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sluttyhaecceities · 8 months

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"In modern thought irony and humor take on a new form: they are now directed at a subversion of the law. This leads us back to Sade and Masoch, who represent the two main attempts at subversion, at turning the law upside down. Irony is still in the process or movement which bypasses the law as a merely secondary power and aims at transcending it toward a higher principle. But what if the higher principle no longer exists, and if the Good can no longer provide a basis for the law or a justification of its power? Sade's answer is that in all its forms - natural, moral and political - the law represents the rule of secondary nature which is always geared to the demands of conservation; it is a usurpation of true sovereignty. It is irrelevant whether we see the law as the expression of the rule of the strongest or as the product of the self-protective union of the weak. Masters and slaves, the strong and the weak, all are creatures of secondary nature; the union of the weak merely favors the emergence of the tyrant; his existence depends on it. In every case the law is a mystification; it is not a delegated but a usurped power that depends on the infamous complicity of slaves and masters. It is significant that Sade attacks the regime of laws as being the regime of the tyrannized and of the tyrants. Only the law can tyrannize: "I have infinitely less reason to fear my neighbor's passions than the law's injustice, for my neighbor's passions are contained by mine, whereas nothing stops or contains the injustices of the law." Tyrants are created by the law alone: they flourish by virtue of the law. As Chigi says in Juliette, "Tyrants are never born in anarchy, they only flourish in the shadow of the laws and draw their authority from them." Sade's hatred of tyranny, his demonstration that the law enables the tyrant to exist, form the essence of his thinking. The tyrant speaks the language of the law, and acknowledges no other, for he lives "in the shadow of the laws." The heroes of Sade are inspired with an extraordinary passion against tyranny; they speak as no tyrant ever spoke or could ever speak; theirs is the counter-language of tyranny.

We now note a new attempt to transcend the law, this time no longer in the direction of the Good as superior principle and ground of the law, but in the direction of its opposite, the Idea of Evil, the supreme principle of wickedness, which subverts the law and turns Platonism upside down. Here, the transcendence of the law implies the discovery of a primary nature which is in every way opposed to the demands and the rule of secondary nature. It follows that the idea of absolute evil embodied in primary nature cannot be equated either with tyranny - for tyranny still presupposes laws - or with a combination of whims and arbitrariness; its higher, impersonal model is rather to be found in the anarchic institutions of perpetual motion and permanent revolution. Sade often stresses the fact that the law can only be transcended toward an institutional model of anarchy. The fact that anarchy can only exist in the interval between two regimes based on laws, abolishing the old to give birth to the new, does not prevent this divine interval, this vanishing instant, from testifying to its fundamental difference from all forms of the law. "The reign of laws is pernicious; it is inferior to that of anarchy; the best proof of this is that all governments are forced to plunge into anarchy when they wish to remake their constitutions." The law can only be transcended by virtue of a principle that subverts it and denies its power."

Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty

Elucidation of anarchy in above quote is very interesting in that it is profoundly different from the conception of anarchism in orthodox anarchist ideological currents. Instead of referring to it as an ideological entity which can, will or does exist, the anarchism as an "evil idea" here is purely a socio-libidinal process. Anarchism in perpetual motion of pure lawlessness.

An inversion of platonism, in that instead of entire society being a "reading" of the laws, the "laws" shall become readings of the society, not dissimilar to laws in physics. Anarchism is strictly the social processual of a pure war, where the social bodies and power vectors are far from equilibrium.

Yet are always in struggle tending to meta stability of concatenating regicides, nonce bashings, banishing, assassinations, a state of asymptotic insurrection. Only war brings life, lawful peace is death. Arsons at nodes of power in an anarchist society play same function as forest fires by indigenous tribes. Becoming-indigenous is becoming-war-machine.

Why does Deleuze say "The fact that anarchy can only exist in the interval between two regimes based on laws" and "all governments are forced to plunge into anarchy when they wish to remake their constitutions"? Deleuze, by anarchy, is not referring to an entity of anarchist society, but the process of this tensile power struggle where all vectors have to push against each other in order to maintain their existence for a vector cannot survive nullification.

Semantics play by same principle, the meaning of signs in language is an open battlefield which has to be fought for unless a state imposes top down structures of law over what can language possibly say, effectively making the entire social recording surface mute until "the chips are down again" and vectors are in motion.

Institutions of anarchy Deleuze refers to are institutions of an anarchist culture which refuses to submit and forego the war machine.

#deleuze #gilles deleuze #deleuze and guattari #cruelty and coldness

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sluttyhaecceities · 8 months

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Forest fires are actually a very important part of mature forest ecology. Some species literally depend on them (Kirtland's Warbler). The reason why they're so extreme now is because of irresponsible practices of not burning the trees to protect private property, basically making huge mature forests that act as massive tinder. The indigenous peoples of americas knew that they were an important part of the ecosystem. One of the biggest tragedies of global warming is not only the extinction of wildlife but the complete extinction of that ancient knowledge and intimate relation with ecology that allowed humans to thrive for thousands of years in those environments. The knowledge is gradually being decontextualized as the world's climate is changing. Very few people understand just how little we will understand of that new world and we are a species that survives on reliable and accessible knowledgebases. Most humans will die in the next 200 years and it's questionable if any will survive at all. Like many species we killed before ourselves we rely on our numbers and mass knowledge. The latter of which is slipping from our fingertips right now. Capitalism is so much more than the oppression of people, it is an active extinction of every stratum of life.

#ecology #climate change #forest fires #capitalism

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sluttyhaecceities · 8 months

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"That is why the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: "Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?" How can people possibly reach the point of shouting: "More taxes! Less bread!"? As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desires into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for."

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Page 29)

#anti oedipus #deleuze and guattari #deleuze #guattari #spinoza #wilhelm reich

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sluttyhaecceities · 8 months

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A woman is the image of God, just as a male St. Thomas Aquinas (Commentary on 1 Corinthians 11).

This is true actually the stuff about women being the rib of Adam is a mistranslation into greek of the Hebrew word tsela (צלע) which often was used figuratively to mean a side rather than what we would call a rib. This is the only place in the bible were tsela is translated so literally where 39 other places use it to mean and is translated as side.

Bible was so violently fucked in the council of nicaea, the more I hear of bible translation the more I understand that "Don't trust the council of Nicaea" graffiti

the council of nicea is the vanguard which canonised the Catholic order and determined which sects were heretical in order for the militarised forces of the Church to be able to start doing a counter revolutionary red terror against all Christian forces at the time which were against the seizure of the Roman state and centralisation of power

including putting down feminists and Christian sects explicitly stating that the kingdom of heaven can only be built via class struggle and the abolition of the classes and inciting slave rebellion

hence why the Catholic church since then crushed every "heresy" which dared to question the feudal and imperial orders and resulted in peasant rebellions as well as colonial uprisings

this however did not work in Latin America where too many Catholic priests became guilt ridden for their crimes against humanity and invented liberation theology in order to ease their colonial conscience leading to the last millenarian insurrection the world has seen in Brazil during the late 1800's.

first 300 years after Christ were theological anarchy prophecies were happening all over people formed communes and free federations and began to tear the Roman empire apart at the roots they just didn't call them by these modern terms

a similar revolutionary spring which formed a commune arose in Persia around zoroastrainism as the macedonian and empire began its conquests iirc

I think this all ties into augustinian theology, he went on a tirade against heresies such as gnosticism which did not seek to literally capture the Roman state and change all the liveries to Christian ones. Anything which did not preach a militant seizure of the class system in order to have it regulated by the Church (remember, only the pope could directly communicate with God…) was attacked

hence why Catholicism to this day preaches much charity. Its throwing crumbs to keep the class system going and unite all the classes under god, hence why the church supported every fascist government

look at that dumb eagle on your, money or presidential seals or whatever, shits all the same

the roman republic was about as democratic as the American republic in the sense that it absolutely fucking wasn't, and was backed with about just as much military up force pointed at everyone at all times

Law being the code unifying all power still being dictated in latin…

athens was probably the only remotely "democratic" state back then and even then it was democracy only for a certain class of male property owners who ere dominating the slaves, women and peasantry of the countryside and denying them any participation in social life

I was just thinking about the other day how the Romans made so many cultures and languages go extinct. Like white imperialism trial run, that was Alexander, that's why Greece is the ground of "the west". alexander the great was proto hitler

venice was a also democracy only in name tbh it was rabidly capitalistic nightmare and had multiple prole revolts lol

by capitalistic I mean like people kept trying to commodify land and create factory systems to shove proles in, same in florence

roman empire being empire had nothing to do with a monarch and everything to do with going on rabid conquest against every native tribe and culture and submitting them to the roman Legions

They rationalized most wars around the paranoia of eventually being attacked by its neighbours.

faggotry was born from roman/greek fascism as a way of big dudes claiming the little twinky weaklings and honestly every time I remember that I hate the cis fag assimilationists even more

#rome #catholicism #liberation theology #others ocs #greece

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sluttyhaecceities · 8 months

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'The tendency in popular thought to view the biological world in economic terms was present at the nineteenth-century beginnings of Darwinian science.

Charles Darwin, after all, borrowed the term “survival of the fittest” from the sociologist Herbert Spencer, that darling of robber barons. Spencer, in turn, was struck by how much the forces driving natural selection in On the Origin of Species jibed with his own laissez-faire economic theories.

Competition over resources, rational calculation of advantage, and the gradual extinction of the weak were taken to be the prime directives of the universe.'

– David Graeber, What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?

By the way, by contrast, the other great, independent discoverer of Evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, was a socialist, indeed an anarchist, even if he didn't use the label.

“However, we did not talk of geography during the afternoon we spent together, but of Anarchism, of which [Élisée Reclus] was one of the most convinced advocates, and I was very anxious to ascertain his exact views, which I found were really not very different from my own. We agreed that almost all social evils — all poverty, misery, and crime — were the creation of governments and of bad social systems ; and that under a law of absolute justice, involving equality of opportunity and the best training for all, each local community would organize itself for mutual aid, and no great central governments would be needed, except as they grew up from the voluntary association of their parts for general and national purposes.”

— Alfred Russel Wallace, My life: A Record of Events and Opinions

#david graeber #anarchist anthropology #charles darwin #what is the point if we cant have fun #anarchism #alfred russel wallace

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sluttyhaecceities · 8 months

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“The great concentrator wants stable circuits, even cycles, predictable repetitions, untroubled accountability. It wants to eliminate every partial drive, it wants to immobilize the body. Such is the anxiety of the emperor of whom Borges speaks, who demanded a map of the entire empire so exact that it had to cover the entire territory in every aspect and therefore duplicate its scale exactly, to such an extent that the monarch’s subjects spent so much time and used up so much energy in putting the finishing touches to it and maintaining it that the empire ‘itself’ fell more and more into ruin as its cartographic blueprint became more and more perfect—such is the madness of the great central Zero, its desire to bring a body, which can only ‘be’ if it is represented, to a standstill.”

— Jean-François Lyotard, Économie libidinale, 1973

#lyotard #philosophy #post structuralism #poststructuralism #libidinal economy #new materialism #deleuze and guattari

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sluttyhaecceities · 8 months

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The term sexual dissidence has a particular meaning and genealogy within Chilean feminism, queer, and social movements. Sexual dissidence is a critique of patriarchy, heteronormativity, as well as the LGBTQ+ movement in its alliance with the state. Some in this movement have ceased to question the socialization of violence and instead seek reforms such as marriage equality and antidiscrimination laws. […] The most well-known sexual dissidence collective is CUDS, which defines their work in this way: “There are no women, men, or gays here. We are [the ones who] the feminist wave in Santiago, Chile threw away. Officially we are a postfeminist sexual dissident university collective that organizes our bodies to perform sexual terror actions within spaces of sexual authoritarianism.” CUDS organizes political interventions to spark conversation, instigate controversy, and question the social parameters that patriarchy has normalized. In November, 2012, CUDS organized a protest at the National Encounter of Diverse Feminists after a CUDS member was prevented from participating for being a “bio-male.” CUDS went to the congress and placed a banner outside that stated “Feminismo en Toma” (“Feminism Occupied”) to bring attention to a growing feminist movement that sought to challenge both masculinity and transphobia, in which CUDS called for a “feminism without women.” At the July 25, 2013 feminist march demanding the legalization of abortion, CUDS marched with a banner that stated, “El Derecho a No Nacer” (“The Right to Not Be Born”), playing a prominent role during the occupation of the national cathedral in downtown Santiago. Other banners included: “Sodomize Heteropatriarchy with Your Clitoris” and “Abort Like Animals.”

#destituent feminism #anarchofeminism #anarchism #anarchist feminism #feminism #giorgio agamben #black rose #rosa negra

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sluttyhaecceities · 8 months

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Institutions such as of psychiatry die when they are sufficiently replaced so as to lose all of their soft power. The institutions are like waves on an ocean and the people water molecules but the flow is bigger than all of those things.

I would go as far as to say that the western model of medicine is the problem itself like why stop at psychiatry. In practice western medicine has proven time and time again to be destructive to everyone who is a minority in many well recorded ways. Psychiatry is deeply infected with the same depersonalization of the patient doctor relationship that every other branch of modern medicine is infected by. It has become statistical, post-modern medicine.

This is not totally true everywhere, there are some pockets that exist, groups of old doctors who practice medicine in a sufficiently personal way as to be healing but the colonial mode of operations which is endemic to every one of our institutions causes minorities who are not protected by white handlers to be repeatedly mishandled by original design. The secret as to why doctors acting in good faith could comply is that the entire system is sustained by its own momentum. It doesn't need anyone to be consciously aware of what it is doing in any given human.

That's what the beating heart of the leviathan is. it's very much like we are cells in its body, a very lonely body. A predator that is running out of prey because the world wasn't big enough to counter it.

You have to go so far as to actively dealienate the doctor from you because from the moment they see you, as any patient, they immediately see a statistic. But this doesn't mean they aren't capable of decent interactions. it's just a boundary they are forced to put up because they can't leave the gamut of operation that their patient's insurer will provide and not to mention the locus of control towards the administrative department they can't cross. The iron cage of despair.

#anti psych #medicalization #therapy trauma #therapy abuse #institutional abuse

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sluttyhaecceities · 1 year

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“For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.

The second big lesson the medical establishment has learned and rejected over and over again is that weight and health are not perfect synonyms. Yes, nearly every population-level study finds that fat people have worse cardiovascular health than thin people. But individuals are not averages: Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people.”

A surprising article to find on the Huffington post. I think, especially towards the end, there’s still a saturation of healthism and diet talk (just of the “clean eating” variety), but the information about weight discrimination is absolutely on point, especially within the medical field ignoring decades of research.

Not only do we know that weight loss isn’t sustainable or possible, we also know that weight discrimination kills, in a myriad of ways. If you actually care about “health” then start unlearning your weight bias NOW and realize that fat people are just people who are a different shape.

And this article doesn’t even touch on “the obesity paradox”(the fact that fat people survive heart attacks and injuries BETTER THAN thin people) or the fact that dieting, especially “yo-yo dieting,” is a better predictor for heart disease than weight, and that many of the fat people who have cardiovascular diseases have a long history of dieting that (understandably) didn’t work.

encouraged to rb but fatphobes will just be blocked.

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sluttyhaecceities · 1 year

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if you think special education should exist... my school used us as free labor under the guise of getting work experience. we worked at local stores, and we worked at the school cafeteria - about 5 hours a week. they "paid" us a dollar a week in fake money redeemable at the school cafeteria... when they even remembered to give it to us. if we had been paid at minimum wage, it would have been $300 a week.

we were not allowed to stop working, even when we were distressed, or physically unwell. my teacher would regularly mock my peers. we were made out to be liars or lazy when we tried to advocate for ourselves. i would have sensory overload every week working at the school cafeteria, because they made me do/not do things under threat of punishment.

they used us. they neglected us. they abused us. they stole from us. all under the guise of helping us - "adjusting us to society." these schools are traumatizing and dangerous. special education is just abusive education. and our needs are not special. they are natural, human needs, that we need fulfilled in order to survive.

and by the way? the school partners with the state psych center to enroll kids who just got out. i was one of them. yeah. just sit on that and realize how fucked it is.

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sluttyhaecceities · 1 year

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Mental health is a lawn; Desire is a prairie

Introduction

A little over a month ago, I began posting about upcoming changes in my practice, which I’ve been working on since. As I said in an instagram story, I realized that I’ve been pretty bad about replacing surface-level words instead of actually challenging underlying concepts; so, I’ve been taking some time to work on learning to better articulate my philosophy.

In the following essay I am going to try to explain my critique of psychiatry and offer a framework to replace it. You don’t have to agree with anything I say to receive herbs, advice or education from me. If I only wanted to work with people that believe the same things as me, I would stick to caring for my network of friends and accomplices. I have a public-facing practice to offer something immediately and materially useful to (broadly speaking) anyone that asks for it. I’m writing this because—while we may or may not be/become friends—my services are a personal gift, and I do not want them to be received as a function of psychiatry.

Most of all, I believe that everyone has an idea about what the future will hold, and everyone is trying to bring that idea to fruition. Ultimately there is nothing in my lifetime that will result in everyone being on the same page about what we all “should” be doing; and we are all relatively powerless on a global scale. What I can do is help the people I can touch, and walk away from those that want to force me to believe things I don’t want to believe in. I can’t make universal healthcare happen, right now or decades in the future; but I can fight tooth and nail to help heal the people around me for free, and I can share, liberate and generate knowledge to help others do the same.

I’m writing with a very limited scope here—if I was having an easier time writing this it would very quickly become an entire book, not a 3,700-some-odd word essay. I’m asking to you believe at face value that this is what I consider to be true; unfortunately I don’t have the capacity to write out an argument containing all the applicable historical evidence and referential sources right now. I hope at some point I do.

Part 1: Groundwork

Lobotomistic violence

I’m going to start by laying out a definition that I think is important to understanding where I’m coming from. I started using this term because I think it marks a useful distinction in how certain people are treated by psychiatry.

Lobotomistic violence is the set of psychiatric “treatments” that intend to make someone “normal” by reducing/inhibiting function in certain parts of their brain. While surgical lobotomies are generally considered outdated and barbaric in mental health culture, the root concept is still very much alive and well. Several antipsychotic drugs have similar effects to surgical lobotomies, and many more otherwise limit brain function in other ways. These drugs can prevent the people they’re prescribed to from thinking abstractly or feeling deeply, and often cut them off from meaningful parts of themselves.

According to the psychiatric framework there are people who need support, understanding, and accommodation; and people who need their bodyminds* to be physically altered and parts of them literally removed/made nonfunctional. Lobotomistic violence is a “last ditch” effort, when less extreme forms of medication or therapy are considered “ineffective”. Sometimes this comes after a long process of trying different treatments—but a lot of people are subjected to lobotomistic violence because they occupy a social position that society sees as a lost cause from the start, like people kidnapped off the street by ambulances in the middle of a psychotic break, or kids in state custody.

*Bodymind is a popular term in mad liberation that refers to the mind and body as a cohesive whole–it invokes the idea that we do not just inhabit our bodies, we ARE our bodies.

Defining mental health

(In this section, I’m using a very charitable interpretation of psychiatry from a scientific standpoint. Even the most advanced neuroscience cannot reliably identify specific mental disorders or their causes—but even if it could, it would still be fundamentally bad, and that’s the point I want to make.)

Civilization is an organism and an ecosystem in its own right, with structures to achieve equilibrium and to perpetuate itself. The choices that we make and options we see as available have been formed by thousands of years of accidents and choices that shape patterns of behavior and create social constructs. It is these structures I’m referring to when I talk about control.

In order for civilization to exist as it currently does, the people and things subjected to it must be easily understood, because things that are understood can be controlled. An example my friend used was a small, early agrarian state—a ruler wants to collect tax, with the goal of collecting as much as possible to enrich his position against neighboring states. He cannot collect too much tax, or else the population will either starve, or get angry and refuse to participate in the state; so to maximize what can be taken he has to know how much is produced, and in turn the farmers have to know how much they produce to know what they owe and what they need to meet immediate needs. Civilization needs to reduce complicated questions to knowable categories in order to respond in ways that benefit itself. This legibility occludes true understanding, pares down the messy, beautiful, difficult-to-communicate nature of life into one-dimensional criteria to be accounted for and processed. To see how these criteria are constructed, let’s look at an oak tree.

The name “oak tree” refers to a thing that exists, pretty indisputably (at least until you get into existentialism but, uh, let’s not go there). However, the name “oak” is something people made up. There are many different perspectives one might understand an oak tree from. Whatever lens you want to use impacts what characteristics you focus on and how you understand them in relation to the whole. You focus on certain attributes to create a story—if you’re using a scientific lens, you might look at DNA and draw connections to other DNA to tell a story about genetic history. Genetic history is also a human construct that only focuses on the pieces that are significant to the stories our culture wants to tell. These stories are what we use to build knowable categories; but a squirrel doesn’t give two nuts about the genetic history of an oak tree, and likely has its own stories that are entirely alien to us—because different attributes are significant to its life.

Mental disorders are real in the same way an oak tree is real—and fake in the same way an oak tree is fake.

The experiences that diagnostic labels describe are real, but the way disorders are defined is 100% a social construct that is entirely dependent on what is significant to our culture, scientifically backed or not.

“Health” is defined as bodymind states that are convenient for cultural perpetuation; and illness is bodymind states that are not. What experiences and attributes are constructed as diagnostic categories is dependent on what is valued and relevant to the dominant culture—and more importantly, what is conducive to the reproduction of that culture.

In our modern society, people who do not fit squarely into the mold of a responsible, reproductive citizen are either validated or marginalized. These are both methods of control, pushing people into legible categories to make them more easily understood and influenced by society. Validation might look like a kid who’s disruptive in class getting diagnosed with ADHD and working more closely with the school to receive accommodation, whereas marginalization might look like a disruptive kid getting diagnosed with ODD and being treated as if any resistance to an authority figure is a symptom of disease for the rest of their life.

In psychiatry, validation is “positivity”. This extends from clinical practice to what I’m going to call “mental health culture”, the expansion of psychiatry from a form of medicine to a fixture of culture. I’m going to talk about this more in a minute, but for now the point is: mental health does not identify a list of “problems” that exist in a vacuum. It constructs sicknesses in order to justify control. Which leads us to…

This wouldn’t work if we didn’t care about each other

Unfortunately, there’s no simple malice to blame here. A lot of the ways psychiatry hurts people are made possible by compassion. I try not to make generalizations about the human condition OR evolution-based arguments, but I do believe very deeply that humans are a fundamentally social species and that we are physically predisposed to caring about each other—evidenced in part by how much of the coerced labor necessary for society to function depends on making it hard to even SEE enslaved and low-class people, let alone extend solidarity and care to each other. The history of modern psychiatry (mostly over the past 200 years) and the birth of mental health is a chaotic mash of capitalistic profiteering, attempts to stifle liberatory movements, and individuals who are genuinely trying to take care of other people, all informed by the underlying assumptions about what “mental illness” is that I just described.

Brief digression: I’m always tempted to put “mental health” into quotes, but “mental health” implies a distinction between what I’m referring to and some other legitimate, non-fucked-up mental health that just doesn’t exist, so assume whenever I say mental health I’m using a slightly sarcastic tone.

Mental illnesses are, by and large, defined and diagnosed based on suffering, and the treatments, by and large, are designed to reduce suffering—or, the assumption that someone is suffering. How that suffering is measured and defined is still dependent on the basic assumption that correctly reproducing culture is good for you and not doing so is bad for you. For example, many diagnostic criteria measure one’s ability to work productively, and our society assumes wage labor is the norm for a healthy life. Sometimes, this is obfuscated by so many layers of reformed language and liberal feel-good-ism that many people who would disagree with that assumption when said so plainly (reproducing culture is good for you and not doing it is bad for you) are still deeply invested in mental health culture.

Diagnostic categories pick out certain experiences and characteristics to name as symptoms of a disease—but human brains are not very easy to put into boxes. Who is pathologized—labeled as diseased—is heavily dependent on their class status, and how well their behaviors contribute to the status quo. A lower-class non-Christian is more likely to be labeled as psychotic for describing their spiritual beliefs and experiences; whereas a richer person who talks about “being spoken to by the Holy Ghost” is simply a religious fanatic. We see consistently demographic-based diagnostic biases for disorders that are supposedly an issue with predetermined brain “hardwiring”, such as autism and ADHD being diagnosed more in white children, whereas Black children receive ODD diagnoses. By associating abnormality with suffering, and enforcing suffering for the abnormal, attempting to make people normal can represent reduction of suffering and a kindness. This dynamic is even more heavily enforced when people actively choose non-normative lifestyles: someone’s body state is not conducive to them living a “normal” life and they don’t even WANT to change, that means they are extra unhealthy. Under this logic, (attempting to/)forcing them to change is doing a good thing for them and thus the kindest course of action.

Everyone who advocates for broader mental health services is contributing to psychiatric and lobotomistic violence through kindness. There are plenty of people who think positively of their interactions with psychiatric institutions or mental health culture, AND there are ways to reduce harm when participating in mental health culture/be more honest about the risks involved; but encouraging people to participate in clinical settings is still encouraging people to put themselves in vulnerable, potentially dangerous positions.

Madness vs. pathology

Anyone can be crazy. I highly recommend trying it. Experiences are individually varied and highly personal—some people see and hear things other people don’t, some think in ways that are strange or confusing to others, and so on—but madness is simply refusal to conform to normative categories of mind-state and behavior. It is not bowing to social norms and the embrace of abnormal experiences that get in the way of a middle-class aspirations.

Pathologizing is the process by which madness is constructed as sickness. Pathology includes all the things that are “unapproved” about madness and it increasingly includes things that are only minorly inconvenient to our legibility and our participation. People re-contextualize experiences they never thought twice about as part of a disease, simply because they were given a label. “I never knew that was a BPD thing!”

Mental health culture encourages and facilitates this creep because even though its participants will often nominally criticizing practitioners who enact psychiatric violence, they continue to rely on the frameworks this violence is based on. Mainstream criticism of psych focuses on the idea that individual doctors (and/or institutions) apply psychiatry poorly, but it caries the implicit assumption that if it was only used correctly it would be a benefit. This can look like social/support groups of people identifying with a common or related diagnoses criticizing the way psychiatrists behave while encouraging people to self-diagnose, seek certain medication or therapy, or otherwise enforcing mainstream assumptions about the ontology of mental disorders.

Pathologizing talk surrounds us: “I think you might have ___”, “I’m like this because I have ___”, etc. It feels very similar to the ways in which certain queer spaces invent and push labels to describe every possible facet of gender or attraction, because well, it is. Both fixations gain traction because we are told that making ourselves legible to the outside world and making those around us legible in the same way will make us feel less lonely or invisible. Unfortunately, only letting people understand us in terms of our categories instead of on our own, unique terms continues to compound this loneliness. In an effort to make the system “work” we expand what experiences are known, create new labels and try to champion “inclusion”, instead of addressing the forces and dynamics surrounding the things that feel lonely, invisible, and difficult to communicate… A list of abbreviations doesn’t tell the world who you are, it tells the world how to react to you.

Many people who ascribe to psychiatric frameworks still live in ways that resist legibility. There are also plenty of people who are both mad and mentally ill, who use diagnostic labels but do not seek to conform to standards of “treatment”. There are also many people who use these labels to pressure conformity from themselves and those around them. It seems to me like the majority of people who, for example, encourage everyone around them to go to therapy, have never had a practitioner make good on the implicit threat of psychiatric violence.

The role of saneism

It would be incomplete for me to talk about the role of kindness without talking about the role of prejudice.

Saneism is a different form of bigotry than say, racism. It is not hatred of an “other” group that the “perpetrator” is not and never will be a part of. It’s more like fatphobia: hatred of a body state that every human being has the potential to experience. It is self-inflicted as much as it is wielded against the other.

Saneism is a tool to select who is and isn’t crazy. It should be clear at this point that there is no “sane” human being; sanity is only the ideal they beat you with. If you can emulate sanity well enough, driven by fear of internal and external hatred of madness, you are sane. If you can’t, you are insane, and either you can be mentally ill, assimilate to the categories and modes of behavior that are deemed acceptable for people like you; or, if you can’t do that, you’re crazy, and your options are either to submit to lobotomistic violence or to refuse to participate in psychiatry.

Part 2: Praxis

As I said at the beginning: The experiences that psychiatry addresses are real. Critique is all well and good in that it helps us name and understand the systems we live in, but it is only part of the process towards doing something better. Here is my attempt at building a model. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.

A lawn is an artificially maintained shape, but a prairie is created organically through small and large events, which lines up nicely with the idea that mental health, as a noun is a standard that must be maintained, but desire, as a verb is a process of seeking, experiencing and evaluating that builds and grows in symbiosis.

Mental Health is a Lawn

The process of maintaining mental health through the reduction of suffering is like the process of maintain a lawn. A lawn is a pre-defined shape created through the prescription of behaviors and chemicals (weeding/mowing; herbicides/pesticides); regulated to be non-challenging and “safe” (no spikey plants, bee or wasp nests, etc) in the name people’s comfort and at the cost of native species; and prioritizing a certain socially-imposed aesthetic at great cost to the environment. Lawns have to be nourished (fertilized and watered) to grow, but are not allowed to get taller or more robust than a set value so that they’re easy to trim regularly with minimal effort. Lawns are monocultures with shallow roots that do not stand up to environmental conditions like drought without intervention. Lawns are also a standard everyone knows–and holds each other to, judges each other based on.

Likewise, to maintain “mental health”, people are regulated to a predefined standard that prioritizes “normal” aesthetics and the “safety” and comfort of others through the prescription of chemicals and habits (medication and therapy). Everyone knows the rules enough to police themselves and each other. Peoples’ material and emotional needs are taken into consideration enough for them to survive (and not commit suicide), but no one is well-supported enough to not feel the pressure to work; and people do not have the freedom to self-regulate on their own so when crisis occurs, you either have to keep working or rely on psychiatric intervention such as hospitalization.

Desire is a Prairie

Seeking desire is like how a prairie or grassland maintains itself as an ecosystem. Many types of plants grow deep symbiotic root systems that create resiliency and allow the ecosystem to survive through many environmental changes. Critters and bugs may kill/destroy plants at times, but they also reuse and decompose detritus and allow the ecosystem to recycle material and stored energy, spread seeds, etc. A prairie is too tall to be mowed easily by a conventional lawn mower and must be poisoned or crushed via heavy machinery. It is a complicated, compelling and beautiful organism that takes years of interaction to understand.

Desire cultivates varied experiences that let us practice the flexibility to survive distress emotionally, and shapes our lifestyles to prioritize self-regulation. Pain, whether external, self inflicted, or both, is an inherent part of life; but pain can allow us to grieve, process and grow, to clarify our desires, and maintain our bodyminds. When we live by desire we become unwilling to bend to social rules that don’t suit us, become uncontrollably mad, and are accustomed to freedom such that we can only be recuperated through incarceration and lobotomistic violence.

A prairie takes a long time to grow, and is difficult to support in a society that demands lawns. Switching from a mental health model to a desire model isn’t a simple or quick thing. Most of us will resemble something more like an overgrown lot, which is just as valuable.

Part 3: What this means for me

It’s taken a long-ass time to be able to articulate these concepts, so it feels extremely good to have finally made the pieces click.

Ultimately, what I offer isn’t substantially changing—at least right now, though I do have a new offering I’ll be announcing in the near future that incorporates herbalism into pleasure-seeking activities. I’ll still be here for consultations, workshops, and informal support; but the foundations are different, and I will be more explicitly incorporating these ideas into how I teach and discuss concepts. You might notice that the pages on my website have been rewritten and restructured, hopefully in ways that represent these ideological changes.

Something that comes up fairly frequently in conversation with my friends and accomplices who do similar public-facing non-hierarchical healing work is how to respond when people come to us expecting more standard frameworks: When people talk to us expecting to be told things about their bodies, or for us to diagnose a sickness and tell them what to do about it. To me, figuring out how to deal with these interactions is a matter of building and improving social skills; figuring out what questions to ask to break the script. This is just as much practical as it is ideological: What I do is in no way compatible with Western Medicine or psychiatry—the tools I have work granularly, effecting a few parts of the body at a time in specific ways. I can help you sleep, eat, relax, play, reduce fear, increase focus, cope with grief, ground thoughts and emotions, feel pleasure… but I do not use diagnostic categories, I do not offer “antidepressants” or treat disease. Someone telling me they have PTSD gives me exactly 0 information about what they want me to be doing for them. In some ways what I think what I already do in these interactions does more to ground my practice outside of psychiatry than any long-ass manifesto or theoretical explanation; but if you want to know why I do what I do, well, there you have it I guess.

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sluttyhaecceities · 1 year

Text

Incomplete List of Therapist Cognitive Distortions

omniscience - i know everything, and specifically everything about you better than you do. i will literally fight you about this.

unreliable narrator- every patient is too crazy, emotional, and evil to be able to know any facts or be able to tell the truth. everything they say is a product of their crazy evilness, and false. i will assume the worst of them and disregard or challenge anything they say that puts them in a positive or faultless light.

commitment fallacy- if any patient becomes upset, i must commit them to the psych ward, whether or not they are in a clearly defined suicidal crisis.

the end justifies the means - preventing suicide is the #1 goal even if it means making the patient’s life worse in the short or long term. being alive is the best way to be, no matter what, so as long as you are alive, everything is truly fine!

if it’s negative, it’s a lie, or your fault - anything negative reported by a patient about their life is untrue, or they made it happen with their bad thoughts and attitudes. ignore evidence to the contrary, and that bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it for no good reason. this goes for small things like unkind comments from coworkers, to big things like institutionalized oppression. if it’s not a lie, then the patient is 100% to blame somehow.

thinking and mindset magics - the patient has total control over their lives, the world, and other people with their thoughts, mindsets, and attitudes. making the patient have the correct and good ones is enough to solve any life problems. similarly, therapy skills and rituals are magic and should fix any life issues. if they dont, you did it wrong, didn’t have the right mindset, didn’t trust the process enough, etc..

cbt but not to me - teach patients cbt skills like healthy boundaries set with assertive communication and not to do the cognitive distortion thoughts, but if they set an assertive healthy boundary within psych treatment, they are evil and must be punished. cognitive distortion thoughts are bad and insane when the patient does it, but it’s ok for me.

every[trauma] happens for a [good] reason - if you haven’t assigned your trauma a silver lining already, one will be provided to you by me. any resistance is incorrect and not allowed. you just have the wrong attitude!

circular delusional thinking fallacy: the patient is delusional and insane. if they provide any proof for their delusions or such, it does not count, because it is coming from a delusional and insane person. evidence that the patient is telling the truth about something that puts them in a positive or faultless light should also be uncritically discounted.

the Danger of the Patient’s autonomy fallacy - 1. a patient is not a person and is not allowed to set their own goals for treatment or similarly, 2. if they ever have any self love or confidence or any other positive skills, that must be punished and corrected. (who knows what crimes they will be enabled to commit if they love themselves??) 3. patients must be made dependent on the therapist to define them, tell them what to think and feel, and to control their lives. assign them the correct beliefs, values, virtues, and goals. if it’s an original belief, etc. of theirs, it’s wrong. 4. the patient is their own worst enemy, purposely messing things up for themselves because they are so weak and stupid and want to have it easy by playing victim. they must be forcibly corrected by me, the authority. they are not to be trusted with any choices or self development on their own, and certainly not to be allowed to leave therapy or other mental health treatments, where they can be observed..

gaslighting - since patients are crazy, they must be taught not to trust themselves no matter what (only trust me and what i teach them)!

therapeutic invalidation - if a patient comes in with emotional pain or traumas, the way to correct them is by being cruel and invalidating. tough love!

therapy doctrine as gospel - if you disagree with or defy the guidelines of whatever therapy module, you are wrong and bad. the patient must fit the treatment. the doctrine and methods are perfect. if you criticize or question them, you are bad.

in a vacuum - everything is the patient’s fault somehow. there is never things outside of their control or that are random. outside power and influence does not exist. every struggle the patient has is a failure on their own part, and they are 100% to blame for it, whether it’s mundane or supernatural.

therapist can do no wrong - any problems in therapy are the patient’s fault because they are so evil and crazy.

false threats - any danger or threats the patient perceives is 100% irrational, because they are crazy, and they must be taught to stop protecting themselves.

hysteria - if the patient gets upset, its never because something is damaging them, it’s because they are so erratic and crazy.

trauma only ever exists in the past - abuse or trauma etc. in the past are sad, but also not that bad. if you say you are currently abused or traumatized though, you are wrong no matter what.

continuing education fallacy - we know everything about the brain and about mental illness and psychology already, so there’s no need for me to learn anything new or consider new perspectives or even listen to my patients as if they might teach me something.

its not my job fallacy - it’s not my job as a mental health professional to help my patients with their mental health. they are skirting responsibility and trying to play victim. my job is to take their money and then demand they take responsibility.

and many more!

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