The first time a Wildflower team member appeared in the New York Times (NYT) was in March, 2013 in the form of a Letter to the Editor by Wildflower Director, Sera Davidow, in response to a piece (“Sunday Dialogue: Defining Mental Illness”) by psychiatrist, Ronald Pies. This spawned a couple of blogs by Sera on Mad in America (beginning with “Too Much Pies” in April, 2013) based on a back-and-forth between the two.
The next NYT appearance came in 2016 featuring Wildflower Director of Learning, Caroline Mazel-Carlton (then White): An Alternative Form of Healthcare Gains a Foothold by Benedict Carey. The piece was focused primarily on the Hearing Voices Movement and lifted up Wildflower’s efforts to have that movement gain traction across the nation.
Then we met Daniel Bergner. Daniel is an established journalist and author with a personal stake in the world of alternatives to the psychiatric system: His younger brother who struggled and was in many ways failed by the system supports available to him.
Over the last few years, Daniel has published a few different articles featuring Wildflower Alliance in some way. In 2022, he published “Doctors Gave her Antipsychotics. She Decided to Live with Her Voices.” Also featuring Caroline (alongside Wildflower’s Peer Respite Director, Ephraim Akiva and Advocate, Beth Manion, as well as New York-based Chacku Mathai), Daniel delved into the world of psychiatric drugs and alternatives, doing his best to shine light on the fact that there are many people living lives that challenge mainstream assumptions about “mental health” and treatment. The article was also based on his book (“The Mind and the Moon”) that was released at the same time (also featuring Caroline as one of three main stories followed).
Then, most recently, the New York Times published, “American’s Hidden Racial Divide: A Mysterious Gap in Psychosis Rates” featuring Wildflower’s Director of Community Supports, Earl Miller, and focusing on the intersections of racism, psychiatry and experiences often given labels like “schizophrenia” and the like. It began with a poignant story from Earl involving a literary reference that serves as a smart way to hook the average NYT reader and ended with a clear message that life in the United States as a Black man – and especially a Black survivor of so much trauma – remains pretty precarious.
Really, each of these pieces have their strengths and share a clear mission: Reach consumers of mainstream media and challenge what they think they know about psychiatric treatment, psychiatric labels and the lives of people the mental health system is supposedly set up to help. In general, these pieces are aimed at a very different audience than those who have already found their way to Wildflower, Mad in America and similar spots. And, for better or worse, that means that different people read these pieces in very different ways.
In fact, Sera wrote an entire article on the 2022 New York Times piece, calling it a Rorschach test of sorts for all its readers. In other words, people’s comments were based on reflections of what was in them projected onto Daniel’s words and the snapshots he shared of Caroline, Ephraim, Beth and Chacku’s lives. Most people missed entirely the imperfection in the title, “Doctors Gave her Antipsychotics. She Decided to Live with Her Voices,” that some of us saw so clearly. Specifically, they missed entirely that those words implied that the psychotropics prescribed to Caroline would have gotten rid of the voice if she’d simply taken them. In reality, that wasn’t true. The drugs weren’t working. They were making Caroline’s life harder to navigate, not easier. Her ‘choice’ to find an alternative was more necessity than simple rebellion if her hope was to live a full life.
But, let’s return to “America’s Hidden Racial Divide”. Daniel’s latest piece focuses on the severely underwritten-about disparities faced by Black and Brown people as they intersect with psychiatric systems. In many ways, it did a good job of that and of lifting up Earl’s story. But, there are three basic ways in which we want to challenge what was written:
- In challenging the mainstream paradigm of “psychosis” the article seems to simultaneously validate it as legitimate. This is a framework that is still used to forcibly incarcerate and drug people, as well as to justify murders and other violence from news reports to horror flicks. In some ways, using the language as if its assumed that it’s basically ‘right’ skips over some of the objections many people have. And that feels hard for some of us, particularly those who’ve been most directly impacted.
- Even though it attempts – successfully to some degree – to get at the nuances of genetics, it doesn’t go quite as far as we’d hoped. The message still seems to be that genetics may contribute to a predisposition to a disease. There are two problems: A) There are actually an array of studies refuting many genetic claims and that is overlooked here (for example, see Jay Joseph’s work). While we’re not saying we know definitively that genetics do not play a role, we do know that not mentioning the scientifically based objections feels like a missed opportunity to further right some of the imbalances in the way this is usually discussed in the national eye; and perhaps even more importantly, B) Even if there is a genetic element, that doesn’t need to mean there’s a genetic element connected to a disease. We think of when Eleanor Longden (who offered one of the most listened to ever TedTalks on Hearing Voices) came to visit us in Western Mass. At a talk at Mount Holyoke College, someone in the audience asked her if she really, fully rejected any genetic claim. Her response was something to the effect of:
“But what is it that you’re saying might be genetic? It’s very different to say there might be a genetic predisposition to hearing voices versus there might be a genetic predisposition to a supposed mental disease. Those aren’t the same thing, because we need not regard hearing voices as disease at all and much of what makes it so is caught up in how society responds to it.”
- There were a few spots where it seemed like a reader could takeaway the idea that Daniel was saying that Black and Brown people might actually be at least a little bit genetically inferior and more likely to be psychotic (which is too close for comfort to intersectional stereotypes like so-called “psychotic people are more dangerous” and “Black people are more dangerous” so therefore so-called “psychotic Black people are doubly dangerous”). We saw the intention. Daniel was ultimately saying that yes, treaters hold biases that lead them to be more likely to give heavier psychiatric diagnoses to Black and Brown people, but also, the stress of racist systems and resultant trauma throughout the course of a Black or Brown person’s life also increases the risk that they’ll interact with the world in ways that fit those diagnoses, too. So, basically, outside bias + inside trauma = significant disparities. He was not intending to suggest any racially-based genetic inferiority. It’s just that the mix of these three issues together means it sometimes appeared the piece was simply saying genetics plays a role in why Black people are more likely to end up “psychotic” and – without the background that some of us have – we’re not sure everyone will see past that and tie all the pieces together quite right.
Although the New York Times is mainstream media it certainly still has a particular audience and we understand that – had Daniel written the article entirely for our eyes – the average NYT reader might simply have glossed over and moved on. It’s hard to argue for change at level 100 if most people are still trying to figure out level 10. We need to take some intentional steps along the way if we’re hoping to bring everyone along.
We can also tell how much Daniel actually cares about the people he includes in his pieces. He’s spent untold hours with Caroline over the years trying to get the representation of her story right in his article and book and he can be seen in the comments section of his more recent piece sharing his appreciation for and admiration of Earl. He’s also one of very few journalists even interested in these topics and trying to get them right. And its obvious from all the response that it did have impact and has gotten people thinking about race and psychiatry in a way that simply wouldn’t have if the piece didn’t exist.
We thank Earl, Caroline, Ephraim – as well as Sera, Cindy Marty Hadge and others from Wildflower who’ve put so much of their lives out there in print (not only in the New York Times, but Foreign Policy, Sun Magazine and more) over the years. That level of vulnerability can be terrifying and it’s hard to comprehend what laying your life out like that for the public to comment on can feel like unless you’ve been there yourself. And thank you to Daniel Bergner for your care, your efforts and lifting up our work.
This piece is not written to tear anything down, but rather, to keep building upon it.
EN 
ES