Let's Talk About the Link Between Systemic Abuse and Mental Illness

The BBQ Pit
1

This article in the Daily Mail came to my attention tonight, and it’s bothering me for a number of reasons.

First off is simply the tragedies of both the suiciding women, and the rail workers who are having the trauma of killing people inflicted upon them.

Second is the frustrations of trying to change a culture without wanting to throw the good out with the bad - and the fact that many insular immigrant cultures seem to fight change even more doggedly than their parent cultures back in the homeland ever did. (AIUI the Amish are an excellent example of this.)

What’s really got me writing this OP, however, is the way that mental illness is dealt with by the spokeswoman from Southall Black Sisters. Hannana Siddiqui is quoted in the linked article as saying:

I can’t comment on the research that Ms Siddiqui is referencing, but it sure sounds like hogwash to me. The sort of systemic abuse that she’s suggesting does not happen without causing mental illness in many of the sufferers. For that matter, many people still count suicide or suicide attempts by non-terminal patients as a certain indicator of mental illness.

PTSD, and other disorders are all the result of experience, often exacerbating pre-existing physiological quirks, but still an inflicted form of mental illness. As such, claiming that there are rarely cases of mental disorders seems to me to be a continuation of the idea that mental illness is somehow “dirty” and should not be discussed, admitted to, and certainly trying to get treatment for it is shameful.

Now, it doesn’t help that the impression I’ve had with most Asian communities here in the US is that people who are identified as being treated for mental illness are stigmatized. I have heard that it exists from American Born Chinese, from immigrant Taiwanese, from Phillipinos and Japanese Americans. I recognize that the plural of anecdote is not data, but they do inform my opinions, anyways. In a large part I think it’s simply a disheartening consequence of the fact that the cultures I’ve named are all generally more socially conservative than current mainstream US or European culture. It’s something that can be changed, and should be, but I don’t think that it’s something to blame those cultures for.

So, when reading about Asian cultures in the UK which are being described as abusive towards their women, to the degree that a relatively short section of rail now produces one third of all rail suicides in the UK, I’m going to assume that the cultures involved share the common* prejudices against mental illness as well.

To my mind, then, one of the other aspects of these cultures that should be addressed is not simply their abuse, but the long-term effects of that abuse. Which will follow the victims often for the rest of their lives. Denying that mental illness is a factor does no one any favors and condones a silence on the topic that still prevents people from seeking help for what are often treatable conditions.

No, I don’t believe that mental illness, alone, is the major cause in driving up these rail suicides. I do believe, however, that it and the associated cultural stigma against getting treatment for mental illness is another factor.

Until advocates for the victims in these cultures are willing to make the point to the victims that it’s acceptable, and normal, to suffer mental illness after prolonged, systemic abuse the deaths are going to continue.

*By common I’m not singling out simply Asian cultures for this prejudice - it’s still pretty common in US and European culture, too. Just not as in your face.

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It’s another “define your terms” problem.

Once upon a time, people assumed that what you felt and thought had mostly to do with who you were and what-all you had been through.

Psychiatry et. al., in their modern incarnation, hold it to be true that the “mental illnesses” consist of biological/physical problems in the brain. Neurochemistry disorders. Neurotransmitter chemical insensitivity and the like. NOT, in other words, caused by what you had been through. Therapy in the old sense of “let’s talk about the horrid shit you’ve been through, and help you cope with it”? Out the window. We have pills for your problem now.

(As to whether or not any of the classical formal “talk therapy” modalities was worth a damn, I make absolutely no assertions, by the way)

What most people believe, whether they’ve taken time to really think it out or not, is that there are probably some biological/chemical/neuro conditions that make one more likely to have a mind full of warped thoughts and lurid feelings of the sort that we regard as “mentally ill”, “crazy”, etc, but that circumstances and context, experiences and situations that people end up going through, also press upon the mind so as to cause those same phenomena. And that they can and probably do overlap, so that someone’s biochemistry etc can make them more susecptible to going nutso if they have to go through some horrible dehumanizing experiences.

That common-sense / everyday and probably widely-shared grasp of “mental illness” is what most of the folks in the mental patient rights movement believe, with the emphasis being on granting some legitimacy to the “experiences and context” part of it instead of treating all of the “disturbing” parts of what we think and feel as if they were brain-static, meaningless and unfortunate side-effects of neurons firing wrong.

If one is freely allowed to switch meanings in mid-conversation or even mid-sentence, never having defined one’s terms, one may make statements along the lines of “Look at what has happened to these unfortunate people! Those experiences had to have caused high rates of mental illness among them! We need to provide them with psychiatric treatment, which will address the chemical imbalances in their brains, which are the causes of their mood swings, self-destructive behaviors, inability to cope, feelings of persecution, and alienated perspective on the world! These people are sick in their minds and they need pharmaceuticals and electroshock! Some of them may be too sick to realize how badly they need treatment, so we need to be prepared to drug and shock them on an involuntary basis for their own good, where necessary!”

Do you see why it is useful and sometimes necessary to say “define your terms”?

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I agree a lot of it is a problem with definitions.

I think, as I often have in the past - no shocker there, that you’re being a bit too hard on modern psychiatry. Though, it’s a thing of degrees, not disagreeing with your basic complaint. I don’t think you’re completely mistaken, just that for all the current focus on chemical and physiological causes and modalities of mental illness, there is still a strong experience based portion to the pathologies, which is still recognized by many professionals as well as by the patient’s rights people. Otherwise there’d be fewer people fighting the push in some circles to have PTSD removed as a diagnosis.

The fact that anyone with a working brain can argue that PTSD is a fake disease, of course, does show that there’s a lot of modern psychiatry that’s as bad as you’re making it out to be.

4

As much as the whole scenario readily feeds into paranoid fantasies of Evil Mind Control, I not only think most of the professionals are well-intentioned and acting in good faith, I also think most of the people who skate back and forth between “mental illness is a complex phenomenon with social and medical aspects” and “mental illness is a chemical imbalance and has nothing to do with the family / the culture / video games / <anything else experiential or contextual >” are also mostly well-intentioned people, usually making whatever argument they are making not in order to do evil nasty things to us but quite the opposite.

Doesn’t often tend to make them any damn safer for us to be around (people trying to help you without consulting you on how you’d like to be helped can be very dangerous people), but I’ll readily give them that much.

5

OtakuLoki writes:

> I have heard that it exists from American Born Chinese, from immigrant
> Taiwanese, from Phillipinos and Japanese Americans.

You are aware, aren’t you, that this is largely irrelevant to “Asians” in the U.K.? “Asians” in the U.K. are nearly all from India, Pakistan, etc. in the Indian subcontinent. The proportion of “Asians” from China, Taiwan, the Phillipines, Japan, etc. is quite small in comparison. If you’re going to make a comparison with immigrants to the U.S., you would have to talk about immigrants from South Asia, not those from East Asia.

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I agree that south Asia is different culturally from east Asia. And that the points of congruence between the cultures are not as great as, say, those between most European cultures. I’ll even grant my direct experience with south Asians is far more limited than my experience of East Asians.

I will point out that given the cultural influence China and India have had over east and south Asia it’s not completely insane to talk about Indians, or Pakistani, sharing certain cultural traits with Chinese. To pick one example not at random the presence of Buddism throughout all the cultures I’d listed show a certain commonality with India’s many cultures. So there is evidence of some commonality of culture.

I’m not going to change my view about how south Asian cultures deal with mental illness, without evidence to support that it needs changing. Would you be happier if I said that many traditionally third world cultures, including south Asian and east Asian cultures, still have what I’d call a stigmatized view towards mental illness, and people who recieve treatment for it?