No one, not even Twilight-era Kristen Stewart, is completely void of emotion. With mental health & well-being never far from the lime-light, we are encouraged to become comfortable with our emotions, or the positive ones at least. There-in lies one of the biggest problems in healthcare right now; we’re so focussed on being positive that we don’t know how to handle anything negative, & some people take this so far as to condemn any & every negative emotion. When something bad happens, we don’t know how to react.
Take, for example, contracting viral meningitis & through a combination of medical failings & sheer bad luck, becoming disabled. Purely hypothetical, of course. No one, not matter how brave or stoic, is going to feel good about their entire world being turned upside-down, & everything they’ve ever known disintegrating like Thanos snapped it away (come on, it’s been well over a year, I think Infinity War spoilers are the least of our worries). Despite this, I was constantly being told to “think positive”, “look at the bigger picture”, or relish in the fact that I no longer took the simple things for granted.
More recently, I’ve been highly critical of accessibility features that prioritise aesthetics over function, & as a result simply don’t work. There have been a couple of ramps merged into staircases, zig-zagging back & forth across the staircase in tight hairpin bends. There were no railings, the corners were tight, it wasn’t wide enough to allow multiple wheelchairs to use it at the same time, it was miles longer than it needed to be, it was a nightmare for those with visual impairments, & no able-bodied pedestrian is going to stop to let someone disabled past. There was also a sign to display in car windows warning emergency responders that someone disabled was in the vehicle. The characteristics it displayed were so generic & vague as to be thoroughly unhelpful, there was no way of linking it to the disabled individual, & it made cars a target for hate crime. Then there was the stair-climbing wheelchair which was so bad I wrote an entire blog post about it.
In each case it was quite clear that no disabled person had been involved in the design process, which when your target audience is disabled people is kind of a bad business model, & I was backed up by hundreds of other disabled people, & many able-bodied too.
On each occasion I was lambasted for being too negative; I was accused of complaining for the sake of it, & not providing constructive advice. I was told I should be more positive if I wanted to make progress. When I pointed out that stopping harm is as progressive as implementing something good, this was disregarded entirely as an excuse. When I caved in & made suggestions on how to improve them (i.e. scrap the entire thing & start again), I was still too negative.
One particularly bad instance came with a long lecture about how she had terminally ill & disabled relatives, & thus she knew that only a positive attitude could get them through the days. As horrible as it sounds, I would bet good money that when her back was turned, those relatives breathed a sigh of negativity relief.
Being positive all the time is not positive. It actually hinders progress, as without criticism you would never improve something that needs improving. It also causes a lot of mental health issues; one of the biggest triggers for my depression when I first fell ill was the idea that I couldn’t find anything positive in my situation. It made me think that my emotional response of “oh sh*t” was completely wrong.
In particular, mental health is one of the few areas where men are worse off than women. Women are encouraged to be in touch with their emotions, but men are told to “man up”. They’re never taught the appropriate way express emotion because they’re just told to suppress it, & they’re also taught not to seek out help when they need it. Women despair when a simple rejection is taken as the biggest insult, & at least part of the reaction some men have to rejection has to be attributed to this.
Quite simply, the “positivity brigade” does more harm than good. They hinder progress, worsen mental health, & stop people developing appropriate ways to express emotion. The reality of the matter is they simply cannot handle criticism & negativity because they themselves have been victims of the same positivity brigade they now endorse.
