Pamphlet

Imagine this, but with a sink full of dirty shame behind her back.

At the doctor’s office, I saw a picture of a woman in a health pamphlet, trapped in grayscale. She was sitting on the floor in front of her sink, which had been taken by an overgrowth of unwashed dishes. The picture looked as though she was digging her fingertips into her face, maybe because she knew she couldn’t bleed if the printer didn’t carry red ink, and she was apparently weeping. On the outset, it looked like she was devastated by having to do her dishes, her thoughts swimming through anxious and wavy cries: "Curses be! The dishes! If any Higher Power can but deliver me from having to wash, I promise I'll never eat with them, or at all, ever again. I’ll die, if I have to! Or, at least I'll use paper plates."

Continuing in the pamphlet, I found another character on the next page: a preteen boy in a wheelchair. This child was the model of elation. He looked as though being crippled from the waist down was the birthright mark of royalty. His face read him as saying, "Check out my iThrone. Not only do I have wheels, I AM wheels, ladies. There's no time I'm not rollin'. Can I get an emoji for this OG, up in here?" I obviously don’t know if he talked like that with his mouth, but, being a preteen boy, he certainly talked like that with his face. In short, the child seemed ecstatic on the brink of an aneurysm from sheer joy because he was in a wheelchair.

The authors of the pamphlet were, perhaps unwittingly, painting this child as the protagonist of disability, while the pathetic woman was the unstable villain.

The woman on the floor, let’s call her ‘the woman (on the floor)’, was found under the umbrella of Mental Illness. Specifically, she was described as Depression. I didn’t need to read what the pamphlet had to say about it, as I am well acquainted with Depression, I just didn’t know she was a woman. Now, suppose this model was actually depressed: do you know what was happening in the picture, in that case? I can tell you, right now, she didn't care about those dishes. It's likely she didn't even remember she had dishes. She might have even forgotten the very purpose dishes, depending on how severe the depression. No, what took her to the floor could have been a tragedy as simple as having looked out the window only to realize the insignicance of how her shoes fit perfectly on her feet.

In the meantime, our hero, the Wheelchair, was simply beaming, from the point of view of the camera. The pamphlet is telling us this child is stronger than the weak depressed woman. It might be because the kid in the wheelchair has friends all around, gleefully pushing him while he keeps his demure hands in his lap.

Maybe that’s the message. Maybe the only difference is that Depression isn't enjoying a free ride in a chair. While the paraplegic have close friends and loving family members escorting them around life, people with mental illness have acquaintances and disaffected family members ushering them into a behavioral unit, and by ‘acquaintances’ I mean the orderlies who'd already seen them three times, that month.

At the heart of the issue is that if these characters were to switch places, and the boy looked as miserable as the woman, most people might think, "He looks so hopeless about those dishes! I don't blame him. I mean, look at him. He's in a wheelchair." But, if the woman was standing around with her friends, beaming with aneurysm-inducing ecstasy, most people would think, “How is this woman depressed? We should defund Medicaid."

My point is that mental illness is not well represented in the medical-pamphlet community. If someone looks like an adult remotely functioning on an adult level, then they obviously must be able to function like every other adult. Whereas, anyone with a physical disability shouldn’t ever be expected to function like their unaffected peers. It's almost as if everyone wants people with diagnosable mood disorders to feel ashamed for needing any help in their lives, considering how happy the truly disabled can manage to be. Otherwise, if they're not ashamed, they should at least have the decency to openly weep on the ground.