Mentally Interesting Feminist Guilt

Gosh.  Well, today’s CBT session was…alarming.  I am pretty down at the moment which doesn’t exactly lend me to good conversation, but it was…well, alarming!

I am keeping a diary for the next fortnight charting how I feel about my appearance and events- such as looking into mirrors, being photographed, socialising (wracked with anxiety) and such.

As well as that, she revealed that she’d like to conduct a survey.  Yes, honestly.  She wants to foist a photo of me into the hands of Joe Public and record their responses on a dictaphone.  The aim is to prove her Theory B: that I am not as hideous as I think I am, as opposed to my theory, Theory A, that I am as hideous as I think I am.

That is pretty much my worst nightmare.  I don’t want to know what people think about the way I look.  It’s callous of me, but I ignore compliments and hoard insults.  At least my response to compliments and insults is not what it used to be.  Which was:

Friend: Hey Seaneen, you look nice today.

Me: No I don’t.  Look at the state of my hair.  And my ridiculous nose.  I have a spot.  One of my eyes is smaller than the other.  I am really fat…. (and rambling off in all directions….)

Friend: Okay.  Bye!

or

Person: (usually not a friend)  You ugly bitch.

Me: I know.

Now I just nod and smile tightlippedly at either.

I don’t think it would work as people are polite.  If someone put a photo in front of me, I wouldn’t be honest about what I thought out of a desire to not be rude.

Still, it’s all rather novel.  We also stared at our hands for two minutes.  The rationale for this is that if you look at something long enough you’ll find flaws.  But really, I don’t spend a lot of time looking at myself.

We acknowledged that it’s difficult to get clear-cut cause-effect scenarios from me as I am often from the mood disordered standpoint, which is quite unrelated to my body image.

I have a medication review next week and I suspect there will be more jipping about.  50mg Lamictal is having no impact on me at all, as it didn’t before. 100mg made me intolerably dead (not just somewhat numb, but suicidally disconnected, where I wanted to throw myself off something high because I was so sure I’d never feel love or hate or interest again) so maybe the holy grail is 150mg or 200mg.  Hannah thinks Lamictal is somewhere on the right track as it’s the only mood stabiliser I’ve taken that has had any impact on my mood.  Depakote did, to a point, but as soon as an antidepressant was added, I went loopy.  And then there is the joy of rapid-cycling…  My expectations are that Lamictal will be hoiked up, or changed.  And I think they might give antidepressants another go.  I’ve taken two already, but as I said, even with mood stabilisers and an antipsychotic, I went nuts.  That’s the risk.  But I can’t carry on being completely untreated as far as depression goes.  It has replaced the hellish dysphoric mania as My Most Oft.  And I hate it.  I am getting the inclination to exercise, out of guilt, mostly, but everything else is going to pot.  I can’t be bothered doing much, I feel very down, and my flat is going to wrack and ruin and I am falling behind in paying bills.  Seroquel, by the looks of it, is here to stay.

Onwards…

I have Feminist Guilt about mental illness.  I feel “wrong” for it.  Firstly, women are historically not treated very well if they have a mental illness.  In Victorian times, it was “hysteria”, in fact, any “immoral” behaviour was slapped as a deviancy.  The same still applies to some degree- I know the toss has been argued here before about the diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder by gender, but it is still mostly a Woman’s Illness, namely because the behaviour therein is more aberant for a woman to engage in.

Bipolar women are more generally acceptable than schizophrenic women (but this is true of men, too.  Manic depression is a far more socially acceptable illness than schizophrenia, even though they overlap).   The image of it has changed, though, as times wore on.  Manic depression no longer represents the image of celebrated artists like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf.  It has reverted back to image of being a promiscuous, impulsive, irresponsible illness by way of Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse and Kerry Katona.

That image shames me, even though it is periodically accurate. That’s a guilt-point for me being a feminist.  Women, in fact, everyone, can have all the sex and booze that they want. But it is mostly men who have the “tortured genius” image when it comes to mental illness.

There is “inappropriate dress”, like being manic and wearing revealing clothes.  Which is not something that is very notable in men, unless they’re waving their willy at you.

My guilt, though, mostly stems from having an eating disorder and body image problems.  To some degree I imagine that most people have problems with these things, it’s just on a sliding scale of how much it fucks you up.   But I despise myself for it.  How can I be a feminist if I judge what is beautiful based on what you can see?  I only do this with myself, but I loathe the culture of making value judgments on what people are like by what they look like, and I do it, too.  That’s horrible.  I have read enough feminist polemic to understand the social mechanism behind this thinking, but I still despise it.  I agree with the (feminist, I guess) notion of Fat Acceptance (read Shapely Prose and Thinspeak), yet feel like an outsider there because I hate my own fat.

There is also guilt about not being an independent woman (in the Destiny’s Child sense, innit).   Feminism is, of course, about choice, all choice, to be whatever you want to be and for the world to let you do that.  My primary independence is in regards to my health, which is something that bothered me when reading the responses to the Cost of Mental Illness post.  I don’t see shame in having to utilise the medical insurance of your husband or parents, but it’s an unacceptable state of affairs when a system forces you to do that, or to choose who gets the health care.   One person should not have to rely on another in regards to their own health.  (Again, I don’t mean emotionally or physically.  But it’s repulsive that the case is for many that they have to financially). But I do look after my own health.  No one forces me to take medication, but I do, I get to my own appointments, choose to continue with treatment.  That would be very much harder if I had to pay for that treatment.  It’s unacceptable.  It should be free because any sort of cost will make you feel guilty and unworthy.

By not working, therefore not earning my own money, I feel as though I am Letting the Side Down.  I do have to rely on the government in order to live.  I don’t want to, believe me, I want to be a high flying yet humble writer who earns her food. (This is in opposition to my principles- no one should have to “earn” food, it’s a human right, there is no such thing as the deserving poor).

There is other guilt, too, that my general mental health Bloody Well Gets In The Way of a lot of things and makes me feel weaker than I suspect I am.   I do, to some extent, need to rely on people.  My CPN, Rob, psychiatrists, etc. I try not to depend on my friends and family, who are both lovely.  After so many years and breakdowns, you become hyper-aware of where the “Line” is, and try your best not to cross it.

And there’s the minefield of fertility.  A double edged sword- the right to not have children, and the desire to have them, but being unable.  I have PCOS, my medication is dangerous to take while pregnant, the changes of me flipping out and becoming psychotic are high, and would I want to pass this down to a child that I might not be able to look after?  I do agree with the research that suggests that mental illness can be inherited.  (I once wrote a shit poem about it when I was sixteen, called “Heirloom”).   Both of my parents suffered, in my dad’s case, and suffer, in my mum’s, from mental illness.  My dad was depressive and an alcoholic, my mum- well, she’s just completely mental but she has had psychosis, and combined, I think they produced me, a girl with manic depression that becomes psychotic at both ends of the scale.  I recognise, along with those who treat me, that I became quite ill rather young, so already I have ten years stacked up behind me, and about six that I recall almost nothing of.  For all I am grateful in my life, if I had the choice, I wouldn’t have this illness, it has mostly been a force for bad in my life.   But there is no choice.  How could I do that to another human being?  Give them a life without the choice?  I don’t think that I could.

It’s not my being fatalistic, it’s because of my own experiences.  I resent the fact that I have to take medication.  I could, of course, not.  But, being a woman, it is better when we are quiet!  Maybe my ideas are outmoded, but it always seems that way, be quiet and high achieving or a good mother.  My life is less destructive on medication.  I may not be able to work yet but it means that I am not being fired every thirty  minutes.  I might not be able to write like I could, but it means I am not believing I am being poisoned, stalked, spied on, listened to, being god, being dead, and the like.

My feminist guilt pretty much ends there.  It’s not entirely relevant because a lot of it is just personal guilt but sometimes I feel that being a woman with mental illness means I am letting womanhood down.  Silly, isn’t it!  I do think that gender does throw its hat in in terms of how mental illness is treated and diagnosed.  Whereas BPD is a very much (at least historically) female diagnosed disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder is very much a male one.

There’s a little bit here on gender and mental illness, if you’re interested.