And another thing...

Anyone who has ever suffered clinical depression will see Broun as a person who is beyond contempt; who deserves nothing less than our damnation. Does he have the slightest clue what clinical depression is? What does he expect an emergency room worker to do for someone with clinical depression? Slap them and shout, "snap out of it! Other people have worse problems that you do!" Maybe he thinks they can hand out magic happy pills without a proper interview and no follow up. Since he puts depression and chronic illness in the same comment, does he think a lifelong mental conditions can, or should, be treated by a simple visit to the emergency room? If he does, he is painfully wrong. You cannot tell a depressed person that all they need is to put aside their painful inertia and go to a noisy, brightly lit place to say a few words to someone who is rushed and keeping one eye on the line behind them and everything will be fine. It would be much kinder and more effective to go with the slap and shout treatment.

Treating this as the outrage du jour will not help depression sufferers. Nor will treating any other medical condition as a rhetorical volleyball help people with those conditions. I'm not sure what the answer is. Bringing in people to be used as visual aids during speeches is a cliche that no one pays attention to any more. Calling hearings makes the sufferers feel good for a moment, but rarely results in change. Camping out on a Senator's doorstep doesn't make them more sensitive to your issues. And so it goes through protests and petitions and rallies and the whole repertoire of political theater. It's just theater. Consciousness raising spectacles almost never raise consciousness and rarely plucks consciences. We need something that will break through the shells that movers, shakers, and even spectators build around themselves and find a way to actually get their attention and make them feel, at a gut level, the pain and desperation that real people feel.

Of course, if I could figure that one out, I'd have the holy grail that all activists seek (at least liberal ones). In a moment, I would become the most sought after consultant in the land and I'd be rich enough that I would never have to worry about healthcare.

Insane voter update

Prompted by my old friend Geoff Hoff, I checked out current state constitutions for mental health and IQ restrictions. Finding the voter qualifications wasn't as easy as it sounds. In some cases, even finding the constitution was a challenge because the state website was such a mess. In some, the problem was finding the right section in the constitution once I managed to find it the constitution. There were two main reasons for that. First, was that many constitutions are not indexed; I had to start at the beginning and skim through it until I found the right section (word search wasn't much help because different names are used for voters in different states). Second, the location of the voter qualifications section could be anywhere in the constitution. In a surprising few, it is located in the bill of rights, where I would have put it (shouldn't voting be a basic right in any polity that calls itself a democracy?). In most, there is a seperate section on elections. Vermont has no voter qualifications section that I could find. Oklahoma leaves it to the legislature to decide. Alabama rather famously has the longest constitution of any state (almost a thousand sections and amendments often dealing with the most trivial local government issues).

What I found was that eight states still use the "idiots or insane" language. They are Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Ohio. Most of the other states have adopted more genteel language (non compos mentis and mentally incompetent are the most common). About a quarter of the constitutions hint at some kind of process for determining when someone's mental condition disqualifies them from voting (usually it runs along the lines of "judicially declared mentally incompetent"). For the most part, all that has changed is the language; the attitudes remain the same and exhibits a simplistic us and them treatment of complex mental health issues. They divide the population into a majority of sane, normal people and a scary minority of abnormal people who are idiots or insane.

Anyone familiar with mental health issues will see that there is still quite a bit of arbitrariness in the system. Although things have improved since 1902, we have a long way to go before we have a system that is nuanced enough to be fair to the whole spectrum of mental ability and health.