The "Ransom Notes" Campaign, and Disability Metaphors

This morning, I wrote about the new "Ransom Notes" campaign from the NYU Child Study Center, which likens psychiatric disorders to kidnapers. If you haven't visited that site yet and looked at the ads, go ahead and do it now.

I've recently had some experience with using metaphor to describe a disability, and it's been a good one. In my recent review of The Anxiety Cure for Kids, I mentioned the idea of characterizing anxiety as a dragon that lives in a child's head and tries to lock the child in a cage. My anxious daughter took to that idea immediately, with some relief that there was a way to think of her scary thoughts as coming from something that is not really "her."

So I can see why, to somebody at a conference table somewhere, the idea of rendering psychiatric disorders as something frightening outside of the child would make sense -- seem empowering, even. Certainly a dragon is a figure of fear as much as a ransom-note writer, at least from a child's-eye view. It's tempting to want to think of a disability as something that has taken away your happy, functioning child, locked him or her away, maybe, in a cage just like that dragon's.

But there's something else about that "dragon" technique that I especially appreciated, and that's the way anxious kids aren't encouraged to slay the dragon, or banish it, or escape and never see it again, but to learn to live with it, and handle its occasional fire-breathing spells.

The authors of The Anxiety Cure for Kids suggest giving the dragon a name that makes it less threatening (my daughter calls hers Moseby, after the fussy and easily upset hotel manager in Disney Channel's The Suite Life of Zack and Cody). The cure involves keeping a journal to remember ways of circumventing the dragon's powers, and to use them when anxiety recurs in a way that gives a kid confidence.

Then, too, there's the revelation that while anxiety can be harmful and impair functioning, there are also ways in which it can be an incredibly positive force in a person's life. My daughter's dragon makes her feel bad and doubt herself and shy away from people ... but it also makes her finish her homework and pay attention in class and be very serious about operating a motor vehicle. A little fear can be good; it's just when the volume gets turned up too high -- when Moseby goes from cautious to full-out hysterical -- that there's trouble. And that, with practice, can be managed.

I see no such optimism, or empowerment, or big-picture view in this "Ransom Notes" campaign. And that, I think, is where it has the potential to do enormous damage. It is a campaign of powerlessness. Children are powerless to escape. Parents are powerless to stop it. The message that the way to combat this terrorist that has kidnaped your child is to seek professional help represents false hope -- that paying the ransom in medical bills will cause the bad thing to go away. Certainly, it may help. But the metaphor of a ransom note is black and white: Do this and your child will be returned; do something else, and your child will be lost forever.

Is shock and fear and threat really the best context in which to place disorders like ADHD, autism, Asperger's syndrome, depression, bulimia, and OCD? I can't see it helping anybody, honestly. I'd think it would make parents less likely to want their children to be diagnosed with these disorders. I'd think it would make parents whose children are already diagnosed with these disorders feel that if they do the wrong thing, they'll be at fault for their child's fall. I'd think it would make children with these disabilities feel like pawns, at the mercy of those seeking ransom and those paying it. And I'd think it would give those who don't live with these disorders every day a dangerously limited and alarmist notion of what they entail.

I don't believe this is what the NYU Child Study Center intends, and I wish they'd rethink before these messages are absolutely everywhere. It's a good intention undone by bad metaphor.

There's a petition online now against this campaign, featuring a letter signed by the heads of many disability organizations. I'm going to sign it, and if you're troubled by these ransom notes, perhaps you'll want to do so, too. Parents of children with special needs have enough to fight and fear without this.