Tag: Kanye West

Mental Illness And Humour

I don’t joke about mental illness.

And when anyone around me does, even if it’s about their own experience, I feel as though I am trapped in a cube of thick glass, a scream frozen in my mouth.

I’ve wanted to write about why I feel this way for a long time but have discarded the topic again and again. I know many people use humour to help them live with their mental illness. But I’ll come back to that.

Onto my reasons for not being able to take these jokes.

At its simplest, I don’t believe we have eradicated sufficient stigma to safely joke about what living with a mental illness means.

It might look like we are making progress, but it’s an illusion.

Sure, our baby steps skim the surface of the most palatable mental illnesses. Anxiety that resolves with mindfulness, or depression that is sorted with some exercise and early morning sun exposure.

The ‘brave’ disclosure of taking (a respectably small amount of) medication for anxiety or depression, has shed a lot of stigma in recent years.

But dive below the surface and things get uncomfortable for many. Think psychosis, psychiatric hospital admissions, Electroconvulsive Therapy etc.). The world still largely deals with this discomfort as though it is a teenager trapped in a car with a parent talking sex education. Sulky silence, avoiding eye contact, and wisecracks.

Then there is the constant energy sap of explaining.

Let’s take some experiences I’ve had recently.

First came the media requests for my opinion on whether Kanye West’s antisemitic hate speech, racism, and misogyny were caused by his bipolar disorder. You can find my responses here:

https://www.mamamia.com.au/mental-illness-can-happen-to-anyone/

https://www.mamamia.com.au/podcasts/the-quicky/kanye-bipolar

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/the-feed/article/kanye-west-is-in-the-news-for-the-wrong-reasons-how-do-we-include-his-bipolar-disorder-in-the-conversation/fuocnelxj

Suffice to say I wasn’t laughing as I wrote and spoke.

Next it was a question at the end of the Q and A for one of my library author talks about my memoir, Abductions From My Beautiful Life.

‘Hi, I’ve read your book. I noticed there is no violence in it. Is that true?’

I asked, ‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s just that whenever you read about people with mental illness, they are always violent. So, I was surprised not to find this in your book.’

An ache swamped my chest. Everyone in the room waited for my answer to this jagged question.

I explained that the media often stigmatises mental illness by reporting violent outcomes devoid of context or humanity. I explained that, yes violence occurs, but the mentally ill are more likely to be victims not perpetrators. I explained that when someone’s violence is rooted in their mental illness it is too often not a case of them slipping through the cracks. It’s a case of there being more cracks than solid ground.

And that no I have not edited any violence from my book. Aside from the violence psychosis visited on my brain, there wasn’t any.

I was thanked for my explanation.

But it shouldn’t take me or anyone else to explain that most people who live with severe mental illness are not violent, antisemitic, misogynistic, racists.

While I am well, I choose to explain it again and again and again, because silence leaves a space for the public to draw their own conclusions when Kanye behaves badly, or poor journalism demonises the vulnerable. But the constant explaining leaves me with no energy to laugh about any of it.

When I can, I push back against memes and social media posts that joke about my worst nightmares, or even just sprinkle stigmatising language around like poison disguised as fairy dust. ‘Psycho’ ‘nuthouse’ ‘mental’…

When I point out these ‘errors’ in the comments sections I am often told I can’t take a joke’. I’m told to ‘get a life’ ‘lighten up’, ‘fuck off’, or that ‘it’s just a meme’.

And when I am not well enough to push back and explain, the world continues to fill in the blanks, and papers over its discomfort with another meme.

So, does anyone get to joke about mental illness?

In my opinion:

If humour surrounding mental illness is part of a private conversation between people with lived experience who share enough history to gauge what is appropriate, I have no problem with it.

If you live with a mental illness and find being humorous about your experience is helpful to your recovery and maintaining stability, go ahead…

But have the grace to acknowledge you don’t represent everyone. Consider whether your jokes hide self-stigma. And if you choose to share your humour publicly, ask yourself if the benefits to you outweigh the risk of potentially generating more stigma.

Also – if you share jokes or memes online that perpetuate negative stereotypes around mental illness – don’t tell me to ‘lighten up’ when I call them out.

Lastly – If you have no lived experience of mental illness, don’t joke about it.

As long as the status quo assumes that the perpetration of violence and mental illness go hand in hand, we are still lightyears away from a point when everyone can laugh safely.

You may also like to check out:

Mind Your Language Katy Perry

Tokenism In Mental Health Awareness

Vulnerability And The Exploitation Of Kanye West

vulnerability image

Kanye West is unwell again. Hurtling through a manic Bipolar episode while the world laughs. And as someone who lives with Bipolar 1 Disorder, I feel for him.

In the early years after my diagnosis, during one manic episode (while hospitalised) I started discussing my sex life with strangers. My friend who was visiting me steered me gently away.

Kanye doesn’t seem to have anyone to steer him away, gently or otherwise.

Kanye is a wealthy, influential man, who probably has access to the best mental health care available. But I don’t believe his problem is accessing top quality care.

His problem is that he lacks insight and no one around him is game to have the difficult conversations with him. The conversations that point out that while he may be a brilliant artist when he is relatively stable, when he develops manic symptoms his brain needs a break from the world, and the world is not entitled to its contents.

Instead, when Kanye becomes unwell his mania is left to run free.

He has been open about his choice not to take medication to help manage his Bipolar Disorder. That is his right. Medication doesn’t work for or agree with everyone.

But he seems to be unaware that to successfully manage this illness without medication, you need to employ other strategies. You need to hone your insight. And if your insight when you are unwell is shaky, you need a mental health directive.

This means sitting down with your doctors and people closest to you when you are well and discussing how you would like to manage your symptoms when you are unwell. And if you experience manic episodes, one of the most basic requests may be to not have access to the media – social or otherwise – while symptomatic. Why?

Because mania can gobble up your inhibitions, make you see the world through a paranoid lens, and sprout delusions of grandeur.

Kanye recently gave an interview to Forbes magazine during which he rambled for four hours, to this effect:

‘…They want to put chips inside of us, they want to do all kinds of things, to make it where we can’t cross the gates of heaven. I’m sorry when I say they, the humans that have the Devil inside them. And the sad thing is that, the saddest thing is that we all won’t make it to heaven, that there’ll be some of us that do not make it.”

“Clean up the chemicals. In our deodorant, in our toothpaste, there are chemicals that affect our ability to be of service to God.”

If Kanye were a homeless man on a street corner sharing these ideas with the world, the interviewer from Forbes magazine would probably have walked past quickly, maybe shuddering at such overt insanity.

Instead that interviewer sat and listened to him for four hours. Noted down delusional quote after quote and then published an article in which they even describe Kanye’s lack of awareness:

‘If it all sounds like a parody, or a particularly surreal episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, West doesn’t seem to be in on it.’

Of course West isn’t in on it! He is walled off from reality by illness.

Did that interviewer ever pause to consider why much of what Kanye was saying made no sense? I suspect (with disgust) that they were fully aware their high profile subject was mentally unwell, but chose to exploit him while he was most vulnerable.

I have written thousands of words I thought were brilliant, while in the grip of mania. But once my symptoms recede, I am relieved no one else has read these largely nonsensical word vomits. Because if they had, that would invalidate the quality of my writing when I am healthy.

But Kanye’s word vomits are out there for all the world to snidely pick at, to brand him a rambling idiot and someone to be sniggered at.

At the time of publishing this post, headlines announcing Kanye’s withdrawal from the presidential race are emerging.

I understand stress and sleep deprivation are a president’s companions for most of their time in office, that pushing through is a corner stone of juggling the demands of the job.

Stress and sleep deprivation are the perfect fertiliser for Bipolar episodes to flourish. Bipolar episodes, once active, can’t simply be pushed through. They have no respect for deadlines or work demands – let alone international or national emergencies.

Whether Kanye recognised the risks of pursuing the presidency himself or whether someone in his circle came forward to have the hard conversations and steered him gently away, I am relieved for him.

 

You may also be interested in:

Misunderstood Mania

Psychiatric Medication And Stigma

If I Were Kanye West – written two years ago with a different angle to this post

 

 

 

If I Were Kanye West

20180804_162240Kanye imageI have never paid much attention to Kanye West. From the snippets of entertainment news that have trickled into my consciousness, he has at various times reminded me of a lost little boy, a toddler throwing a tantrum or red paint on a white rug, to get attention. My sympathy went out to him when it sounded as though he’d suffered a psychotic break under the media’s scrutiny. I have never listened to his music or worn any of his designs. By many accounts he is a talented artist. But humble he is not.

So, why would I risk being caught in a room with Kim Kardashian and not enough in common with her to even cover pleasantries, in order to step into Yeezy’s Yeezys for a day?

Continue reading “If I Were Kanye West”

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