Less than Human?

Posted on January 11, 2006 in Stigma War

The attitudes of the unafflicted can be hard to read. We bipolars sometimes fancy ourselves as mind-readers. But there is far more to detecting a prejudice than guesswork. There are glances. There are subtle and not-so-subtle intonations in a voice. Invitations to dinner or coffee that stop abruptly after our diagnosis. Articles in newspapers that our coworkers cite and laugh about. Our very diagnosis being used to attack others as untrustworthy or dangerous.

Recovery programs sometimes tell us that these things exist entirely in our imagination. They do us no service.

If you ask the Others, most of them will say that they see us as human. I think if you probe further, a few will reveal that they think we are less than human, that our brain dysfunctions bring us down to the level of an ape or, maybe, a rat. It’s disturbing when I see my own kind speaking as if those in mania suddenly lose their privilege to be treated as citizens. Witness how some spoke of the recent Miami affair. They joined the chorus of the so-called sane in blaming the dead man for not taking his meds. In mania, they implied, you lose your right to be considered a human being. We may shoot you like a deer or a coyote or a bear. When we do, it is all your fault.

I find this fact telling: we cannot accept a war if we have to see the victims. The Vietnam War ended because of the images that came back from that beleaguered civil war. We just couldn’t take seeing blood cascading out of a soldier’s face or a little girl running naked down a road after being napalmed. The military learned not to allow pictures like that to flow out of the two Gulf Wars. It gets away with bombing and killing the Iraqis by limiting who gets to see the carnage. If we did see their eyes, we would think twice. The fact is that human beings don’t like killing other human beings.

The dead, the enemy must be dehumanized. Governments present them as numbers. We avoid showing their faces and their wounds. When some do, jingoists decry them as “unpatriotic”. Don’t let them see the whites of their eyes. The subtle tics, the odor of their bodies, their hair falling on us say “This is human. This must not be killed.”

This may explain why it was the practice to lock the mentally ill away, to never show their faces to the world. The Others may still retain some of that programming because they won’t look us in the eye. That would force them to know us and, even worse, include us.

Flash back to Vietnam. This is the photo that ended U.S. participation in the Vietnam War:

Now let me tell you a new story. The little girl tore off her clothes because she had gone manic. The boy in the foreground is trying to get away from her. The smoke in the background is just villagers burning their fields as they do every year after the harvest. And the soldiers are just trying to catch her, take her back to the safety of the ward.

Think that story would have stopped the war? Today’s media might well attach that explanation to a photo such as this. Pro-war pundits often ask “How could anyone be so crazy as to get in the way?” which amounts to blaming the victim for being beneath the bomb. Crazy. It’s a word that takes away our very right to survival and sympathy. Less than human? If not entirely so, then very nearly.

For more about Kim and how she was treated by U.S. forces and the post-war Vietnamese government, click here.