Having recently returned from a mental health seminar abroad, I feel particularly well-prepared to tackle Mel Gibson’s outbursts over the years. In fact, with the help of several colleagues currently practicing in multi-culti or LBT centered facilities around the world, I already have.
You see, a famous therapist presented an in depth study on “the importance of diversity” in health practices at the seminar/conference. Despite his obvious commitment to trying to welcome diverse clients into mainstream services, it became obvious that he had started from the all-too-familiar supposition that emotional reactions to oppression were pathological. In other words, if you are angry because you live in gentrification grand central, or you are acting out in class because you are experiencing all kinds of bullying around your first attempts at gender transgression, it is because you have “maladaptive coping skills” (ie your anger is “inappropriate”). And if you get mad at your therapist, stop treatment, or otherwise try to seek real help by indicating the problem to someone else … oh yes, my friend, you are not only exercising maladaptive coping skills, including triangulation (when you try to get a third party to uphold your “crazy, crazy, fantasy land”) but you are CRAZY with a capital CRAZ and YYYYYY. (image to left http://www.snoopy.com)
What exactly does this have to do with Mel Gibson, you ask?
You can imagine that several of us were unhappy that once again the “doing diversity” plan was to talk “inclusion” at the same time equality was completely ignored in favor of pathologizing people’s response to a lack of it. So when it came time to do break out sessions, my colleagues and I leapt at the chance to answer the break out session question:
Identify a behavior or disorder that you believe is directly related to diversity issues, locate it on a spectrum, and explain how you would engage in inclusive therapeutic techniques to ensure that everyone was served.
(note: the new big thing in mental health is to cut down the number of disorders that stand alone and incorporate them into a larger spectrum in order to give people wiggle room with diagnosis and needs.
Also note that this project was an attempt to confront the way the medical model pathologizes difference and reframe it in a way that actually addresses real pathology in our society.)
Our answer “ripped from the headlines”:
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The Disorder – Colonial Fantasy Syndrome
A disorder in which a member of the dominant culture believes that their experience is normative and any other experience is therefore deviant or abnormal despite evidence to the contrary.
Indicators
Sufferers must meet 5 or more of the following criteria
- delusions of grandeur
- preference for a world in which the fantasy of their dominance supersedes the realities of diversity in the real world
- an overwhelming sense of persecution or victimization
- frequent projection (ie accusing others of the acts in which the client is actually engaging)
- manipulation of interpersonal relationships for one’s own gain while claiming otherwise
- egocentricism often masked as selflessness or self-interested demonstrations of selflessness
- characterized by sublimation in which one’s sense of superiority is masked by seemingly altruistic acts toward the targeted group(s)
- subset of sublimation defined by hypocrisy in which the sense of superiority is masked by calling out others for same or similar behavior, espec if members of targeted group(s)
- desire to belong to a group, see one’s self as, or otherwise engage in elitest or exclusionary practices
- engages in emotionally or physically threatening behavior with those who challenge the client’s world view
- tendency to blame addiction for incongruencies in one’s worldview or self-image (may or may not be accompanied by actual drug & alcohol dependence or abuse)
- willful disregard for the truth when confronted
Spectrum – The Mel Gibson Spectrum Disorder
AP Photo/Ric Francis
This spectrum includes all 9 indicators within its definition and may express itself through racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or any combination therein. It is characterized by hypermasculinity distinguishing it from other similar illnesses. This spectrum is also distinguished from other illnesses by the presence of membership in the dominant racial group and most often, the dominant gender. While some believe absence of membership in heterosexuality exempts one from being located in this spectrum, this is unfortunately not the case.
While it is often characterized by alcohol dependence it may also include people who call any of the other 9 indicators addiction in and of themselves.This behavior is seldom a recognition of the problem but rather an avoidance technique designed to evade or minimize responsibility for one’s actions.
Examples:
- Michael Richards
- John Mayer
- Don Imus
- Prince Harry
- Dan Savage (who was the first blogger to blame black people for prop 8 & refused to intervene when commenters on his blog engaged in blatant racism, including epithets, when discussing the issue)
- Moderators at Boxed Turtle – who allowed anti-immigrant threats to dominate a discussion of a homophobic hotel owner (including against all immigrants not just the hotel owner) until I called them out, then allowed people to attack me and threaten my own status in this country, defended their lack of moderation, and then months later quietly deleted all reference to calling INS on all immigrants, me, and all brown ppl everywhere as well as other threats related to skin color or status from the thread.
Treatment Issues
People in this spectrum are often accompanied by enablers who make treatment of the problem nearly impossible. These enablers include people with more mild forms of the same syndrome (like wordpress itself, whose highlight page consistently includes racialized posts about black people and now Asians rather than highlighting posts written by & abt poc or by white ppl who are actually engaged in decolonized praxis rather than hipster colonial fantasy), other related syndromes or disorders like Goldberg Disorder I or II, etc.
Treatment can also be impeded by the ubiquitousness of the disorder across class lines. For instance more widely recognized cases may be defended by the media, perpetuated by it, or erased through it (which directly contradicted Savage’s part in and continued defense of blaming black people for the loss of gay rights).
Treatment
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Cognitive Behavioral modification that engages the client in understanding their faulty thinking about themselves, the world, and others and provides alternative modes of interacting with targeted group(s) that do not reflect maladaptive behavior. Ongoing intervention in childhood messages that allowed clients to internalize feelings of superiority, actions of violence to reinforce that superiority, and a sense of victimization by anyone who did not confirm their belief systems so as to remap cognitive processes away from cognitive splitting (when a person believes one thing even when seeing another. Example: they are being arrested because the police officer is female and Jewish not because they are driving drunk).
Ultimately, treatment depends on environmental (revolution), intrapersonal (addressing the whack-a-mole mind), interpersonal (friends don’t let friends drive, write, call, etc. while oppressive), and familial (so you say your dead was a Holocaust denier) aspects. Thus treatment is holistic and active at its base.
Being diagnosed with Mel Gibson Spectrum Disorder should in no way be seen as an addiction. Both the Spectrum and its distinct disorders are a choice not an illness beyond one’s control. People can completely heal from Mel Gibson Spectrum Disorder and their healing will ultimately help heal the world. As such, we must not fall into a pattern of excusing or minimizing the behaviors of MGSD but engage it head on rather. In so doing, we understand that MGSD is the pathology not the people who are often the target of people with MGSD.
Conclusion
Weave Mirror/ D. Rozin
In concluding our diagnosis, we pointed to the many ways that Western Society pathologizes victims of people with Mel Gibson Spectrum Disorder while giving people who continue to embrace the disorder and refuse to change a free pass. John Mayer is a perfect example of this phenomena. While he was under intense scrutiny for several days, he was back to tweeting, blogging, and major ticket sales before the end of the week of his racism incident. He is already being featured in a morning show concert series. Don Imus is back on the air and Rush Limbaugh was never taken off it. And I don’t doubt that my willingness to include Dan Savage in this list will raise the ire of some of my longstanding queer readers.
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So was this post really about Mel Gibson? It would have been easy to link to his “crazy” via TMZ or youtube and laugh and laugh and laugh some more with you all. However, ultimately, it is easy to point at the latest spectacle of oppression. But unlike a train wreck or an accident on the freeway, you can’t just slow down, stare, and then move on because when you do, you are in fact ensuring that the number of people with Mel Gibson Spectrum Disorder grows.
For those unfamiliar with the way MH diagnosis work, you may want to look up the list of symptoms we listed here. The reality is that each and everyone of them is actually included in one or more major personality disorder diagnostic criteria. Yet, that criteria is utterly devoid of oppression work. In other words, you are narcissist if you are self-absorbed, a sociopath if you engage in violence without remorse, oppositional defiant if you attack authority figures; but you are none of these things if you beat your wife, girlfriend, or partner, threaten to lynch, beat up, or kill a person of color, trans, or gay person, or try to get your black, queer, or differently-abled doctor, professor, or grocery store clerk fired. When you are deemed crazy in our society, you are expected to seek out treatment and work your treatment plan. Often when you are personality disordered, you are also highly stimatized as dangerous, violent, and in need of supervision. When you are racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. you can simply excuse away your behavior with “I’m sorry you interpreted my behavior that way”, giving to charity or playing on stage with a differently-abled or young child, or a trotting your gay-black-trans friend, ex-wife, or tweens who pee their pants when you come around. No one watches out for or over you or is warned about you being dangerous. And while the medical model often pathologizes and polices people who do not deserve it (including people with personality disorders who have not been violent or whose violence is contingent on not getting treatment which is exacerbated by the way they are pathologized during treatment) the fact is that in the case of oppressors such labels and warnings would actual shift the medical model toward those people who are in fact violent (emotionally, physically, sexually), unrepentant, and therefore likely to be repeat offenders.
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Like a Whisper 
