In 2017, Canada will celebrate 150 years since confederation. In anticipation of this milestone, prolific author and personal historian Harry van Bommel founded the Canada 150 project, “the largest history-gathering project ever” to help Canadians record their memoirs and community histories for future generations. Also called Our Canada, Our Stories / Notre Canada, Nos Histoires, the project consists of a website that serves as a central portal through which Canadians can leave their legacy and also read the histories of others, made freely available through a Creative Commons licence.
Van Bommel encourages people to submit
personal stories
family stories and genealogies
neighbourhood and group histories (of a faith community, arts organization, sports league, etc.)
Short stories, with or without photos, can be in English or French. Beginning in 2016, you’ll also be able to upload self-published or one-of-a-kind ebooks and scanned collections of letters, diaries, journals, photos, films, and scrapbooks. Van Bommel urges people to provide full captions and descriptions if they can, though van Bommel acknowledges that “a lot of that stuff will be lost.” Boomers and younger Canadians don’t have as much written history, because much of their communication was done by phone. Already-published books, films, songs, plays, websites, and multimedia can be submitted to Library and Archives Canada to be included in the Canada 150 series.
One of the books already in the collection is Finding My Voice, written by Donald Smith, with the help of Jane Field. Smith had severe cerebral palsy, and when his mother died when he was 40, his sister moved him from Prince Edward Island to Toronto to live with her. Using a special device and just his thumb, Smith wrote his story, which revealed how he truly felt about his disability, his mother, and his move to Toronto, which he previously had never been able to express. Through Canada 150 we’ll learn a lot about ourselves and other Canadians, and van Bommel hopes that the project will “enhance Canadian unity through a sense of national pride.”
When van Bommel launched Canada 150 in 1997, he anticipated that the project would generate business for writers, editors, documentarians, and videographers. Although some people will want to tell their stories on their own, others will need professional help. The key is to spread the word about the project and get people excited about telling their stories. “The hardest thing is to convince people their story is worth telling,” said van Bommel. “Many people couldn’t care less about someone else’s story but are fascinated by their own as long as someone else is interested in hearing it.” If you’d enjoy this kind personal history work, find opportunities to encourage people to talk about themselves. “If you have a dog, you will be stopped in your neighbourhood at some point,” said van Bommel. “Those are the people who will tell you stories. Your immediate response should be, ‘You should record that.’”
“You will become quite a pest,” he added, to laughter.
Clients will take you more seriously if you have posted your own story. Your contribution will also serve as a sample to show them what you’d be able to do for them.
Rather than sending people to the Canada 150 site, try to sit down with them and show it to them in person to get them engaged. Van Bommel audio-records clients or types up their stories as they tell them, and some of the Boomers who have hired him to record the histories of their parents appreciate that his regular visits keep their aging parents active and engaged. Another strategy that saves you transcription work is to do email interviews. The respondent types up their own responses, and all you have to do is put it together and edit. To give the story structure, start with a table of contents. “A lot of people do stream of consciousness writing, which is lovely, but it’s a hard read,” said van Bommel. Assign a main theme, event, or time period to each chapter.
Van Bommel gives clients complete editorial control, and he acknowledges that thorough fact checking is almost impossible. Major world events can be fact checked, of course, but not so much details that arise out of memories and anecdotes. If someone objects to the content of a story, encourage them to correct what they perceive as errors by writing their own stories. That said, don’t recreate feuds or force people to relive painful memories, advised van Bommel. “Those may seem interesting, but they’re not. What’s most important is what people did to overcome adversity.”
To market yourself, van Bommel suggests adding keywords such as Canada 150, ghostwriter, family history, community history, and storytelling to your website or online profiles. If you expect to be doing a lot of personal history work, van Bommel suggests getting marketing materials like brochures printed, because some people still prefer to get their information through printed documents. Try to find out how you might work collaboratively with your local library and community groups. Van Bommel uses a three-tiered fee scale to accommodate clients of all incomes.
Van Bommel has made an ebook about how to record people’s stories available for free. He sees this work as important for our country’s legacy, and he quoted a Dutch expression (which you may find helpful to use with potential clients): “Those who record exist forever.” He regrets that although Canadians did a lot of this kind of personal storytelling for the country’s centennial, none of it was preserved. There is no contribution too small: “Anything they do is more than what they would have done,” he said.
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Van Bommel’s project seems perfect for members of the Association of Personal Historians. I’m not a member, but anyone who is may want to make their colleagues aware of Canada 150. I was particularly interested in van Bommel’s talk because I’ve been recording my parents’ personal histories since the beginning of this year and have been doing some micro-volunteering for museums and archives that are crowd-sourcing transcription of items in their collections that can’t be easily sent through optical character recognition (OCR) software. Transcribing old letters and journals has been a fascinating way to engage with history, and I’ve brought the Royal BC Museum’s Transcribe project to van Bommel’s attention in case he wants to do the same with Our Canada, Our Stories / Notre Canada, Nos Histories.
Editing Goes Global, the first (and, in my view, hugely successful) international editors’ conference wrapped up yesterday, and, as I did in previous years, I hope to post summaries of some of the sessions I attended. If the past is any indication, though, I’ll probably have to take a few weeks to get through them all, especially because I’m attending another conference at the end of this week and will have to do a bunch of catch-up when I get back to Vancouver.
Highlights of the conference included meeting colleagues that I’ve thus far known only through Twitter, hearing Carol Fisher Saller’s and Katherine Barber’s side-splitting keynotes, and—what was probably the biggest thrill of all for me—being at the awards banquet when my dear friend (and partner in Microsoft Word taming) Grace Yaginuma won the Tom Fairley Award for her work on A Discerning Eye, written by Carol E. Mayer and published by one of my favourite clients, Figure 1 Publishing.
Many thanks to the conference committee, the National Executive Council, and countless volunteers for putting on such a smashing event. Editors Canada’s 2016 conference will be in my ’hood, and the next international conference will be in Chicago in 2019. See you next year in Vancouver?
Sylvia Coates developed and teaches the UC Berkeley Extension indexing course and has been indexing since 1989. Although there’s more than one way to index, Coates’s approach has allowed her to earn a high income for the past several years. The key to her success, which entails indexing a mind-blowing 80 to 130 books a year, is to streamline her process and to develop the index structure concurrently with term selection.
First, work on what you enjoy. Having prior knowledge in a subject area makes it easier to anticipate what readers may want to look for. Start asking thematic questions about the topic—who, what, where, when, why, and under what circumstances?—before you read, and index the answers to these questions as you go. Front-loading the index this way saves you a lot of time. Coates keeps all of this information in her head, so she prefers to work on one book at a time.
Prior knowledge of the subject will also increase the odds that you’ll actually understand the text, and comprehension is essential to selecting indexing terms. Try to summarize chunks of the text, which will not only help you choose headings but will also ensure that you understand. “Summarizing is a part of reading comprehension,” said Coates.
Save time by envisioning the index as a whole instead of individual parts, and learn to think thematically. Children conceptualize thematically, whereas most adults classify, explained Coates, and this difference may be why children learn language so much more easily than adults. When indexers select terms, they have to think thematically.
As you read, listen actively to the author. What’s the author trying to tell you? “They may say, ‘This is what it’s about,’ and you read it and you think, ‘No, it isn’t!’” The index represents a framework of what the author was trying to convey to the audience. Every author has a message and a tone, and indexers have to pick up on that tone and replicate it in the index.
What a lot of indexers do is select terms, then edit the index by rearranging the structure, rewriting entries, and adding terms. This approach is highly time consuming, and the “editing as you go” approach—where the indexer rewrites entries and rearranges structure as they read—isn’t any more efficient. However, if you structure and index concurrently by anticipating the index structure, you can cut your editing time dramatically. All Coates does after she’s done her indexing is to tie up loose ends, delete single subheads, spell check, create the final file, and send it to the client.
“Only handle it once (OHIO),” Coates advised, and try not to “precrastinate,” which is to do something just to get it done, knowing that it’s not ideal and you’ll need to revise it later. Precrastination puts you in time debt. OHIO is not usually realistic, but aim for it. Try not to do a lot of rewriting once you’ve finished selecting your headings.
Finally, learn how to optimize your software use so that you know all the shortcuts that can help you work most efficiently.
Embedded indexing is still evolving as the relatively new ebook industry finds its legs. Ebook indexing is so new that it’s a bit of a Wild West, with different software, standards, and processes competing for space. Clients may hear the buzzwords and turn to you for answers. Should you make the jump to embedded indexing? Lucie Haskins looked at some of the issues you should consider when deciding.
Unlike back-of-the-book (BoB) indexing, in which you receive designed files, either in hard copy or PDF, from the client and write an index in RTF or DOCX format, which the client then typesets, embedded indexing is done in the native file, whether it’s in Framemaker, Word, InDesign, XML, or HTML. You tag the text with index terms and send the file back to the client. In Haskins’s words, “You receive their baby, you manipulate their baby, and you send it back to them. It’s a huge responsibility.”
Some limitations of native indexing modules
Creating terms
No index preview
No autocomplete of index entries
Tiny marker boxes
Poor control of special strings, such as page range, italic or bold formatting, and cross-references
Editing terms
No change propagation of index entries
No index preview
No viewing indexing entries in the document
No temporary grouping of index entries
As a result, Haskins said that you can expect to spend 50 to 100 percent more time on embedded indexing compared with BoB indexing.
Some benefits of native indexing modules
Creating terms
Autogenerated entries
Work process
Indexer can start before final pages
Indexing concurrent with proofreading
Potential reuse in future editions, other formats
Issues specific to embedded indexing
access control and time constraints
software versions
version control on files and downloading/uploading
You and your client will have to discuss what software (and what version of that software) to use. For example, if you and your client are using different versions of InDesign, one of you will have to convert the file to IDML. If you don’t have the client’s fonts, your system will substitute a font that will affect flow and pagination, which means that the final index would have to be regenerated by the client. At that point, the client would have to be responsible for formatting text to italic, because InDesign doesn’t allow italicized text in index entries. Each entry has to be formatted manually. and the formatting disappears whenever the index is regenerated.
Should you bother with embedded indexing? Haskins says you shouldn’t feel you have to, unless existing or prospective clients have approached you directly about it and you have an interest in it. Haskins doesn’t recommend jumping on the bandwagon otherwise, because the field may evolve into something else entirely in a few years. For example, there are hints that BoB indexing using anchors at the paragraph level may be where the field ends up. It would use techniques familiar and intuitive to indexers and would obviate the need for specialized software. Buying all of the software and upgrading your equipment would be a significant investment of money; educating yourself and your client on the software and the process would be an investment of time.
If you do want to learn embedded indexing, however, Haskins suggests
JoAnne Burek drew on her thirty-six years in IT to show freelancers how we can prepare our businesses for sudden and unplanned incidents, which can cause irreparable damage to our brand or revenue loss. Business continuity and resiliency planning (BCRP) involves
Business impact analysis
Plans, measures, and arrangements
Readiness procedures
Quality assurance
Business impact analysis
Evaluate each of your business’s resources and categorize them into critical and not critical. Critical resources are those that could cause loss of revenue or damage to credibility. Consider also financial legal requirements. Some sample questions to ask yourself:
Do I have enough savings in case of an extended outage?
What’s the replacement cost of my equipment?
What will I need to fulfill my tax obligations—and when?
Plans, measures, and arrangements
Further classify your digital records into permanentfiles (e.g., business number, contracts) versus dynamicfiles (e.g., correspondence, meeting minutes, schedules), which may affect how you organize and protect them. Create an emergency list of people you need to contact if you or your business are in trouble.
Implement mitigations to outage risks by backing up the files on your computer to an external hard drive or the cloud (Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Docs), but be aware that some clients may not allow you to store their data on U.S. servers because they are vulnerable to search and seizure via the PATRIOT Act. To save you time, use a scheduling service that backs up automatically.
Burek came across CrashPlan, a service that automatically backs up your files to an external hard drive or on another computer, such as one in the home of a trusted friend. This system lets you have an offsite backup without saving to the cloud.
CrashPlan also has built-in encryption. If you’re using Dropbox or Google Docs, you may want to consider other encryption systems like VeraCrypt or 7-Zip (technically data compression tool that also has optional encryption).
To prevent the security threat from using a universal password for all of your accounts, use a password manager such as LastPass or KeePass.
Finally, use anti-malware software, such as Avast for Windows or Sophos for Mac.
Burek suggests implementing these practices immediately to mitigate risk:
Perform regular backups
Save your work frequently
Keep your cellphone charged
Stay ahead of your work projects
Have a backup credit card
Have an emergency fund
Keep a list of cafés or other Wifi hotspots
Plan migrations carefully
Wait before upgrading
Create a recovery disk for your computer
Consider installing an uninterruptible power supply.
Readiness procedures
Build a plan that you will follow if you have to recover from an unplanned incident. Burek told us about her approach: she considered the two resources that were key to her business—her house and her computer. For each major disaster scenario (“I don’t have my computer,” “I don’t have my house,” and “I don’t have my computer or my house”), Burek considered how she would respond. Your plan should go into more detail so that you can read it like a checklist during a time of crisis.
How will you know your plans will work? You have to test them regularly—Burek suggests annually, at a minimum. Confirm, for example, that you can retrieve a file from backup and that you can restore files on a hard drive. You could also rehearse what you would do in a possible scenario without actually contacting the support people you may need. Further, make sure your plans are up to date when there are major changes to your environment (e.g., new computer, new software) or to a threat.
What can indexers do to work more efficiently? Heather Ebbs and Thérèse Shere offered some productivity tips at the Indexing Society of Canada conference.
The physical setting
For Ebbs, “to live in chaos was to live in a prison. Order freed the mind for other things.” Try to give yourself room to work comfortably, and consider ergonomics: make sure your monitor is big enough, your references are conveniently at hand, and your space is set up to minimize distractions. “It’s hard to get into a working groove if your physical setting isn’t right.”
Your work routine
Keep an activity log—one that goes beyond tracking work time. What are you really doing with your time? Figure out what time of day is your most productive, and build your routine around it. Identify “productivity pits” that eat away at your time, and adjust your routine or physical environment to eliminate them.
Ebbs subscribes to the “only handle it once” view: if you’re going to read email, read it once, answer it, and archive it, rather than reading it and leaving it for later, when you’ll have to read it again. When you submit your index, submit your invoice at the same time. Enter your receipts as soon as you get them, and file them.
Shere’s activity tracking is quite detailed: she keeps a spreadsheet that includes
project title
invoice date
client
editor
number of pages
rate
time spent (she uses a punch-in, punch-out clock)
You may also consider adding in a column for how long it takes a client to pay you and one for how much you enjoyed the project.
“Even if you’re a procrastinator, you’re probably not a procrastinator at all things,” Shere said. Figure out what topics you like working on; you’ll be more productive if you truly enjoy your work.
Pricing
Do the math: annual earnings = earnings/hour × hours/year
How much do you want to work? Make your projects worth your while, or don’t do them. If you feel you’re being underpaid, you’ll feel resentful, your attention will wane, and you’ll end up spending more time on the project, not less. Learn to say no. If you take a project at a cheap rate, you’re really subsidizing that project.
Professional development
Learning how to make yourself better and more productive, which will free up time for you later. Learn how to use software to its highest capability. “I’m not usually a fan of absolutes,” said Ebbs, “but I can guarantee that 100% of you aren’t using your software to its maximum capability.” Use macros and other timesavers.
Attention management
Be attentive to how you feel about your work and your work day, said Shere, and recognize where problems, frustrations, and weaknesses might be coming from. Shere uses the Pomodoro technique, devoting twenty-five-minute blocks to focusing on a single task, then taking short (five-minute) or long (ten minute) breaks. “Breaks are not optional,” she said. “Build them in and track them.” Make your goals and changes small and specific, and you’ll be more able to make progress.
“Don’t turn what should be joys into chores because you’re not managing your time well,” said Ebbs. Can you ask for help or delegate your obligations? Would it be more efficient to hire someone to meet them? Learn when to say no to these obligations and interruptions, even if it means screening your calls or closing your door. Figure out which activities are non-negotiable, and schedule them in. “A short pencil is better than a long memory,” said Ebbs. Writing things down will free your mind to focus on other priorities.
“We choose how to spend our time,” said Ebbs. “It’s not true that other people have more time. Everyone has 24 hours. No one else is stealing your time. If your time is being stolen, it’s an inside job.”
Sylvia Coates, who developed UC Berkeley’s extension indexing course, gave the opening keynote about ethical indexing practice at the 2015 Indexing Society of Canada(ISC) conference in Victoria. She shared her story of how she became an indexer and showed that “if you live ethically, you won’t have ethical dilemmas in indexing.”
According to Coates, there are four aspects of living an ethical life:
Manage your fears
Be teachable
Be a problem solver
Be generous
Manage your fears
Coates started by telling us about her marriage to her high school sweetheart. “By the time I was twenty-four,” she said, “we had four children—four boys—younger than three-and-a-half. You get very organized very quickly when that happens.” Being a mother taught her a lot of organization and getting along with people—skills that serve her well in her indexing career.
When her children were nearly grown, she wanted to go back to school. “It bothered me that I’d never had a paying job,” she said. Her husband asked if she could find something to do at home. She began talking to everyone she met about what they did and how they got there. When she volunteered at the local newspaper, she came across an ad for indexing. She wasn’t sure if indexing would suit her, but the seed had been planted. She heard about an indexing convention in San Francisco and drove there on a whim, sneaking in the back during a session. A participant at the convention turned around, introduced herself to Coates and welcomed her warmly. That indexer was none other than master indexer Bev Anne Ross, who had designed the USDA indexing course and introduced Nancy Mulvany to indexing.
At the convention Coates learned about Bev Anne’s three-day course, which she took. Many of the other students were technical writers who’d been forced to attend by their employers. At lunch on the first day, Coates sat bewildered as she heard her classmates complain about the course, which she found fascinating. She became convinced that she could make a career out of indexing.
Nobody had told her, said Coates, that it was almost impossible for someone to break into indexing unless they already had a foot in the publishing industry—particularly a woman who had no job experience. But that ignorance meant Coates wouldn’t be discouraged before she started, and by the end of her first year as an indexer she had already worked on forty indexes.
Her first job came to her almost accidentally: her husband bought a motorcycle (to her chagrin) and discovered that the seller was a priest who headed a publishing house, Ignatius Press. Coates’s husband left her information with the priest and, within a few days, “Sister Lemon called, hysterical, and said she needed an indexer.”
Coates talked to Carolyn McGovern at the American Society for Indexing, who patiently gave her a list of questions to ask the client—how many pages, how much room, format, and so on. Coates had two weeks to complete the index and was paid $1.60 per page. “Someone paid me for something I did!” she said. But by the midwinter conference, which Coates was involved in organizing, she found herself among experienced indexers and lapsed into doubt: “I got impostor syndrome. I thought, ‘I am a housewife.’”
Impostor syndrome is a scary but natural reaction, Coates said, and you need to manage that fear. “Fear can paralyze you… It’s important to learn to say, ‘I have no idea how to do this. Can you help me figure it out?’” Managing that fear, however, doesn’t mean ignoring it. Be realistic, because fear can be a life saver. Coates recommends reading The Gift of Fearby Gavin de Becker, who write about listening to those subconscious cues about when a situation might be bad.
Be teachable
Being teachable is the most important trait that indexers should have, said Coates. “Learning a new way to think can be intimidating and frustrating.” She told us about her worst learning experience in seventh-grade math, when she asked her teacher for help. Her teacher simply replied, “Just do it,” without taking the time to explain the concepts that would have helped Coates learn.
In contrast, Coates speaks fondly of her best learning experience: an introductory physics course that she took in college. “It was the only undergrad course taught by the dean of the physics college,” said Coates. “He would give a lecture, and you could go if you wanted. TAs gave a multitude of tutorials. The test was always an essay test—you either knew it or you didn’t. If you didn’t like what you got on the test, you could do it as many times as you wanted, even if it took you several semesters.”
“This guy taught me an important lesson,” said Coates. “He taught me that you can learn anything if you’re given the opportunity and if you want to.”
Coates has adopted this lesson in her own teaching: her students can do the course as many times as they want, but they have to understand the fundamentals before they can move forward. “We very much control what we do and what we do not learn,” said Coates. “All things being equal, it depends on your mindset.”
Our education system is not well set up to encourage the risk taking that promotes learning, she said. “I don’t know about you, but I fail all the time. If you are afraid of failure, you will never fail, but you will never move forward, either.”
Be a problem solver
“We need to listen to our fears to prevent problems,” said Coates “and realize that there is no situation that cannot be made worse with whining. If the editor hears you, you will never work for them again. The problem is not ‘the author is an idiot.’ The problem is not ‘the editor should have told you.’ The problem is whatever the problem is.”
Identify the real problem and try to solve it, not to get the editor off your back or to prove that you’re right. “If you need help to solve the problem, even professional help you have to pay for, you do it.” Keep in mind that the book is the author’s baby and that you’re “messing with their baby.” Disassociate yourself from the index: remember that you’re being paid to create a product—you don’t own it. Coates suggests reading Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture, which spends some time talking about the futility of getting into pissing matches.
Be generous
“If you don’t have this last one,” said Coates, “I think you’ve really missed the boat.” Generosity is one of the criteria Coates uses when selecting instructors for her UC Berkeley course. Teaching is a way that Coates gives back to her community. “Teaching made me a much better indexer. I had to deconstruct the process. I gained knowledge and understanding of how to do it and why.”
In addition to being generous with students, Coates believes that you should also be generous with other indexers: “What if Bev Anne Ross hadn’t introduced herself at that convention? I might have been too intimidated to pursue indexing.”
Finally, we should be generous to our clients. She knows of some indexers who say that they don’t keep a list of proofing errors they find because that’s not their job, but an indexer works with a text in a way that makes some types of errors—even some that proofreaders may miss—obvious. “I have no problem when clients consider me a genius for finding those errors,” said Coates, to laughs. She also told us about a fellow indexer who’d had a stroke and was hospitalized. The indexer’s sister contacted the client to let them know that the index wouldn’t be ready, which was generous on her part. Coates finished that index (in reality she started from scratch) and asked the client to forward her pay to the original indexer, who by this time had racked up substantial medical bills. Responding to Coates’s generosity, the client ended up paying them both.
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All of these points are terribly important for our mental health,” said Coates. “And we have to be kind to ourselves, too.”
As I was reading about the stigma of mental illness, I was struck by the lack of a mainstream term to describe the discrimination that arises from that stigma. This void in our everyday terminology is telling: it implies that the oppression people with mental illness face is so commonplace and routine that it doesn’t merit its own label. I submit that until we name it, we can’t effectively discuss it, and the absence of this name makes it easy for many of us to ignore it or deny its existence.
Advocacy and research organizations such as the Mental Health Commission of Canada tend to use the term “mental health stigma,” but I’d argue that finding a single word to describe discrimination against people with mental illness helps put it on par with similar forms of bigotry, including racism and sexism.
Sanism versus mentalism
Two terms that have been proposed to label the discrimination against people with mental illness are sanism and mentalism, which have appeared in legal and social science research circles but haven’t caught on with the public or with mass media. Sanismwas coined by attorney Morton Birnbaum in the 1960s, when he was representing Edward Stephens, a patient with mental illness who claimed he was receiving inadequate treatment. Law professor and mental health advocate Michael L. Perlin has perpetuated the term in legal literature, writing extensively about it since the 1980s. American activist and educator in the psychiatric survivor movement Judi Chamberlin coined the term mentalism in her book On Our Own: Patient Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System, published in 1978. Neither sanism nor this definition of mentalism appears in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
I strongly prefer sanism, not least because mentalism already carries meaning in many other contexts, including:
the performing arts, where it refers to a magic trick or illusion that makes the performer appear to have extraordinary mental abilities;
philosophy, where it refers to the doctrine that objects of knowledge exist only in the mind; and
psychology, where it refers to areas of study that focus on mental perception, in contrast to behaviourism.
And with mentalist gaining a foothold in pop culture within the name of a long-running TV show, calling out discriminatory behaviour as mentalist would be confusing.
Ableism (attested in the OED in 1981—thus a more recent coinage) has been used to describe discrimination against people with disabilities, including cognitive disabilities, but because mental illness doesn’t necessarily lead to disability, I see value in distinguishing between ableism and sanism.
Embracing the use of sanism in our everyday language lets us better acknowledge the many parallels between it and other –isms (or –isms masquerading as phobias).
Islamophobia and sanism compared
Whenever we hear of an individual committing an act of mass violence, it seems we’re eager to pigeonhole them into one of two categories: Muslim or mentally ill (or sometimes both, as in the case of Michael Zehaf-Bibeau). Muslims are all too aware of our knee-jerk reaction to point the finger at Islamic extremists for all acts of terror. From a Washington Post story after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing:
As a Libyan Twitter user named Hend Amry wrote, “Please don’t be a ‘Muslim.'” Her message was retweeted by more than 100 other users, including well-known journalists and writers from the Muslim world.
Jenan Moussa, a journalist for Dubai-based Al-Aan TV, retweeted the message “Please don’t be a ‘Muslim'” and added that the plea was “The thought of every Muslim right now.” Moussa’s message was forwarded more than 200 times.
When the perpetrators turn out not to be Muslim, the public is eager find out what kind of mental illness they must have had. Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian gunman who took 77 lives in 2011, was branded a paranoid schizophrenic following an initial court-ordered psychiatric review, and although a later review concluded he that did not have schizophrenia, the first diagnosis still made its way into articles and books, often with no corrections or retractions. When Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately crashed his plane into the French Alps, killing all 150 people aboard,
[t]he incident sparked headlines such as “Madman in the cockpit” from the Sun newspaper, “Killer pilot suffered from depression” from the Daily Mirror, and “Mass-killer co-pilot who deliberately crashed Germanwings plane had to STOP training because he was suffering depression and ‘burn-out’” and “Why on earth was he allowed to fly?” from the Daily Mail.
roughly 3–5 percent of violence in the United States could be attributed to persons with mental illnesses. Moreover, results of studies from England and New Zealand indicate that in those countries, the percentage of homicides accounted for by persons with major mental illnesses has fallen in recent decades despite policies of deinstitutionalization that have placed more people with severe mental illnesses in the community. Data also suggest that most violence committed by persons with mental illnesses is directed at family members and friends rather than at strangers and tends to occur in the perpetrator’s or the victim’s residence rather than in public places… Thus, while there may be a causal relationship between mental illnesses and violence, the magnitude of the relationship is greatly exaggerated in the minds of the general population.
In fact, people with mental illness are far more likely to be victims of violence: a 2012 meta-analysis of observational studies found that adults with a mental illness were 3.86 times as likely to be on the receiving end of violence compared with adults with no disability.
Automatically attributing mass violence to people with mental illnesses is sanist, completely analogous to the Islamophobia that columnists and advocacy groups are becoming quicker to condemn.
the risk of attempting suicide was 20% greater in unsupportive environments compared to supportive environments. A more supportive social environment was significantly associated with fewer suicide attempts, controlling for sociodemographic variables and multiple risk factors for suicide attempts, including depressive symptoms, binge drinking, peer victimization, and physical abuse by an adult (odds ratio: 0.97 [95% confidence interval: 0.96 – 0.99]).
Among those who are transgender or gender non-conforming, 41% attempt suicide sometime in their lives, according to the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. However, “A supportive environment for social transition and timely access to gender reassignment, for those who required it, emerged as key protective factors,” according to UK researchers.
In other words, homophobia and transphobia exacerbate suicide risk.
Mental illness, particularly mood disorders and substance misuse, is also associated with an increased suicide risk. Risk and Protective Factors for Suicide and Suicidal Behaviour, a 2008 literature review funded by the Scottish government, reported that among the 894 cases of suicide they studied, “the majority of cases (88.6%) had a diagnosis of at least one mental disorder. Mood disorders were most frequent (42.1%), followed by substance-related disorders (40.8%).” It also reported that “risk of dying by suicide in those diagnosed with schizophrenia as 4.9%,” compared with 0.010% to 0.015% in the general population. However, as Simon Davis reports inCommunity Mental Health in Canada, “often [suicide] occurs not in response to symptoms, such as command hallucinations, but when the individual is seeing reality clearly and facing (apparently) a future of diminished prospect and social rejection.”
Much like homophobia and transphobia, sanism—including self-stigma—exacerbates the suicide risk among people with mental illness.
Racism and sanism compared
In the wake of incidents of police violence against members of the black community in the United States, including the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York, activists in and around the #BlackLivesMatter movement have worked to expose the myriad ways racism has become institutionally entrenched:
Poverty: U.S. Census Bureau data show that in 2010, 27.4% of black Americans lived in poverty, compared with a national average rate of 15.1%.
Unemployment: The Bureau of Labour Statistics shows the unemployment rate of black Americans hovering at around 10%—double that of white Americans.
Healthdisparities: According to a Centers for Disease Control brochure, African Americans are 25.4% more likely to die of cancer, twice as likely to die of diabetes, and 30.1% more likely to die of heart disease and stroke, compared with white Americans. Black Americans have a life expectancy 3.8 years lower than white Americans.
Involvement with the criminal justice system: According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice from 2009, although African Americans make up only 13% of the U.S. population, they make up 40% of the male inmates in correctional institutions. A 2013 report on racial disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system, submitted to the United Nations, stated that “one of every three black American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime.”
People with mental illness experienced a history comparable to that of black Americans, with segregation manifesting as institutionalization, and they are overrepresented in the same contexts:
Poverty: Poverty is both a cause and a consequence of mental illness. A 2013 U.S. study found that having a person with a severe mental illness in your household increases your risk of poverty three-fold.
The unemployment rate of persons with serious mental illness reflects these obstacles and has been commonly reported to range from 70–90%, depending on the severity of the disability. These statistics are particularly disturbing in light of the fact that productive work has been identified as a leading component in promoting positive mental health and in paving the way for a rich and fulfilling life in the community.
Health disparities: People in poor mental health are also likely to be in poor physical health. A combination of psychiatric medications that increase the risk of metabolic syndrome, lifestyle, and socio-economic factors contribute to a mortality ratio six times that of the general population. People with serious mental illness can expect to live 15 to 20 years less than people without a mental illness.
Involvement with the criminal justice system: According to a 2006 U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report, people with mental illness represent “56% of State prisoners, 45% of Federal prisoners, and 64% of jail inmates.” The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill’s 2003 survey found that 44% of people with a serious mental illness will have had dealings with the criminal justice system.
Much like systemic racism, sanism may take the form of subtle “microaggressions” that contribute to general oppression. Discrimination is common even among healthcare professionals, which can help reinforce the status quo.
Sanism in our language
“Insane” or “crazy” used in four of the headlines on the front page of Cracked.com on May 9, 2015.
Advocates of inclusive and conscientious language use have campaigned to raise awareness of sanism in our communications, suggesting the best ways to write about suicide, for example, and encouraging writers to use “people first” language (that is, “people with a mental illness” rather than “mentally ill people” or, worse, “the mentally ill”). These same guidelines often recommend that people avoid using stigmatizing words like crazy or psycho, but these terms have so become a part of our daily language, not to mention popular culture, that eradicating them from general use is unrealistic.
Idiot, lunatic, and insane were once clinical or legal terms, but they’ve all had their turn on what psycholinguist Steven Pinker calls the euphemism treadmill, where a term becomes more and more corrupted semantically until a new euphemism is needed to take its place. They’ve also lost much of their clinical meaning with widespread use.
These kinds of broad umbrella terms used to describe mental illness may be hard to contain, but where we can make headway is in educating the public to avoid using names of specific mental illnesses to describe personal quirks, as Miley Cyrus did in a 2010 interview, saying, “I’m kind of bipolar in my acting choices because I just want to do a little bit of everything.” In a recent Vanity Fair article, Saturday Night Live alum Will Forte claimed to be “a little OCD” about his shampoo routine, a usage that has also been criticized.
The most difficult sanist language to sanitize may be terms describing substance misuse: we derisively throw around words like junkie, crackhead, and wino without a second thought. Until policy makers fully acknowledge that drug use should be a medical rather than a legal issue, we may find these loaded descriptors hard to eliminate.
A call to action—and articulation
It’s high time sanism entered the mainstream. I call for everyone (and especially journalists, bloggers, and mental health advocates) to look out for it, name it when you see it, and condemn it. Only when we end the stigma will people with mental illness feel comfortable seeking the help they need to keep themselves—and the rest of us—safe.
Editor
