We are afraid of people who are not like us. This explains our reaction to, say, disabled people. Fear tells us: «God forbid to be in his place.» This reaction is quite natural. But it is worth at least realizing your fear in order not to let it control us.
Sometimes someone’s remark highlights an unexpected side of the familiar. After reading an article about the work of 8-year-old Masha “A girl with autism paints pictures”, psychologist Yulia Boldyreva said: “If a child is talented, then why is it necessary to stick out the disease in the title ?!” On the one hand, it is clear: lively, subtle, emotional pictures do not fit into the cliché of ideas about autism as isolation in a chamber of loneliness, into which the sounds of the world do not reach. On the other hand, will the language turn to say about Kandinsky: “A schizophrenic psychiatrist who wrote a classic book on schizophrenia”? On the one hand, I understand Yulia, and on the other hand, I understand parents who are happy with their successes, as they say, out and support other parents. What I want to say applies not only to autism, but to any features that make people “different”, “different”, different from our ideas about ourselves.
Labeling, stigmatization, and, simply put, tagging — this is something that other people constantly encounter who are not seen behind the tags of diagnoses. The diagnosis itself is not a tag, but a pointer to possible help. We turn it into a tag ourselves. People with Down’s disease today even work in universities, and in a certain kindergarten, parents stand on their hind legs when they try to arrange such a person as a janitor: “We don’t want our children to see this! He’s dangerous!»
A quick-tempered person, while he does not have a diagnosis, is simply quick-tempered, but there is a diagnosis — he is immediately crazy, behind whose every movement an illness is imagined. This is a severe chronic stress, which sooner or later can lead to an explosion of resentment and impotent protest of a cornered person.
The easiest way is to label stigmatization as insensitivity, cruelty, moral ugliness, etc. Easiest and least productive. This puts the stigmatizers in the same position as the stigmatized, and the most likely outcome will be a defensive protest with even more pronounced rejection, rejection of others.
This would be unfair, because each of us, when meeting with a different person, experiences tension, more or less charged with fear: what if the same thing happens to me, to my children? And it’s completely natural. Remaining unconscious, this fear, like any unconscious feeling, will control me. Only by realizing it, I get the opportunity to manage it in one way or another. Here I am walking and I see at the crossroads of a wide avenue, roaring with cars, a blind man frozen in confusion on the edge of the sidewalk. The first reaction, in a split second, is the fear of being in his place. Without realizing my fear, I will most likely find myself busy, late, etc. and run past. Realizing, I can feel myself in his place and, most likely, I will help him get across the road, and myself — to be a man.
Labels are overgrown with myths — for example, about the danger of the mentally ill. The truth is that the percentage of criminals among them is orders of magnitude less than among healthy ones. Or myths that equate mental illness with stupidity. But it is enough to get acquainted with the history of sciences and arts to see how closely intertwined and connected are genius and insanity.
A person does not consist of one of his otherness, whether it is a manifestation of a disease, an innate feature, or the result of, say, an injury. He is experiencing it and is looking for his place in the world, which can help him, and can hinder him. I remember how the humpbacked doctor, a sweet and delicate person, cringed at a lecture by a colleague who said that “hunchbacks are evil and unkind people”: if you constantly hear this, it’s no wonder you get angry, but this is not inherent in humpbackness.
In my opinion, Grigory Pozhenyan said it best: “If you peel the skin off the trunk with a planer, saw it, dry it, and then paint it, then the mast of an ocean ship can rise, a red violin, a spear, a red or white deck can be born. And I don’t want to be skinned. I don’t want to be dyed, dried, bleached. No, I don’t want it. Not because I’m better than other trees. No, I don’t say that. I’m just a different tree.»