fuckyeahmadpride

[fuckyeahmadpride]

Currently working on a tiktok video about this essay, "Making Bipolar Britney: Proliferating psychiatric diagnosis through tabloid media" by Jijian Voranka. She published this on the online journal, Radical Psychology. You have the use the wayback machine, but it's a great archive of essays! The journal ran from like 1999-2008.

I love this piece, especially because it's from 2008 and pre-dates our current understanding of Britney Spears's life story; it pre-dates the Free Britney movement, her court testimonies to end the conservatorship, and her memoir. For example, in early 2008, the conservatorship was set to end in literally December! But, even though it was written before our collective voice ultimately rejected the psych abuse Spears experienced, "Making Bipolar Britney" is prescient and sharply critical of how we (society) treated her at the time. The essay is also critical of the fact that this 2007-2009 era of pop psychology tabloid writings actually socialized us into a very specific (and highly problematic) paradigm of psy knowledge: the medical model.

Voranka critiques the way that tabloid media's pathologization of Britney pushed and even proliferated concepts and language of the medical model of disability. From a mad, psych survivor, and disability studies perspective, this model will always be criticized for its treatment, totalism and danger, and Voranka's piece is no exception. Also she's basically a poptimist before it was cool. Ugh she's genuinely so rad, it's almost challenging. Big fan!!

[fuckyeahmadpride]

[fuckyeahmadpride]

"'GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE!' ...Wait a minute, great minds think for themselves!" - the genie

[fuckyeahmadpride]

Dearest tumblr friends,

After an 11 year hiatus, I am back!

As most of you know, my name is Adelle, and I'm a bipolar, bisexual survivor of the Troubled Teen Industry. I identify broadly as a psych survivor.

This blog, f***YeahMadPride is a project I did from 2011-2014; it's a fangirl blog about the Mad Pride social movement.

At the time, I was getting a degree in Human Development/Psychology, and taking courses in feminism, queer theory, critical race theory (i'm a fan), and disability studies. My senior project was called "Camps, Asylums and Boarding Schools: A Mad Coalitional Genealogy". I thought I was pretty smart! hahahaha.

But seriously, I was trying to apply Cathy Cohen's "Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens" as the foundation for the idea that formerly confined peoples have a shared relationship to power, which could activate political coalitions between our survivor groups.

I remember a big moment in my research was discovering that survivor resources for Native American kids sent to schools had almost identical overlap with suggestions found in Troubled Teen Industry survivor resources. ("never send your child to a school which only lists a P.O. box", is an example).

I also did this because I noticed a difference between outpatient mentally ill people, and mentally ill people who have been longterm inpatient or involuntarily confined, such as myself. I could only explain this through Cohen's frame: seemingly the same out-group or identity, but different relationships to power.

This chapter is a continuation of my work to promote visibility for the mad, sad, mentally ill, troubled teen industry and c/s/x survivors through fangirl content. But this time, I'm posting videos of myself talking - LOL.

I made a TikTok and a YouTube channel (you can find a 5-part introduction to this renewed project on my TikTok, if you're into the lore). I am excited to be back online! It's a totally different era than the tumblr years. Hello fellow kids!

I spent the past 20 years situating my TTI and other psychiatric experiences firmly in the history of asylums and psychiatric survival. Although I became aware of the direct connection between cults and my program about 10 years ago, it honestly has taken a long time for that part to settle in. I spent the last 20 years thinking that I was held captive by uneducated, unethical people, who were haphazardly trying to instill good values and valid psychological principles/theories. It turns out, it was all a grift!!! I spent 20 years reading Carl Jung, when I should have ALSO been reading Robert Jay Lifton.

In this second chapter I'm done being in the closet about my TTI experiences, and I'm done giving those adults-in-charge the benefit of the doubt. I look forward to learning more about "organizational psychology", cults, and coercive control this time around.

TikTok @ex.patient.adelle IG @ex.patient.adelle Reddit @ex-patient-adelle

DESCRIPTION OF THE VIDEO ABOVE: After going into a little background, this video demonstrates how even the most boring, garden variety exchange in a "Feedback Group" at my school, contributes to a compression of harm and stress for survivors. I hope my video provides a thoughtful criticism on the Troubled Teen Industry, and schools considered to be "one of the good ones."

Please note, I made an error in my statement that SRA was open for "16 years". It was open for about 27 years (1996-2023). I correct this in the closed captioning, and added a pop-up in the video with this edit.

IMAGE/VIDEO DESCRIPTION: A white woman with a short buzzcut is wearing a grey suit, sitting in front of a cute and childish desk full of Archie comics, a Wicked lego set, a pink puppy stuffed-animal, candles, a fireplace youtube video playing on a laptop, books and makeup. Her essay is typed on purple printer paper, which she is holding.

Kind regards, Your friend,

Adelle

[fuckyeahmadpride]

[fuckyeahmadpride]

[SOURCE]

Pink flowers on the former grounds of The Lunatic Asylum at Whau.

[fuckyeahmadpride]

I was thinking that I might fly today Just to disprove all the things that you say It doesn't take a talent to be mean Your words can crush things that are unseen So please be careful with me, I'm sensitive And I'd like to stay that way

Jewel

[fuckyeahmadpride]

Older, wiser, crazier. I’m still here. 

[fuckyeahmadpride]

At this point I feel like anyone being mean online is basically colluding with [...] authoritarianism. 

[fuckyeahmadpride]

"We're all misfits!"

Screenshot from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Rankin/Bass Productions, 1964

On the Island of Misfit Toys, a cowboy who rides an ostrich and a bird who swims instead of flies declare, "We're all misfits!"  

[fuckyeahmadpride]

"Do-it-yourself icebergs."

Screenshot from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Rankin/Bass Productions, 1964

Yukon Cornelius, Hermey, Rudolph, the dogs and the sled are on an iceberg out to sea.

[fuckyeahmadpride]

"Oh, well.  Now I'm off to get my life-sustaining supplies... corn meal and gun powder and ham hocks... and guitar strings."

Screenshot from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Rankin/Bass Productions, 1964

Hermey and Rudolph meet Yukon Cornelius, big tall white mountain man with a red hat and red beard.  He's wearing earmuffs, he's got a big pack on his back with a tarp rolled up and a canteen hanging off of it.  He's donned in a green coat and pants with black snow boots and snow shoes.  A silver handgun and an ice pick/hammer are tucked into his belt.  He also has a sled with supplies on it, led by some different breeds of adorable dogs.  As is true throughout the movie, it's a snowy scene.

[fuckyeahmadpride]

"We may be different from the rest [but] who decides the test of what is really best?"

Screenshot from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Rankin/Bass Productions, 1964

Hermey and Rudolph singing about being misfits in a snowy forest.  There's a snowman of an elf.  In the second screenshot they are looking at their reflection in a pond, and then a fish jumps up and ripples the image, which symbolically fits with the lyric "who decides the test of what is really best?"

[fuckyeahmadpride]

"You wouldn't mind my... red nose?" "Not if you don't mind me being a... dentist."

Screenshot from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Rankin/Bass Productions, 1964

Hermey the Christmas elf and Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer meet for the first time.  They're outside in an evergreen forest covered in snow. This early in the movie.  Both of them are smiling as they realize that being outcast misfits is actually the basis for a great friendship.

[fuckyeahmadpride]

"There's always tomorrow."

Screenshot from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Rankin/Bass Productions, 1964

The perspective of this shot is through the evergreen branches, looking into a snowy glen where Clarice sings a hopeful song to Rudolph.  Pairs of sweet little forest creatures join her to harmonize - two birdies, bunnies, raccoons.  They comfort him. 

[fuckyeahmadpride]

"I think it's a handsome nose..."

Screenshot from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Rankin/Bass Productions, 1964

Clarice the adorable reindeer with luxurious eyelashes is, at this point in the movie, the only one to affirm Rudolph for who he really is.  She's wearing a little red and white polka dot bow on her head, standing in the snow.

[fuckyeahmadpride]

We're on the Island of Misfit Toys

I've become infatuated with the surplus of mad and disability pride-related themes that can be found in most holiday movies and tv specials.  An easy example is Miracle on 34th street, with its wonderfully wizardy protagonist Santa whose belief in himself and Christmas magic is socially and structurally pathologized.  It's a Wonderful Life deals with suicide and being visited by angels, White Christmas grapples with ageism ("What do you do with a general, when he stops being a general? What do you do with a general who's retired?").  Tiny Tim's lack of funds for healthcare is a pivotal, fundamental part of A Christmas Carol.  

Miracles, spirits, magic, ghosts, angels, outcasts, misfits, the undervalued rejected little tree in Charlie Brown's Christmas - all of these things resonate with the valuing of madness, disability, and otherness.  Practically every frame of the 1964 stop-motion Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer fits with core themes of the mad and disability pride movement.  To celebrate this I have queue'd up some screenshots I took. :)  Personally, I've always identified with Yukon Cornelius ;)