Well it’s CRPS/RSD awareness month and Station 19/Grey’s Anatomy has started up again. A PERFECT time to address CRPS and the great “drug addict” assumption finally.
If you guessed they didn’t address it AT ALL, ding ding ding, you win.
As predicted, he’s magically healed, in drug rehab as the main focus, and we never even understood what actually happened. So to someone with no CRPS experience or understanding, this guy “caught it”, got addicted to drugs by choice, and “had a magical surgery that completely healed him and now he’s in drug rehab because that’s really all we can focus on”.
For a team of writers who have done such extensive research on how to portray sensitive issues and certain conditions so, so well, they dropped the bomb here. CRPS doesn’t magically go away. Can it go in to remission after extensive medications (and that means trying tons and tons of them and getting all the nasty side effects)? Absolutely. But it also requires SERIOUS amounts of physical therapy and special conditions for remission to occur, and even then its rare. It’s more like you managed to shove a massive poofy prom dress into a tiny box and sat on it. It might stay in there for a while, but eventually if you move it just wrong, BAM, POOF, it explodes everywhere. A mass of glitter and tulle. Which, if you know anything about glitter, it never goes away.
This goes straight back to my point. The writers CHOSE to ignore a perfectly amazing story line about the struggles of being judged and the difficulty of recovering from an injury with a permanent disability. Many people with CRPS do go back to work or try to with accommodations (which is a whole other battle since companies rarely will make their legally obligated ADA accommodations) and have to fight through the brain fog, pain, nausea, and other horrifying side effects of whatever new medicine has been shoved at them. But instead we hear about a magical surgery (less than 20% effectiveness in reality) and he gets some pain meds and BAM “I need time away to go through drug addict recovery steps”. Then he’s up and walking 90 days (we assume based on what they said) later.
So what did they do wrong? Well, #1 they made this about drug addiction for a pain condition, once again laying an assumption and the blame on a patient for something out of their control. #2 They made it seem like there is a CURE. There isn’t. Period. It’s called Chronic for a reason. #3 They just made it a seasonal adventure and tossed it away, just like they do with at least one character and Cancer. Except they try to at least show the pain and exhausting associated with the treatments. They didn’t even do that here. #4 They made it all seem like a personal choice.
As someone with CRPS, this makes me frustrated and angry that they couldn’t even do the BARE minimum to explain the condition properly and the treatment that doesn’t actually exist.
Oh and let me just add, because I am ESPECIALLY pissy right now, Grey’s Anatomy just ruined Bipolar once again. A main character with it, they decided he needs medication and therapy, totally acceptable, but made sure throughout the series to mention how his manic state made him make mistakes and kill someone, and blame all of it on mental health and personal choice. Is Bipolar a tough road that involves crazy manic episodes and huge depressive waves? Yes, for some even with medication it still happens. It also makes people brilliant. It means you’ll ruminate on something for a very long time, that you can be out of your mind sad or excited. But once again, they HAD to make it a tragic story with the Bipolar guy going ballistic, even when he was right and NO ONE apologized properly, and they have to make it seem like he’s going to get a magic pill and some talk therapy and BY THE POWER OF MEDICINE BE HEALED. Just in case you didn’t know the likely reason for this, it’s because all the other characters are constantly cycling through depression, PTSD, mania, and god knows what else, so they have to make “actual conditions” over the top and extreme to try and show “they aren’t like other people”. Not an inaccurate idea, but there is a much better way to go about it that would give them a “showing the lives of the characters” stance AND be factually accurate without further demonizing a marginalized and judged group of strong individuals.
For once can we stop making mental health mean someone will ALWAYS do something bad and chronic conditions can be magically healed.
Quit marginalizing us. You have an audience of over 7 million people on premier nights, yet you let that all go to waste for a need to tell an interpersonal story and ignore an already ignored and often assumption riddled community get further assumptions dumped on them.
Take responsibility and step it up for some actual accuracy. I don’t want to keep seeing every medical show out there magically diagnose people in 30 seconds with a rare disease and never mention the difficult testing involved and the fact they keep getting ignored or the fact there are often little to NO long term effective treatments.
Get your shit together. You had 6 months of quarantine to figure it out.
Life On Fire 