Andrea NickiPSYCHOLOGICAL DISABILITY POETRY, MAD ACTIVISM AND LITERARY PUBLISHINGDisability poetry, as outlined by Jim Ferris (2007), rejects the dominant view of disability as tragic, pitiable, and outside the normal realm of human experience. It arises from an understanding that disability is a social construction; the lived experience of disability is not best understood on a biomedical model. In this essay, I explore a particular instance of disability poetry, which may be called "psychological disability poetry." This kind of poetry is critical of psychiatric explanations of the lived experience of psychological disability. It is linked to the emergent field of mad studies which is, arguably, both a branch of disability studies and a field in its own right.1 Mad studies is the study of the psychiatrization of suffering and of mental and emotional states which society casts as abnormal, or extreme (LeFrançois, Menzies, & Reaume, 2013, p. 1). In this field, "the medical model is dispensed with as biologically reductionist,… [People] are not reduced to symptoms but understood within the social and economic context of the society in which they live" (LeFrançois, Menzies, & Reaume, 2013, p. 2). Thus, psychological disability poems may be seen as acts of resistance against the oppression of people who are psychiatrically labelled and deemed mad—"a collection of chemical imbalances" to be fixed by agents of psychiatry and pharmaceutical companies (LeFrançois, Menzies, & Reaume, 2013, p. 2). In this way psychological disability poetry may also be appropriately called "mad" or "mad activist poetry." Psychological disability poetry challenges stereotypical conceptions of people with psychological disability as having largely negative traits, or personality deficiencies. As Ferris (2007) writes, disability poetry "shows disabled people taking control of the gaze and articulating the terms under which we are viewed." Psychological disability poetry embraces self-definition and displaces demeaning social projections of subhuman and inherently dangerous "mentally ill" people with images of people who are atypical and/or struggling with serious hardship and very difficult life circumstances. It depicts disability within social, cultural, political, or economic contexts and enables readers to gain a deep understanding of the lived experience of disability and of the complex network of causes informing it. In this way, psychological disability poetry promotes social transformation, and does not over-individualize problems. Further, psychological disability poetry, in deeply contextualizing human suffering, may present disability within an environmental context and probe the relationship between human suffering and environmental degradation and/or celebrate animals and nature. Thus, it promotes an environmentally sustainable world. In this essay I present a number of examples of psychological disability poetry, including my own, and show how this kind of poetry is distinctly different from poetry that is merely about emotional suffering or poetry that assumes the validity of the concept of mental illness and of the enterprise of psychiatry. Further, I explore some obstacles that psychologically disabled/mad poets and poets writing on psychological disability/mad experience may encounter in mainstream literary publishing. While psychological disability poetry challenges the narrow view of normalcy defined by psychiatry and allows the exploration of mental and emotional states considered abnormal or extreme, it is not merely the aesthetic exploration of these states and experiences. For if this were true such poetry would include many poems about emotional suffering and would be viewed as no different from poetry characterized as confessional. However, psychological disability poetry is distinctly different from confessional poetry. For example, poet Anne Sexton is commonly regarded as a confessional poet. In contrast to psychological disability poetry, her poetry decontextualizes severe emotional suffering and conceives it as a mental illness; for example, in her poem "Flee on Your Donkey" (1982) she frames it as "disordered senses" (p. 97) and "the fool's disease" (p. 105). Further, there is contemporary poetry which may be categorized as confessional and contrasted with psychological disability poetry. For example, Jane Kenyon writes in her poem sequence "Having It Out with Melancholy" (1993): When I was born, you waited Kenyon decontextualizes her depression from her life situation and presents it as an external supernatural force, against which she is helpless. Similarly, contemporary poet David Budhill in his poem "Letter to the Angel of Depression" writes: "Angel of darkness, Angel of depression, dark Angel/,… I pray you, give me leave,/release me,/let me go" (2008, p. 81). 2 Also, contemporary poet Martha Silano, in her poem "Harborview" presents her "postpartum psychosis" in religious terms: "...some god's gotten hold of me,/some god's squeezed hard the spit-up rag of my soul/...some god's got me thinking my milk's poison, unfit/for a hungry child, some god's got me pacing/...doesn't want me well,..." (2008, p. 140). Psychological disability poets are mindful about their poems not being taken as documenting "battles with mental illness," or as depicting psychological disability/mad experience as an external supernatural force or internal biochemical one over which they have no control. They do not frame their life experience in terms of a psychiatric script. In Barbara Crooker's poem "It Was Like This" (2011), a poem about her son diagnosed with autism, she writes: First you were normal, The poem criticizes psychiatric labelling and explanations. The term "refrigerator mother" was first coined by American psychiatrist Leo Kanner (1941) who argued that autism was associated with a lack of maternal warmth. In another poem, "Grating Parmesan," Crooker challenges the view that autistic people have problems with social communication while challenging narrow conceptions of psychological normalcy which overvalue fluent, literal, oral speech. She writes: ...we hold the rind of the cheese, In her article "Beauty is a Verb—The New Poetics of Disability" (2010), Crooker states that autism is not an inherently negative medical condition. Rather, it is "a different way of visioning" (2010) which has broadened her understanding of normalcy, making her recognize aspects of autism, such as obsessiveness and attention to detail, in her own poetry writing. She does not see her family as battling with autism but, rather, as being enriched by it; autism is "something that made [her] family stronger" (2010). Similarly, in his poem "His Disability" (2010) James Wagner challenges the psychiatrization of traits associated with autism, such as giftedness and nonconformity. He explores how the diagnosis of autism had a devastating effect on a classmate, reducing him to a state of dependency on his mother: I remember him in the marching band, Like Crooker, Wagner celebrates the abilities of a person labelled with autism. Further, in referring to his classmate's considerable talents, he alludes to the reductionist character of psychiatry, which insists on the reduction of human complexity and extremes. Similarly, in "Lewis Carroll in 2012" (2012), I criticize psychiatry's medicalization of intellectual giftedness and unconventionality: Lewis Carroll's book Alice in Wonderland does not explore age or gender appropriate subjects (i.e. girls, rabbits). The writing is peculiar and there is too much thinking in pictures. The writer probably suffers from Asperger's and pedophilia. Unfortunately Asperger's and pedophilia are extremely difficult to cure. The writer should consider the genre of self-help or write a memoir about his struggle with mental illness. (p. 110)In his book Autism and Creativity (2003) psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald devotes a chapter to Carroll and claims that he had high-functioning autism. Further, he characterizes his personality and imagination as childish and symptomatic of autism (p. 205). If Carroll had lived in our day, in the time of the cultural dominance of psychiatry, he would likely have been psychiatrized. 3. Also, he may have found it profitable to devote his energy to understanding and writing about autism. 4 Wagner (2010) further criticizes the psychiatrization of giftedness and noncomformity in a poem called "Deficit Attention Disorder," claiming that this diagnosis wrongly faults students for their inattention to trivial educational lessons and greater interest in pressing social and environmental issues: You say I have a disorder that constitutes a deficit of attention. Like Wagner's poem "Deficit Attention Disorder," Judy Grahn's poem "Mental" (2008) criticizes the concept of mental illness for shifting attention away from social problems like homelessness and poverty. She compassionately depicts homeless people, which society reductively regards as mentally ill, as beautiful "butterflies/curled into a misery cocoon" (p. 68). Further, like Wagner, she situates psychological disability within social and environmental contexts and refers to homeless people as butterflies without a habitat, invoking the notion of an endangered species: That she could be on the street butterflies die out when their habitat is destroyed but it's all in the head, Grahn's depiction of people seen as mentally ill strongly contrasts with Sexton's depiction in her poem "Flee On Your Donkey." Here Sexton refers in a dehumanizing way to people in a psychiatric hospital: "The alcoholic arrives with his golf clubs./The suicide arrives with extra pills sewn/into the lining of her dress./The permanent guests have done nothing new./Their faces are still small/like babies with jaundice" (p. 99). People severely struggling with life are presented apart from social contexts and perceived primarily in terms of their harmful behaviour, as "the alcoholic" and "the suicide." Like Grahn in "Mental," I emphasize inclusiveness toward homeless people in my poem "homeless neighbour" (2012): sixteen-year-old girl The close proximity of a homeless teenage girl should prompt neighbourly compassion and support. Similarly, Barbara Crooker (2014) refers in her poem "Plentitude" to the "crazy" lack of social programs and support for disabled children: My hands curl This kind of poetry, which problematizes social structures, is very different from poetry which problematizes individuals. For example, in "Daddy" (1981), perhaps one of the best known examples of confessional poetry, Sylvia Plath demonizes her father, calling him a Nazi, vampire and devil (pp. 222-224). The speaker does not attempt to understand her father and her relationship with him in a wider social framework of male and female socialization; she does reflect deeply on her statement "Every woman adores a Fascist" (p. 223). Further, she does not provide any direction on how depressed girls who lose their fathers at a young age could be better emotionally supported. In my own poetry I problematize social structures. For example, in my poem "nightcrawlers" (2013) I show the severe inadequacy of mental health services to alleviate severe emotional suffering related to chronic child trauma and social marginalization. In this poem an art therapist mistreats the enormous grief of a survivor of chronic child sexual violence as something that can be easily washed away: in the art therapist's office i take a chunk of grey clay The speaker is directed to dig up and release all her suffering related to child sexual violence only to feel alone and overburdened with this suffering because of the taboo on incest trauma as a topic of public discussion. In another poem, "Therapist" (2009) I depict the severely inadequate human connection that clinical therapy provides: You pay 22 dollars out of pocket Like Grahn and Wagner, I seek in my poetry to humanize people diagnosed with mental illness by contextualizing them within nature. For example, in my poem "Endangered" (2012) I implicitly cast atypical human beings as an endangered species and suicidal ideation as a response to aggressive threats. The speaker wonders how non-human endangered species cope with threats: Do endangered species The speaker gestures toward the wise direction of nature, with the thought that atypical human beings have intelligently adopted a survival strategy of butterflies. Psychological disability poetry, which expresses a loving connection with nature and animals, does not depict nature and animals as inherently negative or hideous, unlike, for example, several of Plath's poems, such as "Wuthering Heights," "Contusion," "Crossing the Water," "Tulips" and "Edge." Consider Plath's poem "Edge" (1981) the last poem she wrote before committing suicide: The woman is perfected. Dead, coiled children are equated with white serpents, making white serpents seem negative, and are then equated with petals of her body, presented as a rose in a dark night garden of bleeding odors. Living petals and their odors are thus depicted negatively. Plath's negative depictions of nature and animals, while a reflection of her depressed mood, verbally enforce her sense of alienation and depression. In contrast, positive, playful, or humorous depictions of nature and animals promote a positive experience of these and lighten a mood. For example, in my poem "rage" (2012), the speaker accepts rage as natural and channels it constructively: after a volcano erupts As psychological disability poets envision a radically different world, it can be hard for them to find mainstream venues for their work as the social and aesthetic values found in this type of poetry are not promoted in mainstream literary publications or reviews. While mainstream literary publications will publish work that explores deeply personal feelings, they do not treat all deeply personal feelings as equal. Rage directed at individual destructive people is regarded as aesthetically better than rage directed at patriarchal, ableist social norms, practices and institutions which contribute to destructive individual behaviour. The mainstream literary world continues to relegate writing that challenges sexism and ableism to women's studies, disability studies, or art therapy. For example, my first poetry book, Welcoming (2009), explores such topics as sexism, violence against girls and women, sexuality, gender identity, poverty, homelessness, work exploitation, mental health, psychiatry, religion, spirituality, nature and animals. While a reviewer acknowledges that the book explores a wide range of topics, he nonetheless writes: It is …a therapeutic volume in that it apparently means to do therapeutic work. It is dedicated 'to incest survivors' and contains [the poem] 'Adult Survivors of Incest,'..... From a critic's standpoint, the dedication somewhat forestalls criticism on 'poetic' grounds, which in a way are rendered moot.... [It] is a book that means to speak to those who carry unspeakable burdens. If it offers any solace, it has fulfilled its truest purpose" (DuBois 2011, 172-3). Rather than seeing the book as a book of poetry intended for a general readership, the reviewer relegates the book to a margin of incest survivors to receive its "therapy." 5 People writing psychological disability poetry may find journals and anthologies specializing in disability or mental health issues, such as Wordgathering: A Journal on Disability Poetry and Literature, edited by Michael Northen, and small presses to publish their work or they can self-publish. For instance, James P. Wagner started the press Local Gems Poetry Press and published an anthology series with two volumes called Perspectives: Poetry Concerning Autism and Other Disabilities, which he edited with Marc Rosen. Unfortunately, since psychological disability poetry is not seen as valuable poetry in the mainstream literary world, and thus by most book store managers, librarians and English professors, the poets must continually strategize in order to obtain a wider readership. However, because of the development of the field of disability studies professors teaching disability issues can influence librarians and direct them to purchase books in disability studies and mad studies, including psychological disability poetry. Hopefully, psychological disability poets will find more opportunities to mix with English professors and direct them to devote more attention to psychological disability poets, to teach them in courses and include them in literary collections which they may edit. This attention would also help psychological disability poets wanting to pursue graduate programs in creative writing since if psychological disability poetry is not considered valuable poetry, then these people will have little chance of being accepted. Graduate programs in creative writing can provide helpful mentorship and literary connections, and can assist one in finding a publisher for one's work. Psychological disability poets may have difficulty gaining acceptance in mainstream literary circles because of not only exclusionary attitudes toward their writing but also inaccessible networking events. For example, attending and giving poetry readings is an important way to network but there can be obstacles for disabled poets. Ferris discusses obstacles for physically disabled poets in participating in poetry readings. For instance, he refers to a panel event in which Lucia Perillo, a poet with MS who uses a wheelchair, had to be lifted to a platform without a ramp to give her reading. Ferris writes that this was an "absurdity" and "inadvertent spectable" as the "thing that was inaccessible to Perillo" was there to enhance access to "the presumedly normative sighted people making up the audience" (2014, p. 316). Further, deaf-blind poet John Lee Clark (2010) refers to hindrances for deaf poets in giving poetry readings, such as the high cost of interpreters. The privileging of fluent, oral speech in networking events can also be an obstacle for people with psychological disability that includes severe social anxiety. For them, speaking in public, in front of a group of strangers, can be unattainable. When I was in my twenties, and starting to identify as a poet and send my poems off to journals, I sometimes attended poetry readings, sitting always in the back of the room. At that time, I had very severe depression and anxiety, and was very afraid that someone would approach and talk to me. Giving a poetry reading was something I would have been incapable of doing and had I been chosen and honored to give one I would have shook and trembled with great fear and discomfort and be an "inadvertent spectable" (Ferris 2014, p. 316) for the psychologically typical audience. Fortunately (and unfortunately) no one ever approached me and once at an event I did hear an editor of a local poetry journal say loudly that I was a snob, misunderstanding my lack of sociability and perhaps trivializing my psychological problems. Certainly, psychological disability poets may reasonably be cautious in interacting with those who don't have knowledge or experience of psychological disability, or view psychological disability purely in terms of a psychiatric model, and a person struggling with psychological disability as not taking the right cocktail of psychiatric medications. Further, not only can disabled people find it difficult to participate in poetry readings but also to engage in submitting work to journals, another important networking opportunity. Even if there are journals that seem open to disability poetry, there can be reasons disabled poets might not aggressively send out work, such as a lack of energy (Bartlett 2014, p. 314). Further, Clark refer to other reasons such as fear of rejection and an experience of rejection based on their identities as disabled people (2014, p. 313). Psychological disability poets may also not submit aggressively if their psychological disability is related to low self-esteem as the experience of rejection may directly feed into their disability. Without the support of a mentor or a literary community, psychological disability poets may, feeling discouraged, give up trying to publish their writings. Fortunately, various online publishing venues have helped poets with severe anxiety problems and other psychological impairments to share their writings, find support, and access literary networks. If biopsychiatry loses its place of dominance in culture, psychological disability poets will have a greater chance of receiving more support, mentoring, and mainstream literary success. However, I think this cultural change is unlikely to happen anytime soon, as the notion of mental illness has expanded to include more and more psychological states and deviances.6 But mainstream literary success can lose its importance and relevance as psychological disability poets, as mad activists, reach for more than a literary audience and see themselves as contributors to the ever-expanding movements of disability activism and mad activism. 7
Notes
1. See Nev Jones and Robyn Lewis Brown 2013. They argue that subsuming mad studies under disability studies fails to accurately render the diversity of mad experience, which is not only negative states of distress and but also states and ways of being that can be positive. For example, visions and hearing voices, psychiatrized as symptoms of schizophrenia, can provide meaningful information, direction, or comfort. Also, obsessions and fixations, psychiatrized as symptoms of autism, can direct creative energy. Further, a lack of attention and judgment that something is not worthy of attention, psychiatrized as a symptom of attention deficit disorder, reflects a commitment to other values and a belief that other matters are more important. Similar claims have been about deaf studies, argued to be part of disability studies and also a distinct field.
A full list of references for the poems and other articles quoted in this essay can be view and printed by clicking: references.
|