People Who and Human Rights

From the perspective of the UN Universal Periodic Review, there are bold and there are subtle indignities.

When the United States signs the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities we must as well honor its careful crafting. For the wants of people with psychiatric diagnoses are diluted by so many others who claim to be stakeholders, who want to share, really direct, instead of support our decision making.

But the most sly, the most subtle deprivation is that I’m stripped of responsibilities, and that deprivation is based on my diagnosis of disability. I’m encouraged to only join low-stress activities, to ask for help to manage myself, and at the extreme I’m not allowed to vote or to sign contracts. Rights have to do with liberty, and mine can be curtailed. Duties have to do with dignity; but I’m asked for few.

We people who cope with mood swings, fear, voices and visions are consistently denied many of the rights enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so that it seems those rights don’t fully attach to us, that we are invisible, or an exception, a yes, but ...

There is no but. The rights of the UDHR are fundamental. They are not entitlements; they are not reversible. They are meant to include me too.

So, what to do?

Education and access.

In order to exercise my rights I need to know what they are. Continue the broadband initiative and create electronic accessibility for full inclusion in the knowledge society. Require transparency, including industry-funded health non-profits and web sites. Emphasize critical thinking starting in grade school.

For my disability in particular, the psychiatric diagnostic manual is being revised. Amidst controversy. The “Clinical tensions mask social and political ones.” “As if to demonstrate the point that the creation of mental illness categories remains as much a social and cultural endeavor as a scientific process, the APA is soliciting input from the public [for DSM-V].

We change the paradigm by changing the language. Not medical. Not criminal. Words do matter. Use words that truly presume “wellness, response-ability and the value of the person’s interpretation of their own experiences”

Include me too.

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Citations:

Jonathan Metzel, Protest Psychosis, 2009. Beacon Press, Boston, p 192.

Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, 2010. Free Press, p 252.

http://www.peoplewho.org/documents/mediaguidelines.htm

http://peoplewho.org/documents/wordsmatter.htm

http://www.mentalhealthpeers.com

Motivations

In the US, there are groups who urge social justice for Native Americans, who consider the election of a black president redemptive of the abuses from slavery, and who are critical of how humans have ill-managed environmental resources. Materialistic, greedy, short-sighted are a few of the adjectives connected to a doomy view of the planet’s, our human, future.

At the same time that we worry about the death of the planet, we are extending the life of individual humans with new technology to support perinatal challenges and various disabilities, extending the length of time each of us stays alive, and trying to forbid voluntarily sanctioned easy death.

I am wondering about connecting this unwillingness to be comfortable with the death of any one individual and the global sense of shame at the much-discussed death of the planet.

Denial? Reparation? Redemption?

Titles

Titles for books to be written, ideas to be developed, indeed, only beginnings. Or maybe endings, enough.

Imperfect Copies

The Seventh Day

Turtles All The Way Down

fractals

The Moment of Parting

Where Was Everybody?

One U:

The Upsets Of The Day

Becoming Mrs Rochester

Mending

Round Two

Unleavened

Zebras Everywhere

The Discover Bee

Total Recall

I watched the authors of Total Recall describe how they’d scanned in their whole lives - receipts, medical records, medals, contracts, business plans, emails, phone calls ... - and developed software to organize it. They gave examples of using the bits to find forgotten items, a phrase from an email, the name of a contact, ...

I search my email this way too, and sometimes the whole internet, and finding that phrase or name releases more of the related memory. Yet I began to think about information overload and time and realize that the amount of time looking backward through this material is time not looking forward and time not in the present and I wonder how having access to so much of one’s own history, one’s DigitalMe, will impact musing, daydreaming, philosophizing, the ability to wander around in one’s mind, rummage through.

I had reluctances when library card catalogs - the serendipity of browsing through the authors - became electronic, and I’ve learned a different kind of browsing.

So possibly with total recall, there will evolve a different kind of remembering and creating. And our plastic brains will adapt. Will we recognize ourselves?

War is not a sports event.

War is not a sports event.

The human species proudly differentiates itself by its consciousness, values, morality, choices. How then explain brutality, and war?

Creating humanitarian principles to guide behavior towards each other as part of the internationally accepted Rules of War has a starting place that accepts war as a given. That false start leads to destruction of persons and property and worst, of kindness. War is an insufficient justification for managing an overload of ambition.

A search for simmer

Buddhism is about emptying the mind and having an awareness of now.

The Dalai Lama says emptiness is not vacuum, nothingness, but rather that nothing is fixed, there is a lack of form, motion, change, manifesting.

Physics states that observation removes choice by fixing a result, that observation fixes what is observed, makes possibility actual. Thus observation slows time. We know how elastic our perception of time is. We encapsulate this idea in “a watched pot never boils.”

So if the pace of human activity is speeding up, as it seems, thinking, doing, faster, faster, moving, ... while Buddhism spreads it’s awareness, slowing, slowing, and fixing/manifesting ... ?

The pot boils over? The bubbling stops?

Tech Hubris

The health care industry is excited about electronics, electronic health records, savings, coordination. They’ve decided to use robot phone calls to customers and patients. I am expectant when the phone rings, between rings wondering who might be calling, kindly reaching out to me. When I hear the robot, instant rage covers my disappointment. I scheme about how to turn off the phone, turn off the ring, never ever answer, never ever hope.

I use TiVo to record chosen television programs, and watch a day or several days later. The first few minutes of a program I just watched was an emergency alert interruption, local flood evacuations, site of shelters, ... But it had no date, only times, evacuate now it commanded in a red trailer and command voice. Do you think there is no message developer at the National Weather Service who thinks that some of the audience time shifts?

As I experience each of these technology innovations, I feel less and less an individual, more a bit in a marketing audience.