#ADHD is a useful way of measuring suffering under capital

[exigencelost]

A Thing I Have Learned after many years of illness is that there are days where the only symptom above baseline is “It’s nearly impossible to consciously direct my attention.” Like, the brain is just full of soft clouds. You can force it to focus it on something but it hurts. And that’s, I don’t know. Allowed? Completely normal? An intrinsic part of being sick and one of the things you need to account for and address with compassion? 

Phase 1 of learning this lesson was “things being mysteriously difficult is a canary in the coal mine and if you push too hard through it you’ll have a real flare-up.” Or in other words, “It’s better to rest as a preventative measure today than as an emergency response to acute suffering tomorrow.”  And that’s true. But Phase 2 of the lesson is: that doesn’t even have to be true. Just being totally out cognitively of it for no apparent reason is by itself part of being sick and deserves to trigger your “oh I’m particularly sick today” self-care apparatus. Whatever that means for you: calling in sick to work, or microwaving dinner instead of cooking it, or skipping class, or asking for an extension on a deadline, or taking an extra long shower, or just moving more gently and slowly through your day than you otherwise would. 

Being persistently spaced out is itself a symptom, and a day with more spaciness than usual counts as a high-symptom day. And if that knocks you out for the day, or even if it allows you to do some things and not others with no apparent pattern that you can discern or control, that is part of your illness. 

We live in a world ideologically dominated by Christianity and capitalism. Under capitalism, “sickness” is a moral failing (because it interferes with productivity), until it crosses some invisible line into “enduring suffering,” which is a Christian virtue. So to be sick but not suffering is the worst of the worst; that’s laziness, that’s deceit, that’s a willful failure to be productive, that’s assuming that you, as a soul inhabiting a body, have a function other than productivity, or that you deserve gentleness or kindness simply because you exist. That’s a sin. 

Which is ridiculous, and worse than ridiculous: it’s cruel. I’m sorry that you learned to think that about yourself. I’m sorry that I learned to think that about myself. I’m sorry for every kid who went to school in the United States and spent their entire childhood needing a signed document affirming that they were experiencing suffering any time they needed to not be in school that day, on pain of randomized punishments up to and including the incarceration of their caregivers. (as a sidenote: fuck you Kamala Harris.)  Incapacitation is not correlated one-to-one with agony. And agony is not a prerequisite for rest. You don’t have to be suffering, or be suffering more than normal, to not do something. You can just not do it. 

I’ve directed this post at chronically ill people because that’s who faces this cruel moralized censure the most, but almost all of this is also true about people who aren’t or don’t identify as chronically ill. Joana Hedva mostly covered it in Sick Woman Theory when she said:

“Sickness” as we speak of it today is a capitalist construct, as is its perceived binary opposite, “wellness.” The “well” person is the person well enough to go to work. The “sick” person is the one who can’t. What is so destructive about conceiving of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way....The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself.

(This post is brought to you by me joining  my Spanish class on Zoom an hour and twenty minutes late after answering work emails about scheduling for that first hour because time zone math was something my brain could think about this afternoon and Mexican poetry wasn’t and I didn’t have a say in the matter even though I don’t technically have a headache right now.)

As a sidenote: the bold and italics are designed to make the post more accessible to ADHD or dyslexic people. If you have a reading-related disability I’m happy to hear feedback on my formatting. 

#remember when this was a chronic illness blog #you probably don't it was before i went viral #chronic illness #sick #sick woman theory #incarceration mention #christianity mention #capitalism #ableism #long post #should i have a tag for like #treatises

[cuntess-carmilla]

Update: I stopped taking psychiatric medication because they turned out to have only ever been of “help” because I have POTS/dysautonomia and one made my blood pressure rise (Wellbutrin) while the other kept it from going up too high (Lamotrigine).

Now that I’m taking meds that are for what I ACTUALLY do have (POTS/dysautonomia) not only do I not need the psychiatric meds, but they were throwing off everything else. I hate psychiatry so much. Can’t believe I turned out to be one of those people who had their physical illness mistreated as You’re Crazy for years haha. :) With that out of the way...

Some Many of my Opinions™ on psychiatry, as a psychiatrized person myself who does take medication, but hates the institutions of psychiatry and psychology, and thinks a large chunk of it is white pseudo-science:

A good amount of the issues that the psychiatric institution addresses ARE absolutely real and, as a society, people who’re afflicted by them should by all means receive help and support so they can live happier lives. I experience many of them and take medication to help myself, I obviously don’t think the difficult experiences people seek help for are made up.

At the same time, psychiatry and psychology as disciplines ARE made up (like every other discipline), making them not infallible or objective, AND they were built on eugenics, patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalist exploitation.

Those very real issues addressed by psychology/psychiatry aren’t actual literal pathologies. They don’t need to be literal tangible sicknesses in order to matter or be deserving of help and compassion. Your literal brain as a bodily organ is not physically “ill”, at least in most cases. It doesn’t need to be for your problems associated with an “ill mind” to be real and to matter. Remember, these disciplines were created at a time in history in which (white, male) doctors and theorists were obsessed with turning everything into a material, scientifically tangible subject that could be objectively measured with numbers and shit, hopefully medicalized or otherwise turned into “hard science”. That’s where ethnography came from. It’s called positivism, which is extremely dehumanizing, white supremacist and capitalist.

Psychology should be largely considered as much more of a metaphysical or philosophical discipline than as objective science, which is how most people perceive it to be. It’s mostly pure theory about emotions, thoughts, cognition, relationships and subjective experiences + perceptions -- which isn’t necessarily a bad thing on itself. It not being hard science doesn’t immediately delegitimize it. Get rid of the white capitalist idea that only (western, white) science and “objectivity” are real or of value. Actually, holding psychology to the standards of hard science turns it into pseudo-science, so... Yeah. I genuinely think we’d get so much further As A Society™ regarding psychology's potential to aid people who’re suffering if we treated it as more of a metaphysical or philosophical discipline than as some objective scientific truth.

Psychiatrists often are super ignorant of the actual way the medications they prescribe work or affect patients lmao. I had that almost ruin a whole semester at college because a shrink prescribed me meds that in combination she should’ve known would fuck me up. Not that much is known about how the human brain truly works compared to other human organs, you can’t expect psychiatric meds to be well tried and true. The research on psychiatric pharmacy is very lacking + biased in favor of pathologizing and controlling psychiatrized people, besides attempting to make the most profit under capitalism like any other capitalist industry, so of course they’re gonna prescribe you shit. Plus, like doctors of every other field, many psychiatrists arrogantly disregard the experiences, requests, questions and ideas of their patients, who’re the ones taking those meds.

Psychologists/therapists, just like psychiatrists, also disregard the experiences, requests, questions and ideas of their patients.

There’s such a strong element of power imbalance in how psychiatry and psychology function. The more a patient knows formal information about anything related to psychology/psychiatry, the more the shrink can get upset, distrustful and dismissive of them, saying they’re faking it, or telling them “not to do their jobs” when they so often do said jobs like shit anyway lmao no matter how thorough the research and understanding of the patient is.

Psychological and psychiatric diagnoses are just as made up as any other human construct (such as language, race, gender, etc). They’re not tangible realities as if shrinks had ran into a previously unknown objective fact of nature. In the realm of psychology, someone takes a bunch of traits and behaviors that by their observation they consider to be interconnected with one another, put them in the same bag, stick a label to said bag, and ask other psychologists if they agree with the bag being a thing. These considerations are heavily influenced by sociocultural bias. You can’t tell me it isn’t true that they’re made up and very subjective when “diagnoses” such as drapetomania, hysteria, homosexuality, gender identity disorder, etc, have been seriously considered at least by part of the psychiatric establishment of their times as legitimate mental disorders. Hell, some still consider being gay or trans to be mental disorders. Don’t get me started on "Oppositional Defiant Disorder”, that shit’s just evil.

A lot of the ideas spread by the psychiatric-psychological institution are legit pseudo-science that researches try time and time again to prove and end up coming with nothing, or they end up tweaking their own research or conclusions to maintain the established consensus that just so turns out to be very convenient to the people who make and sell psychiatric meds.

Many of the traits, emotions, thoughts, perceptions and behaviors that are pathologized by psychiatry and psychology aren’t inherently harmful. If they don’t make the patient or others suffer by their very nature (as opposed to like, homophobic parents “suffering” because their child is gay or a gay person suffering because of homophobia) then there’s no need to alter them. “Correcting” them is a measure of social control that crushes individuality and only attempts to mold people into obedient ~productive~ servants of capitalism. Much of psychiatric medical treatment (not just the diagnoses and therapies themselves) focuses on turning the patient into less of a social “burden”, than on their actual happiness. That’s why you have ADHD and autistic kids being given meds that turn them into zombies and that's been considered a good thing for DECADES. Like, why does the stimming of an autistic person or an “unusual” attachment to stuffed animals as an autistic adult have to be corrected? WHOMST does that harm? Nobody! But it makes allistics uncomfortable because allistics are fucking stupid and can’t mind their God damned business to save their lives like normal people do.

Even non-pharmaceutical treatments for psychiatrized conditions are or can be turned into measures of social control. 

Maybe CBT wasn’t meant to be a tool to control people and shit, but it can be misused as such SO easily! It can go from being therapy to help individuals process inner pain and redirect harmful behaviors in positive ways, to being turned into training someone to react, feel and process abuse and oppression in ways that are convenient to the status quo. 

Don’t get me fucking started on ABA as an inherently oppressive, abusive “treatment” for a psychiatrized condition that does nothing to actually better the lives of autistic people, instead punishing autistic traits, teaching autistic people to painfully repress said traits and ignore their needs, and seeking to appease allistics by prioritizing their convenience and subjective comfort.

Behaviors, emotions, perceptions or traits that on a man or white person would be considered a non-issue or given much more compassionate/less stigmatized diagnoses, are pathologized or given much more stigmatized diagnoses when it comes to female or racialized patients, which reaffirms psychiatry and psychology as subjective tools of social control.

While many of the traits, emotions, perceptions and behaviors of what are considered personality disorders are painful, harmful and real (and thus should be helped, with consent, not hammered down), literal personalities aren’t “ill”. They’re personalities. Pathologizing or medicalizing a fucking personality on itself is ridiculous. It is possible to address those problematic traits/behaviors/etc without saying that a fucking personality is “ill”. So much for “you’re not your disorder”.

What shrinks will deem as hallucinations or delusions can be subjective, and it definitely can be deemed as such out of white-centric cultural bias. Plenty of non-white cultures have considered different perceptions of reality as valid and worthy of respect for centuries, at times related to their sense of spirituality. Not to mention how psychiatry has deemed the real anxieties of oppressed people that they’re being followed, spied on, plotted against and all that, as hallucinations or delusions in order to discredit them.

Many patients are given medication to try to alleviate traits/behaviors/emotions that come from circumstance (poverty, ongoing abuse, trauma, oppression...) instead of addressing the root problems. While I 100% understand using medication as a palliative measure because, bitch, you can’t always fix those problems and you still have a life to live (the same way I take clotiazepam when the insensitivity of the allistics around me causes me sensory overload), this puts the burden of the person’s situation on their own body, as if their body was the essential source of a suffering that comes from outside forces they’re not responsible or in control of. This should ideally be addressed through material change in realities that can be individual (removing the person from an abusive situation, giving economic aid, giving proper treatment to an untreated chronic illness) or social (abolishing white supremacy, the patriarchy, capitalism, etc).

So many times when palliative medical treatments for suffering that comes from circumstances don’t work (BECAUSE THE PATIENT IS STILL TRAPPED IN SAID CIRCUMSTANCES, HELLO?) it’s blamed on a supposed defect of the patient’s body/brain rather than, like... You can give me as many anti-depressants as you want but I’m still gonna be miserable if I’m being abused or suffering from unending physical chronic pain lol. And then, instead of at least having the decency of recognizing the real source of the problem if your shrink can’t realistically fix it, they keep trying more and more different meds on you like you’re a fucking lab rat, keeping on blaming a made up defect you were “born” with. Imagine what that does to a person’s self-image! At least when I loathe my body for the chronic pain, chronic fatigue and more that my chronic illnesses give me, it IS actually true that it’s my body that has a defect that can’t be cured. Why convince a person in suffering due to anything, but especially when it’s due to outside conditions out of their control and your job is fucking supposed to be to help them be happier, that their pain refuses to respond to treatment because their BRAIN is so terribly defective? I don’t wish the hatred I hold for my objectively shitty body on anyone, and causing that to someone when it’s not even true...? Incredible.

Lots of genuine difficulties associated with psychiatric diagnoses are much better helped through accessibility and material considerations, or at least through teaching the patient pragmatic methods to better deal with those, than through pills. But guess what solution shrinks usually give you. Hint: it’s easier for them and they can charge you for it monthly.

Society™ medicalized emotions, bro... WE MEDICALIZED FEELINGS!!! WHAT THE FUCK!!

#antipsych