Those aren’t Voices, those are Injunctions

The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill has won a victory over Sears, getting it to pull t-shirts from its shelves that is says made fun of the mentally ill.

The shirts said, You should hear the NAMES the VOICES in my head are calling you.

The organization also called on Wal-Mart Stores, Kmart Inc., Kohl’s Corp., and Target Corp. to stop selling the T-shirts and similar merchandise “mocking mental illness” or risk facing potential legal liability under federal or state anti-discrimination laws.
“The T-shirt perpetuates prejudice and discrimination against people with mental illnesses through the intimation of threats flowing from auditory hallucinations,” said Ron Honberg, NAMI national legal director. “They reinforce an unfair perception of violence.”

Riiiiigggghhhttt …

I have a great deal of sympathy for folks suffering from mental illness. From as personal experience as one can get without actually being the one diagnosed, I know how disruptive it can be, how painful, how terrifying to experience and difficult to overcome. And certainly this country has a piss-poor attitude toward providing care and appropriate support for the mentally ill.

(For anyone who had a chance to hear the story, there was a chilling article on NPR a week or two ago about a VR program that simulates the effects of schizophrenia. Even just the soundtrack was very disturbing. It’s being developed to give physicians a “taste” of what their patients are going through.)

In short, I am (and have been) willing to go to the wall for fair, decent treatment of folks so afflicted.

But let’s get real folks (so to speak). Battling funny t-shirts at Sears is not going to get better treatment for the mentally ill. It’s not going to engender sympathy, or a desire to help. It’s going to just make NAMI come across as another Politically Correct you-will-respect-us-whether-you-want-to-or-not.

You want to get sympathy and respect? You learn to laugh at yourself. You learn to be the one to tell jokes about your own too-human foibles. We all have them. Making fun of those foibles isn’t the same is making fun of ourselves. Mocking mental illness isn’t mocking the mentally ill.

I mean, not to equate something like gaming with mental illness, but I could be one of those guys who gets in a high dudgeon every time someone makes a deprecating remark about gamers. Or I could be someone who wears Dork Towers t-shirts and is the first to laugh at gamer jokes when they come up.

I know which sounds like more fun, and which is more likely to make me seem like someone who is approachable, friendly, and deserving of respect.

Sometimes when you fight too many small battles, you’re setting yourself up to lose the war. And if you focus just on small battles, you’re more likely to find them, too.

(The cynic in me wonders, BTW, how long we’ll be able to use a phrase like “suffering from mental illness,” and instead have to refer to someone as “enjoying being differently cognizant.”)

Now, you might well ask, how is this different from telling racial or ethnic jokes? Well, ultimately, it’s not. But from what I see, these things go through a cycle. After being constantly joked about, the persecuted minority gets the majority to realize that, y’know, maybe that’s not so funny. But at the same time, the minority members can tell those very same jokes among themselves. And then, slowly, the resentment begins to fade, and everyone can tell at least some of the jokes, particularly the ones that have a grain of truth in them.

So I’ve seen this with a lot of ethnic jokes. Everyone can tell Irish jokes these days, or even wear t-shirts with them — jokes that at one time were actually meant cruelly, or which would have provoked a fist fight (you know those hot-headed Irish types). I expect the same thing will eventually happen with blacks and Hispanics. And with the mentally ill, too.

I just wish we didn’t have to have such sound and fury (and VOICES) in the meantime.