okay I’m normal now I promise let me out of the cage please

Also re: psychiatric care… The concept of consent as being integral to ethical mental health care is a nice one, but in practice RIGHT NOW consent is meaningless in a system where “being noncompliant” in and of itself is medicalized and “"care providers”“ do things like tell you if you refuse to sign on your intake form that it is a consensual hospitalization, or refuse to take the antipsychotic they try to force on you, they will simply take you to court & have you declared mentally incompetent.

Both of these things happened to me during my last hospitalization.

So you will have to forgive psychiatric abuse victims for not instantly agreeing that your improved community care program ideas where social workers or whomever are the ones responding to calls about people "behaving erratically” are great bc you say “everything will be consensual, of course”.

My medical records list almost all of my medical abuse as consensual.

The mission of The Withdrawal Project is to gather and share with all who seek it the rich, crowd-sourced, anecdotal wisdom of the burgeoning layperson withdrawal community regarding the journey towards reducing or coming off psychiatric drugs.

a 1996 study on public perceptions of people with mental health problems found that: (source)

73% of people thought that people who are dxed with schizophrenia were “not very able“ or “not able at all“ to make decisions about their treatment

70.2% thought that s people who are dxed with schizophrenia were “not very able“ or “not able at all“ to control their own finances

60.9% thought that people who are dxed with schizophrenia were “somewhat likely“ or “very likely“ to harm others

86.5% thought that people who are dxed with schizophrenia were “somewhat likely“ or “very likely“ to harm themselves

49.1% thought people who are dxed with schizophrenia should be forced to see a doctor if they refused

42.1% thought people who are dxed with schizophrenia should be forced to take medication if they refused

44.5% thought people who are dxed with schizophrenia should be admitted involuntarily to hospital if they refused

90.5% thought people who are dxed with schizophrenia should be admitted to hospital involuntarily if they were a danger to themselves

94.8% thought people who are dxed with schizophrenia should be admitted to hospital involuntarily if they were a danger to others

and the authors of the study thought this was a good thing, that it meant the public was accurately able to perceive the differences between diagnostic categories (the percentages with different for other diagnoses)

psychotic people deserve support and respect regardless of whether they choose to go on medication or not

recovery starts with deinstitutionalization. recovery starts with housing without strings attached. recovery starts with empowering people, not in the bullshit you-can-decide-which-of-two-equally-terrible-meals-you-can-eat-but-you-can’t-leave-your-room-without-permission sense, but in the you can chose your own housing sense, in the you can decide when to leave your house sense, in the you can have enough food to eat and it can be food you want sense, in the you can make choices about your health care sense. in the you can make meaningful choices just like any other human being sense

recovery starts with equality and treating psychiatrically diagnosed people as human beings and not as problems that need to be locked away or controlled and told their hopes are too high and unrealistic and that they need to accept a life of living in institutions or institution-adjacent homes where they have every meaningful decision about their lives made by them for someone else

meaningful attempts at helping people recover must address poverty, lack of housing, food insecurity, institutionalization, police violence, and countless other things if they want to attempt to be even remotely meaningful, let alone helpful to the people who need them

like i think about the people i knew in the psych ward. the elderly women being given ect forcibly and without their consent, as they protested and insisted they didn’t want it, and the nurses saying to the security guards here to “accompany” her (i.e. forcibly take her against her will) to have ect that she was “confused” though it was clear to anyone that she was saying no, she didn’t want ect

i think about the women and men i knew who had disclosed being raped to find themselves on a locked ward and being called delusion and being forcibly given antipsychotics

i think about the people i used to meet at groups, always lead by a Mental Health Professional, always consisting of people who hate their lives and their institutional housing and the medication they legally can’t stop taking

if we really want to help people recover, and we actually include institutionalized people among those we want to see leading lives that are meaningful to them, than we have to actually talk about how the “help” people are given is more often control, and that control is very frequently a detriment to them ever being able to have lives that they consider meaningful and healthy, not that a social worker/occupational therapist/psychiatrist considers meaningful and healthy, but that they themselves enjoy and want for themselves

that’s what i mean by recovery

get the hell out there and go to hearing voices groups or WHEREVER and actually talk to the people who are considered sickest, most untreatable, most disabled, most crazy and incoherent and disorganized and decompensated, who are on haldol or clozapine or whatever “medication of last resort”, who are coming to group on pass from institutions, who have been told that they will never ever ever recover, actually talk to us and listen to the narrative that still manages to come through when we speak even through the fucking YEARS in the system of being told and told told and told and told that it isn’t there. listen to that and really think about it and feel grief and rage for your community and for yourself

cw: detailed description of strip searches in a psychiatric setting

“One moment that I re-experience again and again is my strip-search. It is the policy of many psychiatric institutions to strip-search all patients upon arrival. I don’t remember the exact details of the events preceding my strip-search, but here is the moment that intrudes over and over into my consciousness:

I am standing across from a mental health worker in the bathroom. 

She has her arms folded and a scowl on her face. “Take off your shirt,” she barks. I do.

“Take off your bra.” For just a second, everything inside me freezes. In any other circumstance, I would never agree to anything like this – I am very modest and have even gotten nervous about wearing bathing suits around other people. I feel my mouth moving, trying to say something. I want to articulate that I am not even suicidal, that they don’t have probable cause to search me. I try to think of some other way I could prove I’m not hiding any weapons or pills.  

But then it hits me that I don’t have a choice. I can’t protest or explain or do anything that could be construed as me fighting back. I had already seen what could happen just for expressing suicidal thoughts; who knows what could happen if I were seen as a patient who does not follow the rules? The terror of being forcibly injected, further restrained or secluded, or held at the hospital for even longer hits me all at once.

I don’t have a say. I don’t have a voice. It doesn’t matter what I want. My body no longer belongs to me. Whatever this mental health worker wants to happen to my body, that is what will happen.

I take off my bra.

Afterwards she commands me to take off my pants and my underwear, bend over, spread my butt cheeks, and cough. It is all so humiliating. Panicked thoughts speed through my mind.

I can’t say no. No is not an option here. There is no choice, no consent, no opt out. My body is not mine.

But of course, I can’t express panic. I can’t show the nausea and fear that has overtaken my body. Instead I just nod and obey her commands.

When I have tried to seek support for what happened to me, I have been told countless times that my experience does not count as sexual assault. I am constantly told that both my involuntary commitment and my strip-search were for my own good.

“You were in a state of mind that didn’t allow you to make decisions for yourself,” one family member told me. “I get that it wasn’t a fun experience, but you needed to be protected from yourself.”

One staff member at a local sexual violence prevention and response center I reached out to asked me if I was a Scientologist. Since Scientologists are often opposed to psychiatric treatment, my trauma was assumed to be a reflection of my religious beliefs, as opposed to a valid reaction to being deprived of my bodily autonomy.

Most hurtful of all have been the reactions of other activists speaking out about sexual violence. When I have tried to get involved with progressive groups, I have been told that the violence that occurs every day in psychiatric institutions is not worth addressing. “Criticizing the mental health system is going to make me sound like a conspiracy theorist,” one local activist said. “I don’t want to look like I’m anti-science.” These reactions have reinforced the idea that my voice does not matter.

The world needs to know that involuntary commitment is a form of violence, and strip-searches are a type of sexual assault. It is time for victims of medical and psychiatric abuse to be recognized and validated.“

Emily Sheera Cutler, Is Strip-Searching a Form of Sexual Abuse?, emphasis in the original (https://www.rootedinrights.org/is-strip-searching-a-form-of-sexual-abuse/)

Do you think there is ever a point at which a person would, morally speaking, be better off committing suicide than staying alive?

Keep reading

USES FOR SELF INJURY; [INCOMPLETE]

Regulative; numbing. Push a few emotions up or down, but probably not sideways. Vent the rage, quell the sadness. Live another day.

Synchronizing; my body did not swell and discolour as I expected from the blue-black poison forced into it, so I helped it along.

Purifying, redefining; try to force the wound up and out, externalize things.

Communicative 1: "cry for help" is the vaguely pitying/insulting phrase, but "you're hurting me" sounded like a cry to me once. A stare from a self-torn face [cold stare, angry stare, piercing stare] speaks. It says "WHAT YOU DO TO ME IS BAD. THIS BAD". It also says "I CAN TAKE IT". You may really need to say " I CAN TAKE IT", and other people may really need to understand it. You may value toughness. You may find something in being visibly & largely tragic, if nothing happier is on the menu. You may wish to scourge other people with guilt. You may hate to appear vulnerable.

Communicative 2: The horse with a habit of banging its head against the stable walls, the caged bird plucking healthy feathers. Self-injury doesn't fiddlefuck around with language or worrying if you make sense. It is an appeal so deep it is animal. You may feel like an animal. You are an animal, is the thing. And the net of words and rationalisations you're in may not be undone just by more words and rationalisations.

Leveraging; see communicative. My parents did not want to see any more of my blood. I was more than willing. This equalized things. Then it fixed things. I'm told I should feel guilty, but why would I go and do a stupid thing like that?

Expressive; marking. Do some storytelling. A difficult thing with a very difficult medium felt appropriate to me. I had my pick of three other art forms and chose this. When will it not matter to me anymore? When will it not be worth remembering? That time was further away than a scar fading, that was for sure.

[You have my full blessing and permission to not hack yourself to pieces. But also if you need to, do it. I'm tired of squeamishness, terror, "it can never ever help anything!". It is my body to score with a nail or blade and your body to be so very afraid of. Feel free also to tell me why and how you hurt yourself; how was it?]

Question anon. I was just wondering what would be the alternative options to psych hospitals? I've been in them before but as awful as it was it kinda saved my life. I 100% agree that they are wildly unethical and that nobody should be put through that. I'm just struggling to figure out what would be done instead for people who are truly in danger from themselves.

There’s the context of social conditions producing specific issues like mental illness, criminality, abuse etc so resolving those would also prevent things reaching that crisis point. I know this is controversial but we have a lot of evidence that mental illness is extremely cultural, and certain mental health issues only became worldwide with the globalisation of psychiatry (there’s a book called Crazy Like Us that goes into this in detail). Like for example in the west we understand schizophrenia as a chronic, incurable illness while historically, similar symptom sets (for lack of a better term, since we’re talking pre psychiatry) were seen as temporary transitional states and so you didn’t have lifelong psychosis as we do now. Eating disorders too became a global phenomena as western psychiatric frameworks became global; in trying to treat mental illness they basically created them (*it’s free real estate voice* it’s colonialism). So I don’t think, for example, a psychosis where someone is a danger to others is an inevitable human experience. Even when this happens though, the way we force people into psychiatric hospitals exacerbates the fear, anger, paranoia etc that individuals experiencing psychosis are battling with. If caring for people in crisis was approached as a life skill rather than as a knowledge only people in the psychiatric framework are privy to, many people could be cared for in their own homes. Thinking about a case some years ago where a quiverful woman in the US developed postnatal psychosis due to so many forced pregnancies and killed her children, that happened because she was forced into that situation and was left alone with those kids while she was so sick. Had there been someone to care for the family it wouldn’t have happened. Similarly, a lot of violent psychotic behaviour is attributed to meth though the real issue tends to be severe sleep deprivation and paranoia from the illegality of it. Psychosis doesn’t come from the ether, it’s informed by experience and perception y'know? Like there are people who believe their brains are being controlled by the government with nanotechnology, that pretty clearly stems from legitimate anxiety about truly scary forces that control our lives (the schizoanalysis people can tell you more about this than me for sure).

I’m not sure how well I’m explaining this sorry but basically I have two points. Firstly that mental illness and crises isn’t a fixed state so changing circumstances, social arrangements and cultural understandings all shape it. Secondly I think caring for people in crisis should be family and community based again rather than institutionalised as it’s the institution that produces the mentally ill subject so to speak. I know not all circumstances are the same but I’ve cared for people experiencing psychosis and the established trust we had enabled that and meant they didn’t have to go the usual route of being forcibly admitted. Slight tangent but childbirth, too, has become medicalized when this model has worse outcomes than non medicalized approaches like homebirth. Like we need to look at the base assumptions of the medical model very carefully through the entire industry.

Does that answer your question?

i really really get a kick out of inflicting myself on the world 

The front lawn, cast in red and blue Discotheque, sirens A lightshow all for me I close my eyes, wiggle my hips, dance along

Jumpsuit Arson This world isn’t big enough for us so let’s  Burn it down, let’s eat the ashes, let’s puke them up and eat them again Let’s make sure everyone knows exactly what the fuck we are

I’m not good, I’m fucking god Apep swallowing the sun Ouroboros swallowing himself  I eat fire and don’t get burned I eat myself and go on forever I eat the sky, the earth, the stars

I’ll burn anything I can put a match to I’ll smash anything I can hit with a bat I’ll swallow pills, I’ll swallow glass, I’ll swallow my own tail I’ll go on forever I’ll burn and burn and burn

AN ANGEL IS A DEAD THING

hello, it is i, Maggot, the reigning ruler of roadkill and rot. i’m a cryptid creature of the avian persuasion. doctors hate me & scientists deny my existence. i’m a dead thing & a living thing at once, schrödinger’s angel, though these days i tend to be more alive than not. 

i have schizoaffective disorder bipolar type and sometimes i talk to God. i’m in love with near-death experiences. this is my blog where i get to be ugly and feral and free. TW for discussions of self harm, suicide, etc.