. Basically, there is one version that simply seeks equal recognition as persons in the liberal sense, ideally self-actualizing and atomized. (That idea of personhood cannot be accurate for anyone since it ignores the matrix of identity as community that every human being is born into including the infant’s relation with its mother.) There are other versions that are idealized differently, for example, viewing individual women, once they have have their consciousness raised and expunged patriarchy from themselves, as exemplars of a theorized ‘originally female’ collectivity that naturally expresses values of cooperation, peacefulness, and industry. That, I would submit, is identitarian feminism that erases its own historical coming into being and universalizes its particulars inaccurately.
I remember a conversation with a young male law student, when I was studying law as an older student in my early 40s, in which he startled me by saying he sees himself as a bubble isolated from other people. I have never seen myself that way; rather when I reflected I saw myself as a node in a network of relationships with other people. Now I am more interested in the multiple dimensions of self that I can experience, for example in expanded consciousness during trance states and the sense of magic that happens when women trancing together have synergistic visions that can shed light on each other. Rather than a theory, what interests me is experience of self-within, self with others, self among others and untangling different individuals’ needs, perceptions, and fears (different depending on whether I seek this understanding through my own reflection alone to determine a course of action, or explore through conversations with those other people, which is also a kind of magic).
Instrumentalizing identity individually and collectively is useful for political action, and if we include representation of a collective as a kind of identity, is necessary if one wants to insert a new agenda into a hostile status quo. The politics of non-discrimination in particular, and the way it is operationalized as law, is a potent tool – some survivors (e.g. Judi Chamberlin and Rae Unzicker in the US, Mary O’Hagan in New Zealand) saw this potential early on for our disability rights affiliation and I experienced this and took it further in the work on the CRPD. Yet ultimately the survivor movement’s aim is to obliterate its own separate identity except as a historical legacy of reparation. Not so with the identity of psychosocial disability, which is meant to persist. For me, and I think for many of us to at least some extent, the ideal even with respect to support and solidarity with people experiencing life crisis, unusual perceptions and intense distress is for our inclusion and acceptance in these states and at these times to be part of the ordinary social fabric. To the extent that this means ending capitalism and drastically altering the nature of the state, both also part of a feminist vision that seeks to center women’s lives as the source from which communal and political imagination proceeds, it seems utopian and merely wishful thinking. I do not know how to resolve that, but I believe that living and working and advocating with these values in mind can put into practice the best possible life in the here and now. (Even in facing authoritarianism and climate change.)
In addition to these necessary linkages, we also face the stubborn persistence of the mental health system that is doing its best to co-opt our demands and assimilate them within its own hegemonic practices and discourse based on concepts of mental health condition, treatment, and the need for specialized professionals to intervene when we are suffering in ways we cannot individually understand or manage. I have argued that knowledge must be democratized, not to lose what has been developed in any profession including mental health, but to metabolize it through dialogues among ordinary people to the extent any of us need or want to use it, and also to allow for alternative disciplines and practices outside that hegemony to be heard, including grassroots and movement-inspired knowledge (feminism and the survivor movement have a great deal of social theory, legal theory and philosophy happening in grassroots spaces that sometimes makes it into books and journals or the work of academics).
The most important part of survivor advocacy is to end the violations, and for this we need to be vigilant in monitoring the mental health system’s actions of cooptation (like WHO’s Guidance on legislation, human rights and mental health) and states’ good-faith strong or partial attempts to legislate abolition of forced psychiatry (like the reformed national health law of Mexico). There is real progress here that we cannot dismiss and we need to make sure that potential loopholes are closed; survivors need to shepherd and guide implementation and enforcement of such laws.
We should not accept the WHO’s interpretation of the CRPD, though we can acknowledge that even the world’s health agency accepts in principle the duty to abolish forced psychiatry. Instead we should use the CRPD and its own interpretive materials from the treaty body directly (primarily General Comment No. 1, Guidelines on Article 14, Guidelines on Deinstitutionalization) and other complementary materials within the human rights system such as the work of certain Special Rapporteurs on Torture and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Survivors have always insisted on not being defined or confined literally or politically within the health system, and our work on the CRPD had to fight that battle too at an early stage. In this sense identity as survivors and as part of the disability movement helps to position ourselves and define our stance, but is not enough, it is only a starting point, and mere recognition or acknowledgement of this identity has never been and never will be enough.
Another point to make related to Chetan Bhatt’s book, is about his critique of identity politics specifically as a product of technocracy and corporate environments. While the disability movement as we were when drafting and negotiating the CRPD incorporated both highly efficient and well funded NGOs and academics, alongside leaders of international organizations, national organizations and disabled members of government delegations who were often highly grassroots as people who could express the aspirations and concerns of their constituency in effective ways relevant to that process, the grassroots voices were especially strong and gave the process a unique character that is remembered with more than fondness, even nostalgia, by many of us who were present. We were not there as performers of identity, we were not there as mere storytellers whose lives would be the fodder for paid technocrats to interpret and legislate on. We wrote the treaty together with people whose professional knowledge and expertise in law and human rights and negotiation supported us (some of us brought our own as well), and those who had the mandate to negotiate a binding treaty on behalf of their countries (again, there was overlap). That is in many ways one of the sources for my idea of democratizing knowledge (and practice).
Since the adoption of the treaty however, there has been a reversion in large part to technocratic dominance and centralization, particularly through the International Disability Alliance. I will not address that in depth here, though I have had my own history with that entity since before it became an NGO with its own legal status, when I was one of the leaders of WNUSP and one of its representatives in IDA, even chairing IDA for a year’s rotation. Becoming a legal entity with first an executive director who seized power and was allowed to do so, then a full complement of staff, gradually over time eroded the voices of the more grassroots organizations that made up IDA within the platforms that IDA itself engaged with and in shaping IDA’s collective voice, policy, actions and programmatic work. I left IDA while remaining in leadership within WNUSP (for a time) early on in this process, and have witnessed from afar the usurpation of voice as collective spokesperson towards the UN and other entities (usurpation from the IDA member organizations acting together, by the standardized voice of the IDA secretariat), establishing IDA as gatekeeper, source of funding and training and fellowship opportunities. My work continued through WNUSP and then through CHRUSP after I left WNUSP leadership – the need of UN bodies for the expertise WNUSP provided, and then my own value as an individual professional and activist whose reputation and legacy is meaningful in its own right, allowed that to happen. Other survivors as well and their representative organizations – TCI, ENUSP, RedEsfera, and PANPPD (I am not sure if the latter still is functioning), and many at the national level – are well respected, and much of this work is still grassroots, voices emerging from their communities to express aspirations and concerns, with varying levels of professional knowledge and skill, but always representing ourselves and not allowing others to speak for us or differentiating between the NGO professional technocrats and others who are brought forward merely to perform as examples of ‘lived experience.’ Navigating the technocrats of IDA, academic institutions, and other NGOs that work on disability human rights and have at times supported survivor organizations’ advocacy, and our own internal variations of professional skill as well as advocacy experience, hopefully still is, as it seems to be, part of the work we do as a movement, and will not dominate us.
What we have going for us, is that as survivors we have a burning desire to bear witness and do our part to stop the atrocities from continuing, to say ‘Never Again’ and keep saying it even when it does keep happening. We cannot afford to give in to despair. Beyond our desire, we have tools now, that have come a long way over the past 23 years (from the beginning of CRPD negotiations in 2002) and that stand on the shoulders of the movement that created us. Whether victory is around the corner or will take a while longer, our fight is meaningful and keeps hope and dignity alive.
tastethespring 