# Stigma: Can we really understand otherness?



## moodywop

*Stigma*: a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance, quality or person: _the stigma of mental disorder_
ORIGIN:via Latin from Greek, "a mark made by pricking or branding"
(_The New Oxford Dictionary)_

This is going to be a completely non-polemical post. Cuchu and Elaine said that controversial/intolerant opinions should be rebutted, not censored. However, on one controversial topic after the other, I still see the two opposite camps re-stating their positions, both claiming logic is on their side. _Un dialogo fra sordi._ Elaine said we should "educate". I think "educate" may sound patronizing. What about "explaining" instead? I don't presume to change strongly held opinions, especially if legitimately based on religious belief. But can we really look beyond the label and understand otherness? I don't know. I'll just try and explain what "otherness" means and feels like from the inside.

This is going to be personal - no holds barred. I know some of you may find disclosing personal details distasteful. *If so, read no further*. Others may see it as self-advertising or seeking pity. While we may never know our deepest motives fully, I can only say that I don't believe those are my motives. It's just a desperate attempt to reach to the "other side", beyond abstract logic and beliefs. And to encourage others to be open about themselves to family and friends. It helps.

I'm not "gay". I'm a human being who happens, among many other, more important things, to be "gay"(a label I dislike, like all labels, but which I'll adopt for convenience' sake). It does not define me but it is part of who I am. If you believe this is an "abomination" because the Bible says so, I can't argue with that. I respect your beliefs. If you say it's "unnatural" because it conflicts with procreation, I can't see the point of starting an endless philosophical debate on what is "natural". 
However, if you say you "disagree" with homosexuality(thread on feminism) then I have to contest that. You can disagree with an opinion, not with an inherent state. You will argue that you can, because you believe that homosexuality is a "choice" or a "lifestyle". Well, again you're entitled to this view. But can you back it up? First Freud told us it was all to do with an unresolved Oedipus complex. Then we were told that gays have a smaller hypothalamus and that it may all be genetic. The jury is still out. But any gay person will tell you that it never felt like a choice. I grew up in a tiny town in Southern Italy in a strictly Catholic family. It was the 60s but it still felt like the 50s there. I was taught that gays are perverts. _Ricchione _was the most offensive, dreaded word you could use to another kid. When I realized I was "one of them" at 14 I was devastated. I desperately tried to go to bed with girls to prove to myself that I was mistaken. I had no one to talk to. I was depressed and reclusive through my teens. I had suicidal thoughts. Why on earth would I *choose* to be something that caused me such anguish?

When Pasolini was murdered in 1975 we were having lunch. My brother-in-law said: "Well done! I'd be proud to be that young man(the killer)'s father". I packed my bags and went off to London. 

Just when I had finally come to terms with being gay, something strange happened. Overnight my mental state underwent a sea-change. I had boundless energy, two hours' sleep was more than enough, I felt an electrical energy racing through my body, my brain was on the rampage and dictating my every move. At first it felt good. I spent money like there was no tomorrow, made lots of friends, bought everyone presents, I was out and about 20 hours a day. A few hours to recharge and out I was again. Then something snapped. The boundless energy turned nasty. I became verbally aggressive. I was on a mission to rid Italy of corrupt politicians. I felt like an avenging angel sent to earth to fight injustice, hypocrisy and prejudice. Eventually I lost touch with reality. I was committed to a mental hospital and treated with ECTs and insulin shocks. Then came the diagnosis: mania, bipolar disorder. I was told there was no cure, only lifelong management through drugs with all kinds of nasty side-effects. Science could not explain the cause. The brain is still a mystery. They told me I was actually lucky. My manic episodes are years apart. Still, it took me twenty years to accept that I am "mentally ill". Even now, when a manic episode subsides, I am left wondering who I am. My sense of identity is shattered. Which is me? The raving maniac or the mild, respected teacher? And I'm riddled with guilt at the pain I inflict on family and friends.
I take my pills religiously but apparently I belong to the minority that doesn't respond to treatment. I feel like a guinea-pig. Every few years a new drug comes out. Nothing seems to work.

So my sexual orientation is "unnatural". My brain chemistry is "abnormal". You've won. I embrace your labels. 

Can you see beyond the label, though?


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## maxiogee

A couple of thoughts on your thread starter.



			
				moodywop said:
			
		

> This is going to be personal - no holds barred. I know some of you may find disclosing personal details distasteful. *If so, read no further*. Others may see it as self-advertising or seeking pity. While we may never know our deepest motives fully,


Good for you.
I'm a firm believer in nailing my colours to the mast when the right moment arises. I did so recently on another thread regarding my relationship with alcohol and regarding my mental health.

I did that because it can often help others to understand me, to know where I'm coming from (a dreadful expression, I'm coming from a hugely varied landscape!) and occasionally it has proved the spark that has enabled others in the same situation to ask me questions which have bothered them for some time. Feck the "deepest motives", there's enough there to be going on with!  



			
				moodywop said:
			
		

> I'm not "gay". I'm a human being who happens, among many other, more important things, to be "gay"


Good for you. I'm not. Next topic please  




			
				moodywop said:
			
		

> If you believe this is an "abomination" because the Bible says so, I can't argue with that. I respect your beliefs.


This is the meat I wish to argue with you. Sorry to hijack the thread, but if the hijack develops sufficiently then we'll get a mod to split it off.

*If* beliefs are based on nothing more than some arcane and contradictory texts, purportedly inspired by a God, but very definitely written by humans with ulterior motives…
*And if* beliefs are things which people are not able to discuss and debate without recourse to "it just is" as a line of argument…
*And if* debate focusses purely on one interpretation of these revelatory and inspired writings — but the people who hold to them can weasel their way out of holding to other parts of these same writings, because they find them inconvenient…

*Then*, why the hell are you so tolerant as to "respect their beliefs"?
I totally fail to see why irrationality should be respected.


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## emma42

Moodywop, I am bowled over by such honesty, which I believe is purely an attempt to teach and ask others to think about their prejudices. Your language was "completely non-polemical" and I think that many, myself included, can learn from that.

I do, however, have to agree with Maxiogee on the question of "respecting beliefs", such as those he describes.  How can one tolerate the "intolerable" (a subjective word, but I am defining it as "irrational" as per Maxiogee's post)?


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## Outsider

I wish I had something insightful or inspiring to add. All I can say is that this is a very brave thread. Life really does play the craziest tricks on us, doesn't it?


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## Lucia Adamoli

I´m sorry to irrupt into this discussion just like that, I suppose that most of you already know each other from earlier discussions. 
We ALL carry our marks, but I don´t agree with the New Oxford Dictionnary´s definition. They are bad if we and our reference mark find it is so. (Whether we like it or not, our environment was, is and will be there for ever, at least, until something that some call god, others call fate, destiny, bad luck, unexplainable climate changes etc.,  call a tsunami and wraps everything out the map.) 
Back to the marks subject:  it´s what we do about that mark or mark-to be, that makes the difference. A mark is a label.
And I believe that if we connect ourselves with who we really are, and not what our parents, teachers, society, family, want us to be, the labels will cease to mean anything to everybody. Except if that is what we really want to be. That is one of the questions. I only have the knowings (some may say they have wisdom because they know something, but they have read it in a book that admits no discussions on its sayings) I have learnt from experience (mine or other´s). And to accept our real sexuality or philosophical, political, existential views of the reality. I believe in respect above all, and in not misjudging someone by his-her´s imposed labels.
It is, as Outsider said, a very hard topic.


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## Chaska Ñawi

My family has been marked indelibly by alcoholism, depression, and suicide manifesting themselves in different members.  I've also watched a close friend abandon his medication and degenerate into a spiral of paranoia and continual hallucinations. You get past these things, but never over them.  

While labels such as homosexual or bipolar or learning-disabled do not identify the person, they _are _a flag to me that the owners of the labels have probably put up with a lot of crap in life.  At the same time, I would never presume to say that I understand their situations, because I have never had to walk that path.  

And there but for the grace of God go I.

Carlo and Tony, my hat is off to you both.


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## Boyd

I personally hate the mental illness labels which indicate that the person has a chemical imbalance in the brain. Do they ever do biopsies? No they don't. Can they help the person without drugging them? Probably.


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## GenJen54

Boyd said:
			
		

> I personally hate the mental illness labels which indicate that the person has a chemical imbalance in the brain. Do they ever do biopsies? No they don't. Can they help the person without drugging them? Probably.
> http://forum.wordreference.com/editpost.php?do=editpost&p=1024879



You seem to understand much on the subject.  Do you have facts to back up your assertations?  If so, please provide them.  Hundreds of thousands of people are alive and thriving today thanks to the assistance of psychotropic medications.  Others are thriving without the assistance of medication, through psychological therapy and other methods.

There is no "one size fits all" cure for mental illness. 

The idea is not to cast judgment upon those for whom these medications may work.


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## coconutpalm

Lable? Mark? I don't like these words when applied to individuals. They promote nothing good but misunderstanding, hatred, conflict or even war (quote the case of Jews).
Chinese detest Japanese, Japanese despise Chinese, but how much we know each other? (I don't like Japan, but I tolerate its people) Do we really understand the cause why we hate each other? I think labelling plays a big role in this particular case.


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## maxiogee

Chaska Ñawi said:
			
		

> While labels such as homosexual or bipolar or learning-disabled do not identify the person, they _are _a flag to me that the owners of the labels have probably put up with a lot of crap in life.


As someone who has seen more than his fair share of that crap, I don't think many of the people who struggle with the problems you mention see it as anything special.
Speaking purely for myself, I think everybody puts up with a vast amount of crap - but homosexuals and alcoholics, depressives and the dispossessed are just people who know what their crap is called. The rest of the world still gets crap chucked at it, but they don't have a handle (label) for it. Having a label for it is the start of understanding it.



> And there but for the grace of God go I.
> Carlo and Tony, my hat is off to you both.


I can't speak for Carlo, but I doubt my crap outweighs yours. I just organise mine better!  And, having done that, I'm seeing a lot less of it than I used to, and a lot less than I now see others wading through!


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## daoxunchang

I feel much tiredness in moodywop's post. Hope you will feel better every tomorrow.


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## Boyd

GenJen54 said:
			
		

> You seem to understand much on the subject. Do you have facts to back up your assertations? If so, please provide them. Hundreds of thousands of people are alive and thriving today thanks to the assistance of psychotropic medications. Others are thriving without the assistance of medication, through psychological therapy and other methods.
> 
> There is no "one size fits all" cure for mental illness.
> 
> The idea is not to cast judgment upon those for whom these medications may work.


The facts are easy to obtain for anyone who wishes to seek them. I don't believe that I have cast any judgement on those for whom these medications may work. My comments have to do with exactly what I stated nothing more nothing less.


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## maxiogee

Boyd said:
			
		

> I personally hate the mental illness labels which indicate that the person has a chemical imbalance in the brain. Do they ever do biopsies? No they don't.



What would a biopsy prove? There is a "normal" range of these chemicals. Depressives fall outside that range.
The amounts which are there (in a medicated person) would only appear as "normal", and in an unmedicated person the differences between them and "normal" would probably not be measurable to the degree of proof. Anyway, people don't tend to die of depression, they die of other things and they're what post-mortems seek to find.




			
				Boyd said:
			
		

> Can they help the person without drugging them? Probably.


I don't know how it is where you are, but over here there are many non-chemical routes tried in the search for what might treat the patient.


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## geve

Outsider has expressed my feeling.
Sometimes, when debating, we tend to overlook that we're talking about human beings. This thread is a beautiful illustration of that, and a great reminder.


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## moura

Hi moodywop

Just a simple message, because my head is too tired for long ones. Congratulations for courage, hopes for the future _and (_see that_)times are changing._
Also something very "la palisse" but very true: if we don't like ourselves who will? You're right to be that way, just like I or anyone else is right to be otherway. Just that.  
Saluti


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## moodywop

Only last night I asked a mod if this thread could be removed. Although I made it clear that mine wasn't meant to be an exercise in self-pity but rather an attempt to foster understanding, I feared (I still do) that it might be misinterpreted.

Let me tell you what made me change my mind. I remembered that a memoir called _An Unquiet Mind. A Memoir of Moods and Madness _literally saved my life when I was diagnosed and hesitated to take my meds because of all the antipsychiatric literature I had read in my radical youth (_The Myth of Mental Illness _etc). In _An Unquiet Mind _Professor Kay Jamison of Johns Hopkins, possibly the leading world expert on the disorder, revealed that she suffered from a severe form of BD herself, including psychosis and hallucinations. In the preface she said she had overcome her hesitation (and her fear she might lose her job and her patients'/colleagues' trust) because she felt a moral imperative to "come clean" and because she hoped she might help others. She was right. As I turned the pages I recognized myself in her account. And her living demonstration that a meaningful, rewarding life was possible through treatment and therapy gave me hope.
Since I "came out" to friends and colleagues I have been able to help others myself.

Another reason for my post was my sadness at seeing abstract, de-humanizing labels pinned on minority groups in some discussions here. I thought that while in some cases the "fear of otherness" that leads to "stigma" can masquerade behind religious/moral dogma, the stigma attached to mental illness cannot hide behind ideology: it is based on pure, unmediated fear. No moral tenets or biblical edicts at stake here.

Certainly, enormous progress has been made. Only a few decades ago mental hospitals were hideous lagers. Lobotomy was acceptable. ECT was administered massively. Psychiatrists in the Soviet Union were locking up and torturing political dissidents.

The stigma survives, though, in society at large. Fear is based on ignorance. Compared to my country, where ignorance reigns supreme, in the UK and the USA several artists, writers, journalists have written candid memoirs (William Styron's _Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness,_ Danielle Steele's and Patty Duke's autobiographies come to mind). Richard Gere's realistic portrait of mania in an otherwise schmaltzy movie (_Mr Jones)_ and _A Beautiful Mind _have fostered greater awareness. So have characters in popular series like _ER._

Still, there is no doubt that unless you have experienced it among family or friends mental illness is hard to fathom and empathize with.
Antipsychiatry hasn't helped (although its denunciation of psychiatric abuse can't be overestimated). Its blaming it all on society and seeing medication as "repressive" has done great damage. Boyd, even without the evidence provided by studies on twins separated at birth, I can feel intuitively that my brain chemistry is awry and the genetic origin is evident in my family history.

Meds can and do help, but good therapy and the support of family and friends are just as fundamental. That's why fighting ignorance and prejudice matters so much.

My principal and fellow teachers at my school have seen a face behind the label. Their warm support, patience and willingness to understand are a tribute to the human capacity for empathy.

May those who cast stones see past the ideological mist that clouds their sight and realize they're casting stones at a mirror.


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## coconutpalm

Pity? Whoever can ever pity others? Each human being is a humble creature in this vast universe. We can only empathysize with others.

Most of my roommates have come to accept that homosexual is "less unnatural" than they thought when I have argued with them for many many times. Sadly enough, they still call them "abnormal" people (labelling). Whenever they say this word, I get angry. Homosexuals are definitely not abnormal, but simply different from the majority in ONE aspect.

We are all different more or less in this way or that. However, people (sometimes I can't avoid such mistakes too) keep labelling themselves as Group A, Group B, Group C according to some, what? Basic principle, natural principle, God's principle. Haha.


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## Boyd

My intention is simply to point out that those who claim chemical imbalances do not ever make any physical tests to support that claim and yes where I am from "there are many non-chemical routes tried in the search for what might treat the patient."  That in my opinion should always be the first treatment provided but sadly this is not the case. It is not my intention at all to label anyone derrogatorily if they need help.


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## Chaska Ñawi

The topic of medication versus non-medication does not really fall under the scope of this thread.  

Boyd, you have been invited to produce facts to back up your assertions.  I am still awaiting these facts, in the context of the topic of stigma.


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## cuchuflete

"...not ever..." is too strong.  Perhaps you mean infrequently.



> At the 2001 conference for The American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, expert Victoria Arango reported that "the brains of people who were depressed and died by suicide contained fewer neurons in the orbital prefrontal cortex...


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## Boyd

Regarding my "invitation" - which smacks loudly of an order - to produce facts, they are readily available at the website for the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights. This should be sufficient.


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## maxiogee

There are no orders given here (except the regular instructions I used to receive to stop chatting and stay on-topic), but people who — in any of the forums here — cite "facts" without support for them are regularly challenged to back these facts up.
I was challenged not too long ago to provide support for something I was saying. The expression "ipse dixit" was used. I and the challenger reached a mutual agreement in time.


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## Boyd

Thanks Max. I will certainly keep that in mind in the future.


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## moodywop

coconutpalm said:
			
		

> Pity? Whoever can ever pity others? Each human being is a humble creature in this vast universe. We can only empathysize with others.


 
Hi coconutpalm

I really meant to write "self-pity" and I've amended my post. I wasn't referring to any of the posts in this thread but to my concern that my motives might be misinterpreted.

I appreciate your comments and the ones made by other posters here, just as I appreciate the open-mindedness you have shown in your posts in another, label-ridden thread.

I totally share your emphasis on empathy.


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## emma42

I read no self-pity whatsoever in your post, moodywop.  Just an intelligent and very honest account.

Labels are, indeed, unfair, unjust and do not describe the whole truth.  

As to the question of the stigma of mental illness, well this is still something of an uphill struggle.  People who have not experienced mentall illness will find it very difficult to understand.  However, the empathy shown by your colleagues and employer is exactly the way to go, and is a model of best practice.  You must have proven yourself to be an effective and empathic teacher.  Case closed.


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## Seana

Hi moodywop,

I decided to join to your conversation therefore a long time ago I didn't already read something such interesting thing, taking a point of view of the tolerance of othernesses. Appreciating the fact that you dared to introduce one's own personal confidences, I would like to thank you very much that doing it you are making people aware of exactly it, that behind general opinions and labels it could be found a specific man with his drama of the solitude and the rejection. 
Just exactly this year togheter with my friends we have been shocked by unusual fact - one of our old good friend had divorced - the reason - his homosexuality. 
Look moodywop, how this man might be experienced by solitude terrible suffering just through all these years, having a "normal" lifestyle - nobody had suspected it. And now look at the other side - his wife and two beautiful teenage daughters? Aren't they also the victims of this situation? It is obvious - they are. He is a very sensitive man he has written some poems that were published. I only know that the milieu at work didn't reject him. He was a teacher in primary school and he still is. 
Unfortunately, I think anywhere it would be happened - rejecting and the intolerance to othernesses are lying dormant still in us as a mankindes since cave times.
However it would be very difficult to change the general conviction of average people at last It could be seen regular, steady and really visible progress in this topic and much more tolerance both for the sex as well as mental otherness although ever so slowly is appearing in human souls. 

Greetings


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## coppergirl

moodywop said:
			
		

> So my sexual orientation is "unnatural". My brain chemistry is "abnormal". You've won. I embrace your labels.
> 
> Can you see beyond the label, though?


Well, for what it is worth, I can see beyond them. In fact, I had 6 months of fairly serious post-natal depression. I have a friend with bi-polar disorder, and another whose brother has had to cope with schizophrenia for years. 

The thing I hated the most about when I had the post-natal depression was that some people---even family members---spent a lot of time suggesting that this was something I was somehow in control of. Like I just was not trying hard enough to get out of it.

I was always a fairly enthusiastic, energetic person and suddenly it was as though I were someone else. My husband was hugely supportive during this time and held everything together for us. But there were still people who suggested that I was probably just seeking attention or hoping for additional help with the baby or something. 

All that, even though there was TONS of information on post-natal depression, treatments etc. available to the general public at that time. 

I will never forget how that felt---it was as though I had my life hijacked completely, and half the people who should have been supportive kept suggesting that if I just "tried a little harder" it would all be just splendid. 

My own view can be summed up in this quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer---"We must learn to regard people less in light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.”


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## danielfranco

Often, I write posts that are elliptical or farfetched or just plain imbecilic. I want you all to please disregard my past behavior for at least this post:

To moodywop,
I want to thank you for sharing so much in this post. I want to thank you for your sincerity and honesty.
I have nothing worth of posting in this thread except my admiration for you, and my best wishes.
Truly,
Daniel Franco.


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## maxiogee

Fine sentiments, danielfranco, and it takes a big person to be able to say them.
Good for you.


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## emma42

Good for you, danielfranco.


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## Benjy

what is to be achieved by disrespecting it? 



> *If* beliefs are based on nothing more than some arcane and contradictory texts, purportedly inspired by a God, but very definitely written by humans with ulterior motives…
> *And if* beliefs are things which people are not able to discuss and debate without recourse to "it just is" as a line of argument…
> *And if* debate focusses purely on one interpretation of these revelatory and inspired writings — but the people who hold to them can weasel their way out of holding to other parts of these same writings, because they find them inconvenient…
> 
> *Then*, why the hell are you so tolerant as to "respect their beliefs"?
> I totally fail to see why irrationality should be respected.


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## emma42

To possibly deter/dissuade others from adopting those views?


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## maxiogee

*Not respecting* something is a long way from *disrespecting* it, benjy.

I don't respect the national anthem of xyzland when they play Ireland at tiddleywinks, but I don't disrespect it.


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## Benjy

maxiogee said:
			
		

> *Not respecting* something is a long way from *disrespecting* it, benjy.
> 
> I don't respect the national anthem of xyzland when they play Ireland at tiddleywinks, but I don't disrespect it.



ahh. right. sorry. you know, it's at time like this when i start thinking i really shou;d be more strict about bedtime 

ben


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## maxiogee

Benjy said:
			
		

> ahh. right. sorry. you know, it's at time like this when i start thinking i really shou;d be more strict about bedtime
> 
> ben



Me too. 'tis late and brains and fingers get addled.  
Good night JohnBoy!


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## GenJen54

Once again, forer@s have taken the opportunity to hijack a thread with posts that are disparaging and judgmental, and not at all on topic. 

Forer@s are welcome to continue posting as long as their posts remain on the topic of *STIGMA*, and do not present *personal judgments*.

GenJen54
Moderator


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## geve

As I said earlier, I think this thread raises a fundamental issue.
It is about understanding that someone is something that you're not, has something that you don't have; and whether it is possible for you to understand this person's feelings and point of view, considering that you have no experience of what they live and go through, of what life resembles when you see it through their eyes. Can we really imagine what a person's life is like without having walked in their shoes? 

"Otherness", says the title. 
The other is not an ennemy or a threat. The other is not an alien. The other is not a concept. The other is a human being, as imperfect and as clueless when faced to this world's misery, as we all are.

There are many ways to be "different", many "othernesses". Everyone can become "the other" one day (or already is "the other" for someone, but hasn't had to suffer from it yet). Until that day, it is hard to realize how that feels. Can we understand that? That's the thread's question as I understand it, and a very important one. 

When you know someone who is one of these "others", otherness takes a new dimension, acquires a firmer reality. So yes, I believe that sharing your experience of otherness helps to better understand it, and both parts can benefit from it.


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## scotu

emma42 said:
			
		

> *Labels are, indeed, unfair, unjust and do not describe the whole truth.*
> 
> Case closed.


 
You ar right of course but what about those that choose to label themselves; as in "I am gay!" or "I am a born-again Christian!"

I am sad when I hear someone engaging in "self-labeling" Because I feel like they have just told me the sum total of everything that is important to themselves, making me feel that there is little hope in having the pleasure of continually discovering new facets of their lives.

I am no less sad when I hear someone using these lables to describe another person. In doing so they have now exposed themselves as a person of prejudice and ignorance, which in my opinion diminishes whatever interest I might otherwise have had in forming a future friendship.


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## coppergirl

scotu said:
			
		

> You ar right of course but what about those that choose to label themselves; as in "I am gay!" or "I am a born-again Christian!"
> 
> I am sad when I hear someone engaging in "self-labeling" Because I feel like they have just told me the sum total of everything that is important to themselves, making me feel that there is little hope in having the pleasure of continually discovering new facets of their lives.
> 
> I am no less sad when I hear someone using these lables to describe another person. In doing so they have now exposed themselves as a person of prejudice and ignorance, which in my opinion diminishes whatever interest I might otherwise have had in forming a future friendship.


I agree with this wholeheartedly. I have the job of raising two children and one of the things I tell them is that it would be best if they didn't spend a lot of their lives trying to label themselves as too many things. People seem to spend a lot of time trying to define themselves and to draw distinctions between themselves and others. This gets downright silly sometimes---we have neighbours who look down on others because they have a more expensive car, their house is larger, they make more money or whatever. 

In fact, I have told the kids that each time you draw such a distinction in order to feel superior to someone else in some way---regardless of what this is based on---it is like adding a bar to a cage that you build to separate yourself from others. But in the end, you find that you have only managed to trap yourself within your cage and that, maybe one day when you want to reach out to someone else who is different from you, you won't be able to do so because you have caged yourself in your own arbitrary ideology and have closed yourself off from others.

This, to me, is what stigma is---it is being on the outside of someone else's cage, but they are the one who is actually trapped.


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## moodywop

Thank you, GenJen, for keeping this thread from derailing.

Thank you, Daniel Franco and Seana, for your empathy.

Coppergirl, Geve and Scotu have addressed some key issues. They are related but I'm not bright enough to weave them together so I'll address them separately, starting with Scotu:



> You are right of course but what about those that choose to label themselves; as in "I am gay!" or "I am a born-again Christian!"
> 
> I am sad when I hear someone engaging in "self-labeling". Because I feel like they have just told me the sum total of everything that is important to themselves, making me feel that there is little hope in having the pleasure of continually discovering new facets of their lives


 
My feelings precisely. As I said in my first post I am first and foremost a human being, with all the facets and contradictions, qualities and flaws that make each of us a unique individual. Saying "I'm gay" (which I'm sometimes forced to do for practical reasons and brevity's sake, e.g, if someone tries to set me up with a girl , or in the course of this debate) is unbearably "riduttivo" (reductive?). Both self-labelling and the labelling of others reduce the complexity of an individual to a single, non-defining trait.

I am actually considered as a reactionary by gay activists. I am utterly against the concept of "gay pride". I can only be proud of something good I've achieved. How can I be proud of something in which no choice was involved? I'm also against the idea of a "gay community". I don't feel part of any such community. Apart from my belonging to the human community I can't see the point of subscribing to sub-communities. 

I have an even more fundamental objection to the tendency of the gay movement to speak of a "gay culture" and a "gay history". To me it seems like a mirror image of homophobia: you implicitly accept the bundling together of people based purely on their sexual orientation (which is what I object to in the first place). To paraphrase Erich Segal, real liberation means never having to say you're gay.

Why should I feel better if Leonardo and Michelangelo were gay? They were also Italians. Should I feel proud to be Italian because of that? We should all be proud that they showed us what the human mind is capable of at its best. In the same way I feel shame and horror at man's capacity for pure evil, wherever and by whoever evil deeds were perpetrated. Collective guilt for man's inhumanity to man should not be restricted to the nations where that inhumanity was displayed but be shared by all of us, irrespective of nationality, creed etc.


----------



## moodywop

geve said:
			
		

> As I said earlier, I think this thread raises a fundamental issue.
> It is about understanding that someone is something that you're not, has something that you don't have; and whether it is possible for you to understand this person's feelings and point of view, considering that you have no experience of what they live and go through, of what life resembles when you see it through their eyes. Can we really imagine what a person's life is like without having walked in their shoes?
> 
> "Otherness", says the title.
> The other is not an ennemy or a threat. The other is not an alien. The other is not a concept. The other is a human being, as imperfect and as clueless when faced to this world's misery, as we all are.
> 
> There are many ways to be "different", many "othernesses". Everyone can become "the other" one day (or already is "the other" for someone, but hasn't had to suffer from it yet). Until that day, it is hard to realize how that feels. Can we understand that? That's the thread's question as I understand it, and a very important one.
> 
> When you know someone who is one of these "others", otherness takes a new dimension, acquires a firmer reality. So yes, I believe that sharing your experience of otherness helps to better understand it, and both parts can benefit from it.


 
Geve

Why didn't we meet before? I'd like to be able to reach across cyberspace and plant a big kiss on your cheek 

You went to the core of the issue. Can we understand and empathize with a human experience which is alien to us? My tentative answer is that no, we can't achieve *complete *understanding and empathy but we can, to varying degrees, come closer to it if we try.

When I am "manic" my friends split in two camps. Some stay close and patiently bear with my eccentric behaviour. They listen to my logorrhoic outbursts. Interestingly, most of them have experienced mental illness through friends or family. Others shun me until I get back to "normal", saying things like: "I can't bear to see you like that", "I don't hate you - I hate your illness", "I know you don't mean the hurtful things you say but they still hurt". I totally respect that. If I want them to undertand me I owe it to them to understand their feelings.

What bothers me though is when people tell me they can't understand _tout court._ These friends are cultured people. They love art, literature, good movies. Now, haven't we always been told that good art and literature help us understand and empathize with human experience at its most diverse? I wasn't in a concentration camp, but Primo Levi's _If This is a Man_ brings me as close as I can possibly get to that modicum of understanding I can reach without having lived through such a horrifying, de-humanizing experience.



			
				 geve said:
			
		

> Everyone can become "the other" one day


 
Absolutely. And my singular "otherness" has made me a more empathetic, questioning, non-dogmatic human being. In some ways it may be a curse but in others I see it as a "gift". Whenever I myself am tempted (an inherent human trait) to label other forms of "otherness" or let the label cloud my judgment an alarm bell goes off and I take a step back. 

One of the antipsychiatry classics I read in my radical years at college (before I "went mad") was _The Manufacture of Madness _by Thomas Szasz. I was a bit tough on antipsychiatry earlier. I disagree with some of its more extreme positions and the blanket condemnation of all psychiatry. But its seeing psychiatric diagnostic classifications as yet more de-humanizing labels still strikes a chord with me:

_To man, the herd animal, as to his non-human ancestors, safety lies in similarity. This is why conformity is good, and deviance evil...__Anyone who values individual liberty, human diversity, and respect for persons can only be dismayed at this spectacle. To one who believes, as I do, that the physician ought to be a protector of the individual, even when the individual comes in conflict with society, it is especially dismaying that, in our day, the painting of birds has become an accepted medical activity, and that, among the colors used, psychiatric diagnoses are most in fashion. _

He is referring to "The Painted Bird", a story by Jerzy Kosinski which he quotes in the epilogue. In it a man performs a cruel ritual. He catches a raven and paints its wings, head, and breast in different, vivid colours. Then he releases the painted bird as a flock of ravens flies over. "As soon as it joined the flock a desperate battle began. The changeling was attacked from all sides. Black, red, green, blue feathers began to drop at our feet. The ravens ran amuck in the skies, and suddenly the painted raven plummeted to the freshly-plowed soil".
(The rest of the excerpt and of Szasz's comments here)


----------



## moodywop

coppergirl said:
			
		

> .
> 
> The thing I hated the most about when I had the post-natal depression was that some people---even family members---spent a lot of time suggesting that this was something I was somehow in control of. Like I just was not trying hard enough to get out of it.
> 
> I will never forget how that felt---it was as though I had my life hijacked completely, and half the people who should have been supportive kept suggesting that if I just "tried a little harder" it would all be just splendid.


 
Coppergirl

This is a most common reaction. People genuinely believe they are helping and their motives are good. But if you read some of the excellent books aimed at spouses/relatives/friends of severely depressed people that is exactly what they tell you not to do. It just makes the depressed person feel even more guilty than they already do.

That's why I never get tired of praising the brave people who threw privacy to the wind and wrote about their experience of mental illness. One of these is Lewis Wolpert, a brilliant, successful British biologist, who wrote _Malignant Sadness _and later turned it into a programme on BBC2, _A Living Hell._ It struck me how he honestly admits that until he suddenly fell into a life-destroying depression he had seen depression as a sign of weakness:

_I have to admit that I rather sneeringly used to proclaim that I believed in the Sock School of Psychiatry - just pull them up..._
_Depression is a serious illness and one should treat with contempt anyone who would argue that it is not, but merely, as some would claim, a mood disorder. It is rather like calling a heart attack a chest disorder._
_(Descent into Darkness, in The Guardian)_

Writers like William Styron and Kay Jamison have explained the difference between depression precipitated by a sad event and so-called clinical depression, which strikes out of the blue:

_Like anyone else I have always had times when I felt deeply depressed, but this was something altogether new in my experience--a despairing, unchanging paralysis of the spirit beyond anything I had ever known or imagined could exist..._
_All capacity for pleasure disappears, and despair maintains a merciless daily drumming..._
_Depression is a wimp of a word for a howling tempest in the brain_
_(W. Styron - Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness)_

_Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable_
_(Kay Jamison - An Unquiet Mind)_

In an interview Kay Jamison has also explained the reasons (in addition to an obvious concern for privacy and for professional repercussions) why she had hesitated to tell her story. They go to the heart of "stigma":

_I have been very concerned, perhaps unduly, with how knowing that I have manic-depressive illness will affect people's perception of who I am and what I do._
_Finally, I am deeply wary that by speaking publicly or writing about such intensely private aspects of my life, I will return to them one day and find them bleached of meaning and feeling...I fear that the experiences will become those of someone else rather than my own._

She has explained better than I could ever put into words those that are also my concerns. They can't be dismissed easily but, like her, I decided to put them on hold.


----------



## Seana

Hello

I hope I wouldn't go "off topic" if I underlined one important thing that we all are able to  *talk and discuss *each other about "stigma topic" and this possibility has just happened thanks to the *internet *
The freedom of the word in the connection with the anonymity an internet is giving is causing, that many persons usually hiding one's desires, the dissimilarity, can without no obstacles or inhibitions reveal concealed his real true "I" and one's reflections without any emotion and shame or the embarrassment. However I would probably never have the possibility to have such a wonderful contact with somebody with this legible label. 
I am sure this thread is changing some my thoughts and will contribute to the shift of some opinions and in a future time I am sure in my private duscussions subconsciously even I will be trying to make something of your thoughts over.
Unfortunately, I think the people just with stigmas ( not the lebels, because some of them very often have very positive associations) are worrying oneself for the fact that they will be unmasked and their life will be destroyed by intolerant people. But look, the society largely just consisted of this sorts of persons is usually treating homosexuals reluctantly forgetting about the fact that there are known and respected writers, musicians, actors, painters among them ( Wilde Oscar, the composer Piotr Tchaikovsky or musicians: Bellboy the George, Elton the John and actors James Dean, the Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift...). Theirs legacy for the world culture is huge. 
Some times ago I have heart just this sentence:
"All large, all brilliant these are gays. (...) Because this all architecture, of different kind able scientists worldwide, poets, painters, it largely these are gays. And they are creating the culture".

I think it is a sort of label too but in the opposite direction. Isn't it?  

Seana


----------



## maxiogee

Despite anything which has been said here, I'm still in favour of self-labelling, at least in relation to other people.

 It means that I can control the time and the place when information about me is released, and the way it is formatted.
 It also means that by controlling those I also control, to a certain extent, how others can react to that information. This relieves me of the on-going niggling doubts such as "What if they find out about my alcoholism from someone else?" or "What if they only find out that I suffer from depression by my having a serious bout on the job one day?"
 It also means that by controlling those I also control, to a certain extent, how others can react to that information. This relieves me of the on-going niggling doubts such as "What if they find out about my alcoholism from someone else?" or "What if they only find out that I suffer from depression by my having a serious bout on the job one day?"
 It also means that I'm ready to answer any questions which might arise from the knowledge I give them.
 It also means that some people get a chance to ask questions which have been on their minds for quite some time concerning themselves or others, but which they haven't had the chance, or a person, to ask.
 And finally and probably most importantly it means that I can show that I'm not ashamed of being either an alcoholic or a depressive. And if anything can help other people to understand "otherness" it can only be knowledge and experience.
Self-labelling does not mean that I go around all day and every day with "I am an alcoholic" or "I am a depressive" at the forefront of my mind. Some days there's too much other stuff going on for me to even think about those things.

If other people work with me and know I'm an [alcoholic]/[depressive], and can see that I can still function as a regular person, it might inform their reaction to the next [alcoholic]/[depressive] (possibly a less functioning one) they come across. 

I think it all boils down to this…
If people don't have positive experiences of "otherness" they will only have negative thoughts about it.


----------



## daoxunchang

scotu said:
			
		

> You ar right of course but what about those that choose to label themselves; as in "I am gay!" or "I am a born-again Christian!"
> 
> I am sad when I hear someone engaging in "self-labeling" Because I feel like they have just told me the sum total of everything that is important to themselves, making me feel that there is little hope in having the pleasure of continually discovering new facets of their lives.
> 
> I am no less sad when I hear someone using these lables to describe another person. In doing so they have now exposed themselves as a person of prejudice and ignorance, which in my opinion diminishes whatever interest I might otherwise have had in forming a future friendship.


 
scotu, I agree with you when using my logical thinking. However, I have much envy --- I think there must be a better word, but I can not recall. Sorry --- for those self-labeling and self-labeled people, because they have a firm belief in something. And this "those" include you, scotu. They are blessed with a belief so they can stand firmly. Even if they have to go through any earthquake in their mind, they have a standpoint to be shaken. They could lead a peaceful life, at least mentally.
Unlike them, I, having being in this world fro nineteen years, do not have a standpoint in mind. I have being thinking for many years and after these years I find out that I have been making a mistake, which our ancestors had long ago pointed out, "One gets confused when he only thinks but not learns". So at present I am trying to "learn", including learing from people on this forum. But this act of "learning", which I expected to give me a standpoint, has not settle my spirit down.
Please think of the good in those stubborn people. They are also people with "otherness" for you. Do not shun them so easily.


----------



## moodywop

Tony

I actually agree with everything you just said. I would also add that these are big issues to do with one's sense of self. My attitude has swung back and forth over the years. Young radical Carlo would have reacted angrily to my post on "gay". He's still kicking and screaming somewhere inside me 

I'm often accused of hairsplitting but to me language matters. If by self-labelling you mean being open about a personal trait/problem etc then I'm all for it. I objected to the transformation of a "label" into an "identity" which, in my opinion, some gay activists advocate. How can sexual orientation lead to a common identity in which all those with that orientation can recognize themselves? 

Of course I agree that openness dispels myths and stereotypes and helps those who have difficulty accepting their "otherness".


----------



## Chaska Ñawi

I'm impressed by those people who are able to talk about these things, because there are places in my life that I still cannot revisit, even in my thoughts.

I still cannot have even a casual conversation about suicide without a physical reaction.  Just typing that last sentence accelerated my heartbeat.  This makes openness on suicide and some other topics very difficult indeed.  It's one thing to mention that you have certain baggage; it's something very different when people see this as an invitation to ask questions or discuss it.

I'd imagine that there are quite a few of us who are quiet about certain issues as much because of the pain as because of the stigma.


----------



## maxiogee

moodywop said:
			
		

> I objected to the transformation of a "label" into an "identity" which, in my opinion, some gay activists advocate. How can sexual orientation lead to a common identity in which all those with that orientation can recognize themselves?



It can't.
I'm a heterosexual male, but there are many others who make me anything from "ashamed", through "jealous" and on to "look celibate"!  
It's like my Irishness - some days I'm happy with it, and on others I wonder what people like panjandrum think of us down here. However, it's only an adjective applied, not an identity assumed.


----------



## moodywop

Chaska must have read my mind. I was just thinking that in all my talk of stigma I had neglected to mention the invisible victims of mental illness: the close relatives and friends who have to go through the excruciating pain of seeing a dear one lose touch with reality or sink into depression and at the same time feel frustrated and guilty at not being able to help, despite all their love and best efforts.

Chaska, I am deeply sorry that this discussion has brought back sad memories.

Carlo


----------



## Chaska Ñawi

Carlo, please do not apologize.  There is no need whatsoever.  

I could have absented myself from this thread had I wished to do so, but am here by choice.

Thank you for summing things up so well.

a warm hug,
Chaska


----------



## geve

This is going to be not exactly on the topic of stigma, but on otherness, as some othernesses are not stigmatized by society. I am not very erudite on that matter, these are my "gut feelings" on it.

I think I can understand how self-labelization is needed to a certain extent. When my mother was killed in a car accident, I felt I had been thrown out of the "normal course" of life. I didn't want to be part of "those people who have lost a loved one from violent death". 
Yet at the beginning (and sometimes even now) I would have wanted to have it labelled on my forehead, because I believed that it was now a part of me and I felt changed inside, only it was not visible from the outside... except for the sad face of course - which made a nice elderly couple sitting next to my sisters and I in a cafeteria shortly afterwards say "now girls, it can't be that bad, can it?" 
Well, it can, but I don't want to bother you with it. This is the whole point actually: I don't want to bother you with it, my point is not to have you sympathetize, but I'd just like you to know. 
Because it's a clue to understand me -just one clue, among many others, on which even I sometimes cannot put a name.

Having an "otherness" participates of the whole self; which does not mean that the self can be reduced to it. The human being is a lot more than the sum of its qualities and shortcomings, pains and joys, othernesses and similarities. How could we judge people when we can barely understand ourselves?
This consciousness that we know very little should always be in our minds when we consider someone.


----------



## maxiogee

Sympathy and compassion, geve, are two words for the same thing. One is rooted in Greek and the other in Latin, but they both mean "feeling with" and to be truly accepted by the person they are being offered to, they need to come from experience of the same thing. For someone to "feel with me" they need to have been where I was - in whatever it is which is arousing this sympathy/compassion.
Modern meanings have taken over both of these words and they now seem to mean "to feel pity and sorrow for", which is not what the recipient is looking for, wants, needs, or even appreciates!


----------



## geve

Then I wonder: does sympathy/compassion as defined above really exist? Or is just theory?


			
				maxiogee said:
			
		

> For someone to "feel with me" they need to have been where I was


No one has ever been where you were -not fully. The way you react to something is linked to all the other experiences you have also been through. There is no way that anyone outside you knows exactly what you're feeling (which doesn't mean that it's not worth trying to grasp it of course)



			
				maxiogee said:
			
		

> Modern meanings have taken over both of these words and they now seem to mean "to feel pity and sorrow for", which is not what the recipient is looking for, wants, needs, or even appreciates!


Further than pity and sorrow, I think what one wants to see in the eyes set upon her/him, is simply _love_ -as the acceptance of one's being as a whole, with no restrictions.


----------



## maxiogee

geve said:
			
		

> Then I wonder: does sympathy/compassion as defined above really exist? Or is just theory?



I think it does. It comes not only from having trodden the same path in some experience, but also from having a close understanding of you, as only friends and extended family can have. But you are right, just having trodden the path doesn't automatically mean that there can be true sympathy/compassion.

I was devastated when my dad died, and a cousin who knew me was the only one who I could talk to about the sense of a hole having opened up inside of me. I hadn't prepared myself for that (of course, as a practising alcoholic at the time, I was far too wrapped up in self at the time) and she had had a similar (but sober) experience when her father died. We spoke for ages. It felt different that speaking with any of my other relatives - even my brothers or sister.


----------



## emma42

I was taught a sort of visual mind aid to trying to see things from another's perspective when I was training at the Citizens' Advice Bureau. I'm sorry if it seems a bit obvious, but it has helped me (when I remember to use it). You have to imagine two hills, side by side, with you on one hill and the other person on the other. You then have to climb down your hill and climb up the other person's, and then look at the view from their perspective. I have found it does concentrate the mind (if you are that sort of learner) and at least makes you pause before reacting/judging.

 As some people may have noticed, I often forget to do this exercise.


----------



## scotu

maxiogee said:
			
		

> Despite anything which has been said here, I'm still in favour of self-labelling, at least in relation to other people.
> 
> Self-labelling does not mean that I go around all day and every day with "I am an alcoholic" or "I am a depressive" at the forefront of my mind. Some days there's too much other stuff going on for me to even think about those things.
> 
> If other people work with me and know I'm an [alcoholic]/[depressive], and can see that I can still function as a regular person, it might inform their reaction to the next [alcoholic]/[depressive] (possibly a less functioning one) they come across.
> 
> I think it all boils down to this…
> If people don't have positive experiences of "otherness" they will only have negative thoughts about it.


 
This really isn't "self-labeling". You are simply sharing  some aspects of your being with us.  You are not saying "maxiogee = xyz"  As you put it in another post you have given us some *adjectives* to help us to know you better. If you were wearing a tee-shirt that says "proud to be a depressive-alcoholic" That would be self-labeling. I appreciate the way you have shared these "adjectives" with us because now our picture of maxiogee is a little richer.
On the other hand when you say "I am Irish" that definitely is "self-labeling".


----------



## daoxunchang

geve said:
			
		

> Having an "otherness" participates of the whole self; which does not mean that the self can be reduced to it. The human being is a lot more than the sum of its qualities and shortcomings, pains and joys, othernesses and similarities. How could we judge people when we can barely understand ourselves?
> This consciousness that we know very little should always be in our minds when we consider someone.


 
You have said exactly what I was thinking. Sadly I am always unable to express my feelings and thoughts.
And I want to add that the most candid exchange of opinions and the most sincere effort to try to understand each other do not necessarily bring about the desired result. And this makes it even more important to try to know oneself and be oneself.


----------



## scotu

maxiogee said:
			
		

> Sympathy and compassion, geve, are two words for the same thing. One is rooted in Greek and the other in Latin, but they both mean "feeling with" and to be truly accepted by the person they are being offered to, they need to come from experience of the same thing. For someone to "feel with me" they need to have been where I was - in whatever it is which is arousing this sympathy/compassion.
> Modern meanings have taken over both of these words and they now seem to mean "to feel pity and sorrow for", which is not what the recipient is looking for, wants, needs, or even appreciates!


 
I read an interesting book lately called "The Sociopath Next Door" . The author (Martha Stout) maintains that a person who _wants or needs_ sympathy is likely to be a sociopath. (sociopath = One who is affected with a personality disorder marked by antisocial behavior)


----------



## moodywop

geve said:
			
		

> Then I wonder: does sympathy/compassion as defined above really exist? Or is just theory?


 
Well, the word certainly exists: empathy. _The ability to share and understand the feelings of others_ (Oxford Dict). Interestingly, the Wikipedia article says that empathy often leads to compassion, but not necessarily. And that empathy can be painful, which is understandable.




> Further than pity and sorrow, I think what one wants to see in the eyes set upon her/him, is simply _love_ -as the acceptance of one's being as a whole, with no restrictions.


 
I promise this is my last quote from Kay Jamison. But it's interesting that although she is a professor of psychiatry, after saying that neither meds nor therapy is sufficient on its own, she goes on to say:

_But love is, to me, the ultimately more extraordinary part of the breakwater wall: it helps to shut out the terror and awfulness, while, at the same time, allowing in life and beuty and vitality...After each seeming death within my mind or heart, love has returned to re-create hope and to restore life_


----------



## maxiogee

scotu said:
			
		

> I read an interesting book lately called "The Sociopath Next Door" . The author (Martha Stout) maintains that a person who _wants or needs_ sympathy is likely to be a sociopath. (sociopath = One who is affected with a personality disorder marked by antisocial behavior)



I wasn't talking about a "needy" person, I was referring to what - if we go to offer our sympathy/compassion to someone who is in a time of crisis - they need from us then. But I only used the word "need" as a contrast to what I felt they most definitely "don't need" from us - and I was talking of the sort of situation which geve mentioned.

(On the subject of self-labelling, I accept your point that I didn't do it here, but I often do it more obviously and blatantly with people, "in the flesh" as it were.)


----------



## KaRiNe_Fr

Just few words to explain the case I experimented, being in the situation of supporting someone when in a crisis of mental disease. You have to feel very strong to be able to do it. I understand people who shuns when this happens to friends or family. It's the same when someone is sick and you know the fatal end. It's easy to say one should support, but when it's your turn it's really harder to do it. Sometimes you feel so helpless and it hurts you so deeply that you cannot do a good job.

Moodywop said something I never expressed as if I did I would be labellized "anti-gay": why gay should have been proud of their "state"? One can't be proud of something you didn't chose. That's really true.

Just my two euros, hope you'll forgive my awful English and can understand what I expressed.


----------



## maxiogee

KaRiNe_Fr said:
			
		

> Moodywop said something I never expressed as if I did I would be labellized "anti-gay": why gay should have been proud of their "state"? One can't be proud of something you didn't chose. That's really true.



After years of repression and oppression, is not gay "pride" really more a case of "no longer ashamed"?


----------



## KaRiNe_Fr

maxiogee said:
			
		

> After years of repression and oppression, is not gay "pride" really more a case of "no longer ashamed"?


Yes, I fully agree with your "no longer ashamed" expression, of course. I can understand that feeling, and don't blame the "gay-priders" (?).
My point was (and I was sure to be misunderstood) that, as moodywop said, the fact itself to be "proud" goes to the sense of those who point out homosexuality as a (bad) choice. And it's obviously not a choice. 
Does it make (more) sense?


----------



## moodywop

KaRiNe_Fr said:
			
		

> Just few words to explain the case I experimented, being in the situation of supporting someone when in a crisis of mental disease. You have to feel very strong to be able to do it. I understand people who shuns when this happens to friends or family. It's the same when someone is sick and you know the fatal end. It's easy to say one should support, but when it's your turn it's really harder to do it. Sometimes you feel so helpless and it hurts you so deeply that you cannot do a good job.


 
Karine

As I wrote earlier, I agree and I understand that it's very hard to be close to someone who is out of his mind. But this is my stable self speaking. When I was "manic" last October and November (I also disappeared from WR, which is just as well, I was so out of control that I would have been banned) I was terribly upset when some friends disappeared. I even wrote them a terrible email which started with "Farewell, false friends" and ended with the lyrics to "Streets of Philadelphia". They are still my friends now, but somehow it's not quite the same.



> Moodywop said something I never expressed as if I did I would be labellized "anti-gay": why gay should have been proud of their "state"? One can't be proud of something you didn't chose. That's really true.


 
Believe it or not, I have myself been called "homophobic" for saying that. There's a difference between "accepting" and "being proud of" something. This just goes to show that some activists, while demanding acceptance for the minority they represent(or claim to represent), are not prepared to extend that acceptance to members of their own minority who disagree with them (or, in some cases, to other minorities). It would be ironic if it weren't sad.

EDIT: If the discussion of the use of the word "pride" is taking us off topic then maybe a new thread might be started(I would stay away from it, though, as I've realized that overheated discussions play havoc with my mental health).
Oh, by the way, please call me Carlo


----------



## emma42

Karine, I have also thought what you thought about Gay Pride and Black Pride, but haven't really said anything because I thought the fact people were standing up for themselves was more important than semantics -  I am sure you feel the same way.  I wouldn't be worried about being labelled anti-gay or racist, though, because I could definitely give anyone who accused me of such attitudes "a run for their money".  I can understand why you felt that way, though.


----------



## geve

(Emma - thank you for the mental trick! Of course we can't always take a few minutes to weigh our words - we all get passionate sometimes, we're only human after all...)


			
				KaRiNe_Fr said:
			
		

> Just few words to explain the case I experimented, being in the situation of supporting someone when in a crisis of mental disease. You have to feel very strong to be able to do it. I understand people who shuns when this happens to friends or family. It's the same when someone is sick and you know the fatal end. It's easy to say one should support, but when it's your turn it's really harder to do it. Sometimes you feel so helpless and it hurts you so deeply that you cannot do a good job.


I think this goes with what Carlo said: empathy can be very painful, and sometimes, for some, the pain is just unbearable. Probably there is something in their history, that would explain why people can't cope... we'd have to climb their hill, too!


----------



## KaRiNe_Fr

geve said:
			
		

> ...we'd have to climb their hill, too!


Ok, let's climb then! 
But like Sysiphe with his rock, many times you fall down and have to climb again, and again, and again...


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## emma42

Yes, the empathy thing can be really really painful.  It is very important to recognise that.

Moodywop's post mentioning his "false friends" email was very sad.  This, I suppose would be a situation in which he would _have _to tell people about his bi-polar condition, if he wanted to build bridges and regain those friends.  I think his friends would have a duty to try to understand bi-polar disorder if they are truly "friends".  It saddens me that Moodywop feels that things are no longer the same.  He could not help the way he acted, and friends should understand this.


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## moodywop

emma42 said:
			
		

> This, I suppose would be a situation in which he would _have _to tell people about his bi-polar condition, if he wanted to build bridges and regain those friends.


 
Emma

I apologize for bringing up personal experiences again but they tell a lot more than psychiatric textbooks.

I learned a very interesting lesson: do not judge people by the views they expound but by their actions. My friends did know about bipolar and had witnessed previous manic episodes(not as intense, though). They are mostly university professors. One is a professor of psychology. He's an antipsychiatrist, against meds and writes papers arguing that "mental illness" doesn't exist. When confronted with the real thing he vanished.
My friends are also all left-wing, like me. In Italy people of my generation, who lived through the terrible decades when right-wing and left-wing extremists murdered their "enemies", still feel uncomfortable making friends with people having radically different political views (I'm not like that but I used to be). Well, the people who most helped me were a couple who run a shop down the road. I would spend hours in their shop. They would invite me to their place for dinner. They are right-wingers. After getting to know me they are no longer homophobic but still support capital punishment. I'm still working on that 

One final note: maybe because I'm an extremely mild person, when manic I'm *never* physically aggressive, only verbally. However, mania does unfortunately lead to physical aggressiveness in its most severe forms. I couldn't blame anyone for staying away from a physically aggressive person


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## emma42

Moodywop, there is absolutely no need to apologise!

I was really talking about the "false friends" on the Forum that you mentioned. In such a situation, fear of physical aggression would be absent. Your psychologist friend is just wrong (ooh, a sweeping statement).

I haven't mentioned things like racism and homophobia as "otherness" because I thought we needed to distinguish between what someone *is *rather than what I consider to be *learned *behaviours, if that makes sense.

*Edit. Moodywop was NOT actually talking about false friends on the Forum. I had completely misunderstood him. He was talking about friends in off-line life.*


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## moodywop

Emma

When I mentioned my email to "false friends" I was talking about my friends in my town, not about my friends here at WR. Actually my forero friends, the mods and Mike were all extremely understanding and supportive when I started writing over-emotional posts. Oh well, this misunderstanding gives me an opportunity to thank them


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## emma42

Moodywop, doesn't that just show how brilliant Mike and the Mods are?  What a Forum to be run by such people.  Truly an acceptance of "otherness".


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## coconutpalm

Last night (my time zone) when I was lying in bed, I kept thinking about this thread, and it occured to me that some self-label in a rather annoying way, that is, they are truly seeking pity but not empathy.
I know such people in the real life, and it's not comfortable to stay with them.


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## emma42

Yes, coconutpalm there are people like that.  If they didn't label themselves, they would seek pity in other ways.


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## Joelline

Carlo,

I cannot tell you how much I admire you for opening this thread and Maxiogee for responding it to so openly.  You have both sacrificed your privacy in order to promote understanding and to offer a helping hand to others!  And, in a strange paradox, I envy you, for I have no where near your courage or your tolerance for the pain associated with self-labeling or self-revelation.  I am ashamed that I am one of those who hide much because they "cannot bear too much reality." 

With affection and admiration,
Joelline


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## moodywop

This thread has more or less run its course. After maybe too much personalizing of the issues on my part, I'd like to go back to the generalities.
The issues touched upon are complex and do not lend themselves to simplistic, black and white answers. That may not be bad: achieving greater awareness and sensitivity may well be preferable to trying to draw impossibly definitive conclusions.
There are also endless ramifications, each of which would deserve a thread of its own.

Here are some of the key issues I'm left pondering about:

1. Stigma and otherness. Do humans really have an innate tendency (the herd instinct) to cast out The Other, as Szasz claims? _If the Other is unlike the members of the herd, he is cast out of the group and destroyed; if he is like them, man intervenes and makes him appear different, so that he may be cast out of the group and destroyed._
We may think we have come a long way from our "herd" days, but the dehumanization and extermination of the Other perpetrated by the Nazis (and by other regimes) maybe suggests that this latent instinct is always at risk of erupting, even after centuries of "civilization".

2. Why do the persecuted turn into persecutors? Why did the Christians, after suffering inhuman persecution at the hands of the Roman emperors, then go on to persecute(or encourage the persecution of) heretics, Jews, "witches" etc once they had become the dominant religion?

3. Leaving aside forms of otherness which ideological or religious dogma provides a justification for stigmatizing, even "others" like the mentally handicapped, towards whom there is no possible moral/religious stigmatization, were until recently locked away in inhumane facilities, as if even just seeing them made us uncomfortable. The same goes for the physically deformed, exhibited in circuses as "freaks".
Why couldn't we even bear to see them? What were we afraid of?
Where religion couldn't provide grounds for discrimination, science at its worst stepped in - witness the Nazi adoption of eugenics.

4. Sympathy and empathy. Does sympathy necessarily imply pity in a patronizing connotation? How does one develop greater empathy?

I have seen how empathy(or at least "seeing beyond the label") can be encouraged. Many teachers in Italy were sceptical when mentally handicapped children were no longer confined to "special" schools but admitted to ordinary schools. We usually have one or two per class. A "special needs" teacher sits in most of the time. All my pupils have welcomed these kids, looked after them and bonded with them. I have never ever heard an offensive or sneering remark. Often the most "undisciplined", "rough" kids have been the most caring. 

5. Is the concept of "mental illness" being applied too liberally, providing a diagnostic classification for every kind of "troublesome" behaviour? Are drugs being dispensed too easily as a result, as in the prescription of Ritalin to very young hyperactive kids?

6. Mental illness and genetics. Why do many radicals object so strongly to the idea that conditions such as schizophrenia may have a genetic base, even in the face of studies of identical twins separated at birth (thus discounting exogenous variables)? 
While psychiatry has been guilty of many terrible abuses in the past and drugs are still often used as an easy alternative to therapy, why not acknowledge that pharmacological treatment is sometimes the only option, at least as a first, emergency measure before a more balanced therapeutic approach can be attempted?

7. Genetics and free will. In 1938, well before genetics became all the rage, leading to simplistic headlines about the gene for infidelity/jealousy/violence etc being identified, an Italian writer, Cesare Pavese, plagued by mental illness (he committed suicide in 1950), wrote in his diary that his experience had led him to question the concept of free will.

Is there a risk that the expansion of genetic explanations for human behaviour may erode the idea of personal responsibility for one's actions?

_EDIT: While points 1-4 are directly related to the topic of this thread, I only included points 5-7 to sum up all the issues the debate has led me to consider. That's all it is - a summing up. I'm not encouraging off-topic discussion. Anybody who may want to discuss points 5-7 can open new threads._


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## maxiogee

moodywop said:
			
		

> 1. Stigma and otherness. Do humans really have an innate tendency (the herd instinct) to cast out The Other, as Szasz claims?



I think so.
I think it is deeply ingrained in us.

Look at the intake of new children into a school each year. It is usually their first experience of forming a social grouping, and one of the first things they do is to exclude.
They will very quickly decide who is not "in". What marks the 'outcast' is usually a visible difference. They are too tall, too small or too fat. They have an uncommon (compared to the rest of the class) hair colour or a physical disability. 
I'm not talking about bullying here - that's a whole separate issue.
I'm just talking about "ordinary" children. There's always an outcast - even if they have to dig deep to find a difference, to such things as a different accent.


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## coconutpalm

moodywop said:
			
		

> 3. Leaving aside forms of otherness which ideological or religious dogma provides a justification for stigmatizing, even "others" like the mentally handicapped, towards whom there is no possible moral/religious stigmatization, were until recently locked away in inhumane facilities, as if even just seeing them made us uncomfortable. The same goes for the physically deformed, exhibited in circuses as "freaks".
> Why couldn't we even bear to see them? What were we afraid of?
> Where religion couldn't provide grounds for discrimination, science at its worst stepped in - witness the Nazi adoption of eugenics.


What are we afraid of?
This question makes me freeze from top to bottom!
Is that we are all innately aware of the truth that we are all different from each other, so that we are afraid to be outcast?
Is that we know it's totally true that we are as "ugly", as "disorderly", as "different" as those locked away?
Or is that, deep in our heart, conscience, soul, we know it's completely wrong to cast those people out?


----------



## daoxunchang

A idea had just occured to me.
I thought of my experience when watching the U.S. TV serials Sex and the City. 8 seasons, with love stories around 4 women on and off. Finally I got the feeling of boredom. I am thinking, " When are you going to settle down? Why can't you just settle down?!"
I think this also occurs in the real life, right?
However, as a person who has not really gone through such situations, either with myself being in "troubles" (so I call it here) or with people around me being in them, I must say we should not just act like watchers.


----------



## GenJen54

coconut palm said:
			
		

> What are we afraid of?


I believe we just found the heart of the matter.  "We" (humans) use fear as an emotional divide.  It is easy to separate ourselves from someone if we believe them to be "different" that who we are.  It is easy to put labels on someone if we are afraid of those differences.

We are all born into this world as "like" creatures, naked, crying and helpless. We are most of us born with great capacity to love, and to fear (I won't use hate, because in many instances, what is at the root of hatred _is_ fear.)

It is only when we begin to learn and be conditioned to differences between ourselves and others, do we allow fear to mount in ourselves, and begin labeling. 

From a metaphysical standpoint, if you take the human "body" away from the equation, all we are left with is someone's soul - the essence of who they are in their absolute spiritual manifestation - completely void of beyond any physical or intellectual "human" pre-text.   In this sense, we are all the same.  In this sense, there is nothing to fear.  In this sense, labels cannot exist.

Labels exist only because *we* put them there.


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## coppergirl

GenJen54 said:
			
		

> I believe we just found the heart of the matter. "We" (humans) use fear as an emotional divide. It is easy to separate ourselves from someone if we believe them to be "different" that who we are. It is easy to put labels on someone if we are afraid of those differences.
> 
> We are all born into this world as "like" creatures, naked, crying and helpless. We are most of us born with great capacity to love, and to fear (I won't use hate, because in many instances, what is at the root of hatred _is_ fear.)
> 
> It is only when we begin to learn and be conditioned to differences between ourselves and others, do we allow fear to mount in ourselves, and begin labeling.
> 
> From a metaphysical standpoint, if you take the human "body" away from the equation, all we are left with is someone's soul - the essence of who they are in their absolute spiritual manifestation - completely void of beyond any physical or intellectual "human" pre-text. In this sense, we are all the same. In this sense, there is nothing to fear. In this sense, labels cannot exist.
> 
> Labels exist only because *we* put them there.


Actually, GenJen54, I'm afraid I have to differ on this one, but only because I am not considering this question from a metaphysical viewpoint, but from a scientific one.

From a scientific viewpoint, what we are afraid of is exactly this otherness. Going back to Carlo's more recent post, 

"Leaving aside forms of otherness which ideological or religious dogma provides a justification for stigmatizing, even "others" like the mentally handicapped, towards whom there is no possible moral/religious stigmatization, were until recently locked away in inhumane facilities, as if even just seeing them made us uncomfortable. The same goes for the physically deformed, exhibited in circuses as "freaks".
Why couldn't we even bear to see them? What were we afraid of?"

What we are afraid of is very deep and very likely instinctive. It is difference from the "norm" in whatever form it manifests. I'm afraid I have to argue that whilst labels exist only because we put them there, the underlying differences are obvious from the start and exist completely regardless of the labels. 

Children are instinctively afraid of anyone or anything which looks different from what they are used to or perceive as "normal". Even adults when faced with food from another culture instinctively shy away unless they are reassured by the natives that it is ok and they will probably like it. Animals often react similarly when faced with an anomalous or weaker creature of their own species. Runts of the litter never do well.

If you believe in the theories behind natural selection, this makes sense. Stronger, healthier genes are selected for precisely by creatures shying away initially from anything or anyone who is considerably different. 

But the thing is, humans have interfered with natural selection precisely through love and empathy. We don't always shy away from a creature---even if different from us---if we perceive it to be in pain or if we can imagine the world from its point of view. 

When I was getting married, I had to tell my husband that my mother had been very sick whilst we were growing up and the doctors didn't know what had happened to her. All they knew was that she had various metabolic disorders but some of them perplexed even the specialists at the Mayo Clinic. I told him he didn't have to marry me if he wasn't sure he could cope with what lay ahead. This was because I didn't know whether I would have the same problems my mother had. I also didn't know if our children would be healthy.

He went ahead with it and said that it didn't matter. I have had some health problems but not exactly the same as hers. All the same, this defies the "laws of nature" if you like. Going purely by natural instincts and aversions to what is "different" he should not have made this choice. But, of course, I am glad he did, even though it was the "illogical" choice.

So, in effect, what has allowed us to transcend our instincts is precisely the fact that we are able to empathize with and love each other. Familiarity doesn't always breed contempt---sometimes it breeds love.

Just my two cents again.


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## emma42

I agree with that, and it was very well put.  Precisely because we do not now (most of us) live in caves, we are able to accept otherness and overcome otherness with love, empathy and compassion.

It may be instinct that a black child, having  never seen a caucasian child, is afraid.  All that has to happen is for another to explain that the caucasian child is different, but equal and that there is nothing to be afraid of.  

Throughout history, various ruling classes (and those who advocate the ideas of the ruling classes) have sought to divide and rule by appealing to our instincts about "otherness".  There are many examples, as you will know.  Just one, the depiction of black people and Irish people not so long ago (cartoons of black people looking like apes and Irish people looking like potatoes).  This continues today with, amongst loads of other things, the demonisation of immigrants and refugees.  And remember the backlash against gay men when AIDS became well-known?


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## Boyd

I'm thinking to ask how far should tolerance go? Where would you stop tolerating otherness?


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## GenJen54

Boyd said:
			
		

> I'm thinking to ask how far should tolerance go? Where would you stop tolerating otherness?



Perhaps THIS thread, or one of your own making, would be appropriate here.  As for this thread, let's please stick to the topic at hand.

GenJen54
Moderator


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## Seana

coppergirl said:
			
		

> (...)
> What were we afraid of?"
> What we are afraid of is very deep and very likely instinctive.
> (...)
> It is difference from the "norm" in whatever form it manifests. I'm afraid I have to argue that whilst labels exist only because we put them there, the underlying differences are obvious from the start and exist completely regardless of the labels.
> (...)
> Children are instinctively afraid of anyone or anything which looks different from what they are used to or perceive as "normal".
> (...)
> If you believe in the theories behind natural selection, this makes sense. Stronger, healthier genes are selected for precisely by creatures shying away initially from anything or anyone which is considerably different.
> (...)
> I told him he didn't have to marry me if he wasn't sure he could cope with what lay ahead. This was because I didn't know whether I would have the same problems my mother had. I also didn't know if our children would be healthy.
> (...)
> He went ahead with it and said that it didn't matter. I have had some health problems but not exactly the same as hers. All the same, this defies the "laws of nature" if you like. Going purely by natural instincts and aversions to what is "different" he should not have made this choice. But, of course, I am glad he did, even though it was the "illogical" choice.
> (...)
> So, in effect, what has allowed us to transcend our instincts is precisely the fact that we are able to empathize with and love each other. Familiarity doesn't always breed contempt---sometimes it breeds love.
> 
> Just my two cents again.


 

And now there are my two cents.

These coppergirl's thoughts probably contain the entire naked truth. 
Subconscious rejecting the otherness by majority of the society is nothing more as just defence of surviving the kind (human kind but in the animal world is certainly alike) and natural selection. Even if we wouldn't like to admit that it is very strong feeling and just encrypted by the nature in each of us. In my opinion some acts noticed as something like "political incorrectness" are nothing else as the behaviour in accordance with the instinct of self-preservation.


Seana


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## coconutpalm

Sorry that I will give a personal story . If you are patient enough ..............
The other day I was walking in the campus and saw two gays (foreigners) walking together with one's arm around the other's waist. Note that I didn't deliberately looked at them, or more offensively, stared at them. It's just "someone walked in your direction and you glanced at them". However, one of them appeared uncomfortable and wanted to step away from his boyfriend, but the other resisted and gave me a fierce glance.
I don't know whether they are ashamed of their sexual tendency or not. What's for sure is that they are too aware of it. Hey, we heterosexual don't need to claim that we are heterosexual. Then why do they need to say "hey, guys, I'm sorry, but I'm a gay/lesbian"?



Today I bumped into a great sentence: It takes all sorts to make a world!
And I would like to make some change: It takes all sorts to make a great world!


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## emma42

Yes, but Seana - what about my point that now human beings are much more able to see beyond the "otherness" of other people, because of such things as widespread travel, communications and education?  What about my example of the black and caucasian children?  Don't you agree that we are much more used to otherness now and therefore we can be aware that we only need to learn - that our basic instincts, are, in fact, becoming less - that we are evolving away from them?


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## coppergirl

emma42 said:
			
		

> Yes, but Seana - what about my point that now human beings are much more able to see beyond the "otherness" of other people, because of such things as widespread travel, communications and education? What about my example of the black and caucasian children? Don't you agree that we are much more used to otherness now and therefore we can be aware that we only need to learn - that our basic instincts, are, in fact, becoming less - that we are evolving away from them?


Hi emma42!

I agree with you that because of travel, communications and education we should all be able to see beyond our differences and be far more accepting of people than in any age previously. 

However, where I run into problems is where you suggest that we are evolving away from our basic instincts. What I mean is, we may be evolving away from certain things very slowly, but evolution works very very slowly. We are still basically animals in terms of the physical reality of our situation. I am actually a humanist and don't mean to set philosophy back 5000 years here by suggesting that this is ALL that we are. However, when we are talking about the basis of stigma, it is important to work out the root of the problem if we are to deal with it.

To provide another personal example, my grandmother had severe psoriasis. Back in the 1930s, if she went to the restroom in a restaurant, she said that ladies would take one look at her hands and arms when she was washing them and involuntarily draw away. There was no rational thought here---or if there was it was very brief. They clearly thought that she had a skin disease due to poor hygiene or a rash they could catch. There was basic, pre-rational fear of contamination there. "Will I get it too? Better keep away". 

There is also involuntary shock at severe disfigurement, sharply asymmetrical faces, burn victims with parts of their face permanantly scarred etc. It does not make me a bad person to acknowledge the sharp intake of breath that I sometimes experience when I see these things---there is initial shock. That is a natural part of our make-up and it is silly to suggest that it isn't there. It is. There is a deep-seated fear initially in many of us if we are being honest that is the same as that in kids---the desire to pull away, look the other way, pretend you're not looking etc. Animals don't use the internet to determine what is dangerous or not---they see it and they smell it and if it looks different and smells different, they keep away from it. We are very clever animals. But we are still animals.

What we do have that other animals do not have is the ability to think past our initial reactions. When educated people see psoriasis or eczema, they do not draw back in fear of contamination since they know that it is not contagious and they are not in danger from it. 

We are able to reason our way past these instinctive fears. When reason fails, our empathy kicks in. The tragedy is that with all these human attributes to help us get past our instinctive natural reactions, some people still stigmatize others anyway.


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## Seana

In the beggining I want to assure that my text is just against for my own principles. I am very sensitive person seeing illness, pain, weakness, disability etc. This is only my reflection - much closer to the technocrat rather than the humanist. I agree with both of you that the education is causing better understanding and in consequence societies are doing empathy and make very much for disabled persons but surely aren't they contributing in order to will be much more of them in the future time? 
I wouldn't like to elaborate exactly this topic here, but I have reliable reflections and I think that you will divide them after the bit longer thought....The nature through million of years developed the ability of selection of best genetic material of living organisms in the destination of the reproductiveness. I wouldn't be wrong understood but look - what is the man doing now- *everything* - in order to level these abilities. Uncanny straight out progress in medicine caused that the majority of pregnancies is being held, prenatal curing is leading for giving birth to the majority children, even with great faults, the contraception and the small birth rate aren't also giving possibility the birth for strongest individuals. 
In the scale of one year whether two maybe this thing isn't playing the bigger role. But do you able to answer whether in the scale many, many generations the human kind without natural selection won't be too much declined.
Maybe our opposition against the "otherness" is the last bastion of the primitive defence - of natural selection - which still exists in the wild nature but probably doesn't or better say have a no chance to exist in husbandry and plantations.

Seana


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## emma42

coppergirl, I agree with everything you say.  I would just emphasise, however, that while one might momentarily falter in the face of otherness (say, your grandma's psoriasis), most people, I would think, would not then demand that she go and sit in a clearing in the forest on her own, whereas this might have happened in the distant past because of ignorance of her condition.  Do you see what I'm getting at? (I'm not suggesting you are stupid - I'm suggesting that I have not expressed myself clearly enough!)  In that sense, we have "evolved" away from certain instincts.  "Evolve" is perhaps not the "mot juste" here.

If I understand you, Seana, you are talking about the idea that we are still practising "selection" in a way because medical science etc is trying to eliminate disease etc.  Is that what you are saying?  I understand that.

But what about "otherness" such as different coloured skin, different sexual orientation?


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## moodywop

A few more thoughts:

1. Boyd mentioned "tolerance". I don't like this word because of its connotation:

*tolerate *
1. accept or endure (someone or something *unpleasant or disliked*) with forbearance
2. *allow *the existence, occurrence, or practice of something one does not necessarily like or agree with (Oxford Dict)

That's why I have used "acceptance" in my posts. That still implies, though, that I (normal, natural, etc) grant you (abnormal, unnatural etc) my acceptance. Overcoming stigma involves recognizing we are fundamentally equal - our equality stemming from our equal dignity as human beings.

(Boyd's mention of the limits of tolerance would, in my opinion, apply to cases where "stigma" is indeed justified. Think of sexual abuse, pedophilia - unfortunately the list is endless. But, as GenJen said, that's a matter for a separate thread. We are discussing stigma applied to people who do others no harm, their only fault being their "otherness")

2. I don't think stigma is always the result of a primitive fear of what is different - although this is a powerful legacy of our origins. Stigma can also be the product of culture. Homosexuality was accepted in ancient Greece. And its stigmatization was not always linked to religious belief. Homosexuality was illegal in the former Soviet Union (an "atheist" state) after Stalin declared it was a "manifestation of the moral decadence of the bourgeoisie". Gays are still being persecuted in Cuba.

3. I still believe that stigma can be overcome through "knowledge". Until a few decades ago mentally handicapped and mentally ill people were locked up in inhumane facilities in Italy. They were "hidden from public view". After a new law was passed many of the "detainees" have, where possible, been returned to their families or accommodated in lodgings where they are assisted by social workers (some of the older inmates had lived their entire lives in mental institutions. They were terrified of the "outside world"). They are no longer "hidden". The other day I saw a man suffering from cerebral palsy sitting on a park bench. His sister and her kids were with him. The affection was palpable. Not long ago this would have been impossible.

Just like "spastic" in English, the word "mongoloide"(an offensive word for Down's syndrome) was one of the most common insults you would hear kids hurling at each other. Since we have had kids with Down's syndrome in ordinary schools I have not heard the word "mongoloide" used by my pupils. It's not political correctness. When the stigma goes so does the stigma-laden word.


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## emma42

Absolutely it can be a product of culture.  I was trying to say that as well.  We have had the same process in mental health services and schools.  The school in which I worked had kids with all sorts of otherness (including some fairly explicit physical otherness) and NONE of the other(!) kids bat an eyelid, beyond a couple of naturally curious questions.


----------



## coppergirl

emma42 said:
			
		

> coppergirl, I agree with everything you say. I would just emphasise, however, that while one might momentarily falter in the face of otherness (say, your grandma's psoriasis), most people, I would think, would not then demand that she go and sit in a clearing in the forest on her own, whereas this might have happened in the distant past because of ignorance of her condition. Do you see what I'm getting at? (I'm not suggesting you are stupid - I'm suggesting that I have not expressed myself clearly enough!) In that sense, we have "evolved" away from certain instincts. "Evolve" is perhaps not the "mot juste" here.


 
Hi emma42!

Yes, I think you are correct in that society has changed sufficiently to ensure that people like my grandmother might not have been ostracized as severely for her condition as in previous centuries.  However, as Carlo has pointed out, the fact remains that in certain countries this is still the case.  Think of leprosy---which still exists in certain places in the world.  Such people are still ostracized and generally left outcast and yet this is modern times.  

As for homosexuality, I have had personal experience with homophobic people.  They are usually men, actually, and in some cases what I have perceived when they express their views on this is that they are afraid of something.  I don't know if it is the "otherness" that they are afraid of.  And I also don't think that it is necessarily a primal shock or negative reaction to someone who appears different to them---most of the gay people I know very frequently appear exactly the same as everyone else, although not always, depending on whether they are deliberately dressing to accentuate their alternate lifestyle. 

I can't say what these men are afraid of exactly, but only that they expressed their homophobic views with such vehemence (many never having actually met or talked with a gay person) that I only had the impression that there was a deep fear there but I could not entirely work out why.  Any ideas?

Cheers!


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## Seana

I think that the ddifferent coloured completely isn't an object of this thread. It isn't none "otherness". 
Different sexual orientation shoud be there where their place really is - in the privacy of everybody's sleeping room at their own home - exactly the same where the sex life heterosexual should be.
I think all differences create great of world. They were and they will always be. 
I would like to say only one thing , the menkind shouldn't go too far from the nature, because sooner or later it could have some bad consequences in the global scale of course. I mean about proper balance of the ecosystem too.


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## emma42

Well, if you're talking about heterosexual male homophobia towards lesbians, I have often found that these charmers are deeply offended that a woman would not want a man, for they are so irresistable.


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## emma42

Seana, of course different coloured skin is "otherness".  In your eyes and my eyes, that is as far as it goes - just different coloured skin.  But in the eyes of racists, well, it goes much further than that.  Look at Hitler.


----------



## Seana

You know I think that this forum should show views of only normal people about moderate reasonable  views even if they are little different or  controversial.
 After all we cannot understand not even  explain action of such a terrible monsters. Unfortunately the word is full of those extremely of evil people. 
We  have not any influence to it. One thing what it is possible to do is never  give them election voices in polling stations


----------



## emma42

Agreed.  But then we would have an argument about what is "normal"!


----------



## moodywop

I made a distinction earlier between stigma based on moral/religious tenets (see thread on gay marriage for examples) and stigma where no such tenets can be invoked (mental illness/handicap, race, etc).

My opinion is that both types of stigma are based on fear. After all the "phobia" in "homophobia" means "fear". But of course those who condemn homosexuality on the basis of moral/religious principles would deny it. However, before GenJen steps in, I think homophobia deserves a thread of its own. It would take us off course.

The reference to stigma based on race reminded me of an interesting distinction made by some writers. There is "visible" stigma, which you can't hide (here "stigma" is being used in its etymologycal sense of "mark", "brand"). And "invisible" stigma. 

When your "stigma" is visible (eg your skin colour, physical disability etc) you can't escape open expression of prejudice or hostility, offensive slurs, etc.

When your "stigma" is invisible, one of the coping strategies is "passing". You pretend you're like the majority. Or you can "come out". I agree with Tony that this "self-labelling" is indeed necessary in order to dispel stererotypes and ignorance. 

But with invisible stigma it's not as simple as "passing"(for something you're not) vs "coming out". I don't fit the stereotype of what a gay man is supposed to look/talk/act like so everybody assumes I'm straight. I often face a dilemma. An acquaintance will start making homophobic remarks. What do I do? I mostly prefer to object to their remarks by rational argument rather than "coming out" there and then. I'm faced with the same dilemma if some of my pupils make homophobic remarks. Again I prefer to start a discussion. Quite often a few pupils will say "I have a gay friend and he's OK" or "what if your brother were gay?". Just saying "I'm gay" would stop them dead in their tracks. I'd rather let the prejudice come out and let the discussion (hopefully) delve into its foundations(or lack thereof). 

One final consideration. When I applied for a mortgage in the UK I was required to get life insurance. In the form I was asked whether I had ever suffered from mental illness. The insurance company informed me they would also be writing to my GP (general practitioner) asking similar questions. I don't know whether the law has changed since (or whether my GP was legally bound to reply) and in the end I didn't buy the house, so I don't know what my replying truthfully would have meant.

I was asked the same question when I applied for a Fulbright scholarship to study for an M.A. in a US university.

I guess the question was legitimate but it made me feel uneasy.


----------



## maxiogee

moodywop said:
			
		

> One final consideration. When I applied for a mortgage in the UK I was required to get life insurance. In the form I was asked whether I had ever suffered from mental illness.



Do you know why they asked?
Would a "yes" answer have automatically meant a refusal of the mortgage?
Or, would it "just" have meant that someone took a longer look at your application? 
I ask, because, from what I can see of the UK market, and the Irish one too, the banks and building societies are falling over themselves trying to give away money!


----------



## coconutpalm

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=165123
Is this topic any relevance?
I think so.


----------



## LV4-26

What if there were the same "amount" of evil in each and every one of us? What if we kept hiding it, muzzling it, ignoring it, tried our best to remain unaware of it? What if the best solution for that were to find somebody else, different (almost any kind of difference would do) enough from the majority of the group (the group in question can be the population of a country, of the whole world, or a clan of any size and/or any kind) and to claim that that individual just incarnates the evil we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves?

What if we desparately needed some one to hate, despise or just disapprove of in order to convince ourselves that *we* are good?

Can we really understand otherness? The problem we have in understanding otherness is that rejecting it is much better for our own morall comfort.

I can't help finding an echo to the above in Seana's opinion as follows


			
				Seana said:
			
		

> After all we cannot understand not even explain action of such terrible *monsters*. Unfortunately the word is full of those extremely *evil people*.


 I understand why you use those words and every one would find them justified. But isn't there a danger here? The Nazis were evil all right. But they were of the same species (as opposed to "monsters" or aliens, E.T.s) as us, so I think I must remain wakeful about what *I* am capable of doing.
Anyone heard of Milgram's experiment?


----------



## KaRiNe_Fr

LV4-26 said:
			
		

> Anyone heard of Milgram's experiment?


Oh! Yes! Very frightening and interesting too about human psychology, obedience and cruelty... brrr! Still hoping I would have behave stopping the experiment early, but can't help wondering... 

(thanks LV I didn't remember the name of this experiment --name of the psychologist in fact)


----------



## coppergirl

LV4-26 said:
			
		

> What if we desparately needed some one to hate, despise or just disapprove of in order to convince ourselves that *we* are good?
> 
> Can we really understand otherness? The problem we have in understanding otherness is that rejecting it is much better for our own morall comfort.


 
This recalls my very early example in this thread. Even leaving deep-seated and strong stigma aside, on a very petty and mundane level I have noticed that when people put down other people on the basis of something---however superficial or ridiculous that thing may be---it is usually to improve their own self-esteem somehow. 

Taking again the example of our former neighbours who drove a BMW. When you spoke to them, it was obvious that this was not merely a car but a serious status symbol. They spent a lot of time mentioning just in passing that so-and-so down the road's car was not washed and that so-and-so across the road only drove a Volkswagen etc. Now this may sound silly, but their whole value-system and self-esteem revolved to a large degree around cars. This chap used to tell everyone that he worked for BMW, that he adored cars, that his little boys were going to be race car drivers etc . . . whilst simultaneously pointing out where everyone else had gone wrong by choosing the car they chose. It was a two-pronged thing---he was superior and everyone else who wasn't like him was inferior. 

With other people it is based on money---how large their house is, how much they earn each year. With other people is it based on their home being picture-perfect and really expensively decorated. With one of the kids in my son's class, this is based on the fact that he only listens to a certain type of music and he has told the other children that anyone who listens to any other type is clearly inferior. 

It is, I think, human nature again to create value systems, but these value systems often result in our looking down on those who don't conform to and share our values. At that point, we are able to boost our own egos through pointing out how someone else's value system is inferior to ours and what great people we are by contrast. 

The thing is, stigma goes far beyond this, but I think it is partly based in this tendency---particularly the culturally-based stigmas that Carlo mentioned, as opposed to the more physically-based stigmas (my grandma's psoriasis etc).

Again, though, the problem is that the more something is partly rooted in our human nature, the more it is a trait which has probably evolved for a reason. There is, for example, every likelihood that our personalities and psychological defense mechanisms have evolved for a reason just as surely as our physical features---to give us some survival advantage in times past. This does not make us horrible creatures, but it does again suggest that those who are not savvy enough to realize what is actually going on in their heads and to examine the basis for some of their feelings about other people are in danger of living a life which is entirely dictated by their natural instinctive predispositions rather than by their actual choices. They are at the mercy of their instincts and psychological predispositions in the same way that my dog is at the mercy of his---you cannot reason with him regarding his behaviour. He is a dog and he will always be a dog and he cannot understand or empathize with cats and that's it. For him, cats will always have a stigma. 

I do think, however, that it would behoove all of us to examine what is behind our feelings, emotions and reactions generally. "The unexamined life is not worth living" as they say! (Well, as Socrates said anyway . . . )


----------



## LV4-26

I realize in the second half of my post I passably drifted away from topic by making an analogy which might sound a bit "forced". I apologize for that. I entrust the following participants with coming back to Carlo's actual questions. I'm warming up to the idea of starting a new thread.


----------



## geve

LV4-26 said:
			
		

> Can we really understand otherness? The problem we have in understanding otherness is that rejecting it is much better for our own morall comfort.


Yes! Please don't tell me about your otherness... 
Because I wouldn't know how to react. What do you expect from me? I'd rather not be exposed to a situation I'm not sure I can handle. 
Because I don't need to know. My side of the fence is just fine. Why should I be bothered to go have a look on the other side? I'd rather keep ignoring how it's like and continue to enjoy my personal comfort. 
Because I don't want to know. I am aware that there are people like you somewhere in this world; but not in _my_ world. I'd rather stay with the idea that otherness only happens to other people. My world is well organized in categories, please don't come and ruin this organization. 

So please, you, yes you with this otherness that seems to make life a bit more complicated, or just different than mine - please go sit over there where I won't notice your existence too much.

But please, you, yes you with this otherness that makes you not that different from me - please come and get me and tell me about you even if I don't want to know. I'll never do the first step, I'm just too coward and selfish.


----------



## maxiogee

LV4-26 said:
			
		

> The Nazis were evil all right. But they were of the same species (as opposed to "monsters" or aliens, E.T.s) as us, so I think I must remain wakeful about what *I* am capable of doing.



Good point, LV4-26 (am I addressing a robot, perchance? and, if I am - how would I know?)
Also the people who stood by in Germany whilst it happened, and who stood by in Cambodia while Pol Pot 'happened' and who stood by whilst all sorts of outrage 'happened' were also human.




			
				LV4-26 said:
			
		

> Anyone heard of Milgram's experiment?


There was a similar piece of research done in Berkeley where a group of student volunteers was split (randomly) into guards and prisoners, and the resulting demeanour of both groups was an eye-opener.


----------



## medeterian

moodywop said:
			
		

> Hi coconutpalm
> 
> I really meant to write "self-pity" and I've amended my post. I wasn't referring to any of the posts in this thread but to my concern that my motives might be misinterpreted.
> 
> I appreciate your comments and the ones made by other posters here, just as I appreciate the open-mindedness you have shown in your posts in another, label-ridden thread.
> 
> I totally share your emphasis on empathy.



Hi moodywop

It is impossible for me not to appriciate your openness on this thread. Such an honest post can not be self-pity. When it comes to understanding otherness, sure I have alot to say. But first I want to clarify a post of mine on "homosexuallity being unnatural for human" subject.

You were in an emotional mood when you share your feelings I think. I dont think the labels should not be used. I also dont think the labels define people. I think people put their and the others feelings on the labels. Of course we will talk about the labels. I share the ideas of maxi that everyone has different aspects only few people know what their labels are. When considering this, there are lots of cultural and social subjects that put some of us in an uncomfortable state. I find benefits talking to that subjects to have information on the first hand.

When it comes to me, being a software developer, I also broke my ties wiht reality many times, besides this is not the situation I want to be in. People bugs me about that which they can not understand how it feels like when you live in your own digitilized fiction world. Sometimes it turns into a personality conflict. Anyways, maybe its about my surroundings, I always resisted what enforce me to the opposite direction of my own.

Please dont take my old post as an argument. It is not I am after the labels. I am searching for the answers. PS: The homosexuality is rising rapidly in my neighborhood and the ones I know are not really natural ones. I should have made the distinction.


----------



## moodywop

LV4-26 said:
			
		

> What if there were the same "amount" of evil in each and every one of us?...The Nazis were evil all right. But they were of the same species (as opposed to "monsters" or aliens, E.T.s) as us, so I think I must remain wakeful about what *I* am capable of doing.


 
Very good point! Isn't that the meaning (or a possible interpretation) of the famous Latin phrase (coined by Terence but then quoted by Cicero and others):

*Homo sum: nihil humanum mihi alienum puto*
(the original actually reads: _humani nil a me alienum puto_)

_I am a man. I don't regard anything human as alien to me_

I would just amend your first sentence to "potential evil".



> What if the best solution for that were to find somebody else, different (almost any kind of difference would do) enough from the majority of the group (the group in question can be the population of a country, of the whole world, or a clan of any size and/or any kind) and to claim that that individual just incarnates the evil we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves?


 
I believe that Sigmund Freud made the very same observation.


----------



## emma42

Thank you for that bit of Terence, Moodywop.  I shall be saying "Humanus sum...", personally (or humanum - I can't remember which declension to use).  It is absolutely excellent and I shall use it to remind myself not to shun otherness.


----------



## Seana

In spite of my imperfect better say totally bad skills in English I would like to discuss two aspects of that matter.



			
				geve said:
			
		

> Yes! Please don't tell me about your otherness...
> Because I wouldn't know how to react. What do you expect from me? I'd rather not be exposed to a situation I'm not sure I can handle.
> Because I don't need to know.
> (...)
> But please, you, yes you with this otherness that makes you not that different from me - please come and get me and tell me about you even if I don't want to know. I'll never do the first step, I'm just too coward and selfish.


Don't you think - if all of that such a common behaviours  you mentioned  are typical and universal for most of people, so they are creating the norm and it couldn't be worthwhile fighting with them because  it will give no effects? 
Recently, the people being proud of such a tolerant society are still suppressing of tendency to showing the most natural, simply primitive emotions. I think this continuous "political correctness" behaviour could generate big frustration.
Don't you think that small innocent demonstrations against  differences between people (in many various topics of course ) and the small dose of  intolerance could work in every day life as the safety valve?
Doesn't the huge dissatisfaction have any chance then to grow to borders when will be got out under control?

And what do you think about the national characteristics of people which go more or less susceptible to influences of the power.
Don't you think that a result of historical, religion and cultural relations could be influenced it.
Looking at my country I think Poles, being in the continuous opposition for the power of authorities through the years after historical bad experiences, the partitions, the war occupation, the communism -wouldn't be so prone and obedient in authority compliance with order against own beliefs (ex. Milligram experyment).

PS I am not sure whether you know what I mean.

Seana


----------



## geve

Seana said:
			
		

> PS I am not sure whether you know what I mean.
> 
> Seana


I'm not sure either, Seana:

Are you suggesting that fighting against our natural instincts might be not worth it and a source of frustration? Well, isn't that something we already do a lot, fighting against our natural instincts? Otherwise we would all probably be fornicating and/or indulging ourselves with beer, chocolate or both, instead of going to work....

Are you saying that we _need_ someone to stigmatize, in order to let out the violence? Like in G.Orwell's "1984", we need an ennemy, no matter who it is but there has to be an ennemy? Like LV said:


			
				LV4-26 said:
			
		

> What if we desparately needed some one to hate, despise or just disapprove of in order to convince ourselves that *we* are good?


----------



## maxiogee

geve said:
			
		

> Are you saying that we _need_ someone to stigmatize, in order to let out the violence? Like in G.Orwell's "1984", we need an enemy, no matter who it is but there has to be an enemy? Like LV said:
> 
> 
> 
> LV4-26 said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> What if we desparately needed some one to hate, despise or just disapprove of in order to convince ourselves that we are good?
Click to expand...


I cannot and would not speak for seana, but I feel 100% certain that we 'need' someone to fear, hate, look down on, and generally be "other than us".
I'm not sugesting that it is to let out the violence, as I do not believe that we are an inherently violent and aggressive species, but I do think that we are social beings, and (for men at least) part of belonging to any group is the concomitant "not belonging" to a different group.
Males are more into this "us and them" mentality, if you look at almost any groups of boys playing they tend to form groups which compete in some manner, whereas girls tend to form co-operative assemblies. If you look at any grouping of (say 15 - 20) girls, the chances are that they are all involved in the one activity, whereas the boys are more likely to be in smaller groups of 5 - 10.
Why this should be so is beyond me.
I wonder could it be innate & hard-wired from millennia back?


----------



## badgrammar

Great post, LV, I'm behind you on this theory..

I just looked at this thread, looks like I will have a lot of reading to do to get up-to-date! 



			
				LV4-26 said:
			
		

> What if there were the same "amount" of evil in each and every one of us? What if we kept hiding it, muzzling it, ignoring it, tried our best to remain unaware of it? What if the best solution for that were to find somebody else, different (almost any kind of difference would do) enough from the majority of the group (the group in question can be the population of a country, of the whole world, or a clan of any size and/or any kind) and to claim that that individual just incarnates the evil we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves?
> 
> What if we desparately needed some one to hate, despise or just disapprove of in order to convince ourselves that *we* are good?
> 
> Can we really understand otherness? The problem we have in understanding otherness is that rejecting it is much better for our own morall comfort.
> 
> I can't help finding an echo to the above in Seana's opinion as follows
> I understand why you use those words and every one would find them justified. But isn't there a danger here? The Nazis were evil all right. But they were of the same species (as opposed to "monsters" or aliens, E.T.s) as us, so I think I must remain wakeful about what *I* am capable of doing.
> Anyone heard of Milgram's experiment?


----------



## Seana

Hi,



			
				geve said:
			
		

> Are you saying that we _need_ someone to stigmatize, in order to let out the violence? Like in G.Orwell's "1984", we need an ennemy, no matter who it is but there has to be an ennemy?


 
Geve, where did you find this sense in my post? No I don't agree with it. 
Perhaps there are some people maybe some individual with loads of complexes for which such a situation is needed but we are talking here about average behaviours most of people.
The post I have shown in my sentences is not mine ( not at all) it is just the state of majority of society. So why shouldn't we ask ourseves whether the fight against their belief and so deeply encrypted instinctive behaviour of the majority of the society will give some expected win? And what could be worse, maybe it will bring exactly an opposite effect. Seeing the last winter events in Europe I am afraid it could be possible.
Even If all of us nice and well educated users of this forum would be agreeing in this issue it won't change the attitude of the whole people to this topic. 
In my opinion making aware and sensitizing people - better say children- to the dissimilarity by small steps in this direction in everyday life at schools and families through a long, long time can bring desired effects to the integration of disabled people, various races and religions and other various dissimilarities - in literal meaning - an otherness. 


Seana


----------



## moodywop

medeterian said:
			
		

> You were in an emotional mood when you shared your feelings I think.


 
I was indeed. I actually wanted to delete my post (reason: too emotional). But what's wrong about being "emotional"? My intention in starting this thread was exactly to bring back feelings and emotions into play compared to the cold logic being used in some running threads. Don't get me wrong. I admire the debating skills displayed in those threads. But I felt that something was missing. And I wanted to remind those who use charged, loaded language ("unnatural", "abomination", "evil") of the feelings such words stir up in those they are applied to. One forero argued that one's belonging to the group being stigmatized had no relevance to the debate. This is the result of the - to me - extremely "unnatural" split between logic/reason and feelings/emotions. Who could possibly argue that a Jew should not be entitled to have stronger feelings (and express them) in a discussion of antisemitism or of the Nazi massacres? And yet that statement went unchallenged. Because from a cold, logical perspective it seems unchallengeable.



> But first I want to clarify a post of mine on "homosexuallity being unnatural for human" subject... The homosexuality is rising rapidly in my neighborhood and the ones I know are not really natural ones. I should have made the distinction.


 
Well, your "clarification" only shifts the label of "unnaturalness" onto a section of the original "grouping". If you expand on why you think(or better - "feel") these people that you say you "know" are "not really natural ones" then that would help us get to the roots of stigma.



> Please dont take my old post as an argument


 
Absolutely. As I said my intention was not "polemical". Just as I would like others to see the "human" referent behind the label I also want to see the human motives behind the labellers' words. _Nihil humanum mihi alienum puto. _My potential for prejudice and stigmatization is the same as that of the "labellers". I'm more interested in exploring the psychological/cultural roots of that potential than in attacking its manifestations through logic and rational argument.

A sobering thought: It is interesting how even the most belligerent "labeller" can change his/her ways and fight stigma if by an unfortunate coincidence one of his/her closest loved ones becomes a stigma-bearer (e.g. by developing mental illness, whose onset can be quite late), maybe the very same stigma the labeller previously strenuously advocated. In such cases, the human face behind the label stares at you in the face every single day.


----------



## coppergirl

medeterian said:
			
		

> But first I want to clarify a post of mine on "homosexuallity being unnatural for human" subject.
> 
> Please dont take my old post as an argument. It is not I am after the labels. I am searching for the answers. PS: The homosexuality is rising rapidly in my neighborhood and the ones I know are not really natural ones. I should have made the distinction.


 
The thing I am having difficulty understanding in this statement is that if a thing exists within nature, how could it be considered "unnatural" in the first place?


----------



## moodywop

coppergirl said:
			
		

> The thing I am having difficulty understanding in this statement is that if a thing exists within nature, how could it be considered "unnatural" in the first place?


 
I'm also puzzled by the _the homosexuality is rising rapidly in my neighborhood _statement. We're not talking about the crime rate, inflation or avian flu . Maybe more gays are moving into the neighbourhood or more of them are "coming out".


----------



## maxiogee

medeterian said:
			
		

> PS: The homosexuality is rising rapidly in my neighborhood and the ones I know are not really natural ones. I should have made the distinction.



Could you explain that disctintion - I really cannot grasp the notion of "natural homosexuals" and "not really natural" ones.


----------



## coconutpalm

Some homosexuals think they are not homosexuals at the very beginning. They get married, have children, perhaps to a very old age, and they suddenly find out that they love the same gender! 
Maybe medeterian was referring to this kind?
But they are natural! They are just deceived by themselves, by the society, by the "moral" standards in the past.


----------



## moodywop

coconutpalm said:
			
		

> Some homosexuals are not homosexuals from the very beginning


 
As you make clear in the rest of your post, they actually are. They suppress it, either consciously or unconsciously (although I find the latter unlikely).

This is what is known as "interiorized stigma". It has led some gays to submit themselves to inhumane (and ultimately useless) forms of "aversion therapy", as described in this BBC News story:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3258041.stm


----------



## coconutpalm

Carlo, I have editted my post. My original post doesn't convey my meaning correctly. 
My poor English!


----------



## heidita

I am late on this thread. Anyway, here I am, better late than never.

Actually I only noticed the thread in the first place, because Carlo mentioned his caustic remark about nazis and their behaviors towards _otherness _in another thread. Now it is quite clear, why he did so.

In any case. Can we deal with otherness? Well, I would like to say first, that my best friend was gay and was my best man in my wedding. I "Made" my very right-wing husband meet him, as a condition, before the wedding. In the end, it was a very boring meeting for me as they had gone to the same school and talked all night about teachers and stuff and my husband, who doesn't like gays particularly was enchanted by my dear friend. My friend Fernando died of aids at the age of 42, I will always love him

Well, I wonder why in the first place we should find it brave and awarding to say the truth? I have found many posts just praising Carlo's telling the truth so clearly. Actually nobody does say these things or others so straightforward. But why it should be so praised is above me. Good for you to tell the truth, Carlo, but why shouldn't you? I always try to, making a lot of enemies on my way. But I don't mind, I have to be myself, as you have to be yourself.

I do state that it is not the same gay of your own sex as gay of another sex. So I had a lot of gay friends and to me there is no difference in my behaviour or appreciation or anything at all, knowing that Carlo for instance is gay. I shall be just as caustic, just as nice, just as whatever.

But I have a personal case of not knowing how to deal with a _feminine _homosexuality. I had these very dear friends, married for ages, one son. So she suddenly found that she was  a lesbian, WITHOUT ADMITTING TO IT and they separated. To me she told a story about her husband not loving her any more and stuff, as it later turned out to be. Then she started to live with this woman. Well, at the beginning I thought she was just a friend, until she started to look more and more male (the friend). That made things very clear. Now, I must say in my favour that I am the only friend who actually kept friends with her. But I wonder if it was the silly bunch of lies she told me, which I hate, or if it is this strange feeling of their _otherness_ I can't overcome. And there you are, my husband has no problem whatsoever with this couple, as they are women, not men. I suppose everything would have been differently if she had been truthful in the first place..but she wasn't.


----------



## emma42

I would like to explain why I have praised Carlo for being open. He should be praised, Heidita, because it can hurt very very much to talk about such personal things (I am thinking more of the mental illness), and the only reason Carlo has brought these matters into the public arena is to try to educate people about otherness. So it's not just about "telling the truth", it's about risking hurt to yourself and also risking further prejudice or stigmatisation on these Fora. 

I hope I have not misrepresented Carlo's intentions.

As for your lesbian friend - obviously she told lies because she was afraid that people would judge her negatively.  And that appears to be exactly what has happened.  I feel very sorry for her.


----------



## heidita

> As for your lesbian friend - obviously she told lies because she was afraid that people would judge her negatively. And that appears to be exactly what has happened. I feel very sorry for her.


 
But would she have had the same rejection telling the truth? I don't know, as I am the only one that stayed. But possibly some people found out, like me, seeing her friend after some time, and thought her no telling was even worse, so to speak. I do not think here in Spain lesbians are very accepted, neither are gays.


----------



## emma42

I would venture to say that she would.  If, as you say, gays are not much accepted, then her friends should have understood her reluctance to be open about herself.  To my mind, it shows a total lack of understanding of what gay people have to go through in a homophobic society.  So what if she lied?  She was not lying to hurt anyone, just to protect herself.  I would really have thought that real friends would understand this.


----------



## french4beth

This has been a very moving thread - I very much appreciate everyone's candid open postings - particularly in your case, Moodywop!  Very powerful!

I don't understand why there are such stigmas associated with mental health, sexuality, etc.  If you break a leg, are you expected to splint it yourself? NO!  If you had a choice to make, would someone choose a sexuality that is so freely judged and condemned by ignorant minds? I think not!  And I don't think that clinical depression just comes up out of the blue - I think that the roots are planted at a very early stage of our development (childhood, perhaps even infancy) and come out at a later stage in life (post-pregnancy, etc).  I think that a combination of medication and therapy is needed (but no, I don't have any facts to back this up). If someone has cancer, they get chemo, radiation, etc.  If you have high blood pressure, you're on medication for life.  Treatment for a mental illness should be no different!

I think that as many people mentioned, stigmas can be caused by a fear of the _unknown_; after all, why do some people in prison choose to have same sex relations?  Are we perhaps all subject to such temptations, given extenuating circumstances? Scary!

I think that such controversial subjects cause us to question ourselves, our identity, who we are, what we think... That can be scary for all of us, no matter how we present ourselves to the outside world.  Thus, stigmatizing certain things can prevent us from truly contemplating the consequences of ignorant ways of thinking! And haven't we all had dark, scary thoughts at one time or another?  After all, we're all human (or humanoids, to be inclusive of all foreros!).

Also, it has been my experience that the people who are most in need of help, particularly in the area of mental health, are the _least_ likely to seek such help.  And if you let other people know that you have sought counseling or treatment, and such people are _not_ mentally healthy themselves, you risk becoming the IP - the Identified Patient.  At that point, unhealthy people can come to the conclusion that _you_ are the sick person, but in reality, by seeking help, you have proven that you are the healthy one... So, if you stigmatize someone who is having mental health problems, you don't have to deal with it.

I try and keep an open mind on things - as long as people don't force their point of view on me or expect me to conform to their expectations, I try to see the person inside & see past the labels.  Having experienced the punk movement first-hand, I know that you have to look past the colored hair, the body piercings, the odd clothing - some of the new-wavers I met over the years were much more _real_  than the stuffed shirts I interacted with in the business world on a daily basis!

Again, thanks to all of you for your very moving, thought-provoking comments.


----------



## maxiogee

heidita said:
			
		

> I am late on this thread. Anyway, here I am, better late than never.


 If you say so. 




> Well, I wonder why in the first place we should find it brave and awarding to say the truth? I have found many posts just praising Carlo's telling the truth so clearly. Actually nobody does say these things or others so straightforward. But why it should be so praised is above me. Good for you to tell the truth, Carlo, but why shouldn't you? I always try to, making a lot of enemies on my way. But I don't mind, I have to be myself, as you have to be yourself.



There is a difference between just telling the truth and revealing one's innermost secrets.
I bet you, heidita, that there is at least one thing about you that you haven't revealed to anyone.
It takes courage to reveal things you feel fairly sure (and with good cause) will make some people despise and revile you. 
Carlo revealed, as you say, only the truth, but it is a personal truth and one which he had no need to reveal to us.


----------



## heidita

maxiogee said:
			
		

> If you say so.


 
I can see not for you. 

I certainly didn't want to imply that now everybody will be pleased to read my posts now, but that* I* am happy to be able to take part in this nice thread as I had missed it.






> There is a difference between just telling the truth and revealing one's innermost secrets.
> I bet you, heidita, that there is at least one thing about you that you haven't revealed to anyone.
> It takes courage to reveal things you feel fairly sure (and with good cause) will make some people despise and revile you.
> Carlo revealed, as you say, only the truth, but it is a personal truth and one which he had no need to reveal to us.


 
Yes, a personal truth and especially the part of: he had no need to tell us. But then, only the truth. In the end, he did say, that doing so, he felt free and sort of liberated, so for him it might have been a necessity to do the same here. As this makes him feel better and more free. 

I do have friends with a personal problem and they do not tell. True. but I do not think this is the right way, as they live tormented, as Carlo also said, by their own secret. I have a friend whose son has a bipolar disorder. Her life is terrible, but I often think most important for her is that others won't find out. And that most certainly doesn't help anybody, especially not her.
Then I met this other woman, who has a severely handicapped child. Well, she used to take him everywhere, to the park, swimming pool, etc. And she used to claim that she found it easier this way to cope with this.

So, I think it really helps not only others to understand you better, but especially yourself.


----------



## emma42

Yes, it_ can_ help others to understand you better, Heidita(and help you to understand yourself), but I still don't think you realise how incredibly difficult, painful and possibly risky it can be to "come out" about mental illness, homosexuality et al.  Maybe you do realise and I am misunderstanding you.  People have many different circumstances and personalities.  I don't think there is a "one-size fits all" answer.


----------



## geve

heidita said:
			
		

> Yes, a personal truth and especially the part of: he had no need to tell us. But then, only the truth. In the end, he did say, that doing so, he felt free and sort of liberated, so for him it might have been a necessity to do the same here. As this makes him feel better and more free.
> 
> I do have friends with a personal problem and they do not tell. True. but I do not think this is the right way, as they live tormented, as Carlo also said, by their own secret.


I see a difference between "not telling everyone" and "having a secret"... You might think that not everyone needs to know. There might even be things that no one needs to know, though this is probably debatable.

I think there was a context to Carlo's original post, which made him decide that it was the right place and the right moment to tell. He was trying "to reach to the other side", as he said, and for that, he chose 


> to try and explain what "otherness" means and feels like from the inside.





> to bring back feelings and emotions into play compared to the cold logic being used in some running threads


which is what I thank him for.


----------



## emma42

Also, I think it's important to remember that whether or not you think that Carlo was right in sharing his personal experiences, he is a human being with feelings and one should be sensitive to that when commenting on his posts.


----------



## heidita

emma42 said:
			
		

> Also, I think it's important to remember that whether or not you think that Carlo was right in sharing his personal experiences, he is a human being with feelings and one should be sensitive to that when commenting on his posts.


 
I do not realize that at any moment I was in any way rude or disrespectful.

And I have been misunderstood, I think and I believe he has done very well in telling and "coming out". Actually I think it was the only right thing to do, for himself especially, as I have written in my previous post. I see so many people tormented by not telling this or the other thing...
I think it is always better to not hide anything. One might make enemies like this, or people who like you less, no doubt.
But the people who stay, are really worth it. I am sure, Carlo has found this , too, when he finally told his secret.


----------



## emma42

Heidita, I'm sorry for misunderstanding you.  I must have  been reading what was not there due to emotion!


----------



## moodywop

Let's not make this about me. Geve summarized my reasons for "opening up" - it was just meant to act as a trigger for a wider debate. Let's leave it at that.

I appreciated and gained insights from each single post in this thread. We can't confront our fears or preconceptions without acknowledging them first. So medeterian's post was most welcome. I have my own preconceptions about some people or groups - my being uneasy about them doesn't mean I've overcome them. I'm working on it. And Heidi - I also appreciated your post. It was honest and frank. I didn't find it insensitive at all.

How much to disclose about oneself (and when) is and should be a personal choice. That's why I find the practice of "outing" public figures by some gay activists utterly despicable. There are so many personal and external considerations involved and where you live makes a huge difference. In Iran you can be hanged for being gay - or even just for being an "unchaste" heterosexual teenage girl

Some forer@s have PMed me saying they had appreciated the thread but didn't feel comfortable discussing their personal experience with mental illness or self-acceptance in public posts. I completely respect and understand their feelings.

I also feel that while I did indeed want to concentrate on "stigma" in general this has obscured the substantial difference between human experiences that are not really comparable, like homosexuality and mental illness. Without wanting to minimize the alienation and isolation of a teenager coming to terms with being gay, mental illness is something else. It has shattering effects on your sense of self and the fear of losing it altogether is ever-present. The singularness of bipolar disorder is that even at the most deranged your rational self is still there in the background, watching it all and feeling utterly impotent. That's why it leads you to question "free will". I don't think even the most empathetic person can comprehend it without having experienced something at least mildly similar.


----------



## medeterian

moodywop said:
			
		

> 1) But what's wrong about being "emotional"? My intention in starting this thread was exactly to bring back feelings and emotions into play compared to the cold logic being used in some running threads... Who could possibly argue that a Jew should not be entitled to have stronger feelings (and express them) in a discussion of antisemitism or of the Nazi massacres?....
> 
> 2) Well, your "clarification" only shifts the label of "unnaturalness" onto a section of the original "grouping". If you expand on why you think(or better - "feel") these people that you say you "know" are "not really natural ones" then that would help us get to the roots of stigma...
> 
> 3) I'm more interested in exploring the psychological/cultural roots of that potential than in attacking its manifestations through logic and rational argument.



Hi moodywop

1) I didnt say you shouldnt be emotionic. You said that you are against using labels for people. I thougt that you said it because you may have been acting with your emotions too much at that time. Maybe you have always defended it. It is your thought. I just wanted to say, I dont agree with this, in a gentle way. It seems I couldnt express myself well.

2) I dont know what do people mean by "cold logic". Why do you think the logic is cold? Why do you draw a line between the logic and emotions. They are not the opposite, rather in different areas.  Grouping the natural and unnaturals is a personal opinion. The inclinations of most of the homosexual/bisexual disposed people (they are not saying they are so) I know are originated (in my opinion) from the environmental factors. If someone wrote their own contradictory opinions there, it would be a informing platform there.  

3) I dont agree your understanding of logic as an isolated, optional thing.


----------



## medeterian

coppergirl said:
			
		

> The thing I am having difficulty understanding in this statement is that if a thing exists within nature, how could it be considered "unnatural" in the first place?



I agree on you when we talk about nature. I am seperating human off the nature. Human are taking most of their actions against nature. Nature doesnt need human to carry on.


----------



## medeterian

moodywop said:
			
		

> I'm also puzzled by the _the homosexuality is rising rapidly in my neighborhood _statement. We're not talking about the crime rate, inflation or avian flu . Maybe more gays are moving into the neighbourhood or more of them are "coming out".


It's not more gays moving into the neighbourhood, I know my place. They are rather young ones. The rates are not going parallel in the whole world. You are too much sensitive for the sayings, but not enough for the meanings


----------



## medeterian

coconutpalm said:
			
		

> Some homosexuals think they are not homosexuals at the very beginning. They get married, have children, perhaps to a very old age, and they suddenly find out that they love the same gender!
> Maybe medeterian was referring to this kind?
> But they are natural! They are just deceived by themselves, by the society, by the "moral" standards in the past.


For people who you have mentioned, I am not saying, "they fake" or "they are not gay". I am seeking for the reasons of "why they are or have been gay". Gay people may react when they come up with such a question. Because they feel more uncomfortable then the straight ones in the subject of otherness. Someone else may ask "why the straight people become straigt after they are born". I dont think anybody will react to that question. Maybe gay people are not giving the best reactions (this is common for all the minorities in the soceity) in order to make other people not to consider gays as "others".

I must add that being gay is not enough for being a guarantor for the other  gays feelings.

Sorry for my English if there are unsuitable words or wrong sentences.

Sevgiler...


----------



## moodywop

Medeterian

I hope you didn't perceive any animosity in my response to your post. I can assure you I am just trying to understand your position. You and I are communicating in a foreign language so misunderstanding is always a risk.

(There was only one statement in your posts that I didn't understand: _I must add that being gay is not enough for being a guarantor for the other gays feelings)_

I'll try to respond to the points you made as best I can:

1. "Cold logic and emotions"
You are right that my reference to "cold logic" may have sounded dismissive. It wasn't meant to be. I actually greatly admire the impeccable logical reasoning displayed, for example, by Cuchu, Tim and Tony in a parallel thread. If you want to rebut someone's statements then bringing emotions into play can diminish the strength of your logic-based arguments.
I just said that I felt something was missing. I was trying to redress the balance and bring emotions into play. For instance, I wanted to make some foreros aware of the emotional, hurtful impact of the "loaded" language they were using. Of course they may well be fully aware of it and not care. Fair enough. Still, I felt I should express my emotional reaction to their choice of words.
Pure logic can also lead to black and white thinking. I'm aware that I said contradictory things about "labels" and "self-labelling". Well it's because I have mixed feelings on the subject. 

2. "Natural and unnatural"


> Grouping the natural and unnaturals is a personal opinion


And you are of course entitled to that opinion. I just asked you to expand on it. Is it based on religious belief or biology? Can you give us more examples of people you regard as "unnatural"? You distinguished "natural" from "unnatural" homosexuals. Again, can you give some examples so that we may understand what you mean?

3. Homosexuality and "choice"

First of all, as I said at the start, I wanted to concentrate on the stigma attached to forms of otherness where moral/religious beliefs are not relevant. This way we can focus on stigma without getting lost in endless theological/moral arguments which cloud the issue. The topic of the origins/morality of homosexuality has been discussed in other threads(here and here). In both cases GenJen was forced to close the threads because the two camps were so vehemently opposed to each other that no fruitful debate was possible("_Once again we have failed, as a group, to come to any general consensus regarding this most delicate topic...Participants in threads such as this typically divide into two camps: a) those whose religious beliefs are inherently against_ _homosexuality, and b) those whose beliefs (religious or secular) are open to homosexuality. Solutions and/or mutual agreement on the topic are never realized_")

However, you raise the subject of homosexuality as a "choice". This is indeed relevant to the topic of stigma, for two reasons: i) those who condemn homosexuality often see it as a personal, sinful/immoral/deviant choice. ii) stigma is often based on ignorance - I firmly believe that the idea that "choice" is involved is utterly wrong, based both on my own experience and on scientific evidence.

Here is an example of how a fundamentalist Christian pamphlet rejects scientific evidence which would weaken its condemnation of homosexuality:

_The absence of data proving a determinative genetic basis for homosexuality is significant because it undermines the oft-repeated claim that homosexuality is an immutable characteristic like race or ethnic origin...homosexual activists have no basis for equating their struggle for special legal privileges _[_ _]_ with that of the civil rights movement. Homosexual behavior--which one can choose or choose not to act out--cannot be equated with an immutable characteristic, such as race or ethnic origin, over which one has no control. (Family Research Council)_

Absence of data? This is how an unbiased researcher summarizes current scientific thinking:

_Lack of change in therapy, lifelong fantasies of one sex only, anterior hypothalamus withered, high concordance of identical twins [*reared apart* - i.e. environmental factors are not relevant], and fetal development all point to an *inflexible process* (Martin Seligman)_



> I am seeking for the reasons of "why they are or have been gay". Gay people may react when they come up with such a question.


As you can see, the question doesn't bother me in the least. When I was struggling with self-acceptance as a teenager I read all I could on the subject. Although science now seems to back up my gut feeling that no "choice" is involved, my interest in the subject is now purely academic. It has no bearing on my self-acceptance. 



> It's not more gays moving into the neighbourhood, I know my place. They are rather young ones. The rates are not going parallel in the whole world


Quite frankly I don't understand what point you are making here. That's why I asked for clarification. You state that you have observed an increase in the number of young gays in your neighbourhood and that this is not due to more gays moving in. Most sociologists say that gays make up about 3% of the population. Of course many move to cities, where there is greater tolerance, so you may well have 10% in Milan and 0.5% in a Sicilian village.
What is your explanation for the increase that you have observed and that clearly concerns you?


----------



## maxiogee

medeterian said:
			
		

> 2) I dont know what do people mean by "cold logic". Why do you think the logic is cold? Why do you draw a line between the logic and emotions. They are not the opposite, rather in different areas.
> 3) I dont agree your understanding of logic as an isolated, optional thing.


I'd hazard a guess that Carlo is referring to my contributions to several threads where I have taken logical, rational, scientific stance on certain topics, and asked questions based on that.
I see religious belief as based on emotion and religious practice as based on blind obedience to some divine writ just "because it is" - there is no room in religion for logic and rational questioning. These things slowly erode mystery.

As to logic and emotions being different areas - try getting someone who is very emotionally charged to act/speak logically and you will see that they are incompatible, because they are not separate, but two sides of the one coin. You can have one, but not the other.

You ask a very strange question…


			
				medeterian said:
			
		

> Someone else may ask "why the straight people become straigt after they are born".


I've never heard anyone ask that, nor do many people speculate on why some people are left handed, or are better able to see at night than others, or any of a million things which 'divide' people.


----------



## maxiogee

medeterian said:
			
		

> 2) I dont know what do people mean by "cold logic". Why do you think the logic is cold? Why do you draw a line between the logic and emotions. They are not the opposite, rather in different areas.  Grouping the natural and unnaturals is a personal opinion. The inclinations of most of the homosexual/bisexual disposed people (they are not saying they are so) I know are originated (in my opinion) from the environmental factors. If someone wrote their own contradictory opinions there, it would be a informing platform there.



You use the words "I know" - and "in my opinion" in there.
We cannot "know" something which is based on our opinion.
This is were logic and reasoning come into play. 
Knowledge must be based on observation and repetition, and must be checked and proven. Other forms of thought are supposition, and worthless.

You go against much research which shows that homosexuality is not a matter of nurture.

from an account of an experiment by D.F. Swaab
> This experiment became the first to document a physiological difference in the anatomical structure of a gay man's brain.  
> Swaab found in his post-mortem examination of homosexual males' brains that a portion of the hypothalamus of the brain was structurally different than a heterosexual brain.  
> The hypothalamus is the portion of the human brain directly related to sexual drive and function.  
> In the homosexual brains examined, a small portion of the hypothalamus, termed the suprachiasmatic nucleus, was found to be twice the size of its heterosexual counterpart.​

You then say this


			
				medeterian said:
			
		

> I must add that being gay is not enough for being a guarantor for the other gays feelings.


I don't understand this and would be glad if you would expand on it to explain it better to me.


----------



## coconutpalm

There was a piece of news the other day: the Church made an annoucement that "being homosexuals is no sin, but if you practise homosexual behaviours, it's sin". 

I don't understand it! It seems that the Church finally admits that homosexual is natural, but at the same time, it says being natural is sin! No logic in my eyes, but maybe it's law thus logic in religious eyes.

I have no intention to offend anybody. I am just curious about "how can you be both logical and illogical"?


----------



## emma42

I think the Christian Church says that, as homosexuality is not a matter of choice, then the homosexual is not sinful per se.  However, to act on homosexual instincts is, in the eyes of the Church, sinful.  This would appear to imply that the homosexual is a poor unfortunate person, who has been saddled with the burden of unnatural urges, which s/he must not act upon.  Charming!


----------



## cuchuflete

There is a logical corollary:  All humans are born with the ability to adhere to mythology, vodoo, polytheism, monotheism, etc.  Some restrain themselves. What makes one a 'sinner'?  Powerful organizations have long been quick to demonize those who don't accept the logical and the illogical assumptions of the organizations.  It helps the perpetuation of the organization and its power.


----------



## medeterian

I mean by saying "unnatural" the ones who chose to be gay after changing their social environment or status, though they didnt show any gay properties or attitudes before. I mean by saying "natural" are the ones who always felt like a gay even in their childhood.


----------



## maxiogee

medeterian said:
			
		

> I mean by saying "unnatural" the ones who chose to be gay after changing their social environment or status, though they didnt show any gay properties or attitudes before. I mean by saying "natural" are the ones who always felt like a gay even in their childhood.



*But that assumes that they understood their emotions in childhood and even in adolescence.* And that's an awfully big assumption.

Many people go through heterosexual courtship and marriage without knowing that they feel differently than others in the same situation - we never really know if our emotions are the same as other people's - and only discover through living a lie that they are gay.

How do you know if your feeling of "love" (and even your _understanding_ of the word) is the same as the person next door when they tell you that they have fallen in love?

You also seem to be precluding the notion that someone who might 'feel' gay might be very uncertain of that feeling, and might think (along with society at large) that all they need is a good dose of heterosexual sex to change them into what they think they ought to be.


----------



## medeterian

maxiogee said:
			
		

> You use the words "I know" - and "in my opinion" in there.
> We cannot "know" something which is based on our opinion.
> This is were logic and reasoning come into play.
> Knowledge must be based on observation and repetition, and must be checked and proven. Other forms of thought are supposition, and worthless.
> 
> You go against much research which shows that homosexuality is not a matter of nurture.
> 
> from an account of an experiment by D.F. Swaab



Sorry for my poor english. I must have used the word "think" instead of "know". I didnt mean I know something that is my opinion.

Researchs are scientific and science is not constant. Especially social sciences. In addition, I didnt say I am proving something, I asked a question to know other peoples observations on that subject.


----------



## medeterian

maxiogee said:
			
		

> *But that assumes that they understood their emotions in childhood and even in adolescence.* And that's an awfully big assumption.
> 
> Many people go through heterosexual courtship and marriage without knowing that they feel differently than others in the same situation - we never really know if our emotions are the same as other people's - and only discover through living a lie that they are gay.
> 
> How do you know if your feeling of "love" (and even your _understanding_ of the word) is the same as the person next door when they tell you that they have fallen in love?
> 
> You also seem to be precluding the notion that someone who might 'feel' gay might be very uncertain of that feeling, and might think (along with society at large) that all they need is a good dose of heterosexual sex to change them into what they think they ought to be.



You can assume that I am a researcher on his own. I think if there are someone who are homosexual from the time they are born, they must have gay attitudes in their childhood too. I dont say the others are not homosexual but I say that if they didnt have homosexual attitude in their childhood, they gain their homosexuality in their teenages or older ages. I wonder what environmental changes or properties yield this kind of change. There is no ignorance or discrimination in my questions.


----------



## maxiogee

medeterian said:
			
		

> Researchs are scientific and science is not constant. Especially social sciences. In addition, I didnt say I am proving something, I asked a question to know other peoples observations on that subject.



Science *is* constant - it moves inexorably towards greater and greater knowledge and understanding.


----------



## medeterian

maxiogee said:
			
		

> You use the words "I know" - and "in my opinion" in there.
> We cannot "know" something which is based on our opinion.



When I read againg what I wrote there, It was not the way you understood it. I meant "The ... people who I know,..." or "The .. people who are my friends..."

sorry again...


----------



## medeterian

maxiogee said:
			
		

> Science *is* constant - it moves inexorably towards greater and greater knowledge and understanding.



Thats good. At last this conversation has produced a beneficial result. We understood our point of views on the status of science...


----------



## maxiogee

medeterian said:
			
		

> I think if there are someone who are homosexual from the time they are born, they must have gay attitudes in their childhood too.



What *are* "gay attitudes"?
*To whom* would they have shown them?
Small children don't usually "show" anything, they reflect the gender roles their parents assign to them, if any.
This is why I commented about not knowing our emotions - many people do not really come to know themselves until they mature emotionally, and that can be a long time after they mature physically.
You cannot say that just because someone doesn't show gay "attitudes" in their youth that they are any less gay than someone who does. It may well be the eye of the observer which sees the "gay attitudes" you mention.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that many boys were sent off to boarding schools and thrust into "manly" pursuits because a parent felt they were "turning into a sissy".


----------



## coppergirl

medeterian said:
			
		

> You can assume that I am a researcher on his own. I think if there are someone who are homosexual from the time they are born, they must have gay attitudes in their childhood too. I dont say the others are not homosexual but I say that if they didnt have homosexual attitude in their childhood, they gain their homosexuality in their teenages or older ages. I wonder what environmental changes or properties yield this kind of change. There is no ignorance or discrimination in my questions.


 
Hi medeterian!

I think it might be a useful exercise here to turn things around a bit for the purposes of illustrating a point. I hope you will not think me rude or anything, and I am not attacking you or your point of view at all here. I am only throwing this out to see whether it might clarify a few points. So, if you will bear with me, let's try this:

(I am assuming for the purposes of this argument that you are heterosexual yourself, but if I am wrong, I apologise in advance for the presumption!)

Suppose that some homosexual chap came up to you and said something along the lines of, 

"Wow---you're attracted to women? I suppose your parents' attitudes on being heterosexual made you what you are. Still, I think you can change this. Maybe read a few books on what it is like to be homosexual and try altering your attitudes a bit. Be open-minded. Maybe you could still like men if you just try harder and think about it. Then you could be like the rest of us. I think maybe you just need to accept that you adopted some weird attitude when you were a kid which made you like women. You can still change, though---don't worry! I'm sure it's all in the way you think about it. You _could_ be attracted to men---in fact, you probably are deep down, but you have just adopted some odd ideas about women, that's all. I'm sure it can be fixed, though. Try liking men more."

What would you say back to that person?

Again, this is only to see if we shift the ideas around a bit whether more things may emerge from the discussion. I am not attacking you personally or your attitudes here, but I am wondering whether a few other ideas might emerge if we think of things from this perspective. 

Cheers!


----------



## badgrammar

I am getting the feeling that Medeterian is being very misunderstood here. I don't know if it is the writing style, because I read this sentence :



> The inclinations of most of the homosexual/bisexual disposed people (they are not saying they are so) I know are originated (in my opinion) from the environmental factors. If someone wrote their own contradictory opinions there, it would be a informing platform there.



as: "The inclinations of most of the homosexual/bisexual people that I know, originated from environmental factors.  If someone writes something different here, it will be informative for me"

So I don't know where the problem with that came up.  

I would really encourage native ENglish speakers to use a little imagination when judging what non-natives write.  Their choice of words may not be as nuanced or precise as ours, and often not as laden with meaning in their heads (as in Natural vs. unnatural, terms I think were not used to begin a debate, but Med's attempt to describe/put a name on the difference between someone who "was just born that way" and someone who develops tendencies later in life).

I think if we read the posts more carefully before jumping to conclusions, we will understand that Medeterian says nothing about homosexuality being bad or "unnatural" in the sense we are used to hearing.  Quite the contrary.


----------



## coppergirl

badgrammar said:
			
		

> I am getting the feeling that Medeterian is being very misunderstood here. I don't know if it is the writing style, because I read this sentence :
> 
> 
> 
> as: "The inclinations of most of the homosexual/bisexual people that I know, originated from environmental factors. If someone writes something different here, it will be informative for me"
> 
> So I don't know where the problem with that came up.
> 
> I would really encourage native ENglish speakers to use a little imagination when judging what non-natives write. Their choice of words may not be as nuanced or precise as ours, and often not as laden with meaning in their heads (as in Natural vs. unnatural, terms I think were not used to begin a debate, but Med's attempt to describe/put a name on the difference between someone who "was just born that way" and someone who develops tendencies later in life).
> 
> I think if we read the posts more carefully before jumping to conclusions, we will understand that Medeterian says nothing about homosexuality being bad or "unnatural" in the sense we are used to hearing. Quite the contrary.


 
Hi badgrammar! 

I agree with you and hope I did not misinterpret what medeterian was saying. I know the language thing can be a real problem, especially in threads such as this.

If it would help, I think my question still stands but I would throw it out not just to medeterian, but to everyone really. It might help to get to the roots of some of these ideas about homosexuality specifically and stigma more generally. 

Therefore, if someone approached any of us and said "I suppose your sexuality is simply rooted in a few ideas you heard growing up or in your environment. You can change it. Just try to think about it differently."

What would we say back? 

Hope that clarifies things! 

Cheers

EDIT: This does not need to apply just to homosexuality, but to other forms of stigma as well, such as mental illness, alcoholism, depression, or any other way in which people might be considered to be "different".


----------



## badgrammar

Max, with all due respect, and I hope you have read my above post imploring native speakers to try to understand the intentions behind waht is being said in order to guide English learners towards the proper expression of what they wish to say...

Attitude here perhaps would have better been said as _traits/characteristics_ (Med will surely tell us if this is so).  It should not be read as meaning that toddlers go around flaunting their gayness, or any other (deliberate? simplistic?) misinterpretation of attitude.  

Small children do indeed exhibit traits linked to their gender/gender identity, outside of parental influence.  And I'll tell ya, I know a couple of children who I think probably will be gay.  Not because they go around dressing like the village people and showing their "gay attitude", but because there are some strong characteristics that are apparent even at a young age. 



> You cannot say that just because someone doesn't show gay "attitudes" in their youth that they are any less gay than someone who does.


Did someone say that?  I didn't see it.

Try to understand what people are _trying_ to express with their words, which may sometimes be akward.  That's what we're here for.  If people who have difficulty expressing themselves are pigeon-holed because we get caught up on shaky vocabulary, we're all losing out.  



			
				maxiogee said:
			
		

> What *are* "gay attitudes"?
> *To whom* would they have shown them?
> Small children don't usually "show" anything, they reflect the gender roles their parents assign to them, if any.
> This is why I commented about not knowing our emotions - many people do not really come to know themselves until they mature emotionally, and that can be a long time after they mature physically.
> You cannot say that just because someone doesn't show gay "attitudes" in their youth that they are any less gay than someone who does. It may well be the eye of the observer which sees the "gay attitudes" you mention.
> Anecdotal evidence suggests that many boys were sent off to boarding schools and thrust into "manly" pursuits because a parent felt they were "turning into a sissy".



Edited to add:  I suppose this is very much ON-Topic for this thread, as we seem to be refusing to understand one another, or atleast not making much of an effort .


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## coppergirl

badgrammar said:
			
		

> Try to understand what people are _trying_ to express with their words, which may sometimes be akward. That's what we're here for. If people who have difficulty expressing themselves are pigeon-holed because we get caught up on shaky vocabulary, we're all losing out.
> 
> Edited to add: I suppose this is very much ON-Topic for this thread, as we seem to be refusing to understand one another, or atleast not making much of an effort .


 
Hi again, badgrammar! 

Just to say that, whilst I completely agree with you and take your point here (and can see where I may have been mistaken in my interpretation of medeterian's post)---this sort of discussion will necessarily be more difficult for non-natives to engage in precisely because of the difficult nuances around words such as "attitudes" vs "traits" etc. Because of this it might be useful to point out to non-natives here that these words have been central to the debate around homosexuality and mental illnesses for quite some time.

Part of the problem with regard to native speakers' responses to non-natives' posts is that there is a very big difference in terms of the topics being debated between discussing "traits" versus "attitudes", and "natural" behaviour versus "learned" behaviour. I know this does not make it any easier for the non-natives to get across their points without confusion, but because these are, in a sense, "loaded" words from a native speaker's point of view, it is very difficult for natives to work out exactly what non-natives mean if these words are mixed up or substituted for each other. 

"Homosexuality is evident from early attitudes" would be a very different statement, for example, from "Homosexuality is evident from early characteristics." The first question is "Whose attitudes?" the parents? the children's? "Characteristics" sounds more as though we mean "the children" here.

I don't mean to make this more complicated than it already is, but one way round this might be for non-natives to provide more examples of what they mean, or maybe to write a more detailed post. I do this in foreign languages myself if I am not sure I will be understood entirely. Short posts with ambiguous wording will naturally lead to more confusion than longer posts with more explanation. 

Just a thought. Once again---sorry if I misunderstood med's earlier post!

Cheers!


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## moodywop

Hi badgrammar

You are perfectly right in saying that communication in English between native speakers of English and non-native speakers can easily lead to misunderstandings.

However medeterian has clarified what he means by "natural" and "unnatural" homosexuals: he thinks the former are those who are gay from birth, while the latter are "the ones who chose to be gay after changing their social environment or status". He also seems not to attach any negative connotation to "unnatural".

So what I'm questioning here is something he has been very clear about. I don't know of any studies claiming that a different "social environment or status" can lead to a change in sexual orientation (which all researchers agree is unmodifiable). Maybe M. is confusing sexual orientation with sexual behaviour. Sexual behaviour can indeed be influenced by the environment: heterosexual prison inmates can resort to sex with same-sex partners but that doesn't mean they are gay. 
I did ask M. to clarify exactly what he meant by saying that in his neighbourhood he has seen a significant rise in homosexuality among people who became gay "in their teenages or older years" but didn't display it in childhood. This statement doesn't make sense. I only became aware of my sexual orientation at 14. And I think that applies to most gays.
You interpreted his use of the word "attitudes" as premonitory signs that you yourself claim to be able to discern in children. I presume you are referring to things like a lack of interest in sports, a higher emotional sensitivity and so on. These have been proved to be stereotypes. 

That's why I think that this discussion is indeed on topic. Stigma is partly based on lack of knowledge. The trouble is that stigma can in itself reinforce stereotypes. It's a vicious circle. For example, because most of the gays who are "visible" are those that display specific mannerisms, people assume that all gays display such mannerisms. The ones who do not display them are "invisible", except to the friends and family they "come out" to (or they don't come out at all, because of the stigma). This is not of course to say that the mannerisms I referred to should be stigmatized - just that there is a lot of stereotyping.



> Small children do indeed exhibit traits linked to their gender/gender identity


 
Here you, too, seem to be confusing gender identity with sexual orientation. Gays have no doubts about their gender identity.

Gender identity is only relevant to transsexuality, which has nothing to do with homosexuality.


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## badgrammar

Now I'm actually going to try to answer the question in the thread by saying we cannot understand all things, including all the variations amongst people that might make us group them as "others".  

There are definitely "Othernesses" that I do not want to mingle with even if I think I understand what makes them so (extreme-right/racist types, for example).  I understand that they are "Other" and have my opinions as to why.  But we will never see eye to eye.

And there are othernesses that are the result of vast cultural differences, that I cannot understand but am willing to try, even if I can never truly begin to grasp (here I'm thinking of India, the cast system, the beliefs system, the everyday existence of the average Indian woman).  I try not to understand these "others" according to my belief system, but according to theirs).  This is where you never truly understand, but you do learn a lot.

Then there are "othernesses" based on personality factors, socio-economic factors, sexual orientation....

What does the original question really mean, anyway?


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## badgrammar

moodywop said:
			
		

> Hi badgrammar
> 
> You interpreted his use of the word "attitudes" as premonitory signs that you yourself claim to be able to discern in children. I presume you are referring to things like a lack of interest in sports, a higher emotional sensitivity and so on. These have been proved to be stereotypes.
> 
> "For example, because most of the gays who are "visible" are those that display specific mannerisms, people assume that all gays display such mannerisms. The ones who do not display them are "invisible", except to the friends and family they "come out" to (or they don't come out at all, because of the stigma). This is not of course to say that the mannerisms I referred to should be stigmatized - just that there is a lot of stereotyping.
> 
> 
> 
> Here you, too, seem to be confusing gender identity with sexual orientation. Gays have no doubts about their gender identity.
> 
> Gender identity is only relevant to transsexuality, which has nothing to do with homosexuality.



You are certainly correct that gender identity is only relevant to transexuality.  Very good point, mea culpa.  

When I refer to having a feeling about a child, I *do not* mean I can discern sexual orientation in all chidren, and we are way far from assuming a boy is gay because he prefers playing piano to playing baseball.  

I have always had gay friends, beginning in childhood with one of my best friends, a boy who was, well... just different.  I didn't know why when I was a kid, but I figured it out just about the same time he did (he told me first).  What I'm saying is that two of the children who I know, I think will probably come out some day. I just sense this in them.  This is not science, it's my feeling.  It's not about mannerisms or being "queeny" or "butch" or anything of the sort - it is a subtle difference.  I may be wrong.  In this case I doubt it though.  

But another big difference is that where I live, there are nearly as many gay as straight residents, and kids of gay couples as well.  So where some people live in an environment hostile to anyting that varies from hetero norms, here being gay is just a fact of life.  Do I consider gays as being "others"?  No, as I view sexual preferences as being on the continuum from 100% straight to 100% gay, to every nuance in between.  We all fall somewhere in there, very very few people are on the extreme ends of the continuum.

Talking about the origins of homosexuality is tricky, but interesting.


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## Sallyb36

I am utterly convinced that a person is born gay, it is not a lifestyle choice, it is a genetic thing.  I believe this because of a neighbours son who I have known since he was 2 years old.  When he was about 3 I thought that he was gay, and now, he is 24 and yes, he is gay.  It's something inherent.  Who after all would decide, oh, I think I'll be gay from now on, put myself up for a bit of abuse. ?


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## maxiogee

badgrammar said:
			
		

> Max, with all due respect, and I hope you have read my above post imploring native speakers to try to understand the intentions behind waht is being said in order to guide English learners towards the proper expression of what they wish to say...


Yes, I have read what you posted at 13:40. 
You are responding to a post I made at 12:06.
Please be kind enough to grant that I am not prescient and couldn't have known what you were thinking before I posted what I did.  

I have taken as much care to read and understand what is behind posters' messages as I can.



			
				badgrammar said:
			
		

> maxiogee said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> You cannot say that just because someone doesn't show gay "attitudes" in their youth that they are any less gay than someone who does.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Did someone say that? I didn't see it.
Click to expand...


Yes!


			
				medeterian said:
			
		

> I mean by saying "unnatural" the ones who chose to be gay after changing their social environment or status, though they didnt show any gay properties or attitudes before. I mean by saying "natural" are the ones who always felt like a gay even in their childhood.


If that is not saying that medeterian sees a difference in their homosexuality between those who are "born" gay and those who aren't then I need to leave the English language to other people!




			
				badgrammar said:
			
		

> Attitude here perhaps would have better been said as traits/characteristics (Med will surely tell us if this is so). It should not be read as meaning that toddlers go around flaunting their gayness, or any other (deliberate? simplistic?) misinterpretation of attitude.


Maybe attitude *could* have been better expressed another way. But I find it unhelpful for someone to say that - by reflecting back someone's own words, and asking them to explain them - I am deliberately (or simplistically) misinterpreting them - I'm not doing any interpreting, I'm asking for an explanation of the language used.


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## badgrammar

> Max:"You cannot say that just because someone doesn't show gay "attitudes" in their youth that they are any less gay than someone who does."





> Med:"I mean by saying "unnatural" the ones who chose to be gay after changing their social environment or status, though they didnt show any gay properties or attitudes before. I mean by saying "natural" are the ones who always felt like a gay even in their childhood."



The latter does not state the former, I am sorry, no matter how I read it, it doesn't say one group is less gay than the other, just that some have always known it, others have not.  There is no judgement about more or less homosexual.  And natural vs unnatural is not used in a judgemental good-bad way. 

And some people may well be more or less gay, atleast if you ascribe to the continuum theory of sexual orientation, then at some point, certain individuals may choose to pursue one sexual orientation over the other, for personal, envirmonmental, social reasons, whatever...  I don't think anyone's goal was to judge these people as being "less legitimate homosexuals".  

Unless you believe that you're either born gay or born straight, and never the two shall meet... can I introduce you to Wayne?  He used to date my cousin Rob, then he met Tammy and fell in love.  Or how about Jane, who dated men until she met Carry, and now she prefers female company.  Are they less legitimate homosexuals?  Who would try to judge that? 

We all fall somewhere on the continuum, unless you see it as black and white.

Sorry Max if I didn't check the times on your post.


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## maxiogee

badgrammar said:
			
		

> The latter does not state the former,
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Unless you believe that you're either born gay or born straight, and never the two shall meet... can I introduce you to Wayne?  He used to date my cousin Rob, then he met Tammy and fell in love.  Or how about Jane, who dated men until she met Carry, and now she prefers female company.  Are they less legitimate homosexuals?  Who would try to judge that?



I cannot see any statement of *X* and *unX* as being anything other than a differentiation, and a judgement —> not matter how you look at it being termed as "*un~*" is perceived as a negative in terms of not being "*~*".




> Sorry Max if I didn't check the times on your post.


Well, it was _ahead_ of yours.


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## Victoria32

moodywop said:


> I felt an electrical energy racing through my body, my brain was on the rampage and dictating my every move. At first it felt good. I spent money like there was no tomorrow, made lots of friends, bought everyone presents, I was out and about 20 hours a day. A few hours to recharge and out I was again. Then something snapped. The boundless energy turned nasty. I became verbally aggressive. I was on a mission to rid Italy of corrupt politicians. I felt like an avenging angel sent to earth to fight injustice, hypocrisy and prejudice. Eventually I lost touch with reality. I was committed to a mental hospital and treated with ECTs and insulin shocks. Then came the diagnosis: mania, bipolar disorder. I was told there was no cure, only lifelong management through drugs with all kinds of nasty side-effects. Science could not explain the cause. The brain is still a mystery. They told me I was actually lucky. My manic episodes are years apart. Still, it took me twenty years to accept that I am "mentally ill". Even now, when a manic episode subsides, I am left wondering who I am. My sense of identity is shattered. Which is me? The raving maniac or the mild, respected teacher? And I'm riddled with guilt at the pain I inflict on family and friends.
> I take my pills religiously but apparently I belong to the minority that doesn't respond to treatment. I feel like a guinea-pig. Every few years a new drug comes out. Nothing seems to work.
> 
> So my sexual orientation is "unnatural". My brain chemistry is "abnormal". You've won. I embrace your labels.
> 
> Can you see beyond the label, though?


Thank you for bringing this thread to my attention, Carlo.
I have a few friends whose discoveries that they have a  bi-polar condition, were very similar to yours. I honour your account of your experience - I think perhaps revealing that you have a mental health issue is very courageous, more so than perhaps revealing your sexual orientation. (I don't propose to say anything about that at all... that's an issue I am scared to touch, really.) 
I have family members diagnosed as schizophrenic. Because of histories of substance abuse those diagnoses may well be mistaken, which is a whole other matter, and there are family members with autism spectrum disorder. (Mild, but still a disability, and I refer here to disability as a social construct as much as anything else...) 
In my parents' day, there was much more a stigma around mental illness/disability than there is now, and although things are changing there is still change needed.

I was reading a novel recently where a character denigrated labels as not useful. On the contrary, they can be very useful globally, (for instance in NZ it is impossible for a child with Aspergers to access educational or health  assistance without a diagnosis, and I know at least one boy who struggled all through school without a diagnosis and therefore no teacher aide, which he really needed. )

But yes, I can see beyond the labels...


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