I was asked for my opinion regarding this article about whether or not trigger warnings should be added to school syllabi (you can read that here http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/05/29/essay-faculty-members-about-why-they-will-not-use-trigger-warnings#ixzz33dKK46xn). This is my opinion.
First, I would like to point out that just because some of the faculty members who wrote this might have experienced some of the traumatic events that have galvanized this dialogue does not mean that they own this issue or that they are entitled to speak on behalf of all trauma survivors, many of whom might react to the same event differently.
I'm getting mixed messages. The authors acknowledge time and time again that they are not equipped to deal with psychiatric episodes, while simultaneously defending their right to retain full control of jobs that might directly involve re-traumatizing students. I'm not at all saying that the material taught in the classroom is inherently problematic; I agree that, for many, there is a valuable learning experience at the heart of this. But if you think you can be off of the hook, and that your personal preferences are going to act as some kind of gatekeeper that denies entry to the full blown manifestation of traumatic aftermath, don't teach. You can't avoid this shit by skipping out on trigger warnings because trigger warnings aren't reeeeally the issue at hand here.
You emphasize the importance of enhancing and expanding institutional support for students with mental health issues. But the classroom is part of the institution.
"PTSD is a disability; as with all disabilities, students and faculty deserve to have effective resources provided by independent campus offices that handle documentation, certification, and accommodation plans rather than by faculty proceeding on an ad hoc basis."
No. Don't you dare say "as with all disabilities" because PTSD is not like all disabilities. It is a psychiatric disability. And what I'm hearing is typical: you don't want to deal with mental health issues. You don't want to see them. You might even have them yourself, but it's still not appropriate to bring them into the classroom. It's too intense. It's not your responsibility. And that is the real issue here.
Think of PTSD as an allergy. Something specific triggers a negative reaction in an individual. There is overlap in physical symptoms and cognitive components including fear, even terror, over the possibility of death. Throats close off, extremities tingle. Pins and needles rain all over the body.
Parents of children with allergies in public schools have the right to tell teachers not to bring a certain food or item into the classroom. My mom did that for my brother every single year of elementary school because he had severe food allergies that would induce anaphylaxis. Letters were sent home to every parent. All kinds of special arrangements were made. Most of the teachers were happy to go out of their way for my brother...because it was a part of their job. It was a part of teaching to make sure that they did not trigger a negative, dangerous, or even deadly reaction in his youthful, learning body.
Yes, triggers are numerous and unpredictable. So are food allergies, but the common ones are still listed on the label in bold print and someone is held accountable for providing them.
You acknowledge that you expose students to visceral and upsetting material on a consistent basis. But dealing with the aftermath is a responsibility better left for disability services and not you?
The Sanctuary Model, which is a trauma-informed, evidence based approach to treating people who have experienced trauma is predicated on the understanding that trauma is pervasive in the human condition. Its tenets have application in schools and provide a method for changing an organizational culture. Procedures to avoid retraumatization includes staff training, awareness, and competency.
Quite frankly, if faculty is as ill-equipped to deal with trauma as you say, maybe you shouldn't be teaching about it without a little extra training.
At the same time, the Sanctuary Model heavily emphasizes survivor involvement, rights, and empowerment, with clients being responsible for much of their own care, and fewer institutional barriers that isolate clients as well as staff.
If you're worried about silencing faculty members, think about the students with PTSD who now know that you don't want to SEE them or their reality, that you don't want to deal with it. Perhaps trigger warnings would not only empower students and encourage them to be in charge of their own psychiatric well being, but they would also lead to fewer institutional barriers that isolate students FROM staff. It sounds like what you all need is a catalyst to collaborate, to listen to each other. You're going to need it.
Because Disability Services often leaves it to the discretion of the professor to decide how to deal with students who are unable to confront the course material. You already have the power, and that includes the power to deny a student with PTSD the accommodations that they need to successfully complete the course. And yet, faculty can't do this, and faculty can't do that.
So my question for you is this: Are you going to ask your students to leave their body casts at the door, or just the ones you can't see?
P.S. What's up with point number nine? You know how many people I've heard say that rape culture is no longer a thing? That racism is no longer a thing? Please, if anything, a trigger warning might remind people that this shit is real.
Friday, June 13, 2014
Sunday, February 16, 2014
A Special Type of Coming Out
I cannot call the time that I have spent in this place a “closet.”
I should not need to adulterate my account with the language of queer struggles in order to humanize experiences that are unique to me and not necessarily analogous to those of others. The harbinger of change is not assimilation, but rather, sincerity.
For weeks, I have known, not a closet, but a womb. Yes. Trapped in a dark place, on someone else’s whim, a product of a containment policy. My body belongs not to me, but to the spirit of the times. It is enmeshed in a historical tradition of stigma and a de facto criminalization of my social reality that is founded upon and simultaneously reinforces that subjugation.
A little over a month ago, I attempted suicide. And while the path was complex and one could enumerate multiple causes, it was a single thing that pushed me over the edge.
Specifically, it was the cumulative trauma that I had sustained over the course of my experiences with the psychiatric system and university administrators at several schools that led me to believe I was forever a prisoner.
I cannot stress this enough...it was the system. It WAS the system. The punitive approach, the loss of all autonomy and instrumental value as a patient, the involvement of law enforcement, the devastating fear of incarceration, the blatant abuse at the hands of mental health professionals, the routine institutional violence, the victim blaming, the complete and utter helplessness, the deep and oppressive fear of unsolicited power. Every encounter damaged me, haunted me forever. Every incident plunged me further into isolation and despair and deterred me further from reaching out for help. Every episode added to my high record of iatrogenic trauma.
From my freshman year of high school until now, I feel as though I have endured psychiatric rape. I have carried these experiences inside of me with shame and unimaginable silence. No one has ever acknowledged the depth of the trauma that I have sustained at the hands of the system.
But I am.
A month ago, I desperately wanted to reach out for help. But my multiple suspensions and involuntary hospitalizations in high school (along with the literal policing of my body, such as when the school nurse routinely checked my arms), combined with being reported behind my back if teachers even suspected me of being upset in school, even if I only looked like I was crying because of a torn contact lens, combined with the disempowering hospital experience and prisoner-like/cruel/degrading treatment of mental health patients that I experienced,
the disrespect for one's body, combined with the possibility of a hotline sending police to my residence if I accidentally hung up on them, as they did to a couple of my friends, combined with therapists who ganged up on me with my mother when she tried to control my therapy sessions, combined with a therapist who wanted to hospitalize me to scare me out of being depressed, combined with my arrest by police on my own front lawn, combined with my involuntary removal from TCNJ for suicidal ideation,
combined with the TCNJ guard who actually told my mother where the police station was when she wanted to leave me there because she didn’t want a trans* child with mental health issues, combined with the involvement of RUPD and the threat of emergency transport and almost being kicked out of the dorms, combined with the indefinite possibility of being kicked out of my dorm, combined with the criminalizing language of university policies that use phrases such as “students who threaten suicide” and “disciplinary action,” combined with the stern reminders of every mental health professional I had ever seen that they would need to report me if I revealed too much,
combined with eight years of being made to feel like a criminal when I had hurt absolutely no one, coalesced in order to convince me that the clinician’s agency would always trump my own. And in the process, my very humanity would be resisted, rather than explored and faced.
I think this is why my peers, too, resist my experiences instead of listening to them. For I have found in this past month that re-connecting with others and gaining their acceptance once more means locking away the institutionalization of a human being and succumbing to-or even being bred by-the fear of being pathologized.
This involves creating an alternative space inside.
Let’s revisit that womb. I am expected to nourish others continuously-to nourish the self-centered origin of those in positions of clinical and administrative power by accepting my perennial status as a safety risk, to nourish the paradigm of those in my social circles of positive psychology by surrendering my right to think and feel as I desire, however dark and scary my human legitimacy may be to others.
This is what it means to be in a womb, to live as an umbilical cord, to be an ambassador to another body, to be a bridge between life and death, to be a ghost, with one foot in the world of the dead and the other in the world of the living without fully belonging to either.
It means that people would be sad to see you go, but you are still alone. Your lived experiences are unspeakable. They are too heavy, too serious, too upsetting.
The full recognition of your rights as a living, breathing person is conditional on whether or not you are willing to run away from and never speak about the single most important and meaningful thing that has ever happened to you, because no one wants to hear about something like that.
We are taught that love conquers all, but only when those we love are sterile. And we cannot love someone until they have faced an “effective” intervention, until they have been evaluated, diagnosed, locked up, and given a prescription pad.
Think about what this does to a person, this institutionalized and socially sanctioned demonization of people like you.
Think about the constant lack of consent, the intrusion into your personal affairs, the control of your body, the penetration by cops and people in white coats, and stigma gyrating all of the while with the hips of a rocking horse as you lay backed up against a wall. The constant force leaves you with bureaucratic-induced brain damage and scars that no one can see. You feel trapped, and you make the decision to not be trapped anymore.
When you emerge, you are reborn.
They say that a rose by any other name would be just as sweet. And yet, who you are before an attempt and who you are after are qualitatively different. They are not separate and equal. There is no such thing. One of them remains fundamentally damaged.
But with this observation comes hope. If substantive and qualitative change can strike once, it can strike again.
I came across this beautiful article, and the author says this: “Listen to someone who is suicidal and you often hear a need for change so important, so indispensable, that they would rather die than go on living without the change. And when the person feels powerless to make that change happen, they become suicidal.”
Rebuilding a life is about enacting change. In the past month, I have felt more passion than I have ever felt before. In addition to getting help for myself, I realized that I can use my final semester at Rutgers to produce some kind of lasting and meaningful influence that might in some way benefit people who are suffering in silence just like I was.
I promise to never stop fighting and to never give up...for people in wombs everywhere. <3
I should not need to adulterate my account with the language of queer struggles in order to humanize experiences that are unique to me and not necessarily analogous to those of others. The harbinger of change is not assimilation, but rather, sincerity.
For weeks, I have known, not a closet, but a womb. Yes. Trapped in a dark place, on someone else’s whim, a product of a containment policy. My body belongs not to me, but to the spirit of the times. It is enmeshed in a historical tradition of stigma and a de facto criminalization of my social reality that is founded upon and simultaneously reinforces that subjugation.
A little over a month ago, I attempted suicide. And while the path was complex and one could enumerate multiple causes, it was a single thing that pushed me over the edge.
Specifically, it was the cumulative trauma that I had sustained over the course of my experiences with the psychiatric system and university administrators at several schools that led me to believe I was forever a prisoner.
I cannot stress this enough...it was the system. It WAS the system. The punitive approach, the loss of all autonomy and instrumental value as a patient, the involvement of law enforcement, the devastating fear of incarceration, the blatant abuse at the hands of mental health professionals, the routine institutional violence, the victim blaming, the complete and utter helplessness, the deep and oppressive fear of unsolicited power. Every encounter damaged me, haunted me forever. Every incident plunged me further into isolation and despair and deterred me further from reaching out for help. Every episode added to my high record of iatrogenic trauma.
From my freshman year of high school until now, I feel as though I have endured psychiatric rape. I have carried these experiences inside of me with shame and unimaginable silence. No one has ever acknowledged the depth of the trauma that I have sustained at the hands of the system.
But I am.
A month ago, I desperately wanted to reach out for help. But my multiple suspensions and involuntary hospitalizations in high school (along with the literal policing of my body, such as when the school nurse routinely checked my arms), combined with being reported behind my back if teachers even suspected me of being upset in school, even if I only looked like I was crying because of a torn contact lens, combined with the disempowering hospital experience and prisoner-like/cruel/degrading treatment of mental health patients that I experienced,
the disrespect for one's body, combined with the possibility of a hotline sending police to my residence if I accidentally hung up on them, as they did to a couple of my friends, combined with therapists who ganged up on me with my mother when she tried to control my therapy sessions, combined with a therapist who wanted to hospitalize me to scare me out of being depressed, combined with my arrest by police on my own front lawn, combined with my involuntary removal from TCNJ for suicidal ideation,
combined with the TCNJ guard who actually told my mother where the police station was when she wanted to leave me there because she didn’t want a trans* child with mental health issues, combined with the involvement of RUPD and the threat of emergency transport and almost being kicked out of the dorms, combined with the indefinite possibility of being kicked out of my dorm, combined with the criminalizing language of university policies that use phrases such as “students who threaten suicide” and “disciplinary action,” combined with the stern reminders of every mental health professional I had ever seen that they would need to report me if I revealed too much,
combined with eight years of being made to feel like a criminal when I had hurt absolutely no one, coalesced in order to convince me that the clinician’s agency would always trump my own. And in the process, my very humanity would be resisted, rather than explored and faced.
I think this is why my peers, too, resist my experiences instead of listening to them. For I have found in this past month that re-connecting with others and gaining their acceptance once more means locking away the institutionalization of a human being and succumbing to-or even being bred by-the fear of being pathologized.
This involves creating an alternative space inside.
Let’s revisit that womb. I am expected to nourish others continuously-to nourish the self-centered origin of those in positions of clinical and administrative power by accepting my perennial status as a safety risk, to nourish the paradigm of those in my social circles of positive psychology by surrendering my right to think and feel as I desire, however dark and scary my human legitimacy may be to others.
This is what it means to be in a womb, to live as an umbilical cord, to be an ambassador to another body, to be a bridge between life and death, to be a ghost, with one foot in the world of the dead and the other in the world of the living without fully belonging to either.
It means that people would be sad to see you go, but you are still alone. Your lived experiences are unspeakable. They are too heavy, too serious, too upsetting.
The full recognition of your rights as a living, breathing person is conditional on whether or not you are willing to run away from and never speak about the single most important and meaningful thing that has ever happened to you, because no one wants to hear about something like that.
We are taught that love conquers all, but only when those we love are sterile. And we cannot love someone until they have faced an “effective” intervention, until they have been evaluated, diagnosed, locked up, and given a prescription pad.
Think about what this does to a person, this institutionalized and socially sanctioned demonization of people like you.
Think about the constant lack of consent, the intrusion into your personal affairs, the control of your body, the penetration by cops and people in white coats, and stigma gyrating all of the while with the hips of a rocking horse as you lay backed up against a wall. The constant force leaves you with bureaucratic-induced brain damage and scars that no one can see. You feel trapped, and you make the decision to not be trapped anymore.
When you emerge, you are reborn.
They say that a rose by any other name would be just as sweet. And yet, who you are before an attempt and who you are after are qualitatively different. They are not separate and equal. There is no such thing. One of them remains fundamentally damaged.
But with this observation comes hope. If substantive and qualitative change can strike once, it can strike again.
I came across this beautiful article, and the author says this: “Listen to someone who is suicidal and you often hear a need for change so important, so indispensable, that they would rather die than go on living without the change. And when the person feels powerless to make that change happen, they become suicidal.”
Rebuilding a life is about enacting change. In the past month, I have felt more passion than I have ever felt before. In addition to getting help for myself, I realized that I can use my final semester at Rutgers to produce some kind of lasting and meaningful influence that might in some way benefit people who are suffering in silence just like I was.
I promise to never stop fighting and to never give up...for people in wombs everywhere. <3
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)