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[HereSince1628]

8. Bravery seems a fine quality, the expectation that the ill display it? Maybe not

This isn't a criticism of the OP. But it is an alternative critical view of how bravery is viewed with respect to the ill.

One of the curious things about street advice on treating illness, is that it regularly seems to run opposite of whatever the prevailing pathologic condition may be. When things are bad, we're told that soon things will be ok. When we're sick and impatient to be well, we're told to be patient. When something we depend upon breaks and the repair requires an amount of money we don't quite have, we're told to be frugal and save. Within healing traditions, this sort of approach is an application of allopathic thinking. It is a major theme in our thinking about illness, but that doesn't mean it is always best.

Allopathy calls for application of a therapy that opposes, and thereby neutralizes, the pathological condition. Feverish? Apply cold compress to forehead or cold water to hands. Depressed to the point of inactivity? Get your ass off the couch and exercise! The examples of this sort of thinking are legion if you just look around for them.

In my American life I've found that bravery is a common cultural expectation of the ill. I can't say this is a universal human expectation. Here in the 'home of the brave', we are expected to courageously, willfully, and actively fight against our illnesses. This, too, is an application of allopathic thinking. It is deeply integrated into our folk-culture and regularly reinforced. Like many culturally accepted solutions, one's capacity for bravery becomes an issue of moral, and personal character. Fighting an illness is good; giving in to an illness is bad. Surely you've heard or read things like: "Mom died after a courageous fight with breast cancer"; "Steve overcame leukemia through a long fight using chemo"; "I've fought borderline personality disorder for decades". If we are ill, we are expected -as a moral imperative- to be brave warriors. And so , as slippery multifaceted concepts often do, bravery becomes something to be measured and a quality for moral judgments about ill people, even judgments about ourselves.

That slide is insidious. The thought of being ill and not manifesting objective signs of bravery by external stoicism, goes beyond being a bad patient, it turns the ill into a bad person. It drives us like the overseers lash. Few of us wish to be deemed a bad person. We'd much rather struggle with doing the right thing and project an appearance of stoicism. We will 'keep a stiff upper lip', we 'never complain', we will 'bite the bullet' and, quite unfortunately, many of us simply and stoically attempt to 'tough it out' or go, unsustainably over the top in manifesting behaviors that show, to meet cultural expectations, engagement in 'the good fight'.

As the bard wrote...'Aye, there is the rub'. To be stoically brave is to go forward in spite of and even in denial of symptoms. Suffering in silence, without any help, does us no good for conditions that are more than transient. With respect to mental illness toughing it out is the choice of 80% of those afflicted. I know the decisions of those 80% are complicated by financial and other factors]. Probably not a good outcome, that. Nor is it good to encourage persons into the manifestation bravado and false indications that the 'fix has been found', that the illness is improving and that recovery is a fortnight away.

Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate bravery. I am deeply embedded in this American culture, too. I really don't want to give the impression that my position is that for the ill, mentally or otherwise, bravery is wrong. I certainly don't want to say that for the ill, the opposite of bravery is always right. I am neither arguing that homeopathy is a preferable approach to allopathy, nor that 'giving in' is always preferable to fighting.

My observation is just this...bravery is often recommended and acknowledged with a casualness that nears thoughtlessness under the cover of cultural expectations. We have a rather deep need to see that the cultural expectation we've bought into are expressed and reinforced by those around us. It angers us when its value is challenged (an emotion I suspect this post elicits in some).

Yet, bravery, can't be given out in doses. It can't be demanded. Expecting bravery, it's behavioral correlates (the things family, friends and therapists desire of the mentally ill), and presenting bravery's estimable values to the ill mostly as a mechanism that allows 'our' values to be endorsed, isn't necessarily so much supportive as it is an imposing act of cultural hegemony.