by CARRIE ARNOLD
The nightmare started with a piece of toast. As a patient at an eating-disorder treatment centre, Holly was required to finish everything on her plate or drink a high-calorie liquid supplement. Already uncomfortably full after eating everything else, she couldn’t finish the slice of toast. A nurse reminded her of the rule: toast or supplement. She tried to explain that it was only her fourth day in treatment and she had already eaten nearly twice what she had been eating at home. The nurse insisted. Finally, Holly admitted: ‘I can’t. I’m scared.’
But the facility didn’t see fear, it saw defiance. In her panic, Holly had pushed a nurse out of the way, which was written down as a physical assault on staff. So the treatment centre transported Holly to a locked psychiatric ward where she was held against her will for the next five days. She was restrained, drugged, and humiliated, all of which gave Holly flashbacks and nightmares. Only after stuffing herself full of food for two days straight to convince the hospital that she wasn’t a danger to herself or to others was she released.
‘Defiant or not, as a patient, I have the right to participate in my own care, and that was taken from me,’ she said.
In nearly two decades of treatment for depression and eating disorders, Holly has frequently been called defiant. She doesn’t hesitate to stand her ground and state her opinion, even if it makes people uncomfortable. Her shaved head and multiple piercings and tattoos add to her defiant image. Holly doesn’t deny that the word applies to her – after all, she tried to enlist the help of the American Civil Liberties Union in suing her high school on the grounds that their community service requirement violated the 14th Amendment. Her problem is that the only thing people can see is defiance.
‘All they see is a pain in the ass,’ she said.
Certainly, people undergoing psychiatric treatment can be challenging, for good reason: the medicine they are asked to take can make their brains feel foggy and flat, cause weight gain and even obesity, and have unpleasant side effects such as constipation, loss of sex drive and dry mouth. But whenever these patients object, they are labelled defiant, a stance that often reinforces the impression that they are irrational players, psychiatric cases worthy of removal from society.
The problem is compounded when physicians, and society at large, see rebelliousness in a psychiatric light, and then shift disease definitions to describe the rebelliousness – even in the absence of diagnosable psychiatric disease. Holly says that without her defiance, her tendency to say ‘Fuck you’ instead of ‘Thank you’, she wouldn’t have been shipped out to the psychiatric unit.
And when the defiant ones are locked up in prisons and hospitals, they are unable to force changes in the status quo – not only do they lack control over the treatment dispensed, they are also unable to express their change-making views on culture and the world. And what a loss: without people protesting police shootings of unarmed black men in Ferguson and Baltimore, racial violence will continue. Without sexual assault victims speaking out against how they were blamed for crimes committed against them, rape culture will go on. Defiance forces us to chip away at the cornerstones of our culture, but it’s all too easy to turn our discomfort into the defiant ones’ psychiatric disease.
Without defiance, the values of the Western world might not exist at all. Early Christians defied laws banning their new religion, worshipping in private and sometimes being killed for their beliefs. In Russia and Europe, serfs defied their masters. Slaves did the same in the United States, ultimately winning their freedom. Women’s right to vote, life-saving treatments for HIV infection, and marriage equality are all the result of defiant acts. Defiance is the Occupy Wall Street movement, protesting income inequality, and Black Lives Matter, bucking a system where law enforcement imprisons young black men at many times the rate of other groups.
Aeon for more