How the Positivity Only Movement Has a Negative Impact on the Disability Community
In September of 2012 I was young, hopelessly optimistic, and terrified of the implications two newly diagnosed autoimmune diseases would have on my existence. Having already been diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 18, I knew that this would be a life-long experience. But I did not know how heavy it would be. The weight of it all settled in my chest and threw me into an unmanageable depression.
I hadn’t even grasped what I was going through before I was tossing out any negative (and, for that matter, natural) thoughts I was having. It was at this point that I stumbled into a movement known by names such as the Positivity Only Movement and the Recovery Movement. The narrative of this movement is “Reject negative emotions and embrace the positive.” As a scared kid, this seemed like a beautiful idea. It was cleansing to absolve myself of doubt and fear. It was refreshing to only let my brain soak in the glory of hope. Reminding myself that my recovery may just be around the corner held me together for a long while.
However, I was not allowing myself to grow in thought and advocacy.
In trying to remain positive, I was missing glaring truths. Not only was I sick, but I was also living in extreme poverty. It took me a while to realize people living like me were harshly underrepresented in Positivity Only and Recovery Movement media. Most of the popular bloggers in this niche were insured and had living situations that helped them thrive. That was something I could only dream of. In the haze of chemo and sleeping medications, all I ever wanted was for the rest of my life be stable. My intersectional identity was harshly ignored by the movement, and participating in “positivity” slowly drained me.
A line in the “Positivity Manifesto” of a positivity group I once moderated reflects this line of thinking: “You are not a victim of your circumstances.” But what if you are, and have been?
Positivity- and recovery-based movements contribute to the notion that you’re continuously in control of your body, your recovery, and what happens to you. It assumes that you can simply remove yourself from situational stresses, and you’re to blame if you can’t. But recovery isn’t just based on an individual’s actions. Situational, environmental, and class-driven factors all play a role. These movements often ignore poverty, race, illness, disability, and class, and instead are usually targeted at supporting cisgender, white, thin, and middle/upper-class people.
And they ignore the fact that we can’t separate ourselves from the intersection of our identities or how they impact our lives.
By ignoring realities of disabled people, ignoring that race affects the quality of healthcare, and ignoring that poverty (which 22,508,075 disabled people experienced in 2014 alone) impacts quality of life, we are committing a grave disservice to our community as a whole. Nothing is beyond repair, however. If we all work to accept the truths and realities of intersectional identities, we will be better able to build a sustainable model of support within and across movements.
Ignoring the realities of living with physical or mental health disabilities doesn’t make them go away, but rather prevents people from being able to assess and deal with them. Instead, I am allowing myself space to be bitter. I am accepting that my situation is unfair, and that it is a struggle. This allows me to accept that I don’t deserve what I’m experiencing, but it has happened anyway.My “negativity” allows me to be realistic in my expectations and goals, and that lets me live a more sustainable lifestyle. With that knowledge, I am able to move on and start dealing with it.
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The film series, Unnatural Causes: California Newsreel, examines the question, is inequality making us sick and is an excellent resource for exposing the phenomenon of how race affects health.
The Social Determinants of Health; IE poor diet, homelessness, violence, etc. cause people to become physically ill. It often takes up to 7 years for a disease to be discovered. During this “lag time”, misdiagnosis can cause the original disorder to worsen and mis-treatment most certainly causes further health problems.
Autoimmune diseases often present with the symptom called “depression”, and as such, are at high risk of being misdiagnosed as “mental illnesses”. Symptoms are not ‘diseases” in and of themselves, but simply the bodies warning symptom that something is wrong.
The American Medical Association withdrew all funding for the DSM5 owing to a complete lack of scientific credibility, yet it is still fraudulently being used to diagnose and drug people with neurotoxic drugs known for 40 years to cause brain injury, death, disability, and addiction.
Boys of color and vulnerable children who end up in child protective services, were found to be the most likely to be diagnosed as “mentally ill” and subject to a life sentence of ineffective and dangerous psychotropic drugs, which some lawyers consider experimentation and the UN considers to be torture. However, no vulnerable group is immune.
The American Psychiatric Association (Ronald Pies) admitted that the “chemical imbalance” myth (a failed theory) was just a convenient allegory to get people to take their meds and he never met a dr who believed it, yet against the law of informed consent, countless people are labelled for life as “mentally ill” for profit.
Misdiagnosis is rampant, unethical insurance fraud and medical malpractice. Informed consent, cannot be garnered by misinformation or fraud. New studies show that the “symptoms” called “mental illness” are largely caused by chronic stress and poor diet which causes inflammation. Inflammation, vitamin deficiencies, poor diet, lack of sleep, illicit drug use and drinking etc. are not “mental illnesses” but are being misdiagnosed as such.
Governments that spend money addressing the Social Determinants of Health, (housing, education) have much better success than those bent on the ‘medicalization of social problems and stream (force) everyone into the “mental health” system in order to be allowed to access a roof over their head or the basic necessities of life. No one should have to trade their sanity, legal rights and for food stamps.
Dr’s and prescription drugs taken as prescribed are competing for the 3rd leading cause of death, to say nothing of the disability they cause.
Please educate yourself so that the mass misinformation and harm it causes can stop. Start reading at Mad in America.
Diagnostic Errors Are the Most Common Type of Medical Mistake
Missed diagnoses out-ranked medication overdoses and surgical mistakes in causing the most patient harm.
http://healthland.time.com/2013/04/24/diagnostic-errors-are-more-common-and-harmful-for-patients/
If the current “medical model” of “mental illness” was helpful, we would see people recovering and being “cured”. That is not the case because we have a “sick care industry” that uses toxic Allopathic drugs, what we see instead is an epidemic of “mental illness’s”.
http://www.emotional-cpr.org/
Dan Fisher used the term PUBLIC HEALTH as a replacement for the pathologizing term “mental health”.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/…/canada-mu…/article34056251/
The real challenge to Canada’s health system is not wait times
ANDRÉ PICARD – PUBLIC HEALTH REPORTER The Globe and Mail
KEY POINTS
• Nordic countries, emphasize the socio-economic determinants of health, in tackling inequality, but spending more on education and social welfare, and less on health, with impressive results.
• In Canada, we have a sickness-care system.
• New CIHI study highlight, patients are often left to navigate the complex system on their own, and too often fall between the cracks.
• But the real challenge we have is not waiting times. It is more fundamental:
• To provide the right care at the right place at the right time at an affordable price (to individuals and society). To do so, we need vision and we need a system; not just data, but a willingness to act on the data.
Hello Felix Quinn,
Great job on your post! It resonated with me so much. I am having 2 main thoughts here.
1) the Positivity movement seems to blatantly disregard the experiences of the disability community because having a disability itself is seen in society as a social disadvantage. Because of society’s perceptions of this as a social disadvantage, people with disabilities often live below the poverty line, experience housing and food insecurity, prolonged financial hardship, inaccessible institutions and processes, lower rates of education and graduation, un- and under-employment, benefits scarcity and fear, as well as political disenfranchisement, marriage penalties, and discrimination against parents with disabilities, among many others. None of these lived realities can be said to be positive. As such, when talking about how society treats people with disabilities, it’s easy to be seen as overly negative when society treats your community negatively.
Allow me to be perfectly clear: disability is not negative, rather the way that society sees it is. This is where the social model of disability comes to mind – impairments affect the body, but it is society that casts it as a disability.
I remember being told a multitude of times growing up as a teenager with a disability when I ran into roadblocks indicative of systemic inequality, gatekeeping, and discrimination, that I was seeing things too negatively and that if I saw things in a positive light, then things would be easier for me.
I think that the Positive Only movement is a misguided attempt. Yes, there are benefits to looking at the bright side of things, but people‘s experiences are complicated and varied. Not all experiences are positive, and those involving oppression and discrimination never are.
I would also like to add how inappropriate Positive Only views can be when targeted at mental health issues specifically. When you have bipolar (as in your case) or major depression (as in mine), these views are not helpful at all, potentially even harmful.
2) I’m all for recovery, whether that be in substance use, trauma, or illness; however, recovery in the case of a disability is a balancing act. By all means, if there is a potential for recovery and you are so inclined, take the opportunity!
On the other hand, attempts at recovery can be the cause of a mental trauma all their own. For instance, if you’ve passed your window of opportunity for recovery or if complete and total recovery is not in the cards for you, continuing to hold out false hope for recovery can lead you further into the grief process, manifesting as denial.
There is beauty in acceptance. Take care not to confuse this with giving up. To illustrate, I’ll use myself as an example.
When I was 14, I was diagnosed with an acquired brain injury resulting from a brain tumor resection and was given the diagnosis of cerebellar mutism.
The part of your brain responsible for fine motor skills and muscle coordination was primarily affected (muted as it were). My body had to physically relearn how to do everything.
11 years later, I still experience deficits and graduation from high school faced me with the biggest decision I had ever had to make. At that point, I had to decide how much of my life I was going to sacrifice to recover the physical skills I had lost and if it was time to accept that these were my capabilities now and make the most of the life I now had as a person with disabilities.
This acceptance has done wonders for my life and trauma recovery. So recovery is not always the answer, there is no reason to let society’s level of comfort around disability to be a catalyst for denying yourself or your abilities.
Keep on keeping on!