#psychiatric abuse mention

[yardsards]

tired of everyone on here reducing icepick joe down to haha funny stabby man

like i DO like the jokes and memes, don't get me wrong, but like

there's SO MUCH to his character and he really does tie into goncharov's main themes

like. we're told early on the he was put into a mental institution as a young man due to his breakdown and inconsolable grief at losing his older brother giorno (who was his only living family and basically a father figure to him!)

wherein he was mistreated and was HEAVILY IMPLIED to be scheduled for a lobotomy before he escaped. (in fact, some interpretations say he actually received and survived the lobotomy, citing his manner of speaking and his lack of impulse control. but that's a whole separate discussion because i can honestly see both sides)

and then he turns to a life of crime because that's basically the only option he had left, after being deprived of so many opportunities in his youth (and the fear of being caught and involuntarily institutionalized again)

and him eventually leaning into the role of "violent madman" that the world thrust onto him for showing signs of mental illness in a way that was nonviolent, but was loud and inconvenient and impossible for those around him to simply push away.

and him taking his rage out at the same world that not only killed his brother but forced him to undergo years of psychiatric abuse and basically dehumanization

(like seriously, how do SO MANY people miss the connection between him using an icepick as a weapon and the concept of an ICEPICK lobotomy)

which. yknow. ties heavily into the film's theme of people being pushed to society's margins and forced into a life of crime, instead of given the help they desperately needed

and then like.

his fucking death scene. he tries to put a stop to the cycle of senseless violence, taking the fall for andrey, telling michailov that *he* was the one who killed luciana

him kneeling down and allowing michailov to bash him through the skull with his very own icepick. it's more lobotomy symbolism; dying from the very thing he spent his whole life running from. further driving home the film's themes of repeating cycles and futility

and then, to drive it all home, that sacrifice didn't even end up stopping the cycle of violence! because andrey viewed joe as basically an older brother (mirroring joe and giorno) and tried to get revenge on michailov for killing joe.

like. come on.

#eliot posts #goncharov #ice pick joe #valery michailov #andrey daddano #goncharov meta #psychiatric abuse mention #unreality #death mention #violence mention #ableism mention #involuntary institutionalization tw #lobotomy

[iphigeniacomplex]

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.

#it speaks! #linked it in the previous post but i wanted to have the full text on my blog. screenshots of it have been posted on tumblr before -> #<- but i just wanted the text #paths outside this garden #hysterical studies #okay getting into the maintag & trigger shit now: #trans history #camille moran #antipsych #psychiatric survivors movement #mad pride #for triggers im not doing 'tw' im just doing the words lmk if that is not effective & lmk if i ought to trigger tag anything else. -> #transmisogyny #rape mention #child abuse #ableism #psychiatric abuse

[shattered-yet-whole]

WIP - I was gonna write an AU psych ward fanfic but then i just started writing my psych ward trauma. Antipsych. This happened a while ago, I'm okay now (and I'm not grateful it happened).

tw - suicidal ideation, descriptions of suicide rehearsal, psychiatric abuse, trauma

--------

“Why are you here?”

I look at the psychiatrist’s tie blankly. He’s dressed in a suit, a clipboard and pen in hand. I haven’t even gotten my clothes back, I have to wear a hospital gown and pants four sizes too large, and am not allowed footwear other than grippy socks. The only thing I have left that's mine is my chipped glittery nail polish. I've picked it halfway off over the past day despite desperately trying not to. But this guy is walking around in shiny Oxfords and a suit.

I don’t look at his face. I know he’s looking at me, expecting an answer. Something I’m learning here is that they wait for you to speak. Even if you take a long time. They don’t try to speak for you. Sometimes I wish they would. It would be easier to say what they wanted to hear if they did. Instead I have to guess. I suppose I’m used to doing that, but it’s a lot scarier. “Don’t you know?” I say.

“Yes. But I want to hear it from you.”

Great. I have to tell him in my own words. It’s like a school assignment, but the grade is how long I’m going to be locked up.

I had been in the ER for 13 hours before I came in, and then I stayed up 2 more hours getting here. I wasn’t allowed my phone until I’d been there for 6 hours. No calling my friends. No telling anyone where I was. No one to talk to. Just me and the book I brought, the book I couldn’t focus on because I’d just gone to the counselor’s office because I was having a hard time and now I was at the ER for a psych eval. The counselor who sent me to the ER had said he thought I would just get connected to resources in the community. He said he didn’t think I would be sent to a psych ward.

I’d done a lot of staring at the ceiling to just get through to the eval part, 4 hours in. 2 hours after, when I finally learned I was recommended inpatient, the social worker told me even if I hate it now, I will be grateful later. Once I feel better, I will approve of the decision to involuntarily commit me. My current wishes tossed aside for a theoretical future me who is glad I never a choice. If they’re right, I should kill myself now so I never become such a monster. All alone, with a life shattering brick dropped on my head, I finally cried.

After the eval, I’d begged the nurse for my phone so I could tell my friends where I was. So I could tell my roommate why I still hadn’t come back at 9pm when we usually saw each other by five. My phone was nearly dead when I got it. I called my friends. I called my parents. My friends stayed with me the rest of the 7 hours I was there. They hugged me and cried with me until I got taken away in an ambulance at 3am. I wondered how much a 45 minute ambulance ride cost. I wondered if it mattered.

What a fuck-up I must have seemed. I’d heard of some college kids going to psych wards before. I knew someone who had called a suicide hotline at 4am and got the cops called to take them in. I hadn’t thought it would happen to me.

It’s nice, in a way. To know how bad I’m doing. I’m bad enough that I need to be locked up. For my own safety. I’m so crazy that I can’t be trusted to make my own decisions. I hadn’t known I was that bad until now. I still don’t believe it. It’s a mistake. But it’s nice they think I’m struggling.

He’s looking at me again. I don’t remember what he asked. “Can you repeat the question?” I ask.

“Sure. Why are you here?” he says again.

Right, that was what it was. I smile. I smile when I’m nervous. “Well, I… I…” Why is he making me say this. He knows what I did. I didn’t even try to kill myself. It’s not that bad. “Well, I was… I was… Sometimes I get into these moods. A lot of times I’m normal and fine. But sometimes I just… sometimes I just want to die. I used to try not to think about how I could do that or anything.” I sigh. I had tried so hard to not think about methods. I must have known I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from doing shit like this eventually. “Because I know this sort of thing would happen. But this time… this time I did. I looked up bridges I could theoretically jump from. But that seems like it would suck.”

I laugh. It’s a nervous laugh. It’s a ‘isn’t it funny that jumping from a bridge to kill yourself would suck?’ joke. One of the classics. He’s not laughing.

“Anyway, I was just feeling… I don’t know. I felt useless. I just keep thinking about dying and killing myself. It’s stupid. And I—I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I don’t know if people think I was trying to kill myself and that’s why I’m here. But I wanted to do something. To—I don’t know. To see what’s even possible. So I—so I—so I—”

This is the part I always get stuck on describing. I don’t know how to put what I was feeling into words. I don’t know how to describe what I was doing. I don’t know why I was doing it. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But then again, it had seemed like a good idea to go to the counselor’s office at the time.

“I took—I took a belt. Right? And I hooked the metal buckle part over the door knob—it’s one of those long ones. And I kind of—I kind of—I don’t know. I kind of wrapped it around my neck once and held it with my other hand. So that if I passed out I would be fine. And then I sort of… pulled down. To see if that would… do anything. I did that a few times, and then I was scared that I did it. And I told the counselor the next day.”

It hadn’t been empty blackness like I’d hoped for. It had been a pulsing pressure in my head. I did it a couple times, to see if I could get the empty blackness. Then I stopped. Because it had seemed like such a good fucking idea before I did it, but then I realized I’d done something very worrying and should probably be in therapy. Even if the voice that had started the whole thing was telling me to do it again. It wasn’t real before I’d done it, but once I’d done it, it was too real to ignore.

He’s writing on the clipboard. I have a sinking feeling I’m not getting a good grade. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” I repeat.

“I know,” he says. He’s still writing. I wish I knew what it was.

It’s just me and him in my room. He woke me up when he came in. I went to sleep after breakfast. When I was admitted at 5am last night, one of the techs told me I should try to be awake during the day and asleep at night. Go to groups. Talk to people. It would help me get out sooner. But I’d already been up for 20 hours and it was 5am. So I was going to sleep and they were just going to have to live with that. Apparently you can’t skip the psychiatrist appointments, though.

“What’s got you so suicidal?” he asks.

The world. Everything. And yet, nothing. My life is great. “What do you mean?” I say.

“What do you think about that makes you want to kill yourself?” he elaborates.

“I… I don’t know,” I say. “The… the environment, I guess. Global warming. Kinda sucks to feel like the future is ruined. And the species and the ice sheets. Rising fascism.” I remember a tumblr post where a therapist talked about her patients talking more about those sorts of things making them depressed. That made it seem like an okay enough reason to give to a psychiatrist. And it’s not like that isn’t a big fucking bummer making me not want to be alive.

He makes more notes. “Anything else?” We both seem know that’s not enough on its own to make me constantly thinking about suicide.

I shrug. I’m just so stupid and worthless doesn’t feel like a cogent enough explanation. And I can’t phrase it like that. That would be stupid. “Feelings of… worthlessness, and um.” I search for something in my head. It’s fuzzy. There’s nothing there. I always remember everything so well when I’m crying in bed thinking about how much I want to kill myself. I could write essays on the subject in those moments. Instead I just rehash them to myself, over and over. But I can’t remember any of it now. “I dunno. I can’t remember unless I’m spiraling. A lot of anxiety. Around… people. Social anxiety.” I nod.

Sometimes I get attacked by my social anxiety, memories from years ago—three years, five years, a decade—sending jolts through me as I remember them. I remember what I should never do again. What I’ve learned. Lessons I can never forget, even when I can’t remember what taught them. I usually throw myself onto my bed and writhe in the agony of memories, clinging to ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I want to die’ like I'm falling in an abyss and they're the only rope up. I can never remember what the memories are until they’ve started their assault. I don’t know how to describe that, though.

I’m not being as amicable to him as I usually would be. I haven’t been amicable since they recommended me for inpatient at the ER. Something broke in me then. I’d felt it snap, a crack of terror, and then—nothing. I’m more stone-faced now. Quiet.

I can be friendly when I need to be. I can be talkative and responsive and say all the right words and have the appropriate “mmhmm”s and “oh no”s and “yeah”s. I can laugh in the right places, when it’s polite to laugh at a joke I don’t think is funny. I can make eye contact and break eye contact at what I assume are appropriate moments. I never know if I’m doing it right, though. I poured over a book about body language in high school, trying to learn how the fuck to do it. It said that the exact percentage varied, but around 40% eye contact 60% not eye contact. I tried to get the proportions right for years. Every conversation. Look at their eyes a few seconds, look away a few more seconds. Look eyes, look away. I used to look between their eyebrows, because the eyes were too much. But I read somewhere that some people can tell and they think it’s weird. So eyes it was.

I’m dead now, though. I’m already in a psych ward. They know I’m crazy. What’s the point in trying to appear like I can converse like a human. I don’t want to have to do it. So I don’t. I stare soullessly past people when they talk to me. I examine their clothes. I look at their hair. I don’t smile when they talk to me. I don’t laugh at their jokes. They ask me how I am and I don’t ask them back.

He seems to conclude I’ve finished explaining. “Well—okay, are you voluntary?” He leafs through his papers. “Yes, voluntary. Let’s see…” He leafs through them again.

Voluntary patient. What a laugh. When I came in, I was involuntary. During intake, they gave me some forms and said if I sign them I’d be a voluntary patient. I asked if anything would change. No, they said, it was a distinction with no difference. A voluntary patient still can’t leave until the psychiatrist says they can. But I would be seen as complying with the recommended treatment. It would be beneficial to be seen as complying with the recommended treatment. So I signed. But I never mistook that little black-and-white print Voluntary for consent, even if everyone else did.

#antipsychiatry #anti psych #creative nonfiction #personal narrative #psychiatric hospital #psychiatric abuse #suicidal ideation #suicide tw #trauma #complex ptsd #work in progress #dissociation #depression #anxiety #climate change mention #psych survivor #psych wards #institutionalization

[oliveroctavius]

ALSO on the topic of domestic abuse, canonicity, and popular male characters I was thinking recently about probably the most viscerally uncomfortable to me personally comics sequence ever, More Bad News from ASM 369

This is going under the cut because it's just kind of omnidirectional pondering of something that makes me upset and therefore not really Comics Criticism but my gut feeling on JMD is that while he cranks up everything very high he's ultimately very like. centrist.

The sequence rides on the tension of justifying psychiatric restraint (the razor blade of fear being is Harry about to hurt Liz the entire time) and you have characters express pretty blunt opinions on both sides of the issue. the guys in full body armor with huge future laser guns are on the side of "locking him up and throwing away the key" and Liz on the side of "this is a horrible way to treat a person, what the fuck" which is a position she holds pretty much through everything, repeating that Harry has never harmed her and isn't going to... and which seems to be intended to make her look more delusional than he is.

like the dialogue goes all in on "I am not going to hurt you"/"I am not afraid of being hurt"/"I am in a really uncomfortable situation"/"I want to get you out of this situation" while tone and staging signal the exact opposite. is this a veiled threat? Liz doesn't take it as one but the art signals it as one.

hang on in another panel they misspelled "Osborn" with an E on his jumpsuit. anyways.

after what Liz sees as a normal conversation (except for the audience-aimed cues that Harry is dangerous) he breaks out of the stupid metal straitjacket and starts going full alpha male rhetoric while like... grabbing Liz and it's unclear what's going on but it's definitely drawn in a way to evoke strangling. there are a lot of shirt collar and face grabs as a violation of boundaries in Sal Buscema's art for JMD around here and they kind of have this air of "you aren't listening to me, I am forcing you to face me so you listen" but the sheer aggression of the one here seems so intentionally evocative of harm that it makes me wonder what the script said in any of these.

like, when included between in this sequence the last panel becomes much more upsetting too. as much as an in-character reading supports taking the boundary violation as "look at me" it's equally easy to read as intending harm. Harry is after all in a situation where he feels powerless and there's only one person who he can exert power over (physically) and it's Liz. this characterization is uncomfortable but that doesn't make it noncanon; a lot of the story already hinges on the fact that Norman's motivations were "love" but the output was still abuse.

at the same time the thing that feels so Gross to me is the voyeurism of the danger Harry supposedly poses as a "crazy person"—literally, this interaction is being watched by people with the power and stated motivation to find an excuse to harm him. and they're getting fuckin horror movie closeups of this sensationalist comic book staging through their security cameras, somehow.

so Harry's only advocate is the person he's also a threat to, who is either too naiive or stubborn to understand the danger. I'm guessing the language here comes a lot from the idea that like, the abused stick with their abusers out of misguided obligation, but I feel like that applies a little differently in a situation where people are just waiting for him to so much as get his hands free so they can burst in and shoot him with stun guns. Which is what happens.

and they drag liz away too for how upset she is at witnessing this. "he loves me! he loves me!" "sure, whatever you say." I feel so bad for Liz on every level and especially when this comes up later when MJ and Peter are trying to get her to call the police on Harry and she refuses because like have you ever had a family member acting very scary and unpredictable but you just got them out of a really really bad situation and that's the option people are suggesting again. I suppose taking everything here as face value canon, yeah actually, you would have a feeling of obligation to someone who hurt you if you knew that bringing charges against them could for real get them killed and that absolutely also traps people in bad situations! though much less often.

anyways it ends with him bodily strapped down to a bed again with multiple security cameras pointing at him. fuckin insane intense sequence. I really hate how reading it makes me feel but it's pretty telling of like the entire JMD goblin II arc

#/ domestic abuse #< in more graphic detail than previous mentions complete with comic panels #/ psychiatric abuse #liz allan #harry osborn #JMD

[ava-does-dumbassery]

What are your thoughts on the new Renfield x Dracula rendition 2023? I for one was so enthralled that I want to start reading the book. I have Dracula on my shelf, is that all there is to it?

I have not seen Renfield 2023 so I don’t think I’m really qualified to give an opinion on it. From what I have seen/heard of it though, it seems like their Renfield is a lot more based on Renfield from the 1931 movie, where he was played by Dwight Frye than he is on original book Renfield. The most obvious and superficial difference would probably be that 2023 Renfield is a pretty young man, like Dwight Frye Renfield, while OG book Renfield is 59 year old man. Renfield having a lot more of an obvious relationship with Dracula and acting directly as an assistant to him is also something that I think comes more from the 1931 movie. Renfield is the best character in the original book (fight me /light-hearted) but doesn’t show up a lot of in it, so if you’re reading it just for the relationship between him and Dracula you’ll probably get pretty bored. Renfield in the original book is also a character who has a lot of things that are hinted at or implied about him, but most of them are never really explained. That does make him a very fun character to speculate on or make headcanons about, but since the book has several parts where the characters will just take a moment to sit down and straight up explain what all the vampire lore that’s been implied so far is, it does feel like a cop out that none of the things that were hinted about Renfield are ever addressed afterwards.

Also, since Renfield 2023 is a horror comedy about a guy overcoming his abuser, I should probably bring this up about the original book if you want to read it, but it’s kind of a hard thing for me to know how to explain, so sorry if anything I say is unclear: Uh, basically, by writing a mentally ill character who he did not see any need to treat with respect and viewed as subhuman, deeply bigoted author Bram Stoker managed to stumble ass backwards into writing the most realistic and honest portrayal of psychiatric abuse that I’ll probably ever be able to find in any piece of media ever?

In the original book, Renfield basically has psychosis (delusions/hallucinations) and is being held in an asylum and abused by a doctor who is one of the most central main characters characters of the novel. Bram Stoker didn’t feel any obligation to make Renfield appealing or relatable to the contemporary ableist Victorian audience, and in most of his scenes it feels like we’re intended to him find his mental illness either creepy or funny. Sometimes it also feels like we’re supposed to find him pitiable, but it’s mainly either creepy or funny. However, Bram Stoker, seemingly by complete accident, managed to make Renfield behave in ways that are very realistic to how someone going through that abuse would actually act. It’s hard to really explain, it feels like Stoker was envisioning Renfield as this ableist caricature of mental illness, but then didn’t think through the implications of a lot of the stuff he wrote, and unintentionally made him complex and incredibly realistic. Reading about OG book Renfield switching between doing things that are really gross or embarrassing because he’s in a state where he has very little grasp on reality or control over himself, to trying to maintain his dignity in his more lucid states only for his abuser to force him back into humiliating himself, to doing gross, humiliating, or bad things intentionally because it’s the only way to feel like he has any power in or any way to potentially escape a situation where someone who sees him as subhuman has complete control over him, and the way his story ends is… the most raw and painfully honest depiction of what it feels like to be in that situation that I will probably ever be able to find anywhere. And it was made by an author who was definitely not aware that he was doing that, in a story that doesn’t even really acknowledge it.

Also, in my opinion, Renfield has a lot of moments that are actually funny and not just in a “mocking someone for displaying mental illness” way. 95% of the characters in Dracula are restrained, polite Victorians who never complain about anything ever and refuse to communicate properly because of it. But Renfield is just so blunt, and rude, and openly sarcastic whenever he has the chance to be, and the people he is talking to always deserve it, which is amazing.

So, yeah, OG book Renfield is one of my favourite characters of all time, he’s the best character in the original book , he manages to be both very fun and iconic while also being deeply tragic at the same time, which is great, but if what I’ve incoherently rambled about in this post doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, the 1931 movie is probably a better bet for you.

#Renfield #rm renfield #dracula #dracula novel #ava has thoughts #tw psychiatric abuse mention #My favourite dracula scene is and will always be the one where Mina goes with Seward to talk to Renfield #And because he has a delicate lady™ with him‚ Seward can’t do anything that bad to Renfield at that moment because it might upset her #And Renfield is so nice and respectful to Mina and then the moment Seward speaks Renfield is like ‘shut up you idiot’ #‘Mrs Harker did you know that the beloved doctor is a dumbass and everything he says is terrible?’

[tacticalhimbo]

" Lord help me. Somebody please help me. This is too much for me. I'm so afraid; please let me escape this place. I just want to go home! I'll do whatever you want, just take me away from here—I swear it! "

Had the worst thought as I was transcribing this audio so I'm sharing it to torture y'all with it:

I'll save the explanation of the "reality versus perception" concept for another post but like. Hinging off of that, if the things John sees aren't entirely real (again, I have my own perception of why this is so definitely feel free to ask)... and given that it's very much implied that John was institutionalized a second time (re: the level when the floating face transports him to a psych ward)...

Imagine that this isn't being said to God, but like. Just in general. John feeling so trapped by his conscience that he's just begging to get out. Whether that's out of Yale Psychiatric or the isolation brought on by his conscience... It goes either way.

#txt #audio files #faith the unholy trinity #faith airdorf #faith chapter 3 #john ward #meta analysis #tw psychiatric abuse #<- brief mentions but just to be safe! #i have so many thoughts on the whole thing and i know it's absolutely not the true intended effect but the subtle notes... #they have me thinking!!!

[craycraybluejay]

"Here are some resources that can help!"

*is shown a direct line to an abusive institution*

*another direct line to an abusive institution*

*whooop another one!*

*financial help that is highly conditional and has an infinite waitlist*

*thing that might actually be kind of helpful but has not been active for over a decade*

*another abusive institution*

*really complicated court-related shit that Will Not Work*

*traumaville electric boogaloo*

*some site that tells you to "just be positive"*

*a free psychologist who will refer you to an institution at the first chance they get*

*a "spiritual medium" that has really toxic and messed up beliefs plastered all over their walls*

Sorry. Unhelpful. Bye.

P.s: kys for even suggesting some of those

#resources #tw: sui mention #ignorance #institutional abuse #psychiatric abuse #toxic positivity #court system #escaping abuse #waitlist #red tape #personal #vent

[bfpnola]

Just finished this 37-page paper titled Separate and Unequal: The Legacy of Racially Segregated Psychiatric Hospitals by Vanessa Jackson, LCSW. Not only was the language fairly plain so it was easy to read through, but it was extremely well-thought-out and detailed, even with a section at the end for recommendations for next steps towards healing. Really glad to have read this!

#reaux speaks #resources #history #bipoc #black lives matter #mad liberation #sanism #ableism #disability justice #segregation #civil rights #tw abuse #tw psychiatric abuse #tw death mention #tw medical abuse

[yardsards]

ice pick joe from goncharov and renfield fron dracula are like. basically the same character archetype

by which i mean the writers are dancing on the line between "ableist caricature" and "sympathetic victim of psychiatric abuse" and most people interpret them as simple villains (ignoring their final acts of heroism!!!) for some reason. and the tumblrinas(/gn) are the only ones who REALLY understand them and give them the appreciation they deserve

#eliot posts #drac #goncharov #renfield #ice pick joe #psychiatric abuse mention #unreality

[cosmic-latt3]

probably going back to E///D inpatient, potentially as early as before Xmas. So that's fucking fun. Last time I was there they wouldn't let me outside for over a month because of my ""noncompliance"". I might be in SEED protocol this time (even though I don't meet the definition? I'm almost 30 but I've only had it 4 yrs. IDK why they said that so 🤞) so hopefully they'll be willing to give the barest accommodations to my other disabilities. Last time I had to advocate for myself to be able to... cross my legs at meals. Don't get me wrong I'm grateful I have access to one of the less bad programs in the country and probably the only one with mandatory masks 🎉 and hope to use this time to work on certain projects with fewer electronic distractions, and but... yea

#survivingpsych #antipsychiatry #psychiatric abuse #sorry i had to censor that it sometimes attracts the p///ro blogs just to say it #hence part of the reason i rarely talk about it on tumblr #I also just fear TMI or oversharing #I dont want to make anyone uncomfortable #so I just hide my whole life online #bc mental health shit #trauma shit #and psychiatry shit #is basically my whole life and has been since I was a kid #I'm tired of it so I'm just gonna be fucking honest going forward #I mentioned it on 2 different discord servers I'm in

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

usually when i write up posts about the talking animal stuff in sdmi, i try to tag the ones that are more coherent than venty.

sometimes though i am struck by just, oh my god the asylum thing is so so so awful, whose fucking idea was that. pretty much everything to do with the talking animal worldbuilding manages to combine some incredible nastiness re: both racism and ableism, and the asylum (which is made specifically to incarcerate them indefinitely--in practice, for the rest of their lives--instead of the set sentence they'd get in prison) is already horrifying both in-narrative and out.

then you realize that the deal with the talking animals is just recreating the historical dynamic of physically disabled people being kept as literal pets, but dressed up in the veneer of Cutesy Hanna-Barbera Animal Mascots, and it uh. jesus fucking christ. what the fuck lmao

#sdmi #scooby doo: mystery incorporated #professor pericles #because he is Relevant here lmao #this part of the show always bothered me *deeply* and i'm like; glad to have the knowledge and life experience to unpack it finally #but also that same knowledge and life experience means that now the full weight of this stuff hits home and [internal screaming] #SDMItag #ableism cw #psychiatric abuse cw #institutionalization cw #racism mention cw #the crit files #sdmicrit tag

[xxlovelynovaxx]

When you say that me accepting and even feeding my delusions that cause me no distress or dysfunction is "unhealthy" and "self-harm" (despite it not harming me and acceptance of them actually helping me heal from a lot of internalized hatred), and that I need to be (often forcibly) medicated and put in therapy*, what you're really saying is:

"I am uncomfortable with people being visibly and happily delusional. I think that gives me the right to remove people's autonomy and medically abuse them in order to make them more 'normal' and force a homogenous nondelusional experience on everyone. I think that not only are delusions an inherently disordered experience but that medical suppression is the only valid treatment even for distressing ones. I think that eradicating delusional people is okay."

And yes, this is eradication, full stop. It is not directly killing us (though for many of us, both the forced medical "treatment" and the rhetoric that it's not okay to be happy about being delusional DOES indirectly kill us), but it is eradication in the same way that saying "I don't want trans people to be killed, I just want them to not to transition" is. "Just be happy as a 'normal' (cis/nondelusional) person".

While there are happy non-transitioning trans people - just as there are delusional people happy to seek traditional medical treatment - it should be each individual's CHOICE and neither choice should be talked about as lesser or wrong. Though one is active (transition) and the other is passive (non-medicating/going to therapy), forcing medical treatment on someone is just as much a violation of autonomy as denying it.

It is also functionally no different from ABA being applied to autistic people, particularly ones who can't or don't mask/pass for neurotypical.

And in all cases, the people that say these things claim it's "for your own good" and that we are "incapable of making these decisions". That's massively condescending, and more importantly, infantilization. Y'know, the classic tool of bigots?

Note: I am saying the above AS AN AUTISTIC TRANS PERSON.

It is forced compliance to a standard of neurotypicality - in this case, nonpsychosis/nondelusionality. It is also an example of healthism - the conflation of health with morality and, in many cases, subsequent labeling of things that are neutral or positive health-wise as unhealthy to discourage them. (Even unhealthy things/choices are morally neutral, but the mislabeling of things is still an extension of healthism.)

This hurts ALL delusional people. It hurts those who don't want medication/therapy because they like their delusions. It hurts those who don't want medication/therapy because they are victims of medical abuse - which, by the way, the rates are extremely high for delusional people. It hurts those that don't want or can't take medication because of allergies/side effects/other health conditions. It hurts those that don't want to or can't do either for financial reasons. It hurts those who don't want to or can't do either due to other forms of bigotry.

And it hurts even those who want one or both because it contributes to the demonization of delusional people by giving them only conditional and partial acceptance on the basis of them managing to maintain a state (or veneer) of conformity to a standard of nondelusion.

Demanding delusional people pass as or be nondelusional for you to accept them means you don't accept them. Period. It means you accept people you believe to be or view as NONdelusional.

I am not anti-medication or therapy, for those who want it. See above: denial of care is just as much a violation of autonomy as forced medical "treatment". I strongly support the right of people to access treatment, and to have many of the access barriers in our current system (one of which is the demonization of certain disorders) torn down. I fight for the right to medicate and go to therapy just as ardently as the right to refuse it.

*Note: Throughout this post I speak of medication and therapy together as treatment to suppress delusions. This is not because I believe therapy will do so or even that medication is fully effective at such. This is because the people that say these things believe that medication is a magic normalization pill; and don't believe that only a BAD therapist would try and SUPPRESS delusions rather than giving you coping skills to RESPOND to them with.

There's more I could say about this topic, like:

that a lot of the idea of not "recovering" being harmful has to do with symptomology that can prevent someone from being as "productive" in capitalist society and therefore diminishes their worth as a capital-generator for companies/rich people

that there is a often component of colonialist white supremacy to this too - both in the deification of western medicine as the most advanced understanding of what constitutes a "disorder" and as a solution for those conditions - and in the focus on white western psychotic experiences to the exclusion of other culture's

in regard to the above point: like how in many other cultures, schizophrenic delusions and hallucinations in particular are often nondistressing and even comforting, and may also be integrated into the beliefs systems of those cultures

also in regards to that: how US racism (and possibly elsewhere as well) both strengthens and is strengthened by this - as black civil rights activists were frequently diagnosed with schizophrenia specifically in order to both turn the public against them and forcibly institutionalize them, especially when they refused treatment for their nonexistent delusions

subsequently, how racism was used to change in view of schizophrenia from primarily a hysteric (white) women's disorder to a "violent/dangerous" one for this reason, and how people of color and especially black people are far more likely to be labeled noncompliant and aggressive if they refuse treatment

the idea that consensual encouragement of delusions is not just harmful but abusive to the delusional person and the inherent removal of the delusional person's autonomy in stripping them of the ability to consent and how this is an extremely prevalent form of ableism that is used to deny everything from the sexuality of disabled people to recognition of their gender identity to their ability to refuse other medical care

in that same vein, the infantilization that leads to denial of physical medical care on the basis that their very real symptoms of another illness/condition are "all in their head", or mental healthcare on the basis that they can't differentiate between a delusion and other symptoms, especially in regards to delusion people with dissociative disorders, autism, and ADHD

just generally how this is just one of many ways delusional people of all kinds are demonized, some of which are subtle and some of which are obvious, but many of which are rooted in multiple forms of bigotry, many of which feed other forms of bigotry, and all of which are harmful and dangerous

As an added note, while I largely use psychosis and delusions interchangeably, delusions exist outside of psychosis (and psychosis exists outside of schizo-spec experiences). This is also because bigots often conflate the two.

#psychosis #delusions #schizophrenia #ableism #sanism #infantilization #demonization #transphobia #autismisia #(idk the specific word for anti-autism ableism or if there is one but that works) #healthism #medical abuse #psychiatric abuse #racism #pluralmisia #white supremacy #colonialism #ABA mention #ask to tag #ask to tw

[oliveroctavius]

a sort-of-essay about Harry Osborn, psychiatry, and schizophrenia in Spider-Man comics

text sources: Crazy Like Us by Steven Watters, The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang, The Protest Psychosis by Jonathan M. Metzel, and Wikipedia.

(An attempt at image transcription is here.)

#harry osborn #peter parker #I could probably have made this a full page or two longer but that would have been hazardous to my health #i care a lot about psychotic harry #spider man #comics #/ psychiatric abuse #suicide mention #olivercollage

[got-a-problem-in-my-head]

the r slur isn’t a slur just because it’s derogatory.

the r slur is a slur because being “diagnosed” with it was a fucking death sentence.

#🌡.txt #our posts #tw death #tw eugenics #r slur mention #disability #physical disability #mental illness #psychiatric abuse #medical abuse #idk how to tag this i just want some sort of reach #because nobody fucking realizes this