70% negative: Response to the Ransom Notes campaign
December 19, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
From an interview with Dr. Harold Koplewicz, director of the NYU Child Study Center in today’s Wall Street Journal Health Blog:
Today, Koplewicz told the Health Blog that he decided to pull the ads because “the debate began to become focused on the ads themselves” rather than on the disorders that they were intended to highlight.
Koplewicz insists there wasn’t a particular incident that spurred the decision, but told us that “many intelligent individuals and reasonable individuals were telling me they were reading the ads in a different way” than they were meant to be read. Many parents said they felt blamed for their child’s illness even though they were getting their child the best treatment they could, which was not the intention of the ads, says Koplewicz.
He has received thousands of phone calls and e-mails since the ads became widely publicized, about 70% against the campaign [my emphasis]. Although he heard from parents who said the ads spoke to them, “simultaneously we unintentionally hurt many other people’s feelings,” Koplewicz says.
“Hurt feelings?” No, not exactly.
But outrage, anger, bafflement, exasperation: A lot of feelings.
And a lot of willingness to make a difference.
Yes you have made a difference. You, a professor of literature, have helped suppress a contrary point of view. Congratulations professor.
I can’t help but imagine Hermann Goering on the stand at Nuremburg: “Really, we never expected that people’s feelings would be hurt.”
Yes, I’m given to occasional flights of hyperbole, but hey, when someone is so utterly hell-bent on missing the point…
It wasn’t a “contrary point-of-view.” It wasn’t a “point-of-view” at all. It was an ad campaign, and a dumb one at that, completely off target and off base and off kilter and off just about everything else it possibly could have been. You seem to be accusing Dr. Chew of suppressing academic freedom, and that’s just nonsense. This isn’t literature, and it isn’t academe. This was simply poor execution of a presumably well-intended concept. Even the perpetrators of the campaign now concede that it was ill conceived. This was not part of a “dialogue” with a “point-of-view” to suppress.
Harold, you might just as plausibly claim that white, middle-class Americans are an “oppressed minority.”
I mean, seriously! Your customary angle on autism is plastered all over the media, every single day. By contrast, if the self-advocacy point of view gets some tepid passing acknowledgment in some obscure article that comes along, say, once a month, we’re all just thrilled speechless.
When you come here and suggest that our point of view is somehow overrepresented, you only make yourself a laughingstock. Think about it.
Oh, yes, Harold: Poor, down-trodden, beleaguered Madison Avenue. They just can’t catch a break, can they?
My suggestion is that the friend who first commented on this post read Mythologies by Roland Barthes. I think that, rather than being “suppressed,” the Ransom Notes campaign will take its footnote in the history of disability rights.
In the days following 9/11, all of New York experienced a period of grace, when every life was so precious and strangers gave each other deep, empathetic smiles as they passed on the street. A child’s failure to measure up no longer seemed to matter. Everyone was accepted and valued.
Perhaps BBDO and the add/PR agencies that give their services quite generously could shift gears to state the overwhelming need for services and supports, research, etc. while fostering the dignity and worth of those individuals they seek to assist.
Suppressed would not be the word that comes to mind; this is not exactly a new opinion which is being brought to light. It’s, as noted, old and even stereotypical, and so to consider it a “suppression” isn’t exactly what I’d call it.
But, yeah, I’m not surprised that most of the response he got was negative. I’m just glad that he had the guts not to dig in his heels on the point, which would have been bad for all involved at the end of the day.
Cliff
The Ransom ads were horribly offensive. The basic questions that now remain include: What would be an effective public health campaign for child mental health? What kind of campaign could address not only treatment issues but also disparities in access to care and education across ethnic, geographical, and class lines? There must be good models from other areas of health — perhaps diabetes. This is an open question that readers of this blog may wish to weigh in on.
I think an ad campaign featuring people with the same issues as those highlighted by the Ransom Notes campaign (ASD, ADHD, Bulimia, etc..) would be a good start. If parents could see that people with these diagnoses can be successful and lead valuable lives, they may be less afraid to get a diagnosis and services. Getting a diagnosis for my son was the major turning point for my son. He was put on an IEP and offered a special ed placement and without this, he would not be making the progress that he is.
The fear needs to be removed and I think ending this campaign is a positive step toward that goal.
I’d second Beth on that the focus really shouldn’t be on the condition at question as the enemy of kinds, but more on the progress that can be made with the correct resources and making a point as to how great that could be. As something else it would also be nice to have a campaign that specifically worked against the stigma this campaign summoned, showing what individuals with conditions can do and what they bring to the table that would be missing without that kind of thinking.
Cliff
Could they not do a reversal of this dumb campaign, show kids who are NOT “kidnapped” by their disorders but who do things like play the piano, ride the subway, attend school, function in situations that don’t fit the unsupported stereotype? Can the point be that people with autism are *not* bound and chained by it but actually live their lives in ways that the stereotype just doesn’t cover? That research and therapies and interventions can sometimes add tools that facilitate their living? That would have been so much more useful and true to life and less reliant on fearmongering.
A NYT blog speculates on why folks were unhappy with the NYU “Ransom Notes” campaign. FWIW–I didn’t like the imagery or the message, and I neither feel guilty nor ashamed, not for our family and not for our kids, but is this truth or fiction, or both?
NYTimes Domestic Disturbances blog
December 20, 2007, 7:08 pm
MARKETING DISORDER
“…For parents of children with “issues” — psychiatric, developmental, neurological, whatever you want to call them — guilt is a constant life companion. We no longer believe that “refrigerator mothers” cause autism by being cold and withholding, or that mothers who give their children “mixed messages” cause schizophrenia, but we’ve replaced these outmoded beliefs with a whole new slew of fears and self-flaggelating forms of blame…
…But when you have a population of people already brimming over with self-blame and guilt, when you have a group of parents whose every nerve ending is exposed, it’s all too easy to spark a crisis…Early next year, the Center will hold an online “town hall” meeting to draw outside voices into the planning of its next public awareness campaign.
Maybe some of the fear and guilt and shame will come out into the open then. And then, maybe, they’ll start to fade.”
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/marketing-disorder/?ref=opinion