![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xandromedovnaCW: Mental Illness, Psychosis, Ableism, Spiritual Abuse
It’s been four months since I had what was likely a psychotic episode. I was stressed out about work and school because everything was happening at once, plus we were two years into a pandemic and I live alone, so I was bound to crack up at some point. One frustrating consequence is that many of the shows I would normally turn to for comfort are extremely triggering for exactly those delusions I’m dealing with. I’ve really tried to avoid making this project about religious psychosis, but it turns out a lot of the themes inherent to the creator-character-fan triangle bring up questions of fate, omniscience, power, and faith, so I guess we’ll be coming back to this throughout the project.
The type of Christianity in which I was raised was extremely toxic and abusive. I’ve talked about that elsewhere but the important point to this post is that for someone at high risk for schizophrenia, for whom delusions of grandeur and paranoia coincide with a theology where the brain is a battleground for the forces of good and evil, the spiritual abuse I endured makes it nearly impossible to trust either religious doctrine or my own thoughts. Am I experiencing divine revelation or am I undermedicated?
That’s why episodes like “Curriculum Unavailable” (3x19), where a ‘psychiatrist’ tries to convince the study group they’re patients in a mental institution, are so hard for me (“Normal Again” from Buffy fucked me up). I am constantly oscillating between multiple modes of reality simultaneously depending on what genre my life is that day—I’ve got the Truman Show set of delusions where my life is a TV show that everybody is ‘in on’ producing, except in my case the audience is mostly fourth-dimensional beings who can’t agree on a style. This makes it very difficult to tease apart which facts or experiences belong to which realities. When I’m not stressed and grounded in my support systems, I can manage it for the most part, but the more I withdraw and get sucked into my own world, all while the stressors of life have their natural peaks and valleys, things can get out of hand fast.
I identify so much with Abed, because we have many of the same neuroses and special interests. Referred to as “Abed the Undiagnosable” in 2x14, his behaviours and experiences don’t fully match the accepted descriptions of autism, schizophrenia, DID, or any other neurodivergence or mental illness (though he does seem to self-identify as autistic [e.g. 3x10] and was the character that helped creator Dan Harmon discover his own autism). This trope is often referred to as ‘Ambiguous Disorder’, and while it can be frustrating because it offsets some of the accountability of content creators for accurate representation, it is also often reflective of the immense difficulties of obtaining an accurate diagnosis in a timely fashion. Between the relative recency of the field of psychiatry; the significant overlap between various neurotypes, disorders, and illnesses; the controlling influence of insurance companies in the States; the diagnostic biases against women, LGBTQ+ people, and people of colour; and the general ableism pervading US society, many of us know something is wrong or at least different but not what or what to do about it.
(Partially this is because many of these neurotypes are only considered disorders if they impair daily function; there are plenty of perfectly functional neurodivergent people who would otherwise meet diagnostic criteria but don’t meet the threshold—or realize they meet the threshold—for negative impact on daily life. In keeping with a social model of disability, for many of us the ‘problem’ is not with us but with an ableist society that renders us disabled by its refusal to acknowledge or accommodate our material difference [see Nettleton for a complication of this]. However, because we don’t meet the diagnostic criteria, it is assumed we don’t ‘have’ the disorder until it reaches the level of problem, making it harder for us to prevent things from getting bad enough to need a diagnosis in the first place.)
Until we can get a clear answer, we often develop coping skills organically that may look odd or detrimental to outsiders, or we are lucky to have a support system that mitigates any adverse effects of our difference and holds space for its benefits. The study group knows Abed is ‘weird’, but that is generally accepted and even celebrated—to an extent. There are several times the study group tries to ‘fix’ him (e.g. 1x17, 3x16), but those attempts are rarely successful and end up teaching the group more about their own prejudices and hang-ups than about how to make Abed normal.
The reason Troy and Abed get along so well is that Troy is very rarely involved in these efforts to change him—and in fact the one time he is, it leads to the Pillow War. Not only does Troy love Abed the way he is, but he implicitly understands how to accommodate Abed, because most of the time those are accommodations he needs too: this understanding is referred to in disability circles as “access intimacy” (Mingus). The prime example of this is the Dreamatorium. Revealed when Annie moves into their apartment, the Dreamatorium is a sacred playspace in the apartment’s second bedroom (Troy and Abed sleep in a blanket fort in the living room). Troy and Abed go in there to roleplay a wide variety of scenarios, often scenes from Inspector Spacetime. The Dreamatorium also helps them become ‘normal’ for Shirley’s wedding by providing them with “a full 24-hour weird-down […], just you, me, and our imaginations, no restraints” (3x11). Without it, their weirdness spills outside the apartment and into their daily lives, where they’re looked down on for being different.
The Dreamatorium is an essential self-care and self-regulation tool for both of them, but especially Abed. When Troy is on a date with Britta, Abed explains to Annie how he (not him and Troy) built it: “this is the Dreamatorium’s engine. My thoughts are collected by this box. Everything I know about my friends is stored here. Both are distilled by logic and then recombined into objective observation.” (3x16) He uses the Dreamatorium to simulate interactions with his friends so that he can better predict their behaviour and react appropriately. Having a dedicated room in their living space for play and self-care prevents Abed from having shutdowns or dissociating.
The problem is that the Dreamatorium allows him to go full-Björk and, left unchecked, to completely detach from reality, or in this case invite another reality in. The more he retreats into the Dreamatorium, the more he needs it. The Dreamatorium used to be a healthy tool for both him and Troy that, while inconvenient for Annie, could be accommodated in their lives and give them an outlet. But when Abed can no longer trust Troy, he enters the Dreamatorium by himself, and that leaves him vulnerable to Evil!Abed. Instead of a tool to help him cope, the Dreamatorium amplifies and gives weight to his delusions, pushing him to the point of madness.
To be clear, I’m not saying Troy was at fault for Abed’s breakdown; what’s so painful about the situation is that it’s neither of their fault (or both of their fault, depending on your perspective). Troy doesn’t have the skills to help Abed this time, and Abed doesn’t understand how he’s hurting Troy. In “Contemporary Impressionists” (3x12), Abed has been hiring celebrity impersonators, creating a large amount of debt that could result in his legs being broken. Troy and the rest of the group help pay off his debt, only for Troy to find out Abed is still using the service. When Troy tries to get him to understand why that’s a problem, he gets frustrated and goes to bed. When Abed asks if he’s mad at him, Troy lies and says he’s not, because that’s the social convention when neurotypicals are mad at someone (despite Troy not being neurotypical), but because Abed doesn’t get that, Troy has to clarify that he is indeed mad, because he feels like Abed neither respects nor trusts him. This in turn makes Abed not trust him, setting the stage for the Pillow War in the next two episodes. Abed’s whimsy and Troy’s protectiveness in this moment go from lovable traits to insurmountable barriers.
(Although what PISSES ME OFF most about the War is that it didn’t have to happen at all; Abed was about to destroy New Fluffytown, but Vice Dean Laybourne convinced him to keep it. Don’t even get me started…)
Oddly, Britta’s prophecy comes true not for Annie, but for Troy and Abed: “When you become roommates with friends, the things you love about them become the things that make you want to smother them with a pillow.” (3x7, emphasis mine) The very things that make Troy-and-Abed work are the things that become their undoing; usually, their accommodation needs line up perfectly and they can look out for and make space for each other, but in this moment their needs are incommensurate and irreconcilable. Troy needs Abed to understand both the stakes of his adventures and how he’s demoted him to sidekick, and Abed needs to be able to trust Troy isn’t manipulating or overpowering him. And they can’t do that because Abed struggles with empathy and social cues and Troy’s never been shoved in a locker (yet).
Even when the War has ended, Abed still plays in the Dreamatorium alone, and eventually he gets taken over by Evil!Abed once Troy is out of his life seemingly forever because of Air Conditioning Repair (long story). He psychologically torments Britta, wreaks havoc at school, and tries to cut off Jeff’s arm. The resolution to this arc is crucial; he has to destroy the Dreamatorium, because it almost destroyed him. But he still needs the mini-Dreamatorium to self-regulate, a cardboard trifold poster that can only hold one person. The sad symbolism is that this world is no longer something he can share, but it is also limited in power meaning it can’t overtake him. The answer is not to remove the accommodations he needs and just make him “adapt to the real world” as Hickey tries to do in s5, but to have safeguards in place to prevent him from spiraling. Abed is both cursed and blessed with the ability to perceive other realities, and the challenge for those of us at those borders is to find a way to balance those different modes of perception without being crushed by the weight of these worlds colliding. To do that we need help, but trusting others to help us sets us up for exploitation.
Britta is not qualified to be a therapist, but she’s the closest thing to a medical professional that will be able to help Abed the way he needs to be helped, and certainly the only one he can trust. Marginalized communities are often put in this position of needing resources that we can’t access without risking further victimization. There’s a reason he has six patient advocates in 3x19; his history of bad experiences with doctors (e.g. 1x3) means this is the only way he can feel safe in doctors’ spaces—and with good reason: even then he still got gaslit because the fake psychiatrist tried to convince all seven of them Greendale didn’t exist! An extreme example perhaps, but for those of us who have experienced discrimination and violence at the hand of medical professionals, a relatable one. And often that means mentally ill people need to take care of each other, which looks fairly chaotic to neurotypicals; as Britta notes, “what you call insanity, we call solidarity” (3x19).
That doesn’t magically give Britta the know-how to give Abed the significant amount of support he needs. But when doctors aren’t available to us, we rely on our support networks for help, however haphazard. This means Britta has a steep learning curve and Abed risks getting worse instead of better, such as in 4x1 when Britta tells him to go to his happy place and he ends up dissociating. But I think one of the most poignant and hard-to-swallow lessons of surviving the Dreamatorium is that one must open themselves to increased access intimacy as both recipient and provider of accommodation, which is a fraught and often scary process. We need to take care of each other without destroying ourselves in the process, and we need to take care of ourselves without destroying each other in the process.
(Also, I need a button I can press that’s just Jeff saying “stop letting him make you realize stuff” [3x19] whenever my delusions get out of hand, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Works Cited
Mingus, Mia. “Access Intimacy: The Missing Link.” Leaving Evidence, Wordpress, 5 May 2011. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/
Nettleton, Sarah. The Sociology of Health and Illness. Polity Press, 1995.
This was great!
Date: 2024-06-30 08:27 pm (UTC)I was searching for the string "access intimacy" and landed here, and wow this is a wonderful essay. You've put into words so many things I loved Community for.
Thanks!
/goes to sample more of this excellent thesis in progress
Re: This was great!
Date: 2024-07-02 03:41 pm (UTC)