Lessons on Changing the World from the Man Who Helped End Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
When I completed my essay, “Too Human,” one of the first things I did was send a copy to Aaron Belkin, the founding director of the Palm Center, a research institute that played a key role in the successful effort to end the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” (DADT) policy and that is currently engaged in a national policy conversation about military service by transgender personnel.
Belkin is one of the most incisive, profound, and unsentimental thinkers we have when it comes to thinking about how to use language, and communications, to advance policy goals. Whatever your politics, it’s hard to deny the brilliant efficacy of the strategy he gamed out to help overturn Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He’d be a great general.
I wanted his take on my essay in no small part because I suspect that my special talent, if I have one, is much less as a general than as a scout. I have a feel for the lay of the land, and I’m good at conveying what I see to others. But I need a general to help me to see how to translate that into a workable strategy.
Below is an edited version of the conversation Belkin and I had, in email and on the phone, about my essay.
-Dan Oppenheimer
Aaron Belkin: Hi Daniel — I read your essay a few different times, leaving space in between the readings to let the ideas sink in. One of the frustrating dynamics at play echoes something one of my cousins, a math teacher with a challenging group of disadvantaged students, said when I asked him which reform(s), of all of the many great ideas offered by smart education experts, might have an impact on learning?
He answered with two words: “reduce poverty.”
So I guess I would ask you, in response to your very rich essay, what are you trying to do? How, in other words, can your ideas about normativity and mental health gain traction given the underlying economic, political and cultural desperation in American society today?
Or is that the wrong question? Is this a thought piece intended to help readers appreciate how our dysfunctional ideas about normativity implicate the provision of mental health services, rather than an effort to arrive at something more concrete, pragmatic, and policy-oriented?
As a thought piece, I wouldn’t change a word. As a call-to-action, I would have a lot to say. But in that latter case, my broadest point would take into account my cousin’s reply about educational reform.
Daniel Oppenheimer: What am I trying to do? To be honest I’m not sure. At a minimum I’m trying to work through what I think, in a very personal way, about some of the issues that have come up over the last two and a half years, since I came to the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health as communications manager.
In particular, I think there’s been a tension between the lefty part of me, as the son of a union rep and the grandson of communists, and the more mainstream liberal part of me, the guy who’s studied at, and worked for, a bunch of elite institutions and who now works for a charitable foundation with a hefty endowment. And this tension manifests in my reaction to some of the ways in which the foundation and its allies use language.
I come from a left-wing political background. In that world the assumption is that you’re never going to get anywhere close to the society you want without challenging the fundamental distribution of power and wealth in America, and without fighting to take apart the ideas that prop up the status quo distribution of power and wealth. I buy that. Entirely.
I also, however, believe that the institutions of mainstream society play an enormously valuable role in sustaining the relatively humane and non-corrupt, if still deeply flawed, society in which we currently live. We’re not a utopia, but we’re also not a dystopia, and we have a lot of boring, bourgeois structures to thank for that non-dystopian-ness. In that sense I’m more of a liberal than a leftist.
The mental health establishment, of which the Hogg Foundation and most of our allies are card-carrying members, is a liberal establishment. It doesn’t tend to challenge systemic inequality and exploitation. Instead it works to ameliorate the consequences of inequality and misery, and it operates from the assumption that if we can be smart and thoughtful enough about how we deliver care, we can get pretty close to where we need to be without radical change. As I said, the work that follows from those assumptions is enormously valuable on its own terms, but I think it has its limits. I fear it’s wrong about how far it can take us. And that makes me uneasy.
I’m also uneasy about the ways in which the language we use as an establishment, to talk about mental health and illness, may implicitly reinforce some of the basic ideas of individualism and anti-collectivism that the left wing part of me thinks are part of the problem. We talk about a lot about individual empowerment. We talk about individual recovery. We talk about mental illness or difficulty as if it’s the product of individual or family dysfunction, or biology, and not so much a product of poverty or inequality or more intangible but very real atmospheric qualities of our culture.
So one question I have is whether it’s possible, even as an establishment, that we could develop and promote a language that would weaken rather than reinforce some of the more politically problematic assumptions of our society.
To get back to your original question, probably the simplest explanation of what I’m trying to do, in the essay, is get closer to some clarity. In that sense it’s very much a think piece, and one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you about it is that I imagine you’ve dealt with some similar issues in your work.
In particular, I’ve heard you talk about what you see as the degree to which our culture is far too celebratory of military values. And yet your whole project has been to make more room, in the military, for people who have been excluded. Not only that, but in order to achieve that objective, you’ve leveraged precisely those military values, and our collective embrace of them, that prop up unreflective militarism. You’ve painted a totally traditional picture of patriotic minded gays and lesbians and trans folk, who just want to fight for their country like everyone else.
So is there a conflict there?
Belkin: Absolutely. The messaging that we’ve used to work on gays and trans inclusion in the military has been very militarized. We’re discussing the notion (which is true by the way) that troops want to join the military and serve like everyone else does, and that their inclusion is going to promote military readiness. So it’s implicitly and explicitly presenting the military as a noble institution.
A good example of this dynamic were the stories, which we helped research and break, about the Arabic language translators who were fired for being gay at a time when the military had a desperate shortage of such linguists. These were people who wanted to serve, and whose skills were essential to the two wars we were fighting in the Middle East.
Those stories were a key moment when the public saw, oy vey, we are losing Arabic linguists.
It was a great weapon against the policy that was responsible for their firing. “We’re failing in the war on terror because of this.”
It’s not a great argument, however, against the fact that we were fighting an unjustified war, or the framing that it should be a “war” at all. It reinforces it. And we were aware of that.
Oppenheimer: But you did it anyway.
Belkin: Just because there might be costs to a messaging opportunity doesn’t mean you should shy away from it.
We made the same calculation that other marginalized groups have made in the past, that first you have to fight to be included in the institutions of American life, even if you may have critiques of some of those institutions. Full citizenship first. The military has long been the site of this kind of struggle. The military was racially integrated, just to give one example, six years before Brown vs. the Board of Education. And that integration became an important foundation from which to make the broader claims for the inclusion of African-Americans in all realms of American life.
How can you make the argument that it’s okay to send someone to fight, and possibly die, in service to our country, but also okay to exclude them from the other major institutions of American life? You can’t. Which is a why we keep winning these battles.
At the same time, though, in making the argument for inclusion you’re removing yourself from the pool of opposition to militarism. And so there were some anti-militarists in the LGBT rights movement who refused to participate in the campaign to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” They felt we were wrapping ourselves in the flag.
To an extent they were right, but it was a trade-off we thought was worth making.
Oppenheimer: I’m with you. I’m a pragmatist. Win that battle, and then move on to the next one.
Belkin: Right, and in fact we’ve done some work on militarism, thinking about how we might go about helping the public to understand how deeply militarized American culture has become, and how dangerous that is for the country, for the military and for the troops . We’re not afraid of that fight, but we were careful to separate it from the fight for inclusion.
But I’ll be honest, it’s a tough one. With DADT, we just had to flip one bad idea, which was this idea that gays in the military undermined unit cohesion, and turn it on its head. We just had to show that discriminating against gays was in fact what undermined military readiness. There were other groups working on lobbying, field organizing, litigation and the like. But as far as public education went, there was really just one message that we had to focus on.
I convened a meeting on militarism, with some of the top military scholars in the country, and asked them what are the lies that are propping up militarism. They came up with 19 lies. That’s a very big target. With DADT it was a single bad lie that was propping up a single bad law. With militarism, there are so many policies that would need to be changed, and so many lies that would need to be exposed.
Which brings us back to your essay, and your concerns about the ways that mental health language may be propping up a bad system.
What is it you’re trying to change? If you could just snap your fingers and change the public’s mind about one thing, what would it be?
Oppenheimer: Before I answer that, I just want to acknowledge the good reasons why people are using the terms and frames they’re using, in the mental health world. I’m critical of a lot of that language, from that longer term perspective of wanting to disrupt ideas of individualism and self-sufficiency at their roots, and that’s why I wrote the essay. But there are very real, on the ground reasons why advocates are using the words they’re using. In a lot of cases they’re making the same calculation you did. We need to win this fight now, even if there are costs in terms of other fights. And often it’s very much a fight for inclusion, for full rights of citizenship, for recognition of a fundamental equality and right to autonomy and voice. As they say, “nothing about us without us.” My deep and perhaps somewhat airy structural complaints should not stand in the way of those kinds of fights.
I think my critique stands, though, in a few ways. One is that it’s always worth being clear about the trade-offs you’re making, as you’ve been honest on the ways your campaign may have reinforced militarism. That candor is much better than pretending it’s entirely win-win.
Another is that there are a lot of campaigns we run, in the mental health world, that really don’t have those kinds of stakes. A lot of the anti-stigma campaigns we run, for instance, aren’t pointed at any particular bad policy. They’re just a general effort to reduce the stigma around mental illness, and to a considerable extent they’re just broadcast out into the ether, not tied to any particular measurable outcome. As a community we spend millions of dollars every year on these kinds of campaigns, and I have real questions about whether they’re doing more harm than good, or at least whether they could be doing a lot more good than they are.
But back to your question. If I could change one thing, what would it be? I think it would be some deep change in how we understand what we are, and how we function, as human beings. It would be a radical shift in our appreciation of how vulnerable, dependent, contingent, and irrational we are. Because I think we’re really frail beings, psychologically, in a lot of ways, and our flourishing is incredibly dependent not just on the people around us, or our smaller community, but on the massive structural forces of our culture and our economy.
I’d like to think that if we saw ourselves that way, more than we do now, then we’d be driven to build a healthier culture and economy. And in that kind of culture we would not only have a far more humane and complex attitude toward what we call “mental illness,” we would have less of it. There would be less poverty. Less inequality. More security and less toxic anxiety. The big forces that do so much to produce the dysfunctions of our age would be less powerful.
I should be clear. I don’t think these macro forces are the cause of all mental illness. There are real biological and genetic causes of certain conditions, but surely there would be less depression, less anxiety, less borderline personality disorder. Even very biological seeming conditions like schizophrenia, we’re now learning, aren’t as separate from the social environment as we once thought, and certainly the course of one’s life after the onset of something like schizophrenia can look radically different depending on the context and the community in which someone’s experiencing it.
Belkin: If the public was able to own up to how vulnerable we are, how much care we need, how dependent we are, are you sure that that would add up to a reorganization of society along the lines that you’d like to see?
Oppenheimer: Not at all. It’s an intuition. I mean, it’s an intuition guided by all my years of reading and living and writing and listening and paying attention, but I don’t want to claim more for it than that. In fact, when I put it that way I’m not sure why anyone would listen to me at all, other than because there’s something about the way I articulate the matter that resonates for them.
I’d also say, I suppose, that there’s really very little evidence that what we’re doing now, from a communications point of view, is having much effect. I’ve read the research on anti-stigma campaigns. It’s very hard to design and implement an effective campaign, and very unclear how effective even the most effective campaigns truly are.
Every time there’s a mass shooting, to give another example, mental health advocates come out in force to provide the facts on the very thin relationship between mental illness and violence, to push back against scapegoating of the mentally ill, and I do think we achieve a certain success in this realm. The conversation is more nuanced than it would be, and far less cruel, than if we weren’t out there doing what we’re doing. But it’s a rearguard action. It never seems to seep in. We have to be out there making it again the next time around. We’re not out there, in between incidents, changing the conversation, framing a new conversation about the causes of violence in our culture.
So I guess part of me, when it comes down to it, feels like we don’t actually have that much to lose. That if we really got together, as a community, and tried out some really radical approaches, the costs of failure would be surprisingly low. And hey, we might succeed.
Belkin: It would be really interesting to see what would happen with a vulnerability and dependence campaign. I can imagine that if were tens of tens of millions of dollars to go crazy about this from a programming perspective, you could do some fascinating work. You could start in a city, to test two or three years of messaging, see the impact.
But of course you’d still have to know what kind of impact you’re trying to measure. If after three years the percent of people in therapy went from 9 percent to 17 percent, is that the goal? How do you measure an increase in compassion and interdependence?
Another way to go about it would be to research and document the benefits of having the kind of perspective you’re talking about, within an individual, versus the costs of having the more individualistic perspective. What if you discovered that anti-collectivist individuals were 72 percent more prone to alcohol abuse, for example.
Or you could develop a comparative measure to compare polities and societies, and measure social outcomes. You could go to societies where their sense of vulnerability has changed and see what outcomes did or didn’t follow.
It does sound ridiculous and high-falutin’, but when you’re trying to do something radical or radically different, it always sounds that way at the beginning.
With the DADT campaign, for instance, when we started discussing DADT in terms of the way that, according to research, discrimination undermined readiness, there were plenty of other groups that didn’t emphasize that frame in their own communications. They were using a fairness message, arguing that discrimination against gays and lesbians was unfair and undemocratic. It’s not that the message was wrong. You can see the logic of it, and agree with it. It’s that we didn’t think that it was working.
So we began emphasizing our main point about discrimination harming readiness, and the other groups got in line pretty quickly.
Oppenheimer: That’s one of the aspects of your work that I find so appealing. On the one hand it’s profoundly insight based. You had this epiphany that the unit cohesion argument could be flipped on its head. You had an intuition, based on your research and your life experience and your worldview. It wasn’t derived quantitatively, from an evidence base of best practices in fighting discrimination. It began with a moment of inspiration.
On the other hand, once you had the insight you went about testing it and modeling it in a very rigorous and concrete way. The success of it was clear, and so it became a best practice. It became an approach that others could emulate.
Belkin: We had clear wins from pretty early on. Three or four times a year we would break a story that would go national. The financial cost of firing gays and lesbians is almost 100 percent higher than the GAO reports. The military is sending gays and lesbians to war, knowing they’re gay, and then firing them when they get back. The Arabic language linguists being fired.
We didn’t have metrics that could track precisely how the stories would lead to the change in public opinion, but you could see when these stories hit, and you could sense the temperature change.
It was enough to persuade a lot of our allies in the broader movement to get on board with our approach. They also had this direct experience where we had been clobbered when we had tried to rely on that fairness message, and then Generals and Admirals who supported discrimination would respond that they were sorry that the policy was unfair, but protecting the lives of the troops is more important than fairness. So they were open to something new.
Oppenheimer: Well that gives me hope. I still don’t know exactly what the call to action is, what the lies are that need debunking, or how we would go about doing that. But it does seem to me that if someone were able to really articulate a new approach, within our mental health world, and it proved successful, that a lot of us would fall in line pretty quickly. We just need some more clarity, and some more inspiration. We need an Aaron Belkin for mental health.
Belkin: Maybe it’s you.
Oppenheimer: I doubt it, but I’ll be an early adopter.
