Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life

Conclusion

Conclusion Mental disabilities permeate our cultural landscape with frequency and intensity. On network television, we have Monk, who has obsessive-compulsive disorder, and House, who commits himself to a psychiatric hospital at the close of the show’s ‹fth season. On premium cable, there’s Showtime’s The United States of Tara, whose protagonist is a housewife with dissociative identity disorder (DID); meanwhile, on HBO, In Treatment depicts a therapist’s sessions with his clients, including a traumatized ‹ghter pilot and a suicidal gymnast, while the therapist himself has a panic attack at one point. In the non‹ctional world of celebrities, Kirsten Dunst, Brooke Shields, and Halle Berry have announced that they have depression, while Axl Rose has discussed his bipolar disorder, and Herschel Walker has published a book about having DID. The onrush of attention to mental disability goes beyond the world of television and celebrities, entering the academic realm as well. Books such as Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings and Binge: What Your College Student Won’t Tell You proliferate on bookstore shelves, and a recent study by Richard D. Kadison and Theresa Foy DiGeronimo announces in its title that we are experiencing a “campus mental health crisis.” Kadison and DiGeronimo’s College of the Overwhelmed: The Campus Mental Health Crisis and What to Do About It is one of the more measured of recent publications on this newly discovered “crisis.” Sensibly , the authors recommend that parents take steps such as evaluating schools’ mental health programs as carefully as they would examine “inadequate chemistry labs or athletic facilities” (201); they also encourage students not to regard mental distress as “a personal weakness or character ›aw” (232). While much of what appears in College of the Overwhelmed is simply common sense, its practical tone is a welcome change from alarmist screeds that seek to diagnose “nutters” or “whack jobs” in 230 order to bar them from the classroom. Mental disability should no longer be considered the af›iction of an aberrant few, but a regular feature of our contemporary culture. Despite this encouraging sign, and despite the glut of information on mental disability in popular and academic culture, we are still missing a careful examination of the ways that higher education clings to the notion that mental disability must be an aberration, something that emerges only rarely and, when it does emerge, should be sti›ed or expunged as quickly as possible. In this book, I have investigated the ways that mental disability is cast out of academic discourse—sometimes by rhetorical means as subtle as our educational debt to Cicero’s “right reason,” sometimes by means as blatant as the refusal to accommodate students with mental illnesses in college classrooms. Often, the instruments of oppression are dif‹cult to discern because they are simply the way academic life operates “normally”: of course students should come to class; of course scholars should stand and deliver their research in front of groups (in a “collegial” manner); of course it’s okay to use terms like idiot, crazy, or even academic psycho-killer. Mad at School is a rhetorical study because I am fascinated by the ways that rhetoric can affect (and effect) relations of power, but also because I am heartened by the belief that attention to rhetoric gives us opportunities to intervene in systems of oppression and change those systems for the better. This book is intended to begin a conversation, not to serve as the ‹nal or authoritative word on mental disability in academe. As I wrote, I came across many research questions and topics that I hope will be taken up by similarly interested researchers. These include the following: • The intersectional operation of mental disability with factors including class, race, gender, and sexuality. Race and mental disability , for example, is an extraordinarily rich area for continued rhetorical work. Anna Stubble‹eld’s impassioned “The Entanglement of Race and Cognitive Disability” points out that black Americans are overrepresented in diagnoses of cognitive disability , yet underrepresented in inclusive education and support services . Stubble‹eld’s response is that we ought to “dispense with cognitive ability labeling” (533). I admire her conviction, although I am not persuaded this is the best course of action, given my belief in naming—and even diagnosis, sometimes—to empower individual persons and pave a way toward liberation. But Conclusion 231 I am hesitant making this argument, and know that...