I have recently become addicted to watching Skepticon videos. Atheism! Rationality! Science! Vulvaless nematodes! Really, it’s everything a young angry atheist’s heart could desire.
However, one video this year went far beyond the usual skeptic fare: JT Eberhard discussing his experience as a man living with anorexia.
I have tremendous respect for JT Eberhard as a person. He wrote one of my favorite descriptions of what it’s like to be depressed:
To be chemically depressed is like having a monster in your brain trying to take it over. The monster is never dead, but you can keep it chained in the corner by taking certain steps. Sometimes it tries especially hard to get loose. And even for the most well-managed loon, sometimes it does break free. When that happens, it changes your opinions. Things you believed to be true just the day before – that life was worth living, that there was hope for things to get better, that you’re not extremely obese, evaporate as the monster sinks its tentacles into your mind. You literally lose track of ‘you’, and with it your ability to realize that the monster is lying to you.
Yeah. I’ve had days I’ve felt that.
I think this speech is tremendously important, because as a crazy person myself (with the line of healing cuts down my right arm to prove it), I think that fighting stigma and myths about mental illness are tremendously important. One of the best tools that we crazy people have to deal with it is to get out there and talk about it– to show that we tend not to be gibbering maniacs, but ordinary people with a disease.
I find this video interesting from a masculist perspective because anorexia tends to be a disease gendered female– if you ask someone to visualize a person with anorexia, they’re liable to visualize a skinny young white woman, despite the fact that anorexia affects people of all genders, races, ages and body types. In particular, even though ten percent of anorexics are male, there is not nearly enough awareness that men even can be anorexic.
So good on JT for speaking up and helping to raise awareness that men can be anorexic.
One moment during his speech really brought home to me how utterly fucked-up our culture’s notions of masculinity are. JT chokes up and starts crying onstage during his speech (quite rightly– I mean, he’s talking about his struggles with mental illness, I can barely go through the list of my crazies without crying either). As he cries, he said he promised his friends that he wouldn’t be a pussy during the speech.
A pussy?
A pussy?
So let me get this straight. JT survives years as an anorexic, a disease which has the highest fatality rate of any mental illness. He fights his way into something approaching recovery. He stands up on a stage and talks about his history of mental illness; he faces the risk that people would take his ideas less seriously because he’s crazy, make fun of him for being crazy, give him all the shit crazy people get, in order to possibly reduce the stigma for all us crazy people in the future.
And our culture’s notion of masculinity is going to call him weak on account of he cries?
There is no conceivable universe, tears or no, in which JT is not strong as shit. All this “boys don’t cry” (which is really just a euphemism for “boys don’t feel”) nonsense needs to go jump off a cliff.
(Accessibility Note: Startledoctopus is MADE OF AWESOME and has a transcript.)
About ozyfrantz
“This is some kind of strange tolerance that non-alcoholics don’t have, and The Experts really can’t understand it. ”
This. And it applies not only to this particular tolerance but also to a metabolic condition in Norterhn Europeans, Asians and Native Americans in which a person is hyper-efficient in carbohydrate metabolism and the body recognizes alcohol as a food source and becomes dependent on it. Alcholism is a huge health risk in Sweden and only the most blue-nosed cultural attitudes were able to bring it under control through the centuries.
“(Definition of Irish Alzheimers: you forget everything but the grudges. )”
I am so stealing this one.
“Depression runs all through my father’s side of the family. It’s pervasive – but it also meant that when I was a boy, my father sat me down and explained to me that it wasn’t that Grandma wasn’t excited to see me, but the chemicals in her brain weren’t letting her feel and express the excitement. I was 9 years old.”
Excellent explanation. That is the adult’s responsibilty towards a child. And it is the answer to this question: “….in order to possibly reduce the stigma for all us crazy people in the future.”
The stigma comes from identifying our minds with our selves, so if our minds are flawed somehow then so are we. It is as silly as identifying with out physical conditions.
@Ozy
“And our culture’s notion of masculinity is going to call him weak on account of he cries?”
Because peope are lazy and stupid and superficial like that?
I’ve read several comments about mental illness that want to make me share this.
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/is-medical-psychatry-a-scam/
startledoctopus thank you so much for the transcript
LOL@debaser71… look who has the second comment?
I self-medicate with alcohol. Not every day, not even most days, but a couple of beers makes me feel better than any amount of drugs the fake docs can give me. A couple more beers than that, not always a great idea…
It’s interesting that he used a feminized insult (pussy) when, as you point out, he’s experienced so much marginalization for suffering from a feminized disease. Time for a moratorium on using insults that refer to people.
F. : you’re welcome. It was my “how can I stand by my principles in action as well as word” deed for the day. Plus it’s a good speech.
Debaser, thanks for the link, I might actually use it myself, since I am bothered A LOT by the Abilify commercial which I would like to write about it, if I could figure out what its trying to subliminally convey.
In the ad, a little black hole (symbolizes depression) is following the woman. In the beginning of the commercial, she steps aside to avoid falling into the hole. Then it morphs into a black balloon, then a ball and chain that creates a large hole that she falls into. Speaking of sexism, a nice kindly white doctor helps her climb out of the hole.
At one point, she is sitting and taking notes on the drug and the little black hole is sitting next to her and also taking notes. The little black hole follows her throughout the rest of the ad, but its smaller.
I am really bothered by that… I think it is propaganda, not sure of the psychological message it is trying to send. That whole black hole thing floating around (its own entity, not part of the woman, but a separate force, like a demon) really bothers me, and I find it really creepy. Making a separate entity of the depression ignores the fact that it is PART of the mind of a person and it just… creeps me out for some reason.
Again, thanks for link–365 comments, wow!
That’s interesting. For me, learning to separate myself from my depression and acknowledge that it wasn’t inherently who I was, that it was the product of disordered thinking was very helpful in getting out of depression. I haven’t seen the Abilify ad in question, but as a description of depression, it sounds somewhat apt, though I prefer the Spoons Theory. “Spoons” is about Lupus, but applies pretty well to depression and many other mental illnesses.
@debaser: That link is interesting, although the legitimate criticisms it makes of psychiatry are super exaggerated and unbalanced, IMO. Its certainly not “nothing but a giant scam”, and while its an infant science that in truth knows very little about its subject domain, all of the proposed alternatives of its critics I’ve ever come across are significantly worse.
I think part of the basis for the ultra-negative perception comes down to the stronger links between the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatry in America; doctors in other developed countries as a rule are less likely to reach first for the prescription pad. My guess is that this is symptomatic of the wider issues in America’s health system.
To take issue with one particular point it makes, the quoted description of Zyprexa is accurate, but very one sided. The drugs to treat more common mental illnesses like Anxiety and Depression may well not be more efficacious than placebo, but they also typically lack serious side effects. Whereas the heavier duty drugs such as the anti-psychotics do frequently have really bad side effects – as my psychiatrist, for one, has been unstintingly upfront about when discussing my medication regime. But the evidence for efficacy in mitigating psychosis is much stronger, I’m lead to believe.
@Daisy, I’m totally with you. I absolutely cannot relate to the “when I’m affected by mental illness that’s not really who I am” mindset – so much of my identity draws directly from times when I am less sane. Perhaps this is more common amongst people who experience significant degrees of hypomania or mania; anecdotally, people who mainly experience depressive or anxious symptoms are far more likely to treat the conditions as a separate entity to themselves.
Also, your experiences with alcohol and hypomania match mine closely. Normally I drink at about the same rate as my peers, and sometimes I am drunk and falling asleep after two beers. But at other times if the stars align just right I can drink absolutely incredible amounts for hours on end and stay not just conscious but in fact far more stimulated than most sober people. The effects the next day are usually….. interesting.
I suffered from depression. Funny, sometimes now I find myself downplaying it; “I got a bit burned-out back when in university”. No, I was fecking crazy.
It’s really scary the thought of taking drugs that change your personality, and this put me off for ages, long after I should have sought help. But you know what, just because drugs were imposed on your brain, and depression happened to it naturally, doesn’t mean that what the depression does to your brain is any more “normal” than what the drugs to you.
It’s hard to describe the feeling when the drugs kick in… it’s not like so much more of you is suddenly there again. Your emotions, your desires, your entire self-awareness. So please, to anybody else suffering from depression, don’t deny yourself the possibility of that freedom and that happiness just because it was attained through “unnatural” means.
And finally, men, like JT says: don’t fall prey to the idea that you have the magical ability to make yourself better through force of will. So many self-help books push this idea, and it’s utter horseshit. It’s okay to be weak, it’s okay to be sick, and it’s okay to ask for help.
@Leum, for me it was exactly the same. Being able to tell myself that the anorexic impulse wasn’t quite me exactly was so important. Then I could be like, stfu anorexia, I am going to put this sandwich in my mouth because it is delicious! When I was finally able to externalize that stuff, I felt like I could take hold of a volume knob and just turn the obsessive thoughts down.
@Leum and @f.,
I did the exact same thing when overcoming alcohol abuse. I learned to view my impulse to drink as “the booze monster” reaching for the controls. This, together with the understanding that the otherwise impressive mind control abilities of the monster only work when I actually had alcohol in my system, was perhaps the greatest factor in me actually managing to stop drinking and staying sober. Viewing the alcoholic thought patterns as something that was not “me”, but something external to my core self, was how I became able to actually fight against it, instead of just sitting around being paralyzed with shame over knowing that drinking was stupid, and doing it anyway.
I have not had success with using the same technique against depression and self-hatred, unfortunately. It is more difficult to tell the difference between depressive thought patterns and normal ones, than to tell the difference between alcoholic thought patterns and normal ones, at least for me.
I’m very touched by all of this. Thank you.
As for the ‘pussy’ comment, that was my friend Amber, the same one who initially made me go to the doctor. She knew I would cry and was just joshing with me.
JT
Funny, I’ve always read “Boys don’t cry” as “Boys feel, sometimes deeply, but should never show it”. The appearance of strength comes from the appearance of restraint, not from the appearance of invulnerability. And, I guess, though I know this is wrong, I feel that it is right. Still working on it.