Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I’d like to welcome you to the thirty-first installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.
My guest today is Brian Montgomery. Brian is a visiting professor at University of Texas-El Paso who works primarily in philosophy of language and epistemology, especially where they intersect, as well as on issues in standpoint epistemology and epistemic injustice and the relationship between science and metaphysics. He is engaged in a long-term project in mind-centered sexual ethics and the norm of monogamy and has written a screenplay about the relationship between Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill which explores the latter’s experiences of depression. Almost all of Brian’s hobbies involve films.
Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Brian! When you began college, you were enrolled in a law enforcement program; however, you gravitated to philosophy. Tell us about your academic background and your motivation to pursue a career in philosophy.
Thank you for the invitation to participate, Shelley. Yes, I began my academic career as a criminal justice major at Western Illinois University. This start of my academic career was the culmination of the previous three years spent working for a suburban Illinois police department through its Explorers program. I initially joined the program as a teenager out of a general desire to help people. I was more than a bit idealistic back then and thought that my involvement in the program was the best way to help others. I saw a lot of good among the officers I worked under, but also a lot of bad. I was already disillusioned with the profession by the time that my freshman year began.
Consequently, I decided to switch majors to my favorite subject in high school: history. I had an Advanced Placement (AP) European history instructor my senior year of high school who specialized in Soviet history, and I decided to do it too. I did well with the Russian history courses, but struggled with learning the language. I decided to transfer universities for my sophomore year, and ended up at Illinois State University. Upon entering, I found out that I had enough AP credit to graduate in my junior year. Not wanting to enter the real world any earlier than I had to, however, I took on philosophy as a second major, as I was enrolled in an intro to philosophy course.
In high school, I had read some Nietzsche without understanding much of it. I really got into the subject in the summer before I became a major. I had purchased a number of Bertrand Russell’s popular titles, including A History of Western Philosophy, Unpopular Essays, and Marriage & Morals, consuming them voraciously. I also read both Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World and Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things and became deeply interested in questions of pseudoscience, belief formation and epistemic hygiene. After all of this, I decided that philosophy was the discipline for me. I had previously decided to become a professor; since I struggled with learning Russian, pursuing a career in academic philosophy felt like the natural path for me.
What was your graduate school experience like?
I had two separate experiences in graduate schools. In 2002, I earned a B.A. and went straight into a terminal M.A. program at Northern Illinois University. Unfortunately, I applied after the deadline, and was therefore ineligible for funding my first year. Thankfully, I had wonderful professors there like Sharon Sytsma and Tomis Kapitan who fought to ensure that I received an assistantship my second year. I had a rough first semester, but excelled for the remaining three, passing three of my four competency exams in my second semester and finishing the final one in my third. I consider myself especially fortunate to have a year overlapping with Jennifer Lackey and Baron Reed in their first-year teaching there. I’ve stayed in touch with the pair throughout the intervening years and have learned so much from them.
I saw many of my fellow students go off to graduate school; but, with my fiancé, I decided to take a two-year hiatus. We were married in the summer of 2004 and I spent the period teaching at a pair of community colleges. Unfortunately, I was only a part-time employee and couldn’t get health insurance because of a previous treatment for depression. So, I took a job at a Border’s bookstore to get minimal health coverage, working seven days a week between the three jobs. I enjoyed the time that I spent with my partner, but was grateful to put the adjuncting behind me.
I returned to graduate studies in the fall of 2006, when I enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of Missouri. It was an exciting period in my life, but also a time of great challenges. I was diagnosed with several medical disorders during this time. For instance, I found out that I have vitiligo, which causes my white blood cells to destroy my skin pigment. Since I have the usual northern European paleness, it’s not as visible in me as it is in people of color. I am, however, more likely to develop skin cancer during my lifetime. I was also diagnosed with a degenerative osteological disorder that has reduced my bone mass. It’s effectively given me arthritis in my 30s, making it painful to stand during lectures. Neither of these conditions has affected me as much as struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder (O.C.D.), depression, and anxiety.
My first year in the program, I began to experience symptoms of depression without realizing it. My reading comprehension went early on in the Fall semester. I was taking a course on Thomas Reid, and seminars on epistemology and action theory. I would sit down and do the readings, but remembered little of it, and comprehended even less. I thought that I wasn't intelligent enough to understand any of it and would flunk out at the end of the semester, which led me to sinking even lower into depression.
At the time, the department had a large contingent of graduate students who held a conservative view of Christianity. They were there to study under Jon Kvanvig, who had left for Baylor in the summer before I accepted the department’s offer. Although I was an agnostic who leaned heavily toward atheism, I quickly became friends with most of these students. In fact, they were some of the kindest and most caring people that I’ve ever known. Unfortunately, two of them took it upon themselves to tell me that I was going to burn in Hell for being a nonbeliever. I politely nodded along with the idea, and feigned concern, but intellectually believed none of it.
Yet, there was a part of me that wouldn’t let it go. I had a viscerally emotional reaction to these claims, even becoming obsessed with them. I began to stay up late at night, thinking about the Devil taking my soul, while I simultaneously believed that there was no such thing as a soul or devil. Eventually, I was only sleeping for an hour or two a night, repeating the Lord’s Prayer until I fell unconscious. Reflecting on the situation, I diagnosed myself as “crazy”. Intellectually, I knew that these worries had no basis in reality; but, they had an emotional hold over me that I couldn’t rationalize away. After a week, I told my wife what was going on with me and agreed to set up an intake appointment with my university’s student mental health center.
When I got there, I spoke with a psychiatrist and told her my symptoms and medical history. After an hour or so of discussion, she diagnosed me as having O.C.D., with accompanying recurrent major depression and anxiety.
Just receiving the diagnosis made me feel significantly better because it helped to hear that what I was experiencing had a name. It also connected disparate threads from my past that never made much sense independently. Both of my grandmothers were diagnosed with O.C.D. later in their lives, but I never thought that it was something that I might have as well.
Yet, the signs were all there growing up. As a young child, all my actions had to be symmetrical. If I touched one knee, I had to touch the other. If I stepped on a crack with my right foot, I would make myself step on one with my left foot. My first job as a teenager was a movie theater. I dreaded interacting with people, but found that I enjoyed rote counting and organizational activities that others would consider boring. I would wash my hands dozens of times a day and return home during breaks between classes to ensure that I locked my front door.
Most of all, the diagnosis explained my intrusive thoughts. I was diagnosed specifically with what is known as “harm O.C.D.”, a kind of O.C.D. where my brain forces me to think of the things that it most fears. My greatest fear was that I would harm others. My brain would play violent vignettes of me hurting others, without any corresponding desire or intention to act on these scenarios. For example, I might pass a stranger on the street and have a mental image of punching them in the face. One time, I took my son to see a baseball game and had recurring thoughts of throwing him off the upper deck where we were sitting. I had at one time thought that these mental intrusions made me a monster, but subsequently learned that I experienced them specifically because I abhor violence. The diagnosis clarified my experiences, that is, this diagnosis made me better understand who I am.
Shortly thereafter, I set up regularly counseling and psychiatric appointments, and was placed on Lexapro. I didn’t know what to expect when I took the pill, but immediately began to believe that I was experiencing an adverse reaction to it. I had thoughts of self-harm and begged my wife to take me to the E.R. Although we spent the night there, without sleep, I realize now that I was experiencing nothing more than a panic attack. By the time morning came around, I couldn’t stop vomiting from the stress, but I contacted all three of my professors via email to let them know about my breakdown. Two of my professors were very understanding and accommodated me.
Unfortunately, that very day I was scheduled to do an in-class presentation in one of my seminars; the professor who ran that course was very upset about me missing it. She responded to my email by saying that she had no other option than to flunk me. When I read her response, I was convinced that my graduate studies were over. I panicked and was inconsolable for hours. When I could function again, I wrote my department chair, and explained the situation to him. The two of them discussed the matter and agreed that I would instead take an incomplete that would remain that way on my official transcripts.
Due to this episode, I learned to be more tolerant and understanding of mental health issues. Things steadily got better after my first year. My medication worked well for me. I learned quite a bit about myself through therapy, and developed effective redirection skills for my intrusive thoughts. My reading comprehension returned, I began teaching my own classes, became a first-time father, and started working on my dissertation.
Things were going as smoothly as possible until one of my students spoke to me about her own struggles with mental health. She told me that she had recently experienced a psychotic break and was planning to kill herself later that night. By the time this occurred, I was familiar enough with my university’s mental health resources to immediately escort her to see a psychiatrist. On the way there, she told me that she couldn’t tell if this event was actually happening or whether what she was experiencing was another psychotic delusion. She asked me if I was real. I waited with her until she could get in to see a university psychiatrist.
I later learned that when a someone threatens suicide, they should be escorted immediately to the E.R.; otherwise, I had done everything right. I requested a wellness check for her that night from Mizzou’s campus police, and the police found that she was doing better. She eventually moved back in with her family for the rest of the semester, but not before thanking me for helping her out. After that, I recognized how important it is to be open and honest with my students about my own mental health struggles. Throughout my career as both a grad instructor and then a professor, I have had students tell me that my openness about these issues has motivated them to seek out help for their own difficulties. I cannot express how rewarding it feels to be told that.
Please explain your work on epistemic virtues and debunking beliefs grounded in superstition. Do you think that the impetus for this work derives from the fact that you have visions and thoughts that you regard as intrusive?
As I mentioned, one of my main areas of interest in epistemology is what might be called epistemic hygiene—how one ought to form beliefs. Ever since completing my Ph.D. in 2012, I’ve worked on and off on a critical thinking textbook that heavily emphasizes issues in superstition and pseudoscience—e.g. parapsychology, Holocaust denial, climate change denialism, Biblical literalism, etc. I’ve also taught courses on the demarcation problem in the philosophy of science. I’m currently at work on a paper that examines the social epistemic factors that give rise to conspiracy theories.
I think that my interest in epistemic hygiene is less influenced by my harm O.C.D. than it is in disgust over what I see the obvious consequences of sloppy thinking to be. The willful distrust of scientific consensus and expertise has led our world to a very dark and troubled time in which environmental degradation and human rights abuses are the consequence of the collapse of our liberal institutions. I think that the blame for our collective ability to, say, accept Alex Jones’s claims about globalist Satanists that run the world or the willingness to elect a literal conman to the presidency, lies in mental laziness and an unwillingness to properly analyze the issues. I see learning how to think like a philosopher, and especially how to think critically, as a necessary step in extricating ourselves from these base superstitions that are slowly destroying us.
The irony of this all is not lost on me: I want people to fix their thinking, yet, I have a disorder that is predicated upon irrational thoughts. My mental health issues are, however, the result of a chemical imbalance in my brain that prevents communication across regions. No matter how much I work at it, it’ll always be there. The best that I can hope for is to minimize its effects and cope with them. I think that much of what I seek to change in others is the result of mental laziness and false beliefs—nothing that can’t be changed with dedication.
Brian, you have indicated to me that you lack confidence in your philosophical prowess, which often leads you to undermine your own flourishing. How do you negotiate your perceptions of yourself as a philosopher and your status as an untenured faculty member?
While in counseling, I made several key breakthroughs of self-discovery. One of them was a general feeling of inferiority amongst my peers. Whenever I walk into a room of fellow academics, I cannot help but think to myself that I’m the least intelligent person there. Instead of focusing on what I’ve achieved, I measure my worth in comparison to what others have achieved, and always find myself coming up wanting. I tend to expand this worry into a general concern that others recognize my own shortcomings and consequently despise me.
When I was in grad school, I wouldn’t leave food or drinks in the T.A. office while I was away because I had the unfounded fear that my colleagues would spit in it. Now that I’m older, these same insecurities are still with me, but manifest themselves in different forms than they once did. If I write something on Facebook, and see that a friend “liked” another comment on the thread, but not mine, then my brain automatically concludes that they secretly hate me. It’s irrational to think that way, but my brain is locked into thinking it.
This general low self-esteem has led to some problems career-wise. Like most of those on the market, I’ve struggled to find a permanent position over the last few years, and I know that I’m not helping my case with publications. I have a few that I’ve gotten in decent sources, but I am quick to abandon a given paper after one or two rejections. The process of hearing criticism is so brutal to me that nagging self-doubt has me convinced that it’ll never be published and I’d be best off if I just give up. In fact, that little voice often tells me that I have no business in the profession and, with no ideas worth sharing, I ought to just quit. I have roughly a dozen unpublished papers in areas like epistemology, feminism, philosophy of language, and meta-metaphysics. If I could move past this self-sabotage, who knows how many of these papers I might be able to get out in a year? I’ve actually got about seven of them on the norm of assertion debate; so, I’m considering trying to weave them into a book.
Would I have a tenure track job today if I had pursued publications more vigorously right out of the gate? Possibly, but I’ve seen many of my other colleagues with impressive CVs go without permanent jobs as well. I would be lying if I said that I haven’t found this experience demoralizing. When I entered my Ph.D. program, almost all of our graduates went tenure-track in the first year or two on the market. Then 2008 hit, and job placement was almost non-existent. Now I’ve seen friends with multiple publications in top journals who also are stuck in the same predicament as me.
I don’t know how to solve this, but going through it with major depression and anxiety makes the situation even worse. Fortunately, I have had a number of wonderful non-permanent jobs. I am currently at the University of Texas-El Paso, where I’ve had my first chance to work with brilliant graduate students in a seminar on epistemic injustice, as well as to work alongside uniformly kind and helpful fellow faculty members. It is really a wonderful department. I would love to have the opportunity to stay here in a permanent capacity.
How do philosophy and philosophers need to change to make space in the profession for you?
I see this as a two-ended problem. There are changes that I must make to be in the profession. If my O.C.D. or depression is flaring up, as they still do from time-to-time, then it’s incumbent upon me to show up and do my job. I find that generally this isn’t a problem though. Nor have I had any real issues with my coworkers over my mental health issues. In fact, I have amazing coworkers here at UT-EP who have been completely supportive of me.
If I could make any plea for a change based upon my experiences, I would ask that my fellow professors be sensitive to the mental health needs of their students. The response from the aforementioned grad school professor led to me to entertain thoughts of self-harm and near hospitalization. Students are in a precarious position: money is tight, they’re in fear of their future, stress is high, and most grad students are at an age where mental health issues first manifest themselves. Please be sensitive to the needs of your students, and be willing to work with them when they’re in need. It’s the decent thing to do.
In a different vein, I would also like to highlight the adversarial view of philosophy that permeates so much of our discipline. There is a tendency for some members of our field to go for the jugular when responding to another philosopher. Sometimes this occurs at conferences where commenters attempt to build up their own reputation by viciously taking down speakers and attempting to insult them into silence. Sometimes this occurs when reviewing manuscripts, where anonymous reviewers feel the need to belittle the author whose work they’ve just read. I can only assume that this tendency comes from weakness—an attempt to prop up one’s own ego through tearing down someone else’s. In general, this approach is destructive and unhelpful. If someone experiences anxiety and depression, these insults may be magnified a hundredfold.
As a graduate student, I wrote a paper on the semantics of moral appraisals—“good,” “bad,” “right,” “wrong,” etc.—that was a direct response to the work on Peter Unger and others on the subject. Immediately after graduation, I sent the paper to an elite journal. I received the nastiest set of comments on the paper from reviewers. One reviewer began their comments by calling the subject matter “boring,” which was the nicest thing that they had to say about the paper. I was devastated. I haven’t tried to do anything with the paper since then. Whoever did this, wounded me. Instead of suggesting how to improve the project, they killed it with their insults. I would like us to be a kinder profession, more focused on helping build each other up instead of tearing each other down.
Also, I do want to reiterate that those of us who live with harm O.C.D. are not violent people. While we do have violent thoughts, this is because we find their content so antithetical to who we are. We are not violent ourselves. For the longest time, I felt guilty that I had these thoughts, but there is no choice I’ve made, no action that I’ve performed that brought them about. My O.C.D. is the result of genetics, that gives rise to an abnormal brain chemistry. Having obsessive thoughts is not within my control, but my reaction to them is. We can control them, instead of letting them control us.
I do have one more non-academic specific request. I wish that people would stop saying “I am so O.C.D.…” because, for example, they like things a certain way. Just because you prefer a certain kind of organization does not mean you have obsessions or compulsions. When you have O.C.D., you feel like your life is collapsing because something is out of order; something as simple as an unalphabetized bookshelf, gnaws away at you and consumes all of your attention and energy. O.C.D. hurts. It hurts like hell, in fact, and often drives people who suffer from it to self-harm. When you attribute O.C.D. to yourself, you’re belittling people who struggle with it. Please stop.
Would you like to recommend some books or articles or other resources on the topics that you’ve discussed in this interview or anything else for that matter?
You mean aside from my awesome research in philosophy? If people are interested in learning more about O.C.D., then I strongly recommend the book Brain Lock. Not only does it contain solid advice on how to live with O.C.D., it also presents a far more realistic portrait of the disorder than anything I’ve ever seen in popular entertainment. If you watch the television show Monk, then you might think that our disorder gives us hyper-observant super powers. It doesn’t. The main thing it does is make our lives more difficult, and better in no discernable way. When I was at my worst, I could barely sleep, I couldn’t leave my home without returning to check that the lights were out and the door locked, and I couldn’t think about a subject without an irrational fear about it creeping in. It’s both mentally and physically exhausting. The book is filled with first-hand accounts from fellow sufferers that perfectly illustrate this.
One piece of media that I believe captured O.C.D. quite well, was the Martin Scorsese film The Aviator. If someone wants to know what it’s like to live with untreated O.C.D., then they could do a lot worse than to watch the film. There’s a scene in the movie where Howard Hughes is in a public restroom and won’t leave because he’s terrified of touching the germs on the door knob. I’ve literally experienced this same situation; standing around and waiting for someone to open a door for me so that I wouldn’t have to get my hands dirty. I guess that it’s an apt metaphor for life before and after finding the right treatment. Now I can open the door. I’ll always be nervous about doing it, but at least now I have the strength to do it anyway.
That seems like a good note on which to end our interview, Brian. Thank you for your provocative remarks throughout this interview. Our readers and listeners have been given a great deal of information to consider.
Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Brian Montgomery’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. As always, although signed comments are encouraged and preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.
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Please join me here again on Wednesday, November 15th at 8 a.m. EST, for the thirty-second installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at [email protected]. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.
Dear Brian,
Thanks for sharing your experiences and mental health challenges. You seem like a great mentor for students. I agree that the philosophy profession needs to become kinder and review processes of journal submissions can be very nasty and destructive. I also appreciate your point about people trivializing OCD when they casually toss around the term "OCD" and apply it to non-disabling preocuppations or obsessions. I had a relative who had the disabling mental health issue that you describe; in her case, she could not stop washing her hands, which caused her serious skin problems. While you refer to your belief that this issue is primarily caused by genetics, it seemed to me that her problem was related primarily to chronic domestic abuse in her home, other sources of stress, and familial influences (one of her parents was very preocuppied with germs and contamination and would go through a refrigerator throwing out perfectly good food). On your view, are all cases of OCD caused primarily by genetics? As with other disorders, like anoexia, I wonder if OCD could be considered a multidimensional disorder, with a variety of influences, such as familial, cultural, historical, and genetic. For example, is OCD more common in some eras or cultures? Are there different manifestations of the disorder from culture to culture? Does the disorder take different forms in men vs. women?
Best, Andrea Nicki
Posted by: Andrea L Nicki | 10/18/2017 at 06:20 PM
Thank you very much, Professor Montgomery, for your openness about your experiences with OCD.
Posted by: Christine Overall | 10/20/2017 at 04:32 PM
Thanks for this Brian. I have OCD too. Many of your experiences resonate with mine.
Posted by: Instructor Gadget | 10/25/2017 at 03:46 PM