Speaking up about sanism: love as social action
For mental health awareness week, Lucy Aphramor makes links between different aspects of social witness and discusses how justice can reshape our language.
Quakers have a long tradition of engagement around mental health. If we want to plot a timeline, then the founding of The Retreat in 1792 by Yorkshire Quaker William Tuke provides a cornerstone. It was the first establishment of its kind to assume recovery from mental illness was possible, notable for treating residents with sympathy, respect and dignity. These shifts had a profound influence on public opinion, foreshadowing fundamental reform of the laws relating to mental illness and its treatment.
Fast forward two and a half centuries and The Retreat is now a Quaker Recognised Body providing specialist mental health services for people with complex and challenging needs.
Mental health in meetings
For a rich tapestry of other contemporary initiatives designed to support Friends impacted by mental distress personally, as carers, and as meetings, see our page on mental health in Quaker communities. There's a range of videos, different kinds of books to download, and leaflets too.
This is all very valuable. And there's also room for commentary on how to be activists and allies for disability justice. This isn't in competition with love as individual level care and support for people impacted by mental distress but adds another dimension - love as social witness for radical transformation.
What is sanism?
Sanism is a form of disability discrimination, or ableism. It describes systemic discrimination against people who experience mental or emotional distress or who are perceived as lacking intelligence. Sanism notably oppresses people with mental health problems, people with a learning disability, and people who are neurodivergent.
The term was coined in the 1960s by the Black activist lawyer, Mortin Birnbaum, who saw sanism deny people dignity and adequate, humane healthcare. Sanism also denies people self-worth, belonging, opportunity to contribute to society, jobs, a voice, bodily integrity, safety, and much more.
Sanism implies that someone's claim to full humanity is linked to intelligence or sanity. We participate in this pattern when we use words like crazy, insane, stupid etc. as a shorthand way of suggesting someone or something can be dismissed and isn't worth taking seriously.
We're giving a message that we, as a sane and intelligent speaker, are notably distinct from and more fully human than people who are crazy, insane, stupid etc.
In this way, sanism silences, shames and isolates. As with other forms of discrimination, naming sanism helps us notice its strategies, reclaim words, and organise for a more equitable world.
Sanism harms some people more than others
People who experience poverty, trauma, and oppression such as racism, sexism, fatmisia, classism, transphobia and anti-queerness are more likely than other people to experience psychosocial distress. Hence, sanism disproportionately impacts already marginalised and oppressed people.
As with other forms discrimination, sanism upholds colonial values. For instance, it devalues Global Majority ways of knowing, and is therefore inherently anti-Black.
Bluntly put, it's important to recognise and dismantle sanism as it's a cog in the social machinery that decides who lives and who dies. Sanism is not just an abstract theory, it has a real-life impact via ableist, racialised and gendered systemic oppression.
Living audaciously
The theme for Mental Health Awareness week this year is Action. Taking action by speaking up to interrupt sanism aligns with our Quaker values, notably equality and peace.
However, it is important to note that there are different consequences to speaking up depending on our positionality, the ways that we are shaped by, and treated because of, our social identities and experiences in a given context. For example, when someone known to have mental health problems challenges a belief their point may be disregarded because of sanism. The same person may be taken seriously when their mental health status is not known.
Sanism is harmful whether or not the person who was the target of sanism cares what the speaker thinks about them.
Challenging sanism
When I'm challenging sanism, I aim for conversations that 'call in'. These often have an 'oh hey' vibe', as in 'oh hey, you know I used that phrase too for so long and then someone pointed out that it probably went against all my values - and explained why. And they were right. Wild!' Calling in means offering to share ideas that support collective, social change without implying we're somehow superior to the speaker for having this knowledge already.
It makes it easier for me to risk being on the end of a defensive response by remembering that what's really at stake isn't the speaker's or my reputation for niceness or goodness but justice. And this can be a matter of life or death for those most marginalised
This isn't hyperbole. It was when I was in the mental health system that I began to notice how respect was calibrated to socially constructed differences. I realised belatedly that however much I was treated as worthless, I would never be bottom of the pile. An updated paraphrase is that sanism is entangled with many forms of oppression and I benefited from being thin, white, educated, and middle-class.
The belief that no-one should be treated as less than fully human encourages me to have possibly- socially awkward conversations as one way to tackle sanism and other oppression and help create new, more equitable, ways of relating to each other and the earth.
