Ultimately, I have come to view mental health as a critical area of multicultural education. Multicultural and diversity education tend to be concerned with differences across race, ethnicity, social class, gender, and other familiar categories because often such categories are used to justify discriminatory behavior. Given the fact that people from outside the diagnostic mental health norm are believed to be in deficit, to be disordered, to be lacking “natural” social skills—even by those such as Kim Kiker Painter who consider themselves part of the solution rather than part of the problem—it seems that mental health variation meets every criterion for consideration as a multicultural education category. Given the fact that young people sometimes act out violently for the treatment they endure for being different—from taking their own lives to lashing out at others (Mental Health America)— there appears to be nothing short of an imperative to integrate mental health considerations into any inclusive effort in education.

Being typical has its advantages, and being atypicalcan be hell. But a good part of the hell of being atypical follows from being treated by others as socially abnormal or deviant. I have an interest in the ways in which people of extranormative makeups are constructed, viewed, and treated in school and urge educators to treat them inclusively and without stigma. Lev Vygotsky recognized this possibility when working in the field of “defectology,” anunfortunate term that, in Vygotsky’s day, covered conditions such as blindness, slow or arrested cognitive growth, and other limitations that affected children following the incessant warfare in Russia and its environs from 1914 to 1922. His insights are relevant to a modern understanding of mental health, and I have drawn on them in prior essays to inform my understanding of the 21st-century mental health landscape (Smagorinsky, “Confessions,” “Every Individual,” “Vygotsky”).

Vygotsky resisted the prevalent approach of his day—and ours—that saw children of difference as defective and in need of repair. He instead viewed the question of their condition as one that needed to be addressed in the environment, rather than in the individual. Vygotsky’s key insight was that a primary disability—the condition that is diagnosed, such as blindness (to him) or mental health difference(to me)—only becomes problematic when a secondary disability is imposed by other people. This secondary disability emerges from the negative social consequences of the primary disability, that is, the stigmas that people associate with difference and in turn apply such that the person of difference feels rejected and of lesser value. Vygotsky’s solution was not to fix the child, but to change the context of the child’s development so that the point of difference did not produce secondary disabilities and the accompanying feelings of inadequacy that follow from social judgment such as pity or scorn.