About a week ago, I had to leave class because I had trouble breathing. It got harder and harder to take a deep breath, and a few minutes in (when I could really only breath in, not out) I knew that I was dying. I walked down the hallway, violently shaking, and attracted the attention of a passerby who followed me into the bathroom. In the bathroom stall, I vomited a few times before I could stand up and walk out. I was light headed and dizzy, and found out that the passerby had called an ambulance for me. A crowd was formed outside of the bathroom near the two EMTs who tried to strap something onto my arm to check my blood pressure. I didn’t want to die in front of all of these people so I ran out. A few hours later I was fine and got a really tasty dinner with friends at Sava’s.

That was a panic attack — in case you’re not familiar with what a panic attack feels like, this source does a really great job of mapping out the symptoms while also kind of dehumanizing it. Use it as a resource to conceptualize and then also imagine that feeling you get in your stomach when you go too high on a swing or think there’s an extra step at the top of the stairs, and then add the feeling you get when you absolutely think that you’re going to die (and I mean, like, how you would feel if someone had you pinned down and had a gun to your head). That’s what it feels like when I have a panic attack; I get one about once a day.

Anyway, that explanation’s a pretty good indication of how my experiment went during the research stages of this midterm project. I decided I wanted to add an uncomfortable level of depth to the obligatory question: “hey, how are you?” Each time someone asked me that question, I would respond with a story about my latest panic attack. It was a really interesting project — I haven’t really developed a way to describe my anxiety disorder without sounding desperate for attention or clinically unstable, so the reactions mirror that. The most common responses I received after answering the “how are you?” question with something similar to the above story are, paraphrased and in order of most common:

• “You should really just respond to that with ‘fine.’”
• The above often followed by: “Didn’t really need to know that.”
• “You should get that fixed, talk to a therapist or something.”
• Relatedly: “I’m not your therapist.”
• “Oh, my God! Are you okay? Do you need something? What can I do?”

These were primarily the responses I had expected, but finding a way to connect my experiences to concepts talked about in class led me to an interesting conclusion: the majority of people who I spoke to tried to educate me on the proper societal answer to “How are you?” While the content of the education I was receiving was different than that exemplified in the readings, the techniques my peers used to get me to retreat back into the normative are the same as those shown in Oullette’s “Take Responsibility for Yourself” and Weber’s Economies of Looking.

The two most common responses that I received — those telling me how I should have responded and what I shouldn’t have told them, specifically — were often met by looks of discomfort or disdain. It was made clear to me not just by vocal response but by body language that I had made this person uncomfortable; after hearing about my panic attack, people looked around them as if searching for an escape, and immediately closed themselves off. The intentionality behind presenting themselves as uncomfortable and the bluntness in telling me I had done something wrong were reminiscent of the discussions of moral shaming, prompted by Oullette’s discourse on Judge Judy. Moral shaming requires a clear attack on someone’s character based on an action; in my case, it wasn’t that I cooked up and ate roadkill, but that I had answered a question truthfully. I was not told how to fix my transgression, but instead was shamed into being a better citizen of the normative world by being told that what I did was unacceptable. This neoliberalistic aspect of moral shaming — public indictment — transfers well from the crime-ridden to the mentally ill. My inability to keep my emotions in check, and further, my ability to keep the instances where I could not keep them in check private, separates me from the able majority; the moral shaming required of neoliberal citizens obligated them to put me in check and educate me into submission through disdainful responses.

Others wanted me to look into therapy or medication, telling me there are more helpful outlets than them. These responses seem helpful by nature, but actually closely resemble the techniques used in taste shaming, as described in Weber’s piece. Whereas the previous responses were framed in a more explicit way, the responses at hand came under the guise of trying to lead me to fix myself. The negative effects of framing mental illness in a way that requires it to be treated as something that must be fixed for a person to be a functional member of society aside, I was assigned the label of a burden by those who reacted with suggestions for therapy and medication. My honest response to a question asked of me was not seen as just that — an honest response — but rather as a cry for help. This is reminiscent of many of the subjects on What Not To Wear, who were told that their styles of fashion (something they did for themselves) was a cry for help. My isolated experience as someone with an anxiety disorder became not only my burden, but the burden of society and it was up to this person to rectify it. Their suggestions for fixing my anxiety disorder attempt the opposite method of education used in moral shaming; taste shaming offers to help fix you where moral shaming tells you to get fixed. This method of education teaches you that you aren’t the optimal citizen because people have to come to the rescue.

My experiences in telling people about my panic attacks led me to the conclusion that the methods used in moral and taste shaming can transfer to realms outside of moralism and taste; they are guides to rectify any behavior in which one doesn’t adhere to the hegemony assigned to certain ideologies. The only difference in method of education was that in one instance, my peers believed they were fulfilling a public duty and in the other, a public service.