On NPR’s “Wrestling with my husband's fear of getting COVID again” (03/18/24)

Death Panel podcast hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant and Jules Gill-Peterson discuss a recent piece in NPR, “Wrestling with my husband's fear of getting COVID again,” which presents avoiding covid both as the product of unreasonable “anxiety” and as something immunocompromised people should let go of lest their loved ones consider abandoning them.

This episode was originally released for Death Panel patrons on March 18th 2024, and quickly became one of our most widely requested unlocks. To support the show and help make episodes like this one possible, become a patron at www.patreon.com/deathpanelpod

Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)

---

[ Intro music ]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:32

Welcome to the Death Panel. To support the show and get access to the second weekly bonus episode, as well as the entire back catalogue of bonus episodes, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. Patrons, thank you so much for supporting the show. We are entirely listener supported and couldn't do any of this without you. If you'd like to help us out a little bit more, you can always share the show with your friends, hold listening or discussion groups, or post about your favorite episodes, pick up copies of Health Communism, and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_.

I'm Beatrice Adler-Bolton, and today I am joined by two of my co-hosts, Artie Vierkant.

Artie Vierkant 1:03

Hello.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:04

And Jules Gill-Peterson.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:05

Hello.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:06

And the three of us today are going to be doing a close read on a recent piece that was published March 11th, by NPR called “Wrestling with My Husband's Fear of Getting COVID Again.”

Artie Vierkant 1:19

Hmmm.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:20

Now a lot of people rightly got very mad when this piece came out. It was thoroughly critiqued online, calling the piece out for its pathologization of those who still take layered COVID protection seriously, the way that, for example, the author put her husband's desire for COVID precautions stemming from his being immunocompromised, on the same level as her desire to go out to eat in restaurants. There's a lot there. It's a very short piece. And there are a couple reasons why we wanted to talk about it today especially. Yes, all of what I just mentioned, but also there's a huge point that this piece is trying to make about so-called risk, risk assessments and the privatization of care and the family. And so, even the way that the conflict is framed in the piece, the framing that again, you know, folks very rightly called out right away when it was published is, as you put it when we were texting about this Jules, "A very juicy example of a much bigger issue." So we're going to do a close read of this piece, it's very short. I think we will need to spend a lot of time discussing not just what is being said in the piece, but what is going unsaid in this piece.

Artie Vierkant 2:28

Especially Yeah.

Jules Gill-Peterson 2:29

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:30

So there's so much going on here. But before we start with the close read, is there anything either of you want to just offer up in terms of opening thoughts or any additional context on this piece that we should get into first?

Jules Gill-Peterson 2:40

Yeah, I think one thing that this piece kind of helped me start to think about a little more directly, is some of the actual ways sociologically or relationally, that privatizing care and turning COVID into a risk factor, like how does that actually get socialized in real life? You know, it's through -- it's through relationships, it's through kinship structures, it's through forms of attachment that are both affectional, but also economic, like the couple form. And I mean, it's not like I didn't know that, but there was just something about reading this that kind of made it click into place for me like, oh, right, this is -- this is like an experience vector for so many people. How do you actually experience state abandonment, right, of the collective population, or the abandonment of all measures to take care of one another collectively, you experience it through these private relationships.

Artie Vierkant 3:37

I think I had kind of a similar experience, which was, my first experience of it was sort of I skimmed the piece, I got to the part that we'll talk about a little bit later, which is where they make the hard pivot towards so and so medical professional says this may just be anxiety getting wrapped up in the husband's continued desire for not getting COVID and not having the material impacts on his life, and the author's life too, frankly, that that comes with.

And my initial reaction was like, oh wow, here it is, the thing that we've been calling out as the thing that's been the subtext of so many things in the drumbeat for years and years at this point. And that's all true, but then it's very interesting, because then as I sort of read and reread the piece again, these other layers that you're talking about, Jules, started to come to the surface, which is yeah, exactly, I mean, I think another way to say sort of what you just said is all the stuff that we're about to talk about today, you know, everything that is written here in this piece was prefigured by the disastrous set of policy decisions to create a sociological end to the pandemic --

Jules Gill-Peterson 4:48

Yes.

Artie Vierkant 4:49

Rather than an epidemiological end to the pandemic or whatever else that we could call actually making it truly not a big deal or eradicated or, you know, whatever could have been the option.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 5:01

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we really have here is kind of one of those classic examples of having two solutions to understanding and interpreting conflict, right? Does this have anything to do with, for example, a collective response to the pandemic that has been retracted in favor of a personal response, right? There is literally a line in this piece that says "Long COVID is a family problem" that we'll get into, right? Or is this merely an issue happening between two private parties, two people, and therefore a kind of marital negotiation, right?

So there is I think a really good example of, as you're saying Artie, something that we often allude to, we discuss as part of the pandemic minimization sort of arsenal, and this is very literally one of those examples of how stigma doesn't just pop up out of the ground, like a dandelion or something, right? It needs to be made, created, reinforced and reproduced. And this is a really good example of not just like a bad piece, but a piece that literally invites intensification and reproduction of the very issue it's purporting to try to solve --

Artie Vierkant 6:15

[laughing] Right, yes.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 6:15

In its very structure. And so there's a bit of a sort of mindfuck aspect to the kind of way that the experts and the professionals, so to speak, engage with these questions, right. But it really points to something that we talk about all the time, which is that the kind of language that we use to talk about the pandemic, it matters to be precise, because that's part of how these kinds of pressures and realities are actually literally enforced in a very specific and iterative social context.

Artie Vierkant 6:48

Yeah. And if I may, a final thing before we sort of jump in. I think, to your point, there are fundamentally two different things going on in this article simultaneously. And I think both of them are bad, ultimately. I think both of them, we will have disagreements with, but I think that there are two separate things just to keep in mind as we go through here. I think the first is the attempt the author is making to be empathetic -- I say attempt very specifically, right? The attempt to be empathetic that the author clearly really wants to convey, she cares about her husband, she's signaling that she cares about COVID somewhat, doesn't care that much maybe, and is clearly more than a little tired of it.

But there's a lot of language, even including we'll see at the very beginning, mentioning government abandonment sort of. Not exactly by name, but you know, mentioning or kind of throwing to government abandonment, throwing to the fact that Long COVID is serious, throwing to the fact that the husband's concerns are valid, but then it quickly turns to valid up to a point. There's a second thing going on though beyond the interpersonal stuff, that then shapes, I think, that first interpersonal lens. The second part, though, is more the professional advice that she is getting, for lack of a better way to put it, right, the medical advice and often outright pathologization that she's getting from the professionals that she chose to speak to for this piece. I think it's notable that we don't get a professional in here who is saying, yeah, your husband's right. So.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 8:26

Yeah. Should we get into the close read from here right away?

Jules Gill-Peterson 8:29

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant 8:30

Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so, as Bea mentioned at the top, this is a piece that ran March 11th in NPR. The author's name is Malaka Gharib, and it is called "Wrestling with my husband's fear of getting COVID again." And I think we're probably going to close read most of this, I would say. The beginning part though is really important. So we're gonna get -- I'll just telegraph what's gonna happen basically. We're gonna get all that stuff that I talked about just a moment ago, which is, this is the big empathy part.

So it begins, "In 2022, while I was seven months pregnant, my husband and I got COVID. While it was a mild case for me, he had scary, lingering symptoms. He said it felt like there was 'an engine humming in his chest.' He experienced frightening fits of insomnia. And his personality changed -- my normally upbeat husband became uncharacteristically depressed. After a few months, his symptoms went away, but his fears of getting COVID didn't. He is immunocompromised and his doctors warned him that if he got sick again, it may complicate his autoimmune disease. Plus, he didn't want to repeat his traumatic ordeal, especially with a baby on the way. There are more reasons to be anxious. State and national measures to prevent COVID are falling away, like most recently, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's decision to end its five day isolation guidance. And the disease is still very much a threat. Yes, vaccines and boosters can protect against severe illness, but vulnerable people like my husband are still at high risk. To top it off, there is a lot we don't know about the coronavirus. Emerging evidence suggests that the neurological symptoms of COVID can persist years after infection. So while the rest of the world seems to have moved on from the pandemic, in our house, it is still 2020. We wear masks when we go into public indoor spaces. We don't eat inside restaurants. We don't go to movies. We have people take COVID tests before they enter our house. All this leaves me feeling torn between two emotions. I want to keep my husband safe and healthy. But I also want our old life back."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 10:35

[sigh] So, I mean, just first off --

Jules Gill-Peterson 10:39

Remarkably honest.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 10:40

Yes. Yeah. I mean, I'm like, I wish she would name exactly what those two emotions are. But I kind of prefer that she doesn't in some ways. This is kind of what I was referring to, in terms of the real balancing of these two sides, so to speak, right. And this is, I think, one of the most core dynamics, like when we're talking about what is difficult and dangerous about the pathologization of people who still protect themselves from COVID. It's not to say that like to be pathologized, right, and labeled as mentally ill is bad because mentally ill people are bad, right? No, we're saying like, in the pathologization of groups of people who are still protecting themselves from COVID, right, we see, for example, the ammunition to equate it with a preference about social life, right, where you can have the kind of medical need put on the same footing as someone wanting to go back to restaurants, back to movies, right? The desire to go back to normal becomes just as equal as the medical need and the medical vulnerability through the leveraging of the framework of anxiety, right? So we're talking about literally how these things are weaponized, not a value judgment, saying, you know, like, okay, because this is being equated with mental illness, therefore, it's bad.

But what I think materially we're also seeing here, as Artie's saying, is this kind of foregrounding of empathy. And I think, as you'll see, as we get into the sections where the experts begin to weigh in, you know, this is also a way of sort of indirectly being like, well, I'm not saying that I'm saying these things, I'm saying that this is just the way I feel, I can't help the way I feel, and here are these experts and professionals who are here to validate my position, right. So it's a kind of way of setting up a sense of neutrality, a sense of even handedness, right, even though the perspective that we're going to get, as Artie mentioned, is either all directly and intentionally weighted against the person still taking COVID protections. Anything that comes off also slightly neutral towards the person still taking COVID protections is then interpreted by the author immediately afterward, as being favorable towards her position as well. So it's a -- it's a very kind of insidious way of framing this as a reasonable, even handed debate where both sides have the same leverage of power. And what's not being named is the kind of massive imbalance of power that exists beyond, in the broader context in the actual social world in which this interpersonal conflict is actually taking place.

Jules Gill-Peterson 13:22

Yeah, that's so well said. And I don't want to be overly interpretive about the text, in part, because this is an article that trades so much in psychotherapeutic interpretation, however, I just want to stress and even underline part of what you were saying, Bea, because I think it's so helpful as a guide for understanding what this piece is doing, that that empathy, right, is the sort of container in which we get to do this thing that I think -- I don't know, I'm just connecting this to so many of the op-eds or other media pieces that we close read on Death Panel, and it's very often this style, where at the top, through the lens of empathy, you actually dump a bunch of useful information, right, just kind of go through all of the facts that on surface appearance wouldn't actually support pathologizing someone who doesn't want to get COVID.

But part of the reason to dangle that all up front, right, is to then be able to dismiss it really carefully. And to begin to assert, in this case, right, that what's really at hand is a battle of emotions, a battle between empathy and something that is perhaps selfish, but you just can't help it. And that is very different, right, than kind of trying to critically analyze the information we have to make decisions, both at the individual level, but of course, at the policy level, or at the level of public health, or at the level of health care, at the level of politics, right, ultimately.

And it's just sort of interesting too that ultimately, the way the feeling emerges for the author, right, I think is really helpful for identifying a larger phenomenon that I'm sure lots of people are experiencing different versions of or are encountering in relationships with other people, just this feeling of, well, everyone else is back to an old life and a pre-2020 life, and I am not. I mean, I just think that's a really -- just talk about the sociological production of feelings. I mean, that's a really -- that's a really, really intense feeling to have produced politically, intentionally --

Artie Vierkant 15:32

Absolutely.

Jules Gill-Peterson 15:33

And propagated throughout the -- throughout the population. And now people are genuinely caught up in this feeling. And that's --I just, I don't know, I'm just kind of marveling at that for a moment. I mean, it's rare that government can produce such concrete feelings and disperse them so effectively.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 15:51

That was so well put, Jules. And I feel like one other thing that we're also seeing here is that in terms of other persuasive techniques that are being leveraged against the reader, right, there's also what appears to be kind of like an empathy towards immunocompromised people and their desire to be loved and partnered, right. And that was something that people really reacted strongly to, right, because that sense of empathy, right, it reads like the kind of betrayal and distrust that I think many people have experienced, where they havebegun relationships or had optimism about relationships that could have worked out, but that were ended as a result of difference in levels of taking the pandemic seriously, right.

So, you know, I think that there's another layer here too, in just sort of persuasive technique of like this kind of projection, right, of, well, you've got to kind of compromise here on your COVID protections, like if you want to be loved and that's really, I mean, I think a pretty insidious undercurrent that runs through the whole piece.

Jules Gill-Peterson 16:58

“Can't spell immunocompromise without compromise!” Sorry.

Artie Vierkant 17:03

[laughing] I was gonna --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 17:04

[laughing] Oh my god.

Jules Gill-Peterson 17:04

Saddest joke I've ever thought of. It actually makes me feel terrible [laughing].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 17:07

I kind of love it though. I love it and I hate it.

Artie Vierkant 17:09

Well, there's -- we're gonna get to this in a second, but one of the headers in this piece is "Compromising on risk."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 17:18

I know.

Artie Vierkant 17:19

And I just -- when I read that the first time, I just immediately thought, are they doing wordplay, or are they just completely un --

Jules Gill-Peterson 17:29

Oh yeahhh.

Artie Vierkant 17:29

Or do they just genuinely not realize that the immunocompromised and compromise is -- yeah, anyway. I think I'm gonna continue with some of this because there's -- there's a couple things that I want to say on what both of you just brought up, but I think that actually, it'll maybe have some more context after sort of the next section.

So to continue with the piece, there's then a header, which is "A family problem," she writes, "It feels selfish and trivial to say that amid my husband's plight. He is terrified that if he gets COVID again, it will be as harrowing as the first time. And it could trigger a flare up of his chronic illness. But my feelings as his spouse are valid too, says James C, Jackson, a neuropsychologist at Vanderbilt University and the author of Clearing the Fog: From Surviving to Thriving with Long COVID, A Practical Guide. There's a sentiment that if spouses of those who have experienced long COVID complain, they're "missing the real victim says," Jackson. "But that's problematic from so many standpoints. For one, it fails to recognize that long COVID is a family problem." Again, this is this person Jackson speaking. I don't know if we want to react immediately to this family problem thing, or if --

Jules Gill-Peterson 18:41

I know I could [laughing].

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 18:43

I definiteley could. I mean, Jules, do you want to go first?

Jules Gill-Peterson 18:46

Sure, sure. I mean, okay, look, something hanging over my experience, my valid experience of reading this article is that I study the history of psychotherapy, so I've got a lot -- a lot going on in my head right now. But oh boy, James C. Jackson. So there's some -- there's some real frustrating things going on in this, right? There's an actual conflation going on from which the author benefits, in conjunction with this neuropsychologist, right? She's saying that she -- the author is saying that she feels selfish and that it's -- you know, she shouldn't trivialize her husband's really serious concerns about getting COVID again, but then what are valid are -- her feelings are being conflated with being equally as valid and concrete as like actual objective medical concerns or like --

Artie Vierkant 19:38

Material threats to her husband's life, yeah.

Jules Gill-Peterson 19:40

Material threats, right. And this Jackson guy is co-signing this in a way I find quite annoying. And not to be -- I promise, this is not old lady shaking her fist at the cloud moment. But it's really notable to me that there's a second conflation here, and that conflation is like going from sort of like the expert language of psychology, which I'm not a fan of, to another vernacular kind of therapy-speak language that is more common in everyday life, which I'm also not a fan of, right. So her feelings are valid. Well, yes, of course, all feelings are valid. They're not -- they're not falsifiable.

They're completely subjective. It's not like a -- that's not a kind of sparkling claim. Of course your feelings are valid. Everyone's feelings are valid. That doesn't give us any clarity on anything. But then the second thing, right, is then Jackson goes on to say that, yeah, if the spouse asserts their feelings, right, about their partner who's experiencing Long COVID, then they get accused of missing the real victim. But that's not actually what was happening here, right? The idea that like her feelings about what she misses or is grieving are in direct competition with wanting to ally with her spouse and taking care of him, that's just a manufactured antagonism, right.

And then Jackson says, "that's problematic from so many standpoints." Just this like weird -- I feel like this sort of TikTok therapy speak is sort of covering over the fact that the showdown being set up here doesn't have to be read as a showdown, right? That there's not an obvious competition between the author's feelings and her husband's also feeling of fear, right? Those would both be valid, but no one -- no one was ever saying, right, that if she talks openly about her feelings, she has to necessarily be minimizing her husband or displacing his concerns, right?

No one ever said it was a competition, until James C. Jackson implied it is a competition and we can't be problematic, so we have to let them both have equal standing. And I just think that that's like a really -- I don't know, I'm not loving that. And the fact that the book that that Jackson has written, Clearing the Fog: From Surviving to Thriving with Long COVID, A Practical Guide -- “from surviving to thriving,” seriously? We're still doing neoliberal resilience discourse? So it just feels --

Artie Vierkant 22:00

Oh yeah, that's what that book is basically.

Jules Gill-Peterson 22:01

That's what it is, right? It all just feels so --

Artie Vierkant 22:03

If I may, I skimmed it -- sorry, go ahead.

Jules Gill-Peterson 22:05

No, no, no. It just feels so pop psychology and it feels so dismissive, right? Like, this guy's not even doing what normally neuropsychologists do, which is be really annoying in one abstract way. He's been really annoying in a totally crass, like anti-intellectual way.

Artie Vierkant 22:20

Yeah. I skimmed this guy's book, actually. And there's like a whole chapter about the idea of "post-traumatic growth" as a concept, for example. So I think, like a way to read this is almost as -- he kind of feels to me like a pop-psy sort of present day rehabilitationist or something like that, for those who've read Health Communism, or know anything about that history. I'll say though really quick, one thing I want to name is -- sort of just to pull this quote out from him, this "long COVID is a family problem" idea, I think this is really interesting, like Long COVID is a family problem.

Because okay, sure, to the extent that under state abandonment, care devolves to the family, right, to the extent that the family is the social unit that's deputized to pick up the slack of a dangling social safety net, no matter how much harm that can lead to in practice, you know, sure, I suppose, Long COVID is a family problem. But in the sense that Jackson is saying it, to me, it sounds a lot more like to say Long COVID is a family problem is really similar to rhetoric that we're used to hearing about disability being a burden on the family, right? Focusing on -- or a burden to friends and loved ones, right, that are in the disabled person's life or in an immunocompromised person's life, right?

That it's a family problem in the sense that it becomes a burden on those that this individual surrounds themselves with, which again, this whole thing, I mean, just to say too, this whole thing, including the -- I think just before, remember, the author said, let me see, "But vulnerable people like my husband are still at high risk." Again, like this whole construction of it's just -- the problem is just the husband, not that it's still a problem. And so because the problem is just the husband's problem, that is one of these things that gets socially reproduced endlessly as an idea that the "majority," that most of us or whatever, can move on, right? Something we're very familiar with.

Anyway.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 24:30

Well, I did want to just pop in on the sort of family problem and the ways that also sort of like disability theory is kind of at play here too, because to what you're saying, Artie, you know, the framing is that he is the problem, that his immunocompromised existence is the problem, and that that deviation from immunocompetency and from the norm, right, that is the problem, right, which is a kind of classic iteration of what's called the medical model of disability, where disability becomes translated through ideas like rehabilitation, ideas like the fact that this kind of problem is located in his medicalized status, which of course collapses and ignores the fact that she is vulnerable to COVID as well as he is, right.

Like he's not just worried about him getting COVID, he's worried about their child getting COVID and about her getting COVID. And not just about his disability, but he's worried about passing COVID to other people, right? Like this is someone who understands the realities of COVID after state abandonment and is responding to try and protect the people around him. And yet, everything about this frame, right, locates that problem back into that medicalized location of immunocompromised status, right. And so the husband is disabled in that he's chronically ill, yes, but he's also -- as per the social model of disability, he's also disabled by the sociological production of the end of the pandemic, right, which is denying him and by extension, his family, access to social life, right.

But again, that is redounded to a problem of this kind of medicalized specificity in the individual, and the wife sort of is reacting here to being forced into a caregiving role, right? Like the privatization of the family is at play, as we've been talking about, but rather than this being seen and portrayed as a collective problem, for example, you know, COVID is still a pandemic, we need to reinstitute robust, layered mitigations, put them back in place so that people like my husband and I can have access to society again, which doesn't just benefit us, but benefits everyone, since we're all vulnerable to COVID and Long COVID, and no one should be forced to be under these working conditions of forced repeated illness, especially when many people don't have sick pay, right. Like, that's one way of making this argument.

I think if Artie were allowed by NPR to write a piece like this, his would probably go like that. But that is not the point that this piece takes, right? Like that is the collective way to frame it, right, in terms of social rights, the way that the husband is not just disabled by his body and his medical status, but also by laws, policies, misconceptions about COVID, including his wife's, and the experts that she's referencing, systems, structures, social attitudes, you name it, right? Like as I said at the top, like this is stigma, and this is the social model of disability. This is what that is called.

And it's also super missing from this article, like that analysis that places this conflict in the broader context of what is actually going on in terms of COVID, and where the kind of problem is, right, being a much larger sociopolitical and economic sort of intersection, right? We see not just the literal privatization of this problem, but again, the kind of ways that we understand not just like mitigations now having changed, but the ways that medical expertise has influenced the understanding of the pandemic, right? We are all expected right now to be making these "personal risk calculations," right, in order to find ways to sort of reassimilate into the 2019 pre-COVID, normal, right, despite the fact that COVID is still everywhere.

But no, this is a problem of this one individual couple and a disagreement between these two people, all else equal, right? And so in that translation, right, you can see how medicalization can strip the political, the economic, the social out of something and translate it purely into a kind of identity based, diagnosis based, personal problem that can then be filtered through expertise and experience of professionals in order to be corrected and rehabilitated and reasserted as normal, right? Like the goal is to bully the husband into giving up COVID protections.

And that's not stated explicitly in the article, but that is -- in some sense, this is enforcement, right? This is enforcement against people taking COVID precautions, and it is an attempt to discredit that position, right. And it's part of, again, this process of individuation that also is just part of how we understand disability as a kind of deviance from the norm.

Artie Vierkant 29:29

So the article continues, and this is back to talking about this neuropsychologist, James C. Jackson. "Jackson has seen how one partner's experience with a traumatic bout of COVID can affect the other partner firsthand. Every other week, Jackson meets with a support group for family members of people who were critically ill with COVID.

Many of the participants are women who 'are having to negotiate their husbands' fears of socializing, traveling or even going to the doctor,' he says." So yeah, we learned that he leads a support group for people to complain about their partners' so-called fear of COVID. Great, cool. Continuing "As a result, the women tell Jackson that 'we used to live this really full life, but fear of going out has truncated our lives so much.' I can relate to that," the author says, "My husband and I used to host big parties, go to concerts, travel on a whim -- and now we can't do those things without seriously considering our risk of getting COVID. I mourn the life we used to have. And I know he does too."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 30:35

Where I didn't have to think about disability all day when I did anything, right? I mean, it's -- this is, again, the kind of fantasy of returning to a pre-COVID state, that that is possible.

Artie Vierkant 30:48

Yeah. Well, it's also -- you know, it is alienating. It is isolating.

Jules Gill-Peterson 30:52

Right.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 30:53

Yeah.

Artie Vierkant 30:53

But not for the reasons that she's talking about necessarily.

Jules Gill-Peterson 30:58

Well, just really quickly, I think part of what's really stuck out to me here is because there -- again, there is an acknowledgment of something that is sort of more objectively true, that yeah, you have to consider -- you have to consider disability now, and you don't like that, right, it's leading to mourning.

But I think part of what really stuck out to me here as a trained feminist reader is, you know, part of what needs to happen in order to effectively privatize the pandemic and effectively privatize care for disability and effectively privatize the reaction to the spread of the virus, is you do actually need like genres, you need like narratives that make sense of and bring order to this experience.

And so it really stuck out to me that one of the much older kind of narratives or frameworks for making sense of your place in the world that Jackson is really leaning on, the neuropsychologist, is like a heterosexual romance narrative and its inevitable spoiling, right? There's a kind of hetero pessimism here, that's interpolating women into a role that they can already understand, right?

Because the support group, he chooses to single out the women whose husbands are ill. These women are like, well, my husband has this problem, right, I'm not used to -- I don't want a husband who's fearful, right, you know, implied deep down here that it's like, well, men aren't really supposed to be afraid of things.

Men can grumble about going to the doctor, but they shouldn't be terrified of going to the doctor. Men aren't supposed to be afraid of other people, right? Men aren't supposed to want to be stuck at home. That's the gender coded province of women, right. But even as it's sort of raising this kind of -- this frustration with men today, right, for being scared, basically pathologizing them, being like, how dare men have disabilities, and how dare men react in a way that they judge to be reasonable in the world we live in.

But it's also then giving a framework to slip into that's more comforting and older, right, which is that men are always the problem in relationships. And women's job really is ultimately to coax men into doing things, you know, kind of that are for their own good and that get them to live a kind of happy couple life in the end. Women are really the ones pulling the strings behind the curtain, and that's what leads to good romance, right? I just think there's something really -- I actually really kind of want to stress that, that part of what this article is offering is like, do you feel totally out to sea and like what you're going through right now is completely unprecedented, and that it's really isolating?

Well, actually, what if it's just traditional hetero pessimism, and it's just like, you know, men are hard to be with, and like, women have to be kind of crafty. And sometimes you got to go to a therapist, and your husband doesn't want to go to a therapist, because you know how men are, right? I mean, it's just like, it's giving this kind of structure, this sort of -- these set of affects, these set of feelings, these set of expectations, and these set of stories about how men and women behave, that can make sense of something, and kind of again, dismiss the part that is "seriously considering our risk of getting COVID." No, no, no, no, no, it's actually just about how marriage is hard.

And I think that -- like, I don't say that to be glib. I think that's genuinely a really significant narrative, right? It's being -- it's the one that this neuropsychologist wants to lean on for a reason, right. Again, don't know the history of where this piece came from. But it is telling to me that it's a story about a woman writing about her husband, right? That says so much, that communicates so much about how the putative public reading this piece is supposed to think about how we would turn something like Long COVID into a family problem, right, making that a story in which women are the protagonists, but women are basically having to pick up the slack for their fearful, incapable husbands. That is a really, really, really significant, I think, framing.

Artie Vierkant 35:06

Yeah. I think that's one very important aspect of this. I also want to kind of think about approaching this from a slightly different angle, which is -- I mean, one of the reasons -- I haven't mentioned this yet, even though we're quite far into this conversation, but one of the reasons I think I was particularly keen to talk about this is because this piece to me is quite frustrating because I have overlap with this author's subject position, right? I have been in a relationship with an immunocompromised person since 2015. I think you all know her. She's on this recording right now.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 35:43

I heard a rumor it was me.

Artie Vierkant 35:45

Yep. And, you know, from one perspective, I read this, and I'm like, how the fuck -- god, how could you write something like this, Jesus Christ, what the fuck, you know, just mumbling under my -- that was -- I didn't intend to do that for affect, but it just happened like that. But I think one thing that it kind of made me think about, this whole piece, which is, I think, overlapping with the dynamic that you're talking about, Jules, but is slightly separate, because I understand from my position as like the sort of "immunocompetent," even though I hate that term, immunocompetent, the immunocompetent partner in a relationship with a disabled and immunocompromised person.

If I think about the sort of -- not to sound corny, but the sort of journey as it were, that I had to go through, the sort of learning that I had to do to actually be a good partner, from the point that we met and all of the -- basically the way that meeting Bea completely changed the way that I thought about health and disability, illness in general, and as it will come to no surprise to anyone who has read our book or listens to the show, politics itself and the political economy, writ large, right, by extension.

But I think when I think about the sort of process that you have to go through to have the realization of what I like to kind of think of as our collective vulnerability, the fact that it is really not -- you know, I think for me, it's interesting, but very frustrating to hear someone like this author, who is also in a relationship with an immunocompromised person, obviously, they don't say how long they've been together, we don't know how long the guy has been immunocompromised, not that that matters. But I'm just saying we don't have this context.

It could be relatively early on, who knows? Which would, I think, help explain some of the stuff that I'm taking issue with. Not explain away, but like it would give context for that. When I think about what the process was to kind of come to that understanding of how these binaries between vulnerable and non-vulnerable people, right, are totally wrong and incorrect, all of the stuff that I had to figure out to get to that point, it just makes me think, you know, I think that when you're in this subject position, you know, I can't totally speak for her because I don't fully share her subject position, obviously, but I have -- I have this overlap in being a partner, right? I think that when you are the partner of an immunocompromised or disabled person, you kind of have a choice. I think a lot of people do kind of ignore it.

And I'm not necessarily judging people on that, or whatever. I'm just saying that I think that -- I think a lot of partners don't really get it, I think they look away, or just kind of avoid it, pretend their partner is totally able bodied and occupying the same fantasy of perfect health and youth that a lot of us hold on to, you know, a fantasy that, frankly, our political economy explicitly encourages, so what else -- you know, again, this whole social reproduction angle that we've just been talking about this whole time, this whole episode.

And this is like a spectrum of behaviors, right? I'm not just saying like, oh, there's like, two ways, and one of the ways is partners just like put hands in their ears and they go la la la la. it's not, you know, a big deal, whatever, and totally ignore it. There's like a spectrum, right.

But I think one way is to sort of -- some people, I think, choose to not really interrogate it too much and think about what -- what their relationship to this person could also mean for them, I think in part because it can be scary, frankly. It is a big change to realize that a lot of these fantasies that we hold on to about health and ability, capacity, whatever, are really fantasies, right. So I totally understand that perspective, in a way, even though I've gone away from it.

The other option is to -- I don't want to sound corny again, but to sort of go down the rabbit hole, right? I mean, the other option is to really embrace it and try to understand it as much as you can. You will never understand it, because disability and even being immunocompromised, sick, or mad, other subject positions like this, all of these things are so heterogenous, right?

There's so many varieties of perspective and being within all of these things that we think of as these -- or some of us can think of as these like hegemonic categories. There's so much diversity of experience and ways of being that you're -- even if you become disabled yourself, you're probably never going to fucking understand your disabled partner totally. And that's fine. But you can try, you know?

Jules Gill-Peterson 40:48

Right [laughter].

Artie Vierkant 40:48

And if you -- and you can try as much as you -- right. And so, and part of the reason I say this, I know this is like a -- this is sort of a long build up to what I'm getting at, but what I'm getting at is, as I mentioned, Bea and I have been in this relationship since 2015.

There's a lot of stuff that I went through before the pandemic even started, that had already changed and reshaped how I thought about so many of these things. For example, as we've talked about a couple of times I think on the show, my first experience in -- I think it was the beginning of 2016, like very early 2016. wearing a face mask on a plane for the first time, because we were going somewhere together and Bea didn't want to get sick.

Before that, I was one of those people, I think, who like you see someone wearing a mask, and you're like, oh, they must be sick, or whatever. They must be like the sick person, or something, which, you know, it's been a while, but I've talked about this on the show before, I think that's one of the reasons why people react so strongly to masking because there's this large, ingrained thing -- at least I can speak for maybe US culture -- in the US, there's this big culture of -- this big, big preexisting culture of the person wearing the mask, the only reason they could possibly be wearing a face mask is because they're the sick one, and they don't want to get others sick.

And so people would make faces at Bea when she was wearing a mask in public, before the pandemic, and spit on her in the subway, because they thought that she was a health threat to them, not the other way around, right. And so my point is, again, having gone through so much of that, I can understand, I think, if because the experience of understanding this for the last four years plus, has to, for many people, I'm sure, also be filtered through all the things that we hear about the pandemic and all stuff about who is or is not vulnerable to the pandemic, and etc, etc. I can totally understand how you could miss the fact that it's real for everyone, you know what I mean? You could miss all of that.

But I think the the problem, the real fundamental problem that I have with this piece, is that what the author I think is talking about, and what the author even in writing the piece is resisting is the realization that that mourning feeling that she talks about, right, mourning the past life, or however she says it, that that mourning feeling, the feeling that you're feeling is in part the realization that this is how society values the sick, right? Like the realization that this is the position that your husband, an immunocompromised person, or a disabled person, or a mad person or whatever, that this is the way that society and our political economy, values them. And if there's a disconnect between how society values them, and how you value them, then what does that say about you, and what does that say about society, right?

And I think that that's something that is very important to keep in mind here. Because, yeah, terrible conclusions in this piece. We'll go through more of it. Not a fan, especially don't like it for the reasons of, as we all mentioned much earlier, the fact that it reproduces -- it reproduces the idea that we can sort of just like slough off our responsibility to people, including our partners, right. But also really, again, I think it's just important to acknowledge, this is a thing that encapsulates that choice quite well. You can decide that you're going to be open to it and you're going to learn and you can try to be -- you can try to be able to hang, as it were, and if you can't hang, you have to be real with yourself about that.

And that's probably a more traditional, you know, is this relationship good for both of us conversation that isn't particularly germane to the specifics of the conversation that we're having about this piece, right? That's more of a traditional problem, a traditional interpersonal problem.

The other stuff, though, if you just -- if you make the other decision, if you want to learn, and I think what's interesting is, if the author was open to that, they probably could figure out, oh, yeah, this is not anxiety. I believe that it's not that I'm like some outlier, for example, that the fact that I came to understand so much of this before 2020 certainly helped in the fact that it's never been a question for me, like, oh, you know, Bea is just being a buzzkill not wanting to go out to eat or something, or, you know, I'm not going to mask somewhere, or I'm not going to do this or that.

Like, no, I'm doing that stuff. And not just because of Bea. Also because like, I don't want to fucking get sick. Like I don't want to do that to myself.

Jules Gill-Peterson 46:11

No, I appreciate it, right. This is ultimately, like, part of what we're wrestling with and talking about this is on the one hand, right, we want to be able to make a political critique of privatization and the way that that socializes through relationships, things that are political problems, and there's a lot of personification going on in this piece, right. And part of what I was thinking about when you were talking, Artie, is like, actually, I can see how when -- when part of what someone might be feeling, maybe this author is feeling that, I don't know, but I can imagine plenty of people might feel that -- you know, that the larger forces that boil down to, will we get COVID in our own home or not, you know, when those larger forces feel well outside your control, because there's no governmental point of view on those things anymore, there's no public point of view, there's no collective point of view, there's no -- you know, you're not part of a political movement trying to transform those conditions of life, then I could see how it would just personify - well, COVID is this thing that manifests as my spouse, right? Or as the risk in my spouse, right?

I mean, I could totally understand how that happens. And so part of I think what's tricky, and I really appreciate you sharing and talking about that, Artie, is that the point here is we're not trying to say like that individual people are experiencing some kind of false consciousness, or that they are -- you know, or that there's a moral problem in the individual. Rather, we're trying to figure out what is -- how do we activate those switch points from individual to collective, or individual to political, right? How do you get out of Long COVID as a family problem and into Long COVID as a political problem, right? And those still have to involve, right, starting from that individual point of view, right? There is an aspect, there can be an aspect of like political education here, right, for anyone, where you're sort of unlearning a bunch of things that you haven't been pushed to, or haven't been forced by circumstance to reckon with before.

So I think that's -- you know, I think that's important. Yeah. We're showing a different kind of something that I might call political empathy. But in any case, we're thinking about like that as, if anything, the departure point for something much bigger than just sort of how you have --how any of us has feelings, individually or in small units, with the primary people we see the most in our life.

Artie Vierkant 48:42

Shall we keep going with the article?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 48:44

Oh, yeah, let's keep going.

Jules Gill-Peterson 48:46

Oh yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 48:46

We're barely halfway through.

Artie Vierkant 48:50

So the sub header for this section is "Compromising on risk." This is that part that I was talking about.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 48:56

Dun dun dun.

Artie Vierkant 48:57

Word choice, we love it. "Jackson says the main problem area he sees with couples in this situation is their individual assessment of risk."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 49:07

[groans]

Artie Vierkant 49:08

The Death Panel air horn sound effect that -- right there, "...individual assessment of risk. That's actually been one of the biggest points of contention between me and my husband. It's been hard to agree on a set of responsible COVID protections for our household. I don't think it would be terrible, for example, to eat inside a restaurant every once in a while. But he says there's still a possibility we may bring COVID home from our outing, and that scares him. It's a fair concern." I want to be clear, your husband's totally right, by the way.

Jules Gill-Peterson 49:38

Yeah. This is a manipulated -- I mean, I just think it's worth saying, right -- "I don't think it would be terrible, for example, to eat inside a restaurant, but he says there's still a possibility. Both are fair concerns." That is not telling the truth at all. There is an empirical way to evaluate those two. They are not both emotionally equally valid propositions.

And I just want to say, again, I think there is a long history of psychotherapists providing this kind of what I would call like, in an academic sense, we might call like analytic -- like sophisticated analytic neutrality, where you're just sort of playing shadow games with syntax and grammar and phrasing and perspective in order to neutralize or render equivalent, right, statements or beliefs or ideas that actually have real objective empirical relationships, and you turn them into these privatized expressions of feeling.

And so, I'm not saying the author is doing that in some sort of premeditated or sort of like conspiratorial sense, but just actually that the language and worldview of psychotherapy or couples counseling tends toward this kind of obscuring, right, anti-empirical, anti-material kind of outcomes. So, you know, that's gross.

Artie Vierkant 49:42

A psychiatric third way, if you will.

Jules Gill-Peterson 49:56

If you will.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 49:57

[laughing] Oh gosh, I mean, and I just want to point out here, just the ridiculously frustrating irony of being like my immunocompromised husband points out that there is still an airborne vascular disease all around us, right, that if we go to the restaurant this one time, we have a chance to catch, right? Like, these are how risk assessments are done, right.

And she's like, well, we're just not -- you know, we're having these clashing risk assessments. At no point does she say, I don't care if I get COVID, right. But that's the implication, of course. And this is laid out as if it's an argument over the technique for loading the dishwasher.

Jules Gill-Peterson 51:48

Exactly.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 51:49

Like that, in and of itself, just the equivalency, that is being made to the stakes of this argument, right? I think the way that we're about to see this elaborated upon, for example, is again, really kind of tying back into this very like old school at this point understanding of the pandemic where this is, quote unquote, simply just a big matrix of personal choices that need to be made, and everybody's gonna have their individual point that they're gonna fall on the graph, and then we just have to plot some sort of average from that, right?

Like this is eugenic logic dictating a bare minimum, right, of protection being equal to adequate protection on the basis of the fact that social rights have been largely denied to people who are immunocompromised, right? She is mad at how society is treating them and making their social life difficult, not just social life in terms of like socialization and going out and stuff, but there's so much discussion of mourning this old life, wanting this old life back, right.

And the recognition of where that denial is coming from, right, is completely absent. It is all located, in this case, in the husband's preferences, right? This is the classic choice framework of the pandemic. And here we can see just the incredible damage that this does, right, in terms of not only just doing damage interpersonally, but this also works to discredit people who are trying to agitate to make a political economy like the one we are living under not exist anymore, right?

Like this not only is undermining the husband's COVID precautions, right, but as it's reproduced at NPR, it becomes a much bigger problem because it is public facing communication, right. Like, this is not a private issue. This is being aired out in public, right. And people are being asked to see this as the kind of norm that couples that are split between immunocompetent and immunocompromised need to be discussing, right? I mean, it was the joke we made -- compromise is in the name.

And that kind of understanding of like what accessibility is, right, is just fundamentally fucked up. Like it shouldn't be about compromise like this, right? The target should be the fact that things are made inaccessible for the both of them, right. Instead, it's that the husband's accessibility needs are making things inaccessible for her. I mean, this is a classic zero sum framing of like any accessibility win takes away from someone else, right? This is just disability stigma, regurgitated through pop psych, and then blasted out by NPR as marriage advice.

Jules Gill-Peterson 54:45

Well said.

Artie Vierkant 54:46

The piece continues quote, "In these situations, Jackson says compromise is key."

Jules Gill-Peterson 54:51

Well, well, well.

Artie Vierkant 54:52

"The best outcomes in relationships are when partners 'with polar extremes of safety move toward the other in a way that is a little bit uncomfortable for them,' says Jackson. For me, that might mean being okay with dining al fresco most of the time. For him, that might mean acquiescing to eating indoors sometimes, maybe during less busy times of the day." I'm suddenly thinking --

Jules Gill-Peterson 55:16

I'm flagging that as disinformation, but yeah.

Artie Vierkant 55:19

But also, I'm just suddenly reminded of the thing that you said several -- I can't remember exactly which episode, but I think the episode about one of the Pamela Paul pieces that we talked about recently, where you were basically like, of course, obviously, anytime we're talking about COVID, it's always some extremely bourgeois shit --

Jules Gill-Peterson 55:40

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Artie Vierkant 55:42

Like going for a run, and being annoyed by the other people around in the public space around you. Or in this case, eating in a restaurant. Anyway.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 55:53

Mhm. Dining al fresco.

Jules Gill-Peterson 55:55

The horrible condemnation to dining [exaggerated accent] al fresco, the most horrible experience that has this [accented] al fresco turn of phrase in English. Yeah. Like, oh no, you poor things. Anyway. Sorry.

Artie Vierkant 56:07

We're getting to, I think, the most important part now.

Jules Gill-Peterson 56:09

Yeah, yeah.

Artie Vierkant 56:10

"Unpacking anxiety," is the header. "I told Jackson that I want to be more supportive and empathetic to my husband's needs." A thing that I did by writing an article for NPR -- I'm just kidding. She doesn't say that. "I wanted to be more supportive and empathetic to my husband's needs. But sometimes it is tricky to parse out what is a valid health concern and what might be anxiety." Ummm.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 56:34

[sighs]

Jules Gill-Peterson 56:34

Hmm, is it?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 56:34

So instead of trusting what my partner says about themselves, and what they think to be valid, I asked an expert if I was right.

Artie Vierkant 56:42

I'm just gonna say, in addition to anything else that we're definitely going to be saying about this anxiety thing [Jules laughing], I just want to call out, again, from my subject position, as someone who is the partner of an immunocompromised and disabled person, if you're someone who shares my subject position, like, if you're a listener -- I'm serious, I'm talking to you right now -- if you're a listener, and you share my subject position, especially if you're kind of new to that, right, and you're kind of in that learning phase: Don't do this. Do not weigh, ever, the -- you know, parsing what is a valid health concern and just an anxiety? That's not like ever helpful. I'm just -- I just want to say that. If I can be of any help to anyone listening to this, who is thinking, like, maybe they're just getting a little too -- no, no, no. Don't do that. Please. Anyway.

Jules Gill-Peterson 57:34

Right. No, lurking in everything you're about to go on to read in this piece is the idea that when someone has anxiety, everything they say and think is irrational and shouldn't be honored or taken into consideration. It actually is worth devaluing, because it's a sign of their incapacity and their immaturity. And it's their job to get over it. And all you can do is prod them towards that. Sorry, does it sound like I don't like this part of the article? Please continue.

Artie Vierkant 58:06

She writes, "The reality is that if he gets COVID again, he could get really sick."

Jules Gill-Peterson 58:11

Hm.

Artie Vierkant 58:11

Correct [Jules laughing]. "He could get really sick. So some of our efforts to protect our household from the Coronavirus are warranted. But there are moments when his measures are unnecessary.

For example, when he wears a mask outdoors and no one is around. When I bring it up, he gets defensive. 'That's a hard conversation to have with Long COVID patients. Many of them feel like they've been gaslit in the medical community, and they've had to defend themselves in the context of people not believing that Long COVID is real,' says Jackson," I say as I'm gaslighting. "So approach this topic with care. You don't want to invalidate your partner's emotions or tell them how to feel, says Ranak Trivedi, a clinical health psychologist and a health services researcher at Stanford who studies the relationship between family caregivers and patients with chronic illnesses. Saying things like 'you're making a big deal out of this,' for example, is not useful. Instead, make sure that it's 'science that is contributing to the beliefs he's having,'" --

Jules Gill-Peterson 59:13

Oh my god.

Artie Vierkant 59:14

"Around COVID precautions, says Jackson, and not other emotions like depression, anxiety or anger that may be affecting his quality of life."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 59:22

Okay, okay.

Artie Vierkant 59:23

Is your husband aware that we have the tools?

Jules Gill-Peterson 59:26

Yeah. I'm sorry. Before you continue to speak, let's make sure there are no emotions behind your thought and belief. It can only be derived from peer reviewed scientific research. This is how normal people function. What?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 59:40

I mean.

Jules Gill-Peterson 59:41

Are you joking?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 59:43

I just want to name also that I -- that this is specifically what I was talking about, about the author receiving neutral information and then interpreting it as in her favor. I know Trivedi's work actually, I know of them. They write a lot about the way that people are punished for disclosing their illnesses in the workplace, for example, with cancer diagnoses and Southeast Asian women, and this is one of the areas that they study. And I have a feeling that this author really didn't like what Trivedi was telling them in the interview, right? So they included these quotes, but after every quote from Trivedi that's like saying anything neutral, right, the author makes a very explicit point to essentially say something like, instead make sure it's the science that's contributing to the beliefs, right. So part of what I just want to point out is that for all of her performance of empathy, I just want to point out how self centered, shallow and hollow that performance of empathy is, right? Because we even have her literally twisting neutrality in her favor in order to facilitate making a comment, like, okay, so it's not -- I've been told it's not helpful to question whether my husband's health concerns are valid or not, and I shouldn't -- it's not useful to say things like, you're making a big deal out of this, right.

Artie Vierkant 1:01:09

But have you considered asking him if it's scientifically sound?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:01:13

But what if he's wrong, right?

Artie Vierkant 1:01:15

Is he a rational, post-Enlightenment subject, or not? Etc.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:01:20

Right.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:01:20

I mean, come on. This [sighing] -- it's such bullshit.

Artie Vierkant 1:01:25

I also want to, before we continue, just circle back on that last paragraph for one second, because we've talked about the science and anxiety part of it. But there's one thing I wanted to kind of highlight too, which is, so again, she writes, "Instead, make sure that it's science that is contributing to the beliefs he's having around COVID precautions, says Jackson, and not other emotions, like depression, anxiety, or anger that may be affecting his quality of life."

And this is another thing where it's important just to say, when you do the sort of classic liberal thing of taking politics, political economy, society, out of the equation and making everything a kind of individuated problem, then of course you can't see the kind of bigger picture of this, because it clearly sounds to me, if anything is affecting his quality of life, it is the state abandonment that we are all experiencing, to COVID, right. I mean, the fact that the state itself is saying, essentially, it is on all of you to protect yourselves.

And in fact, actually, this is basically what he's doing, is taking it upon himself to protect himself and her. That's certainly something that I think is affecting their quality of life. But anyway, I digress. So I'm gonna continue, she writes her sort of response in here, "I told Jackson that's not an easy thing to communicate -- and he agrees. 'Sometimes people have a hard time considering something when a spouse brings it up,' he says, because it may sound like lecturing or nagging or come with emotional baggage from the relationship." I just want to note, that's not the problem.

The problem isn't like who's bringing it up, and it's weird to -- again, like this whole reflex to like, oh, if she says that, she's gonna be nagging, or it's like, what a -- anyway, classic why we don't buy into these frameworks, right? Anyway, "That's where a therapist or a couples counselor could help," she writes, "especially one who has experience working with patients who have had long COVID or chronic illness and understands the science and the high stakes. They may be able to help my husband 'step back, be reflective and say, "Maybe my anxiety is getting tangled up in this," ' says Jackson."

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:03:50

Sorry, I had to restrain myself from swearing.

Artie Vierkant 1:03:53

Get you a psychiatrist that will --

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:03:55

That will pathologize the hell out of you and treat you like you're monstrous for being actually really rational. Yeah, yeah. Sounds familiar, actually.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:04:05

I was going to say, I really feel like you shouldn't be allowed to write articles where essentially the contents of what appears to be a personal therapy session in which your therapist was validating you, at whatever cost to the people around you, should not be aired as like empirical commentary in the media, like as a rule. There should just be like a hard no on any shit like that, you know what I mean?

Because that really feels like what it is, is we are getting right now a specific type of complaint and it feels like being unwillingly submitted to participating in someone's marriage counseling session where the therapist is manipulating something -- someone into accepting something ridiculously untenable and dangerous, right, which you know [sighs].

Artie Vierkant 1:04:55

Which is exactly the advice, so.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:04:57

Exactly.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:04:57

Mhm, mhm.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:04:58

Which is exactly the goal of the piece.

Artie Vierkant 1:05:00

Well, that's -- I mean, that's exactly what they -- just go to a couples counselor who will say -- who will help the husband --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:05:07

Who will help you gang up on --

Artie Vierkant 1:05:07

Go to a couples counselor who will take your --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:05:10

Take your side, yeah.

Artie Vierkant 1:05:11

Will take your side. Yeah, exactly. Okay, we're getting towards the end of the piece, I think. We're not going to read totally to the end. But I think there's one important final bit in here. So subheader, "Keep communicating." "Sometimes I feel like I'm at an impasse with my husband on this topic, so I don't bother revisiting our restrictive COVID precautions.

But Laura Murray, a clinical psychologist and a senior scientist at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in mental and behavioral problems, says 'always keep trying to communicate. If one way doesn't work, try another way,' she says. "It could be writing a very heartfelt letter. You might say: I love you more than anything. I want our family to do normal things. And I'm worried about you, worried that your life has become so much about avoiding COVID."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:06:01

What if you made it like an episode of intervention, then maybe your husband would listen to you.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:06:05

Oh my god. It's so mean. Imagine saying that - I'm worried that your life has become so much about avoiding COVID. Yeah, because, what, your husband chose to do that? What is wrong --

Artie Vierkant 1:06:14

Right, yeah. Whose fault is that? Exactly.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:06:16

Empathy has disappeared.

Artie Vierkant 1:06:17

Maybe should go to couples counseling with Joe Biden or something.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:06:20

Right. I'm always -- can I just say, I always wear my shame as someone who researches and thinks about the politics of health, that every single piece in the media ever always includes someone who's my co-worker at Johns Hopkins University, being the mouthpiece for the most regressive, neoliberal nonsense, and that person probably gets paid twice as much as I do.

But anyways [Artie and Beatrice laughing], that's not the point. We're trying to get away from personal grievances. I just wanted to say like, one of the things that I think really emerges in this letter example is how, you know, a really -- I'm going to save -- I'm being -- okay, I'm being glib here, a really rational response to this piece would be, wait a minute, you know what's not a possible outcome in the universe that the author sets up? That by making these compromises, her husband will, in fact, get COVID again, and will become incredibly ill. And then guess what? Their shot at normal things, all the things that he has been worried about all along, will come true. But will she be very pleased that they got to go to a restaurant a couple of times, like that's -- I mean, there's a way in which, right, her feelings are -- if I were to be a therapist, I would say like, the structure of feelings presented in this piece, right, or by this text, are so deeply anxious, they're rooted in the present only, present desires - I want normal life now, I want to restore fantasy of 2019 in the present. There's actually -- right, because so much here is about pathologizing future oriented anxiety, that's about like assessing outcome, right That if we do this, then this is likely to happen.

Because this piece is condemning that kind of thinking as irrational and fearful, but doesn't think that abandoning it actually will like increase the likelihood of getting COVID, like there's just no space in this piece for the obvious outcome that like, statistically, probably, if you make all these compromises, go to couples therapy, pathologize your husband's feelings, you're probably both gonna get COVID again, and then what's going to happen? Like if you're already so -- if you already experience your husband's illness and disability as such an incredible antagonist to your own desires, what will happen when this plan of yours and your desires are spoiled and fail, right, and actually lead to even more hardship because you are being abandoned by the state. That's unsayable, right?

And in many ways, like I don't actually -- I'm not saying this as like an accusation at the author. I actually think it's just symptomatic of this kind of way of talking about the pandemic and talking about disability, right? These are the -- this is why -- I can't remember which of you said this at the top, right, the things that are unsaid in this piece, right? They are the structuring, unsayable truths that are the engine of this way of thinking, shrinking the world down to, I love you so much, I just want to be normal, and I'm worried that you're not normal, right?

And it's like, well, if the husband were writing a letter, or if I were the husband writing the letter, I would say, I guess I love you more than anything, I'm worried about your need for a fantasy of normality overriding reality, and I'm worried that your life has become so much about avoiding the fact that COVID has already affected us, and affects me, right? But it's like, even that still isn't really getting at what's sitting underneath all of this, right, which is that the fact that it's boiling down to a hypothetical letter writing exercise, which is just the most classic, like BetterHelp cheap therapist, right? Write a letter to the person.

Like, okay, we've all heard that before. It's like -- but that's just really, again, a form of avoidance for what's really sitting underneath all of this. Like, if we're already at the point where we're writing letters, we've really kind of lost the plot in a really substantial political way. But I just think it so beautifully -- it's so, so, so beautifully set up by my colleague at Johns Hopkins University.

Artie Vierkant 1:07:08

Have you considered leaving a passive aggressive medical on the fridge?

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:10:29

[giggling]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:10:33

I mean, that was so beautifully put, Jules, and I think it reminds me of the discussion around, for example, intellectual disability and abortion, right, where you have the kind of liberal argument that like aborting fetuses because you have proof that the baby is going to have Down syndrome, for example, is an important decision to make because of essentially cost-benefit analysis, right? If you're a middle class family, you can't afford to have an intellectually disabled child. Wealthy people can choose to have those children, but you middle class Joe and Jane, like you can't afford that kind of care, right? Your family, you can't afford to take that time off of work that that will require.

And that's kind of used as the justification and that helps sidestep the conversation of like, is it moral to -- you know, the wealthiest nation in the history of the world or whatever, like is it moral to not provide for people with intellectual disabilities in the United States, right?

And that changes it into a question of like, can this individual family afford to choose to have someone with an intellectual disability in their life? Can they choose to have someone who doesn't fully qualify for Rawlsian citizenship because they'll never have a job and be a taxpayer, right? And this is the kind of frustrating thing that's also going on here, right, is that what keeps happening, right, is that these experts that are -- that are being rolled in, to validate the wife's position, right, what they're also validating is the way the United States and the way that states and capitalism and other people treat disability, right?

They are validating that this position, that disability should be a reason for interpersonal abandonment, that unable -- an inability to return to "normal" is grounds for abandonment. And it's really, really important to also see this piece as a threat, right? Like, if you don't get with the program of normality, right, like your partner will leave you, because no one except for the immunocompromised really want to protect themselves. And this is the kind of then attitude that is being modeled and can be taken up and reproduced by other people, right? And that's where this harm begins to compound and spread, right.

And we start to see the literal, again, weaponization of these expert opinions purportedly being involved in order to solve this interpersonal conflict, raising the stakes for the conflict, reproducing the very conditions that contribute it, right. And this whole framing itself is a threat that should be -- should be read as a threat of essentially the kind of framework of the political economy reinforcing the fact that disability is a negative thing, and a death sentence within the United States from an economic perspective, from a social perspective, and that it's always going to be that way, and it's on the individual person to individually rise up and overcome their disability if they're to be given, you know, the benefit of inclusion in society, right?

This is a completely like libertarian framework of disability, which ironically, is not inconsistent with the ADA's own framing of disability accommodations that are to be made on a person by person, individual basis, not universally applied, but litigated on a case by case basis, in very specific circumstances, with incredible weight against the disabled person, and for the denial of accommodations.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:14:11

Bea, I think that's so important. I just want to -- I just want to like second and amp up what you just said, because I think you're drawing our attention to probably the more difficult to appreciate dynamic of rehabilitation in a neoliberal context, right? We're often really trying to understand how state abandonment functions by shrinking, right, everything down to the -- to the size of the private family or the private relationship, but I think especially psychotherapy has the role then of making the opposite threat, right?

Because everything has been shrunk down to the size of the family, the imperative to self-rehabilitation for disabled people, or for people who are told they're unlovable and pathologized psychiatrically, right, is you have to get -- whip yourself into shape, or no one will love you, and you will never be cared for, and you will be abandoned, not only by -- you've already been abandoned by the state, but you will be abandoned, right, by the people who say they love you, by your family, by your significant others.

I mean, I've just -- like, there's so many therapists who I've been researching in my own work, you know, where there's a rehabilitation framework for trans people, where they make the same argument, right? The state is not going to support you and doesn't approve of you, and so you have to rehabilitate yourself, not just to like meet the state's demands, but you have to rehabilitate yourself, or you will never have a loving relationship, your family will never accept you, your partner will never want to be with you, everyone will leave you and leave you alone, right? Like, that's a huge threat. That's so significant -- like just, you cannot -- you cannot underestimate how damaging and how painful it is to be told that by people, over and over again. And it's not a totally empty threat, right? Like it's a really material threat.

I just think it's so, so, so important. And that helps connect the stakes of this NPR piece to something much, much, much larger.

Artie Vierkant 1:16:09

Well, it's also not empty, because the other people involved in that person's life also hears similar -- you know what I mean? They hear similar --

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:16:17

Exactly. Yes.

Artie Vierkant 1:16:17

So, and I'll -- actually this brings us perfectly to I think the last thing that I wanted to read from this article, which is the very next paragraph. And I think this is a perfect place to kind of close our close read on. It continues, "Don't forget to ask your partner how they feel too, says Murray."

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:16:25

The gall [laughing]. Sorry.

Artie Vierkant 1:16:18

"'Is this the life that he wants? Does he foresee an end to this? Or is this something he would like help with?' That may make it easier to segue into a more productive conversation about solutions and compromise." And this, everybody, is where it really helps to not see this as an individual problem. And also to not see this -- as I talked about earlier, to not see this as a -- there are the vulnerable and then the non-vulnerable, and these are two totally separate categories of people.

The sort of, you know, I've -- I think we've talked about this on the show before as the sort of "normal people," and then there's these like intrinsically, somehow magically intrinsically vulnerable categories of person that are just other, right? And these questions, these questions that they have quoted from this person, underscore so completely how even if you just read them in a slightly different context, acknowledging state abandonment, acknowledging COVID as a political problem, and Long COVID as a political problem, right, they read very different. "Is this the life that he wants? Does he foresee an end to this? Or is this something he would like help with?" Those are not questions for him.

I mean, earlier in the pandemic, these are things that Bea and I had as conversations amongst ourselves, not in terms of like, oh, our own behavior, but in terms of, wow, this is just what life is now. Can we foresee an end to this, right? And then, obviously, the last one, or is this something he would like help with, etc. I mean, come on, like structurally "help" versus whatever, not being abandoned by the state or society or whatever? This is -- there's a very different way to read these things.

And again, this goes back to this question, is this the life that he wants, or this assertion from the earlier quote from this expert, "and I'm worried about, worried that your life has become so much about avoiding COVID," this isn't the life that anyone wants, right? I mean, that's not -- that's not like their individual decision. This is a reaction to the material conditions around them.

This is also, as I mentioned, the thing that they've been told to do, which is to, if they want to protect themselves, they have to be responsible for it. That's the state policy. That is the policy. That is what we are left with, right. And it is hard, it is -- it is alienating, it is isolating, and it is lonely, all of those things, but not because it's an individual psychological problem, as is so clearly the interpretation here. And it's so important to be really upfront about that and to understand that because there's no way that that experience gets less alienating or isolating or lonely, unless we stop with all this fucking bullshit that this article is trading in, for example, of, yeah, it's just fine for everybody, you know what I mean? Like this is totally fine.

It's, as Jules has been saying, like late 2019 again or something, pandemic is over. And oh, yeah, there's a couple of people who are like blah blah -- we're not, we're not going to think about -- we're not going to be thinking about those vulnerable people over there, who we just kind of imagine, but also fundamentally imagine to be not really a part of society, not a part of the society that we also inhabit, that they're just somewhere else magically.

And as we know, these binaries don't function in the first place the way that this fantasy asserts that they do, but also, again, these feelings, and these questions, right, that are being posed of this individual that the author is in a relationship with, are, again, really getting at that question, that mourning feeling, that mourning feeling that you're feeling, is partially, or should at least, I would hope, partially be a realization that this is how we treat the sick and disabled in society, and that it could very easily be otherwise.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:21:23

I mean, if you look -- first of all, so well put, Artie. And if you look at, for example, the CDC recommendations for protecting yourself from COVID for people who need extra precautions, people with medical conditions, it advises people to stock up on prescription and over the counter medications to reduce trips to the pharmacy. It advises people to make sure to follow your treatment plan and be compliant, to keep your medical condition under control, to reduce the need for emergency visits. It says when possible, keep your appointments with your healthcare provider.

The whole sort of framework, right, essentially even backs up the husband's case, right? The understanding that this is sort of -- that life is hostile, right, to immunocompromised people is quite clear and reflected across all of the CDC recommendations. We are told over and over and over again, that this is just a matter of personal choices, and that we have to respect people's choices about how much risk they want to take on. And yet, as we've just laid out in fucking excruciating detail, this is about a power imbalance. This is about power relationships. And the pressure against making a choice to protect yourself from COVID, regardless of whether you're immunocompromised or not, is incredible right now.

And so I just -- you know, I brought in this David Cooper quote that I wanted to read you both to wrap us out. This is from his 1978 essay called The Invention of Non-Psychiatry, and David Cooper writes, "There are no personal problems, only political problems. But one takes 'the political' in a wide sense that refers to the deployment of power in or between social entities. Personal problems in the commonest sense reduce the political to things going on between one person and a few others, usually on an at least implicitly family model."

So again, this is a way of sort of stripping the actual relations of power that are at play out of the conversation, right, and transforming it into a mere disagreement and point of compromise between two individuals, all else equal, with equal positions on the pandemic, right.

And that is -- that is the essential translation that we have seen weaponized over and over and over again, against people who are still protecting themselves from COVID, regardless of whether you have the immunocompromised status to allegedly justify your protections or not.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:21:25

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:21:58

So with that, I think that's probably a good place to leave it.

Artie Vierkant 1:24:10

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think we said about all that needs to be said.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:24:16

And also, we could go on for hours if we're not careful.

Jules Gill-Peterson 1:24:19

Yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:24:20

So patrons, as always, thank you so much for supporting the show. We couldn't do any of this without you. And listeners, if you'd like to become a patron, you'll get access to our second weekly bonus episode and entire back catalogue of bonus episodes. And you can become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. If you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up copies of Health Communism and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_. We'll catch you later in the week in the main feed.

As always, Medicare for All now. Solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.

[ Outro music ]

---

Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)