Liz Spikol has a great entry today about the Treatment Advocacy Center’s (TAC) press release about how mental illness affects our nation’s public libraries. The Treatment Advocacy Center is the organization that prefers that anyone who has mental illness get treatment, even if it’s against their will. Think of it as a stodgy old grandfather from the 1800s that might say, “Hitting a child is necessary and good for the child; the more often the better! Teaches them some manners…”
Liz details the problems with the survey by TAC of librarians:
Are library employees qualified to determine who has serious psychiatric disorders? I doubt it. I suspect they wouldn’t identify me as one of those people, but I’m guessing every disheveled person gets tarred with that brush, no matter the issue. And let’s not forget the classicism and racism that makes such observations inherently problematic. If a black guy in dirty clothes comes into a library and spends a lot of time on the web, is he going to be seen as the same as a white woman in clean clothes (like me)? Who’s more likely to be called “crazy,” despite whatever behaviors?
Even assuming that people with psych disorders do use the library — which I know is true, particularly when their situation coincides with poverty — why can’t they? So what if they have odd behaviors? Are they any less entitled to access the resources? People with disabilities have a right to be accommodated.
TAC’s ostensible point is that:
“Our nation’s libraries are turning into daytime shelters for people with severe mental illness who need to be in treatment. The fact that libraries remain a safe haven from violence and life on the streets for people with mental illness is a sad commentary. Doing so devalues human life and the importance of libraries in our communities.”
As Spikol notes, this is not a new problem, but it’s also not one to be particularly concerned about. I remember going into the city’s public library in Wilmington, Del. 20 some years ago as a young adult and noticing the number of homeless who would sit there and read the paper, a magazine, or a book in the public reading room. Are people with mental illness not citizens of the U.S.? Do they not have the same rights as other citizens, including the right to use the library unaccosted?
The Treatment Advocacy Center, rather than being a positive advocate for people with mental illness, is a sad blemish in the world of mental health advocacy. The TAC press release’s only apparent purpose is to scare people into thinking that someone with a mental health diagnosis is someone to be scared of. Shame on TAC. Instead of helping educate people about the fact that folks with mental illness are not only just like you and me — they are you and me — they focus on making people with mental illness out to be something to be feared.
And I have to say, I’m disappointed by some of the comments by librarians highlighted in the press release. I have nothing but respect for librarians and have worked in a few libraries in my life. But really, rather than helping educate their patrons about mental illness, they seem to accept other people’s stigmatizing and ignorant attitudes without question. This may just be TAC’s spin on the survey results, however, which is difficult to discern without looking at the survey article itself. The numbers sure sound impressive:
The survey of 1,300 public libraries finds that 9 out of 10 library staff members said that patrons with a mental illness have disturbed or affected the use of the library…
But the last paragraph notes that actually only 124 librarians returned the survey. It’s not clear why the huge discrepancy exists (sent surveys versus those returned? which would be an abysmal 9% return rate).
The survey’s results are supposed to be available in the “March/April issue of American Libraries, the journal of the American Library Association.” Yet the supposed journal, which is actually the magazine of the American Library Association (sorry, it’s not a peer-reviewed journal), has a March issue and an April issue, and neither appear to contain the survey.
What a sad day for the Treatment Advocacy Center, reduced to maligning people with a mental illness because some people like to spend time in a public library.
Read the full entry: The Trouble With Spikol » I Am a Threat to Your Library!
Read TAC’s survey press release: Straining America’s Libraries
10 comments
I know of a Starbucks employee who complains about the “middle-aged unemployed losers who come in with their laptops and sit all day.” … never mind those folks still buy something (or a number of somethings) and have their reasons for needing to get out of the house to job-hunt online.
Sadly, there are idiots everywhere. It’s just that much sadder when the “idiot” is an organization that’s supposed to be helpful instead.
Perhaps TAC should be renamed the Treatment Adverse Center, or Treatment Avoidance Center.
Gez, first you read about NAMI, then this.
It seems as though stigmatizing and maintaining myths and misperceptions is a mountain that need more than a guide, but a bomb to level it!!!
Well of course 9 out of 10 librarians are going to say that a mentally handicapped person disturbed the library at some point. The 10th one just hasn’t been around long enough to see it. What’s unfair about that comment is that they forgot to ask, “Did anyone care”?
I have a friend who regularly brings her autistic brother to the library with her and me. He constantly talks, babbling just about anything and occasionally shrieks. Yes, it is disturbing. Yes, there are two or three people who give him the evil eye, than they realize why he’s doing these things, and the annoyance turns to understanding and acceptance.
There’s at least 5 or 6 people noticably handicapped that come in. Some come to do homework, some come just because nobody gawks there. I had one lady ask me to help her with a division problem, no fear of scorn.
If that isn’t what the library is for, it is definitely a good use for it.
Just my two cents.
@UninvokedAuthor… So true. Public spaces like libraries are just that — public. They are home to anyone who is a part of society, even if we’re not used to a particular person’s disorder or disease. Education, not stigmatizing, is what’s needed, and then once people understand, most people gain empathy for the person. Instead of “scary,” they become human, fragile. Real.
Of course, that takes time and willingness to set aside our preconceptions and openness to learning more about someone else. And in our increasingly fast-paced world, it seems fewer people are willing to commit to such efforts. (And trust me, libraries today are more worried about whether they’ll be able to stay open because of funding issues/declining use in the Internet age far more than they’re worried about this sort of thing.)
E. Fuller Torrey up to it again, eh?
Hey, do a little due diligence, why don’t you? 🙁 If you’d read the actual TAC press release on their website instead of relying ion what Spikol wrote, you’d see that the study was published in PUBLIC LIBRARIES, which is in fact the bimonthly, peer-reviewed journal of the Public Library Association, not AMERICAN LIBRARIES, which is a different publication.
Such sloppy reporting does no credit to your case, whatever it is. I can’t speak to the methodology of the study as I haven’t seen it, but the impact of mentally ill, homeless patrons on public libraries is very real and libraries have been dealing with it for decades. You may not like to hear that, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
“The Treatment Advocacy Center is the organization that prefers that anyone who has mental illness get treatment, even if it’s against their will.”
Anyone with mental illness? So in the case of anxiety, agrophobia, mild depression etc. they advocate forced treatment?
That’s not on their website, which speaks to tryig to help people overcome by severe mental illnesses (which I assume means haveing impaired judgment because of one, which would be a very small percentage to all people with mental illness, and…to tell the truth…hopefully not including the person writing this who has one).
Can you point to something that proves they support forced treatment for any and everyone with any type of mental illness? I can’t imagine that (and a quick google showed nothing about it).
They very well may be wrong generally, but perhaps we could at least be accurate about why.
I went searching for the study myself and was able to find a PDF version at the article linked below…
Press release vs. article
The article, headlined “Problems Associated with Mentally Ill Individuals in Public Libraries” (PDF) offers significant details about the design of the survey and the responses to an issue that librarians, notably former Salt Lake City Public Library deputy director Chip Ward, have been raising publicly. (Here’s a 5/28/08 LJ Q&A with Ward, who is also cited in the article.)
Source: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6650957.html
Overall, I found the tone of the article to be distasteful because it’s purporting a treatment that does not cure, it only warehouses.
I can sympathize with the difficulties library staff may have to endure however as one librarian quoted in the article above noted: “I used to work in a public library and certainly we had a number of patrons who exhibited symptoms of various mental and physical health conditions. Was this uncomfortable for some other patrons or staff? Sure. But there’s no law against being uncomfortable in a social situation…. Patrons who actually violated rules (after reasonable accommodation) are another kettle of fish entirely. Some folks who exhibited symptoms and plenty of folks who didn’t exhibit symptoms were asked to leave because of behavior that made the library unsafe or unproductive.â€
The point being that library staff may often find themselves in the position of having to deal with difficult patrons, some of whom may be mentally ill and many others who may not be ill at all. It is to Torrey’s benefit to focus strictly on the “assumed mentally ill” but it may well be that the mentally healthy pose a greater risk and strain on library staff and resources.
Thanks for finding that reference!
So the article, which appeared in the journal Public Libraries (the TAC press release couldn’t even get the name of the journal correct), is not surprisingly flawed. The authors of the study hand-selected the 301 libraries to send the survey to (although they don’t say outright, I suspect it was to try and reflect the demographic makeup of the U.S.). They had a 41 percent response rate.
The wording of all the questions is neither objective nor unbiased. In a serious scientific survey, survey givers work hard to remove any sense of bias from the questions they ask. These are called “loaded questions,” because the question gives the person responding a sense of what kinds of answers they are looking for.
What the TAC press release failed to note:
1. There was no significant change or increase in the number of mentally ill patrons over the course of time librarians have been working in their library. In other words, there’s nothing new or different here.
2. The survey fails to define virtually any of the terms it uses.
How do librarians judge someone who “appears to have serious psychiatric disorders?” Are the researchers seriously suggesting that you can tell someone has depression just by looking at them or observing their behaviors? Wow, yeah, that’s scientific.
What’s a “disproportinate amount of staff time and resources?” Disproportinate to what? To children? To elderly patrons? To some ideal normal adult library patron?
“Have such patrons ever disturbed or otherwise affected the use of the library by other people?” Wow, you could ask that about so many groups — children, teens, homeless people without mental illness. It’s a public space, so yeah, you’re going to have to deal with groups of unruly people. It comes with the service.
3. The vast majority of the unscientific survey is devoted to reproducing subjective comments from librarians. Not surprising that all of the comments are negative, because the survey didn’t ask any questions like, “Has someone with mental illness ever helped someone else at the library?” “Do you help educate other patrons at the library about mental illness and its stigmatization within society?”
In other words, this is a poor example of a survey, and it’s both sad and telling TAC was happy to jump on its results. It’s no wonder, since one of the authors (Torrey) of the study is on the board of TAC and is a long known example of a man on a mission to lock up anyone with mental illness and force treatment on them whether they want it or not. It’s also sad that Public Libraries allowed their publication to be used in such an obvious manner for the publication of this survey. I guess that goes to show you the quality of this particular library journal.
You declined to answer my first post, yet then responded to another poster with something equally broad-based and on-its-face incredible.
“one of the authors (Torrey) of the study is on the board of TAC and is a long known example of a man on a mission to lock up anyone with mental illness and force treatment on them whether they want it or not. ”
Do you have proof that Dr. Torrey wants to lock-up “anyone with mental illness and force treatment on them”?
Quite a statement considering how many tens of millions of Americans have some type of mental illness and especially since on the TAC sit it appears one of its major focuses is outpatient laws.