A Society Which Pushes People Into The Closet (About Mental Health Conditions) Is The Problem, Not The People In The Closet

“It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.”? ~ Donald Winnicott

An invitation: think of the most recent time you felt you had to hide some aspect of who you are. Consider what, why, from whom. Maybe you didn’t want your supervisor to know how much you drink on the weekends, or your in-laws to discover that you and your partner actually have a polyamorous marriage. Maybe it was something else. Take a moment to extend love to the part of you that felt compelled to hide. Extend love to the part of you that was/is hidden. Hold on to all of it. We will return to it. For now, let’s begin here: we need each other. As humans, we are neurologically wired to be in community. Authentic engagement in community requires genuine relationships built across time. Structural oppression and power dynamics tend to interrupt the freedom to be genuine. There can be consequences for showing up real.?

My first response when I saw the recent Chronicle of Higher Education headline “Academics Don’t Talk About Our Mental Illnesses. We Should.” was ambivalence. Not a passive near-neutral kind of ambivalence, but a deep tug felt simultaneously towards opposite poles: Yes! No! Yes! No! We don’t talk about it, true. But why is the word “should” present, and what does it mean in this context? Before I continue, I pause to offer that although my writing is part critique, I engage with ideas I find worthy of dialogue. The piece I am responding to is overall strong, important, and deeply appreciated. Thank you, Dr. Alicia Andrzejewski for courageously creating and sharing it.?

One of my favorite lines is:?

“...to diverge is to differ, to deviate, to continually depart from a standard, a norm. It follows, then, that neurodivergent academics are trailblazers; they offer the academy something more than already exists.”

And another is:?

“Everyone I talked to made it as far as they did because of support and understanding from people in power: mentors, advisers, program directors — a shared thread that gave me hope that, with more awareness, such personal efforts could become structural."?

The latter sentiment holds a key I wish Dr. Andrzejewski had expanded on a bit more: how personal understanding must become structural change. Because here are my concerns about another aspect of the piece: saying that people should stop masking is likely to land as an act of shaming, and including a quote from someone who states that “Those who can mask make it harder for those of us who can’t” implies harsh judgment. This stance is a form of horizontal hostility at best and lateral violence at worst, which comes dangerously close to blaming us for our own oppression. The problem is not the people who are closeted, it's ableist structures which cause the condition of closeting. I lovingly wonder if this stance is an example of the very thing – internalized stigma – the writer is attempting to dismantle. With years of clinical practice under my belt, I can also say that shaming people to change is generally not effective.?

Here's a reframe. Living and thriving through oppression creates an opportunity to hone certain skill sets. For example, in places we are marginalized we often have a fine-tuned sense of when it is safe/brave to “come out” or “push back” and when it isn’t. Yes, the trauma of stigmatization can cloud that, perhaps making us more fearful than necessary at times. But still, trusting our own intuition of how to navigate is immensely necessary. None of us can decide for another person whether or not they “should” be out or “should” remain partially or fully closeted – even if they have attained a position of power. It is, simply, a decision each of us has to make on our own, with support from our connections who have a proven track record of trustworthiness.?

If we decide to come out, we have to be prepared for all the risks involved. We have to be ready not only for the stigma and bias, but the added labor – how many additional students will we be called to mentor, how many times will we be asked to speak for what it’s like for people with X diagnosis in the academy – as if it is possible for any one of us to generalize our experiences to represent a whole group? And if we do not come out, the pain of masking is itself punishment enough. I have talked with a number of faculty at various institutions who did not “come out” about mental health diagnoses and accommodation needs until after they were tenured – and for good reason.??

Speaking from personal experience, in my current job as Associate Director of Disability Services at Smith College, I have for the first time been fully out about my disabilities. I don’t fault myself for not doing so sooner. Partly I attribute this recent choice to trust of my relationships at Smith; Smith is my alma mater, and there are people here who have seen me shine across the past two decades, who unabashedly place my competence, capacity, and resilience in the center and consistently keep my strengths at the forefront in our collaborations. Partly I attribute this choice to my particular position. Being in a director-level role in disability services does give me a greater sense of freedom to reveal. Not just freedom, but perhaps responsibility to reveal. And, unlearning the survival skill of invisibling myself is an ongoing process. As with any growth, it happens over time rather than all at once.?

When positioning myself in Disability Justice work, I notice I still tend to publicly name neurological/rheumatological symptoms and diagnoses rather than my C-PTSD. It's much easier to talk about vertigo and joint pain than it is to admit the impact of (long past yet severe) childhood trauma. Part of my disparate disclosure has to do with internalized stigma, sure, though there are very real barriers that can arise when any professional is open about a mental health condition. Although there are some nods towards these barriers in Dr. Andrzejewski’s piece, I feel it is important to boost the reality of this circumstance and thus to extend nonjudgmental compassion rather than adding shame for those who are “in the closet” about mental illness.?

In the realm of dominant narratives and societal assumptions, C-PTSD is more likely to be attributed to experiences that are not my fault (though plenty of societal survivor-blaming still occurs). C-PTSD is thus perhaps more likely to be seen as a medical condition rather than a moral failing as so often happens with other mental health conditions. At my previous two institutions, I watched unconscious bias play out with colleagues too many times. A colleague known to have ADD was framed as “disorganized,” while another colleague who displayed the same type of behavior with similar frequency was “having a bad day” any time their pattern became too obvious to ignore. A colleague who was known to experience chronic depression was blamed for not putting in enough effort, while another colleague who was equally disengaged was just “too busy to contribute.” Of course, other identities (race, gender, class, etc.) factor in too. Unconscious bias is everywhere. A web of deep connections is a strong protective factor against the harm it causes. If our institutions can grow that kind of web into actual structural support and systematized care, then it will truly be possible for more people to “stop masking” as Dr. Andrzejewski encourages. Further, the whole existing system of diagnostic categories is fraught, culturally-bound, has dominant systems baked in.?

Ultimately, we all have to do social change work together. Ultimately, all of us hold varying blends of both privilege and oppression within ourselves. Most of my identities are complex, mixed, hybrid, occupy gray in-betweens. However, one place I definitely have privilege is citizenship; I was born a U.S. Citizen and have never had to worry about my documentation status, so have often chosen to focus my activist energy there. I’d like to take this moment to lovingly call on those with the privilege of able bodyminds to more fully accept the onus of changework. In the same vein, many of us agree that amending racism and white supremacist culture in our institutions and society is not solely the work of BIPOC people. BIPOC colleagues may be involved, may be leaders, and yet the responsibility to correct it resides most with those who benefit from the oppression. Undoing homophobia and transphobia doesn’t rest on queer folx and whether or not we are “out;” it rests most on straight cis people. It makes sense to extend a similar nudge regarding Disability Justice work in higher ed: fixing ableism within our structures most squarely rests on those who are benefiting from said structures.?

At the same time, undoing ableism in organizations does not exclusively support disabled community members. At a teaching luncheon hosted by our faculty development center last year, I gave a talk called “Academic Curb Cuts: from accommodations to accessible design.” The main thread I want to pull from that presentation is the idea that if we build Universal Design principles into our institutions, it will make them gentler and kinder places for everyone, not just those who have been dis-abled by the ways our inherited environments were built to exclude. The Curb Cut Story is a classic which demonstrates this point: when activist wheelchair users advocated and fought (and I do mean fought!) for cities to be more accessible by placing indentations at sidewalk corners so they could cross streets, the resulting updates also benefited people wheeling baby strollers, contractors with work carts, those on bikes, rollerblades, skateboards.?

While studying Critical Theory in the early 2000s, Tanya Titchkosky’s writings were a revelation to me. My takeaway, succinctly: everyone’s bodymind exists within a spectrum – all of us have limits and all of us have possibilities; where we place the line that determines who is “able” and who is “disabled” is based on how and for whom the world has been arranged. We can change how the world is arranged. I read Titchkosky alongside Bodies That Matter, bell hooks, Cornel West, and the work of a number of other brilliant thinkers and feelers. There is no true Disability Justice without intersectional racial, gender, class, decolonial, environmental justice. There are many who are brainstorming and dreamstorming what comes next in these realms: Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha , Dr. Aurora Levins Morales , Dr. Sami Schalk, Dr. Jina Kim, Dr. Autumn BlackDeer , Dr. Camille Bernier, Ph.D. The list goes on.? We have just to follow the map and continue visioning new possibilities together. Possibilities that increase joy, levity, access to lives well-lived, and celebration of the full spectrum of what that means.?

At heart, I am a poet and creative writer. A storyteller. I prefer lyric prose, though I will code switch to linear prose such as this essay when necessary. As an undergrad, I wanted to be an English professor. Although I sometimes teach as an adjunct, I have not (yet) pursued a path towards becoming faculty – not because I couldn’t, but because I have had deep concern about the potential cost to my wellbeing. How many of us desire to contribute more to the academy, yet feel we must steer in another direction, or do commit to that path and then reel from the high price of what it requires? Too many. Our communities will be stronger when we have made shifts towards deeper care for ourselves and one another, can disentangle from rhetorical statements of support and actually logistically enact and operationalize the inclusion many of us value. Our institutions and societies will be stronger when neurodiverse trailblazers are more adequately welcomed with increased flexibility in terms of options for input, output, and pacing. We will all be better held, then.?

Winnicott wrote about “true selves” and “false selves,” the gap between how we outwardly present and the totality of who we are. He wrote about not striving for some state of idealized perfection, but finding the “good enough” version. Those who are closeted are not doing something wrong. True, when we are able to exist authentically, the act of being ourselves does generate profound openings. Proudly proclaiming madness is indeed a powerful, radical choice – it just is not the answer for many people in a world that would still pathologize and harm those who do so.?

Remember the moment you brought to mind at the top of this article, the recent time you felt the need to hide? What would it feel like to not have to hide that thing? What would it feel like to not have to hide anything? What would it take? What tools – compassion, empathy, what else? – do we need in order to gently find one another when we are obscured? What policies and cultural transformations are needed to scaffold openly-expressed solidarity? What would it feel like to have a world where the “joy of hiding” was sourced from freely chosen playfulness or actually-preferred privacy, rather than erected as a necessary shield? I want that kind of liberation for all of us.?

-- ej seibert