Modern Steve/Bucky AU

No powers

No serum

Steve has EDS!!!

Part of a larger series

Bucky is an amputee, also he's brother to Natasha and Yelena. Yelena is also chronically ill and Natasha deals with a mental illness I think (sorry haven't read it in a couple months)

No trigger warnings for the Steve fic but the overall series deals with self-hatred, medical system abuse/disbelief/gaslighting of patients, hallucinations, and drug use

Also, they refer to Bucky as James the whole time, which was really weird for me

I feel like sysmedicalism gets boiled down to just being anti-endo, and that's not really even the core of their beliefs. That's definitely a big part of it, but it's more of a side effect of their core beliefs. Those beliefs are:

Plurality only exists in the context of DID and similar disorders

Those disorders only ever happen as the result of trauma

Both the above points have been scientifically proven

Psychiatrists who study/treat DID, as well as the ISSTD, are more trustworthy than anyone claiming their personal experiences fall outside of what they believe "real DID" looks like

The only one of those that even might be true is the second, but I have no idea if it is or not, and it would be irresponsible to make the claim that it is without proof (correlation isn't proof, that's literally the first lesson in statistics). But what I want to focus on is the last point, because I think it explains everything else

People with DID/OSDD/etc have pretty much always been fighting an uphill battle against the general public's disbelief. This worsened significantly in the 90s. DID (then called MPD) got swept up into the Satanic Panic, and when aspects of that were disproven, everything else that got lumped in with it was assumed to be equally false. On top of that, there was a high-profile lawsuit against Bennett Braun (psychiatrist and founding member of the ISSTD) that alleged some pretty horrific abuse against a woman who claimed she was misdiagnosed and never had MPD/DID in the first place

This split the discourse. Some people condemned Braun and his associates for their treatment of their patients, and claimed that MPD/DID was made up. This is why the name was changed to DID, btw. The chair of the DSM-IV task force didn't believe it was real. On the other side of things, there were people who believed it was real, and therefore assumed everything being said about Braun and others was made up. There were some people, like those who were abused as "treatment" for MPD/DID, who believed that both plurality and the abuse were real, but they were largely ignored or silenced

Nowadays the issue is mostly simplified into "is DID real or not?". However, the idea that criticizing the ISSTD/psychiatrists who treat DID is the same as siding with the people who don't believe in it lingers. For many people newly diagnosed or discovering the online community and their place in it for the first time, these clinicians seem to be the only ones who believe their experiences are real. On top of that, there's a societal belief that being a doctor gives someone the authority to speak on medical issues in a way that being a patient doesn't. This goes doubly for anything mental health related. So these systems latch onto the ISSTD/psychiatrists and uncritically buy into everything they say (or what a game of twitter discourse telephone claims they say), even if it doesn't make sense, or if the proof just isn't there

So when they lash out at endogenic systems, or systems who claim to be people instead of parts, or any system that doesn't fit their idea of "real DID', it's because they see us as threats to their legitimacy. They think we can only be taken seriously if we go along with what the ISSTD claims. But this community has decades worth of very real reasons not to trust the psychiatrists making those claims

If you're a system whose beliefs align with the bullet points above, and you're starting to doubt the ISSTD (or even just some individual psychiatrists) because of the McLean video, take some time to look a little deeper. Look up what Bennett Braun got sued for malpractice for at least 11 times over (but be prepared, it will be triggering, it's some fucked up shit). Look up other prominent psychiatrists in this area, see how many of them have had accusations of abuse leveled against them. Try this video on Onno van der Hart, the primary contributer to the ToSD as it applies to DID (TW psychiatric abuse). And if you're starting to realize that perhaps they can't be trusted to be correct about everything, maybe it's time to consider what else they've said that's wrong

-Oliver (he/him)

P.S. If you're a dick on this post you'll be blocked on sight