@OnTheLevel: Word to Big Bird :) For transpeople there isn't some automatic life stage/ life choice where things just become automatically livable. Finishing high school isn't the answer, any more than moving to SoCal from Alabama, or moving to Denmark from SoCal is :)
Random anecdote: What my brother experienced a lot of while he was in college in England was people who would befriend transpeople who had emigrated from more conservative countries only to get them to confide about their birth gender and then start to blackmail them for money, sex and favors. Blech. It happened to a number of his friends and really scared the crap out of him.
Anyways thanks for responding and sharing your story. It could always be a lot better but i'm infinitely glad that it is not/no longer unbearable. Keep being brave. I'm rooting for you :)
Random anecdote: What my brother experienced a lot of while he was in college in England was people who would befriend transpeople who had emigrated from more conservative countries only to get them to confide about their birth gender and then start to blackmail them for money, sex and favors. Blech. It happened to a number of his friends and really scared the crap out of him.
Anyways thanks for responding and sharing your story. It could always be a lot better but i'm infinitely glad that it is not/no longer unbearable. Keep being brave. I'm rooting for you :)
@Pierce Nichols: Dude, I've lived in the U.S. for eight years, on both coasts, and i've spent time in the South. Not everyone is geographically mobile. That's a myth on par with the tooth fairy or the Easter Bunny. For some people, everyone they know is in that small town or city and they cannot leave because they have no one to go to in another place/crash with until their first paycheck/get a hookup for a job or a homeless shelter from.
And for a lot of women, effeminate gay men or trans people who can't pass yet, hitchhiking can be a death sentence. All-encompassing geographic mobility is a myth. As much of one as easily attainable economic mobility.
And for a lot of women, effeminate gay men or trans people who can't pass yet, hitchhiking can be a death sentence. All-encompassing geographic mobility is a myth. As much of one as easily attainable economic mobility.
I saw Dan Savage and his partner's video and cried. It was touching. It did it for me. I'm not gay or a teenager but I know what it is like to not belong, and, more saliently, I am African and have a trans brother who has attempted suicide and been closeted all his life. So, the message resonated with me. It really did. As someone battling serious clinical depression, hearing someone just say the words was touching. And I feel like for some kids, somewhere, the impact might have been the same.
However, I subscribe to the theory that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come and for most people the power of a message comes from its ability to resonate/reflect/exemplify some life circumstance. I think that the criticism of the inadequacy of "It Gets Better" as a message stems from the fact that for people who do not feel any resonance/reflection/exemplification coming from the message, the words come across as pretty hollow, maybe even trite.
I watched all the youtube videos. Most of the them (probably because of the demographic of the suicides) seem to focus on the idea that if you just get through middle school and high school things will improve. It's a worthwhile idea but it's not true for a lot of people. For a lot of LGBT people who are not Caucasian, middle-class, and geographically mobile, acceptance and self-love does not come until their forties or later.
Some LGBT people (particularly closeted/conforming ones) were fine in high school. College was where the shit hit the fan. Some of them were fine in college. Adulthood was where they had to come face to face with themselves. There is a high incidence of depression in people's twenties. For someone like my brother, who is in the oft-ignored "T" section of the LGBTQQI, and who tried to kill himself at 23, hearing "it gets better" back then would probably have just made him feel like more of a failure--like the hell that was his life was already supposedly in the "better" phase and that he was pitiful and weak and the only one who was having trouble coping.
I think the criticism people have about the San Francisco videos and the ones about making it past high school and being able to leave the bigots behind is that they peddle a false reality; this mythical theory of gay utopias--places you can migrate to to escape the bigotry of your native environment. It is a problematic message, not just because it accords more bigotry to some places above others (that is not entirely false) but because it seems to posit the idea that coastal cosmopolitan centers are like the Underground Railroad--once you make it there you'll be okay. As if bigots don't move to San Francisco too. As if bigots can't be from San Francisco. The message almost seems to condemn people who are not lucky enough to be born in these "blessed utopias of acceptance" to a life of separation from the people they are closest to. My big reservation is that it also ignores the fact that usually those places that are so accepting of your sexuality still have enormous amounts of bigotry within them about other aspects of your identity (race, socio-economic status, religion, etc) which are sometimes just as much a part of you as who you sleep with or what your gender is.
The claim that certain areas are more bigoted than others is not entirely false if you are talking simply about numbers but it arouses backlash because it seems simplistic. Like my favorite author always says stereotypes do not cause harm because they are untrue; they cause harm because they are incomplete.
One of the notes that I saw talked about how instead of saying "It's Gets Better" queer people and allies should make a stream of videos saying "I am committed to making it better" or "This is how i'm going to make it better" and I think that idea has its merit. Not necessarily as a replacement for Dan Savage's message but in tandem with it.
Just my two (rather long) cents :)
However, I subscribe to the theory that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come and for most people the power of a message comes from its ability to resonate/reflect/exemplify some life circumstance. I think that the criticism of the inadequacy of "It Gets Better" as a message stems from the fact that for people who do not feel any resonance/reflection/exemplification coming from the message, the words come across as pretty hollow, maybe even trite.
I watched all the youtube videos. Most of the them (probably because of the demographic of the suicides) seem to focus on the idea that if you just get through middle school and high school things will improve. It's a worthwhile idea but it's not true for a lot of people. For a lot of LGBT people who are not Caucasian, middle-class, and geographically mobile, acceptance and self-love does not come until their forties or later.
Some LGBT people (particularly closeted/conforming ones) were fine in high school. College was where the shit hit the fan. Some of them were fine in college. Adulthood was where they had to come face to face with themselves. There is a high incidence of depression in people's twenties. For someone like my brother, who is in the oft-ignored "T" section of the LGBTQQI, and who tried to kill himself at 23, hearing "it gets better" back then would probably have just made him feel like more of a failure--like the hell that was his life was already supposedly in the "better" phase and that he was pitiful and weak and the only one who was having trouble coping.
I think the criticism people have about the San Francisco videos and the ones about making it past high school and being able to leave the bigots behind is that they peddle a false reality; this mythical theory of gay utopias--places you can migrate to to escape the bigotry of your native environment. It is a problematic message, not just because it accords more bigotry to some places above others (that is not entirely false) but because it seems to posit the idea that coastal cosmopolitan centers are like the Underground Railroad--once you make it there you'll be okay. As if bigots don't move to San Francisco too. As if bigots can't be from San Francisco. The message almost seems to condemn people who are not lucky enough to be born in these "blessed utopias of acceptance" to a life of separation from the people they are closest to. My big reservation is that it also ignores the fact that usually those places that are so accepting of your sexuality still have enormous amounts of bigotry within them about other aspects of your identity (race, socio-economic status, religion, etc) which are sometimes just as much a part of you as who you sleep with or what your gender is.
The claim that certain areas are more bigoted than others is not entirely false if you are talking simply about numbers but it arouses backlash because it seems simplistic. Like my favorite author always says stereotypes do not cause harm because they are untrue; they cause harm because they are incomplete.
One of the notes that I saw talked about how instead of saying "It's Gets Better" queer people and allies should make a stream of videos saying "I am committed to making it better" or "This is how i'm going to make it better" and I think that idea has its merit. Not necessarily as a replacement for Dan Savage's message but in tandem with it.
Just my two (rather long) cents :)
Latoya, the adjective for people from Ghana is spelt "Ghanaian." There's an extra "a" in there that always throws non-native folks off but just FYI=).
@Tredwina: Hahaha. That cracks me up. My aunt had really bad period cramps when she was in college, so bad she would have to be taken in an ambulance to the student hospital for IV pain meds, and she was always a steady 28 days on the dot kind of bleeder. She told me after the first three months she started running into some of the older nurses at the student hospital in the grocery store and they would always say hi to her and then loudly say things like "See you on the 18th when the cramps hit!"
When she got pregnant she didn't know for sure yet and she ran into one of the nurses at the market. The old lady chirpily exclaimed, "Oooh, you must be knocked up because we didn't see you this month!" My aunt turned pale and walked away really quickly.
First World problems, indeed peoples. Even though, coming to think of it, I'm from the 3rd World and my mother had the most interesting experience. She was at her gynaecologist's on the day where he was doing rounds at the national teaching hospital (i think he used to do three days in his private office and then three days at the big hospital) and he was examining her ladyparts in depth. He brought a bunch of his first year residents over to have a peek and six or so of them stayed down there hmming and hawing and discussing what some odd thing might be. Then one of them after a long perusal of my mom's vagina, raised his head, saw her face and exclaimed in horror "Miss Nicholson!!!!" Turns out before my mother became a banker she was a teacher in a small rural high school for three years and he was one of her best students.
She said he was so mortified she didn't feel there was room for her to be embarrassed as well so she just cried silent tears in her head and concluded her appointment.
Oh and thankfully, her ladyparts were just fine.
@mrsdracomalfoy: I was very surprised to find that having a single episode is so rare in the Western world, and I think that is unimpeachable evidence that the diagnosis affects the outcome. It's interesting to think about though because in some ways it makes sense that as a result, in other cultures, that is then seen as evidence of mental turmoil being a series of intermittent or one-off "crises" that carry no stigma. It's a feedback loop of support and euphemism.
The trouble happens when you have the rare cases of people in developing countries with very highly developed debilitating forms of the disease--acute schizophrenic episodes that last months, violent . When they can't be understood under the euphemisms the culture provides then the person is shit out of luck. That is when dangerous things like deadly exorcisms and ritual beatings to rid you of "possessedness" --which often turn fatal--happen.
@hello.kitty: Sometimes very much so. The patient responds to the agitation around them. Their agitation and the lack of a support structure to share the load makes the caregivers anxious and nervous. The nervousness that the people around them are exhibiting make the schizophrenic's voices seem much more credible and the paranoia much more based in reality. And on and on it goes.
@thelandlady: Yep. Another interesting thing is that in a lot of other countries, either due to this large cache of free family-based healthcare or just a lax legal system there aren't a lot of power of attorney and involuntary custody issues with schizophrenic people over 18. I've seen a lot of immigrant families in America with schizophrenic adult children feel utterly powerless legally to yank their children out of college or make them come home to live with them. Getting stewardship of their affairs etc is also hell. It makes sense in the American context because since everyone is so busy working or stressed to the max the law exists to keep people from indiscriminately institutionalising adults who are no immediate threat to society. But to my Ethiopian family friends who live in Boston and had the support structure to take in their thirty year old schizophrenic relative during a psychotic episode having her get a lawyer and successfully get a restraining order against them to prevent them from stopping her from going to Argentina (she thought the voices in her head were there teaching samba) was heartbreaking. The stress of going to Argentina to retrieve her from some very dangerous situations did not help her mother's lymphoma.
@activearchivist is lovely, in a moist, fluffy sort of way: True, true. I often think that if I had gone to high school here they would totally have missed me. I didn't have any "red flags" until the day I just fell apart.
@pesematology: I empathize. I find that the children of doctors and psychologists encounter this quite often and it intrigues me.
@greeneyedfem: Word. It's interesting for me as a foreigner with acute depression because I live within such a syncretism of these two emotions. Realizing my inability to turn in work and get out of bed wasn't simply laziness and was M.S induced depression was such a relief. It allowed me to let go of so much guilt. But coming from a society is which guilt and the concept of shame is a very valuable social tool letting go of the notion of feeling guilty also led me to feel very isolated and anxious. Feeling "free" to feel sad and treat my depression as a worthy illness, as relevant as nerve damage or cancer, made me feel less Ghanaian in a sense, which is the most isolating thing an immigrant can feel.
Moreover, coming from a culture where there is a huge emphasis on labelling and the proverbial wisdom of "Never let a white man name you or you will answer to anything" is such a strong tenet, "allowing" myself to be called "depressed," owning up to the fact that it was beyond my family's skillset and needed outside intervention was as painful and anxiety-inducing and isolating as the depression itself.
@PetiteGal: A lot of the time with children of immigrants it could be that a combination of methods works best. Or that the method is not the problem as much as an interpretation of it that the parents don't find directly threatening to their own cultural values. The sad crux of the matter is that a lot of the things that worked in the Old World no longer work in the New World because the unique societal support structures that made those methods salient simply disintegrate under immigration conditions. This renders the entire methodology kinda obsolete.
A perfect example is medication for depression and anxiety. It works to some degree in America. It would only seek to stigmatize the patient in a lot of other places in the world. There are several factors at hand here. In America there just isn't an abundance of free talk therapy. In a lot of developing countries there is. In America, due to the culture of self-medication, vitamin supplements, birth control etc there is nothing inherently culturally odd about taking a pill every day. People probably won't even ask you what it is for. Pills aren't taking just for health-threatening conditions. You can get away with taking it in public, at work, at school, in an office etc. In a lot of places where privacy is less and a doctor's prescription, just due to poverty, access and homeopathic remedies, is given only in fairly serious cases, having to explain to everyone why you are taking the medicine could cause far more anxiety and depression for the patient. Similarly therapy here in Euro-American middle to upper class circles is stigmatized to a lesser degree. In other places, dealing with fallout from family and friends about talking to a psychologist about problems (which is seen as washing dirty linen in public and can be perceived as a betrayal of your family) can cause much more depression and anxiety than the talk therapy is alleviating.
If you are the child of a fairly insulated community from another country, who has to deal with depression and anxiety in a place different from the one your parents were raised in, often it is the contact zones of these two vastly different coping mechanisms that really fucks with you.
There is no greater value of any one method over another. The methods just need to keep up with the fluctuating cultural mores of largely migrant and constantly melding society that makes up our modern world.
@rah29: You saved me the trouble of typing out a long-winded screed saying exactly that!
My frustration with cultural psychology is that it often ignores the degree to which Protestant, Calvinist and Puritan cultures affect the conception of a mind and its purity, of a mind and its purposes, of a sound mind and its inherent value. Other cultures work within constraints that make an immense amount of sense to them. Often, limning psychological, interpretative frameworks unto other places and its inhabitants just succeeds in exoticising them and fails to fundamentally recognize the highly sophisticated nature of the coping mechanisms those societies have engineered.
More so, than with any other kind of condescension it fails at the onset, because people will not trust you with the secrets of their souls and their minds if they feel disrespected or gawked at.
@gracie1117: I'm from Ghana, born and raised, studied to be a psychologist in a U.S college, and have struggled with acute depression myself. The cross-cultural differences I have found are often more nuanced than just Ghanaians not believing it is real. The issue that actually exists is that the credence given to it and the assessment of it as an "illness" ---as opposed to as a transient, transitory or self-indulgent period that naturally passes ---differs from culture to culture.
Ghanaians (as much as you can call any diverse group of people that) traditionally believe sadness is real. They fully acknowledge debilitating sadness and a chemical inability to find happiness in anything. They acknowledge manic episodes, the euphoria of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder, body dysmorphia stuff etc. They just don't call them that. They label of them something euphemistic like "crises." But particularly with depression and PTSD they have a keen awareness of its existence and its frequent rate of occurrence.
That is why they have so many cultural measures in place for dealing with grief/mourning/sadness/the blues/trauma.
For example, back home, after you lose a loved one you are not allowed to be alone for a period spanning one month to one year. Someone moves in with you and sleeps in your bed to keep loneliness at bay, someone is dispatched to cook and clean for you, at the funeral a collection is taken to help you pay the funeral costs, you are allowed to wear nothing but black for a year so the society is compassionate and sympathetic when dealing with you, and also mentally prepared that you might have emotional swings or cry at the slightest provocation etc.
The difference between mental illness diagnoses in a lot of Sub-Saharan Africa and in the Western world is more that the issue of therapy and drug treatment is seen differently. Elders, family members, jujumen (shamans) and informal traditional counsellers traditionally play the roles that therapists play here. Because mental illness feeds off isolation and isolation is largely a novelty in your parent's societies my guess would be that what baffles them about depression is not its existence but the methods of its expression here. And more importantly, the drastic ways in which the coping methods differ from what they are used to.
In Ghana the idea that you have to go to a therapist or a psychologist or psychiatrist is largely foreign. It is seen as your family having failed you. To quote my dad when I told him I wanted to go to therapy "Are you an orphan? Are you so bereft of community that you would have to pay a STRANGER (emphasis his =)) to listen to your problems?" Are you so alone, such an island unto yourself, my daughter, that you have to take a white man's medicine and spin around in your own head?"
Now, of course I don't agree with this assessment. I'm just saying that that is the way it is perceived. The stigma of the perceived self-indulgence of it also comes from the same root. Only white people are that lonely. Only white people have that much time on their hands. Only white people are so full, and have so much food so consistently, that they can "afford" to be just sit down and be sad.
The notion that depression is something that overtakes you when you become idle is not an accurate one, of course. But it is born out of the root of thinking (which has some inherent value) that the cycle of negative flooding that chemical depression causes is helped by activity and consistent and enduring support system.
In Ghana schizophrenics often don't receive treatment. They roam the streets absolutely filthy and are act out with few boundaries. This is in stark contrast to how they are treated here. But some preliminary research shows that "mad people" as they are called back home, have less protracted psychotic episodes and benefit to some degree from that kind of free range madness in Ghanaian society. For the most part, every mad person has a home. When their "thing comes" as people so delicately put it, they disappear and roam the streets and talk to themselves. When the lucidity returns they return to their homes. During the periods of lucidity they are treated just like everyone else. When the psychotic episodes happen again they are left alone and left to wild out. They are not entirely integrated into their family structures as functioning members but unlike it often happens here they are not totally isolated either.
I'm not saying that either system is inherently better than another. I'm just saying that people's cultural frames of reference differ greatly about mental illness usually not because the concept of something happening in your mind that is not within your immediate control being foreign to them but because the individual societal structures in place for dealing with such "lapses in functionality" vary so greatly from place to place.
The real danger is in situations like yours where the hybridism of cultures leads to a disconnect in how to deal and often leaves people feeling abandoned, misunderstood or marginalized.
I love how even when it comes to something as market-specific as pussy dye all women of color are lumped into a monolithic "other".
Is "ginger" supposed to fit the entire spectrum from Lucy Liu's pussy to Alek Wek's pussy?
At least be smart misogynists, Pink Button people!
@ameliabearhart: These are the exactly the questions I was about to ask. Thanks so much for doing it so much more thoroughly than I ever could have.
I find the equation of religious and conservative faintly troubling and I have come to discover that the limning of the outward trappings/adherences to a religion or culture with a perceived belief in the fundamental tenets of that faith or culture are not always things that line up as neatly as people would believe.
Sometimes hijab is just hijab, sometimes quotes from the Quran are just words, sometimes people use markers as a way to identify culturally or assuage nostalgia far more than they use it to outwardly proclaim that they subscribe to an ideology or belief system.
I am sick for even thinking this I know but this picture unfortunately evokes an image of one of those absurd old "Socialite-Sexing IV," or whatever, kind of pornos. Like she's about to force Brad's head down to Muhammed Ali's lap in the next frame. And then start oiling big silicone breasts while she makes cootchycoo noises.
@sshacker: I concur. For certain parts of West Africa (where I might add her paternal heritage is from) Gabourey Sidibe is as conventionally attractive as Britney Spears is in the U.S. The phrase is so unfortunately and euphemistically Eurocentric that every time I see it I cringe.
@Lizabelle: This is Naomi Campbell.
I would hazard a guess that her superior success at life than yours comes from the fact that you do not assault people with blackberries.
