Multifarious Threads

PTSD and the remnants of Cartesianism in psychological practice

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The view of trauma adopted in the DSM-V is a reflection of the Cartesian dualism that still permeates mainstream psychology. The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, requires that a direct, physical threat to someone’s life occur; emotional abuse doesn’t seem to count, despite research studies indicating that emotional distress can exert the same effects as physical abuse. If emotional abuse results in the same biochemical responses as physical abuse or life-threatening accidents, then it should be included as a criterion for PTSD or other psychiatric disabilities that arise from stress or trauma. Limiting the aetiology to direct physical threats prevents survivors of emotional abuse or other forms of sustained maltreatment from receiving the help they need.

Drawing a bright line between the two seems entirely predicated on the idea that the mind and body are two separate entities. This kind of crude dualism reflected in the DSM is not in keeping with current neuroscientific findings. Rather, the states of the mind and the rest of the body work in concert with one another. For example, anxiety and depression lead to the increased production of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which can ultimately overload the body and lead to a variety of adverse health consequences like stroke and heart disease (McEwen, 2005). The idea of a mind wholly separate from the rest of the body is an epiphenomenon of our cognition, not a tangible reality; while we may feel a separation between our thoughts and the rest of our body, the brain is still inextricable from the rest of our flesh, blood and bones. Our selfhood is immanent within the corporeal; it neither transcends it nor is reducible to it.

Admittedly, this frustration is deeply personal; I myself have PTSD symptoms from surviving years of emotional abuse and neglect, but if diagnosticians adhered strictly to the DSM, I couldn’t even be diagnosed with it. There is no official name for what I’ve gone through, even though the effects of this maltreatment still linger. Some psychologists and psychiatrists have suggested adding complex PTSD, or C-PSTD, to the DSM, but it hasn’t been added as of 2013. Leaving the scars of emotional trauma unnamed creates the potential for gaslighting, denial, and manipulation. While I’m not an unalloyed supporter of the medical model to name and identify trauma, I do think that we need ways to discuss what we’ve gone through as survivors in a systematic way. I hope the DSM-6 actually catches up with the literature and recognises the effects of long-term emotional trauma.

References

McEwen, B (2005). Stressed or stressed out: What is the difference? Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience 2006, 30(5).

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V) (2013).

Hyphens: Get them right, professional writers.

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One of my pet peeves is the rampant omission of hyphens in professional writing. Note that I’m talking about professional writing: paid blog posts, newspapers, books, academic journal articles, marketing materials, policy briefs. I really couldn’t care less what you do in your social-media statuses or texts. If you’re writing for pay, though, it makes sense to be more careful about what you’re doing.

Professionally edited text in books, newspapers and magazines will almost always hyphenate phrases like five-year-old boy, small-government conservatives and well-known author. Using these hyphens makes your meaning clear. Leaving them out can confuse your readers because it’s not obvious how you’re grouping the adjectives.

Phrasal-adjective hyphenation is not dependent on the variant of English you use; British, American, Canadian and Australian style guides all recommend hyphenating phrasal adjectives. Look carefully at the hyphenation patterns in The Economist, The Washington Post or The Atlantic. (The Guardian is an outlier and only hyphenates phrasal adjectives in ambiguous cases or short phrases like three-hour wait.)

Examples include

  • well-known author
  • old-fashioned ideas
  • civil-rights advocates
  • eighty-year-old books (remember to use hyphens after both the number and the time word)
  • orange-faced, loud-mouthed politician

…Speaking of orange-faced, loud-mouthed politicians, this xenophobia- and conspiracy-theory-laden Trump tweet from 28 December 2018 shows an example of what not to do; he wrote “profit making operation” instead of the correct “profit-making operation.” (He also confused loose for lose, but that’s beyond the scope of this post…)

  • Note that hyphenation rules don’t apply to proper names if the name of an organisation or company omits the phrasal-adjective hyphen. The disability-rights organisation Self Advocates Being Empowered (SABE) come to mind. Since it’s a proper name, you shouldn’t add a hyphen; personal and organisational preferences supersede the usual rules.
  • You should also avoid hyphenating phrases that end in -ly, since it’s clear that they’re modifying the word that comes immediately after it. It’s a clearly defined phrase, not a clearly-defined phrase. If it were well-defined, however, it would take a hyphen.
  • This rule applies only to multi-word adjectives that come directly before a noun in most cases. You’d say a fifty-year-old woman, but the woman was fifty years old.

Am I perfect at this? Certainly not, mostly because I keep wondering whether I’m being too fussy by adhering strictly to this rule. I often wonder if I sound like a stuffed-shirt pedant when I follow rules too strictly; because of these worries, I’ll sometimes take liberties on social media to seem more approachable. If I’m writing professionally or editing someone else’s writing, however, my inner stickler comes out in force.

References (not exhaustive)

  • Bryan Garner (2016), Garner’s Modern English Usage, 4th Edition.
  • The Economist Style Guide, 11th Edition.
  • The Guardian Style Guide
  • Grammar and Style in British English
  • While Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography was primarily intended to help make writers make good typographic choices, it does also cover punctuation from an American perspective. (The hyphenation rules he lists out are NOT US-specific, though.)

More intelligent spellchecking

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Spellchecking technology is frankly lacking. While it’s good for spotting unambiguous errors, it’s less effective in identifying spellings whose correctness varies based on context. This can be especially problematic when an author works with two variants of the same language that use somewhat different spelling conventions.

Typical spellcheckers have a regional dialect associated with them—for example, British or American English—and mark other regional spellings as errors. On top of that, publishing houses and editors may also have their own idiosyncratic preferences within a given regional dialect.

This problem pops up reasonably often with writers whose preferred spelling conventions aren’t captured properly by a spellchecker, or who need help identifying which spellings belong to which variant.For example, English spelling standards can be broadly split into two categories: American, and what I call “Ecumenical.” Ecumenical English spellings tend to resemble British spellings for a few classes of words—namely, words whose spellings follow the pattern of colour, honour, travelling, and defence—though some variation exists between individual written dialects. Moreover, both regional spellings may be allowable within a dialect depending on how they’re used; for example, “program” and “programme” are both allowed in British writing. A typical British spellchecker lets “programme” and “program” though without flagging either of them, even though there are distinct rules for both. “Program” is restricted to computing contexts, while “programme” refers to TV shows, government projects, and anything else that’s not computer-specific.

Spellcheckers should behave more like grammar checkers when checking for words whose spelling varies based on context. Variable spellings aren’t mistakes and shouldn’t be treated as such.

A mockup of a context-sensitive spellchecker. On the left, the spellchecker is marking a misspelling of independent as wrong. On the right, the spellchecker is suggesting different forms of the word behaviour depending on the dialect.

Note that this mockup distinguishes between the obvious error, “independant,” and “behaviour,” a spelling that varies depending on the dialect being used. “Independant,” which is always a mistake, uses the traditional red underline, while “behaviour” is highlighted in a contrasting colour. The contextual menus change, too; right-clicking on a marked error will show spelling suggestions, while variable spellings will provide context and allow the user to make a choice between two correct options, each labelled with the region, style manual, or user-selected preferences they’re associated with. Of course, variant-highlighting mode can be turned off if users don’t want words that are always correct for them highlighted, just as any other spellchecker can be disabled.

A context-sensitive spellchecker would obviate the need for distinct spellcheckers for different English variants. Grammarly comes close, but it still uses separate dialect settings (British, American, Australian, and Canadian English) and struggles to disambiguate between regional vocabulary variants.

Of course, this wouldn’t be limited to English; this hypothetical spellchecker could work for different languages, too, especially when vocabulary is included along with spelling. For example, if you speak Walloon/Belgian French and are writing a document geared towards an international French-speaking audience, the checker could highlight regional expressions like septante and nonante and indicate that they’re regionalisms that may need to be changed to soixante-dix and quatre-vingt-dix, the typical French words for seventy and ninety. The same applies to German and its spelling reforms: is the German for “that” spelled dass or daß?

Here are some contexts in which a context-sensitive, but region-neutral, spellchecker would be helpful:

  • People who work on within-language software localisation need to change spelling, vocabulary, and punctuation to target a particular region. If someone is converting American to British English, all the variant spellings will be highlighted to prevent the appearance of stray Americanisms in the final British localisation.
  • It would encourage developers to create multiple English-language localisations instead of assuming that American standards are neutral or universally acceptable, since any US spellings they use would be treated as the regionally marked variants they are. The reminder that more than one option exists may push them to create multiple versions that can be mostly maintained automatically without hiring translators for small spelling, vocabulary, and punctuation changes.
  • Some people who have been exposed to multiple standards may confuse them in their personal writing. Context-sensitive spellcheckers allow them to decide on a convention and stick to it without treating the other standards they know as erroneous.
  • Writers who use a specific style guide will be better able to adhere to the stipulated guidelines without going through the trouble of creating an exclude dictionary in Microsoft Word. Not all operating systems or applications have exclude dictionaries, either.
  • If a language has recently adopted a spelling reform, a context-sensitive spellchecker can help writers edit their work to adhere to the new reforms.

When “wokeness” plays into the far right’s hands

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Supposedly “woke” leftists have a tendency of advocating for social behaviour and policies that mirror those of their opponents on the far right. A particular galling example is the hostility towards romantic or sexual relationships with people of other racial backgrounds amongst some black people. This is the kind of toxic thinking that comes from fixating on collective statuses over individual characteristics. While I agree that refusing to date other black people can be a form of internalised racism, I don’t agree that dating Latinos, white people, Asians, or people of any other racial background is a form of self-hate in and of itself. Insisting that you should only have black romantic or sexual partners feels like a form of racial purism, a mirror image of what one sees from white supremacists who claim that interracial relationships are “white genocide.” Black people echoing the same thoughts is the kind of thing that white nationalists love: supposedly “woke” people advocating for behaviour and policy that dovetail well with their goal of white racial and cultural purity. (I think that complete purity is a wholly quixotic goal with no basis in historical fact, but these people aren’t particularly au fait with history that hasn’t been rewritten to suit their white-nationalist narrative.) Encouraging Philistinism and separatism is not “woke.” Segregation was and is considered a moral ill for a reason. Why, then, are people who claim to be anti-racist advocating for a modern version of “separate but equal” under a “woke” veneer?

Just because someone is black doesn’t mean they’ll have political views that match yours. My parents are hardcore conservative evangelical Christians who will vote for any candidate with an R after their name, including, but not limited to, lowlives like Donald Trump. When I lived with them, they watched Fox News practically every day. Both of them are black. Both of them are old enough to remember the United States immediately after the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement; they’re in their mid- to late fifties and grew up in the 60s and 70s. Both my father’s biological and de facto adoptive parents fled the Jim Crow South for New York in the Great Migration. But yet here they are, voting for Trump and Southern Republican candidates who pander directly to unreconstructed Confederate sympathisers, the empathy-free Religious Right, morally craven Tea Partiers, and white nationalists. The converse is also true; I know countless white people who repudiate racism, would vote for Trump over their dead bodies, and see Fox News as a menace to society. I’m infinitely more comfortable being in a relationship with a left-wing, anti-racist, Trump-hating white person than I would a black person who loves Trump’s policies. Black Trump supporters may encounter the same racism I do, but just experiencing something doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily have a set opinion about that experience, or even perceive it.

Yes, white people as a class should recognise how they benefit from structural privilege and do the work to dismantle it within themselves and in their communities. The same applies to men, westerners of any race, straight and cis people, rich people, non-disabled people, and anyone else who benefits from systemic privilege. Collective accountability is important and shouldn’t be dismissed. Being able to recognise cultural dynamics, however, is not synonymous with claiming that any one group of people is essentially good or evil. Creating a fairer world means dismantling essentialist thinking about people’s ethnic or racial backgrounds, not just offloading it.

The slipperiness of “I”: emergent properties, personal mythos, and co-creative development

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I’ve talked before about having psychiatric disabilities and being an abuse survivor. Today, I’m going to go into a bit more detail. This hasn’t been easy to write, but I think it’s a story that needs to be told.

It’s honestly a misnomer to say “I” in the first place; it’s more for your convenience than it is an inner truth. There are a lot of ghosts in this machine. I have a complex, intricate personal mythos; though I am very private about what that entails, it’s still a central component of my experience. I don’t feel comfortable with any of the “official” diagnostic labels that come close to what I experience, but there’s some similarity to Internal Family Systems. I’d say that the experience is more complex than that therapeutic model encourages, but it’s vastly better than anything that immediately evokes thoughts of Sybil and Three Faces of Eve.

I said this when I was 19:

It is difficult to define me in a few words; I see myself as a fissiparous, separate collection of ideas consolidated into one whole, forced to work together because of physical unity. In my mind exist multitudes of plots, characters, turns of phrase, denouements, orchestras with rousing crescendos and subtle diminuendos, the decisions and revisions of daily life, and the constant analysis of information. I’ve likened my brain to a large music-box or production factory; the ideas and influences of this world enter me, and I take them and combine them through my perception and interpretation, and take the universe and make it into [my own].

So many “psychiatric disorders” are extreme responses to a disordered, chaotic, and often mean world. To imply that the person experiencing psychiatric disability is the one who is “disordered” lets abusers, dictators, and warmongers off the hook. Our lives are intricately linked with others’. It’s important to understand individual factors, but it’s also vital to remember that we exist within systems: families, towns and cities, friend groups, countries, Earth at large. My lack of a contiguous “I”-narrator is in part a response to the circumstances in which I was brought up. I don’t—can’t—believe anything with absolute certitude, because I know my entire universe can be ruptured at any moment. It gets even more intense when you add in generational trauma: slavery, the Middle Passage, Jim Crow, and centuries of tilling the land without being able to reap the results of one’s own handiwork. This is not a stable foundation on which to build a singular sense of self, but my brain mitigated this problem by allowing for varied and co-creative senses of self to exist instead. I’m not anti-psychiatry, but I am vehemently against seeing people’s mental health as something extricable from the contexts in which people grow, live, work, and play.

A contiguous sense of self is an epiphenomenal emergent property anyway, not a concrete reality that can be used as an absolute benchmark of sanity or insanity. Because it’s all people know, they act as though it can be used to delineate what is beneficial and what is harmful. That’s not to say that there aren’t consistent tendencies, traits, and behaviours I can label as mine, but they’re the traits of a microcosm. There are plenty of other creative people who “contain multitudes,” pace Walt Whitman.

On a meta-level, it’s already pretty fucking weird that a collection of atoms can perceive itself at all. Thought itself is an intangible process generated by electrical impulses and chemical baths washing over our brains. I could continue the reduction to the sub-atomic levels: quarks, photons, and the like.

If it weren’t for the way my cognition is arranged, I don’t think I’d be alive to be telling you about this today, or if I were still alive, I think my quality of life would be greatly diminished. Having an internal support team has allowed me to pull through difficult traumas and create a better life for myself. This is deeply important to me and I am horrified by narratives that pathologise, flatten, and diminish my interiority or its positive effects on my external presentation. It’s especially galling when those judgements come from other neurodivergent people who seem to think that only some forms of cognitive difference are acceptable. Anxiety, autism, and depression are OK to talk about, but nothing else is. This is not OK. There is no point in trying to win the Oppression Olympics. Some animals are not more equal than others.

I don’t typically talk about it publicly because I have no interest in ontological debates, especially when people drag in the medical model. I’m also profoundly uncomfortable with having people apply inaccurate, minimising, and hurtful narratives to my experiences, turning a complex, multi-dimensional topological space into a two-dimensional figure or stripping it into non-contiguous pieces separate from the context in which they originally existed. It’s particularly painful to see people who know me well do it. I don’t want people to delve into extensive analyses of my personal mereology. I just want them to listen and not try to create their own—ultimately inaccurate—stories that they think supersede my own.

I refuse to allow people to denigrate me for having internal mechanisms that allow me to survive and even thrive after years of abuse, discrimination, marginalisation, and oppression. It’s time to take my power back by telling my story. Our story.