"Rhetorics of Mental Disability"

Ch apt 7 “On the Rhetorics Of Mental Disability”

Her point is that there isn’t any – rhetoric of mental disability, at least one that takes into account the rhetoric of the mentally disabled themselves, especially schizophrenics.

Catherine Prendergast wrote this essay in 2000, 12 years ago, on the cusp of the Clinton/Bush presidential election, resulting in an exchange from “liberal” Clinton to reactionary Bush. I mention this, because, as bad as things were for schizophrenics during the 90’s, when she says, mental illness became increasingly criminalized, it must be even worse now. (It’s largely a question of money, isn’t it? Hospitals cost money. Who is going to pay for it? Bill O’Reilly doesn’t want his tax money going to these maligners and neither do Health Insurers). In 1979, I remember the Dayton State Hospital with a physical plant the size of a small college campus, housing 100s of mental patients. It got shut down in the early 80s, nothing remains. This was the era of deinstitutionalization. I think that it was about this time that Axl Rose appeared on the scene, mute testimony to the failure of deinstitutionalization in Indiana. (I kid).

It seems what she is documenting is just more and more penetration by the mean spirit of bureaucracy and corporatization of the mental health profession, exemplified by the use of the DSM - IV for sorting patients into recognizably billable categories. This has to have been on-going.

What most concerns her is the almost absolute repression of all recognition of the language use of SZs by institutional psychiatry. The case of the uni-bomber Ted K is paradigmatic. Teams of psychiatrists poured over his manifesto and other writing in order to decide if these texts revealed an individual, rhetorically competent to defend himself and stand trial, which is what he wanted, even though that exposed him to the risks of execution for capital murder. The team decided that his writings were evidence of his inability to stand trial because of mental disability and were therefore excluded from testimony.

What Prendergast wants is “a rhetoric of mental disability that the mentally disabled themselves will have the greatest part in crafting.”