Wednesday, September 15, 2010

OCD and science fiction's responsibility to the mentally ill

Budd recently brought up Orson Scott Card's novel Xenocide, which created a religious movement out of OCD. As someone who suffers from OCD, I have always been fascinated by Card's depiction in Xenocide. I think OCD is a deeply underused mental illness in science fiction, even more than the almost equally underused schizophrenia and bipolar. Phillip K. Dick, at least, portrayed the complexity of schizophrenics lives in unusual, tender terms. But OCD is even a more interesting mental illness, in sci-fi terms. What Xenocide pointed out is that OCD has some evolutionary benefits. For instance, my OCD gives me literally almost superhuman powers of concentration. I can read 300, 400 pages a day often, or work on a paper for 10 hours straight, and not be tired. I think contemporary science fiction too often emphasizes the victimized or maladaptive elements of mental illness, without realizing that mental illness is not necessarily maladaptive, if channeled in the right directions. Of course it causes problems. But so does one's sexual orientation and science fiction authors don't routinely demonize LGBT people (nor should they).
I think science fiction really needs to come to terms with its own history of psychophobia. Obviously, I am in part talking about Scientology. I don't think its any accident that it was science fiction that created the most deeply anti-mentally ill ideology of the last century. Science fiction, from its conception, has always emphasized the power of the ubermensch, and therefore neglected the hidden powers that undermensch populations can also have. Science fiction's history of ableism and racism is directly linked to its inability to divorce itself from the myth of the superhuman. But I'd really like to science fiction to link itself to the underdog for a change, not for the Paul Atreides's, Enders, and Supermans of the world. Science fiction, quite simply, owes mentally ill people for the crimes done in science fiction's names. And it's about time that mentally ill people collect.

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