12:19pm November 30, 2013

➸ I really fucking hate

youneedacat:

andreashettle:

slashmarks:

youneedacat:

soilrockslove:

youneedacat:

That if something happened to me half of tumblr would explode but stuff IS happening to tons of other people and the same doesn’t happen. It’s not that half of tumblr shouldn’t explode for me, it’s that (if and when it’s safe for that person, to do so, and it’s not always, so that’s…

Yes, institutions shouldn’t happen to anyone. I wish there was some sort of network like you describe, but I don’t know how to get it started.

All the people who need it are in the least position to start it. I have some influence but not many resources (people confuse the two and come to me begging for assistance with problems I have no capacity to do much about, which reminds me SHIT I need to do my best anyway for someone soon that my cognitive problems made me forget all about), and most of the influence I have is over other people without many resources.

I think there are two main components to setting up what you’re talking about — housing/resources to help with life, and legal stuff to get people out of institutions if they’re trapped — and, yeah, unfortunately both are pretty money dependent. If people are interested I could set up sort of a tentative plan? Like, it’s nothing I could implement myself because I just don’t have the fundraising/volunteer finding abilities involved, but I have a pretty good idea of how it could be done with people who did. But I’m not sure if what y’all are saying is that you know how and just can’t… ugh

I’m not sure if I have any ideas concrete enough to really help. But I do wonder if perhaps one starting point (other than developing a more cohesive vision of exactly what something like this would “look like”, which might also be worthwhile) could be to identify organizations that are already doing something that is closely related in goals and vision and persuade them to extend their mission to include things like what you’re looking for. Or at least get them involved, more informally, with offering advice, ideas, guidance for how one might go about implementing a program like this.

Examples (though most of these will probably be familiar, at least for people in the US): MindFreedom International in the US, advocacy organization for users and survivors of psychiatry, among other things works to fight forced/coerced treatment (including coerced confinement to psychiatric institutes)

National Council on Independent Living (NCIL), also in the US, network of independent living centers providing services to enable more independent / community living (and also does some policy-related advocacy)

ADAPT (direction action advocacy promoting independent living)

Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN)

Not Dead Yet

And I’m sure others could come up with more.

I realize none of these do exactly what is being talked about here. But I suspect most if not all will have staff/volunteers/etc. who are at least sympathetic and broadly supportive of the aims in principle. Even if they feel that the kind of program you’re talking about here is beyond the mission and scope of their organization, some of their individual staff members might still at least be open to meeting occasionally with advocates (by phone, if in-person meetings aren’t feasible) to engage in some general dialogue and mutual brainstorming of ideas for how to move forward.

Side note that, alas, as you probably realize organizations do have to be careful not to get too heavily involved across too many initiatives and activities, however wonderful and important many of them might be, or else they’ll spread themselves so thin they won’t be effective at anything. If lucky, perhaps some dialogue could lead an organization to realize they could more proactively support certain pieces of what you envision by extending their existing activities in certain directions that are easily compatible with what they’re already doing. But even if this doesn’t occur—and that would be probably a long shot—organizations like these would at least have people who have the background and experience to advise what things would need to happen in more concrete terms to make this happen. And if they are sold on the vision, AND ALSO sold on the PEOPLE “selling” the vision (ie believe that you are the right people to help organize what needs to happen to implement this vision) then they might also help with referring to other organizations and contacts that might have other kinds of advice/guidance.

I do think some kind of plan (from Slashmarks and/or others) would be a good starting point. It is usually easier for people/organizations to give guidance and advice if they have a clear understanding what you want to accomplish and how you hope to accomplish it and why you think your approach is likely to work better than whatever existing models/programs are in place. Then once you have a more detailed and concrete concept/plan, you could reach out to individuals/organizations that you think might have helpful insight, tell them you have a vision of a program you think should be implemented and wanted to “pick their brains” for how to go about making it happen, would they be comfortable looking briefly at your plan and having a conversation about it?

You might need two written versions of a plan: one longer and more detailed for people who are more closely involved with it, and also a much shorter summary of the plan (maybe one to two pages) that could be shared with people who are not yet involved but who you hope might have advice/guidance. Then if people have questions after reading the shorter summary, then the work you do in developing the more detailed version of the plan might help in knowing how to answer these questions. Or if they decide they want to be more closely involved, you could share a longer version of the plan.

Not sure if this has helped.

One component of this that people need to remember is that the work it would be doing is not necessarily going to be legal or above-board. Getting out of institutions is not always possible to do legally. People would need to be able to be hidden — not in some flashy program that advertises what it does, but in places where they are not going to be found. That was a key component of what I was talking about, and it is a key component of getting out of institutions for a lot of people. Many people have only gotten out of some serious hellholes by trickery on the part of friends and family. That has to be part of this, so it’s obviously beyond the scope of any of these organizations that always do everything above board and many of them actually receive public funding. (Public funding would be the death of this kind of thing, and in fact has been the death of the actual mission of many, many, CILs and supposedly-activist organizations.) There have to be creative ways of getting people out, and there have to be people involved who don’t say they’re involved, and a lot of this stuff has to be done out of the sight of anyone who could possibly fuck with it.

Thank you for the amplification. I do suspect that some of the individual people working in these organizations may still be broadly sympathetic to the aims of a more secretive underground rescue system of the kind you’re talking about even if their organization can’t help much directly. But this gives me a better vision of what you’re going for.

I wonder if domestic violence shelters might have helpful insights? Since they have experience working with (women, usually) who cannot afford to be found by their abusers. So they might have ideas for how to keep certain things hidden so that it is harder for them to be traced down or discovered. Or helping individual people cover their tracks so it is harder for people to find them. Perhaps in particular, programs with experience helping people who have been abused by cops since it is harder for people to hide themselves from cops (because they have more access to resources for finding people who don’t want to be found).

Oh yes I do think there are many people from those organizations who would be interested in that. I just don’t want to build another organization LIKE these organizations – this is the key part that is different from them in important ways.

And people should know what they are getting into. (Also not all of the planning can be in public for obvious reasons.)

I just wanted to say all this before people start rushing in to start an official above-board organization that does things in a very public and obvious way. Because that’s not going to help people who have no legal way of leaving an institution. I know so many people who have had to get out of institutions illegally and then essentially go into hiding from their families, from the institutions, while all these people are looking for them to put them back in. And these are often going to be people in severe crisis, medically, emotionally, etc. who need a lot of help with things of all sorts. This has to be thought about carefully.

Notes: