fragmentating - Tumblr blog

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When you keep seeing random ass people online and friends of friends getting prescribed benzos long term / as emergency medication to have at home but when i even look like ihave thought about the word benzos at a psych he shoots me in the face and tells me I'm bleeding because benzos are addictive

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I love casually dropping anti psych shit around other paychiatrized people who haven't heard of it before. I love showing them that they have a world out there of people who understand what they went through. I love showing them that they are right with that deep seated feeling that things arent okay the way they are. I love showing them that no matter what, I believe they should have autonomy.

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keep seeing shit about the new ts album & mental illness and i am so so tired. please be nice to actually "crazy" people if ur gonna use us for the aesthetic. i'm not schizophrenic cause it's cute. don't joke about asylums if u haven't had those experiences (and even some of y'all who have been treat it like a vacation & to the rest of us it's prison. i mean literally. prison. incarceration. that's not new shit. and yeah, i'm that "actually crazy" person screaming in the ward. ur not any better than me.)

idk i keep posting and deleting about this cause i can't get my thoughts out properly i just. i'm tired. there was already a worsening problem of "socially acceptable" mental illness pushing out the rest of us (as it's always been) and now there's the top artist in the united states calling herself crazy, saying you should be scared of her, she was raised in an asylum, etc. and it's like.... that's my lived experience. medical doctors refuse to treat me because they're scared of my psychiatric disorders. i've had the cops called on me for episodes. i spent a decade rotting in the mental health system & institutions and i only got out after years of planning how to get away. and so much more i cant even put into words.

and now not only are y'all using folk like me & our experiences for the aesthetic. you're not even a decent human being to those of us who have actually lived through this shit. idk man. really rubs me the wrong way.

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People like to get mad at you for daring to say that it isnt all a chemical imbalance thing, but like. You know what it gets us when everyone treats it like that? Me having been in therapy for since I was maybe 12 years old and not a single therapist ever trying to figure out if maybe, just maybe, theres a real life reason for me feeling like shit. (There was, I was severely abused). It makes me lose my mind how close all of them were to actually seeing what's going on, but none of them ever cared enough to ask the right questions?

Because especially young kids usually arent aware that they're being abused. It's all they know. You cant expect them to waltz into therapy and be like "hey doc my parents are like soooo abusive" you gotta figure that out another way.

Pretty quickly it ended up being "let's throw some meds at it" and then being surprised when that didnt make me feel better as if I didnt get told by multiple people nearly daily how fucking awful and horrible and useless I was. Like yeah I think the only thing thatd ~fix~ my mood with all that was fucking MDMA or som shit /j

They love a survivor cause then they can send you to another round of therapy or whatever but they dont care about people currently being abused and it shows.

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content note: discussion of suicide.

this next monday will be the six year anniversary of losing one of my friends to suicide.

when he died, my high school barely mentioned his death, even though for other students who died by things like car crashes or illness, there were so many public expressions of grief. they believed that having any memorials for a student who died by suicide would encourage other people to die the same way. in their rush to erase the circumstances of his death, they erased the memory of his life.

there are so many things i am angry at that high school about in terms of how they treated mental health (mandatory reporting and collaborating with cops, their refusal to recognize the ways in which that system led to peer-to-peer crisis support, their refusal to recognize the ways that trying to keep each other alive through trial and error was scary and exhausting, carceral disciplinary policies, etc etc etc). but i think one of the things i am still angriest about is the way they enforced shame around his death. it felt like they were retroactively blaming him for the constellation of circumstances that made suicide an option in his life. it felt like they were blaming those of us who missed him and cared about him and wanted to grieve him. it made those of us still there who were actively suicidal feel even more scared about the reaction if we did reach out for help from one of those mythical safe adults.

as an adult now involved in psych abolition/mad liberation work, it makes me so fucking mad to see the ways in which he was discarded by people in authority positions. and the older i get, the more options i have found in my life for making sense of the world and finding healing and community and support which were never available to him because he died when he was 16 and the only things offered to him were a carceral psychiatric system that blamed him for his own fucking death. it feels so incredibly unfair.

i miss him and i think i always will; i can't remember his laugh or the sound of his voice or his favorite color any more and that aches. this grief is so heavy and it feels harder in a new way each year, when i become older than he will ever be. sometimes meeting new comrades or seeing new anticarceral suicide support models hurts because i wish so fucking bad that we had that back then. i remember how close we came to losing even more people that year and i know it is simple fucking luck that i'm still here when he's not.

i remember another letter (never sent) that i wrote to a friend while they were in an ICU bed after a suicide attempt when i didn't know if they would live or not. i have spent so much time in the past 10 years begging for anything to keep me and my friends alive, but even in that letter i knew that there is so much fucking violence that is hidden beneath psychiatric logics of cure and safety that promise a "solution" to suicide. I knew that institutionalization, coercion, and shame would not have helped build a life more liveable for him or **** or any of the people i've loved and lost since.

there needs to be more fucking options for care and support that aren't so incredibly cruel to suicidal people. i know so many people doing incredible work in alternatives, peer respite, a million different frameworks for healing and liberation. but it makes me so mad every day i have to live in a world where there are still people restrained, locked up in psych wards, having all autonomy and personhood taken away from them. knowing there are dozens of people every day getting blamed for their deaths the same way he was blamed for his.

i miss him. i cared so fucking much for him. and he died by suicide, and all of those things are true. he has been dead for 6 years and he lived before that and the people who loved him want to remember all of him; our celebrations of his life should not require hiding the way that he died.

Image description: [1000 origami cranes in all different colors and patterns that are tied together in strings of 25]

(these were the 1000 cranes we made to give to his parents, in memorial and recognition of how much he meant to us.)

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Copies of Mad Thought: a zine about being psychiatrized are available on my Etsy! It's a text-based, 12-page zine (or self-published booklet) of thoughts on my experience with psychiatric treatment. It also features a related ~400 word creative nonfiction essay I wrote. This zine measures roughly 8.5 by 5.5 inches and it is staple-bound. Thanks for checking out my work!

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december

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If therapy did not help you at all, you’re valid.

If therapy made your situation worse, you’re valid.

If you have therapy trauma, you’re valid.

Therapy is often shown as this great thing, and it can be, but please don’t feel invalidated if your therapy experience wasn’t great.

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Honestly not much radicalized me in regards to bodily autonomy the way being a chronic selfharmer for 10+ years has. And one of those things that really are so awful to deal with is a lack of privacy.

When I go inpatient and they ask me if I have wounds, and I answer honestly, they dont just write that down. They make me undress and show each single one, otherwise I wont be "processed" and let into my room.

In the underage psych ward I was in they would sometimes search the rooms of known selfharmers while we were away at a therapy appointment, or seeing family in the visitation room, etc. They wouldn't tell you. They would lie about it if you asked about it. But all your shit had been moved around slightly, enough for observant people to notice. If they found blades, or any other sharp object regardless of it you had used it to selfharm though, you would obviously be punished.

One time I cut and went to the nurses for help, I was scared because it had never been that deep before and their response was tossing my room after I had voluntarily given them the two blades i had, while a male nurse kept saying how uncomfortable he was that he "had to" inspect my pads, saying "why would you need that many", ... they had metal detectors. They could've just swiped it across everything. But that wouldn't have been humiliating enough like seeing a nurse dig through my underwear and pads and diary.

Outside of the psych ward, my family kept up a similar approach. They did not search my room at least, knowing it was futile because there were always knifes in the house if I was desperate anyways, and a store down the street that sold razors. But locked doors were my mothers enemy. If I locked my door to masturbate, and she noticed it was locked? She would knock and yell until I opened it. If I simply wanted to relax in a bath but she decided it was suspiciously long ? The same.

When they couldn't catch me in the act but my scars kept getting more and more theyd threaten me with being hospitalized again.

When the hospital ER would send me to the closed ward for cuts that had nothing to do with suicidal ideation, but they decided I must be lying because it was deep enough, no matter how often I said I simply "messed up" because of adrenaline and blades that were sharper than expected. They had no legal ground to lock me up again but who cares, right. Its just one of those freaks who cuts themselves anyways.

And none of this kept me safe. None of this prevented me from cutting majority of the time. It made me distrust the ER. It made me distrust nurses. It made me hide my body even around my family. And when it did momentarily work I simply started harming myself in other ways. I ended up covered in bruises, with minor concussions, increasingly starving myself, depriving myself of sleep, ...

No one ever went "let's really try to figure out why you do this." Instead they went "why the fuck wont you just chew some bubble gum and roll a spikey ball on the soles of your feet you depressed fuck" or some shit like bro I am being severely traumatized by the world and this is my reaction. It's all "you are the problem".

And as an adult whos decided that I'm not interested in quitting, who "only" practices harm reduction I know that absolutely no one wants to accept that as a choice I should be allowed to make. Doesnt matter that I'm an expert at taking care of wounds and I have not had a single infection in 10+ years aside from once on wounds that got fucking stitched at the hospital. that I actively do my best to avoid lasting damage. That I try to keep the frequency low. They put me through years of surveillance and shame and threats without ever trying to see the root cause, only ever treat me as a bratty problem child who's being difficult just to fuck with them, and can not understand why that wouldn't make me want to stick to the goals they have set for me.

Therapists genuinely lose their mind when I tell them I don't want ~sobriety~ I just want to reduce harm and get on with my life. Their teachings do not allow for this to be but a short term compromise. I do not care.

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I guess what I think is that suicide is a symptom of a problem and not the problem to fix, you know what I mean? To stop suicides you have to stop people’s mental health from getting to the point where they consider it, you have to treat the disease, trying to treat the symptom itself is almost completely useless.

For instance, Japan has spent a great deal of money on anti-suicide infrastructure, doing genuinely cartoonishly things like putting rollers on bridge railings so you can’t climb over them and slide right off, putting blue lights in the subway so it’s harder to see to throw yourself in front of a train. It’s not working. Japan’s suicide rate rose again in 2022. They are not addressing the root causes and stressors in their citizen’s lives and social barriers to mental health care and psychiatric medication.

It’s the same with universities in America, many have spent an exorbitant amount of money on turning their dorms into psych ward like environments. Anti-hanging chairs that you can’t stand on, bunks you can’t hang yourself from, slanted doorknobs etc. And yet suicide is still the second leading cause of death for college students. They make no attempts to make college easier, to make pausing and resuming your studies better, to make the pressure of an academic environment feel less life or death. They make no accommodations for the individual. They just make it a little harder to hang yourself in a few rooms on campus and call it a day, say they’re being proactive in terms of mental health.

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Btw the solution to TikTokkers abusing the meanings of psychological terms is not gonna involve treating the DSM as the word of god

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btw if you are/have ever been suicidal or want to hear about suicide from an antipsych queer disabled perspective. read alexandre baril's Undoing Suicidism. you can buy it (which I do recommend) or get it free here (also his og paper on suicidism & this plain language explanation of suicidism)

tbh i never want to hear another discussion about suicide and how it relates to oppression that doesn't discuss suicidism. ive been suicidal nearly my entire life and his writing is the first time ive felt seen by a perspective on suicide that didn't alienate me for having the Wrong Feelings about my own suicidality. also, alexandre baril is a trans man, and while he does not specifically bring up the high rates of suicidality amongst transmascs, i love supporting transmasc academics and i find it interesting that one wrote such a radical perspective on suicide. rlly cannot recommend this enough. he also specifically tried to write a book that would be accessible to people who struggle with reading academic texts.

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The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, Jonathan Metzl

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& all the handwringing about hurting yourself and coping mechanisms and blah blah at the end of the day does come back to the basic conviction that you can in fact determine what's in someone else's best interest and, having done so, are not only justified in forcing them to live that way, but in fact obligated to do so. well unfortunately 1 you might be wrong and 2 i don't want to live in a world where my every action is mandated to produce Wellness. sometimes something is harmful to a person in one way and helpful in another. sometimes it's the less harmful of available shitty options. sometimes it's fun. the logic that attempts to eliminate these actions through the use of psychiatric institutions & force is the same logic that attempts to eliminate abortions and hrt and casual sex by declaring them unhealthy and self harming. you can't half ass this 👍

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less “therapy is for everyone!” more advice on how to recognize when therapy is helping you and when it is harming you, more educating people on their rights and what they can do when their rights have been violated, more advice on navigating finding a therapist that isn’t only applicable to private practice situations

less “don’t forget to take your meds!” more sharing of studies on the effects of psychiatric medication (wanted and unwanted/positive and negative), more discussion of how to document your experiences on medications so you can understand how they are effecting you, more support for people struggling to navigate getting prescribed/using/going off of psychiatric medication

less “always reblog the suicide hotline!“ more sharing information on what happens if you do actually call one of these lines (i.e. will they send the cops to your house), more teaching individuals and communities how to help someone in crisis without involving police or hospitalization, more open discussions of how to share what we feel and make others feel seen, understood, and supported when it comes to extremely difficult feelings and situations

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not to make this about “this mental illness versus that mental illness” because it’s really not about the diagnoses or the identities themselves. but I feel like materially, those of us who have been through situations (personally or with a loved one) involving some kind of psychosis/mania/severe dissociation/another stigmatized mental health crisis that necessitated immediate crisis response, we know- without/before reading the theory- what it means to be anti-psychiatry or psych-critical, at least somewhat.

we get it on some deep-set level even if we’ve had an uncomfortable knee-jerk response to those terms before, because of ways we’ve had to rely on existing psych systems for personal safety in the past. 

I can’t tell you how many people get angry and say things like “my abusive mother was hospitalized during mania and it saved my life, how dare you suggest we dismantle psychiatry, you’re obviously unipolar & privileged”, or, “without my medication I would be in a scary situation, the word anti-psychiatry makes me feel like you’re trying to take away my medication” or something like that.

but then if I take away the words that trigger that response (“anti-psych”) and explain it in terms of its core ideas/sentiments/concerns, those people often end up agreeing in part or whole with what I’m saying.

because it’s not about wanting an end to skilled or trained crisis interventions, it’s about wanting them out of the hands of state or corporate institutions that rob people of their dignity and autonomy. which is the current reality of psychiatry and the impact of the ways medical, psychiatric and pharmaceutical institutions hold and use societal power.

it’s about watching yourself (or someone close to you) be handed over to those institutions for the sake of your/their/others’ safety, knowing that there’s no alternative in place in your community, and having that powerless feeling of “isn’t there some other way”.

there are other ways, and all of us have to put serious thought into them and constructing them rather than falling complacent whenever the conversation turns to mental health professionals and simply normalizing the current system as the way it has to be.

it’s like the prison/police abolition conversation: just because we have a hard time picturing another way out because of everything we’ve always been surrounded by and taught, doesn’t absolve us of doing that work.

psych-critical activists are not suggesting making the need for “people who respond to [problem]” obsolete. we are 1) having a larger conversation about the causes and exacerbating factors for that problem, and how solutions must go beyond individual pathology/diagnosis/treatment, and 2) challenging the current “professional” role that has been constructed (whether it be police, psychiatrists, etc), and the entrenchment of that role in capitalism and white supremacy and patriarchy and other systems of oppression.

“I don’t trust psychiatrists or even therapists” doesn’t mean “I’ve given up on training people specifically in mental health crisis intervention.” it means “the structures these figures are embedded in are committing and maintaining violence, ensuring that anyone who adopts these roles is easily complicit in that violence and forced to enter into those power dynamics, and we can’t settle for that”.

it also involves considering- especially in a society where we could approach labor and roles in a community differently- that responding to mental health involves all manner of collective care and mutual aid. and rejecting the psychiatric thesis that every mentally ill person has an inherent disease, when it has been shown to be much more complex and deeply involve the surrounding environment and conditions someone lives in.

this means mental health care must center housing and feeding people. educating them in a way that isn’t alienating or oppressive. structuring labor differently. it means that the community must be prepared to respond to instances of abuse or just conflict in general, and do so with justice and dignity. that gendered and sexual violence are addressed in the community. that racism is thoroughly dismantled. 

meds can be important. counseling and therapy of various kinds can be important. but those things in isolation, especially the way they currently exist (behind a paywall, dismissive of patient autonomy, a mechanism of regulation and control, focused on pathologizing the individual rather than addressing the surrounding environment and context) are not an acceptable picture of care.

I literally want to be a trained responder/counselor to mental health crises and I’m psych-critical + opposed to existing psych institutions, and that’s something I’m going to grapple with my whole life as I move through educational institutions and then try to build my life work around it. it’s not something that should scare me away from my interest and investment in organizing and participating in crisis response or counseling in my community, it’s just something I am cognizant of and should never neglect to make central to my practices and whatever I publish, whatever projects I work on, and where & how I choose to work in those capacities.

edit from months later: through doing street outreach and peer counseling at a syringe exchange/overall harm reduction center (as a person who has, and continues to, receive resources myself through that space) I’ve now seen more than ever how powerful it is to have a team of mutual-aid oriented community members- who’ve received thorough training but lack a draconian power imbalance with the person they’re helping- come together to help someone access resources and engage in healing practices.

I am less conflicted about the reasons for, and application of, my training. I am confident that I do not want to undertake a mainstream social work or therapy role. I want to use my training and Professional Credentials to glean resources from the system at times, and make myself heard through my research, writing, and voice. but overall, I plan to work within groups doing community-based collective care work, grounded in harm reduction. 

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I dont think I've seen many discussions of this project or the similar ones this author discusses in other articles on here yet, which really is a shame and I reccomend everyone read it especially if you, like me, sometimes struggle with being asked "so what are alternative ways of treating people in crisis"

Under the cut is some very personal ramblings about how I stumbled over this article and how it felt reading it for the first time in a fairly vulnerable state. Tw for abuse mentions, drugs, your fairly normal mad life shit. This is the most personal writing I have ever created on this overall topic, so I would really appreciate if any of you would give it your time of day, thanks..!

As an introduction I have to begin with this: I recently quit being a consumer. I was always a survivor, but I clung to anti psychotics for a couple years of adulthood because it felt preferable to the insomnia I'd find myself with without, and a nice little blanket of nothingness in the saved pills in those extra stressful moments. Whenever I'd quit, I'd come back sometime later again. Last time it was being desperate to quit getting excessively drunk every night. And the closed psych ward I checked myself into, because I genuinely was not capable of controlling my drinking at home in any way at all, starting me on seroquel once again. Neither helped me achieve sobriety long term (not really surprising to myself, but not the point of this, honestly). Rather I kept risking my health even more by consuming both on many nights after being back home. But the warnings sort of stop feeling real too. I mean, I've done this a few hundred times for sure by now. What really pushed me over the edge, was my tardive dyskenesia (tics) worsening and worsening, even after switching to another anti psychotic hoping itd stop the progression getting back on seroquel was causing. Sometimes they're painful. That's the worst. I was originally planning on trying another pill my friend had reccomended who was currently staying in rehab, hearing me lament my lack of sleep without this medication I didn't want anymore. he gave me the email address of the psych giving it to him that I could access through the outpatient services at the clinic for addiction by using the right keywords. It would've been easy.

But I never wrote that mail. Instead, after getting my last refill of Perazine, from that asshole psych who also misgendered me so aggressively and consequently, didnt matter that I legitimately already had changed my gender marker a year earlier... that refill was supposed to last me the next 3 months, and I halfheartedly tapered it off for 2 or 3 weeks. The thought of seeing his face again made me sick. This was now nearly exactly a month ago. I have felt no desire to write that email.

I didnt experience any of the common withdrawal symptoms I heard so much about, only after quitting completely, there was a very short bout of very confusing feelings, sensations, beliefs. The usual. I've been there, medicated or not. I made it through without reaching for a pill again. 3 days, max, then it was over. But suddenly I stopped sleeping, for up to 50 hours at a time. After about a week of that, I finally found someone online say insomnia can be a withdrawal symptom of quitting anti psychotics. I genuinely never heard of that before ? (But to be fair, maybe at some point I did, and the perazin and seroquel and others just made it drip off my longterm memory like teflon.) Either way, could it have been that every time I went running back for (sometimes way less bad) insomnia after quitting, it was actually fucking withdrawals? I thought I could probably keep this up for a few months until starting my new / first job. Unemployed people have an easier time staying up 50 hours at a time because we can simply collapse into bed at 9am after those and sleep all day. By now I'm mostly down to 30 hours at a time. Theres issues still, sure, but the quick progress is making me excited. I might never sleep perfectly normal, but at this point, I'd take that any day over daily substances.

What happened exactly, aside from the insomnia? I ran out of my weed a couple weeks earlier. Lost my hookup at the same time, so I decided, you know what, let me just not get something for a while, I'm not in the mood to look for something new rn. I was still drinking weekly with friends, but then they got sick for a while, and I only got drunk by myself once or twice that entire time. and somehow realized it wasnt actually my favorite alone-time substance anymore, that was weed. But I didn't have weed. So I just tried. And tried. And it mostly worked out. I stopped thinking about it. Had a small run in with cough syrup we dont talk about. And then I quit the perazine. I was terrified. This was the thing keeping all the other cravings at bay, right? It didnt make sense. I hadn't been "unmedicated" for more than a few weeks since the last 8 years. If I was out of pills, I'd turn to weed or alcohol or both. But nothing really happened this time. Because I stopped running from my feelings.

Slowly I started noticing it. There were so many things I was suddenly reacting to emotionally. Joy, pain, grief, connection, ... I never thought of myself as particularly numb before, but in comparison? It's hard to describe. It felt like every day further into getting off the perazine I felt more like myself. But how did I know it was me? It was someone I had never met before. I hadn't met adult me, ever. All I knew was abused kid me, abused teen me. It was me because now I felt alive in every little thing. Suddenly insomnia feels a lot less awful when you're having it by yourself, someone so novel but comforting. But with good emotions come bad. Suddenly I was crying curled up in a ball about memories from my most traumatic first institutionalization as a teen that I used to talk about like it was a fun little anecdote. There I felt it. "Go take one of your pills. 100m should probably be enough, maybe 150?" I wish I could say I did something super healthy. But I went for a cigarette cause I was really craving one, the breakdown had sort of delayed my usual midnight smoke. That turned into looking at the stars with music on my headphones for a bit. Back in bed I actually had forgotten about the pills again. Instead I opened up Google and typed in "psych abuse survivor". I was looking for something akin to a forum, I believe. But Nothing, really. A few term definitions on Wikipedia. Im no stranger to this internet search. And internet searches about anti psychiatry, anti psychotics, drug interactions, the name of the place I was institutionalized at. Every couple months I check if someone finally burned it down. And About to give up I saw the link to this article. And I opened it. Newly me, newly free to feel, really feel.

It was intriguing at first. I teared up a little a few times. Nothing major or surprising for my newfound emotional range. Then I got to the part where he talks about holding people, after they were allowed to freely let out their pent up rage, anger, manic energy, whatever it was, just let it out, all out. And theyd slowly come out of the (UNLOCKED) room (THAT THEY WERE ALLOWED TO LEAVE AT ANY POINT) after a few hours, and they would be hugged. And often they would start crying. Sometimes violently. And they would hold them lovingly, sometimes multiple of them, until the persons sobs trailed off into sniffles, into nothing. As I finished the sentence it broke out of me in a same way. Theres silent tears running down my cheeks writing this right now. But last night ? I was wailing. Sounds I had not heard from myself, ever. Not the night my grandmother passed. Not the nights I recalled sexual abuse, recalled my violent father, recalled my peers universally rejecting me for the freak I was, as I laid in my basement next to baggies of weed and xtc, as i sat in the bathroom watching blood go down the drain.

Suddenly it wasn't just the abuse in the ward that hurt. The memories of seeing tiny harm- and powerless kids strapped down and tied up, older boys injected and carried off, alarms blaring, keys turning in locks, a haze of benzos that made everything blur together, being watched as you shower, watched as you sleep. Dragged out of your room screaming. What hurt me so much I was wailing like never before was the love I needed, but never got when I needed it the most. I needed to be held as I cried. I dont think I have been held as I cried since I was 9 years old. I have been gawked at, yelled at, ignored and stepped over as I laid on the floor, walked past in public, threatened, locked up.

But I have not once been held.