as small as a world and as large as alone, madeofpatterns: slashmarks: people are allowed...

12:17am December 15, 2013

slashmarks:

people are allowed to do things that might hurt them, or that definitely hurt them, and it isn’t always a bad choice

therapists, unfortunately, are taught that they know better than their clients about when they’re making right or wrong choices, and may get to force their clients to apply

for instance, I was in partial program as a teenager. they often would drug us very heavily. I’m not talking about prescribing medication that’s needed for relief from symptoms with consent; I’m talking about trying two SSRIs for depression and then next putting a pre-pubertal preteen on a heavy adult dose of an atypical anti-psychotic and lying to their face about what drug they’re taking.

anti-psychotics have some side effects that can be very serious and very permanent, even fatal. is it worth taking them if you need them? yes, frequently. however, that is a decision that people have to make themselves, and it’s kind of hard to do that if not only have they not been aware that they’re risking anything, but they’ve been outright given false information about the level of risk.

that didn’t matter to the therapists, though. they weren’t concerned about the client’s opinion of the risk they were taking, they had decided for themselves it was fine.

another client in the same program liked piercings. she was apprenticing as a piercing shop, actually, learning to do them safely and under sterile conditions. she had done a number of her own prior to being in the program. at some point, she stated her intent to do another that week. the therapists told her she would be sent to the inpatient ward for self harm if she was planning on it.

piercings are not really dangerous. the worst that can happen is an infection or scarring. she was doing hers under sterile conditions with a professional’s guidance, which made a serious infection or complications fantastically unlikely.

they didn’t care about that. they weren’t concerned about her opinion of the risk. they had control over her body and they didn’t like what she wanted to do with it.

this is sort of about madeofpatterns’s post on politics, and at the same time sort of not. the point is, making your own judgement that you’re hurting yourself, or having someone tell you you’re hurting yourself and need to stop and think, is fantastically different from having someone with legal power over you tell you you aren’t allowed to make that decision because you might hurt yourself.

both of those decisions were choices that would be good under some circumstances and bad under others (if you have a condition that requires anti-psychotics and want them, they’re great. if you’re being bullied into taking them when it’s not really safe, not so much. getting piercings in certain areas or in unsanitary conditions is almost certain to result in complications. most of the time, it’s safe and results in some pretty jewelry). the point is that it’s the person making them’s right to decide that, no one else’s.

Or even saying “Yes, I’m hurting myself, but it’s at a bearable level and I see no reasonable way of avoiding it at present”/

None of the following is about the main point, it’s just stuff dredged up by this post.

I remember nurses and psych techs at one of the mental institutions I was at, having a very hard-line stance on what meant hurting yourself.

I was accused of self-harm for picking my chapped lips.

They said that people who wrote on their bodies (with pens and the like) were ‘showing disrespect to their bodies’.

Which, by the way… writing on your body is one thing people do to avoid actual self-harm. But they even said it about people writing phone numbers on their hands, or doodling on themselves.

They said the same about tattoos and piercings other than single holes in earlobes on people they assumed were girls.

Pretty much anything you did to your body was 'disrespecting your body’ and therefore not allowed. And I was actually put in six-point restraints for things like picking my lips, which they insisted was a form of self-injury. I’m sure they picked their lips themselves sometimes, and didn’t think a thing about it.

I know this isn’t the main point, but reading this really brought back a lot of memories.

They were so damn judgmental in general.

And a lot of their judgements (including many of the above) weren’t just ableist, but also sexist, classist, and racist.

I still remember how they treated a Latina girl who was in a gang. I remember one nurse suddenly screaming at her, “I REMEMBER HOW YOU CAME IN HERE, your whole body was COVERED IN HICKIES, I sure hope they didn’t PASS YOU AROUND!” I can hear it like it was yesterday. And they treated her with total scorn and contempt and refused to even try to see her point of view about anything at all. They just saw her as “a girl who has no self-respect”.

They said that a lot, about self-respect, to all of us. Their idea of self-respect was extremely rigid. Again, if you even wrote on yourself you had no self-respect. They kept talking about “respect for your body” in a way that seemed to mean “looking totally normal white middle-class mainstream etc.” And “respect” and “dignity” meant doing what they wanted you to do.

And when we wanted to change, when we wanted to do better, when we wanted to do the right thing but couldn’t figure out how, they had nothing but scorn for us. Because if we wanted to do the right thing, we would just do it, we wouldn’t sit around whining about why we didn’t know why we did things or we didn’t know how to do the right thing or etc.

Ugh, bad memories.