This week in people of interest: Marta Russell
Marta Russell proposes a theory of disability that rejects arguments about culture and identity, instead charging that specific systems and values embedded within capitalism are the primary driver of (and justification for) legal frameworks sanctioning the institutionalization and economic exclusion of disabled people. A key question for Russell was: What do systems of production and wealth accumulation gain from the way in which disability certification frameworks are constructed and public benefits allocated? Centered in an analysis of means-testing, war spending, administrative burdens, and underfunded social safety net supports, Russell’s work showed how a society obsessed with optimization, efficiency, and cost-benefit analysis had created a vast network of laws and institutions that worked together to perpetuate what she called “the money model of disablement,” better known as “the money model.”
The money model, best articulated in Russell’s 1998 book, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract, posits that disabled people are not, as they are often framed in dominant culture, a “burden to society,” but are actually a valuable resource. As Russell explains: “…persons who do not offer a body which will enhance profitmaking as laborers are used to shore up US capitalism by other means.” Disabled people are a nexus around which the capacity for surplus labor power can be built (often financed in part by federal money)—whole sectors of our economy have sprung forth from the money model, which has normalized the commodification of things, systems, and places that maintain disabled bodies in pursuit of squeezing profit from the money which passes through disabled people towards their survival and care. For example, nursing homes, Russell argued, are not places of rest and comfort, but a strategy for commodifying the “least productive” so that they can both be “made of use to the economic order” and free up the labor supply of those who love and wish to care for them. This system benefits neither the workers nor disabled people, only what Russell called the “owning class.” US disability policy, instead of being oriented around supporting the needs of disabled people, sanctions and facilitates the capitalist capture of nearly all aspects of disablement, impairment, chronic illness, and disability, including the way that “reasonable accommodations” are commodified (as explored by Ruth Colker in her essay for this symposium).
Russell was not just a theorist but also was a long-time disability rights activist. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s she was involved in disability advocacy and organizing with ADAPT, Not Dead Yet, and the ACLU. Her efforts focused on policy interventions like assisted suicide laws and SSDI cuts, campaigns that challenged the many stigmatizing portrayals of disabled people sold to the public via the charity industrial complex, and more formal organizing and direct action with ADAPT agitating for home and community-based services as alternatives to nursing homes and other institutions of warehousing. As Nate Holdren argues in his piece for this symposium, Russell’s significant contributions to both disability theory and Marxism were crucially informed by her work in social movements. This connection between theory and praxis is reflected not just in the subject matter of her work, or in her citational practices, but also in the empathy, clarity, and rage with which she argues for the need for the left to begin to engage in a broad refusal of the economic valuation of life.
Russell’s political writing was extensive, covering the topics she organized around as well as more explicit political economic analysis of US policy and critique of the disabling effects of the then-expanding criminal justice system. Russell’s work was also highly critical of the liberal disability rights movement, arguing that disability rights discourse would benefit from embracing leftist thought and political economic analysis. Russell’s approach rejected the court-oriented civil rights strategy that was widely celebrated by liberal disability organizations and activists in the post-ADA era. This strategy, she argued, only sought to tamp down the violence caused by the ways that the state interacted with disabled people; instead, she focused on the political economic, not merely the “cultural” forces, driving systemic oppression of disabled people—an approach on which Jules Gill-Peterson expands in her essay for this symposium.
The lack of exposure that Russell’s small yet incredibly powerful body of work has had cannot be overstated. Her books are hard to find, there is one major printed collection of her essays, and one important book of essays about or incorporating her work. Until Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell was published by Haymarket Books in 2019, no comprehensive volume of her collected writings existed, nor was there broad citation of them within disability studies or law. Three years prior, when legal scholar and her former collaborator Ravi Malhotra edited Disability Politics in a Global Economy, an important anthology dedicated to Marta Russell’s memory, it was one of the first times Russell’s work was broadly celebrated within a purely academic context.
— from The Law and Political Economy Project.
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Congrats!
Somatic therapy is generally really well received by autistic people and by chronic intellectualisers/"over"intellectualisers.
IFS should work well with your cerebral-ness but it might feel like you’re a bit adrift in the process because of how it works. IFS works well with people who have a lot of developmental trauma and people who dissociate so I think it sounds promising.
Somatic therapy is very experiential, so you kinda just have to do it to understand how it works moreso than most other therapeutic models. IFS, on the other hand, is easier to learn about by reading about it. There’s a couple of really good books on IFS, both of which are available as audiobooks and one of which may or may not have been “liberated” by someone I know.
I already threatened to post up the one which os arguably the best IFS book which is oriented to being accessible to a lay audience on TankieTube. I think I just need to go and make that happen. Edit: It happened.
Does anyone have any advice on what to ask during a therapy consultation?
Hell yeah, they are doing a consultation first? Normalise this shit, immediately!!
I’d go in with any questions or concerns you have about the therapeutic models, and with how the therapists work. I’d ask if they draw upon any other major modalities of therapy and how they integrate them, although maybe that’s more of a therapy nerd question and it could be a very me-specific thing to ask.
I’d also go in with the intent to give them a bit of an inventory of yourself - the nature of your neurodivergence and any suspected diagnoses or self-identification with diagnoses. I’d ask about how they work with people who have your diagnosis/es. I’d also talk about the stuff you’ve mentioned here about how you process things and your coping strategies etc.
Last of all, I think it’s really good to set intentions for the therapy. “Goals”, although I don’t really like the framing of “therapeutic goals” since it sets a sort of target that makes it feel like deliverables and it can create a situation where you/they/everyone feels the implicit pressure to “achieve” these “outcomes” rather than focusing on the quality of the process and going where things are needed. Goodhart’s Law and all that stuff.
I think it’s better to approach therapy like a ship on the seas; set your heading or your destination but know that the best route is not necessarily the fastest or most direct one and conditions will change and you will get diverted off course, often necessarily, and that’s okay. Approaching therapy from the perspective of it being like a hiking trail, where the path is predefined, creates a lot of unnecessary difficulties and obstructions imo. And treating it like you’re a project worker in an office job is peak late capitalist bullshit.
Oh yeah, and feel free to set boundaries on the things that you aren’t ready to delve into such as saying “I am working my way through developing a better understanding how I experience my gender right now but I don’t want to go into this stuff in therapy just yet because I need to hash it out with myself first/actually my primary concern is ways to manage my social anxiety and my social isolation because I feel like addressing this is going to be the most effective use of our time for the benefits I will get from it”. Obviously what you choose to set boundaries on will need to be your own but, for example, if you have a lot of childhood trauma because of one specific thing and it’s just too raw to deal with in therapy then I’d encourage you to name it and to say that it’s out of bounds for therapy until further notice.
Thanks for your advice! I was able to collect my thoughts enough to have two good consultations where I got a good feel for the therapists.
I’m split now. I had my two consultations. One therapist does more IFS which I am more interested in but doesn’t offer in-person as much. The other does offer more in person and is a bit cheaper, but seems less experienced overall.
You love you hear it.
Was there a therapist that you seemed to vibe with more?
Look, at the end of the day the choice probably matters less than you think. There was a meta-anaysis done which compared the therapeutic outcomes of CBT vs other major modalities and, while CBT had the most extensive evidence base by far (and they’d argue that it’s the most robust but I would absolutely dispute this claim - that’s a story for another time though) the findings were that outcomes across all modalities were essentially the same.
That includes Freudian psychoanalysis, which is absolute junk science as far as I’m concerned.
So what does the conclusion of these results point towards? Well, if you get roughly equivalent outcomes from the psychological version of mysticism that you do from what is arguably very rigourous and scientific therapy then that indicates that it’s really about the quality of the relationship between therapist and client, not whichever modality is chosen.
I’m gonna say this next part with a big, somewhat personal caveat, but basically it’s more about how skilful a therapist is and how well they work with you specifically than it is about the other factors.
(Caveat to say that CBT seems almost universally reviled by autistic people and I know for sure that it absolutely does not work with me, to the point that I basically tell therapists “Don’t even fucking try that CBT bullshit on me” on the first session lol)
IFS and somatic therapies are arguably more complex modalities, which require a degree of skill and experience as a therapist before they start developing their skill in them. I’m not saying it’s impossible to do it otherwise but I feel like most people start out as therapists first and it’s only later with more experience that they start into IFS especially but likely somatic therapy too; your newly qualified and certified therapist who is very green doesn’t seem like a likely candidate to be offering IFS honestly.
So I guess if all things are roughly equivalent, I’d likely go with the therapist you seemed to gel with better. You can always change your mind later on anyway.
The one who does not offer in-person appointments seems substantially more experienced and well-read. I think I might try it with the in-person person first and then switch. It was weird I felt more comfortable with the one who had more of a removed/distant demeanor.
It’s funny to hear that the different modalities make almost no impact. That sort of matches my impression of the field.