there's our catastrophe

I’m really annoyed by how many people have chosen to reblog this terrible news about the shooting spree in Italy targeted at Black African immigrants and focus on this pull quote:

“Don’t tell us he was a madman,” said one, “because if he was he would have killed whites as well as blacks”.

it’s amazing. so many people have been like “oh yes that is terrible.  but this quote is right on!  ableism is never acceptable and neurology is never responsible for atrocities and so on and so forth”,  going on for paragraphs on end. 

firstly, the point of the quote is that rhetoric of madness is depoliticising and draws attention away from the systemic factors (i.e. nationalism and white supremacy) leading someone to a shooting spree targeting Black people.  that is, the quote is about racism, not ableism. 

which leads me to: it’s derailing.  I think spending all your rhetorical energy on the old chestnut of whether it’s ok to call a violent person “mad” says you don’t think the shootings are worthy of comment in themselves.  it says you’re more interested in continuing a nit-picky hair-splitting insular social justice language debate than in understanding or combating the social conditions that led to that kind of violence.

I kind of think that currently internet-hip attempts to fit mental illness into a strictly social model of disability — that is, where disabled is a verb not an adjective, where you’re disabled primarily by the unaccommodating society around you — are flawed.  Like, my experience of being crazy has involved stuff like being confused about the nature of reality, being likely to hurt myself or others, not being able to do the things I want to do, doing useless things that I really don’t want to do, doing things that are in conflict with my values, and primarily, being in a lot of pain and fear.   I do value the kind of politics that has let me focus on managing this rather than on a quixotic attempt to be normal.  but I still reckon that these are all inherently bad things, and I can’t see a way to organise society that would make that better. 

so I have some misgivings about the focus on “crazy” and the like as ableist terms.  I never slur people I disagree with with medicalised terms around mental illness because to me that’s a different thing, it’s simply playing on stigma.  I don’t imply that people are mentally ill as a critique, full stop: I have a weakness but it doesn’t make me a bad person.  but it’s a weakness and it’s something I hate and if I say, in my day-to-day speech, “that plan is crazy” and mean “that plan is ill-thought through, likely to harm someone, likely to get out of control, and possibly originating in unexamined fears” then I kind of don’t see the issue.  but people seem to want me to deny that being crazy can be bad, ever. 

I think this is part of blogland’s obsessive focus on discourse.  I guess it’s to be expected in a written medium.  & of course the way we speak and write is important.  but sometimes it seems like the only mental illness issue I see talked about in blogland is ableist language.   and uh there are about six million things that I would change about how we as a society treat and view the mentally ill, things that would have made my life better, things that would’ve saved lives, and people using the word “crazy” in a way I think is kind of accurate is…not top of my list.