JK Rowling new book — chronic illness references

JKR's readers of The Ink Black Heart discussing at length the 2 characters with ME in the book, the characters are Kea Niven and Inigo Upcott. Most posts speculate on *Are they faking their illness/symptoms? Histrionic as well? Psychosomatised? 'Some undiagnosed mental health problem as well' Etc etc.


And of course some posters noting that of course the 2 fictional characters are 'just like' sick people with ME in real life. Not fictional products/creations out of JKRs own mind/her own perceptions/beliefs/prejudices about ME at all.....


AND no insight that JKR Created those characters the way she did totally deliberately for her own purposes.


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Paul Garner
Dragons' Den
Miranda Hart
The MEA
J K Rowling

it's like Whack-A-Mole.

 

It’s really unfair how such a small number of people have a disproportionate cultral influence.

 

Especially when they could make just as much money from telling the opposite side of the story.

 

I will be watching the BBC's Ink Black Heart, as my wife is a huge fan of the Strike books and TV adaptations. I reserve the right to start screaming at the screen if provoked. In one of the previous series Strike gets into an exchange with a post modernist and lectures them with his contemptuous analysis of Jacques Derrida. It was so contrived it was embarrassing, and obviously JKR talking through him. Although I suppose he could have picked it up in his first year at Oxford before he dropped out. Whatever. I actually wouldn't wipe my dog's arse with anything Jacques Derrida wrote, but I won't have Cormoran Strike telling me about him.

 

JK Rowling's novel 'The Ink Black Heart' has been adapted as a drama for BBC1TV with the last episode on BBC1 on Christmas Eve.


JKR's novel has a 2 characters with ME - One (Inigo) is an angry abusive bully (he bullies his family) whose friends and workmates dropped him not because That's What Happens When People Become Sick/Disabled With ME but according to JKR because he was a self aggrandizing bully.

The 2nd character with ME (Kea) is portrayed by JKR as a lying faker, a hysteric, who runs around shouting/slamming doors while supposedly in an ME relapse.

The TV Series adapters left out some of the most horrible scenes of denigration of the characters with ME - but ensured the 2 characters are portrayed as faking their illness, with the series heroes Strike and Robin emphasizing their disbelief in the characters' illnesses, repeatedly and strongly implying that the characters with ME are faking.



On Christmas Eve BBC1 viewers can watch JK Rowling's character assassination of people with the disabling disease ME (majority women).

JK Rowling claims to be a feminist, concerned for women and kids, but clearly sick and disabled women and kids with ME are *The wrong sort of women and kids*



JK Rowling's hero-detectives Strike and Robin put the sick people with ME in their place:
"This is a murder enquiry!!".


NO. It's Fiction. Real ME patients (who are mostly women) are dying from medical neglect and prejudice.


I'm so sorry JKR has done such a cruel thing as to exploit a serious disabling disease, and character assassinate the sufferers, for literary and dramatic effect.


https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0025ydf

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It does warrant a complaint to the BBC, Trish. I am just not up to doing that. But anyone who can make a complaint is welcome to use anything I have written on this thread as part of their complaint.

The book is so long that hardly anyone (who is ill) has read it (I did, but missed out a chunk in the middle) but I did keep track (and transcripts) of the most damaging parts. The giant slab of a book (over 1,000 pages) is somewhere in my flat with tags in the pages that give evidence.

In fact the novel 'The Ink Black Heart' has sold 20 million copies world wide.


I also tweeted extensively when the book was published and since the TV series has been shown. Some pwME and feminists who don't have ME responded Very supportively. But mostly silence.

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I have only skimmed the book but at one stage close to but not at the end Strike is in hospital because of problems with his leg including muscle spasms and the doctor says the spasms could be psychogenic and asks him if he's been under stress recently. I don't know what the purpose of including this was as I don't think it was followed up on elsewhere, given the way people with ME are portrayed in the book it just seems strange to include this random detail.

 

Yes @Theresa maybe not so random - that was done in Grange Hill too (the school-age TV soap) but maybe it got more balance there. I think there was one schoolboy off school in a wheelchair being told by the hospital and so then told by his friend - who he needed to push his chair - that its a mystery so it must be

Spoiler: that word

psychogenic

so he CAN walk. I don't know how it panned out in the series, I think it was S4ME linked me to that video. Grange Hill also demo'd a schoolgirl with M.E at home stuck in bed.


Warning - I may use the word:

Spoiler: rhymes wth brillo, harsh

sicko

to reflect the language of a real person who wrote a book, it is not my language, in no way does it refer to you or to any other real person, it demonstrates the people who talk that way in so many words. So its just a copy of how they portray their fellow human beings, bringing enormous influence to bear upon the young and impressionable, bringing their professions into disrepute, hence the Guilds.

- ill men are also *clearly the wrong sort, a nightmare be that the parent or child* as portrayed

Not a right sort in sight. Are there no nice s..k.s for balance. Are there only nasty s..k.s.

Spoiler: BBC balance

Upstream in this thread, did someone say that the BBC polices bias or discrimination?. Does this assasination of my good character show bias? If not biased then where is the BBC balance? Some say the BBC balance is famous, some say its notorious but where oh where is it?

Where is the nice s..ko to be balanced so the BBC can say a nasty s..ko or so is just a plotline. Disabled people can be villains of course, but I'd expect to see a fair reflection of my type that doesn't provoke hate crime. There must be some nice s..k.s somewhere. If i sit in the high street in front of millions and scratch my armpits and act the ape yelling monkey go home, I'd be arrested? For hate crime? Being a protected characteristic myself, who knows.

The BBC will say but look at all the positive programs we show about real small people and all the others, yes I will say they get right up my friend's nose too, bit over the top she says. Anyway, where are the nice s..k.s in drama, as in real life, are there any, and in this series there had better be some next year, or its off-balance, rabble-rousing fiction.

Did the BBC run any drama series picking on any other protected characteristic. Or are we alone singled out to bear the brunt already, post-pandemic with nary a nice s..ko in sight.

We can provide an exonerating balance by demonstrating other bestsellers who do not own and demonstrate such scurrilous bias. But will the BBC exonerate itself (and us) with a contrasting balance that retrieves and restores our own good character in the eye of its public by demonstrating nice ill people?

Spoiler: pigeon-holed

Stereotype used to be a dirty word but no-one uses the word now. JKR certainly constructed an infamous stereotype. We now see words like profile or category, subset, demographic, typecast if dramatic, and algorithm (if in use an algorithm must be disclosed upon request for Data Protection)

Well plainly all the characterisations in question were calculated (populist) moneyspinners - by the author's own vain, snottty and foolish admission. Snide and wide up there. Maybe she'll get the next slot with our Elon. But yes there is an algorithm applied, don't even need a computer to calculate it.

Are not T.V. ratings an algorithm? Can the BBC explain the rating algorithm used on JKR s..k.s in drama and on real s..k.s in documentary and reality shows. And disclose the algorithmic ratings as a matter of data protection or if thats too personal then freedom of info. I take it personal. And its political

Has their Patient Participation Panel read this thread yet? Did the world's doctors in Helsinki declare or infer the healthy research ethic, and safety, of healthy market research? Bias being bias.

It seems populist until it starts a riot then its outnumbered. Auditing accountable algorithms, whatever next?

Spoiler: so sad

Does anyone recall the Bill and other such fictitious telly drama some 30 years ago where a visibly disabled person was always portrayed as such a nightmare as to drive their relative - understandably - to murder, and other grief? Thats what got me thinking, then and since

 

Thanks @bicentennial - I do think JK Rowling has committed serious character assassination on ME sufferers in the novel and much of it made it into the tv series, which is being shown on BBC1 on Christmas Eve.

Btw, I mentioned ... "clearly sick and disabled women and kids with ME are *The wrong sort of women and kids*" because of the female predominance of ME but mostly because JKR claims she is some kind of feminist.

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She certainly did @Lou B Lou no doubt about it, and its this thread made it so clear

Character assassination is seriously dangerous ... and in a hundred ways so 100x over

You are not the one going for the cheap shots. It is our sort of women and kids in the line of fire. Just can't monsterise mum on Xmas Eve.

Si..i..ilent ... Ni..i...i...ight ..... I'm singing it...

At least its not Guy Fawkes Night. And no-one gets crucifixed til Easter I guess the timing was scheduled in advance, someone thought it through, others maybe just got obsessed with the ratings, its obviouly supposed to be so populiar, lets wait and see about that.

I wonder who was the BBC's medical plot advisor and how long after the program before Cochrane yells out or who will be the first to yell out "Marm they are bullying us again", even the MRC maybe, you see they just can't catalyse all tha research WE scared off, well not until we show them how, us stick-in-the-muds

And how many children with M.E are still in state care because its *psychogenic*, being called brats again and again and now tonight because the BBC said so.

*The wrong sort of feminist* eh did that get another giggle at her bank account

Its hard for me not to jeer back when such people get so nasty. They all sound generically supremacist to me.

I had guessed you were citing female predominance, I had been thinking - with a majority of women there will also be a majority of mothers, except not so many disabled children grow up to become disabled parents, however the age of onset still seems to be mostly of an age to have had children, and i was thinking its the parents who get accused before their children can be taken, for psychogenic experiments in voodoo because what else does psychogenic mean. So I noticed the characters at stake were a child and a parent and the parent was an ill man, a father, and a bad ambassador for the 1st nation

Maybe the author wasn't so comfy to make a mother into a monster, well not at this time of year anyway, so she went to town on 2 big bad brat themes instead.

I had forgotten about the feminist thing, it all got like Syria by when there were so many denominations no-one knew which side was which any more, that was interesting, I had never seen that before Syria

just as long as no-one says that f.m.n.zi word, i lost track around then

Last night I had decided not to post because the draft seemed too long, but then I rread the last 2 posts by you and Trish, so i had to pile back in because I wanted to say I had read the whole thread and watrched the clip so I didn't need to see the film or read the book, it told me all i needed to know, there are more readers than can be counted, the thread ripples and has effect, .... rest assured ... but that bit vanished on a finger-slip

Its this whole forum board that has so vastly informed me. In particular, I thank you for alll the observation and effort you put into this long long alert

 

Jk Rowling has been very supportive and generous funding MS and neurological research over the past 15-20 years .
Neurological research based in Edinburgh has benefitted massively .
Cynically it does make you wonder re casual chat .

 

I just want to add - I've watched the first three episodes of this, think I just have one more to go. Only watched it because I wanted to see if the BBC had toned down the ableism.

They hadn't.

Incidentally, the two characters with ME are, as far as I can tell from looking the actors up on the internet, played by non-disabled people. The Good Disabled Person, the astrophysics researcher who has a Clearly Visible Disability, is played by a disabled actor.

Anyway. Something I found interesting is that the BBC adaptation has taken out the things from the book that are potentially offensive to other marginalised groups (I mean, I think those things in the book were extremely offensive, but I don't want to get into an argument), but they have NOT removed the ableism. Thanks BBC.

 

Sorry Jonathan, not a chance. Not with a woman who tweeted that she sleeps easy at night thinking about her royalty checks.

Also, trans organisations have many times in the past tried to arrange a polite conversation with her about the issues at hand, and she refused to even consider talking with them.

If ME patients and allies were to try to talk to Rowling and "make her see sense" as you put it, it could very well end up with her views on PWME and other chronic invisible illnesses being regularly broadcast all over her Twitter. Which is the last thing we want!

 

It's a sensitive subject but I don't think that is a fair comparison.

Both in the case of Trans people and that of ME/CFS my impression is that Rowling takes the view that we do not have the right to be treated according to some category of our own choice. We have the right to be treated fairly in comparison to all others, but not differently.

I take the same view. I do not ask anyone to treat me as a man, or as a deaf man, or as a cancer survivor, or as a white man. I feel entitled to be treated as a colleague, as a friend, as a lover or whatever the other person chooses to treat me as without unfairness. At one time a man was expected to give up a seat on a bus to a woman, but the trend to equality has meant that you give up your seat to whoever looks to need it more than you. I have looked through Rowling's documented comments in relation to the trans debate and I don't see anything unreasonable.

The problem is that her attitude to people with ME/CFS seems to be based on the same sense that people are not entitled to be seen by others as 'A Person with ME' (and it will be ME, not CFS). I strongly suspect that she has come across people who expect to be treated as 'A Person with MS' in an MS charity. They are there in all medical charities, as are (even more) those who like to be seen as 'A Person Who Once Had ME But Managed to Overcome It With Will-power'.

I am A Deaf Man but I just want to be treated as someone who cannot follow you unless you speak clearly. I don't want to be treated as an Elderly Man, but I am grateful if I have a heavy bag and am not feeling great and someone senses that I wouldn't mind sitting down.

And of course she completely misses the point of what being disabled with ME/CFS is about. That people in wheelchairs can often walk a bit at times but still need a wheelchair.

But I fear that all too often ME/CFS is encountered by the public in the context of 'disease identity'. Almost every article on someone who probably has ME/CFS tells us that this remarkable horse rider is in fact a Person With ME, POTS, MCAS and Ehlers Danlos Syndrome.

The abandonment of People with ME/CFS by both the public and health care needs to be shouted from the rooftops, yes, but maybe Rowling's attitude is a lesson in how advocacy can go wrong. I don't think it I about identity. I think it is about needing, and deserving, help.