My friend works in the mental heath field. She is in charge of her patients, and takes
responsibility for their treatment and care.
Her choices effect the lives of those around her, and fortunately she is
wise and good of heart. Making these
decisions has shaped her wisdom and compassion giving her a title and an
operation in the world which she continues to aggrandize with goals of graduate
school and doctorship. She’s athletic,
and been practicing a disciplined yoga routine.
Being a psychology major, of course she wanted to go to the Stanford
prison experiment movie playing at the Ritz movie theather. I had nothing better to do, so I was down to
see it with her.
I keep having these mental breakdowns at night. My attendant leaves at five pm, the door
shuts and locks. Unless someone is free
to hangout, I am now stuck for the rest of the night alone in my
apartment. This doesn’t always bother
me, but currently my power wheelchair isn’t working and I can’t take the
scooter on the bus without people making comments “Why don’t you go to driving
school?” or angrily shouting at me to hurry the f^ck up. I can’t turn my head to navigate because of
my fusion, and I can’t turn the scooter into the seat area for wheelchairs
because it’s just physically impossible.
I am lucky that I have the option though to even try, before I got the
scooter for Christmas there was no other alternative when my chair breaks. I try to keep myself busy when I’m stuck
inside: write songs, talk to people online, watch movies with the brightness
turned down because it affects my vision and headaches. But a lot of the time I lose control and
totally become nothing. My eyes focus
off and I’m still conscious and sitting up but I’m not here. I go into a catatonic state of depression and
depersonalization; I don’t move, I don’t think, it’s just a lucid
surrender. People ask why I didn’t
answer their texts later I tell them I was sleeping. It usually lasts until there’s someone around
again who can help me manage myself and my surroundings.
So my friend came over last night after my attendant left
and we made the plan to go get dinner and see the movie. She asked me which restaurant I wanted to go
to, I told her I didn’t care because she was driving so it’s her call. We ended up going to a Cosi and getting the
most watered down health sodas with some pretty good soup. She got a cookie and I got the James-and-the-giant-peach
sequel size of an apple. There weren’t
any singing dancing claymation insects on it, unfortunately. We went to the Ritz, and she helped me get
around and into the seat. In the back
row I noticed on the other side of the theather was a man lighting a lighter
with his shoes and socks removed and repeatedly burning the bottoms of his bare
feet. I thought maybe I should say
something with the flame being so close to the fabric on the seats, but
didn’t. The movie started and I put on my sunglasses.
Most people know of the Dr. Zimbardo’s Stanford prison
experiment. The psychology doctor on a
totalitarian power-trip. His experiment
on power, personality, authority and prison behavior, that was really just a
simulation of how cruel college fraternity kids can be to eachother. A bunch of
young boys volunteered to be subjects, with a coin flip half were given the
role as “prison guards” and the other half the role as “prisoners.” The only difference between giving the kids
the title of “prison guard” and three greek letters was that they had no codes
to follow as guards. Only rules to
create. They chose to be abusive, and
the prisoners were harassed, punished without crime, and robbed of all personal
freedom. Within seven days they had to
just down the experiment that was supposed to last for weeks because the “prisoners”
had broken down mentally, many of them needing therapy to recover
afterwards.
The movie overdramatized it a lot, in the experiment the
prisoners were not physically harmed, but in the film they were thrown around
violently and beaten with nightsticks because physical abuse is far easier for
people to understand than psychological.
It’s a movie for American audiences so it needs visuals to be
intense. I saw in the previews they are
doing a movie on the Milgram shock experiments, I wonder if they’ll make the
electric shocks real in that just for the dramatic effect. The weirdo in the
seat on the other side kept massaging his feet which he had up on the seat in
front of him, I think he might have had a mental illness. As I was watching the movie and the scenes
where the prisoners lost it psychologically in different ways I realized I’d
been through all of those stages myself with my disability.
-The deprivation of identity: you
are not who you were when able-bodied.
-The distress of rebellion: the
harder you fight, the more it hurts.
-The loss of control and the abuse
of the controllers.
My controllers or “prison guards”
are as followed:
1.
My disability.
It tells my body what it can and can’t most, most of it cants. It puts me in severe amounts of physical
discomfort pain that I have no choice to get of aside from heavy narcotics
which is its own type of torture. The
quadriparesis weakness I have no choice but to accept.
2.
My government.
It tells I can’t have a substantial income without losing my insurance
and my attendant care services. It tells
me I must stay welfare poor, living in a ghetto in subsidized housing. Of course I feel like a prisoner, there are bars on my windows. It tells me that if I am ever to try to go to college,
have a career like those I admire, I will be screwing myself over. Because I am chronically ill and disabled, I
must not be anyone of authority to those who are not disabled. I am not allowed to marry a person with an
income greater than mine without losing what little independence and freedom I
have.
3.
My society.
It tells me where I can and can’t go.
It ignores me and people like me with barriers of architecture, keeping
the minds of people ignorant and inaccessible.
With acknowledging these controllers in my life I can accept them even less. The Stanford
experiment was shut down after seven days because it was deemed as
inhumane. This is a lifetime of
imprisonment without crime for many people unless it is changed by those in
power. The doctors, the politicians, the
communities. They need compassion; they
need to make the choice to be compassionate.
Otherwise they are just as abusive as those prison guards, who in the
end repented and felt horrible for their actions. I can beg until I break for change, but I
cannot make that happen. I am not a criminal, but I do not know who I
fully am because I am not given the authority to be that person. This is why I’m crazy.
