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#anti psychiatry
bioethicists · 8 months
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i'm just thinking abt how many providers i've had who heard my story abt psychiatric abuse + immediately individualized it. "oh, you're so smart + kind+ obviously sane! you didn't deserve that! i can't believe they gave you that diagnosis when you're obviously not like that! they shouldn't have treated u like that when all you did was xyz! they shouldn't have assumed you were crazy like that!"
there is always a third person haunting this interaction- the patient who does deserve that, who is "actually" that evilscary diagnosis, who did Have To be treated like that. if i want to soak up the affirmations of these providers, i must be careful to never become this third person. i must affirm myself by setting myself apart from her- i did not deserve to be treated like that because i am not like that.
i reject this. not only was i like that, she + everyone else like that deserve everything i deserve. they are my siblings + my friends + my lovers. i do not need to cut them out of me to believe i deserved better. i refuse to comfort myself through the lens of someone else's dehumanization. the tragedy is not that psychiatric violence was applied to someone who not insane enough to warrant it. the tragedy is the violence.
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thegirlsarenevergone · 5 months
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The Woman In Me - Britney Spears
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[Disparities in mental healthcare aren't just "therapy is expensive," they are also "rich people get sprawling, expansive, multi-year, relationship-focused psychotherapy while poor people get structured 12-week CBT programs with newly-minted MSWs"]
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dromaeocore · 9 months
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So, Peer Respites are a not-very-well-known alternative to psychiatric hospitalization. They are 100% voluntary and staffed by peers, AKA individuals with lived experience of mental illness/emotional distress/what-have-you. Generally, they are a homelike environment where you can come and go as you please, and there is lots of voluntary programming like groups, art, yoga, etc. You can bring your own food or cook meals together with staff and other residents. Stays are usually anywhere from five days to two weeks, depending on the respite house and also your own wants and needs. There are no restraints, strip searches, or seclusion.
They're also on the rise!! I know this because I've spent all day today compiling data on peer respites in the US so I could create this fun graph for ya'll.
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In the past ten years, at least 38 new peer respites have opened in the US. The data for 2023 is incomplete, but at least one has already opened, and another is scheduled for a soft opening later this year.
Some things about the data:
I did not include peer respites which were permanently closed (2) or could not find an opening date for (1)
I used the National Empowerment Center's Directory of Peer Respites, along with some internet sleuthing to find a few more (and to find the opening dates for each one). Because of this, I may have missed a few.
There were a handful of peer respites for which I could not pin down a for-certain, exact date for. I did include these in the dataset as I was able to find rough estimates.
I have also not done a deep dive for all peer respites that were unsuccessful, which may skew the data a little bit.
I included Soteria Vermont as well, as it technically fits the definition despite being specifically for people with psychosis
If you would like to help get a peer respite off the ground, I would recommend donating to Peer Support Space Inc.'s Orlando FL Peer Respite. Their soft launch is November 2023, and they are scheduled to open to the public in January 2024. This is really important, because Florida's only peer respite has recently permanently closed.
If you're interested in starting your own peer respite, the National Empowerment Center has a list of resources here.
If you are interested in seeking help from a peer respite, there is a directory of most of them here. You can also look at the Google Doc I created to compile my data, which has a few more/is slightly more updated - though it's not nearly as nicely put together as the other one!
If anyone would like to add any information, non-US peer respites, etc, feel free to!
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transrevolutionaries · 7 months
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Marsha P. Johnson was a psychiatric abuse survivor. In Pay it No Mind, friend Bob Kohler says
"She would go down christopher street, and be picked up midway... they would take her away for about two-three months, and they would put an implant in her spine, thorazine i think it was, that would calm her down, and she would come back, and be a zombie for about a month, and then she would go back to being old Marsha"
We must not erase this aspect of her life, and its important to celebrate marsha as a Black Mad Street Transvestite, not whatever sanitized version of her life the mainstream wants to celebrate. The parts of Marsha that made her such a celebrated and mythologized part of NYC gay and trans life is the same thing that got her institutionalized, a victim of state violence. Marsha was the patron saint of Christopher street, and she was also a Mad, Black, Street Transvesite, and many of the people who swear they owe their protection to her did not fight for her, all of her, the way she did for them.
Make sure you do
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This shouldn't even be need to be said but don't fucking report people who express being suicidal. I don't care how much you think you're doing it for someone's own good, it does NOT help us it only harms further
READ that AGAIN
You are ACTIVELY harming those people when you try to be a goody two-shoes and tell on them when they get suicidal
Don't fucking report them to social media app features that have the report for self harm option. Don't fucking call a suicide hotline on them. Don't fucking report them to therapists, paychiatrists, cops, controlling parents or partners
It does not matter how uncomfortable it makes you - this isn't ABOUT you - it doesn't matter how much it goes against your cute little saviour complex thinking you're being oh such a wonderful kind heroic person by "saving" someone from themself.
When you report a person to any of those places it heavily risks hospitalisation and incarceration. Where I live it's technically still a crime to attempt suicide, they never overturned the law. And if you think being in a ward might help them - do everyone a favour and go check out the actual conditions in the wards and talk to psych survivors about how they actually are. Otherwise shut up about things you have no experience with.
Everyone should have a right to autonomy, especially bodily autonomy, and you don't have to like what they do with their own body for you to know not to take that away from someone. It's not your place to judge, it's not okay to be moralistic about bodily autonomy suddenly because you can't handle the reality of mentally ill people.
And it's not fucking okay to lock us in and remove us from society just because our disorders are too fucking ugly for you to look at.
If you absolutely have to help just talk to a suicidal person if they're up to it, just ask them what will help, and if you can't do that then leave us the fuck alone you snitches
And don't come at me with the law, if you had to be an ally to mentally ill people, to queer people, to women, to any kind of marginalised people, historically a lot of it has always included standing against the law and with us.
STOP REPORTING US
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actuallyverynormalbtw · 5 months
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i dont like to talk about self-diagnosis because i dont enjoy people making assumptions about me, my illnesses, and my diagnostic status. but i will say:
i have self diagnosed and gone on to be medically validated with an official diagnosis. multiple times actually. i was never wrong about my self-diagnoses.
however, i have been misdiagnosed by professionals FIVE TIMES. and let me tell you, a professional diagnosis being wrong is far more harmful than a self-diagnosis being wrong.
if your self diagnosis is wrong, maybe you used the wrong language or put yourself in a box or now feel invalid and whatnot. but if your professional diagnosis is wrong, it can lead to abuse, medical trauma, panic attacks, issues with medication, even suicide.
i was misdiagnosed with BPD when i was 15 by a psychologist that i spoke to for hardly even 10 minutes. this diagnosis was based on my parent's description of my reactions to abuse, and the diagnosis was used to validate and excuse their abuse.
i was misdiagnosed with MDD when i was 12 and put through several different types of anti-depressants. we never found anything that worked, because it was actually ADHD and dissociation, but i did end up with panic attacks and insomnia all throughout middle/highschool!
when i self-diagnosed with autism however, it saved my life. it took me out of active suicidality because i was able to finally able to accept myself after years of feeling like i am just "being a person wrong". i had the knowledge to accomodate for myself and the language to advocate for myself. this was life changing. even if i was wrong, which i wasnt, i dont see how it couldve caused any harm.
my opinions on self-diagnoses arent black and white, and im not entirely settled on them either, but i do think this is important to understand. doctors and psychologists are not all knowing. we live in a time where we can access thousands of dollars worth of university level education on the internet, even the same exact resources medical students use. plenty of people are capable of interpreting themselves and that information to come to a conclusion about what they are experiencing and what might help.
sure, self-diagnosis might be biased. but a professional is most likely going to be just as biased, and possibly less aware of it. its just silly to use bias as a primary argument when it is an inescapable feature of human psychology. there is a reason ADHD is underdiagnosed in women. there is a reason anxiety disorders are underdiagnosed in men.
an incorrect self-diagnosis wont take away resources or your space in your comminities. but professional misdiagnosis can cause real damage.
(i am not trying to fear-monger about professional diagnosis, moreso responding to the fear-mongering surrounding self-diagnosis)
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neuroticboyfriend · 1 year
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no but being told to use your communication coping skills when talking to abusive people is bullshit. abusers do not listen to their victims no matter how reasonable we are.
like. anything that shows we're an individual with thoughts and feelings is going to make an abuser double down. using "i feel" statements isn't going to help if your abuser lashes out at you for showing feelings. speaking calmly isn't going to help if your abuser is threatening you. gently stating what you need isn't going to help if your abuser neglects even your simplest needs.
also so many of us hide our anger and rage. we dont speak our mind, because it's dangerous. it's the most threatening thing to an abuser... but it's also the most empowering for us. anger is the feeling that tells us something is wrong, and we need to embrace it. because our anger is not the danger - our abuser's reaction to it is, and that reaction is not our fault.
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whereserpentswalk · 2 months
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Professors, bosses and parents will see you having a panic attack and really just be like "Could we maybe not do this on a weekday? It's really easier for everyone if you save your mental breakdowns for the weekend."
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equalperson · 2 months
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i think we should always take predominant sexes and races for psychiatric disabilities into question.
are men really more likely to be antisocial or narcissistic, or are women just overlooked because ASPD/NPD are seen as too "aggressive" for them?
are women really more likely to be borderline or histrionic, or are they just seen as so "hysterical" that they have to be feminine?
are black people more likely to have schizophrenia or ODD, or are labels of "psychosis" and "defiance" simply used to further dismiss, oppress, and imprison BIPOC?
are white people more likely to have autism and ADHD, or are doctors just more willing to accept that white children are disabled and not just "bad?"
oppressive biases are everywhere in psychiatry. never take psychiatric demographics at face value.
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disabledunitypunk · 5 months
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I am once again thinking about the term "suicide survivors". How it's a term that rightfully belongs to those that lived through a suicide attempt, that literally survived suicide. How instead it means those that lived through someone else's death. How it neans "surviving" in only the archaic use 'survived by" used in obituaries. How suicide "survivors" lived through something that was never going to kill them, that was never even a threat to their life.
How we are only ever a footnote in the stories of others. We're a tragedy that happens to people, a cautionary tale if we die and inspiration porn if we live. How, forever long we do live, we were suicidal, past tense, because it makes people too uncomfortable too acknowledge that suicidality is chronic (whether pathological or environmental).
How everyone wants to do suicide prevention but no one wants to acknowledge the people at the center of it. How it's never actually about our needs - or even about our safety, really. It doesn't matter what trauma or pain we must endure - they'll have us live if it kills us. Never mind social programs to give us housing, food, security, to make us want to live - it's our responsibility to find someone to tell us it's all in our heads and we need meds to fix us, because it's CRAZY to want to die. Make sure the hotlines can all call the cops if we don't comply.
Don't we know how selfish it is to want to not be in pain and be so desperate that we're willing to die for it? Don't we know how selfish it is to not have any access to the things we need to survive? Don't we know that suicidal depression is really our duty to get over, because obviously if we don't take meds that don't work or that make us sick, if we don't submit to medical gaslighting, if we don't "try" to recover, it's not like it's an illness or a disability! It's selfishness, a character flaw.
Don't we know that we're the selfish ones, when they make our struggling, our illness, our deaths, about us and not them?
It's sanism at its most basic. We're not reliable narrators of our own experiences. We're not the main characters of even our own stories. We're there to be a single pretty tear rolling down the cheek of our loved ones. We're tragedy-as-an-object, as an object lesson. "Make sure you pick yourself up by your bootstraps seek help so you don't become an inconvenience for us hurt your loved ones." Even STILL the focus is not on the harm done to yourself, except as a moral failure in that it harms the healthy people around you.
Quite frankly, I'm sick of it. I don't ever want someone to call themselves a "suicide survivor" again who means it not as "I've survived BEING suicidal" but as "I lived through someone else being in so much pain that they took their own life over it". Not when there still exist people that have survived attempts or are actively suicidal. This is our narrative, not one for you to center yourselves in.
I will not go so far as to say your grief is selfish. That would be cruel. But your grief IS about someone else. This is still THEIR story.
It is likewise the same pain, the same trauma, and the same ableism and sanism we face over it, for those of us who have actually survived it, more than it is that of those who have never stood on that edge. It is the same decentering of our own stories when we go through the exact same thing.
It is the same surviving another day of being suicidal, another attempt, and hearing people who have either never been suicidal or simply are not talking about their own survivorship of suicidality, have the audacity to call themselves survivors of something that they never survived. To take something that KILLED someone they love and claim to be survivors of it.
Cancer survivors had cancer. Automobile collision survivors were in collisions. Survivors of critical illnesses or disabling/severe injuries lived through those illnesses or injuries affecting THEIR lives. But suddenly when a deadly chronic illness kills someone, in this one case, the survivors are the ones who watched someone die of it?
Nah. This isn't a mass threat like a shooting or a pandemic, where your life was ever in danger. You're not the survivor. Your grief is valid, and there absolutely needs to be times and places where being a GRIEF survivor is centered, where your healing and well-being is focused on.
But let those of us who we so sick we nearly died for it, or DID die from it, be the center of THAT story.
Dead men tell no tales, so at least have the grace to let the echoes of our voices remain, unspoken over. And for gods' sakes, remember that there are people that DID make it through alive, that we're still talking, that our voices are most important in a conversation about OUR potentially deadly illnesses.
We're still here telling our own tales.
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bioethicists · 8 months
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it's actually terrifying how quickly the concept of self care (originally a radical concept rooted in the black panther party's efforts to support other black ppl living through racism) became another tool of self-management which is viewed as both a moral obligation + an individual responsibility. businesses + employers + other institutions now easily wield it as a progressive way to say "if you're upset about xyz, make yourself get over it". "we are going to treat you like shit + you need to learn how to cope with that or else you're doing something wrong"
i have seen job listings where "ability to practice self care" was listed as a requirement for employment. as a case worker, we were repeatedly drilled on "self-care" as a response to unconscionably high case loads, traumatizing experiences, dead end job obligations, + poor living conditions due to subpar pay/high stress. my clients would go to appointments regarding their evictions, food insecurity, active domestic violence situations, etc + receive tips on "self care" without any tangible community, legal, or structural support to follow.
everyone absolutely deserves to care for themselves + it is useful to circulate affirmations + advice on how to do this. this should happen within communities, through a sincere concern/love for one another, as a way of helping everyone live the best life possible while we work towards total liberation. it should not be a replacement for caring for one another!!! it should be one of many ways of caring for one another!!!
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rattusn0rvegicus · 1 year
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Sometimes, when talking about the current psychiatric system, we get lost in anger and don’t look towards alternatives and what a better tomorrow might look like. Here’s some cool mental health/psychiatry reform things that I think are neat (Somewhat US centric bc that’s where I live). Lots of them focus on psychosis, because I think psychosis is a sorely ignored subject in mental health activism.
US Peer Respite Directory - A list of voluntary, community-based, non-clinical crisis support group-home like environments that are staffed by people with lived experience of mental illness and/or lived experiences in the psychiatric system.
Students With Psychosis - A nonprofit that empowers students with psychosis through virtual programming, support groups, etc. They’re run by the amazing Cecilia McGough, an advocate with schizophrenia.
Hearing Voices Network - A network of support groups for people who hear voices, see visions, and have other extreme experiences. Focused on supporting individuals without judgement and giving them a place to explore their experiences and grow from them.
Open Dialogue - An psychosocial approach to psychiatric services that focuses on treating clients with respect, shared decision-making, dialogue between client, providers, and family (if the client wants family involved), and more minimal use of medication.
CommonGround software - A software developed by Dr. Pat Deegan that allows clients to communicate their needs to their providers more efficiently to support shared-decision making. Dr. Deegan has a lived experience of being diagnosed with schizophrenia and believes in personal medicine and med empowerment.
Project LETS - A radical approach to peer support and healing that has a disability justice centered approach, giving people with lived experience a voice and focusing on mutual aid. They provide peer mental health advocates, self-harm prevention, and more.
Integrative Psychiatry - A holistic form of psychiatry that focuses on nutrition, exercise, therapy, and psychosocial factors, where medication is just an aspect of treatment. US database of integrative psychiatrists here.
Soteria Houses - Community homes with peer support that provide residents with personal power, responsibilities, and “being with” residents, that focus on a humane and person-centered approach.
Relating to Voices Using Compassion Focused Therapy - A self-help book by Drs. Eleanor Longden and Charlie Heriot Maitland about managing distressing voices and building a respectful, cooperative relationship with them. Views voices as potential allies in emotional problem-solving rather than enemies.
Clubhouse International - A non-profit organization that gives people with mental illness opportunities for friendship, employment, housing, educational, and medical services all in one place. It was founded by a group of friends who survived a psychiatric hospital together.
Psychosis Research Unit - A group of psychology researchers who are doing research on and developing psychotherapeutic techniques for coping with and managing psychosis, such as CBT for psychosis and Talking with Voices therapy.
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also i think a lot of support needs discourse completely overlooks the fact that the reason functioning labels and autism levels are problematic to begin with is because there is no across-the-board way to generalize support needs across dozens and dozens of different daily activities usefully, realistically you end up categorizing almost every disabled person as "mid support needs" because of splinter skills and that just isn't materially useful
"can't feed or bath themself" and "completely independently handles their finances and works an accounting job from home" can and do coexist in the same disabled person
"nonverbal and uses aac" and "is capable of completing a college degree" can and do coexist in the same disabled person
"can't live independently and needs a carer" and "is a carer for the other disabled people they live with" is something that applies to literally every disabled person i know
(and like, yes of course i think that people who are profoundly incapable of participating in abled hegemony in any way need language to describe themselves, but the ability to access abled hegemony is already overlooked as the main axis of disabled oppression, instead trying to localize it within our bodyminds? and yeahyeah i get it "i'd still be disabled under socialism" thats not really the point there, the point is regardless of how little you can access abled hegemony the disabling feature is still the access to abled hegemony, current language and discourse abt support needs obscures that imho)
(particularly because the visible markers of disability more profoundly limit someone from accessing abled hegemony, and arguments abt what is "more" or "less" disabling aren't centered on the axis of "how much is this person able to access the benefits of this hegemony, incl. income, respect and authority, social acceptance." i've seen people who have no ability to access institutions like work and school, 0 degree or qualifications and 0 income, being implied as ~less disabled~ due to current discourses on support needs, than people who draw on hegemonic authority via academic and professional accreditation.)
and like, separating out those into categories and representing access to those categories with ur language is fundamentally more accurate than drawing broad lines around dozens of categories of daily living and shunting disabled ppl off into those 3 or 4 categories. the experience of someone who cannot feed or toilet independently + has a masters degree is fundamentally different from the experience of someone who is independently physically mobile + labeled as violent and dangerous due to their disability and currently street homeless. and trying to determine whose "support needs are higher" in that axis or trying to plot them on an axis of "more or less disabled" is fundamentally useless in comparison to describing how their disability positions them in relation to abled hegemony and what parts of it they have access to and what parts they dont!
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dromaeocore · 8 months
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Good news! There are plenty! Most of which have been in practice for years and have been shown to work! And these are just some of the alternatives!
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Okay but I'm actually kind of starting to hate mainstream neurodiversity social media spaces. I hate all those infographics that look like boring corporate power point slides. I hate that neurodivergent has just come to mean autism and adhd while other neurominorities are ignored or even further stigmatized by these spaces. I hate this constant focus on how autistic people can be super empathetic and have lots of friends and work in high paying professional jobs. I hate the demonization of people with low empathy. I hate the empathification of autism. I hate how my friend was called a eugenics apologist for saying it's okay to use the word aspergers. I hate the constant policing. I hate the pathologization of every trait. I hate essentialist understandings of psychiatric diagnoses. I hate the quirkification of it all. I hate the buzzfeedification of mental health. I hate tiktok psychiatry. I hate capitalism selling us back the traumas it's inflicted on us as products.
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