POLITICS NOT SYMPTOMS
The Revolution will be Medicalized
By Joseph Dumit, 09/21/2001
Why is this terrorist attack being medicalized? How can we get over what is still going on? Every day there are articles in the newspaper teaching us that the "profound sadness, recurring nightmares, hyper-alertness, horror, edginess, anger, numbness" we experience are symptoms. The risk for many of us, we are told, is that our "normal reaction to an abnormal event" will turn into a full-blown disease. Our feelings are to be identified as symptoms in order to diagnose an increasing variety of syndromes that may result from the traumatic event. Depression, panic disorder, PTSD are all threats. If this is the case, many of us will not "recover" from our traumatic symptoms, but instead spiral down into a syndrome. "A variety of therapies tailored for trauma survivors, including methods that gradually desensitize survivors to their memories or teach them to reconstruct how they interpret their experiences, can be effective in treating post-traumatic stress disorder. Depression, once identified, can be helped with psychotherapy and medications. // As the weeks unfold, the memories laid down last week will work their way into people's minds and souls. But their damage may not yet be entirely done, Dr. Shalev said. [We can still get help to them]"But what if these are not "symptoms" at all, but real responses to an ongoing situation? A terrorist attack of immense scale and horror has happened. It was not done by "mad, irrational, brutes", but by a reasoning, calculating group of terrorists who have tried before and will try again. The terrorists' goals are not simply to disrupt our lives. They have international goals; their main one may be to goad the U.S. into a global indiscriminate war that will convert others to their cause. The horrible acts were committed by people willing to die to succeed, and their real motivations are unknown to us. On September 11, we were successfully attacked by people who will continue to do so. We were not and are not safe. Our friends and loved ones were killed for some bigger picture that we were not privy to. Whether we were ignorant of it, refused it, or denied it; we now know viscerally that we are part of that bigger picture. September 11 was an event. The situation is ongoing. We are not "reacting" to the trauma of one event, but living with and struggling with the situation. These distinctions are not simple word games. The notion that there was an event in the past that we are reacting to, sets up the language of syndromes: if the event is over, then there is some residual reaction that we may experience, but in time it should pass. If those reactions don't pass, then we are no longer reacting normally, we have become mentally ill. But Sep 11 marks an ongoing situation. The feelings we have of "profound sadness, recurring nightmares, hyper-alertness, horror, edginess, anger, numbness" are real. These feelings are significant now and for the future. They signal a political awakening to a global situation of terror; a situation that we share with most nations on earth, now, since Sep 11. Our feelings are politics. Israelies and Palestinians have been living with this kind of terror for decades now. Many of them either know someone who has, or have seen people who have been blown up by a surprise bomb. Everyone there has seen it happen on TV too many times, too close, and rubble is always visible. If we are experiencing numbness, sadness, anger, and anxiety - and want it to stop - we are in solidarity with all of those who have been living under terror in the whole world. "In a city full of loudmouths, everybody needs to talk right now"The anxious, inchoate feelings of loss that motivate us to talk to people in the street that we would have avoided a couple of weeks ago - this is the feeling of solidarity: a shared sense of a situation, a shared commitment to make it through, to do something so that the situation will change. This feeling we should cultivate, realizing that we share it with almost everyone in every country living in terror. The feelings we have of profound sadness, so deep we seem numb, even if we have only witnessed the events on TV - this feeling is compassion, a word meaning "sharing pain". Yes, these feelings are a reaching into our souls and finding that we can, and do share the pain of those who are unconscionably killed and traumatized. The very same compassion that seemed so distant when we watched cities being bombed on TV in other countries before September 11, is now activated by that same TV because now it "us" that has been devastated. This feeling we should cultivate, and understand that it is there (however repressed) whenever we watch or hear about others being devastated. September 11 reminded us that those others are "us" too. The anger, resentment, vengeance, even hatred we feel toward unknown enemies - these are desires for peace. We are bloody angry that we can no longer sleep soundly at night; we are vengeful against all who participate in violent attacks on normal people. We want this violence, this disruption, and this horror to stop now and in the future. Peace does not mean an abdication of responsibility. Desire for peace is a primal, forceful emotion, an insistence that the world is not right, is not okay, and needs to be changed. If we are told that peace will come through bombing others, then we will desire this. But what we really desire is peace, and we need to think through whether bombing leads to peace. We definitely need to stop future terrorism, everywhere, but we do not want generalized war to replace it. All of these feelings are not reactions to an event that is past. They are ongoing political feelings appropriate to our ongoing situation. We are living our politics out loud - our solidarity with subjects of terrorism everywhere, our compassion for victims of terrorism everywhere, our desire for peace without constant fear. We must not allow this to stop. We have a chance: with September 11, everything changed... if we help it change. The Revolution will be Medicalized It is not so simple of course. Article after article tells us the opposite. Experts tell us that these feelings are not political at all, are not conscious at all, but simply bodily, neurochemical reactions to horror. We, cultural and symbolic beings, are affected by this interpretation. It is a terrifying reframing of our lives: in the face of our bodily selves crying out to the world in solidarity and compassion, we are told to "Wait, and the symptoms will pass." If they don't, there are treatments. Treatments so that you will be numb to your numbness, so you will no longer be angry at your anger, so you will be happy in your distance, so you will be able to work without thinking of your fears. Notice the individualization of this approach. The psychiatric approach to political trauma is to make it each individual's problem. If you are shaken up for a few days and then are able to go back to work, you are normal. If not, you are the problem. This is so backward it is scary. It should scare you. These feelings are social, not individual; they are political, not medical. Just because you are able to bottle up all of those feelings of solidarity and compassion, and desires for peace and go back to the way you lived and worked before September 11 doesn't mean you are normal. It means you have achieved denial. "Experts on terrorism say it is good to get back to normal"And far worse: if you still feel the anxiousness of solidarity with those who live under terrorism, the sadness of compassion for those who continue to be terrorized and devastated everyday, and the anger and resentment of a desire for peace - if you still feel all this, your friends are directed to take you in for counseling and/or medication. Why aren't we talking with people in Israel, Ireland, Kosovo, and so on? These are places where people have learned to live while fearing (rather than having to choose between one and the other), where they have learned to laugh while profoundly sad. They are not in therapy. They are struggling together to make sense of their, our, wounded world. So many people in so many places have been, and are working for peace, in solidarity, even as they have not been able to solve the terror in their lives by themselves. "There are some people who are so overcome by the events that they can't get past the trauma by themselves, North said."Of course people can't get past it by themselves. It is a social and political problem that we are living. We have been woken up... Will we go back to sleep? Helping is not therapy "Any title with the word 'therapy' in it has a friendly ring this week, when everyone feels in need of it."Story after story describes how people have woken up to a desire to help others, to listen to them, to find out their stories and to tell their own. They are doing this spontaneously, out of their awakened sense of solidarity and compassion. And yet there is an ever-present suggestion that helping others is a form of individualized therapy. It is a way of working through events, to process them - so that one can return to work, to not helping, to not listening. "Thousands of people streamed into blood centers in Wisconsin and around the nation, donating blood as a kind of therapy, a way to do something - anything - to help."Helping is not therapy, it is political consciousness. We have awakened to our interconnectedness, to our shared terror, and to an uncertain future that we share with the world. We are working to change and heal this world that we no longer feel comfortable in. It is the world that needs change therapy, not our selves. And it is our world, not a lone America, that was attacked and needs healing. We say, "it should not happen here", when we mean, "it should not happen anywhere." This was not a unique terrorist occurrence. If you cannot name at least five other countries attacked by terrorism in the last decade, you need to get informed. These are all fellow victims. These are people who felt and feel as we do. Inform your desire for peace by learning how terrorism is fed and grows and festers. The medical image goes still further: we are told that terrorism is a cancer in our world that we must destroy. But if we are not careful, we will end up waging a war on symptoms. If terrorism is a cancer, then we cannot hope to succeed by inventing better and better means of screening and detection devices, nor by bigger and better surgical, chemo, and radiation weapons. These are important and will, as with cancer, succeed in locating many outbreaks early on and saving lives (at no small cost). But cancer rates are not, and cannot be, reduced by these methods. When the Oklahoma bombing was revealed to be committed by Americans who didn't look "different", the response was a deep questioning within the press and in homes over "why" this happened. No longer was the idea that this was done by "mindless, irrational, barbarian fanatics" enough of an explanation. We needed to know what drove some people like us to kill hundreds of innocent people. How did they come to have so much resolve, so much hatred and revenge, and so much cruel rational planning to carry out such a terrorist act? (These are also the same questions that we ask of the school kids who, after weeks of planning, gun down their schoolmates. We want to know why so that we can heal the causes along with the wounds.) Helping remakes community. Helping out of a deep sense of solidarity and compassion is political work rebuilding the world so that it is inclusive, so that we feel comfortable in it once again. Healing the wounds that we feel through helping can only be a collective, ongoing process. It is hard, conscious, informed work to remake a world that is out of joint. Our wounded world and wounded selves will only heal if we cultivate, not medicate these feelings. |
