North Carolina Do Not Resuscitate And Most Form: Fill & Download for Free

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There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College, 21 May 2005There are many reasons a majority of Americans believe statues honoring Confederate leaders should remain. Most of these answers are in some way connected to the failure of Reconstruction in the postwar era, the resultant flourishing of the Lost Cause mythology, and white America’s general reluctance to confront its past meaningfully.This is admittedly a lot to dig into. Let’s get started.I. Causes of the Civil WarThe main cause of the American Civil War was slavery. Anything else rates as a distant second. We know this because the Confederates were kind enough to tell us this themselves. For example, here’s a transcript of “the Cornerstone Speech” (emphasis mine):Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.] This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind — from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics; their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just — but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.The Cornerstone Speech was delivered by Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, in Savannah, Georgia, about a month after he’d been sworn into that office, and less than a month before the rebels assaulted Federal troops at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.Let’s also consider the “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” which contains this gem (emphasis mine):The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.When reading this document, it may sound reasonable: the states are defying federal law, therefore other states have no obligation to the federal government. It is, however, decidedly unreasonable given the historical context. Specifically, in 1832, South Carolina refused to accept the validity of a tariff and refused to apply it under a pseudolegal concept called “nullification.” This provoked a major crisis, one that only subsided not when the federal government threatened to use force to apply the tariff, but rather, when the tariff was lowered. South Carolina never repudiated the doctrine of nullification, and so, this complaint in its declaration of secession is hypocritical garbage. South Carolina gave no care to the principle of states’ rights, it simply wanted its interests to completely dominate the Union’s. When this did not happen, South Carolina threw a fit and rebelled.Claiming the American Civil War was about anything other than slavery is therefore neatly countered by the statements and actions put forth by the rebels themselves. It is also demonstrated by statements made by the Union — most notably, the Gettysburg Address — and actions taken by it and within it. These actions, by the way, were not all pro-liberation: the draft riots in New York City of 13–16 July 1863, wherein the non-black underclasses[1] of the city attacked the black population, fearing that a hospitable environment for freedmen, as they believed was being created by the war itself, would lead to their own replacement with black labor.So why are we discussing the causes of the Civil War in a discussion on why a majority of Americans in the twenty-first century believe statues commemorating rebels should stay standing? We need to point this out because modern American society is vehemently opposed, at least nominally, to slavery. To defend the continued standing of these statues in their current positions therefore requires squaring a circle: the people represented by those statues were willing to kill to maintain the institution of slavery, which very few modern Americans would view as a defensible position. Indeed, that they did kill to maintain the institution of slavery and the structures of white supremacy constitutes, for the overwhelming majority of those represented, the overwhelming share of their legacy to the country.[2]There are, in general, three ways of squaring the circle:Claiming that the Civil War was not about slavery.Claiming that slavery wasn’t so bad.Claiming that taking down the statues would be an example of historical negationism, or that it would lead via the “slippery slope,” to historical negationism.[3]Since, as demonstrated in the rest of this section,[4] the first two require historical illiteracy, whether intentional or not, in order to understand why the arguments for the monuments persist, we must understand why historical illiteracy regarding the Civil War is as prevalent as it is within the United States.Part II: The Myth of the Good SlaveownerThe most pernicious of the defenses cited in the first answer is the claim that slavery wasn't that bad. This argument is trotted out on a regular basis, albeit in different words: "X may have been a slaveowner, but he always treated his slaves well and even had provisions in his will to free them after his death." The argument is therefore that there were "good" slaveowners and "bad" slaveowners, and yes, the bad slaveowners were terrible people, but the good slaveowners were simply good people who happened to own slaves, and why should we be so awful about their slaveholding? I mean, you can't expect people to just go against the standards of their time, can you?It isn't hard to see where it came from, either: slaveowners themselves. A "good" slaveowner might occasionally feel a pang of guilt about their slaveowning - and posthumous manumission is clear evidence of this - but they could always comfort themselves by saying that at least they weren't that bad slaveowner down the road, and besides, what would happen to the slaves were they to just be freed all willy-nilly?This is a nonsense argument, and the disingenuousness of the claim has been in the popular consciousness since, at the very latest, the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852. Indeed, much of the controversy regarding Uncle Tom's Cabin stemmed not from its depiction of Legree, the text's depiction of a "bad" slaveowner,[5] but rather, from its condemnation of even the "good" slaveowners and its unsparing attack on slavery as a whole.In particular, at one point, following being sold and ripped away from his wife and children by a "good" slaveowner named Shelby, the titular character becomes the possession of St. Clare. St. Clare treats Tom kindly, and St. Clare's young daughter, Eva, loves Tom like she would a member of the family. Tom's situation at this point in the novel is relatively comfortable among the "good" slaveowning set. Eva then dies of disease, her father subsequently stabbed outside a tavern, and because St. Clare's desire to free Tom is ignored, Tom ends up with Legree.The text portrays St. Clare sympathetically, but it still condemns him: he may personally treat Tom well and he may have no animus towards black people, but his own participation in the system is, in the end, directly responsible for Tom's suffering and eventual death at the hands of Legree. The "good" slaveowner does little-to-no physical harm to his slaves directly,[6] but by participating in the system in the first place, facilitates — even unwillingly — the violence of others towards slaves.This is why Uncle Tom's Cabin caused a furor. Had Uncle Tom's Cabin merely been a condemnation of the "bad" slaveowner, it may have briefly seized the public's attention, but then rapidly faded from it. However, Uncle Tom's Cabin condemns even the so-called "good" slaveowners, and for that, the slaveowning South had to create a response. Thus, an entire genre of literature, "anti-Tom literature" arose in the antebellum South. The anti-Tom books have all faded from popular consciousness, but Uncle Tom's Cabin has not — this even despite Uncle Tom's Cabin not being an especially good book[7] — to the point where, even a century after publication, the plot was assumed to be sufficiently generally familiar to an American audience that an idiosyncratic adaptation of the novel in Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I could be assumed by the authors to reliably generate laughs. It still does.Of course, there's another reason why counters to Uncle Tom's Cabin's argument are usually rejected today: they rely on explicit white supremacy. This was obviously true of anti-Tom literature, which invariably asserted slavery's necessity in view of the supposed inferiority of blacks. It has also been true of every popular counter since: D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation depicts blacks as subhuman, and the depiction of blacks in Gone With the Wind ascribes humanity only to subservient blacks — the blacks who aren't subservient to the white population are depicted as rapists whose murder is thoroughly justified. The argument for why "good" slaveowners existed is therefore not "no, Harriet, they didn't participate in and facilitate an inherently violent system," but rather "slavery was necessary due to the inferiority of the black population." No other argument has had anywhere near the same success in sticking in the popular consciousness as the one borne from white supremacy.Having said all this, it is a misuse of language as it is colloquially used to describe anyone putting forth this argument as a "white supremacist." We generally reserve that term for people who consciously believe that "white" people are superior and would intentionally structure society in accordance with this belief. This is not currently a popular position within American discourse (although it is growing in strength); however, this does not change the fact that the myth of the good slaveowner is rooted in white supremacy, and defense of Confederate monuments to "good" slaveowners is therefore incurably poisoned by white supremacy.This itself raises another question: how does white supremacy, including coded and unintentional, so frequently go unquestioned within American discourse?Part III: Southern Victory via ReconstructionFollowing July of 1863, with the capture of Vicksburg and Lee's defeat at Gettysburg, the question was no longer if the Confederacy would fall, but rather, when. This meant serious thought had to be given to how the states in rebellion would be reintegrated into the Union. This proved a matter of some controversy. Northern Democrats, who themselves had ranged in position from complete opposition to the war to tepid support for it, generally advocated an extremely lenient reintegration process — but following the 1864 elections, the Democrats would lose most of their representation, with Republicans "waving the bloody shirt" and blaming them, mostly successfully, for having created the conditions for the war in the first place. This led to the primary players in the question of reintegration being all Republicans. At the time of the end of the Civil War, there were two factions in the Republican Party.The Moderates, among whose numbers were President Abraham Lincoln and Vice-President Andrew Johnson, believed representatives and senators from former Confederate states could be seated in Congress after a lenient set of conditions were met: acceptance of the Thirteenth Amendment,[8] a proviso in the state constitution banning slavery, and ten percent of the state's population to swear an oath of loyalty to the federal government. The Radicals, who dominated the legislative branch, wanted much stricter conditions, among them, for a majority of the state's population to swear said oath of loyalty. Either way, both sides were convinced Reconstruction was required, and that acceptance of the rebellion without any change was unacceptable.Lincoln initially, by virtue of being commander in chief of the armed forces and putting the former rebellion under military occupation, steered a Moderate course. Historians are split on whether or not Lincoln would have been successful in this had he lived. Lincoln's prestige was high after the war, and he may have had the popularity and statesmanship required to sell the public and the legislative branch on his proposals. We will never know, however, because within days of the war's end, Lincoln was assassinated and was succeeded by Andrew Johnson.Andrew Johnson was not a popular politician. He had gotten the job of vice-president mostly by virtue of having been a southerner, thus allowing the Republican party to run as the "National Union Party" in the 1864 election and secure the support of pro-war Democrats. He was not particularly skilled, nor was he particularly charismatic, and, having had very little to do with the Union's victory, had none of Lincoln's credit to trade on. Thus, he was in a poor position to see his Moderate goals enacted, and unequipped to navigate to a better position. However, as he was still president following Lincoln's assassination, which meant he was far from powerless.The result was a series of increasingly nasty battles between Johnson and the Radicals in Congress. This eventually culminated in Johnson's impeachment in 1868, his trial on the Senate floor, and his acquittal by a single vote. These squabbles diverted attention and energy away from the actual process of Reconstruction. Some of this ended with the election of a Radical Republican, Ulysses S. Grant, to the presidency in 1868. Unfortunately for the Radicals, this came with its own set of problems: the Grant administration is generally viewed by historians as being among the most corrupt in presidential history.[9] The corruption of the Grant administration caused a fight in the Republican party, one sufficiently bitter that, in 1870, a sizeable group bolted the party and put up its own candidate for election, Horace Greeley, in 1872.[10]Partly as a result of all this infighting, by the time of the 1876 election, the appetite in the north for continuing Reconstruction was essentially gone. The 1876 election proved to be among the most controversial in US history, with Democrat Samuel J. Tilden winning the popular vote and, by all rights, the electoral college only to have it stolen out from under him.[11] In exchange for Democrats conceding the election, Republicans would pull all remaining federal troops from the former Confederacy and end Reconstruction.This was a disaster. Everyone knew what it would mean, and nobody in a position to do anything about it gave anything approximating a shit.What is commonly taught regarding Reconstruction in the US education system is, putting it politely, garbage. It is frequently taught that the Reconstruction era governments were hopelessly corrupt, incurably inefficient, and just generally terrible. None of this, as it so happens, is true.[12] What did happen with these Reconstruction Era governments is that the previously powerful in the former Confederate states were disenfranchised, while those who had been enslaved were suddenly allowed to have a hand in determining their own government. In other words, local and state governments began to see significant black representation, and black senators and representatives were elected to the federal government.Of course, the titanic change in social structure did lead to serious problems of governance - not so much from the governments, but from the governed. In 1866,[13] a group of former Confederate officers formed the Ku Klux Klan in Tennessee. Initially, the Klan was a social organization; however, this soon changed and the Klan's purpose in life was giving voice and action to the resentment felt by the newly disenfranchised former rebels. This, of course, euphemistically refers to the fact that the Klan was a terrorist organization, which murdered, assaulted, and, to be redundant, terrorized the black population.Thus, while blacks went to the polls for the first time in 1867, they were still under-represented there, a state of affairs that would continue into the early 1870's, when the federal government finally enacted legislation making the Klan's terrorism, and deprivation of civil rights more generally, a federal offense. Between this and dedicated police work by the military, the Klan had essentially disappeared by the mid-1870's. However, the Klan's systematic extralegal disenfranchisement of the black community and the steady re-enfranchisement of former rebels[14] allowed the former structures of power to reassert themselves, and start legally disenfranchising the black population.This was ongoing during the tail end of Reconstruction, so the effects of withdrawal of federal troops from former Confederate states were known by all well in advance of the Compromise of 1877. Thus, exclusively blaming the South for the failure of Reconstruction to create an equitable society and stamp out the virus of white supremacy is intellectually dishonest twaddle: the North barely had an interest in redressing the evils of the previous ninety years of slavery within the United States. Of course, this isn't surprising: white supremacy as an ideology had pretty well taken root north of the Mason-Dixon Line, just as it had south of it.This once again goes back to the myth of the good slaveholder. We usually think of states north of the Mason-Dixon Line as having been "free states." When discussing the Missouri Compromise of 1820, we talk about how the admission of Missouri as a slave state threatened to wreck the precious balance between free states and slave states in the Union. The problem with this view is that the "free states" weren't. In 1820, slavery was still legal in New York, and would remain so until 4 July 1827.[15] As another example, New Jersey kept slavery legal in some form until 1865.And even more to the point, even though the "free states" were generally quite inhospitable to slavery as an institution, slavery was good business for them all the same. New York City grew rich from exporting southern cotton, and Massachusetts' textile mills desperately depended on it. When one makes a deal with the devil, one has to either ignore the devil's actions or else justify them, and since white superiority was already a required system in the northern states — how else could the abysmal treatment of the Amerindian population otherwise be justified? — the belief in the inherent, natural, and appropriate supremacy of white people over nonwhites (but especially over blacks) was essentially de rigeur.[16]This is why Reconstruction failed, and indeed, had no chance of success. Yes, the most popular campfire songs among the Union included "Battle Hymn of the Republic,"[17] "Battle Cry of Freedom"[18] and "John Brown's Body"[19], but only the most egregious offenses against the black population could be condemned, for the northern states were frequently just as guilty of everything else, and indirectly culpable for those offenses.Part IV: Early Historical RevisionismThe overwhelming majority of monuments glorifying rebels were not built until the twentieth century. As has been pointed out time and time again, plenty of former rebels did not want statues erected in their honor, most famously Robert E. Lee. The first large wave of monument building began approximately in 1900 and hit its peak in 1910. This was also one of the nastiest periods of anti-black violence in American history: for the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth, between fifty and one hundred black people in the South were lynched per year. It also came after the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson made segregation legal within the United States. Every means was used to keep the black population down.This included the statues.As pointed out by current GOP senator Ben Sasse,[20] monuments to the Confederacy and to Confederates were not infrequently erected on the sites where black men had been lynched. To be clear: after murdering innocent black men and frequently mutilating their corpses, the local white population would erect statues glorifying those who had killed to keep slavery legal on the site, statues of figures such as Nathan Bedford Forrest, likely the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.[21] These statues were deliberately designed to be as offensive as possible as a means of declaring white power over black people. George Orwell discussed a similar phenomenon in fascism. Orwell pointed out that, yes, the goosestepping looked ridiculous, but in intentionally adopting ridiculous gestures and then forbidding people to laugh, the state was demonstrating its own power. The same principle was in effect here: the most outrageous and intolerable things were done, with objection forbidden, to demonstrate power.This isn't usually discussed, and once again, it's not hard to understand why: broad sections of white America were broadly culpable. The Ku Klux Klan was re-founded in 1915, but where the original incarnation of the Klan was a regional organization determined to restore the antebellum social order in the former Confederacy — an aim that was mostly accomplished — the second incarnation of the Klan was a national organization that was virulently anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and antisemitic. Within a decade of its second founding, the Ku Klux Klan had 15% of the nation's eligible population in its rolls (and just under 5% of the population, period), coming out to just under 5 million people. Explicit white supremacy as the basis for governance was popular in wide sections of the country. And frankly, the reason the second incarnation of the Klan had fallen from favor by the late 1920's had virtually nothing to do with the Klan's aims, but rather, with their means. The constant in American political thought is that if things are quiet — which violence most assuredly is not — then things are fine. Get rid of the violent goons of the Klan, and things are fine, no need to address the entire system that naturally spawned the Klan on three separate occasions.[22]The statues were not the only example of white supremacy being forced into the historical record. As discussed back in Part I, the primary cause of the Civil War was slavery. This was, again, announced proudly by the belligerents themselves. However, within twenty years of the Thirteenth Amendment, this became a matter of some embarrassment for the former Confederates: it turns out that, when nobody is a slaveholder, killing several hundred thousand people to keep black people in bondage appears indefensible to the population at large. And so, we end up seeing such nonsense as "states' rights" as the cause of the Civil War, even though the only particular right the rebels had really cared about was the right to own slaves. This garbage started shortly after the Civil War — former Confederate President Jefferson Davis in his self-aggrandizing The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government was an early example — and soon predominated the record such that by the 1890's, Lincoln's former secretaries had to resuscitate Lincoln's reputation.[23] Rather than frame the Confederacy as a rebellion that fired the first shots of the war so that they could keep black people in slavery, the dominant trend in historiography of the conflict for the following century was to frame the Confederacy as a glorious last stand for freedom, a "Lost Cause" whose leaders embodied greatness of spirit. Similarly, the Dunning School — which grew from Columbia University — dominated the view of Reconstruction, painting it in the most starkly negative terms, including the maligning of black participation in governance. Until the "Neoabolitionists" of the 1960's came to the scene, these and other similar views were the dominant narrative of Civil War historiography.It is difficult to overstate just how much influence Lost Cause mythology has had on the American perception of the Civil War, and how much effect it has had on race relations within the country. The most obvious effects have been on popular media. D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation in 1915 was the first blockbuster film in American history. Its climax involves a group of Klan horsemen riding frantically to rescue a white woman from the evil clutches of a Reconstruction governor, who is presumably voted out of office the following day when the Klan bars the black population from the polls. That this film was a product of its culture should be obvious — art is rarely created ex nihilo, and art produced as a specifically capitalist endeavor as studio films must reflect the culture that gave rise to them.[24] However, The Birth of a Nation also deeply reinforced the culture from which it was born. Griffith's film is often, rightly, cited as a masterpiece of cinema, to the point where virtually every film made since has been influenced by it either directly or indirectly. It is not exaggeration to say film audiences had never seen anything remotely like it, which also means that whatever tropes it employs that would strike a twenty-first century audience as melodramatic cliche would have been fresh, original, and insidiously persuasive to the audiences of 1915. The founder of the second incarnation of the Klan would go on to say that he did not believe the Klan could have been re-founded had The Birth of a Nation not been made.The Birth of a Nation, however, is a three hour silent movie[25] and is, outside of film schools, generally not viewed today. That said, for most people, the cinematic images they have of the Civil War still come from this Lost Cause/Dunning School view, because of Gone With the Wind.Gone With the Wind was published in 1936 and was an instant bestseller. Polls still place it as the second favorite book of American readers after only the Bible, and for a time, it was at the top of of the US all-time bestseller list.[26] Its film adaptation was one of the most hotly anticipated films of all time, and would subsequently go on to be the most successful film in box-office history.[27] It is still a popular film, and it still sees periodic cinema re-release.And it is undeniably a text of white supremacy. Even when the black characters are granted virtues, said virtues tend to stem from white people all the same — Mammy (who the film doesn’t even give an actual name!) is generally a moral center of the proceedings, but is always clear that her judgement is guided entirely by “Miss Ellen,” her master. This is the film people generally think of when asked for cinema depicting the March through Georgia or Reconstruction. Even now, when white supremacy as a doctrine of thought is disavowed by polite society, the image we have of Reconstruction is in no small part shaped by white supremacy.[28]Part V: Leaving the Roots of the WeedThe second wave of statue building came during the Civil Rights Movement. Again, this was a weaponization of history designed to intimidate the black population into staying silent; however, this time, it didn’t work. Timing had quite a bit to do with it: while white supremacy was a “respectable” doctrine in the 1910’s and 1920’s, it could not be anything of the sort in a post-Auschwitz world. The Nazis essentially single-handedly destroyed the respectability of “racial science,” and without some greater justification for white supremacy — and in a modernist and postmodernist world, said justification could never be religion — it could not be espoused respectably, which meant systems that required supporters to explicitly espouse white supremacist beliefs simply could not survive.This is not to downplay the efforts of those people who actively campaigned against segregation and voter suppression, because those people were indeed brave. They frequently risked their lives in the struggle, and sometimes lost them. However, unlike half a century before, the federal government was willing to step in on behalf of the protesters. The Supreme Court ruled against segregation in Brown v Board of Education in 1954 and against anti-miscegenation statutes in Loving v Virginia in 1967, among others. President Dwight D. Eisienhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi when the state refused to do so.[29]Similarly, this is not to say white supremacy disappeared. It didn’t. Many of white supremacy’s most obvious reinforcing structures were dismantled through the end of segregation and the enactment of various anti-discrimination and civil rights statutes, but white supremacy is still a pervasive element of mainstream American culture. Remember, hungover high school history teachers will still put Gone With the Wind on instead of teaching, without commenting on the text and its underlying assumptions. History textbooks routinely still present the Dunning School interpretation of Reconstruction without criticism[30] and will even go so far as to label slaves as migrant workers from Africa. And yes, this stuff has an effect. It’s close to thirty years since Do the Right Thing came out in theaters, and we’re still arguing if Mookie did the right thing by smashing the window of Sal’s Pizzeria, and not asking why Radio Raheem had to die. Hell, we’re still actually killing Radio Raheem in the streets, filming it, and letting those responsible go.[31]And so, we get to the crux of the matter: white supremacy runs deep, and America never really dealt with it. At every obvious opportunity to do so, the country has combated the worst and most obvious excesses without actually bothering to interrogate the deeper psychology of the matter. Because of white supremacy, we end up with apparent nonsense like “the Civil War was not about slavery” being taught in schools. Because of white supremacy, we end up with people viewing the nature of a cause people killed for as being incidental to whether or not they should be honored. Because of white supremacy, we don’t recognize monuments to the Confederacy as inherently historically revisionist. Because of white supremacy, we cannot accept their removal as a needed correction to a grossly distorted record. Because of white supremacy, we can somehow talk of slavery as a “mistake,” when we would recognize this as a disgusting statement coming from any other analogous circumstance.[32] And because of white supremacy, the only way we seem to be able to keep monuments of our “mistakes” is not through monuments to the oppressed, but rather, through monuments to the oppressors.[1] Primarily the Irish. The application of the term “white” here would be ahistorical, because while Irish-Americans are considered white now, they were most decidedly not considered white at the time of the Civil War, and indeed, not until the twentieth century.[2] Nobody would remember Thomas Jackson were it not for the Civil War. He was a competent junior officer during the Mexican-American War, but how many statues of first lieutenants of that conflict who died prior to 1861 have been erected in the years since? Indeed, Jackson is more commonly referred to by his nickname, Stonewall, which came during the Civil War.[3] As we shall see, this third claim is usually heavily reliant on the first or the second claim, but I’ve listed it here separately because it sometimes manages to skirt that issue.[4] For a thorough treatment of the subject, I recommend Battle Cry of Freedom, by James M. McPherson, Oxford University Press, 1988.[5] Legree's background is a transplanted northerner, which helps the novel’s argument significantly. Had Legree been a southerner, it would have come across as a purely regional attack.[6]Uncle Tom's Cabin is a melodrama written by a white woman in the first half of the nineteenth century. That it provides little insight into the psychological states of black slaves is therefore understandable.[7] Again, it's a melodrama with little psychological insight into its characters. It is very much of a kind with all sorts of disposable literature from the nineteenth century (or today, for that matter), except in theme. For a more substantial treatment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin's failing's as a novel, please refer to George Orwell's essay "Good Bad Books."[8] The Thirteenth Amendment mostly bans slavery within the United States. It does not, however, ban it outright, so it is technically legal, from a constitutional perspective, for a convicted prisoner to be sold.[9] Grant himself was generally not implicated in the corruption, and by most accounts was an honest man. However, he was also a deeply trusting man and created an environment in which corruption flourished.[10] Greeley, despite also being nominated by the Democrats, did not do well in the election of 1872. This meant that his death in between the casting of the popular vote and the voting of the electoral college did not change the outcome of the election. One wonders what would have happened had Grant died in between the two votes.[11] There were "irregularities" in some of the ballots. In order to win the election, Tilden only had to receive one of the disputed electoral votes, and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes had to win all of them. The commission that was supposed to impartially decide the apportionment of the votes ended up being composed of eight Republicans and seven Democrats — that the vote went according to party lines should not be a surprise, and that this was partisan nonsense has never really been meaningfully disputed.[12] For a more thorough treatment on the topic, James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Taught Me is an excellent resource.[13] The Klan was possibly founded in December of 1865. The history of the first Ku Klux Klan relies on poorly-kept records.[14] The re-enfranchisement of former rebels was extensive, to the point where Alexander H. Stephens, he of the Cornerstone Speech and the Vice Presidency of the Confederacy, would go on to be Georgia's Eight District's representative in the House from 1873 to 1882, when he resigned to take the office of Governor of Georgia.[15] Gradual abolition was passed in New York in 1799, with all children of slaves born after that time being technically free — except they were legally indentured until their mid-to-late twenties.[16] This is another attitude called out in Uncle Tom's Cabin. St. Clare's northern relatives are antislavery in sentiment, but also take the superiority of whites over blacks as obvious and natural.[17] "In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea / With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me / As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free"[18] "We are bringing to our numbers the loyal, true and brave / Shouting The battle cry of freedom / For although he may be poor, he shall never be a slave"[19] A song glorifying a failed attempt to create a republic of freed slaves within territory that would later attempt to secede.[20] A statement made on Facebook here, for example: Senator Ben Sasse[21] The leader of the Ku Klux Klan is the "Grand Wizard." His direct underlings are "Grand Dragons." Local cells are led by an "Exalted Cyclops." This sounds like it's out of a crappy Dungeons & Dragons campaign, but it's mostly designed to echo esoteric mystery cults, which use these sorts of naming practices to create a sense of grandeur. However, the Klan's "grandeur," much like the Third Reich's "theatricality," is inherently fragile. Thus, Nazis dancing in a swastika formation in The Producers generates a laugh, even though that's barely an exaggeration of actual Nazi pageantry, and Superman battling a Grand Wizard on a radio program can get children of Klan members cheering.[22] As reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of Klan chapters in the United States grew by over 100% in 2015, suggesting we may be looking at a fourth iteration of the Klan.[23] Without John Hay and John Nicolay's biography, there is little chance Lincoln would enjoy the exalted position he currently holds in reckonings of American presidents.[24] Yes, I’m cribbing from the Frankfurt School here.[25] There is no definite length of the film besides to say it is twelve reels long. At the time the film was released, manual cranking of the projector was still the norm, so depending on the vigor of the projectionist and the speed at which the accompanist played the recommended score, the film could come it at wildly different run times.[26] It displaced Ben-Hur: A Story of the Christ, which had displaced Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Note that Uncle Tom and Ben-Hur are both stridently anti-slavery, and were dwarfed in popularity by a book that took the complete opposite tack.[27] Adjusting for inflation, it is still the most successful film in box-office history, beating Avatar by close to half a billion dollars.[28] This is actually a common phenomenon. As another example, mental images of the Nazis are often shaped by Triumph des Willens, the 1935 propaganda film the Nazis themselves produced.[29] Local law enforcement were involved in the murders. The FBI was able to claim jurisdiction based on the 1870 Enforcement Act, discussed obliquely in Part III.[30] Again, Lies My Teacher Told Me.[31] The death of Eric Garner, involving an illegal chokehold death, is the most obvious parallel. It is not the only one.[32] Imagine someone calling Dachau a “mistake.” Doesn’t sound right, does it?

In Australia, one in five new mothers experience post-partum/post-natal depression, or anxiety. Post-partum depression can lead to a psychotic break, during which a mother may kill her child. She is not accountable before God for murder as she is criminally insane.Pastor Dr. David Jeremiah of Turning Point Ministries, as well as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, teach that all little children who die before the age of accountability go straight to the Kingdom of Heaven. Neither the Bible nor the Book of Mormon:Another Testament of Jesus Christ, provide the age of accountability. In Jospeh Smith Jr’s inspired translation of the Bible, Genesis 17:11–12 gives the age of accountability as 8 y.o. In Doctrine and Covenants Section 68, the age of accountability is given as 8 y.o.Dr John Gray, author of Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus, states in his book Children are from Heaven, that the age of accountability is 9 y.o.In New South Wales, Australia, children under 10 y.o. cannot be charged with a crime, as it is considered that they cannot comprehend enough between right and wrong to deliberately commit a crime.In the Book of Mormon:Another Testament of Jesus Christ, Moroni 8:8 Listen to the words of Christ, your Redeemer, your Lord and your God. Behold, I came into the world not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance; the whole need no physician, but they that are sick; wherefore, little children are whole, for they are not capable of committing sin; wherefore the curse of Adam is taken from them in me, that it hath no power over them; and the law of circumcision is done away in me.9 And after this manner did the Holy Ghost manifest the word of God unto me; wherefore, my beloved son, I know that it is solemn mockery before God, that ye should baptize little children.10 Behold I say unto you that this thing shall ye teach—repentance and baptism unto those who are accountable and capable of committing sin; yea, teach parents that they must repent and be baptized, and humble themselves as their little children, and they shall all be saved with their little children.11 And their little children need no repentance, neither baptism. Behold, baptism is unto repentance to the fulfilling the commandments unto the remission of sins.12 But little children are alive in Christ, even from the foundation of the world; if not so, God is a partial God, and also a changeable God, and a respecter to persons; for how many little children have died without baptism!So, while infanticide is a horrible thing, the children are saved through the Atonement of jesus Christ, and the mother is saved by Grace.That is the religious side of the question. I told the moderators that I would provide a psychiatric/psychological answer as well. It is as follows (these are the best three answers):Post-partum psychosisPost-partum psychosis is a serious mental illness that starts soon after childbirth. Fortunately it is very rare and there are very effective treatments.Psychosis essentially means a loss of reality. It usually comes on in a very quick and spectacular manner within the first few weeks after giving birth, but the onset can be within hours of deliveriy. It can be extremely scary, especially if you’ve never had it before, because you find it difficult to differentiate between reality and the illness playing tricks on your brain.On this page:Why do women have post-partum psychosis?What are the signs of post-partum psychosis?What to doWhat your partner and family can doWhy do women have post-partum psychosis?Things that are thought to contribute to post-partum psychosis include:a genetic predisposition (there is an increased risk in women with a family history of post-partum psychosis or bipolar disorder)severe sleep deprivation that can happen in the first little while after a baby is bornthe rapid hormonal changes around the birthphysical stress of delivery – particularly if there are other medical problems.There is also a relationship between post-partum psychosis and bipolar disorder. Women with bipolar disorder are at greatest risk of a relapse with psychotic symptoms soon after delivery. Conversely for some women, post-partum psychosis marks the first episode of a bipolar illness. However, this is not always the case. Some women will have only a single episode of post-partum psychosis, while others will have an episode of illness after each time they have a baby.Return to topWhat are the signs of post-partum psychosis?Women who have post-partum psychosis may have a range of the following symptoms:confusion and disorientation, about the day and time and who people areconcentration can be affected and your mind may feel foggy or that it is overloaded with too many thoughtssevere physical anxiety or agitation, such that you cannot stay stillvariable mood, either on a high, irritable or depressedinsomnia, feeling like you need less sleep and perhaps going days without sleepingdelusions or thoughts that are not true and that are often paranoid – that the hospital staff are spies, that your partner is an imposter in disguise. These thoughts may seem bizarre or silly when you are well, but in the middle of the illness they can seem realhallucinations or impaired sensations where you either hear, see or smell things that are not presentstrange sensations that you are not really yourself and there are others controlling your actions and thoughtsthoughts of and/or plans to harm yourself and your baby.Return to topWhat to doPost-partum psychosis is a psychiatric emergency and you need immediate treatment for your safety and the safety of your baby.Treatment will be provided in a hospital, in either a:psychiatric mother–baby unit, where your baby will stay with yougeneral adult psychiatric unit, where your baby will need to be cared for by your partner, family or friends until you are well enough to go home.​Treatment usually involves medication, but sometimes, if the episode is very severe, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is the fastest and most effective treatment to get you on the path to recovery.It may also be worthwhile to have counselling. The experience of psychosis can be very traumatic. You may be left grieving, scared or confused about the entire event. Talking through your experience can help you process and make sense of it.Return to topWhat your partner or family can doDepending on how unwell you are, it may be up to your partner or another family member to organise medical help for you. It can be very hard for family members to support a woman who has post-partum psychosis because she may resist help or think that people are intending to harm her. Partners can get advice and support through Beyond Blue, the hospital where your baby was born, your local hospital emergency department or GP. A Crisis Assessment or Acute Treatment team (sometimes called a CAT team) can also be accessed in a mental health crisis. Your local hospital or community health centre can help you to access the right service.Return to topRelated informationBeyond Blue Post-partum psychosis information and resourcesPANDAProvide feedback about the information on this pageShare this pageDisclaimerThe Women’s does not accept any liability to any person for the information or advice (or use of such information or advice) which is provided on the Website or incorporated into it by reference. The Women’s provide this information on the understanding that all persons accessing it take responsibility for assessing its relevance and accuracy. Women are encouraged to discuss their health needs with a health practitioner. If you have concerns about your health, you should seek advice from your health care provider or if you require urgent care you should go to the nearest Emergency Dept.https://www.panda.org.au › Info & SupportPANDA offers support for mums experiencing postnatal psychosis, a serious mental health condition that affects 1-2 women in every 1000 after childbirth.Postnatal Psychosis* can be a potentially life-threatening condition that can put both mother and baby at risk so recognising symptoms and seeking urgent medical assistance is essential. Women with postnatal psychosis will almost always need admission to hospital for specialised psychiatric assessment, care and treatment. Beyond the immediate treatment period, significant ongoing support and is required throughout the recovery process.A treatable illnessMost people know little, if anything about postnatal psychosis so when one experiences it, it comes as a shock. It can often happen‘out of the blue’ to women without any previous history of mental illness. Changes in behaviour and thinking are often sudden and dramatic. Postnatal psychosis can cause a loss of contact with reality, and behaviour that seems out of character. Fortunately postnatal psychosis is temporary and treatable. Women generally experience a full recovery with time and appropriate treatment and go on to mother their children as they expected to.Causes of postnatal psychosisWhile we know little about what causes postnatal psychosis, we do know that women who experience bipolar disorder or who have experienced postnatal psychosis after previous births are at greater risk. There is also an increased risk in women with a family history of postnatal psychosis or bipolar disorder.Severe sleep deprivation and rapid hormonal changes following childbirth may also be contributing factors. Many women will have only a single episode of postnatal psychosis, while others might experience it with more than one baby. For a smaller group of women, postnatal psychosis may mark the first episode of bipolar disorder.*This condition is also known as puerperal or postpartum psychosis.'I experienced delusional thinking and at times felt paranoid. I had times of severe depression, some elevated moods and severe anxiety.In Australia call: PANDA National Helpline (Mon to Fri, 9am - 7.30pm AEST/AEDT) Call 1300 726 306Postpartum psychosis: “I’m afraid of how you’ll judge me, as a mother and as a person”Postpartum psychosis: “I’m afraid of how you’ll judge me, as a mother and as a person”By Catherine Carver04 Jul 2017MindMental healthAfter giving birth, Catherine Carver became convinced that her baby had been swapped and that social workers were plotting to kill her. She recounts her terrifying journey into postpartum psychosis, and how she found healing in unexpected ways.Listen to the free audio version 24 minI have a story to tell you, but I’m afraid I’m a less than perfect narrator because there are crevasses in my mind that I fall through whenever I try to tell it. Let’s begin with a memory that is on solid ground: I can pin my finger firmly on the moment I began to wonder if something was really quite wrong. From behind me I heard a child’s voice, small but determined, counting, “One, two, three… one, two, three…” in a Glaswegian accent. I contorted this way and that in search of its pestering, persistent owner, but I was alone. This was new. Later that evening I watched a psychedelic display of electric lions, roaring tigers and the cast of the film Jumanji cavort on the bare blue wall. I wasn’t afraid, just captivated. Yet a voice, this time my own, questioned how I could be seeing such a spectacle and suggested, gently, that perhaps those around me were right – things were very wrong.Given that all of this was happening in my room on a psychiatric ward, I was a little late to the realisation party. There had been other not-so-subtle hints – in my belief that my baby had been swapped at birth, for instance, and that road signs were tailored messages for me. I held these truths to be self-evident and never considered them to be odd, let alone symptoms of an illness. Yet that’s precisely what they were – evidence of a sick and struggling brain. Just as a diseased heart struggles to keep time, or a broken leg struggles to bear weight, my poorly brain was struggling to maintain my personality and kept coughing up delusions and hallucinations.I was diagnosed with postpartum psychosis, a severe mental illness that affects about one or two in every 1,000 women soon after childbirth. It can cause a litany of symptoms, from anxiety and profound sadness to chattiness, hyperactivity and euphoria. Women with postpartum psychosis can rapidly cycle between moods and may experience hallucinations and delusions. While it’s more common in women who have bipolar disorder, it can affect women who’ve never had any mental health issues before. It’s a psychiatric emergency that requires urgent treatment because the symptoms can start suddenly and get worse quickly. At its most severe it poses a risk of suicide. It can even lead to accidental harm to the baby or infanticide, though this is exceedingly rare.Unfortunately, infanticide grabs headlines and so women who suffer postpartum psychosis often worry about the stigma of revealing they’ve had the disease, a stigma that also affects mothers with other maternal mental health problems, such as postpartum depression. Many don’t seek help. One Australian study found that of those women who had symptoms of postpartum depression, 41 per cent had not sought help by nine months after the birth. As well as stigma and embarrassment, many said they believed their symptoms were normal and would go away on their own.I can identify with those women. I feel the fear of stigma keenly as I write this, afraid of how you’ll judge me as a mother and as a person. And for months, I too thought my symptoms were a normal part of motherhood and would resolve. This was made easier to believe because the symptoms of postpartum psychosis can wax and wane, so sometimes I didn’t feel so bad. Yet at the peak of my disease a nurse told me I was one of the sickest women she’d seen enter the ward. This shocked me. Sure, I was a bit anxious, a bit bothered, but surely not seriously ill. I had put so much of it down to sleep deprivation, to the shock of becoming a new mother, to the stress of losing blood and developing an infection after the Caesarean section. Being a parent is meant to be hard, isn’t it? Yes, but it shouldn’t involve thinking trees are angry with you.It seems so obvious now but thanks to the disease I lacked what’s called “insight” in psychiatric parlance – awareness of how ill I was. I have insight now. I know how serious an illness I had and how lucky I was to eventually get the specialist medical help I needed.One in five mothers suffers from depression, anxiety or psychosis during pregnancy or the first year after giving birth, according to a report last year by the Independent Mental Health Taskforce for NHS England. Yet in England, fewer than 15 per cent of local clinical commissioning groups provide effective specialist community perinatal services for women with severe or complex conditions. Over 40 per cent provide no service at all. This is despite the fact that in the UK, suicide is the leading cause of maternal deaths in the first 12 months after the end of pregnancy.© MoonassiMany people who tell their stories of severe mental illness do so from a safe distance of years. My story is only months old, and the bits I remember, I see in full technicolour. It was my first pregnancy and it had gone pretty well, apart from some joint pain in my pelvis and the stress of commuting from St Albans to work as a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Some days it seemed as if the act of wearing my “Baby on board” badge rendered my fellow travellers temporarily blind and deaf to my bulging bump and seat request. I was done with commuting and also ready to be done with my NHS-mandated, irritatingly cheese- and wine-depleted diet. The end was in sight but in the first piece of evidence that my baby was destined to be a contrary madam, she was breech – essentially meaning she was the wrong way up in my womb – and therefore a plan was made for me to have an elective Caesarean section. In further verification of her wayward nature, she demanded to enter the world before the elective date. So my 8 lb 7 oz of pink, screamy gorgeousness, also known as Beatrix, was born by emergency Caesarean section in January 2016.Now, as I reflect on the gap between my expectations of bringing her into the world and the reality of it, I see a dark, vast cavern. I had expected to be the first person to hold her. I’d imagined a celebratory moment as the three of us were together as a family for the first time. In fact, due to the cocktail of drugs I had been given I spent most of my C-section trying to throw up. My husband was therefore the first to hold her, and clutched her in one arm and a sick bowl for me in the other. I also bled quite a lot, losing about a third of my blood volume. When the operation was over I began to shake violently, so I still couldn’t hold her. We returned to the maternity ward, where a nurse tried to get breastfeeding to work for us, but I was still shaking too much. Ever resourceful, she hand-milked me and collected the milk in a syringe to give to Beatrix. And that’s not the least dignified experience I’ve had since joining the ranks of motherhood.In those first few days I began to develop beliefs that I can now see as the first daggers of disease stabbing my mind. I thought all the nurses were talking about me, and had an ever-growing suspicion that my baby had been swapped. “She looks just like your husband,” the nurses said, and each time they did I was more convinced that she had been swapped and that they were part of a conspiracy trying to fool me. Over time, once back home with my baby, I felt increasingly anxious and had a burgeoning concern that ninja social workers were watching me and plotting to take my baby. I had to prove to the world that I was a model mum so the spying social workers wouldn’t see any signs of weakness. I therefore hid my suspicious thoughts and fears from everyone. Even my husband, who has been my best friend and confidant for over 13 years, wasn’t aware of just how ill I had become. However, he knew from my behaviour that something was wrong and so at his behest six weeks after the birth I went to see a GP. Unhelpfully, she said that it was a “red flag” against my care for Beatrix that I had said I didn’t want a particular health visitor coming round. The phrase set me off and I exited sharply from the meeting, convinced she was part of the baby-thieving conspiracy. Without the help I needed, over the following weeks my mind shattered into a thousand jagged pieces. I became manic.Five months after my baby was born things had reached the point where I was terrified of leaving the house for fear of murderous social workers. I had a new health visitor, who had picked up that something was amiss and had begun visiting every two weeks. When she came round one day to find me speaking rapidly and unable to stop pacing, she put the wheels in motion to get me help urgently.My mind was like a fantastical game of pinball, the steel balls of my thoughts zig-zagging at a million miles an hour around my energised grey matterAnd so it came to be that on an otherwise ordinary Sunday afternoon in June, I was admitted voluntarily to the mother and baby psychiatric unit (MBU) at St John’s Hospital, Livingston (we had left London for Edinburgh to be closer to family). I thought it seemed like overkill, but my mum and husband persuaded me it was a good idea. It didn’t seem like such a good idea once I arrived. As we approached the MBU I heard a baby scream and I instantly ran down the bare brick-walled corridor in the opposite direction, convinced the unit existed to collect up bad mothers and swap their babies for robots. My husband and a psychiatric nurse had to physically shepherd me on to the ward, coaxing me with promises that my baby girl and I could leave again soon. That was an optimistic assessment.My mind was like a fantastical game of pinball, the steel balls of my thoughts zig-zagging at a million miles an hour around my energised grey matter: “Red car. Gryffindor. Harry Potter. Harry Styles. Ooh, hair!” Each thought lit up like Vegas but burned out quickly, serving only as a springboard to the next – an experience that psychiatrists call a “flight of ideas”. It was exhilarating to think so quickly, faster than I had ever thought before, but there were too many thoughts for one mind to think. I tried explaining this, using an octopus-based analogy, to a psychiatric nurse, who said in a kind voice, the sort you might use when speaking to a small child or a golden retriever, that she didn’t follow. I didn’t expect her to follow. She was like a Peugeot 106 to my Formula 1 car, a three-legged donkey to my thoroughbred, the Circle Line to my bullet train – how could she possibly keep up with me? I didn’t need to slow down, I needed to speed up! And speed up I did, racing and pacing and chasing thoughts around the room. I paused only occasionally to line my belongings up in rows, in a vain attempt to create some order in my spiralling world of ever-increasing entropy.© MoonassiIt was a week before I could leave the room, my paranoid mind conjuring up a million ways harm would befall me in the wide-open savannah of the ward. I pictured the nurses’ station as being staffed by red-eyed hyenas and jackals, all waiting to shred me limb from limb. This was to change as the antipsychotic medication helped to heal my beleaguered brain, and over the weeks of my admission I came to see the MBU as a place of safety. It offered baby massage sessions, weaning classes and splash play activities, all of which enabled me to be the mother I wanted to be. As it was a six-bed unit, there was also the opportunity to meet other mothers who were going through the same thing and discuss the impacts of our various treatments as well as the trials and tribulations of motherhood. In short, it was a place that helped me to re-grow the confidence that my disease had decimated, making me feel positive about our ability to thrive together at home.I will forever be indebted to the dedicated, exceptionally talented professionals at St John’s MBU. The nurses, the doctors, the nursery nurses, the cleaners, the psychologist – they were united in their effort to care for me and they formed a net that caught me when I was falling fast. Some went above and beyond the remit of their jobs and became valued friends. It’s not an exaggeration to say their care saved my life. More than a year on since Beatrix’s birth, I still know I can lift the phone and get help from them.It makes sense that holistic care that nurtures and supports the mother–baby relationship is beneficial for a mother’s mental health. As the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence advises: “Women who need inpatient care for a mental health problem within 12 months of childbirth should normally be admitted to a specialist mother and baby unit, unless there are specific reasons for not doing so.” Yet MBUs are expensive to staff and there is a dearth of published evidence comparing the recovery of patients in an MBU with those on a general adult psychiatric ward (who will be separated from their babies). This lack of evidence probably does little to encourage the people in charge of the purse strings to fund MBUs. There are currently just 125 MBU beds in the UK, and some regions have none at all. The entire United States had zero MBU beds until 2011, when the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill opened its Perinatal Mood Disorders Inpatient Unit with five beds.Hannah Bissett is well placed to compare and contrast the experience of an MBU with that of a general adult psychiatric ward. In September 2009 she gave birth to her first baby, by emergency C-section, and just two weeks later she found herself admitted to an adult psychiatric ward with postpartum psychosis. In a story I can empathise with, Hannah recalls insomnia and a constant need to pace. She also describes a profound confusion that is a common symptom in postpartum psychosis: “I could barely put sentences together,” she recalls. “I couldn’t remember how to dress myself.”The value of this family time shouldn’t be underestimatedHannah was sectioned and spent a total of three and a half months in hospitals in the north of England, initially on two general adult psychiatric wards and then in a small MBU. Her memories of the early weeks of her admission are hazy. She acknowledges that the wards kept her safe. But the separation from her baby was “awful”, she tells me. “I had this one photo on the wall by my bed and it was really well thumbed.” In contrast, she speaks of the MBU with a smile in her voice: “It was my little haven to be with my baby and for my husband to come in and spend family time together.”The value of this family time shouldn’t be underestimated, and its importance is echoed in the story of Sally Wilson. Sally gave birth to her first baby, Ella, by emergency C-section in March 2015. She too developed postpartum psychosis and the very day of Ella’s birth she began to have the same confusion Hannah describes. “I couldn’t understand that I’d had a baby,” she says. Doctors initially looked for a physical cause, conducting a CT head scan and blood tests. They found nothing, and Sally’s condition progressively got worse until she became manic: “I was running around saying to people I need to breastfeed and I haven’t got time to eat my lunch.”Things escalated over the next few days until Sally collapsed and had a psychotic episode: “I kind of had what I’d describe as an out-of-body experience, where I could see the midwives and Jamie [her husband] and people around me. But Jamie wasn’t there at the time. I had this realisation that I’d killed Ella and I was dead myself and living in an afterlife. I saw the midwives taking Ella off to be resuscitated – even though this never happened in real life. From that point onwards, reality had changed…” Sally spent a week in a general adult psychiatric ward, until, she says, she lied about how ill she was to get discharged home. She had a home treatment team who visited her house every day for a month, then weekly, then monthly until a year after Ella was born. I ask how she thinks things might have been different if she’d been given a place in an MBU instead and she says: “In mother and baby units you have people who help you care for your baby and bond with your baby. It took me a very long time to bond with her – it’s probably taken the best part of two years to get over it and bond with her. I think all that could have been helped quite a lot, really.”© MoonassiBoth Hannah and Sally tell me their partners were essential to their recovery. I can only concur. My husband was my advocate, my voice when I was too manic to make sense; he did the research I couldn’t sit down long enough to do, and his 6′ 3″ bear hugs formed one of my few places of safety. I would squeeze him hard, making the muscles in my arms ache, as if holding on tight enough could stop my manic need to pace and cease my swirling maelstrom of thoughts.Like most women with postpartum psychosis, I was offered medication to treat it. There are several options, and it can be a bit of trial and error to find the right drug. This may include antipsychotic drugs, anti-anxiety medications, mood stabilisers and antidepressants. In my case an antipsychotic called olanzapine was key to my recovery, and luckily it was the first I tried. Sally went through six and found none that really tackled her disease, leaving her with psychotic symptoms eight months after Ella’s birth. Her husband, being an academic, scoured the literature to find an evidence-based alternative. What he found was a game-changer for Sally: electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).ECT was first developed in 1938, and involves passing an electric current through the brain to induce a seizure. When ECT was first used, the seizure would cause painful muscle spasms that could even break the patient’s bones. Today, a general anaesthetic and a muscle relaxant are given, which means the most of the seizure that’s likely to show is a slight twitch of the foot or tensing of the jaw. Doctors can “see” the seizure by monitoring the electrical activity in the brain. A course of ECT usually involves multiple treatments. Its use is controversial, and typically reserved for the most severely unwell or for those patients who haven’t improved on medication.When her husband first told her of ECT, Sally was surprised because she didn’t think it still existed as a treatment. But, after researching her condition, she enlisted the help of Ian Jones, a specialist perinatal psychiatrist from Cardiff, to persuade her medical team to try the treatment. She tells me it was a success: “It is not a nice thing to have to go through, but it basically saved my life.”However it works, ECT certainly seems to make a big difference to some patientsHannah also had ECT and was also sceptical at first. “To Joe Public it’s an absolutely barbaric thing to do,” she says. “If you’d asked me about it ten years ago, I’d have thought of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The reality is different. Having been a medical student, I have seen ECT administered and can confirm that present-day ECT would make a truly boring scene in a film. It’s a quick, clinical procedure that can provide rapid relief of life-threatening symptoms. However, as yet we don’t know how it works. Its use began because doctors had noticed that some people with depression or schizophrenia who also had epilepsy found the symptoms of their mental illness improved after a fit. It’s thought that it is the induced fit, as opposed to the administered electricity, that has the therapeutic effect.However it works, it certainly seems to make a big difference to some patients. Like Sally, Hannah tells me ECT saved her life. Alas, like most treatments it comes with potential side-effects. In the hours following treatment, people can often complain of headache and muscle aches, with a smaller number left tearful or frightened. In the longer term, memory can be a significant issue and this is the source of a lot of the controversy surrounding ECT. The Royal College of Psychiatrists sums up the available evidence: “Surveys conducted by doctors and clinical staff usually find a low level of severe side-effects, maybe around 1 in 10. Patient-led surveys have found much more, maybe in half of those having ECT. Some surveys conducted by those strongly against ECT say there are severe side-effects in everyone.” Both Sally and Hannah have memory loss from the period of treatment, which could be attributed to ECT (although it’s hard to separate this from the potential memory impact of the illness itself). Neither appears particularly distressed by this fact, as Hannah explains very matter-of-factly: “It’s a small window of time, I can live with it really. I have to – I can’t change it.” Other people who have had ECT feel very differently, saying the treatment has had a permanent, negative effect on their memory. Some go further and say ECT changed their personality or caused them to lose skills, but this remains an area of controversy.As my time on the MBU progressed and I became well, my fearful thoughts were replaced with a lot of questions, such as: what had happened to my brain? I had never suffered from mental illness before and I was used to trusting my mind implicitly. It had earned me a double first at the University of Cambridge, a medical degree and a Master’s from Harvard. What had happened to make it betray me at what was supposed to be a beautiful time in my life? Working in academia, I’m a fully paid up member of the “knowledge is power” club. When faced with adversity I am used to using knowledge like a scalpel to dissect fear and confusion away so I can see the thing responsible for my situation and tackle it head on.To find answers, I turned to Jessica Heron, a senior research fellow in perinatal psychiatry at the University of Birmingham and director of Action on Postpartum Psychosis (APP), a charity that provides support and information for those affected. She sympathetically listened to my story and patiently responded to a litany of questions with the best available evidence in the field.While the risk of postpartum psychosis in the general population is about 0.1 per cent, for women with bipolar disorder the risk is far higher, at around 25 per centI asked her what we know about the risk factors for postpartum psychosis and the first three words of her reply sum up our understanding of the disease generally: “Very little, really.” But she went on to say: “The best guess at the moment is that biological and hormonal factors are involved. There’s been some studies into the most likely candidates and they haven’t found anything consistent. We do know it runs in families more often than you’d expect. We know there’s a strong link with bipolar disorder. So some of the risk factors that have been found in bipolar, like sleep disruption, [may be implicated].” While the risk of postpartum psychosis in the general population is about 0.1 per cent, for women with bipolar disorder the risk is far higher, at around 25 per cent. This suggests there may be a significant overlap in the biochemistry of what’s happening in the two conditions. Unfortunately, when it comes to the neurobiology of both bipolar and postpartum psychosis, there are many theories at large – genes that have been implicated and chemicals that have been incriminated – but no clear answers.I asked Heron why so little of the biology of postpartum psychosis has been elucidated. “Because it’s been perceived as rare, I think funders haven’t seen it as a priority,” she replied. As she points out, it is not a common complication of childbirth, but it’s comparable with the risk of a 30-year-old woman having a baby with Down’s syndrome, something that is researched extensively and which women are very much aware of. Given that suicide is a major cause of maternal death, it seems shocking that postpartum psychosis has such a struggle to attract funding. APP is the leading source of information for women with the condition and it too battles to be financially secure: having previously been funded by the National Lottery, it currently relies upon funding from Comic Relief to keep its peer-support network running. The loss of this group would not only affect women with postpartum psychosis; it would also leave the research community impoverished. Its network includes 1,000 women, Heron said, “who can help in developing research proposals and giving feedback and saying what they think is most important to study. We’ve also got a very ready population of women who really want to take part in research, but lack the capacity to make the most of this.”APP receives a growing number of requests from researchers for information, reflecting an increasing interest in postpartum psychosis. Hopefully the funding tides will shift too and there will be fewer question marks floating around the field.The knowledge drought around my illness left me feeling that science, my usually faithful mistress, had failed me. Thankfully a new friend came to my rescue and provided some of the insight and understanding I sought. My new friend hailed from the humanities and is best described as the art of storytelling. As I plundered the internet for scientific facts I came across many personal accounts of postpartum psychosis. The stories of other women let me see the beast from many different angles, as each woman held up a mirror to her own experience. With each reflection I saw a different part of the beast and in time this helped me build up a better picture of what postpartum psychosis was and what the path to recovery looked like.I also found recording my own story therapeutic. This started in the hospital, initially through the medium of photos because I couldn’t focus or stay still long enough to write anything. The photos I took tell a tale of mercurial emotions. I charted my depths of sadness through tear-stained selfies and the gut-wrenchingly empty cot when my baby was in the nursery. She was gone to allow me to banish sleep deprivation, but I felt like I’d been hollowed out when she wasn’t there. Matching the depths of sadness were the heights of an electric current of raw anger. This was revealed in images of bruises splashed across my legs from when my sentences were punctuated by self-directed fury. Successes are also trapped in time, such as the first time I roamed the hospital grounds – holding firmly onto my husband, but out in the real world once more. The photos are hard to look at now, but they also help me pin down my personal narrative. When I try to recall the early weeks of being ill, I find my memory is riddled with crevasses. However, looking at the photos allows me to fill in some of the gaps and own that time. Vitally, they also give me an understanding that doesn’t depend on other people’s accounts of what happened to me. This ability to tell my own story goes some way to giving me power over postpartum psychosis, stopping it from stealing my memories of my baby’s early months; however awful some of them may be, they are mine.Despite the rich medium of imagery, I was pleased when I could once again communicate using the written word. I used Venn diagrams to try and explain my qualms about breastfeeding while taking antipsychotic drugs. I scribbled like a mad hatter about the challenges and injustices of the day. In the early weeks it was like I’d fallen off a motorbike at great speed and my mind was all raw and pitted with debris from the road. But, like taking photos, writing was therapeutic and formed a key part of the healing process. Hannah also cited writing as something that helped, in her case in the form of a diary that let her flick back over the months and years and see how she had improved.Narrative writing allows you to impose order on the chaos that disease foists on your lifeHannah and I are not alone in finding help in storytelling. In 2006 there was a review of 146 randomised controlled trials of written or spoken “experimental disclosure” (disclosing information, thoughts and feelings about personal and meaningful topics). It found significant positive effects across a range of measures including psychological health and physiological functioning. But by what mechanism might storytelling translate into these physical and psychological benefits? The following year, Matthew Kreuter and colleagues came up with a hypothesis for how narrative communication (which includes storytelling, entertainment, education, journalism, literature and testimonials) might benefit people in the case of cancer, but which I think is transferable to mental illness too.They suggest that narrative writing allows you to impose order on the chaos that disease foists on your life. This gets to the heart of why, for me, storytelling has been integral to recovering from postpartum psychosis. My diseased brain was the grand high queen of chaos. She had been making up scary stories and convincing me they were facts – like that the depot at the end of my street was an outpost for ninja social workers who would break into the house, steal my baby and murder me. I felt like I was standing in a hurricane of these terrifying thoughts, and writing was like stepping into the quiet eye of the storm where I could physically pin my thoughts onto the page and stop them constantly whizzing around my brain. For someone used to being in control, this was a godsend.The researchers also propose that the process of writing a narrative gives you a distance and perspective that reframes the illness as a set of solvable problems or an opportunity for positive change. I made a list of things I needed to be able to do in order to be well and get home, such as being able to use the communal kitchen, and venturing off the ward for the first time. One item on the list was about ending my 24/7 observation by a member of staff, something I put down in shorthand as “Lose the shadow”, which led a member of staff to carefully enquire in a concerned tone about who exactly “The Shadow” was.I also wanted to find a positive from the experience – something I tried explaining to my psychiatrist while I was still manic, telling him that I would make jugfuls of glorious lemonade from the godforsaken lemons that had been piled high on my plate. I slightly undermined the seriousness of my point by jumping to the fact Lemonade was Beyoncé’s latest album. Yet even that little fact became a key part of my story and recovery, as Beyoncé became a source of bonding with a nurse who turned out to be a fellow devotee. I found that stories became a form of currency – when staff handed me excerpts of their life stories, I could see them more as real people and could trust them with more of my story.With the combined therapies of medication, the MBU and storytelling, I became well enough to go home after six weeks. Unfortunately the road to recovery from postpartum psychosis is often beset with challenges. About three months after being discharged I developed postpartum depression, an experience Heron reassured me is more common than not after postpartum psychosis, and I was hospitalised in the MBU for a further three months. I got home, only to be admitted to hospital for a third time, though only briefly. Once home again I felt I should be back to “normal” me. Nope. It wasn’t until I spoke to Hannah that I realised recovery really begins when you walk out of the hospital doors. One thing she said, which resonated with me, was: “I describe it as being shattered into a million pieces and then rebuilding it all gradually, the main thing being the confidence in my own abilities.” I’ve always been a confident person but the experiences of the last year have dented that.© MoonassiWriting this article is part of the process of rebuilding my confidence. Being adept at writing is one of the things that is core to my identity – the pre-psychosis me managed to write Immune, an accessible (and hopefully entertaining) book on the immune system. As well as understanding and processing what had happened to me, I needed to do this to prove post-psychosis me could still write.Pre-psychosis me was also adept at shouting about things in the world she felt strongly about. Yet post-psychosis me seemed to have lost her voice – I found it hard to tell even my nearest and dearest what had happened. However, I also had a gnawing need to act. I felt that part of the reason there were only 17 MBUs in the UK was that women found it hard to shout about this compared with less stigmatised diseases. Looking at the mother-and-baby photos on my Facebook feed, you could be forgiven for thinking new motherhood is some sort of heaven filled with cutesy shoes and blissed-out smiles – but I know that 10–15 per cent of these mothers are suffering from postpartum depression. That’s a lot of sadness hidden behind that impenetrable wall of smiles. I wanted to shout about maternal mental health, and postpartum psychosis in particular. And this is something to be encouraged, said Heron: “When people speak out, other women realise it’s not something to be ashamed of or feel guilty about; it’s a medical illness like any other. It’s shocking, it’s frightening and it’s scary, but women do get better.” In fact, she said, the prognosis is “really good, really positive. Full recovery is definitely the most likely outcome.”When people speak out, other women realise it’s not something to be ashamed of or feel guilty aboutWomen who have experienced postpartum psychosis have more than a 50 per cent chance of another episode following a subsequent birth. This leads us to one of the questions I’ve been asking myself: would I risk being shattered once more? I think of the fun and fights and memories and love that I get from having siblings; it’s an important relationship unlike any other. I want Beatrix to have that. However, as you’ll be unsurprised to hear, I’d rather not repeat the last year. There are things that can be done to try and reduce the risks, though nobody seems able to tell me by how much. One measure is to take antipsychotics in the last stages of pregnancy, assuming I’m comfortable with the idea of exposing my baby to these drugs in utero. Another is to be admitted to the MBU for five days post-delivery so I can be watched closely for any signs of psychosis. As Heron told me, “Giving antipsychotics at the first sign of symptoms can prevent episodes from being as severe and long-lived.” So if we do decide to have another baby it should be different next time. And it’s possible I would be psychosis-free. Sally decided not to try for more children; Hannah went on to have a psychosis-free birth with her second child.It’s a bridge that my husband and I will cross in the future. For now I’m focused on the present and grateful that the MBU and various forms of storytelling – from the stories on APP to my photo diary – have helped me move from a place of acute illness to being at home and well with my baby girl. It’s not a completed journey, there are still ups and downs, but storytelling continues to help me process and come to terms with what was one of the most disturbing experiences of my life. Hopefully by telling my story I can give a voice to the women who are now struggling or have struggled with postpartum psychosis and other maternal mental health problems. Speak to your friends about it, share it and shout about it with me – together we can break the stigma.Find out what's happened with Catherine since this story was published in our update.For support and information on postpartum psychosis, contact Action on Postpartum Psychosis (APP). In the UK and Republic of Ireland, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the USA, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK.Catherine Carver has previously been employed by Wellcome, which publishes Mosaic.