A Waunakee, Wisconsin high school dance team has created an uproar over its “psych ward” routine. It involves the anti-stigma crowd, the comments from the gym teacher (whose intellectual muscle if she ever had one has slipped below her neck), and then there is the rather low IQ sports writer who accuses the anti-stigma people of being overly politically correct. This is the kind of story that is tailor made for Fox News, USA Today and . . . blogs.
I can’t get too fussed since I deliberately avoid just about any event that would involve cheerleaders, stock car racing or the National Hockey League, knowing that I may be frequently wincing at what I see and hear. What I find most amusing are the comments from the coach and from columnist Rick Chandler. It’s like, hey, how smart are they?
Erin Cotter, the team’s head coach, says she is taken aback by how upset people are about the routine. “I don’t understand where they are coming from,” she says. Hip-hop is all about being “bold,” she says. Last year, a competing team dressed in orange jumpsuits pretended they were prisoners, she says. “The whole point is to get people pumped up and energized. Our intent had nothing to do with mental illness. Our total intent was just a hip-hop dance and the songs and the words that were popular. The thought never crossed my mind or the school’s or the parents’ or the kids’ that it was about mental illness.”
Here’s the picture. I rest my case. It’s like, hello, it never occurred to her that this dance routine had anything to do with mental illness? It’s totally awesome the way these girls combine making a fashion statement with lurching like they’re on heavy duty antipychotics. One photo observant reader wondered if psych patients always bleed from their eyes.
The columnist dude, Rick Chandler, thinks that “teaching our children to back down under pressure is not cool.”
And once again the comment section teems with “heartbreaking” stories about the misery of individuals and families who lost everything, had their lives destroyed, because of a “mentally ill” relative, who, uninsightful and off their “meds”, ruined everything for them. How dare someone mock these poor, poor people’s misery?! The thing is, they don’t mock these people, or their misery (if only they did!). There’s one intelligent sentence in the article: “This brings up painful memories.” Yeah, memories of the abuse suffered while incarcerated in a psych ward. It’s this suffering that is mocked here. Unfortunately, and as a look at the comments confirms, it’s hardly the suffering Hugh Davis, or any other of the “advocates”, has in mind. And so, with “mental illness” once again being NAMI-touted as real brain diseases, all the “advocacy” falls flat.