The (Real) Perks of Being a Wall Flower
An entry-point article on the effects of discrimination and the strength it takes to stand against it.
1
The Power of Contact
Click here to read more about The Power of Contact.
On the surface, it sounds like something out of Star wars. Or a scientology ideology, depending on where you prefer to get your holistic models of activism from. In reality, the Power of Contact is one of the most effective tools we have for combating stigma and discrimination. It’s also an ideology most of us use everyday, without even realizing it.
One of the key benefits of The Power of Contact model as a tool for stigma and discrimination reduction, is it offers a simple framework for anyone wanting to do that work;
The best way to actively reduce stigma, is to let people witness you thriving.
Simply put, by living well, and letting others see you living well (spending time with you, talking with you), you actively reduce any negative opinions they might have about your condition. By getting to know a person living with a disability, whatever it may be, it becomes easier to empathize with both the person and the experience.
Easy. Perfect. Problem solved.
Except what is the effect of using this strategy, which is essentially just ‘existing’, in the long term? And how does existing as an act of activism differ from day to day living?
The 2nd question has been answered for us by the wonderful people at Like Minds Like Mine. For contact to be effective, it has to take place within a certain context. To scab from the article linked above;
Intergroup interactions bring about more positive attitudes only when interactions are such that members of different groups have equal status.
The interaction must afford acquaintance potential, or the opportunity to get to know the other person.
The information exchanged during the interaction must be of the type that might disconfirm a negative stereotype.
The participants must pursue mutual goals.
The participants must actively cooperate with each other.
You know at university, when you make a terrible 1st impression with someone, and you end up hating each other for months? You forgot their name, they were a dick about it, and you generally refer to each other in the 3rd person “Fuck that guy...” for months? Until one day, you’re both the only people you know at a party. Both of your respective groups of friends abandoned you, and now you are each other’s only hope of getting through this party alive? Over a couple of Cindy’s (don’t judge me this is uni) and some backstory, you learn that they grew up on a farm with 6 siblings, and you tell them how you fell off a boat one time and quit sailing lessons in tears (true story). That’s contact baby.
All of a sudden, you’re best friends. The party is more bearable. And over the next few years, you find out you’ve got a pretty solid foundation to build a friendship from. Every so often they still call you up to yarn about how they’re a lawyer fighting climate and you’re a poet writing queer erotica. The world works in mysterious ways.
So before calling Contact a strategy, you can essentially simplify it right down to our collective, and very human ability, to survive anything… and to work alongside anyone... when the context encourages it.
I want to be clear. The first point of the Power of Contact states that participants need to be of equal status. This does not mean participants view one another as equal. Otherwise there’d be no negative stereotypes to clear up. What this means is that within a certain power structure (employees in a workplace, members of the public, family members), each participant has an approximately equal standing to that of their peers. If a discriminated member of the family also happens to be grossly disenfranchised (i.e. dad doesn’t let mum out of the house, he says her mental state means she can’t be trusted with others), then the Power of Contact is less effective. A disenfranchised person, especially one who is being treated abusively, is less able to affect the perspectives of their abuser. Nor should they have to bear the responsibility of doing so. What you need is one of the other two options listed in the article, protest (immediate intervention) or education.
For more information on how to intervene in these extreme situations, please click here.
But put two people together in the same position with a mutual goal, and chances are they’ll find a way to humanize the other. They might not love each other like me and my friend lawyer-man (still not learned his name). But it becomes harder to dehumanize someone once you understand their perspective. Who they are, where they come from, and how they navigate the nuances of daily living. The weird and wonderful ways of how we all just get by. Discrimination is slightly higher on the scale than a bad first impression mind you, but it’s still the same scale.
2
Prejudice; the basics
Let’s make the scenario a little bit trickier. Replace the context of forgetting someone's name, with something more difficult to pin down. Replace it with someone who’s anxious, standing by themselves in the corner.
Something changes in this scenario. Now, there is no interaction. That person stands by themselves, too anxious to speak to introduce themselves. And unless anyone is willing to make the first move, that isn’t to change.
So effectively, you remove the conditions to achieve the power of contact. Participants are no longer cooperating with one another. You effectively have a stalemate. Anxious person is alone with their thoughts. Partygoers might take notice, might occasionally wonder if anxious person is ok, might assume they’re quite strange, might instinctively dislike them, without questioning why.
I imagine this scenario feels familiar on both ends. We all make assumptions. And we all find ourselves in situations where we’re unable to move.
To answer the first question I mentioned above, the title of this article, we need to understand a key aspect of the Power of Contact, but an aspect which often gets unacknowledged;
For this scenario to change, somebody has to make a move.
If nobody moves, nothing changes, and assumptions are all we’re left to work with.
Up until this point, the examples I’ve used have been at the pretty minor end of ‘that person is different than me’. But again, this is a sliding scale.
At the extreme end of ‘assumptions’, we find discrimination, stigma, and intolerance. Not just ‘ignorance,’ but gross misinformation in the spaces where knowledge should exist. Over long periods of time, this misinformation calcifies. Beliefs pass down between generations and within communities. Entire populations of people buying into the assumptions their families made before them. Never stopping to question where this information might have come from.
Information which can be as subtle as;
Depression doesn’t exist.
There’s no reason to be anxious, just throw yourself into it!
Statements which are just not true. Or, on the other end of the scale, misinformation as extreme as;
That terrorist was mentally ill. Why did nobody catch this?
In response to recent acts of terrorism in New Zealand, you might have caught the response of the mental health foundation. It’s beautifully written, can be found here, and can be summed up with - Terrorism is not a symptom of mental illness. It never has. And never will be.
I cannot tell you the brunt of consistently seeing the behavior of terrorists, murderers, and violent criminals written away as the result of mental ill health. Truth be told, I think it does everyone a disservice; I think we have so much to learn about the reasons people are driven to violent behavior and how to prevent it, and chalking it up to mental illness stops that discussion in its tracks. I believe this ultimately harms everyone, not just those with mental ill health.
But seeing a descriptor like psychosis, or schizophrenia, or manic depression, ascribed to acts of extreme violence time and time again… is immense. Especially over time. Anger doesn’t cut it. And it’s not even a feeling of hating the people who use these descriptors. These feel too ‘singular’. It’s sort of like a feeling of giving up. On people you never wanted to give up on. On a world you desperately want to be a part of still. Moving away from home because it’s unsafe. Refusing to stick around in an abusive environment.
Eventually this feeling calcifies as well. You start to feel sort of numb to the outside world. A world you perceive hates you. And then you’re stuck at a party with strangers, neither of you willing to make the first move.
Again, perhaps this feeling is familiar to you? There are lots of forms of discrimination out there. Some more insidious and widespread than others (*cough* white-supremacy *cough*). But again, this is why the party metaphor is useful I think. I believe we’ve all felt that scenario at some point in our lives, to (greatly) varying degrees.
3
So, you want to be an advocate?
In my line of work, I throw myself into spaces to discuss mental health and discrimination a fair amount. Often in theatre settings, consulting on narratives which draw on experiences of mental distress, but sometimes in public forums, social media, the news (hi mum) or at community panels. I love this work.
The majority of people who turn up to these spaces, especially the public ones, are inquisitive and curious. I meet a lot of kind people who want to know more about mental health. Who have questions they want to ask but have never had a space to ask them. I’ve had the privilege of being in so many spaces where people have shared stories and experiences in safety, and gotten to learn and thrive with one another.
All of those experiences are the Power of Contact running smoothly, in perhaps its most appropriate setting.
I’ve also had people come up to me, well meaning people, and ask about violence. Or more specifically, the potential for violence. Often, these questions come from people who are scared. Who have had family members experience mental distress, and are worried about their future. Or have seen friends experience hardship and not known how to intervene, or step forward. How do I say hello to the anxious person at the party without making them uncomfortable?
I love these questions as well. They’re not harder to answer, but they take more time. Sitting down with someone to let information sink in slowly is important. A half hour discussion with someone about extreme states of mental distress, prefaced with saying ‘I experienced what you’re describing (psychosis in my case), and I can talk to you about it if you want?” goes a long way.
All of these interactions are positive. They’re interactions a lot of us are hungry for as well. Disabled people are eager to share their experiences. Able-bodied people are eager to learn, I’ve found.
Occasionally you come across someone who has a visually negative reaction to your experiences; someone who can’t shake the fact that psychosis might make you violent for example. In my experience I’ve usually found that these reactions come from fear. In some ways all of these questions do, a fear of the unknown. But when someone has a strong physical reaction, often there’s a story there which doesn’t have a positive ending. A grief, or trauma which hasn’t resolved itself yet. These are the hardest situations to place yourself into.
Often all you can do is listen. Offer your own informed perspective when you can. Try to encourage them to question things they haven’t questioned before. Hopefully allow for something to escape which hasn’t had the opportunity to be said before. It’s tricky, and involves holding the weight of someone’s history and trauma. They have to do the mending for themselves, and the most you can try to be is a catalyst for that. It’s taxing work. But it’s still the Power of Contact doing it’s thing. Slowly but surely.
And that’s maybe the real pain of the Power of Contact, for those who use it from a position of being discriminated against. It’s an effective model, but it’s a slow one.
The pdf linked at the top of this article lists the Power of Contact as being the most effective strategy of reducing stigma and discrimination in relation to strategies on protest and education. I believe this is true.
In my experience, I’ve found however that these three strategies often exist in a timeline with each another.
Protest - to get their attention
Educate - once they are willing to listen
Contact - once you’ve convinced them to stay.
Protest is linked as the least effective strategy for long term change. But in the moment, when the weight of discrimination makes life unbearable and your body is urging you to do anything, protest is what feels effective. It’s the starting point. An impulse to move. And to move in a direction when other people are telling you to stay still. To move one way or else.
Protest is what my body urges me to do when I see comments on new articles linking violence to mental ill health. Protest (on perhaps it’s most minor scale) is the spontaneous reaction to call someone an idiot in a Facebook comment. It’s an impulse I’m sure many of us resist every single day.
If the comment is protest, then a lengthy description of why someone is misinformed would be education. It takes considerably more energy. And you have to know your stuff, and be able to back it up for people to believe you. If people don’t believe you, then it doesn’t work. Again, a disenfranchised person cannot effectively use the Power of Contact (or even education) to actively change their abusers position.
If the lengthy comment is education, then Contact is deciding to step away from the laptop. To go for a walk. To take a moment to yourself to remember where this misinformation comes from. What causes it, and why blind spots are allowed to continue. It’s returning to the laptop after an hour or so, and instead of returning to the article, it’s deciding to go on your own page. Post about your own story. Celebrate the successes of your own life. Show the world how much you are thriving despite overwhelming stigma. It is a decision to show up and flourish. Even if your body wants nothing more than to shut down, and give up on a world which does seem to accept you.
4
Shout out
So contact is a two part process. Realization, and considered action.
I’ve talked about the second step, action. I want to finish this piece with a nod to the first. Not so much a breakdown of what it means to ‘step away from your laptop’, so to speak. But more of an acknowledgement to the mana it takes to achieve realization. An acknowledgement of the decisions people make every single day, when they decide (knowingly or not) to utilize the Power of Contact. Decisions which might look like;
I’m going to keep putting myself on the frontline.
I’m going to keep showing up to a world which does not accept me, in the hopes that someone someday will.
I’m going to knowingly walk into spaces where I might be considered ‘different’, because I know I can affect some positive change there.
If not for me, then for people like me who come after.
The power of contact is hard.
It’s slow, and it can be incredibly weighty to sit with the perceptions of others, positive and negative alike, with only the hope that maybe you can have a positive influence keeping you there. It requires a strong sense of self, to believe and reinforce in yourself, that idea you can affect positive change simply by being you. The impulse to shy away in the face of discrimination is so strong. A body's way of keeping you safe. Out of harm's way.
Resisting that impulse, and showing up to say;
No. I’m a good person. I deserve to exist. And I deserve to exist well, in the company of others.
Being the anxious one at the party, to go up to a stranger and introduce yourself, takes courage. To stand in the face of a stranger asking, “Hey, are you alright? You seem kind of nervous?” and say, “I’m well! I just have a touch of anxiety. But I’m moving through it!” takes courage. It takes hard work. It’s also, for the record, not the only effective strategy. If you don’t like a party, then fuck the party. There are so many different ways of making contact with the world. This work of showing up and flourishing exists in so many nuanced ways and spaces
And to those who do that work, consciously or not, thank you.
Whether it was your intention or not, the work you do now is going to make it easier for people like you to exist in the future. It can be hard sometimes, knowing the fruits of your labor might not be felt for another few years or so, perhaps not even by you. But the world is a better place because of it.
And I hope, in some small way, you feel the fruits of your labor. I hope you feel included somewhere. Like you have a family. A place you belong which understands you, and more importantly takes the time to understand when faced with their ignorance.
I hope you feel accepted by this world.
Over time, I hope it feels easier x