Stigma – …And the Truth Shall Set You Free.

How the Mental Health Reshapes in the Deaf Community

May 14, 2020May 14, 2020 The Last HiccupLeave a comment

How the Coronavirus pandemic is reshaping the mental health in the Deaf community. Important to focus on “reshaping” and understand. May is Mental Health Awareness Month.

American Sign Language (ASL) is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Rights are important. Why? ASL is the form of ‘speech’ of the Deaf. Communication, information, and knowledge by accessing to ASL in counseling. That is your right. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

When the COVID-19 crisis affects Deaf people’s well-being, mental health–they would seek Deaf-centered counseling. The quality of Deaf counseling is the greatest tool to decompress any kind of stress. The gain of the mental health reminds of Paddy Ladd, the Deaf author, Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood, writes:

“It has become clear, too, that the rapid growth of this contact, combined with the quality rapid growth in unexamined use of the Deaf culture concept, has created a situation in which Deaf cultural research is needed as a matter of maximum urgency.”

Deaf-centered counseling is truly a dedication, they are the front line helpers. Many solutions can help Deaf citizens to feel stress-free. When counseling is being deprived of this pandemic, in a hearing world, where Deaf people often fall under a wrong agenda, struggling with language deprivation.

The mental health awareness in the human welfare of the Deaf, seek for better guidance through Deaf-centered counseling to provide resources, should not be simply a struggle of the human mind, body, and spirit.

Mental health awareness also should not be a struck in human struggle, but to serve the public awareness as possible for the Deaf community to have a valid reason why Deaf-centered counseling on the front lines of this pandemic is forever in debt to provide every Deaf person.

Please visit:

Deaf Counseling Center

Much grateful,

-Jason “JT” Tozier

Using Non-Deaf Returnees to ‘Speak’ for Deaf Returnees: NO-NO!

May 1, 2020May 1, 2020 The Last Hiccup1 Comment

It is important to analyze privileges. Check your privileges! For example, White people speak for Black people? NO! Men speak for Women? NO! Hearing people speak for Deaf people? NO!

Same thing as non-returning citizens. No difference. Those people who had not experienced jail or prison emotionally, physically and mentally. Understand what it is being a Deaf returning citizen or returnees “RC” like after returning to the society. Do they really understand hardships, emotional triggers, stigma, PTSD, depression, labeling, the list goes on. You cannot measure their struggles and understand the pain.

Those non-returning citizens should not speak for Deaf returning citizens.

HEARD [Helping Educate to Advance the Rights of the Deaf], a hearing-owned organization run by Talila Lewis, decides to use non-returning citizens in a video discussing semantics related to quarantine is inappropriate. Those non-returning citizens should not speak for Deaf returning citizens.

It is the same way for other organizations that use privileged people to speak for unprivileged people. It is best to learn from Deaf returning citizens because they had gone through the system. They are the unprivileged people.

I wrote a column for DEAF LIFE in December 2017 Issue: “DEAF RETURNEES: WHAT DO THEY RETURN TO?” “They’re [Deaf returnees] kept invisible. The stigma they experience is deeply rooted in the sense of struggle, a fear of being silenced.”–Jason “JT” Tozier

For more reading on my piece: Check the link below.

THREE (3) REFERENCES:

https://audismnegatsurdi.com/2018/03/24/deaf-returnees-what-do-they-return-to/

https://www.deafcounseling.com/returning-citizen-on-asl-sign-for-quarantine/

Survive

January 1, 2020January 1, 2020 The Last Hiccup1 Comment

From 2010-2020, this decade has been the challenging of how the stigma can be. Someone once said: ‘The thing that I did that I am most proud of this decade? Survive.’ the other day.

W.E.B. DuBois on Abraham Lincoln: “I love him not because he was perfect, but because he was not, and yet triumphed.”

Learning how to navigate a history of bullying, slandering, character assassination, and hate dynamics in regards to a modern scarlet letter. Wellness, healing, equity, and the paramount factor is not so easily accepted: Strength.

Everything is the opposite. Cyberculture is the new norm of bullying. Technology has adapted faster even before blink eyes every time is something of concern we should be aware of in the future.

The wisdom that I appreciate most from books can be found in their writings on how we should how to survive. Landauer’s For Socialism, Day’s Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, and Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today, Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Baird and Rosenbaum’s Hatred, Bigotry, and Prejudice, Lawrence’s Punishing Hate: Bias Crimes Under American Law, and many others.

Indeed, for many of the great writers, critical thinking is not always abstract, head-in-the-clouds, the kind of thing, but focus on how to survive in a hate-filled life. Professors whom I admire the most, they teach not just as something you do, but find the purpose of living. And I am grateful to know them.

Majoring in Sociology was the best decision rather than advanced math and signed up for those courses that impacted my life forever; Revolution and Radical Social Change, Hate Crimes and Bias, Methodology of the Oppressed, but not something like this, until the book surfaced: Understanding Deaf Culture: in Search of Deafhood by Paddy Ladd in 2010 had changed my life more than anything.

I wonder all the time, if I have not read Ladd’s book, I wouldn’t be here. Honestly, I wouldn’t be here. I am grateful for the book. It is one of many reasons: survive. Every day is filled with mystery and answers to make all the difference in the world.

Encouraging suicide by its Deaf community is something really tough to bear with, and I am thankful for Deaf-centered counseling. Rehabilitation is the key. The obstacles seem insurmountable, and the people I love and care the most had been supportive, though I am about as depressed as I’ve been and kept thinking that it is unbelievable for me to survive through.

Stigma sucks. I walk that road and I keep walking, no matter what how hard it is in the spite of cyberculture, and that makes all the difference, where an 18th-century British legal scholar, Sir William Blackstone: “It is but reasonable that among crimes of different natures those should be most severely punished, which are the most destructive of the public safety and happiness.”

Here comes 2020. I look forward to finishing my greatest project. As of 16th President of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln: “Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.”

The thing that I did that I am most proud of this decade? Survive.

-JT

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Nyle DiMarco: Can You End Stigma?

December 5, 2019December 5, 2019 The Last HiccupLeave a comment

Harry H. Laughlin’s Hatred of Deaf People

December 5, 2019 The Last HiccupLeave a comment

Hearing supremacy is a hellavu drug. A mind filled with hatred speaks a sober heart. History did not teach us enough about haters that comes out of their mouth right into the public when they feel safe because of eugenics ideology. Not only that, but Whiteness is like a drug.

After I learned the history about Harry Hamiliton Laughlin, one of the staunchest supporters of eugenical research and policy in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, where Laughlin writes a letter to Professor Dr. Eugene Fischer, President of International Congress for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems in 1935, responsible for the sterilization of Deaf people where the Nazi party filled with white supremacy loved his idea and used his model in 1933 to verbally and physically assault Deaf people by sterilization.

If it was in 2019, would Harry Laughlin be prosecuted for a hate crime? Would that be a prosecutorial slam dunk……but white privilege gets in the way. Wasn’t he possibly suffering from a lithium imbalance? Isn’t paranoia approaching severe personality disorder characterized by a constant suspicion that Laughlin have sinister motives against Deaf people?

When I learned about the history about Harry Laughlin through Equal Justice Initiative, one of my favorite organization, commented: “On this day [December 2nd] in 1922, eugenicist Henry Laughlin published the “model sterilization law” which encouraged lawmakers to develop more effective and “constitutionally acceptable” sterilization laws.” and realized that he was public enemy number one influencing American eugenics policy. That was where Alexander Graham Bell loved his idea.

The anger, and the arrogance towards innocent Deaf people Harry Laughlin did not know, and cannot fathom to understand this hatred. The damage control has been done. Laughlin who went after Deaf subjects for eugenic sterilization of personal power and a higher degree of self-esteem because it demonstrates that one feels good enough about himself to demand something better or higher from the world.

Harry Laughlin knew who Alexander Graham Bell, the leading eugenicist in the Deaf community who would publish articles on hereditary ‘Deafness’, and they were responsible for the destruction of the Deaf community.

Imagine if Harry Laughlin and Alexander Graham Bell who sit together in order to spew hatred towards Deaf people. Wake up! Inside the media propaganda is yet another effort to dismantle the Deaf community. Or, another effort to deter intellectual freedom to all the Deaf?

Would they really understand the painful history what Harry Hamiliton Laughlin and Alexander Graham Bell had caused enough destruction in the Deaf community? Where is the mistrust of what we see on the news outlets about Harry H. Laughlin and Alexander Graham Bell?

The sterilization of the Deaf people is the worst of all. The Deaf community began to sense differently.

When I first learned about Charles Darwin back in 1988 in eighth grade after taking Biology class, my hearing teacher would speak highly of Darwin’s work, also learned about Francis Galton whom I had no idea he was related to Charles Darwin as half-cousins in college days and told a history lesson where eugenics were taught in schools across the country, only many years later after I read Paddy Ladd’s Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood:

“Against this background, Darwin’s initially explosive ideas on evolution served to reinforce the medical discourse. Deaf people and their languages were confirmed as akin to those of other savages, and an atavistic throwback who, like them, ‘may fancifully be called living fossils [and] will aid us in forming a picture of the ancient forms of life’ ” (1859: 448)

That hit me hard. I had no idea until 2010 when I was 35. The book written by Paddy Ladd had changed my life completely. I feel the wind differently. I relate to the Deaf community and experience a bond with the Deaf community which clearly unknown to you.

Sociology had stolen my heart and became a student of Sociology, and learned that Harriet Martineau, the Mother of Sociology, Martineau was Deaf. I was surprised. I bet you do not know that either. Even my professor whom studied Martineau in graduate school had no idea that Martineau was Deaf.

Not even hearing professors ever mention anything about it. A pattern of ignorance? A certain weaving together of ignorance? Peace, freedom, and global health of the Deaf shall not be ignored.

Martineau was dating Charles Darwin’s older brother, Erasmus Alvey Darwin, and Darwin saw and grabbed the greatest ignorance, the slandering of Deaf people so great that not even an idea exists of what Darwin’s hatred should look like. Would it end all kinds of intellectual oppression? Darwin’s ideology rakes for the highest form of democracy in the broadest sense of hatred.

Despite the vast differences, would The Society for Biodemography and Social Biology, formerly American Eugenics Society apologize for Laughlin’s hatred of the Deaf people? Would they do so with a commitment to develop healthy task to overcome indifference, show of human compassion, that plagues the Deaf community?

Deaf people who lived in Hitler’s Europe, whom were targeted for the display of symbols of hate, thanks to Laughlin’s work. Dealing with the cultural differences, specifically, with the way of life of the ‘minorities’ who live in the society. After reading Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany by Horst Biesold, by cultural norms, in processing of a hate crime, and that becomes an issue that all hate crime sessions by Laughlin’s work, must tackle.

Isn’t hate crime by no means unique in the broadest respect of the Deaf people?

If The Society for Biodemography and Social Biology, formerly as American Eugenics Society, refuses to apologize for Laughlin’s action, why should Deaf people be punished more severely because of social and psychological pathology?

Laughlin as an American citizen who breeds in White Supremacy as he received an honorary degree from the Nazi-controlled, University of Heidelberg for the work of race-cleansing. Hate crime violates constitutional rights of the Deaf people, especially Deaf babies.

We must always remind ourselves as well as all others how our Declaration of Independence makes our country different from any other nation around the world. The Declaration proclaims that we have inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

American Eugenics Society, under the establishment of Harry H. Laughlin in 1926 who was served as the Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, probably the best known, if not the most oppressive, White supremacist in America–all but faded into culture of hate.

Will Deaf people ever get a formal apology from The Society for Biodemography and Social Biology?

-JT

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National Deaf Therapy: Misrepresenting Mental Health

November 26, 2019 The Last HiccupLeave a comment

When Communication Service for the Deaf (CSD) & National Deaf Therapy (NDT) continues their silence and still stand with this:

‘HATE IS NOT A MENTAL HEALTH ISSUE’

Did they just gaslight the Deaf community? Communication Service for the Deaf and National Deaf Therapy, are both attempting at the framing of the way Deaf people think; Both carry the same idea: without necessary and proper exposure to change, deficit thinking is necessary, and ignorance is the direct problem of the human brain.

How humans are afraid of change and what they do not know, in which the Deaf community shall live in the ‘dark figure’ cave. The Deaf community is chained so that they only can see the wall, and that was the goal.

Communication Service for the Deaf & National Deaf Therapy has yet to begin where Deaf people are because they claimed that hate is not a mental health issue in the Deaf community. To date, it has failed miserably.

The experience of National Deaf Therapy in the instruction of the Deaf has shown in great concerns that also exists in mental and physical conditions, and incapacity for truth, censorship is nothing new. Censorship is one of the highest forms of oppression in the Deaf space and limiting valuable access even though it fosters thinking critically, expression, and advocating ideas effectively for the Deaf community.

Deaf people do experience hate (crime, speech, literature, et al) because they are public figures in the Deaf community, for instance, we, as the country, are much too extreme and have let the media feed people’s fears far too long. How would we prepare to do something to help minimize this cycle of social injustice? Why should the Deaf community continue to be penalized by this very society that is unforgiving and hypocritical?

Deaf people remain as a scapegoat for fear, hatred, and ignorance.

‘Hate is not Mental Health Issue’: violates the Eighth (8th) Amendment of the United States Constitution that prohibits imposing cruel and unusual punishment. It is cruel to punish Deaf people for life when they experience hate. Often the path of explanation and clarification is easily connected to denials. The lack of power in the Deaf community.

A leading cause of stress is a change; Acknowledging that there is more that needs education, training, and embarking on a journey that requires courage, due to mental health field, and learn how to stop the nature of fear. Individuals who currently oppose hate as a mental health issue mirror the truth dwellers, and the term, ‘Deaf’ had been exposed to a form of hate where they face dangers every day. Communication Service for the Deaf and National Deaf Therapy needs to be honest about it.

This kind of realization that is critical that we must not lose access to the material. It is diametrically opposed to the American Dream and the future of democracy for the Deaf community. There is a lot of difficult things in the foundation of this country.

This powerful ideology puts a human face of the Deaf, who survives hate crime across the country. That is what happens when it comes to a Deaf person in America where they do not exist. It is a scar of knowledge, to the “mental health professional” like National Deaf Therapy, which is the symbol of power by the oppressive society.

I highly recommend this book to read. As I wrote in my older post (December 8, 2017, Understanding Stigma about Deaf People:

“One of the most difficult issues for the survivors of stigma is thinking how widespread the stigma is. As bad as stigma in Deaf community may be, where is the direction of making some effort, through community help, to reduce stigma about Deaf people and increase awareness for Deaf people?”

-JT

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Christopher Soukup: CEO, Communication Service for the Deaf

October 28, 2019October 28, 2019 The Last HiccupLeave a comment

“In the collective mind the intellectual aptitudes of the individuals, and consequence their individuality are weakened.”–Gustav Le Bon, La Psycholgie des Foules, 1895

Dear Communication Service for the Deaf (CSD) CEO Christopher Soukup:

Since you are the Mighty Chief of CSD Social Venture Fund (SFV) and the majority stakeholder for National Deaf Therapy (NDT) to invest in business owned by members of the Deaf community, you control the information, using misinformation to shield, and in consequence, as you wrote in June 2016:

“As a not for profit organization, we remain committed to pushing out our resources into the community—in the form of tangible action and new products, programs, and services that make our world a better place for everyone. Careful and responsible management of our resources is an absolute reflection of our integrity and our commitment to you.”

The reflection of integrity and commitment is nothing to replace better than this. Since you put (NDT) in your power, misleading the Deaf community that the message: “Hate is not a mental health issue” is greatly problematic. The hardest part what you wrote: “Careful and responsible management”

There are plenty of valid-proven academic articles by well-versed professors and experts that hate is a mental health issue. Unlock the power of hate and action. For one, NDT argue that it is not a mental health issue differs from, and Deaf citizens punished more severely; because it betrays the expression of ignorance.

On the surface, this appears to be a problematic with significance: Deaf citizens do experience hate, derives from truth, in the same manner as all of us. The language deprivation of “hate”, although intentional, is no less truth.

Deaf people has a deep-longing to live as powerful people, to share their stories within our Deaf community and to make connections because they have suffered an inordinate amount of language deprivation that has left them deeply wounded.

“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.”–Maya Angelou

Hate: Crime, speech, literature and culture. For example:

Dr. Merzenich in his own reference with the print from American Psychological Association: “The simple fact is that if [American Deaf culture] could be reliably wiped out, it would be a good thing to wipe out. (Fischer & Lane, 1993)

As wiping out the culture, language, souls, and stories is very much part of hate in the broadest sense of mental health issue. The deprivation of truth will affect Deaf people’s usability, life security, and stability, would also affect in higher education. It would take the high road–boldness and healing.

The denial of hate leads to a societal taboo that would reject Deaf people in general. The sociological and punishment as punishing hate articles have plenty of merit that hate is indeed, recognized as mental health issue.

The rule of law whether it lacks the most where it represents the moral view of the Deaf community, is it accurate enough for NDT under your leadership to formally announce that hate is not a mental health issue as it is powerfully damaged, misleading the information and seeing the statement in print is even more painful.

Deaf citizens illustrates the fact they struggle in their own values or liberty that cannot easily reconcile with the community and becomes a difficult time to value their own individualism and self-constructed to begin their journey as survivors of dealing with hate, whether the forms of hate, through self-destructive in attempting to grasp its own path to escape oppressive judgement of systematic oppression to curb their struggles.

Being told by NDT in the direction of your leadership such as careful and responsible management, Mr. Soukup, the only freedom Deaf survivors of hate could reasonably negotiate in their lives was suffering enough pain. The denial of hate as a mental health issue abides by the society customs for the refusal, or flippancy towards, the mental state is severe enough.

Yet, you approved the idea that hate is not a mental health issue clearly a decision making table and decide the best for the Deaf community is questionably concerned lacking compassion and leave the results on the benefits of politics and power. As to put this:

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”-Jedi Master Yoda

-Jason “JT” Tozier

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Did H-Dirksen Bauman Experience Bullying?

October 27, 2019October 27, 2019 The Last HiccupLeave a comment

In higher education, bullying is often invisible in Gallaudet/Deaf community. H-Dirksen Bauman, former chair for ASL/Deaf Studies department got severely bullied and chose not to speak up against bullying on the campus what it is supposed to be hate-free. Why allow culture of silence?