Juice and Stereotypes

Zuma Juice made the worst piece of disability stereotyping commercial I've ever seen. The disability community let them know what was going on, and I wrote it up for Pacific Standard.

This ad trades on two of the most pervasive stereotypes facing disabled folks. First, that their disability is attributable to poor lifestyle choices—i.e. drinking soda and eating junk food. Second, that lots of them are faking and are just lazy. The choices in this ad reflect deeply held stigmas about bodies, health, and disability. As we've reported at Pacific Standard, people working to cut disability benefits tend to blame disabled people for their disabilities, while simultaneously accusing many people receiving those benefits of having perpetrated fraud. Moreover, the belief that lots of people are just pretending to be disabled leads to public accusations and humiliation, even violence.

See more on the ad here.

Disability Stereotypes Aren't Cute Marketing Tools

This is not a big deal requiring massive internet outrage spirals, but I do want to make this point very clearly: Disability stigma and stereotypes aren't funny memes you get to use in marketing. OCD, for example, is a serious condition that can play a major role in the structure of the lives with people who have it. Stigma about OCD is not trivial. Your "detail oriented" nature is not OCD.

Which brings me to this:

Image Description: Two male Tufts students walk by a big elephant. The headline reads: Do you have Jumbo-sized OCD? Do you sweat the small stuff? Then there's an ad for production managers for Communications at Tufts, reading in part, "University Communications and Marketing is looking for production managers. If you are totally Type A and care about getting the details 100 percent right, this could be just the opportunity for you."

Source: Linked In post from a Tufts Communication manager, now removed.

I emailed the author. He wrote:

Thank you for your message. I sincerely apologize for this and the offense to folks who suffer with this or any other disability. The last thing I would want to do is to hurt anyone who already suffers from or knows someone with a disabling condition. In my hope to garner attention and excitement to this job posting, I didn’t think about how it sounded.  Upon internal and external feedback, I now understand how I sounded and regret offending or hurting anyone.  I have removed the post and will revise the description for the position. This lack of sensitivity is entirely a reflection on me and not a reflection on Tufts University, which has a well-earned reputation for respect toward people from all backgrounds.  Here is the Tufts non-discrimination and separate ADA policies, which includes the university’s support for recruiting and hiring people with disabilities:
http://oeo.tufts.edu/wp-content/uploads/Non-Discrimination-Policy-040115.pdfhttp://oeo.tufts.edu/wp-content/uploads/ADA-Policy-July-2014.pdf

Questioning Trump's Sanity - Fair Game?

Donald Trump is an erratic man with poor impulse control, a temperament that belong nowhere near the White House, and self-centered to a degree unusual even among politicians. He lies routinely.

But does he lie pathologically? Are his lies related to a mental health condition which makes it difficult for him to tell the truth? Is his erratic and bullying conduct related to a psychological condition which could be diagnosed? Plenty of "Twitter psychologists" (not as many armchairs any more) have wondered if he has dementia, which sounds terrible, but we did have a president whom many people believe was entering early stages of Alzheimers while still in office.

I am no fan of Donald Trump. I want him soundly defeated. Do we have to call him crazy to accomplish that?

For months I've been saying no, and that's still basically my position, but last night I had a long conversation on Twitter with, among others, the brilliant political writer James Fallows, science writer and professor Emily Willingham, and philosopher and disability rights journalist Elizabeth Picciuto. We all agree that Trump doesn't have the temperament to be president. We disagree over whether we needed to frame temperament-issues in terms of mental health.

Here's the storify of the whole thing. I keep thinking about Thomas Eagleton, the VP candidate booted from the race because he dared treat his depression. The use of casually stigmatizing pathological language as a way of criticizing Trump's conduct still feels to me like it's out of bounds.

Please pay particular attention to Deanne Shoyer, who identified herself as having a mental illness, and her objections.

@ejwillingham I'll defer to your expertise Emily but as a lay person (& someone w MI) I find it stigmatizing @Lollardfish @JamesFallows

— Deanne Shoyer (@OMum22) July 28, 2016

But the key here is the word "casually." If there are genuine concerns about Trump's conduct that suggest mental health issues - and of course he's not releasing contemporary medical records, unlike every other presidential candidate in recent history - Willingham made the argument that we can't simply take mental illness out of the frame of discussion. Silencing, she argues, is also stigmatizing. 

Posed: treating any discussion of possible MI as explanatory, no matter how rational, as hands off enhances stigma https://t.co/5UxSbJCKW8

— Emily Willingham (@ejwillingham) July 28, 2016

So we end up, as so often, looking for nuance. When Trump wildly contradicts himself, flies in and out of rages, says things that are patently untrue, and so forth - I don't think I can flatly tell reporters: Any discussion of mental health is forbidden!

What I'd like is for reporters, and all of us, to be intentional about the way we use language related to disability (and everything else). Being thoughtful about language will solve a lot of these issues related to stigma and discourse, and then we can just focus on beating Trump.

UPDATE: Read Finn on "Wrong does not mean crazy."