"Disability: A Choice of Models"

This article ties in with previous post "A Mad Fight" but goes the other route in elaborating about persons with physical handicaps. My first question is why does this article, the beginning of a book really, start off with 'Western' societies only? Do Eastern societies feel differently or are you implying that your research is based off of Western cultures only?

Next. With regards to the late 1960s movement, it mentions disabled persons forced to live in residential institutions. Isn't this like the forced hospitalizations that the Mad activists were going on about? Isn't this a just reason to combine forces? The Mad article talks about how they have that extra level of politics, but when I read this article and the idea of second-class citizens, I think physically disabled people have it worse. You can see the problem; you can often figure out if someone is physically disabled whether they want you to or not. Finding out if someone has a mental disorder is harder.

Just like there is the idea that "whiteness" is a social construction more than a race issue, the same can be said of the label disability. The article talks about how it's a social and environmental construct toward those with impairments, not that they're disabled - that is to say, not able.

One thing that did horrify me was The Making of Blind Men (Scott, 1969) showed that agencies would "fix" the personalities of people who are blind to fit a stereotype. This reminded me of the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the notion that being curried basically means turning you into a zombie and the nurses don't care or even recognize you as a person. Utterly terrifying.

"A Mad Fight"

Okay. I have to applaud disability activists and their argument over the medicalization to achieve "normal" bodies. As much as some disabilities really are able-bodied versus the disabled, most things can just be viewed as deviations from the "norm" that society hascreatedand not actually a disability. Page 340 states that these activists call for a shift in perspective from a medical model to a social one. The real hardships come from other people and their judgments, criticisms, and pity. By looking down on someone becauseoftheirdisability, they rob that person the chance to prove themselves as equals. And if they do, then they are extraordinary. Normal isn't even an option then.

The Mad activists struggle through similar battles. One of their qualms with psychiatrization is that it provides "tremendous social and psychological pressure to stay on the side of normality, or sanity" (pp 340). Yet, these same people make a lot of money and have expensive hobbies such as collecting art, which may never have been created if the artist wasn't mad. I feel that is an argument for enabling. Doesn't society encourage such things as the arts? And don't we as art therapists provide opportunities to elmore alternative forms of treatment for these samemad people? It's a paradox.

I think this may tie into the struggle that disability and Mad activists have with each other. Physically disabled persons mayn't necessarily work without be associated with crazy people and Mad activists may not view their condition as a handicap. But as the article suggests, the two factions need to team up to form a formidable coalition.

The only other thing I found worth noting was the NO FORCED TREATMENT EVER rule (pp. 348). The only question I have is, what if the person is unable to make choices? We limit kids choices because "they don't know any better" but isn't that the exact same argument? Who determines the cut off point of understanding?

"Opening therapy to Conversations with a Personal God"

First off, this article is great if for no other reason than that it brings up religion. In working with a client, it is important to be able to acknowledge the different facets of their life, and that includes their religious/spiritual beliefs. One of the major goals I have learned as a budding art therapist is the importance of having a safe space. A client needs to feel that they are safe and allowed to open themselves, be vulnerable, and not be judged. If a client has private and meaningful conversations with a personal God (which is a strange phrase to me. I'm assuming that this is an umbrella term since many religions have a God. It does make me feel as though the author/therapist feels that the God isn't real but is real to that person aka their personal God) and feels that they cannot share that part of them in a therapy session, then they may lose trust or gain uncertainty about the art therapist and art therapy (or any therapy really).

When Griffith brings up her experience with Susan and her mother, she talks about 'kneejerk thinking' that causes a therapist to pause or disregard a thought or idea (re: the panic disorder specialist not wanting to see Susan and her mother together, that she was too dependent on her). This is similar to what we learned in Substance Abuse class and the idea of harm reduction techniques. Just because you don't agree with something, doesn't make it right. Treating alcoholism and a mental illness together, reducing alcohol intake instead of life-long sobriety, these alternatives to blacks white thinking are what causes more success stories. So it's no surprise that the author was mistaken in her theories about Susan's personal God.

Four Certainties-->Wonder. The author breaks down the knowledge she has gained based on her personal experiences in the field and how those lead to positive results.

#1
I know what God is like for you because I know your religious denomination

#2
I know what God is like for you because I know what your language about God means

#3
I know what God is like for you because your image of God is a reflection of your early childhood attachment figures

#4
I know what God is like and you need to know God as I do.

After reading the article, it seems that the author is merely summarizing how stereotypes, archetypes, and general "common knowledge" (the stories of certainty) lead to false assumptions (the already knowingness) that limit developing a great relationship (away from curiosity and creative) (pp.127).
The four certainties can be acquainted with four general assumptions about religion that break the therapist-client relationship. In giving example of how to handle situations that may arise revolving a personal God, the author shows how itcanbe beneficial to actively listen and allow the client to sort themselves out without restriction.

"Make Me Wanna Holler"

The beginning introduction to this article has already upset me. Is it because I am not white, middle class or male but grew up with little more than an inner city attitude influenced by my Puerto Rican mother who was raised in the Bronx? I don't know. But I will admit that I often find myself rolling my eyes when gender, class, or race issues arise from a privileged view point.

For example, the opening sequence shows a Latino boy being amazed, presumably because there was a white man in his neighborhood. But there is a lot to be determined. Had the kid never seen this guy before? I mean, he said "You're here". Was that a general statement (white person in the neighborhood) or toward him specifically since he's a regular due to his group meetings. Why was he amazed? Was it really for that reason? Perhaps the kid thought the guy was someone important. Why was it presumed that he ran off to tell his friends about the alien? I think this story is too general to be used for so specific a purpose. Assuming that the interaction meant one thing when it could have been anything (based on the short description and minimal dialogue) puts him in the over-generalization that writers have that he (the author) was trying to avoid (pp. 214). Maybe I'm just reading too much into this...but isn't the whole point of this class that we explore Cultural Dimensions and other outlooks? "I envied my colleagues of color who had grown up in New York, wishing that I could find a way to access their unique ability to connect and understand" (pp. 214). But isn't this the same for every person who finds themselves in a situation that they are unfamiliar with? It's not really a unique ability, it's just the ability to identify with the current population. And I know the author understands this, because he later goes on to write about how recent mental health literature on male development has a Freudian problem; that is to say, it looks at white, middle-class boys and makes it a general experience for all.

Moving on...
The author brings up a valid point in defining "whiteness"; using Javier and Herron's (2002) definition of a "social construction built from the components of economic and and educational status" shows how even people of color can be labelled as 'white' (pp 215):

Twinkie/Banana - yellow on the outside, white on the inside
Oreo - black on the outside, white on the inside Urban Dictionary: oreo

If you are well educated and come from a privileged background, then you must be white, because white people get all the good jobs and money. They can afford fancy education and so forth. They have the options, the opportunities. This is generally true and needs to be changed. Unless there is a role model or an example, kids who are taught to be one way may have trouble thinking that other possibilities exist.

I believe that the author's points on inner-city male youth are valid. Self-protection, dis-empowerment, male role models, and rage are all things that I have witnessed while working at my internship at Rice. Though not about boys, one teenage girl was upset that I was leaving and stated, "I like you because you're half-Puerto Rican like me. I don't have any role models to look up to. People think because I'm half that I don't count, but I do." These kinds of comments are unique in that you rarely hear them from white, middle-class boys. So this article is relevant in that sense. It brings awareness that there is a gap in society and in literature.

Mary and max

Thinking about our discussion in class regarding autism and mental illness, I wanted to share this film:

Mary and Max. Its a clay animation film about a girl whose mother suffers from mental illness and a man with autism who form a friendship despite their differences. The film gives a really unique perspective into the minds of two characters who just want answers to life's key questions. It's on Netflix instant queue so you really have no excuse not to watch it! (If you don't have Netflix we can have a movie night)

Stigma and Disability

"Finally, stigma theory reminds us that the problems we confront are not disability, ethnicity, race, class homosexuality, or gender; they are instead the inequalities, negative attitudes, misrepresentations, and institutional practices that result from the process of stigmatization.( Thomson, 1997, p. 32)" 

I was reading Theorizing Disability, and this quote spoke to me, because the perception of mind creates the the inferior thinking against for both the people with the disability and others without the disability. I think that the imagined and idealized form of body within the group, in other words, society creates dangerous thought process and idea of normal; thus, it creates the stigma around the subject--in this case, body and the different body. 

I often see some note like--"adjustment to disability"at my internship site when a client is referred to the art therapy. Most of these clients were recently gone through the big changes in their lives. It is hard for them to see their body changes in a positive way because it is different from before. I respect/admire their efforts to make adjustments and courage to keep themselves up, because the difference sometimes means hard. However, I think this difference looking at this subject matter, 'disability' needs to take one step further to look at people with 'disability' on the same level. So they are not different but the same in the view of human existence; thus they are not inferior. 

Autoethnography

Korean.
Buddhist.
Painter.

These are interrelated different identities that I correspond with.

I struggled to be a Korean because of my mixed environment that I grew up. I was hiding in my closet with a flashlight after 11pm every night to finish my homework when I was in the high school. I tried to speak well and do well in this English speaking world. But I couldn't not be the American, because I was Korean. When I realized this, I didn't have to try so hard on myself any more. Also, Theses years were worthy, because it gave me an opened eye to understand America and Americans better, moreover, cultures, values, the difference in general.

I was born in a buddhist family. But I didn't think about being a buddhist seriously until 2008(though I some time to time said that I wanted to be a buddhist nun to mother when I was a child.) But now, this is one of the strongest identities I find myself. I do not know how to explain my understandings of it, how they affected me. The learnings and all practices really helped me to see things without ends, to see the unseen etc. I constantly try to "know myself."

I paint because I survive. This is what I think every Wednesday when I drag my body to the painting studio. I need to paint in order to function normally without getting depressed. I can forget things that is attached from everything around me and paint so painting is my exit to my own world. It's a step to my wonderland, that I can focus on me.

Buy Art Not People

After researching human trafficking in the Chicago, I interviewed the program director from the STOP-IT Program (which you can read about on our other blog), but she lead me to 2 very interesting art shows.  One is actually happening tonight and I wanted to share the information with you guys.

Youth in the Sex Trade: from Exploitation to Empowerment
Monday, April 30
1505 W. Chicago Avenue
7 p.m.
Special Guest Rachel Lloyd of GEMS and author of "Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls Are Not For Sale, an Activist Finds her Calling and Heals Herself."
Cost: $10 to benefit CAASE and Traffick Free. 


And the other art event is through Buy Art Not People and it is on May 19th.

Where are all the men?

My supervisor and I briefly had a discussion about men in art therapy that I wanted to bring up on the blog to you all. During one of our group sessions, my supervisor invited her friend, another art therapist, to lead an art making session to teach our group a new sculpture technique. We noticed that her friend, who happened to be male, had a specific effect on our female members. Our group does have male members however, the two co-facilitators and myself are female. My supervisor and I had a discussion about it and compared it to one of the museum programs that I also help her with where the female participants seemed so smitten with one of the male art therapists.

It's no secret that men are a rarity in our field and I think it's important to talk about that. Other fields that are primarily female have similar discussions: At last year's National Art Education Conference, there was a presentation titled, "Where are all the men?". A part of me, honestly, wants to reply, who cares?

While I do identify as a feminist, I am definitely in no way anti-men and I definitely think it's important to have male art therapists, for the same reason it is important to have diversity in art therapy. HOWEVER, do fields that lack women (i.e. politics, business, engineering) ever question, where are all the women? Are we, and other female-dominated fields, asking for men in order to validate and justify our field?

The lack of men in our field I think needs to be readdressed as a diversity issue as opposed to a gender issue - what do you think?

Auto Ethnography

 

In 1795, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach published his final taxonomy of race, dividing the world population into five categories based on physical features and geographical location. Each of these five categories were further generalized into color:

 - Caucasian variety (white): light-skinned people of Europe and
   surrounding areas
 - Mongolian variety (yellow): eastern Asia
 - Ethiopian variety (black): dark-skinned people of Africa
 - American variety (red): native peoples of the New World
 - Malay variety (brown): Pacific islands and native peoples of Australia
   (aborigines)

This model was an expansion of Linnaean's four-race system, radically shifting the thought that geography alone defined race and added the hierarchy of worth.

This compartmentalization does not allow for cross-cultural relations to be a reality. In examining my own family, I cannot fathom how we would fit into any model. I decided that in order to understand, I needed to create my family tree using this "original modern racial classification".

Autoethnography

This piece represents my connection with my Cuban culture and the culture of South Florida. As I was making this painting, I felt as if I have been making it over and over all semester long. It seemed so repetitive. But for some reason that is where I am now. The longer I live away from what I always called home, the more I long to connect to it. I haven't lived in Miami for almost 7 years now yet I find myself connecting to the culture and seeing it more and more as a part of who I am.

This piece literally bridges my family's Cuban culture with the South Florida culture I grew up in with my family's passport pictures. My face is made up of old family photos. Some of people I knew growing up... Some who I never met... Yet all make up who I am today. This painting also emphasizes my connection to strong women in my family. All of the pictures are of my mother's side of the family and of her mother's side of the family. Being raised by strong women who didn't know they were strong also made me who I am today. I was always encouraged to be independent and never to depend on others. I was led by examples that they did not know they were setting.

At this point in my life, I have one year left of grad school and my boyfriend has two. I am from South Florida, he is from Central New York. We have already discussed where we would like to be in a few years, when we are done with school and trying to figure out where we are going to live. It is physically impossible to live near both families. This realization that my time away from my family will suddenly become "permanent" is what I feel is drawing me to hold on to as much as my culture as possible.

How will I pass on my culture? My boyfriend is white, and does not speak Spanish. If I want my children to hold on to my culture it rests on my shoulders... They will most likely not grow up like I did. In a city where I was not a minority, where the majority (if not all at some points) of my friends' parents were immigrants, where my culture took over...

Going to college was in many ways like going to another country for me. Its a concept thats hard to explain unless you have grown up where I did, but college was the first time I felt like I stood out. I stood out in a good way, I felt special, I wasn't one of many anymore. This positive experience with having my culture separate me from the rest was probably due to the fact that it happened in college and not elementary school when it was more importnat to fit in. I grew up in a place where growing up a "minority" was very different than it would have been anywhere else in the US. Therefore, as I have mentioned many times before my "Miami culture" and the inclusion I got from being cuban-american is just as much of who I am as my "Cuban culture.

This is a topic I will continue to explore... I will probably paint this/create this idea over and over again. As a cuban-american who looks and sounds "white" I feel the need to constantly legitimize myself as a minority. Which is probably part of the reason I feel the need to continually address this topic. I am interested to see where this goes...

Autoethnography
Basically, I stick out in my family. I didn't used to. I grew up doing what everyone wanted, fitting into their mold, because I didn't really know what I wanted in life. Although I did know I enjoyed art and I loved being with my family. I liked learning about my German and Indian heritage and staying connect with my family but as I got older I found that I was more connected to art than my family members. Art was my passion, not just a hobby like everyone surrounding me. My parents and other family members didn't quite understand but were supportive in this journey. I'm not sure I'll ever completely grow up, but I think that suits me wanting to work with children in the art therapy field. I have a connection to children that allows me to enter their world. My own art got me through every challenge as a child and I want to share that with other children.

Ten Years Later...

This past weekend, I watched Bowling for Columbine. Not a new documentary at all, but one that I had been wanting to see and I was looking to unwind. I definitely did not expect the film to strike me as much as it did. Despite being released in 2002, ten years later there are still so many of the same issues that Michael Moore brought up then.

For those who haven't seen it, it centers around the mass school shooting that happened at Columbine High School but I found it was really more about gun control and violence. It talks about how the number of killings by gunshoot in the U.S. more than triples the number of that in Canada, France, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Moore attempts to understand what makes Americans so quick to pull the trigger and while he never comes through with a straight answer, it does seem to come down to fear. Thinking about the recent Zimmerman case in Florida, I found this is to be particularly interesting. Why are we so afraid?

Moore also touches on the welfare system, which still continues to have its problems today. I think Jordan had made an earlier comment about the welfare system and how it doesn't really benefit people at all. There was a scene which illustrated this particularly well in the movie where a woman, through a work to welfare program, worked 70 hours a week in two entry-level, low paying jobs that barely paid her rent.

The movie also highlights how society and media continually make the black man as the bad guy and our conversations about the prison system and race really made those scenes more poignant.

It's sad that so many of these issues are still issues today and we aren't really all that much closer to finding a resolution. Doesn't it seem like they are getting worse? I definitely expected the film to be meaningful but my experiences in this class allowed me to watch it in through a specific lens that allowed me to see these stories in a deeper, more relevant way.