[screaming to the void][originally posted in French]
An escape game where you’re locked up in an asylum and you got to escape before the crazy psycho gets to you.
The Grévin museum and its horrifying week based on a 19th century asylum where mentally ill and criminals are the same.
Baudelaire’s suicide letter for sale in an auction.
It’s funny, when there is money to make, you’re willing to discuss about “madness”. Well… about the vision you have of it. You’re turning into entertainment things that are STILL hurting, sorry, DESTROYING a fuckton of people. “We can say nothing anymore” “It’s in a teaching aim”. And you’re making money on this.
A little detour: I’m fan of the artist Emilie Autumn, musician and writer. She is bipolar. After a non consented internment , her artistic career suddenly changes its path and she has developed the whole universe of the Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, which aims to show that eventually, the treatment given to the interned persons is not quite different between the Victorian area and nowadays. She wrote a book which she rewrote a bunch of times (it might be the third version), based on her experience and her research. She did a first concept-album, several shows and today, she’s working on the musical. You got to know that a lot of neuroatypical persons relate to her universe and made it their own. Her work allowed them to make their living and their story their own again. Her work reminded them that they have a place in the world.
Why am I talking about this? Because often, when I discuss this with neurotypical people, of the reactions I got is “she’s doing this because she knows she’ll make money on this.” The first who told me that was my ex, and back in the day, I simply answered that it was her life, and if she wanted to make money out of it, it was her very right to do so since it was HER life. You don’t blame (male) singers to write songs about their bad breakups, or about their anger towards the world. It’s their life. So why should EA not be allowed to do the same? Because her life is being bipolar? If one accepts that artists use their life in their art, there is not reason to blame the neuroatypical to use their neurodivergence in their art: it’s part of their life.
Today, I’m a bit further in this development…
Because if some people blame Emilie Autumn to make money out of the universe of the psychiatric hospital/asylum, even though she is directly concerned and it’s part of her life, no one bothers when an escape game company or a museum capitalize on it, nor that you can make a killing by selling a suicide letter just because it is signed by Baudelaire.
To those who blame us to use our own madness and pain in our artistic universe/to make money, where are you when such companies are created? I know, you’re on the side of those who tell us “it’s just a game” “it’s teaching” “we can say nothing today there is always a community to cry”.
Teaching? Excuse me but where is this damn teaching? Autumn’s work clearly has its flaws (fatphobia and white feminism among other things), but at least she succeeds in pointing out the drifts of the current system, to offer some peace and a piece of hope to the concerned people. (spoiler: do you know how? At the end of the book, in Emily’s Victorian world, the female patients live happily in the asylum where they can finally fix and rebuild themselves from all the pain the world put upon them. But this idyllic life can be achieved only because they killed all the doctors that tortured them and they did all they could for the asylum to be isolated from the rest of the world.)
But where is the teaching in the initiative of the Grévin museum? When do they explain that this vision of madness shouldn’t be but unfortunately it is still ours? Nowhere, since they even sold the tickets based on it. When do they point the abuses and drifts still terribly present in the current system?
In 2018, a huge part of our society seem to consider it normal to lock people in isolation quarters for days, or to tie them by force, or to medicate them until they drool on themselves because it is “treatment” for the “ill” persons (understand “crazy”).
But.. If the very same people surprised their neighbors tyeing their children for hours / days and forget them here because said children was screaming too loud, these people would yell “abuse !” and call the cops (and they’d be right). But label this “treatment” or “care”, aim at the people “potentially dangerous” and “sick” and put it behind closed doors, and there, it’s ok, it’s all good?
And we are the crazy ones?
Teaching? Do you realize that people are still going through this today? Do you realize people are still dying because of this? Do you realize that many will get out the psychiatry traumatized for life, that there is a before and an after psychiatry? To the point that in a group for neuroatypical only, lately, there was a debate to know if us, the neuroatipycals who avoided the internment could really understand them. To the point that for these people, there is a gap between them and the world. To the point that those who avoided it keep running away as fast as they can and spend their time estimating what will be the most dangerous thing for them : stay in distress with no help or take the risk of an abusive psychiatry.
Teaching? If you want teaching, what are you waiting to read the testimonies of the concerned people? You just don’t. Or when you do, you quickly look for excuses for the other side. Or, you hurry to undo our legitimacy. “You’re not schizophrenic/autistic, you write too well for this” “it might not be that terrible if you can talk about it.”
The people who did the escape game or the attraction (in another time, we would have called it a Freak Show, bu we no longer use that term, because boooo, it’s wrong to do that ! To expose people in their “deformities” labeling them as monsters and making money on them. We don’t do that sort of thing anymore, right?) didn’t go there because they wanted to learn. It’s entertaining, period. By the way, to learn, you must understand, to understand, you need empathy. In these stuffs, you never want to be on the side of the “sick”, in our side. You never think it could be you. We can criticize Autumn for a lot of things, but when you read her, you want to be on her side, or you understand it could be you.
Here lies the difference. We screamed to these entertainment because once again, we were the beasts you ostracize. These stories are not told to you to suggest empathy, but for you to think “what a relief, I’m not like that”. Just like you watch trash reality TV to think that you, you’re not so dumb, you enjoy these entertainment so you can think (even if you don’t do it on purpose), “what a relief, I’m very normal, everything’s fine” And us, we’re all alone, again.
Where were you when we screamed of fear because of Hospyweb*?
Where were you when the European Union blamed France for the bad treatments in the psychiatric hospitals?
Where are you when the concerned people tell you what they’ve gone through in those places?
Where are you when we tell you we’re scared to go to a therapist because we are scared of the psychiatric hospital?
When an artist uses this part of their life to create, they’re blamed to “surf on the hype”, hype that bother no one when non-concerned people surf on it. Eventually, what bothers you might be that we are claiming our lives as ours. That we refuse detention, we refuse to locked behind closed doors. Because if the “madness hype” bothered your for real, then you would scream with us in front of such initiatives, rather than laughing at us or trying to despise our fears and experiences. What bothers you is that we’re not the stupid crazy beasts that were sold to you, but people not so different from you who just do what they can with what they have. What bothers you is that we remind you that the line between you and us is not so clear than that, and that soon, you might be in our shoes.
What bothers me is that they’re making money on people who suffer. What bothers me is that they commercialize suffering, they capitalize on it. What bothers me is that one more time we won’t be heard. The madness label is so useful. Instead of shutting people up, you can just explain why you don’t have to listen to them.
In my head, a voice keeps repeating:
Neuroatypicals are despaired cases
Neurotypicals are despairing cases
It seems like the world is not ready to deny it. What a pity, this voice is exhausting… I write more for the concerned comrades than for anyone else. Like wolves hauling to the moon to tell the others we are here, so that our gathered screams can break a bit of the loneliness…
I am tired and used. Really. I feel like I can’t even be angry because it will only comfort people in their imaginary of the crazy that screams. And I can’t shut up either, I can’t accept to be deprived of my anger, or I will end up dying because of it.
To you who haul to the moon too, I hear you, I believe you.
*To sum up Hopsyweb is a French database that will keep track of every person interned against their consent and now the cops will be allowed to look at it.
