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#psychiatric abuse
neuroticboyfriend · 7 months
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not that people who've been to the ward are immune from being pro-psych, but if you've never been to a psych ward*, i sincerely don't want to hear about how psychiatry/psychology is good because you've had such a good experience with X provider, or X medication saved your life. *i also don't want to hear about how the forced treatment was what you needed or how the ward you went to let you have your cellphone etc. etc. i genuinely do not want to hear it.
like. the first hospitalization traumatized me so bad, i became dangerously delusional, was re-hospitalized, and sent to state. when they transferred me, i was strapped down into a gurney at all points on my body, *head and neck included*, and loaded onto an ambulance. my parents lost most of their parental rights; i was a ward of the state and had near zero rights. when i got there, they made me choose if, "if necessary," if i wanted to be wrangled down and forcibly injected with a sedative... or wrangled down and locked in a padded room all by myself (but at least i had a choice, right?). i signed consents and paperwork that i did not fucking understand. then i was told i'd be locked inside for 2 straight weeks (which yes, they followed through with). the psych ward was remote, nothing but barbed fences and trees around us. cant even see the sun through the heavily tinted windows. that was the *start* of the stay. i'm sure you can imagine nothing good came after.
so like. if you walk out of a place like that thinking it was good for you, then i can only imagine how traumatized you are and i hope you heal someday. but if you've never faced the destruction of your autonomy like that and go around being like "oh this is good actually" then shut the ever living fuck up.
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trans-axolotl · 1 year
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antipsychiatry does not mean the same thing as anti medication. i firmly believe in antipsychiatry and part of the reason is because I’ve seen how hard it is for people to get the meds they actually want. the amount of friends I’ve had who’s doctors refuse to prescribe them meds for their ADHD even though they can prove that it’s helping them, the amount of people I know who want to get psych meds but can’t because psychiatrists refuse to prescribe them meds once they learn that they use criminalized drugs, the amount of people I know who can’t get psychs to prescribe them meds for the symptoms that are actually distressing them unless they agree to be on other meds that don’t help them—easy access to psych meds is a right that goes hand in hand with the right to not be medicated against your will. it comes back to autonomy and how psychiatry gets in the way of autonomy in so so many ways. psychiatry operates in a paradigm where the most convenient justification for the psychiatrists view of cure becomes the one they cling to in the moment. Which means that mad/mentally ill/neurodivergent people who have to interact with the psych system are constantly at risk both for being drugged against our will and for being prevented from taking medication.
mad/mentally ill / neurodivergent people deserve authentic, informed consent that allows us to make the choices about what risks we are willing to take, what symptoms are liveable, and what side effects are intolerable. The psychiatric system has a million barriers that get in the way of this type of decision making, and fucks over all mad/mentally ill/ neurodivergent people, no matter our personal relationship to medication.
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starblaster · 1 year
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October 9th is Psychiatric Survivor Pride Day
“The problems of the ex-patient are more subtle but no less pressing. Many ex-patients try to cope with what has happened to them by pretending that the experience never occurred. However, because the experience of having once been a mental patient teaches you to think of yourself as less than human, this is not a satisfactory solution. People feel emotions. They are justifiably happy or sad, angry, calm, elated, and so forth. As patients, however, we were taught to think of ourselves as permanently crippled, and we tend to react to the normal ups and downs of life as affirmations of our secret deformity. In addition, society imposes penalties upon ex-patients which affect you whether or not you acknowledge your identity. For the rest of your life, you will lie on applications for jobs, schools, and driver's licenses, and worry about being found out. Your friends and acquaintances will be divided into two groups, those who know and those who don't, and it will always be necessary to watch what you say to the latter. Ex-patients are full of anger at what has been done to them, but alone and unorganized this anger is not expressed and is often turned inward against oneself. Our anger is the fuel of our movement, and when we come together, acknowledging our identity to ourselves and to each other, we will have made the first and largest step in striking back at our oppressors.”
— "Mental Patients' Liberation: Why?  How?", originally distributed in the early 1970s by Mental Patients'  Resistance of Brooklyn, New York
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[image ID] Seven photographs from antipsychiatry demonstrations. They are described below, in order of appearance: 1. a picture taken at the National Association for Rights Protection & Advocacy (NARPA) Conference on November 10, 2000 in Sacramento, California. Fifty to sixty people stand around a red sign with white text that reads: NO FORCED TREATMENT EVER. 2. a picture taken on October 9th, 1999 in Toronto, Ontario during a march for Psychiatric Survivor Pride Day. Several people march in a line, including one man at the start of the march playing bagpipes. Behind him is a hand-painted sign being held up that reads: Psychiatric Survivor Pride Day. 3. pictures taken at a demonstration outside the California State Capitol building in Sacramento on February 28th, 2000. The signs in each of these pictures say: Psychiatric drugs can kill! 4. a picture taken at a demonstration outside the American Psychiatric Association's 156th annual meeting in San Fransisco, California. The activist's sign says: PSYCHIATRY IS NOT A MEDICAL PROFESSION: IT IS A TOOL OF OPPRESSION. 5. a picture taken at a demonstration outside the Jacob Javits Center, hosting the American Psychiatric Association's 167th annual meeting in New York City on May 4th, 2014. The picture features an activist wearing a printed t-shirt and is cropped so as not to feature the face of the wearer. The t-shirt says: TO HELL WITH THEIR PROFITS, STOP FORCED DRUGGING OF PSYCHIATRIC INMATES! 6 and 7. pictures taken at a demonstration outside the California State Capitol building in Sacramento on February 28th, 2000. The signs in each of these pictures say: Psychiatric drugs can kill!, STOP expansion of forced treatment, Mental illness is NOT a CRIME, and FORCED MENTAL HEALTH TREATMENT IS INHUMANE. 8. a picture taken at an antipsychiatry demonstration on May 2nd, 1998 in Freedom Plaza, Washington D.C. Two people hold a hand-painted banner-sign that says: BET YOUR ASS WE'RE PARANOID. 9. taken at an antipsychiatry demonstration hosted by the Mental Patients Liberation Alliance during Mad Pride Week in 2000, between July 13th and 16th on the lawn in front of the New York State Capitol Building in Albany. [end of ID]
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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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librarycards · 2 years
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Fat people’s eating habits, and what psychologists make of them, were the subject of an article I wrote a year and a half ago, “Uptight and Hungry: The Contradiction in Psychology of Fat,” published in RT: A Journal of Radical Therapy (State and Mind, Vol. 4, No. 8, November, 1975). The point from that article that I want to remind you of is that, with all the dieting we do, fat people are often more half-starved than “overfed.” Brainwashing us into believing we’re gluttons is one way psychiatry and social pressure make fat people crazy. The average fat person does not eat any more than the average slim person. Many fat people eat less than most slim people. We in no way choose to be fat (unless you call a reluctance –– or physical inability –– to endure semi-starvation on lifelong reduced-calorie regimens a “choice” to be fat). Most fat people I have known hate being fat. The notion that we only think we hate being fat, but subconsciously choose it, is pure therapy-bullshit. As long as I believed what psychologists told me, all l could conclude was that I was a very, very sick person who couldn’t even trust her own desires. With such lies, therapy keeps fat people from developing the pride to challenge the authority of our oppressors.
Fat Liberation - A Luxury? An Open Letter to Radical (and Other) Therapists (1977)
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sickness-stricken · 3 months
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Y'all ever think about how fucked up it is that you can be prescribed things like anti-depressants or anti-psychotics that can make your life infinitely worse upon taking them and the person that prescribed it is just like "Oh. Oopsie 🥰 Let's try another one"
Keep in mind, it's perfectly acceptable to mock stoners who say "Nah man, you just gotta try a different strain bro just trust" and write off what they're saying as quackery, but telling therapist bootlickers about the terrible experience you had on a specific medication is 9 times out of 10 met with "Well you should just try a different one :)"
Okay, then what happens? The same healthcare professional that prescribed me the first med is gonna do the exact same process again with another med with almost identical effects because they have it in their head what I'm like and what I need. They want me to keep nodding along to whatever brain fog shit they decide to put me on next because it looks good on their stupid fucking papers while they laugh at their new favourite test rat.
I'm so tired.
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beguines · 1 month
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There was little opposition from inside the profession for the atrocities that were to follow. This is because the psychiatric profession saw these pursuits as furthering their branch of medicine, progressing biomedical ideas on the mind and the "treatment" of mental disordered patients, and—in the language of medicine under the rationale of biomedicine—in the best interests of their patients. Internationally, German psychiatry was well established, highly influential, and often considered to be at the cutting edge of new theoretical and research endeavours.
Nearly, 40 years before the Nazis came to power, in 1895, the psychologist Adolf Jost published his book The Right to Die (Das Recht auf den Tod). In it, he argued that: "[i]n cases of incurable suffering the State can say its interest and the interest of the person concerned demand equally a quick and painless death, but it must be left to the patient to decide between life and death. In the case of mental patients this right reverts to the State, and the diagnosis of incurability is sufficient in itself to justify killing."
Jost's discussion on the state's right to kill the "incurably ill" was not out of place with the growing interest in eugenics across the psy-disciplines in western society. The book was followed in 1920 by the highly influential text, Permission for the Extermination of Worthless Life (Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens). Co-written by the lawyer Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, a psychiatrist, the book argued for the "mercy killing" of those who were seen as an economic and social burden on the state, including "the incurably ill, the mentally ill, the feeble-minded, and deformed children". Hoche gave the example of his own psychiatric institution, which he claimed was filled with people who were "incapable of human feeling and hence could have no sense of the value of life". Permission for the Extermination of Worthless Life is widely credited with introducing the eugenic concept of the "life unworthy of living" and utilised a language that would inspire the National Socialists in due course. Burstow remarks that it was no accident that psychiatry so directly inspired Nazi ideas around genetic purity and racial hygiene; "[v]ested with police powers," she says, "this was the profession whose job it had always been to protect the 'fit' from the 'unfit'. This was the profession who had taken the lead in the early theories of degeneration."
Bruce M.Z. Cohen, Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness
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miralines · 1 year
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Oh by the way fun fact about Marius
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There’s a distinction between psychology and psychiatry
the phrasing here implies that marius wasn’t just doing therapy without a license; he was also (or maybe just) prescribing medication
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craycraybluejay · 5 months
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Can anyone please stop encouraging taking away the autonomy and safety of suicidal and other mentally ill people for FIVE MINUTES. DO NOT report vent posts or call the social services or cops on someone venting to you. If you can't handle it, block the tags, don't interact with that person, or if it's a personal thing try pointing them to someone that does want to support them. DO NOT forcefully institutionalize your "friends" out of "concern." After traumatizing them and contributing to getting their rights stripped of them, their blood will be on YOUR hands. Is this guilt trippy? I don't care. Don't be a narc. Watch out for your friends, filter out things you know you personally aren't equipped to deal with, arm yourself against this pervasive idea that institutions are here to "help." And don't fucking white knight for struggling people without being asked. No one likes that, the victim least of all. You are not some hero. You do not "know best and better than them." If you are pro-non consensual "treatment" and siccing dangerous systems onto already vulnerable people, especially if you've done something like that before, get off my blog and I hope the door hits you on the way out.
I am not joking. The moment you decide to stick your nose into someone's life and fuck shit up by bringing in all that horribly dehumanizing dangerous shit is the moment you have that person's blood on your hands. Even if the experience doesn't kill them-- any trauma they sustain because of what you did is in fact your fault. Any friends or opportunities they lose that makes their life worse is your fault. If they become homeless because you got them institutionalized? Your fault. And I hope that guilt makes it hard to sleep for you forever. I hope that whenever you have the audacity to eat your nice safe home cooked food you remember the kind of food that they could barely keep down because of you. I hope when you settle into your soft, blanketed bed-- you remember how they couldn't have even that because of you. I hope when you go out with your friends to a nice mall or park or bar you remember how you stole that freedom from them. All for the crime of being in pain and vulnerable. I hope that on your deathbed all you can think about is the people who you made sure could not be afforded such a peaceful death surrounded by loved ones because you just HAD TO make YOURSELF feel better and be the white knight no one asked for, never once stopping to actually think what that could do to someone. Fuck people with saviour complexes who ruin lives over their petty feelings. And I am so sorry to anyone who has been betrayed and so thoroughly fucked in this way. It is NOT fair, it is NOT okay, and you didn't deserve that. You deserve the softness, safety, and comfort that is afforded to everyone else. And I am sorry that others believe any different.
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iphigeniacomplex · 4 months
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My name is Camille. I am a born transgendered woman. When I was a child I said that I was a girl but the world called me a "faggot." Under the sky of pain called psychiatry I was locked away for many years and had the requisite tortures: the terror of electroshock, my bones broken, my body drugged and raped. I was not raised as a gender but as a bug of a child to be smashed. I am nobody's victim. My body belongs to me & so does my holy brain. I am the ghost of the untapped conscience of shrinks, a lurking justice, a part of the gathering truth that is rising with a common voice out of the wake of their evil blue fire. Transsexuals are born into the book of labels. We may be genetic but we are not genetically defective sub-human creatures. By the very nature of our difference, the independence of our alien spirituality, and the passion of the power of our will, we are a threat to the ruling delusions of the mental death profession. No one has our permission to debate the validity of our existence, to define our reality, to dismiss our pain, and to name us. We name ourselves. If you could look into the collective genetic memory of your humanity you would find us in the rivers of your dreams, for we were always here, we were here when Earth was a green spirit. We were a natural occurrence in a singing world. In times of absolute horror and destruction I wish for you all the transformational creativity of an utterly beautiful madness, and I offer you the blessing of a holy human freak.
"Why A Transgendered Woman Calls for Psychiatry's Destruction" by Camille Moran, published in the Fall 1993 issue of Dendron.
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unstablemotions · 5 months
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Thinking about how different my life would have been if I had been treated for my adhd at any point and that I might have had graduated with my masters degree and practicing as a licensed psychologist, have a stable social life and a routine keeping my body cleaned, fed and healthy and my home tidy and clean
I will forever mourn the youth I could have had. The life I might never have. I am trying to stay alive and fight to get help, but my body is tired of treading water and the black bottom of the sea is feeling more and more like peace
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neuroticboyfriend · 7 months
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i know us schizos can be relatively lax about the word schizo... but for people who aren't on the schizophrenia spectrum, please remember... it is a slur, or at the very least, a derogatory term. maybe don't say it (unless we're okay with you calling us it), especially not to separate yourselves from us.
context: i just saw someone say "i'm not a fucking schizo" when talking about their misdiagnosis and resulting trauma. this could have been done without using a slur, especially given how much we also face misdiagnosis and medical/psychiatric trauma. we're in this together, not apart.
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selfmedblves · 2 months
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Went to a place expecting care and experienced the worst psychiatric abuse of my life.
I got restrained and tortured. I was also mocked for wondering about ssri side effects. This is why I don't trust psychiatrists. This is why I avoid a lot of mental health services. I shouldn't have to endure more trauma in services that claim to want to help mentally ill people. We need to face that psychiatric abuse is still a thing, as unfortunate as it is.
This is not a mistake though. Psychiatry is an often abusive field as psychiatrists act like codescending, know-it-alls who play with their patient's lives for a paycheck. Patients who question their psychiatrists are often faced with ridicule and gaslit about their concerns.
I deserve to be informed about any medications I might be put on. There is a reason I trust street drugs to solve my problems more than psychiatrists. Drugs make me feel good and I know how they'll make me feel. Psychiatry has only harmed me.
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atundratoadstool · 2 years
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I know the most visceral horror of the day is that a man ate a colony of birds and then vomited up a pile of blood and feathers, but as a person obsessed with the dynamics between Jack and Renfield, I really must draw our attention to the guy casually using chemical restraint; drawing comparisons between probing the human mind and vivisectionist cortical mapping; and making deliberate comparisons between himself, his brain, his 'cause' and the those of a man he deems to be a homicidal maniac.
And also, as I love to point out, having a serious think as to whether or not it's ethical to feed a man kittens for science.
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crimeronan · 7 months
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the mental health clinic i'm going to tomorrow to manage my psych meds has pretty much exclusively dogshit reviews, which is to be expected because it's a medicaid clinic. even in portland you can expect that the american healthcare system is actively trying to kill poor people, nobody hates a poor person like a mental health professional. HOWEVER since i don't actually want to develop a rapport with a therapist or say anything true in my sessions or do anything except get my prescriptions and get out, here are the BEST THINGS i've learned:
providers are so overworked they will never remember your name or your patient history
you will have a different therapist every time
you will be in a different room every time bc no one has an office
the clinic will refuse to schedule you for therapy more than once a month if you "seem functional"
former employees attest that every therapist quits within 4 months because it's such an unrelenting hellscape
former employees attest that all the policies are made by a clinic owner with no background in trauma-informed care who fucking hates high-maintenance patients and wants to get you out the door as fast as possible
former employees and clients alike attest that the only thing anybody here cares about is avoiding on-paper malpractice suits instead of providing patient care
THE ONE SAD THING I'VE LEARNED:
the main psychiatrist is catholic. and hates medication.
THE GOOD NEWS:
i am a heterosexual cisgender white woman with good heterosexual cisgender friends who loves to work hard for money and wants to settle down someday with a husband and have babies and knows SO MUCH about jesus because i love jesus and He's going to heal me :)
THE BAD NEWS:
i am protestant.
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mysidaesm · 4 months
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Dr Pepper is a cool drink to savor and enjoy! But you know what isn't cool? Doctor's involuntarily admitting people into mental health facilities. In this essay I will-
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