10:44pm May 18, 2013

➸ Janna's weird crap: [tw: ableism, mental health "professionals"] Actually crying because it made me so mad.

People send in asks with links and I have to read them so I can answer them (on the ADHD blog).

And there was this one a few days ago, I’m going to respond to it at some point this weekend, about how the guy who first described ADHD for the DSM said it’s fictitious right before he died. And it…

The French system are dicka about neuro developmental conditions. They think autism is caused by bad parenting. And family therapists like this can go die in a fire. My parents put me in a residential facility, long after I was diagnosed with autism. And they turned out to have a psychoanalytic approach much like the French. Such throwbacks to the seventies still exist in America. They declared me psychotic since infancy and schizophrenic since childhood. Then they spent ages building me into that person, forcing me to admit symptoms I never had, and then destroying me. And they put me in family therapy where they endlessly talked about my mom causing my childhood psychosis/childhood schizophrenia. Everything they said was straight out of a textbook on autism as childhood psychosis that I read later, from the early seventies. Everything. My mom is generally a sweet person. But when my dad said the name of the family therapist once during all this. My mom said “MAY SHE ROT IN HELL.” My dad had to go on antidepressants because he was shaking so badly from anxiety during this time period. It nearly broke my mom for a long time. And it did completely break me. I felt like a robot doing only what they thought I should be, not me. They told me they would get inside my head. Kill the person I was. Replace it with a better more functional person. That this was justified because otherwise I’d be institutionalized for life.

The doctor loved power trips that’s why he became a psychotherapist, I could tell. It was worse than forced drugging, worse than being tied down, worse than being beat up, although he also did beat me up too just for fun, to force me to make eye contact he’d hit me on the leg as hard as he could until I looked him in the eye. But the worst part was the way he tried to get in my head and destroy me. He didn’t succeed but for many years it felt like he did, like I was trapped behind this person who wasn’t even me, going through the motions of being a proper schizophrenic for them. And he told me he was going to get inside my head and come live there, that he would be there for the rest of my life, telling me what to do and how to do it. He told me I wasn’t allowed to have thoughts of my own, that I must check every thought with someone else and make sure it was okay to have that thought. That he would replace my thoughts with better thoughts.

What people don’t realize. They think facilities like the one I was at are better than more normal institutions. Because they don’t use restraints or locked doors. But they’re worse. Because they use restraints inside your head. They build those up and you’re not even you anymore. It’s the worst thing in the world.

And that’s what they do in France to autistic kids and kids diagnosed with other things. I just happened to get one of the outliers who was still doing it in the USA in the mid nineties. But what happened to me is what is normal in France. And anyone who says that is better is totally messed up. It is not better. It is worse than even a lot of the worst of our more biologically oriented system. Because it gets inside your head and messes with you in a way that even unnecessary drugs don’t do. In order of preference I would prefer physical restraints over unnecessary drugs, and unnecessary drugs over psychoanalytic treatment. Because that’s in order if which us the most invasive. At least when they tie you down it’s only physical. I’d rather be beaten up, too. Of course I’d rather none of this. But if I had to. That’s the order I’d prefer. Nobody understands that.

Psychoanalytic treatment isn’t the kinder and gentler version of psychiatry. It’s the most invasive form of psychiatry. Even in the USA and Canada, there’s a movement of people who have been harmed by psychiatry as it is. And psychoanalytic therapists have hijacked that movement so that it’s not run by people with a legitimate gripe against psychiatry as a whole, it’s run by therapists who are upset that biological methods have put them out of a job. And if those therapists ran things, things would be worse than they are right now. Worse. Because it’s just a difference in how the power and control happens, it doesn’t get rid of the power and control. And it’s worse because psychoanalytic methods of the sort used in France, get inside your head and try to turn you into someone else, and they do it in the name of helping you, but it doesn’t make it good. They mess with your head. They are not kind and gentle. It’s psychological violence. It’s no less violent for not being physical. And that goes even for the ones who genuinely think they’re helping people. They still think they can define us and our problems, they can define the solutions, and that they can manipulate us as long as it makes us seemingly better. Meanwhile they blame out families for things that aren’t caused by families. It’s a mess.

Not that I think every psychiatric thing is at the root, a neurological difference. But a lot of them are. And denying that and blaming the family environment helps nobody. As soon as I saw she was a family therapist, I was pretty sure I knew what she does, given that she’s touting the French method.

Notes: