Which begs the question, when you give someone the benefit of doubt does that mean not communicating that harm (intentional or otherwise) has been done? I hope not.

Oh, no, absolutely not. I’m of the firm belief that communicating harm in a non-hostile way is the best way to go about it. Along the lines of, “You may not know what you’ve done here, but…”

I’d like it if Sophie knew she caused some harm (whether it was intentional or not) and if she isn’t able to absorb the information, that’s on her.

The rest I’ve extrapolated from her & her parents’ comics and other published works, which, even if they are autobiographical, should probably be taken with grains of salt.

Having said that, since all this autobiographical information is available, it encourages me to feel that Sophie would benefit from some fat advocasy feedback. If she’s doesn’t want it there isn’t anything I can do about it, but if (in theory) I don’t try, how will I know what she’s up for?

Which begs the question, when you give someone the benefit of doubt does that mean not communicating that harm (intentional or otherwise) has been done? I hope not.

If we don’t communicate with allies and potential allies when an honest mistake has been made, what do we do when intentional harm from allies comes our way?

Mike - what does FTW mean?

Sorry. Lolcats and too much intarwebz have rotted my brain. It’s “for the win”, as opposed to FAIL.

How would expressing my dismay on my size being equated with not taking care of myself in the context of mental illness be alienating to the artist? It’s alienating to ME that the artist depicted a fat person in that role, and that role only, of all the people drawn for the poster.

Well, it’s not, and I probably wasn’t clear there. I meant that a lot of people’s automatic assumption of guilt (i.e., bigotry) vs giving someone the benefit of the doubt is alienating to someone who is probably an ally or likely to become one.

Also, in Sophie’s case I think she is very aware of body image prejudices, at least how it impacts on her - not neccesarily how her prejudices may impact others. She writes & draws stories about them in her comics.

If the issues were completely unconscious she wouldn’t be creating comics that depict how crappy she feels when her mom encourages her to go to the gym with her and Sophie interprets this, in the strip, as a criticsm (which, actually, it might be, on an unconscious level, on her mom’s part, as depicted in the strip).

Fair enough; I wasn’t aware of that. As I said, I’m more comfortable giving prospective allies or people who should be allies the benefit of the doubt; as I’ve said before, intent is important. Douchebaggery is not the same as unintentionally causing harm; while it may have some of the same effect part of the time, I find that unintentional harm at least gives one some slight hope of reform and the chance not to be hurt later.

It’s easier to see other people’s faults, but often those faults, in a general sense, are the ones we have to work on ourselves. I think Sophie may still be young enough (under 30) to not see how the prejudices she’s fighting off from her family she may also being dishing out to other people.

Absolutely. Minor nitpick - people under 30 aren’t automatically un-self-aware, and vice versa for those above it. Experience is not age, after all.

So when I say “called on it” I mean to tell her that the issue of how people are depicted has an effect on the people who are being targeted - and as someone who has been inside the comics world her whole life I think she knows that - but perhaps she doesn’t know the way fat mental health consumers experience it.

Probably not; thinner people tend not to know, as a rule, what it’s like to be part of teh dreaded FATZ! unless they’ve been fat already. And even then, they can be arseholes.

And that’s germaine - she drew a poster for a mental health organization! If she’s gonna get alienated by feedback about it why bother illustrating for the organization? Why bother illustrating anything at all, if she doesn’t get to grow as an artist and as a person? Graphic artists don’t last very long if they aren’t flexible and open to criticsm.

Sure. I guess it’s a question of how legit criticism is perceived by the criticised party, and how much of that comes down to how the criticism is couched in the first place. I think criticism, in order to be positive and have a useful end effect, should not descend into blaming. It’s understandable, but it rarely has any use.

I do think she sees the world as skinny = healthy, possibly just “normal”.

The thing is, most people see the world as skinny=healthy, because that’s the medical advice they’ve been given. Personally, I was talking about and advocating Fat Acceptance long before I encountered the term, as a (thin) teenager; but because everything I’d ever read, including science magazines and similar health materials, said that being fat was bad for one’s health, I always expressed it in terms of trade-offs (it’s no use being ostensibly physically healthier if you get that way through an unhealthy relationship to food) limits (people who are not medically overweight shouldn’t be thinking about losing weight) limitations (dieting is a bad way of losing weight) no-guarantees (I knew that I was thin but very unfit indeed) universality (almost everyone has unhealthy aspects to their lifestyle, including many health nuts) and privacy (although you can’t say that people have no right to be concerned about others, there have to be limits to the extent that someone’s bodily states are considered available for public scrutiny.)

It was only reading the scientific coverage on this blog which alerted me to the fact that the medical evidence tells a story which is rather more complicated than that. That information isn’t easy to come by, and the story it contradicts comes from an apparently trustworthy source: I’m sure others will dispute this, but in my opinion, most areas – mental health is another one where this doesn’t hold, incidentally – the health advice and information that, for example, the NHS gives out is pretty good.

I now make a point of challenging people when they bring up the medical effects of being fat - but I still think that my earlier arguments hold, and also that arguments based on the a simplistic fat != unhealthy shouldn’t be the whole basis on which FA proceeds. The fact is that for some people, fat is a sign, not a cause, of poor health, just as for some people thinness is a sign of poor health.

And I genuinely don’t see why FA or the valuing of food shouldn’t also allow us to recognise that there are good and bad meals – I use the word ‘meal’ rather than ‘food’ because it’s often just as much the way that food is eaten that is healthy or unhealthy as the food itself. In fact, valuing good meals – meals with symbolic value, meals we enjoy, meals with lots of interesting vegetables – can be part of what it is to value food. I think that steering away from being moralistic or medicalistic about food shouldn’t mean avoiding all value judgments about eating whatsoever. I have so far steered clear of my own experiences with eating and mood, because I’m not comfortable discussing those aspects of my life in this setting, but I will say that there have been and are times when the problem I have with food is that it’s empty and meaningless and just a way of getting energy into my body, something I think about and care about too little, and in that context it can help to be reminded that the way I eat can impact the way I feel later.

Another internet acronym is TL;DR. It stands for ‘Too long; didn’t read’. I wonder how many people are actually reading the longer comments.

How would expressing my dismay on my size being equated with not taking care of myself in the context of mental illness be alienating to the artist? It’s alienating to ME that the artist depicted a fat person in that role, and that role only, of all the people drawn for the poster.

Also, in Sophie’s case I think she is very aware of body image prejudices, at least how it impacts on her - not neccesarily how her prejudices may impact others. She writes & draws stories about them in her comics.

If the issues were completely unconscious she wouldn’t be creating comics that depict how crappy she feels when her mom encourages her to go to the gym with her and Sophie interprets this, in the strip, as a criticsm (which, actually, it might be, on an unconscious level, on her mom’s part, as depicted in the strip).

It’s easier to see other people’s faults, but often those faults, in a general sense, are the ones we have to work on ourselves. I think Sophie may still be young enough (under 30) to not see how the prejudices she’s fighting off from her family she may also being dishing out to other people.

So when I say “called on it” I mean to tell her that the issue of how people are depicted has an effect on the people who are being targeted - and as someone who has been inside the comics world her whole life I think she knows that - but perhaps she doesn’t know the way fat mental health consumers experience it. And that’s germaine - she drew a poster for a mental health organization! If she’s gonna get alienated by feedback about it why bother illustrating for the organization? Why bother illustrating anything at all, if she doesn’t get to grow as an artist and as a person? Graphic artists don’t last very long if they aren’t flexible and open to criticsm.

Although I don’t think Sophie’s choice of a fat person on the “bad” side in the poster above is intentionally hurtful (aka bigoted), I do think she sees the world as skinny = healthy, possibly just “normal”. I think it’s worth noting everyone else in the poster is skinny…which seems to mean that skinny is normal, to her.

I think she and the Icarus project should be called on it. Sophie could probably use the feedback (if nothing else to expand her idea of “normal” sized people) and certainly a alternative mental health organization can use the information, so they can expand their capacity to treat all mental health consumers with respect.

It is, however, germane. It’s the difference between unconsciously causing offence and being a bigot, which is what some people have said they believe the artist to be.

I’m not saying she should be given a pass… But she shouldn’t be getting nailed up anywhere, either. I can appreciate that others may see it differently from me, and that they may see it as being anti-fat. I did say that I’m not going to tell anyone that s/he is wrong; my opinion is basically “not proven“.

*shrug* I don’t see it as a deliberate slam against fat people, but I’m not going to out and out tell you that you’re wrong, either.

I don’t see it as a deliberate slam either. With all due respect, so what? That it wasn’t intentional doesn’t make it okay.

Even if the cheeseburger guy is supposed to only be “a little overweight” (and I don’t see it: he’s got multiple rolls of stomach fat, which puts him at well above average size for an American),

It doesn’t make him unusual, though. Not average does not imply unusual, either.

look at him in comparison to the “good” panel. Everyone in it is almost literally half that guy’s size.

True enough, although it does bear mentioning that all of the people engaged in self-destructive behaviour elsewhere are pretty skinny, too.

And in a culture that wasn’t constantly telling fat people how lazy & disgusting we are, and how we owe it to society to stop being fat at everybody, that could be a value-neutral thing, but again, we don’t live in such a utopia.

*shrug* I don’t see it as a deliberate slam against fat people, but I’m not going to out and out tell you that you’re wrong, either.

B.Adu:
I think it’s more about maintaining a sensible life style when you’re not depressed, so as to avoid situations like extreme fatigue etc that can make you more vulnerable to depression when (if) it hits.

Exactly, depression is not a lifestyle choice, a collection of lifestyle choices, or even the product of a collection of ‘bad’ lifestyle choices, it is for want of a better word, an illness. If you can do the things they say are you depressed?

You describe how you go without food, and then you eat lots of food, anyone who does the former tends to do the latter, that is not specific to depression, it’s clearly the body rebalancing itself, and perfectly natural, why should this be represented as self-abuse, it’s absurd.

As depression is an imbalance of the nervous system, it’s going to affect the function of your body, effect not cause. Depression can make you vulnerable to feelings of failure about coping with life, I genuinely do not think it’s a good idea to set oneself for more failure of the failing to care of yourself kind when it’s not that way at all.

I thought the point of this project was a different way of seeing depression, from the point of view of those affected, free from the baggage that others bring to it, I think that’s an interesting idea. It might be better to advise people of how to try and see their depression, whilst there in the midst of it.

I’d just say they *might* cause a significant weight gain, but they might not as well. I’ve gone from anti-depressants to hormones - the latter is supposed to increase fat and slow down metabolism…yet I don’t gain a pound. Though yeah I’m somewhat depressed. I still eat usually 2 meals a day, with snacks. Everything fat, ice cream, small cakes, chocolate chips cookies and I got no idea where it goes but it doesn’t stay on me…

Depression tends to make me lose weight, hormones apparently don’t affect my weight. So I oscillate between 100 and 108 lbs, usually the lower portion of it. I’ve not managed reaching above 110 lbs in a couple years and I eat anything that’s supposedly bad for your body. I’m finicky so I don’t eat fruit or vegetables unless in certain ways (canned fruits, dried raisins, apple pie is limit, as for vegetables: in sauce, soup I eat roughly 1/4 of the variety, I eat my hamburgers and hot-dogs plain because I don’t like any of the toppings).

In my experience with being depressed for decades, I have found that keeping a regular schedule for food and sleep makes a HUGE difference in controlling my symptoms. If a person is not depressed to start with, skipping meals and staying up all night is not going to cause depression…that’s not how it works. Depression makes me want to stay in bed for 4 or 5 days at a time, drifting between deep sleep and half-sleep. That’s not an effective way to nurture my body. Depression makes me forget to eat for days, then eat whatever food is immediately available. That’s not nurturing, either.

Breaking out of that pattern can be really difficult, and sometimes I need help to do it. If I wasn’t depressed, it would be easy to “take care of myself” at the level I need for depression control, (not going more than 20 hours without food. Not staying in bed for more than 14 hours at a time. Taking meds twice a day. Going outside in daylight at least once every 2 days), but when the depression is bad it’s a terrible challenge for me. When I can keep it up for a couple of weeks, it helps, but it’s hard to keep up with when I don’t want to bother with anything. I found the Icarus poster encouraging. I don’t see how you regard it as reflecting “current sterile lifestyle choice debate.”

The Icarus Project envisions a new culture and language that resonates with our actual experiences of ‘mental illness’ rather than trying to fit our lives into a conventional framework.

This is a laudable aim, so why are they suggesting that depression is caused by what you eat, staying up late at night etc? That sounds like it reflects the current sterile lifestyle choice debates. Part of the body’s attempt to keep you out of the danger zone, that which would end with suicide, is to try and raise you mood and prevent anymore strain on an overtaxed system. This is self-nuture and it’s important to know if your going through depression, it is unfair to represent this as a sign of self-abuse.

I think it’s great that people want to take more control over their lives in this way, but they must be careful not to accept other people’s cliches unexamined, that defeats the object.

Just wanted to add that it would make sense for many more of these pictures to include fat folks, given the well-documented fact that so many psych meds cause not insignificant weight gain.

I know my meds made me fat–but they also made me well (along with social supports, regular exercise, and a whole-foods-based vegetarian way of eating).

So I would have liked to see larger people at the “healthy” dinner table, and also engaged in the healthy activities.

Acheman - you have a lot of faith in an organisation that is happy to trot out ‘eww fat people’, a fatih I don’t share.

I don’t really know what would be a better image though, I mean aside from not having that image at all. How about, since we’re talking about depression, showing someone sleeping in bed all day vs the person eating healthily. Cause I’ve been depressed and remember that you loose your appetite and want to sleep tons. I also got the version that caused me to desire to wear lots of black clothing, white face powder, and copious eyeliner.

If you’re depressed and a part of your depression is over your fatness, as is quite easy in a fat-hating society, a message which reinforces the wrongness of your very body is not one that is going to be encouraging in any fashion.

There are just multiple problems with this depiction.