(no subject)

[kradeelav]

Esme Weijun Wang writes very movingly about being one of the good sick. Her doctors are initially reluctant to switch her diagnosis from bipolar disorder to schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, because schizoaffective disorder “has a gloomier prognosis and stigma than bipolar disorder does.” During an earlier hospitalization, Wang noticed that there was even a hierarchy on the ward: the two women at the bottom of the hierarchy were the woman who were very clearly, to the other patients, schizophrenic. Wang, who had not yet experienced psychosis, treated schizophrenic Pauline “like a contagion.” Perhaps, she writes, she sensed the possibility of psychosis “thrumming in [herself] even then.”

There are many benefits that one gets, being the good sick. And there are compromises one makes to remain the good sick. And then there is the fear of becoming the contagion. [...]

As with my initial desire to distance myself from my great aunt’s illnesses, I don’t feel proud of the compromises I’ve made to try to be and to appear one of the good sick. But I’m sure that, if I was faced with the same choices at the same points in my life, I’d make the same decisions over again. I do worry that we understand illness as something that we hold and foster as individuals, and that this masks the extent to which social conditions, like racism, sexism, homophobia, overwork, and eviscerated social safety nets, trigger and exacerbate it. This is the dark side of gleaning what we can from the narratives of the good sick in order to give better “tools” to the bad sick—Is the idea to improve someone’s quality of life or to render them a better worker? It’s also why I tap out, each year, of participating in campaigns like Bell Let’s Talk Day: they place the onus on the unwell to share their stories for nickels and dimes while raising brand recognition for a major corporation. Understandably, people share what is safe for them to share; I doubt Bell will chip in on my mortgage if I no longer appear quite as employable because I regularly saw an imaginary owl for a period in my early twenties. The result is a sanitized portrayal of illness that does little to shorten psychiatric wait times for people, like me, who rely on provincial health care to seek mental health treatment."

- On Being Bipolar