Accommodating

I was watching television the other night. A & E to be precise, and an advertisement came on for mental health awareness. This particular ad claimed that one in five Americans have some kind of mental illness. I’ve had an issue or two in the past with some of the statistical claims made in advertisements, but this one was kind of stunning, and I don’t know exactly how they came up with the data to make the claim. It reminded me of the responsible gun coalition of Canada that alleges a huge increase in gun fatalities in our dominion. But they conveniently fail to point out that the rise in the percentage of gun deaths really meant that we went from something like forty to fifty, which is probably in line with our population growth over the measured period. They also neglect to point out that illegal guns from America used to carjack Mitch Marner are still going to cross the border regardless of Canada’s gun laws, and the people that use those weapons to liberate Range Rovers do not give one shit about gun laws or the law in general. But those facts don’t support their goals and so they chose to call the increase a meteoric rise of twenty five percent.

It sounds better and it’s more alarming, but I don’t really think the claim is accurate. In fact, it’s deliberately misleading.

And so that made me wonder about the one in five claim of mental illness for the Americans. I would think that if accurate, then the statistic for the Yanks should be generally applicable to Canadians as well. I suppose that it could be argued that we’re not quite as mental as the Americans, but I still maintain that with all the lifestyle similarities between Canada and the U.S. that our mental illness rate should be close to our neighbors. So, that means that if I stand with four of my friends or family that one of us has a problem. An illness actually.

I don’t think I have enough friends to generate an acceptable sample size for multiple one in five tests, so I decided to add acquaintances to the mix to get the numbers of samples to an acceptable level. Then with the numbers in place, I randomly generated groups of five people I know and tried to determine if any of them are mental.

And I’ve decided that the one in five claim just might be correct.

It depends on determining what qualifies as a mental illness. I suspect that the list of illnesses has expanded from back in the day when in order to be labeled as mentally ill, you pretty much had to be a drooling predator that communicated with invisible friends. Excluding the clergy of course, who for some reason got a pass.

So, while contemplating the percentage of Canadians with a mental issue, I started thinking about the numbers of fucked up people in say,1945 or1946. Because by today’s standards of what constitutes a cerebral complication, I’m guessing that huge swaths of the population of Europe and the America’s would have qualified as mentally ill once the shooting ceased. If you weren’t a soldier then you were a refugee, a concentration camp survivor or a London or Berlin carpet bombing veteran. An entire generation of kids spent four years without parental figures around while dad soldiered and mom riveted wing sections on to b-52’s, and everybody knew someone that the war whacked in one fashion or another. So, I think it’s safe to assume that hordes of people were walking around with Sophie’s choice trauma and nobody gave a shit. It’s actually amazing that the 1950’s were as productive and they were, considering the number of damaged people that were now in charge of the rebuild.

Maybe almost everyone was suffering in one fashion or another, and so a saturation point was reached where the mentally ill were the majority, and everyone decided that having demons was normal and not even worth mentioning. So as a result, people buried their trauma and carried on, because there weren’t any other options.

No counselling. No medication except alcohol, and most importantly, no sympathy. There was empathy I think, because everyone could relate, but sympathy was in short supply. Everyone understood that you’d experienced some ugly shit, but if they didn’t have time to feel sorry for themselves, then the best you could expect in terms of support was a silent acknowledgement of mutual adversity.

The silent part is important. People didn’t talk much about what they had been through. It was frowned on because no one wanted to be reminded constantly of their own personally endured misery. As a result, it’s likely that dwelling on the past was probably seen as weakness. People had seen plenty of death, and as a result had an increased appreciation for life. They understood that you can be here one instant and gone the next, and so dwelling on the past became much less important than focusing on the moment while rekindling a hope that they could perhaps even consider the future. There were suburbs to build and populations to replenish after all, and no one had the time or energy to accommodate anyone who couldn’t mentally adjust.

But times have changed, and now there’s an expectation of accommodation. In fact, there’s more than an expectation. There’s a demand that everyone else accept that an individual has an illness and adapt accordingly to accommodate that persons issue. So now your problem is everyone’s problem.

And I think we’re approaching a new saturation point where awareness and accommodation are being replaced with anger and apathy. Because we haven’t had another world war and yet the numbers of damaged people continues to climb.

Assuming the statistics are correct.

I suppose that part of the issue is that we’ve become much better at identifying the breadth of mental illnesses. A characteristic of a person that was described as odd ten years ago now has a name, and it seems that if you take the words associative or dissociative, then add any other word followed by disorder then you’ve got yourself a mental illness.

It’s a good thing to identify these illnesses by the way. Once they’ve been clinically evaluated it’s possible to develop treatment with a goal to remedy or manage that particular illness.

However once a mental illness has been identified then the next step is to raise awareness of that illness. This awareness then ideally will educate the public to the challenges the afflicted face. Then the challenges will be addressed with accommodation.

And now we’ve got ourselves a problem or two.

For starters the concept of raising awareness is challenging when whole segments of the population consider raised awareness as woke, and therefore a radical leftist idea that needs to be opposed with school board mom outrage. I realize that there’s a difference between gay marriage and Autism, but I still believe that the three A principle applies to both groups. Awareness, acceptance and accommodation seems the natural path to take for advocates of both mental illnesses and social change, but it’s the accommodation part that ultimately provides the most challenges.

Because I don’t think that people are naturally accommodating if it means they have to sacrifice something to provide that accommodation. And unless we’re talking hotels, then pretty much every other accommodation means the majority has to deliver a provision to the minority.

And I think that people resist that provision because there’s nothing in it for them.

Years ago, the province of Ontario recognized that resistance, and created a term in labor law called the duty to accommodate. Essentially forcing workplace provisions for mentally and physically disadvantaged workers. And that’s kind of what’s happening right at this moment in our entire society, except the provisions aren’t just for physical handicaps and mental illnesses, but have expanded to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation and wealth.

Basically what’s happening is that the more capable you are, the more you’re expected to accommodate, and I think we’re perilously close to the saturation point I mentioned earlier. A point where the deluge of causes and people demanding accommodation is going to become so overwhelming that people are going to make a voting choice to elect a government whose policies are viewed as accommodating to the majority.

And fuck everyone else.