Mental Health Writings: NAMI’s Wretched Writing Style

 (The last of my mental health writings for a while, which was true at the time of posting--GF)

I know NAMI well, having been a member since December 2019 (but not going to renew my membership when it expires November 2023), receiving its publications, including its national magazine, NAMI Advocate, and reading many of the articles it publishes.  Thus can I properly pass judgment on what I’ve seen:  what I’ve seen is truly wretched, article after article (and the same goes for NAMI oral presentations at conferences) in the same breezy, superficial, saccharinely cheery “positive thinking” vibe that does massive injustice to the seriousness of the topics it deals with:  mental illness, its treatment, and its effects on families, caregivers and others.  Moreover, it’s a very homogenous style, where one presentation is interchangeable with another, as though they were auto parts.  This even carries over in the first full-length book NAMI has commissioned, NAMI Chief Psychiatrist Dr. Kenneth Duckworth’s You Are Not Alone (New York: Zando, 1922), wherein the breeziness and good cheer of the presentation once again belies the seriousness of the topics covered:  mental health and its treatment, and the successful navigation to get such treatment through the maze of clinics and practitioners, insurance companies, “stigma,” and the myriad of people affected by being involved with a person under psychiatric care, such as caregivers, family members, friends, and others.

 

This kind of language, which is assiduously promoted by many nonprofits, of which NAMI is one, and which is designed to be “inclusive” (even though some of us with a more “elitist” regard for language might regard it as “dumbing down” or “speaking only in euphemisms”), has been masterfully dissected by Atlantic staff writer George Packer in the April 2023 issue of that esteemed magazine (which is a hallmark of genuinely good writing).  His short but pithy article, “The Moral Case Against Euphemism” devastatingly mocks such “inclusive” but vapid language, language that Packer dismisses well and with flourish.  He writes:  “Imprecise language is less likely to offend.  Good writing—vivid imagery, strong statements—will hurt, because it’s bound to convey painful truths.”  Such as, in the case of NAMI, the actual realities of living with, and suffering through, mental illness.  “Imprecise language” also infantilizes—another hallmark involved in its usage.  Again, as Packer points out, the euphemistic, “inclusive” language of the new nonprofit Language Police is pitched to a sixth- to eighth-grade reading level.  While such may theoretically garner a larger reading audience—after all, according to statistics I’ve seen, 57% of the US population reads only at a sixth-grade level or below—it does so by trivializing and infantilizing content, and making the expression of adult content childish rather than adult; thus radically oversimplifying and brushing off the inevitable hardships that will attend in the real world when people have to deal with mental illness and psychological disfunction, either in themselves, or in loved ones and acquaintances.  Remember, the sixth-grade level is only the beginning of real literacy, and is too young to acquire critical reading skills and understanding, which don’t even begin until the eighth-grade level.

 

NAMI’s wretched language also suffers from all the defects adult writer (who wrote as an adult for adults) Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in her excellent critique of the cult of “positive thinking,” her book Bright-Sided (New York: Picador, 2009).  Ehrenreich’s book is aptly subtitled “How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America” (emphasis in original), and tears apart all the “positive thinking,” “look on the bright side” pabulum that infests the culture particularly of the US in the present time.  This includes the world of the nonprofit advocacy groups such as NAMI.  Being forever “bright-sided,” always “thinking positive” undermines what Ehrenreich properly calls for:  not negative thinking but (her words) “realistic thinking.”  Infantilizing the issue of mental illness rather than writing about as an adult speaking to other adults doesn’t make its understanding any less onerous or palatable, and doesn’t extend the realm of proper diagnosis, treatment, and provision of help one iota.  And Ehrenreich should know—she wrote Bright-Sided by becoming involuntarily immersed in the universe of “positive thinking” when she had to deal with her own breast cancer, where the realm of “positive thinking” in the face of a serious medical condition abounded!

 

Yet, mental illness and its often-painful realities can be properly dealt with in adult ways by adult prose aimed at adult readers in very compelling ways.  We need not the saccharine nostrums of the NAMI Advocate or You are Not Alone.  As an excellent example, take a good reading of Jonathan Rosen’s “American Madness” in the May 2023 issue of the Atlantic, the poignant and often wrenching account by Rosen of his childhood best friend, a brilliant young man who became schizophrenic and, in a fit of schizophrenic hallucination, murdered his fiancé.  Rosen’s account brings home not only the realities of mental illness, but also, our failure to provide adequate psychiatric treatment for it all too frequently.  This is adult writing for adults.  And thus makes a positive contribution to the subject.  A greater contribution, I might add, than I think NAMI makes.

 

I, too, am a writer who’s had to deal with my own mental illness (or, technically, “mental disorder”) of borderline personality disorder accompanied by bouts of acute depression.  Often my own disorder would interfere with my writing, and chagrin not only myself, but also editors, who were understandably irked at my not always delivering on time.  I had to write under the double burden of professional pressures and mental illness going on simultaneously, and had to overcome both.  But overcome I did, had a fairly successful (not monetarily, but in quality and quantity of output) several-decades long writing career (which still continues, by the way).  I even became a biographee in Who’s Who in America for both 2019 and 2020, thus achieving my Andy Warhol fifteen-minutes-of-fame!  And, I can say, without the help, but only the hindrance, of NAMI.  (I’ve written on NAMI’s hindrance elsewhere in my other mental health writings such as my “Politically Incorrect Leftist” BlogSpot blogs of September 19 and 28, 2023.)

 

All of which makes me very appreciative of adult writing for adults.  Over the past few years, I’ve been reading adult writers who wrote for adults in both the socialist press and popular literature, from Frederick Engels to Ernest Hemingway, and can tell you firsthand, reading adult literature written for adult readers is a joy to behold!  It will also “spoil” you, make you not want to go back to “inclusive” infantilizing, “positive thinking” pabulum such as NAMI proffers.  But being so “spoiled” is definitely worth it.