Forum / INTERVIEW (take one) with Lynn Beighley

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Nov 09, 08:18pm

  http://fictionaut.com/groups/m-illness/threads/1773

  M ILLNESS group members and others may wish to read this interview that Lynn Beighley and I conducted via email in September. We'll sit down together in December in New York for a face-to-face conversation about the group. Watch the Fictionaut blog later for that.

  From my answer to Lynn's first question in the emailed interview:

  "That world (clinical diagnoses) is sometimes described as a 'hospital without walls.' I believe Peter Kramer has called it that. In Minnesota where I have lived most of my life, the clinical world is becoming increasingly forensic, as if mood swings and tics and phobias and delusions and psychological duress and (mal)adaptations and disorders are somehow illegal forms of internal experience. They threaten, for one thing, capitalism—if capitalism means donating labor (for a barely livable wage) to aid a few others in attaining wealth. Duress comes in part from the false promise that one can fulfill one’s destiny living in the United States—from a broken social contract. In art and writing, there is merely a promise, regulated by concepts of prestige. Mental illness carries concepts of liability and peer hierarchy that mimic not prestige but pecking orders."

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