Veronique West, mia susan amir, Kagan Goh, Maya Jones, Constantin Lozitsky, Jivesh Parasram, Kendra Place, Manuel Axel Strain, David Mesiha, JD Derbyshire, Kathleen Flaherty, Ladan Sahraei, Brian Postalian, Amy Amantea, June Fukumura, Simran Gill, MariFer Douglas, Jane Harms
The process for Szepty/Whispers: Dialogue began when artist Veronique West invited seven collaborators to make audio recordings in response to open-ended questions about mental health, language and lineage. The collaborators were: mia susan amir, Kagan Goh, Maya Jones, Constantin Lozitsky, Jivesh Parasram, Kendra Place, and Manuel Axel Strain. A digital platform was developed to host the recordings, through collaboration between the Cultch Digital Storytelling Team, Sound Designer David Mesiha, Inclusive Designer JD Derbyshire, Dramaturg Kathleen Flaherty, Deaf Interpreter Ladan Sahraei, Production Coordinator Brian Postalian and Veronique West, consultants Amy Amantea, June Fukumura, Simran Gill, and MariFer Rios. Szepty/Whispers: Dialogue was first presented at the 2021 rEvolver Festival.
Content Warning: Brief references to colonization, war, genocide, child abuse, suicide, and psychiatric hospitalization. Detailed description of ableism, depression, mania, trauma, and a parent's incarceration. The content does not play automatically and can be paused or skipped.
Words that I have heard family members use when reflecting on other ancestors' lives and experiences: Asylum (as in, "so and so was sent to an asylum"). Teary. Alcoholic. Angry. Sick. In previous generations, I think conversations have often skirted around mental health. Perhaps a person's inner world was passed off as inconsequential, or seen as something to be locked away.
"Nerves" and "Nervous": as in my grandmother couldn't work outside the home, she was too nervous.
"Strange": you didn't behave in a manner considered normal, you said odd things, perhaps had tantrums, a spooky look in your eyes.
"Not all there": as if some part of your brain was missing or you were physically present but your mind was absent, somewhere else. Often characterized by a blank stare or quietude.
"Crazy": usually referring to a ranter, a raver, but also someone who expressed unpopular, harsh or nebulous thoughts + ideas.
"Depressed", "Down in the dumps", "Out of sorts": Sad or negative, listless,apathetic or angry, suicidal.
We don't talk about it. I talk about it with other people but I'm doing damage control on myself, they're pretty gone.
In addition to what I just sent, I wanted to also share this:
"Stupid": as in "She's a little stupid", not smart, doesn't compute things the way others do
"Braindead": defective in the head, killed brain cells perhaps through drug Use
I grew up with a mother who found a lot of solace and comfort in the clinical linguistics of mental health. It presented a framework in which she could engage with the way she was feeling without engaging with the traumas she had growing up in poverty with an alcoholic father. A way to acknowledge she was said without re-triggering herself. I think for her, it is a lot easier to relegate her feelings to unbalanced chemicals than to political and personal trauma. This sounds like a value judgment, but I promise it’s not. It’s not how I find power in language around “mental health”, but I know it brings joy to my mother and so I respect it. However, what was linguistics of solace and comfort for my mother, was the language of restricted imagination for me.
I grew up with a similar framework of “mental health” to my mother’s, one that relied heavily on medicalizations and deterministic clinical frameworks. And when I was diagnosed with Aspergers, that was treated with a largely similar philosophy. Back then, I didn’t put a lot of thought into what my pathologized labels meant. I didn’t understand the medical implications, how it was juxtaposed to my neurotypical peers, and I certainly didn’t know that this particular label’s origins were tied to a doctor that worked with the Nazi regime. I had no sense of history when it came to the way I identified. I didn’t know that there was an implied power to the words I was wielding. Whether I knew it or not, I felt the effects of this power, even if I couldn’t pinpoint it. When I felt shame around my behavior or felt othered, I was not aware that those feelings were informed by a specter of eugenics in which I compared myself to a mythical ideal of “sane” and “abled”.
In the years since my childhood, I’ve tried on many different labels. I started to get curious about my lineage, not necessarily of my blood lineage, but the lineage of my communities. How did the lineage of the Autistic community, Disabled communities, Queer communities, Mad communities, all impact the words I used to talk about “mental health”? I’ve moved away from person first language toward Identity first language. I’ve learned to love and wield Disabled as an identifier. The more I engaged with the histories of the words I was using, the more I learned to love myself. And in equal measure, I was becoming weary of the history of those who wielded the clinical diagnosis my mom found such comfort in. The histories of medical authorities committing acts of violence against people like me made me question and recoil against their words. What does it mean to wield their words? What do their histories tell me about my history?
Crazy. Weird.
Estas loco/loca? 'Are you crazy?' I was often called that because I was not willing to conform to our social norms. The words loco/loca were used to put people down.
For me, 'lineage' doesn't go very long back (in terms of born-into family) -- but of those people, the words used are 'mental health', 'mental illness', 'depression', 'the depression festival' (or just 'the festival'). In terms of chosen family, the words used also included 'autism', 'bipolar', 'manic', 'anxiety'. These words, to me, mean an attempt to see, name, and give space for the experience of family members (and friends). They are more diffuse than labels, although that's what they sound like.
In my culture, if you are depressed or anxious, you're not really depressed or anxious, because there's nothing to be depressed or anxious about. If you have a roof over your head, food on the table, and everyone you love is still alive, then being depressed isn't a mental health issue. You're just being lazy and selfish.
in mandarin, a psychologist is a "doctor of heart science", or more poetically, a "person who studies heart truths". we migrated here when I was small. I was devastated. After a long wait, I got to meet a person who studies heart truths. There were toys in her office, and we talked for a long time. I don't know if she found my heart truths. I am still searching.
My family isn't big on having honest conversations about mental health. It all seems to be wrapped up in a lot of blame, guilt, and shame. It just isn't talked about. The absence of words leaves no space for healing or even the possibility of understanding.
The twirling of their index finger by their temple to indicate a scrambled brain and sticking tongue out at an angle (in reference to someone else)
Crying.
Not getting out of bed.
Refusing to eat.
Running away from home.
Carrying an axe to work.
Attempting suicide.
In the part of my family in which I grew up, mental health struggles weren't discussed but, looking back, I can recognize the pins in the fabric of my mother's world; the coping mechanisms for holding it together, those which can't be removed lest it all fall apart. I look back at the advice she gave + it feels like tracing rays back to a child's drawing of the sun, everything pointing to her own depression or flitting mind. Me taking decades to understand the shape of these mental illnesses that I inherited from her because I grew up on their slopes without ever seeing the mountain. And yet I must have been aware of something, because no other grown ups were like my mother, none so fun or compassionate or charismatic or imaginative. There was some sense that she and I were the same, and a knowledge that, even if I could choose to walk instead of this difficult way of flying, that I absolutely never would.
We all sit in different rooms. We've never really learnt how to be around each other, let alone honest.
In addition to what I just sent, I wanted to also share this:
Being silent, refusing to speak.
Appearing to be angry all the time.
Not showing up for important life events.
Slapping, pushing.
I don’t really talk to my mom about this journey. I usually can be fairly open with her, but I suspect this exploration might hurt her. She’s always held tremendous fear that she messed up somewhere in raising an Autistic child (a fear grounded in another history, the history of the refrigerator mother. The history of blaming mothers for Autism). Whenever I bring up a new discovery about being Autistic, she feels guilt that my new thought meant her old one was wrong. But as this particular exploration (the de-medicalization and Maddening of mental health) becomes increasingly important in my life, I try to find a way and reconcile my blood lineage with the lineage of my communities. The values of my birth family and the values of my found family.
The lineage of Autistic self-advocacy is filled with histories built by the conflict between the self-advocate and the parent advocate. I feel these histories play out when I talk to her about these things. She tries to fight those histories, and for that, I’m very grateful. Still, I see the pain and the guilt, and sometimes I wonder what silence might offer instead. Lately, I 've leaned into silence a little more. Maybe it's ok if I have my core strong beliefs...and still can choose to spare my mother some hurt.
Never even communicated about it. Grandfather later wrote his memoir about hiding under Nazi occupation.
People used their index finder to make a gesture around their ear. This meant whomever they were referring to was mentally ill. This gesture was also used to put people down. While I was growing up in Puerto Rico mentally ill people were looked down upon.
The wordless ways my born-into and chosen family uses include art, tears, human contact, going out into the wild, and silence (more, or more recently, in an attempt to give space and understand than in a loss for words -- so, deliberate silence).
Substance abuse, depression, alienation, abandonment.