Reframing Mental Illness

Mental illness. This is a term that has been bothering me more and more lately. Mental illness; as if whatever’s going on in your head is some sort of a disease, something that’s profoundly wrong with you.

I don’t buy it.

Because as far as I can tell, mental health issues are rooted in trauma. Something bad happened, and now the brain and the body are struggling to cope. Feelings that need to be expressed and heard may be stuffed down, suppressed with whatever the trauma victim chooses to manage them with – for me that was food, which leaves me with a 30 year history of binge eating and weight issues. I’m not too bothered about that, to be honest – when you think I could have been using drugs, alcohol, sex or any number of more harmful things to cope instead.

But the trauma is real. It’s there, and it’s not going anywhere until the victim gets proper support and help to process and release it. And that can be a messy process, I can tell you!

Nobody ever really worried too much about my mental health too much, until I was suddenly sectioned in October last year. I had a prolonged anxiety attack, triggered by opening up to a close family member about my trauma, which resulted in me not sleeping for around 5 days. By that time I was delusional and needed to be hospitalised and forced to sleep. It was a shock for everybody, including me. I was in hospital for 10 days.

The thing is, I was and am closer to the end of a process than I am to the beginning of one; I have suffered from anxiety and depression since I was a child. None of this is new to me, I’ve been coping with panic attacks, low mood, debilitating fatigue, and self-loathing for as long as I can remember. Those feelings were always there beneath the surface. Just because I was able to hide them well enough to hold down decent jobs, find a nice man to marry and have three kids, doesn’t mean they ever went away, it just means that I’m a much more talented actress than I have always assumed. The only thing different about last October was that I became unwilling to hide it any more.

I made a decision in August 2016 that I was going to deal with my shit. My physical health was all over the place, I was subclinical hypothyroid, not sleeping well, couldn’t seem to eat anything without it making me ill, and to say my mood was up and down would be the understatement of the century. I was sick and tired of how miserable and disconnected I felt, and just wanted to live a happy life. I decided to embark on serious therapy for the first time in my life, and actually give voice to all the rubbish that had been festering away inside for decades.

By and large it worked really well. I went through a course of EFT with a really talented therapist, and addressed the food issues directly with help from another EFT practitioner. Last year I had a lot of hands-on energy healing that helped me to release even more, and the difference in my self-esteem was enormous. My friends and family started noticing how much healthier I looked, and my relationships improved as I gained the confidence just to be myself, rather than the watered-down, amended and sanitised version of me that I assumed would be acceptable to everybody else (or at least wouldn’t give them any bother).

But now, at a time when I’m probably stronger, happier and more resilient than I’ve ever been, now I get labelled “mentally ill” simply because I’m not hiding stuff any more. My baseline mental health status has been updated to “suffers from mental ill-health” on the basis of the blip that led to my hospitalisation, which means that now I’m being watched closely for signs of being unwell. Now people believe there’s something wrong with me, when in fact the truth is I’m finally coming to terms with a number of shitty things that happened to me a long time ago, and I’m just not pretending to be perfect any more.

Well bloody bollocks to that!

We need to reframe how we talk about mental health, because the truth is many, many people who are labelled mentally ill are in fact trauma victims who are either unable or unwilling to continue hiding the effects of what happened to them. Is it kind or fair to say to them “this is all in your head” as if they were making up their mind or their body’s responses to what happened? Is it correct to instruct them to internalise their trauma as something that’s wrong with them, as a “mental illness”, rather than as a reasonable and normal response to something that affected them profoundly?

This is why it’s so important for us to talk openly about mental health and overcome the stigma associated with just not being ok at the moment. I believe we need to reframe “mental illness” as being frequently rooted in trauma, and start considering the possibility that the people who are strong enough to be open and honest about their struggles with mental health may in fact be a lot further along in the process of dealing with their shit than our labels give them credit for.

The Perfect Mother

I was the perfect mother. It was a Monday, and despite a restless night I treated my sons with impeccable respect and inexhaustible patience; I acknowledged and met their every need for comfort, connection and care. No emotion was too big for me to help them face, no childish desire of theirs was too small for me to acknowledge, there was no compromise I was unwilling to help them reach. I watched them unfurling like flowers, blossoming under this perfect parenting, becoming happier, more cooperative, more patient themselves – faster than I ever could have imagined possible. Finally, there was enough love to go around, enough Mum for everybody.

By Tuesday my body had already started shrinking as I prioritised my burning need to mother perfectly over feeding myself. Soon, I realised to my satisfaction, I would be the perfectly shaped woman as well as the perfect mother. This could only be good news. I stopped sleeping almost entirely, waking with the slightest night-time noise to spring out of bed and check on my brood, three beautiful boys, blissfully asleep and completely unaware of all the dangers lurking in the dark that their watchful mother was ready to defend them from.

Fuelled by half or three quarters of an hour of sleep, I got the kids ready for school on the Wednesday. Uniforms donned, shoes located and breakfasts made, sibling spats mediated and resolved to everybody’s satisfaction; none of it could touch me. Why would it? I’m the perfect mother. Look at me, coping with it all with ease and grace. I don’t even resent it any more.

By Thursday evening I was being forcibly sedated in a psychiatric ward; I hadn’t slept and had barely eaten for five days. It took two men to restrain me so an injection could be administered that would make me rest. As I was being pinned down on the mattress of a hospital bed by men twice my size, I floated gently out of my body and started doing yoga, stretching out my hamstrings in a downward-facing dog, whilst singing a Gaelic lullaby to the newborn baby who had for some reason been given into my care.

That’s it. That’s how long it can take for a woman – a strong, smart and articulate woman like me – to break under the strain of being the perfect mother. About five days, give or take.

Because to be a perfect mother under the expectations of the society we live in, basically demands that you surrender any and all needs of your own, and give yourself over entirely to the service of others, however demanding they may be and whatever limitations of your own may exist. For me, those limitations included a hefty dose of repressed trauma, the precise nature of which is unclear at this time, although apparently clearly recognisable as same by the doctors who sectioned me. Then a perfectionist streak a mile wide. That was all it took to drive me over the edge into what my doctor called “une bouffée de folie” or a “puff of madness”.

Perfectionist as I am, I only spent about a week in hospital. The first third I spent drugged-up and sleeping, waking up every so often confused and vulnerable to receive visitors, and to send terrified text messages to family and friends – “I need to know what the fuck is going on – are you safe??”

By the Friday, I’d come to believe that I was taking part in a huge social experiment to find out if there was any such thing as the perfect mother. Hidden cameras were secreted around the ward, and I walked round and around the U-shaped living area, making gentle eye contact with every patient, and giving them a soft smile if I thought that wouldn’t seem too threatening to them. There was a pregnant woman there, wrapped in a hijab and robes; clearly afraid of giving birth, needing to be mothered and protected from Islamophobia. I was there for her; I skirted around her personal space, giving her an encouraging smile from time to time, and letting her know without saying a word, that I was there to keep her safe. I spent hours pacing the floor, holding the space for everybody in that ward. Nobody, whether staff or patient, was allowed to feel that I wasn’t ready to spring to their service at the slightest indication I might be needed.

Eventually (although stupidly fast according to the expectations of everybody involved, not least my doctor) I improved enough to understand where I was. The woman striding around on her mobile phone wasn’t actually Nicola Sturgeon in disguise, she was Suzanne, another patient with a heart of gold, pathologically unable to express anything but her truth. Living your truth on the outside of a psychiatric ward is life goals for many; but as a patient it leads only to more question marks over your sanity. I liked Suzanne a lot.

As I rested and improved, I started to notice just how fine the lines are between sane and insane; between healthy “normal” people and those who need the state to intervene to keep them, or others, safe. I had been sectioned and described in notes as “clearly psychotic” and yet I had only been staying awake in an effort to keep everybody in and around my family safe. Surely this was just the job of a good mother?

Writing this is part therapy for me, part warning for anybody who feels like reading it. I realised last night as a dear friend gave me some reflexology and a safe space to speak, that presenting myself as sane enough, fast enough to get out of that hospital, simply launched me straight back into the pattern I’ve been following for as long as I can remember – sacrificing my own health, mental and physical to create a display of coping, to reassure everybody around me that I don’t need help.

Because when you’re a perfectionist with low self-esteem, when somebody offers you help, you don’t see the love and care behind the offer, all you hear is the perceived insult “you’re not good enough.”

We need to have a serious think about the expectations we place on ourselves as mothers. The pressure to “have it all” is insidious and fucking terrifying – if we don’t have endless reserves of patience and compassion to lavish on our children, pert breasts and arses clad in expensive active-wear, gleaming show-homes and fulfilling careers, we’re given to believe we’re somehow failing. And no matter how good a game we talk about the number of fucks we give (behold the barren field in which mine ought to grow) I doubt there’s even one of us who can, hand on heart, swear to never having suffered impostor syndrome and anxiety in case the world should discover just how very, very far from perfect we really are.

If anybody is reading this and it rings a bell, let me leave you with the words a few wonderful women engraved on a beautiful silver bracelet for me, to celebrate me getting out of hospital.

You are loved….You are enough.

Fix your own oxygen mask first. There needs to be enough Mum left for you, if you’re going to deduct all the myriad ways in which you serve everybody else.

Are we nearly there yet?

When the result of the first Scottish Independence Referendum result hit me, I remember talking, in floods of tears, to my Dad on the phone. We took some small solace in my theory that things sometimes have to hit rock bottom before an upward spiral of hope and renewal can kick in, and perhaps we just weren’t quite there – much as it felt like we were at the time.

So I steeled myself for things to get even nastier than the UK of 2014, with its food banks, its virulent inequality, its pernicious government, its weapons of mass destruction.

 

I didn’t have to wait long. The morning of the UK’s reprieve, David Cameron stood outside number 10 and made a mockery of all the “stay with us, lead us, more powers for Holyrood” chat that dominated the last few weeks of the referendum campaign, by creating two tiers of MPs in Westminster – English MPs and all the rest of them.

The air almost seemed to ring with the collective sound of 1,617,989 eyeballs rolling skywards, as those of us who had voted for independence felt our internal narratives shift from grief and loss to giant, weary sighs. Here we go again. Are we nearly there yet?

The lies that the Better Together campaign based itself on began to unravel rapidly – plenty of oil* left after all, renewables subsidies binned, pensions looking less secure than ever; of course there would have been a currency union, defence contracts awarded elsewhere, HMRC jobs in Scotland culled, no meaningful new powers for the Scottish Parliament.

And then came the absolute kicker. No more EU membership.

When I woke up the morning after the EU referendum, I really thought that was it. I thought we’d reached rock bottom. Hate crimes through the roof, EU National friends and family suddenly feeling unwelcome and even threatened in their adopted home country, a quarter of the population duped by an idiotic and clearly mendacious bus slogan, opportunistic Brexiteer “Leaders” on the telly with their faces absolutely *tripping* them because all they had really wanted was a narrow enough Remain vote to enable them to further their own careers at the expense of David Cameron’s.

If we’d held an independence referendum on the day after the EU referendum, I have absolutely no doubt we would have walked it. But just as the election of Donald Trump and other monstrosities become somewhat normalised with time, so has the pain of Brexit been dulled down with the passing months. People who told me on EURef results day that they were 100% on board for independence now, “bring it on”, reverted quietly back to “better the devil you know”.

And we still had so very much further down to go.

Now our devolution settlement in Scotland is under attack, with the UK government having voted to bring powers in areas such as farming, animal welfare and the environment back to Westminster. The European Charter of (human) Rights has been done away with as surplus to requirements, and almost every leading figure of the Leave campaign has jumped ship, leaving Theresa May, a lukewarm and heartily incompetent Remainer, strapped firmly to the mast as it disappears beneath the waves.

 

That fantastic return to 1950s Great, Great, Great Britain when our mighty island stood in splendid isolation, drinking tea and basking in the glory of winning a terrible war, is just that – a fantasy. The reality is utter, shambolic chaos, under a government absolutely incapable of producing any sort of coherent plan, never mind implementing it. The reality is a Prime Minister who is literally letting a fascist lead her by the hand, in her desperation to secure some sort of chlorine-soaked trade deal with anyone. The government are even releasing advice now on stockpiling food, in anticipation of Brexit talks breaking down altogether!

How can this possibly not be rock bottom yet?

How much worse does it have to get, before enough of us realise just how intolerable the devil we know is? How little do we have to think of ourselves as a country, to truly believe that we can’t hope to do any better than this by governing ourselves? Look at our devolved NHS, performing better than anywhere else in the UK – I’m not saying it doesn’t have its problems, but it’s not quite on its knees yet. Look at our renewables industry – currently hamstrung by the lack of subsidies, but oh the potential! Tourism, food and drink, exports – all areas in which we are competent and entirely capable.

 

Do we really think so little of Scotland and its people, that the complete vacuum of leadership and order in London seem preferable to the risks and rewards of governing ourselves as a normal country? Do we really set so little value on our EU National friends and family, that we would be willing to sacrifice their rights and possibly even their citizenship in a no-deal UK Brexit, for the sake of staying in the food-stockpiling, fascist-courting, hate-criming, DUP propped-up, nightmare that would be?

I would a hundred times rather we had voted for independence in the spirit of self-confidence and optimism in 2014; I find the concept of independence as a last-resort escape from a UK that has become intolerable, depressing beyond words. But depressing as it is, surely it must be time?

Are we nearly there yet?

 

 

*For the record, I still think we should be leaving the oil where it is, for the sake of our planet. I don’t, however, think it’s acceptable to blatantly lie about it.

 

 

 

 

Sometimes you just need to have a rant.

Sometimes you just need to have a rant.

Sometimes you wake up feeling like shit, and something simple like having to look after your kids on a snow day seems absolutely intolerable.

Sometimes you’ll focus on something small and petty like how ridiculous it is that a whole country grinds to a halt for the sake of an inch and a half of snow, because the real reason you feel like shit is just a little bit too much to deal with right this minute.

So you have a bit of a rant, you let off a bit of steam. You release a little bit of the anger and frustration about how rubbish you feel, by venting on social media about how your plans have been upset by a dusting of snow that looks absolutely identical to the one a couple of weeks ago when you felt like getting the sledge out was probably overkill, but you did it anyway because the kids really wanted to be towed to school.

But it’s not really the snow that’s making you feel like shit. It’s not really the hair appointment you had to cancel that’s upsetting you. That’s just a handy place for you to put your anger and frustration for the moment.

Because if I went on to have a rant about what’s really bothering me, I’d have to post something like, “Well, I recently uncovered suppressed memories of being raped 13 years ago. It’s been a total head-fuck, and I feel terrible at the moment. So the hair appointment, which I was really looking forward to, was actually about self-care and trying to help myself feel a little bit better in the face of a shitty situation full of shitty feelings.”

So please don’t tell me I’m wrong for being pissed off that the snow kept the kids off school today, because frankly that’s not helping me at all. In fact it’s making today even more difficult, because I know perfectly well that I’m not really angry about the snow. I’m angry about being raped, but I don’t have the time or space to deal with that right now.

I have to adult. I have to parent.

I don’t have the luxury of privacy to examine and release how I feel about suddenly having to come to terms with being a rape survivor when I always assumed I was “one of the lucky ones”. And what sort of fucked-up shit is that anyway? On what planet do I, a stroppy feminist by anyone’s standards, not feel able to talk about this openly? Why am I letting my rage out in tiny bursts by substituting annoyance over the inability of Scottish infrastructure to cope with a bit of snow?

I’m the woman who’s always saying that we need to speak up, we need to tell the truth about this sexual harassment crap that happens to women all the time. I’m the “nasty woman” who believes that we need to shine a light on this sort of shit.

But when the shoe is so abruptly switched to the other foot, it’s different. I don’t feel like a warrior any more, I feel like a (whisper it) victim. I’m not just talking about that time I was groped in a club, or catcalled in the street, or that time a “friend” effectively stalked me for three months after a drunken snog. I’m talking about that time I said No to a predator, and he did it anyway. That time I shamed and blamed myself, because I only gave him a qualified No, so what happened next must have been my fault.

It was “No. I don’t want to have sex without a condom.”

It was me freezing solid when I realised that he didn’t care, and he was going to do it anyway. It was me lying there, waiting silently for him to finish so that I could just get the fuck out of there without being hurt. It was me blocking that out and forgetting I’d ever met him, because I just couldn’t bear the fact that I’d been so disgusting, that I hadn’t fought him, that I’d let him ride rough-shod and bareback over my No.

I understand now. I understand why women don’t speak out, why not all of us are up on our soapboxes furiously demanding justice and change. Because it’s just too horrible. It’s too visible. It’s too public and it feels really really shameful. I feel like an attention-seeker, as if I’m being self-indulgent by over-sharing, like I don’t have the right to complain, because I was never physically injured and it could have been so much worse.

But fuck all that! It turns out I do have some time for reflection via the written word today (courtesy of electronic babysitters and Ninjago), so here it is.

This is why I’m so unreasonably angry about the snow today. It’s not pretty, it’s not nice, it feels scary as shit to me, but it’s my truth. And I feel like talking about it might be the way out of this mess for me, by speaking my truth and channeling the rage where it really belongs. I’ve been silent about this for 13 years; if that was going to make me feel better, or change anything for other women that would have worked by now.

So for today I’m going to straighten my stroppy feminist crown, and make some beans on toast for the kids. Maybe we’ll get outside after lunch for a while and build a crappy snowman. And it will be crappy because there’s really not much fucking snow out there!

Oh yeah, and #metoo. Again.

Isn’t it time we got this shit sorted out?

The polarisation of voicelessness.

I have watched with rising concern the polarisation of politics in Scotland; how pro-union voters desperate to hold Britain together are being driven to vote for a party that until recently seemed anathema in Scotland, and which can reasonably be acknowledged to have caused serious damage to the UK. How pro-independence voters are by and large digging their heels in by persisting in using the SNP as a vehicle through which to achieve their goals, despite what many of us see as fairly lacklustre, cautious policy – certainly not the truly radical change most of us voted Yes for.

This is the polarisation of voicelessness, and it’s preventing our country from moving forward. We are stuck in a seemingly endless constitutional loop; every election since the referendum has been dominated by the independence debate, every vote is being cast with the issue in mind – either in the hopes of securing a second referendum, or of invalidating the mandate achieved in 2016 to hold one in the event of Brexit against the Scottish vote.

The refrain on both sides has been “well that’s democracy” – we tell each other to put up and shut up, because a mandate at the ballot box is unarguable and must be respected, no matter how unpleasant to however many people. The huge problem with this is that the ballot boxes in the UK, and the whole concept of a winner takes all referendum aren’t actually terribly democratic; they are blunt tools of majority rule, and more often than not these majorities are wafer-thin, leaving far too many citizens without a voice.

Over and over again we see it happening – voted Yes to independence, and got the Union? Put up and shut up – that’s democracy. Voted No and got the 2016 SNP mandate for a second referendum? Put up and shut up – that’s democracy. Voted Remain and got Brexit? Put up and shut up – that’s democracy. Voted progressive in 2017 and got the most vicious right-wing government in history, propped up by homophobic extremists with a history of terrorism? Well, you get the idea…

We have got to stop expecting our fellow citizens simply to swallow any and all outcomes in the name of democracy, when our democratic model is so utterly flawed. And I include my own movement in that. It should be crystal clear now to the pro-independence population, that resistance to Scottish independence simply hasn’t melted away with Brexit as we had hoped. It should also be equally clear to the pro-Union population that the Yes movement’s resistance to the Union isn’t going to melt away any time soon either.

We need to try somehow to meet in the middle. We all have to admit, that right now, nobody is going to get what they want; and the longer we go on without trying to move forward constructively, the more damage we are going to do to each other, our relationships and the future of the country as our politics stagnate.

So what can we do, to make everybody (or at least *more people* feel heard? In the context of the independence debate, the obvious answer to that is Devo-Max*, or Federalism – crucially with proportional representation (although I would also love to hear other ideas on how we could compromise). Devo Max ticks a number of boxes for the Independence movement, without breaking us away from the UK altogether. Both sides would have to make some pretty hefty compromises, but at least we are moving forward and *trying* to understand and accommodate positions on either side. Whether this is achievable under the new Tory/DUP alliance is questionable, but with a teenyweeny margin of power, and another general election by no means out of the picture for 5 years, it may not be completely impossible either.

So as a properly rabid Yesser, who will genuinely never be convinced that remaining in the UK is in Scotland’s best interests, this is what I have to say….

• I want people on both sides of the debate to feel heard and represented, rather than frustrated and voiceless.
• I want people to be able to take back their votes from tactical loans that are not achieving any meaningful progress for the purposes they were lent.
• I want to start Scotland moving forward again, and rescue our political debate from interminable constitutional wrangling.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results, we have to take steps now to steer ourselves away from madness. It’s so clear now, that neither “side” is going to have a sudden epiphany and concede that their opponents have been right all along; the best we can do right now is to fight the polarisation of voicelessness, and try to reach some sort of acceptable compromise.

Could a majority of us commit to putting our exhausting Indyref differences aside, and agitate together as a larger and stronger bloc for Devo Max instead?

I reckon I could; and whilst I have serious reservations about it as a political model (not least the whole continuing WMDs in the hands of Westminster thing…) I can’t deny it’s a heck of a lot more attractive than the alternative.

What do we all think?
Ps: any ideas on how to reconcile Remainers and Brexiters also welcome – that one has me totally stumped at this time!

 

*For clarity, I am using Devo Max here to describe home rule for Scotland, whereby everything except Defence and Foreign Affairs are managed by the Scottish Parliament, but we still remain part of the UK.

Not even Donald Trump knows everything.

Oh my days.

As if the events of the last few weeks weren’t enough, this morning my elder two boys were having a fight over whether or not Jack Frost was real. Lewis reckoned he was, Adam argued back on the basis that his teacher Mrs C had told him that frost was just weather.

Lewis: Mrs C doesn’t know everything, you know Adam.

Adam: But *Jack Frost isn’t real*!

Lewis: You don’t know that. You don’t know everything. 

…and then the pièce de résistance…

Lewis: Not even *Donald Trump* knows everything.

Now I can see where he is coming from here. I have been making a big effort to make sure the the boys know they don’t have all the answers. As the children of a (let’s face it) know-it-all feminist who has to regularly sit on her hands when people say stupid stuff share opinions contrary to her own beliefs, they can absolutely be forgiven for inheriting a level of self-righteousness. I have been encouraging them to look at evidence rather than just repeating opinions, to ask themselves *why* things are true rather than just assuming they are because that’s what they believe. Hence nobody knows everything.

It should also be fairly reasonable of Lewis to assume that the leader of the “free world” would be a person of some wisdom, from whom we could expect facts and truth spoken. It should be absolutely sensible for a seven year old to refer to arguably the most powerful man (still a man, sigh) in the world as someone who knows a lot of stuff.

Erm…

One school run later, and I was settling down to listen to my colleague Rosie McGarvey-Kane from the Women for Independence National Committee. Rosie was speaking to Kaye Adams on BBC Radio Scotland about Donald Trump and his ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries travelling to the US. The programme was its usual unedifying self, with Rosie providing the only really articulate opposition to the spitting venom of people who demanded we “show the man [Trump] some respect” and that “Muslims are a problem”.

Kaye herself seemed to enjoy her role as devil’s advocate, challenging people on either side of the debate calmly, but taking no stance herself on the issue herself. So far, so much the actions of a responsible impartial broadcaster, no?

No.

By the time that Alec, pleased and proud member of Trump Turnberry golf course had shared that “Let’s face it, there is a problem with Muslims in America. They blew up the twin towers!” and then went on to tell Kaye that “You’re an infidel. That’s how they see you. They are the most intolerant people on the face of the earth” I had lost hope that she would step out of her impartial interviewer shoes and challenge what was basically blatant racism, given a platform on public radio. As it happened, Kaye asked warmly and urgently for a Muslim to call in to the show (any Muslim would do, apparently) as she didn’t “feel qualified” to respond to charming Alec’s comments. At this point I started considering gin.

These are two apparently unconnected events, but it became clearer than ever to me as a parent, that our media’s failure, our leaders’ failure and our own failure to loudly, openly and consistently challenge Trump’s racism, his misogyny and his absolute unfitness to hold the office he holds, is doing our children a disservice. My kids and yours, if you have any, will be hearing reports on Trump on the radio, they’ll be hearing broadcasters maintain a calm impartiality in the face of out-and-out racism and hate speech, and they will be learning that these things are ok, that they can be said on the radio, that they are valid and valued opinions, even if they are very different from what they hear at home.

When a section of the world’s population is under attack in the way the Muslims are right now, it’s simply not enough to just be non-racist. We have to be anti-racist. We have to call out racism, and challenge it loudly, and do it in front of everyone, even if we’re not used to it – because if we don’t, the reasonable seven year-old assumption to make will be that racism as an opinion held is simply another difference between people, rather than a fundamental question of human decency.

The reasonable seven year-old conclusion will be that the most powerful man (again, sigh) on the planet is someone you can sensibly refer to in an argument about knowing stuff.

And isn’t that one a scary thought?

 

 

PNAS – more info required!

It will be no surprise to people who know me, that I am a champion of woman-centred* birth. Extensive reading throughout my five childbearing years, backed up by observation of my own experiences and hearing about others have given me plenty of evidence to support my gut instinct – that women and babies are suffering in enormous numbers under an unfit, patriarchal model of care.

This week, the articles that have been pressing buttons throughout the world of birth, are the ones citing the PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of the USA) study that suggests women are evolving out of being able to give birth vaginally, due to babies with bigger heads, and no corresponding increase in maternal pelvis size – a result of increased births by caesarean section.

I am keen to read the study, to get a better understanding of how it was conducted, but unfortunately the PNAS website seems to be down for the time being, so I can’t!

I have read several articles based on the study, though, and they all have one thing in common – not one of them mentions how the birthing women were treated.

There is absolutely zero information in the articles on whether the women included in the study were subject to interventions in the natural birthing process, such as:

• Planning to birth in a hospital: known to increase the c-section rate, instrumental delivery and episiotomy.  (Birthplace 2014)
• Continuous fetal monitoring: known to increase the c-section rate with no associated improvement in outcomes. (cfah.org 2012)
• Epidural anaesthesia: known to increase the c-section rate when administered in early labour, as well as increasing perineal trauma and operative vaginal delivery. (Klein 2006)
• Induction of labour: known to increase the c-section rate in low risk women. (Jacquemyn, Michiels, Martens 2012)
• Not having a doula: known to increase the c-section rate and the use of pitocin (Syntocinon in the UK) to accelerate labour. (Trueba, Contreras, Velazco, García Lara, Martínez 2000)
• Not being upright during labour: known to increase the c-section rate, increase use of epidurals (see above) and increase the risk of neonatal unit admission, as well as instrumental deliveries and perineal trauma in second stage mothers without epidurals. (Cochrane 2013 & Cochrane 2012)

I’m sure I could go on; there are studies upon studies out there, proving time and time again that our medicalised, patriarchal model of maternity care is causing harm to mothers and babies. I know from my own personal experience how the mainstream care model can derail an otherwise healthy experience of pregnancy, and birth; and perhaps more importantly I know at first hand how very different it can be, when mothers receive woman centred care, and are provided with the conditions they physiologically and emotionally require to be able to give birth safely.

What I need to know before I can form an opinion of the PNAS study is whether or not the basic needs of birthing women, were met for each and every study participant. Because if they weren’t, then this is just another invalid piece of research that treats our inadequate, unfit and often dangerous mainstream model of maternity care as a biological norm that it could barely be further from.

What does this all have to do with feminism, though?

Birth is a massive feminist issue. Name me another fundamental function of the human body, that has been undermined to the point where many of us believe it’s not even possible in nearly a third of cases, without surgical intervention – even in the face of the stacks and stacks of evidence (again, see above for a not-in-the-least-bit-exhaustive list) proving that generally speaking medical intervention makes it more dangerous.

Is it any surprise that it’s a basic function of the *female* body that’s been undermined so completely?

Women buy into it as well; I certainly did. The first time I was pregnant, I was absolutely fucking terrified of giving birth. I just wanted somebody to knock me out, give me a nice quick, clean c-section and to have nothing to do with the whole painful, dangerous, messy business. I lost that baby in a miscarriage, which although terribly sad turned out to be an enormous blessing, as the experience of going through miscarriage actually taught me a lot about how well-equipped my body was to handle exactly that sort of involuntary physical process.

That was the event that set me on the path to what was probably my first radically feminist act, planning a home birth; choosing to trust in my body and in the skills of a good midwife, over the patriarchal and misogynist messages that had been fed to me from girlhood, that women giving birth are an accident waiting to happen, and unless you happen to get lucky, you will need rescued.

My two home births were transformative, I can think of no better word to describe them. I have never met a woman who experienced undisturbed birth, who doesn’t say much the same thing. Throw yourself down the rabbit hole for a moment, and have a read of positive birth forums on the internet – so many more women using words like “amazing”, “empowering”, “beautiful”, “ecstatic” – now imagine if *most* women were experiencing this, rather than the relatively small number who have the support, knowledge, experience and (yes) the luck they need to successfully birth against the system.

Anecdotally speaking, most of my Scottish home birthing buddies identify as feminist and were also Yes voters in the 2014 independence referendum – it’s not a scientific study, no, and it’s very possible that I’m simply living in a pro-indy, pro-birth bubble; but if that trend is actually valid, then I feel it says a lot about how women who have chosen evidence based birth against the weight of mainstream opinion, may also be likely to embrace other radical, non-mainstream options to secure the future they want for their children. Can you imagine a norm of such women? I can sense a great deal of appalled establishment and patriarchal boot-quaking at the very thought…

Like I said, birth is a massive feminist issue. If enough women continue missing out on the transformative and empowering experience that giving birth autonomously can be, well that’s all very much in the interests of those who would keep us in our place, isn’t it?

This is why I have such a problem with the reporting of the PNAS study so far, and why I am so anxious to read it in full. Currently, all we see is a report undermining the female body’s innate ability to cope with birth; how many of us will simply take this as read, without thinking about how far the study conditions may have been from the conditions that women require to give birth in, safely? Will this just be another addition to the heap of internalised misogyny that prevents so many women from believing that birth can and *should* be very different from the modern experience?

Show me the research paper where every participating woman had a dedicated and skilled midwife, who looked after her one-to-one throughout her pregnancy, building trust and friendship; where every woman was allowed to go into labour in her own time, in her own environment, and given the peace, quiet and (sometimes) darkness her body needs to feel safe and give herself over to the birthing process. Show me the research paper where every woman was completely free to move, eat, and sleep as she felt she needed to, where there were no ticking clocks marking “too long” and no invasive vaginal examinations marking “too narrow”, where every woman was protected from negative imagery and messaging about birth, and instead heard stories of empowerment and euphoria as the norm.

Show me the research paper where all these basic needs have been met, for every single woman involved. If that one says we are evolving out of being able to give birth vaginally, then I’ll hold up my hands and say “fair enough”.

 

* I hope you note I refer to myself as a proponent of “woman-centred” and “autonomous” birth rather than simply natural or vaginal. In emergencies, surgical birth is obviously life saving; my argument is that such emergencies can often be avoided with the correct care.

In the meantime, let’s remember that the concepts of correct care and empowerment also apply to c-section mums – like this amazing woman, birthing her baby. How fucking awesome is this?

 

 

 

 

You win some, you lose some.

 

  

Paw Patrol – a cesspit of regressive, offensive & oppressive values..?

I struggle with the kids’ TV choices quite a lot of the time. No more so, than when they switch on the dreaded (by me) Paw Patrol.

Sure, on the surface it’s a nicey-nice wee programme about a bunch of puppies that hop around Adventure Bay saving the day, but scratch that saccharine surface and you find an absolute shitstorm of terrible messages about gender, race and (to a lesser extent) nationality.

Let’s start with gender (because, F-MOB). The female characters in Paw Patrol are all, without exception, passive. Absolutely, soul-destroyingly passive.

Skye, the token regular female of the usually-six, occasionally-seven-when-they-wheel-out-the-new-female husky, strong Paw Patrol is almost exclusively limited to flying about dressed in pink, spotting stuff from the air. That’s if she gets anything to do at all. 

The new female husky Everest doesn’t do anything remotely useful either, she just leads people around snow-covered mountains, getting them lost and necessitating rescue. (I suspect Everest was created when some pain in the arse feminist complained about gender diversity anyway, because there was no trace of her until well into the second series…)

I’m not kidding. I just sat through a whole bedtime episode of this rubbish, where Skye did literally nothing but point out to her male colleagues where various monkeys needed to be saved from a slowly erupting volcano. At one point, I got excited, thinking she might be about to unexpectedly swoop in and save one the boys had missed, but no – she radioed Ryder the middle-class male who leads the 83% middle-class male (71% on a rare husky day) rescue squad, and he made an heroic last-minute dive to save the day. At which point Skye congratulated him warmly – nice one, Little Miss Internalised Misogyny. *eyeroll*

Mayor Goodwin is even more problematic. She takes passivity further, well into and beyond incompetence. Her sole purpose as the only person of any obvious colour (and one of the few females) in Paw Patrol is to fuck things up royally, and then wail down the telephone for the middle class males to come and rescue her from her own idiocy.

It should be wonderful that a kids TV programme has shown a female person of colour in a position of power (Mayor of Adventure Bay must be quite a gig), but the people behind this drivel have chosen to squander that opportunity by turning her into exactly the kind of halfwit that people opposed to quotas believe will fill up parliament in the event we start “making up numbers” for under-represented groups.

So, females portrayed as a minority – passive at best, fuckwitted at worst. Big tick for sexism.

Sole person of colour portrayed as imbecilic, incapable and questionably promoted into a position of power? There’s a tick in the racism box too.

What about nationality? This one is more subtle, and took me a while to notice. There was some cultural stereotyping of the French going on in tonight’s episode, which didn’t sit particularly well with me, but the really sneaky subliminal one is this…

There are only two regional accents in the whole programme, as far as I can tell – both are female. Skye the airborne pointer-outer is Welsh, and Everest the lesser-spotted diversity husky, is Scottish; everybody else, absolutely everybody else, has a middle-class English accent. The kind of accent that would typify “Britishness” to people who don’t really get that the UK is made up of four separate countries.

Do we need to add British Nationalism to the list of Paw Patrol’s sins?

*takes moment to adjust tinfoil hat*

Of course, British Nationalism as a “thing” is not something people like to talk about at all, it’s much more fun and socially acceptable to deplore Scottish and Welsh “nationalists” for their inherent (and mostly fictional, in my experience) anti-Englishness. And yet it does exist – anybody who was paying the slightest attention during either of our recent referenda should have noticed the not-so-subtle messages that Great Britain is Really Great, and needs to be Made Greater again, and this Greater Great Britain definitely definitely includes the Not Quite So Great, but Still Great for being a part of Great Great Britain, but Not Great AT ALL if you dare to leave, Scotland and to a lesser extent Wales.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, that the only two regional pups are female, hopelessly passive, greatly outnumbered, and seemingly exist only to be ordered about by their dominant male counterparts…

I wonder what would happen if Skye and Everest ever put their wee regional, girly heads together and said “Bollocks to this! Let’s go off and rescue ourselves some fucking monkeys…”  *insert winky face*

What do you think? Am I barking (gah sorry…) up the wrong tree?

Is Paw Patrol in fact a cesspit of regressive, offensive and oppressive values?

Or perhaps I am just barking, full stop.

Let me know in the comments, folks.

 

A Magnificent Rant

I was planning a post about the colour pink today, and specifically my middle son’s resistance to same, but I am time-poor and have a lot of admin to get through.

Happily, I logged into Twitter this morning and found the MOST MAGNIFICENT RANT, I think I have ever seen, so felt moved to share that instead.

Please note, eff-word and generally angry tone warning…

See? I told you the Peppa Pig Paradigm was a thing…

Of course, I followed @foiltheplot immediately.

Have a fabulous, and feminist day everybody. 🙂