Televison's Glee Asks the Big Questions
Last night’s episode of Glee gave rise to an interesting question: if you could change the things that you don’t like about yourself, would you? Or, are they the things that make you, you? Do you become a lesser self when you undergo a transformation to conform to some cultural idea of beauty or sanity? Or do you become a better version of yourself?
Glee, in an ambitious hour and a half episode took on both vanity and sanity; I’m going to stick to the latter, which, as a psychologist, I spend a lot of time thinking about.
Working with children with autism, I have often questioned who am I to say that the way people with autism live in the world is “wrong” and that their behavior needs to be “modified.” Is the need to treat a disorder actually the need of the person with the alleged disorder or a larger, societial need to make those who are “different,” conform. Is imposing a social sense of “normal” on individuals just another form of bias?
At a training for administration of Autism Diagnostic Observation Scales (ADOS), I spoke with an autism researcher from England who said, here, in America we have a very different attitude towards people with mental illness. We are always trying to change the person to fit the larger society, rather than to adapt the environment to suit the individual. He was not being pejorative; he acknowledged that this was a cultural difference in our attitudes towards mental health.
Of course, if the individual (or family) is suffering—if his or her “disorder” interferes with their ability to love, work, play, achieve personal goals and be happy—then it makes sense for that individual (or the family) to seek help and to work to bring about positive change. But not every situation is so clear cut. For example, if a child with autism is happy and the family is content to care for the child all the days of his/her life (as this researcher described is often true in some cultures), then who are we to step in and say the family needs to “get help” or live differently? Such an instance begs the question, what constitutes a live well-lived?
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