Month: August 2014

Standing Out From The Crowd

Standing Out From The Crowd

by alexforshaw ♥ 9 Comments

After so many days of reading about the shooting of Mike Brown by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri, after so many days of feeling unqualified to speak about the killing of a young black man by a predominantly white police dept., I finally feel that I am able to contribute.

I am white in a predominantly white community. I do not know the feeling of fear when confronted by the police. I have not suffered that prejudice. The closest I ever came was as a student when I was stopped in the street and searched because allegedly there had been a nearby burglary.

The luxury of my white privilege gave me the confidence to believe that I would emerge from that confrontation unharmed because I knew I was innocent. But there was another incident in my life where I felt much less secure.

I didn’t know at the time, but I am autistic with problems in social interaction. At the age of 14 I was flying home alone from Orlando, FL to Manchester, UK. I suffered a nose bleed on the flight from Orlando to NY JFK, and on landing with blood on my hands and face I was terrifyingly aware of the presence of cops with firearms all through the airport.

It is hard to describe the fear of that time. The fear that because of the way I looked to other people I would be targeted. That I would be pulled from the line and asked to step aside. The thing is,… even then I did not fear for my life. I cannot imagine how it might feel to know that there was a chance that I might be killed for being different.

To imagine that I might comply with police instructions, raise my hands, show that I hold no weapon and pose no threat… and still face the threat of being killed. How can anybody argue that what happened that day in Missouri did not contravene the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution: “nor shall any person […] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”.

Mike Brown was an unarmed man shot dead by the police. I have seen no convincing excuse as to why the police officer discharged his firearm in this case. Except that as a white man he felt threatened by the fact that the victim was black. He was afraid of the color of his skin.

As an English woman I cannot claim that my own country is any better. There is widespread, casual equation of Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani people with Islamic terrorism, despite the fact that many of them are not Muslim but Hindu or Sikh, and the vast majority of Muslims are as opposed to terrorism as the majority of Christians or any other religious group.

The unpalatable fact remains that a significant number of white people feel uneasy in the presence of non-whites. They feel threatened. They feel afraid because non-whites are different. Fear causes irrational responses such as drawing a weapon on an unarmed teenager and shooting him dead.

That fear is wrong. It is unjustified. It is also at the heart of the problem. One cause of that fear is lack of integration between groups in society. In a community where whites go to one church (or synagogue, or mosque) and black folk go to another, how are they ever going to get to know one another? How can they move beyond that fear of the unknown?

I believe so strongly that the only way to an inclusive society where we all know and trust each other, where we recognize that everybody else is just a person (as are we), is to find ways that we can all participate in shared activities. Let us reach out and find our common ground.

It might be a shared love of craft beer, collecting Kenyan wood carving, or being a fan of Doctor Who. IT DOESN’T MATTER! At the heart of it all we are all human. We are all different, but each of us has something in common with somebody else. It might not be our beliefs — I know I’ve got close friends whose beliefs differ from mine — but that doesn’t stop us being friends. We connect on a level that owes nothing to religion. We are of the same species, sharing the same planet, and we found that we are more alike than different.

Does Mental Illness Scare You?

Does Mental Illness Scare You?

by alexforshaw ♥ 4 Comments

The brain is a mysterious organ. Unlike the heart, lungs or kidneys, its workings are shrouded in a veil of complexity. For all that we know about the chemical and electrical activity it exhibits, for all our mathematical models of neurons and synapses we simply cannot fathom how its activity gives rise to self-awareness and consciousness.

Throughout history most people have viewed this consciousness as a uniquely human trait. Yes, we are learning that this is not the case and other animals also have consciousness, but the idea that the human mind is special persists.

Many people cherish the idea that we are set apart from the rest of life on earth, that we are more important as a result of the functioning of our brains. And perhaps this is one reason why mental illness carries such stigma.

When other organs malfunction modern medicine can often repair the damage, or even replace the damaged part (heart valve replacement, pacemakers, kidney dialysis, transplants). There is confidence in these treatments: we can understand a surgeon replacing a worn out valve in the same way that we understand an auto mechanic swapping out a fouled spark plug.

When it is the brain that suffers damage or illness things become much less certain. Because we do not understand its inner workings and how consciousness arises from them there is a deep fear that mental illness will corrupt who we are. That we would no longer be ourselves. We fear the unknown.

Most mental illnesses are also invisible. There are no outward physical signs that somebody has depression, schizophrenia or Bi-polar disorder. You never know. And that not knowing triggers fear, compounded by a general ignorance about mental illnesses.

The media doesn’t help (surprise, surprise!) by actively seeking to explain many violent acts as the result of mental illnesses, and often describing the antagonist in thrillers and horror movies as mentally ill. Schizophrenia in particular has a long history of being unfairly linked to violent behavior. I’m not saying that schizophrenics are never violent, but the reality is far, far removed from the picture painted in popular culture.

One statistic relating to mental illness and violence does stand out, however. A person who suffers from a mental illness is far more likely to harm or kill themselves. The misplaced fear of the mentally ill person needs to be replaced by a fear for them.

Because you can help by fighting the stigma, by being there when somebody you know is affected — because it’s more likely than not that somebody among your family and friends will suffer from a mental illness at some point.
Mentally ill people are often afraid to disclose their illness because of the stigma. It can be a sure-fire way to lose friends overnight. It might lose them their employment. How would that feel? Not only are you ill but now you’re on your own with no job. “Good luck with that!” Can you understand why that would push some people to kill themselves?So yes, disclosing mental illness can carry a sizable risk. But not disclosing means that there’s no chance to get the necessary support. It’s a catch-22 situation, and all because of the stigma. You wouldn’t shun somebody because they had asthma, would you? So why do it when an illness affects their brain?It’s not a difficult concept. Here’s a person who is ill. Support them. Simple.

Being True

Being True

by alexforshaw ♥ 5 Comments

My journey through life has been a series of roles. I fell into routines, habits of behavior that became so ingrained that I could barely think of myself in any other terms. Life reduced to drifting on the currents as I was drawn along by others’ influences, the powerful need to conform, to be accepted.

There is a dangerous attraction to this kind of submission, suppressing one’s own desires and impulses in the service of others. Fulfilling the strongest desire of all: my compulsion to seek the approval of my peers. Measuring my worth by the praise I received.

For a long time it felt like the perfect existence. I didn’t have to worry about my decisions causing change because my path had been mapped out for me in advance, other people’s suggestions crystallizing into a solid picture of the future.

And like crystal it was brittle.

The problem with trying to become other people’s versions of myself was that I lost myself in the process. I had willingly entered the cage and made my home there, and in the process my ability to identify my own aspirations and dreams atrophied.

Suppressed, reduced and weak but not dead. I slowly — very slowly — began to awaken from my state of comfortable numbness and grew to realize that I had become trapped. I had become a stranger to myself, a mindless automaton.

The realization that I was nothing more than a set of roles, a set of made-to-measure costumes in which to act out scripts penned by other people, was shattering. For a while my mind was broken, in pieces, struggling to reassemble itself into its native form.

My need to be accepted had led me to impose so much pressure on myself, driving myself so hard to meet the targets of others, that in the end my strength failed and I was overwhelmed by depression.

I’m getting better. I’ve made changes and will continue to do so. The depression is not beaten: it lurks and reminds me of its presence every now and again. But change has become a positive for me. As I evolve I put distance between myself and the shackles of those old roles.

I do have a destination in mind — a goal, a dream — and while I know I may never fully achieve it and completely become the person I feel inside, it helps that my life is now taking me in the right direction.