
This blog entry, written by Mad at School author Margaret Price, is the second of three posts on mental disabilities in the college setting. For the first post on the Chronicle of Higher Education story, please click here.
Killer Dichotomies: Ir/rational, Crazy/Sane, Dangerous/Not
There are a number of conversations about Mad at School going on now. I am happy to see all of them—even those that contain opinions I strongly disagree with—because at least we are now having this conversation.
Over the past week, I’ve been reading Benjamin Reiss’s "Campus Security and the Specter of Mental-Health Profiling," along with its comment stream; also comments on Facebook; and other conversations on listservs such as DS-HUM.
And while I am not a fan of dichotomies—those “killer dichotomies,” in Anne Berthoff’s wonderful phrase—I do think I am beginning to perceive a divide.
On one side are those who have some direct experience or knowledge of mental disability. These folks include clinical psychologists or mental-health administrators on campus. They include professors who live with major depression, or bipolar disorder—or some other lurid diagnosis—carefully, and in secret. They may include teachers who have walked a crying student to the campus mental-health center. This group includes those who have a loved one—a brother or sister, a child, a close friend—who experiences significant mental health distress.
These people, in my experience, understand that mental health, mental unhealth, and the torturous framework of diagnosis, money, and human rights that lurches along with these concepts, are vastly complicated. Empirical studies tell us that many of our students, many of our faculty colleagues, we ourselves, are mentally disabled in large numbers. This group is interested in finding ways to improve access to all kinds of spaces, including academe.
Recent Comments