2:18am August 4, 2015

madeofpatterns:

it is hard to express…

just how much you can break someone…

…if what you think you’re doing..

..is making them into someone who might someday become a real person worthy of respect…

I had a psychologist once who openly told me that his goal was to kill the person I was, and replace that person, inside me, with a person who was more functional and better adapted to living in the world and less psychotic.

Note that ‘psychotic’, for him, encompassed ‘autistic’.  (He was part of a team who had diagnosed me, among other things, as having been ‘psychotic since infancy’.  Which can only ever mean autism, because there’s no way to diagnose actual psychosis in an infant.  They were taking their ideas straight out of Frances Tustin’s books from the seventies, that differentiated some forms of autism from others, and called some of it autism and some of it childhood schizophrenia or childhood psychosis.  I was supposedly psychotic since infancy and schizophrenic since adolescence, although what the difference was, I was never exactly told.)

He did not succeed.

But he did succeed in doing some incredibly scary stuff to the inside of my head.  I was unable to defend myself against the things he did, because I was heavily drugged and he was an accomplished manipulator.

I have been told since – by strangers online who know nothing about my life, mind you –  that I should’ve known it was impossible for someone to kill who you are and make you into someone else.  That if I actually believed him that it was possible, then there was something clearly wrong with me that needed to be fixed, possibly by the very guy who was abusing me in this fashion.

Of all of the abuse I encountered in the psychiatric system, this man’s abuse was the longest-lasting and most damaging in terms of consequences for my mind.  I remember going into appointments with him and feeling like I was an entirely different person.  Like I’d walk in the door myself, immediately turn into someone else the moment I saw him, and leave the door someone else again.  Often I wouldn’t be able to remember our sessions later.

He once let it slip that he’d been trained by a certain school of hypnotherapy.  Then he refused to name it again when I and my family asked about it, and got evasive whenever we brought up the subject.  I eventually found some stuff by the person, and it was someone who was considered highly unethical by a lot of hypnotherapists, because he believed in lying to patients if he thought lying would bring them around to healing in some manner, and he also believed in involuntary trance induction.  When I read about the ‘confusion induction’, it was exactly what this therapist did sometimes. 

And being on a very high dose of antipsychotics made it impossible for me to psychologically defend myself.  Antipsychotics can have an effect where they basically shatter your cognitive abilities, including your defenses against having your mind invaded.  By which I don’t mean like sci-fi telepathy sort of mind invasion, but more like extremely skilled manipulation.  If you can’t think straight, you can’t defend yourself well against people who are hell-bent on manipulating you.

But he was incredibly up front about the idea that he was going to kill the person I was inside, and replace that person.  He said also that he was going to get inside my mind and never leave.  And that if I ever had an original thought, I should bring it to him, because I would probably die if I ever thought for myself for very long.

I remember when a friend first taught me to repeat “I am allowed to think for myself.”  She said I needed to repeat it to myself over and over until I really believed it, and that it was very important that I do so.  I thought she was trying to kill me.  And at first, even beginning to try to repeat it to myself, resulted in this torrent of confusing brain noise that felt like I was drowning.  It was like he’d set booby traps all over my mind.

People don’t think this kind of thing is possible.

People are wrong.

I was first able to begin resisting this stuff when I found a book about cults, by a person who had been a cult member and had indoctrinated other people, and he talked in depth about how indoctrination works and how to resist it and remove it from yourself.  I had never been in a religious cult, or even in any of the other types of cults in the book, but the residential facility I lived at when all this went down, had a power structure that resembled a cult enough that the book was very useful for me.

I actually confronted him about it once, after I started reading about cults.  He told me that anything he did was warranted because if it wasn’t for him I’d have been in a state institution for at minimum the rest of my childhood.  Mind you, when given a choice between the residential facility and the state institution, I chose the state institution.  I was overruled both because people didn’t believe anyone in their right mind could ever make the choice I made, and because there were no beds open in the state institution. 

But having now talked to people who’ve been in similar residential facilities and in the exact state institution I almost ended up in, I have been told that the state institution was definitely better.  Not good, not good by a long shot.  In fact, terrible.  But better.  State institutions don’t usually have the money to throw around for intensive one-on-one 24/7 brainwashing.  Which is why many actual patients prefer them to private institutions.  Not all patients, and not all institutions, but it’s a preference that occurs often enough, and goes against what most people consider common sense, that it’s been explicitly noted a lot in the psychiatric ex-patient movement.  Unfortunately, that preference (and, in general, preferences for places seen as “worse” from the outside for reasons that are largely aesthetic) is often seen as evidence that we lack sanity and should not have control over our lives. 

Of course, most of us would prefer no institutions, but when given a choice between different types of institutions, we’ll often choose ones considered “more restrictive” or “worse”.  Because our definition of what makes a place worse – as patients, who understand certain things instinctively that other people don’t understand – is often very different from what staff or family members consider worse.

So this idea that he was keeping me out of a state institution doesn’t hold water to me at all.

The idea that he did this for any reason other than his own amusement and power tripping, doesn’t hold water to me at all.  He was someone who got off on power and control.  Not someone who inadvertently misused power, but someone who craved power and misused it to do harm to people, and often enjoyed doing so.

He also told me that he really enjoyed being able to treat me, because normally people like me were stuck in state institutions and out of his reach, so he didn’t normally get to “work on” anyone like me.

Which was a creepy-ass thing to say.

I learned later that even in psychotherapy that is not deliberately sadistic, there’s a frequent idea that you have to destroy who someone is and replace them with someone more functional. 

So I was not imagining that he said this, and the fact that I believed him capable of doing something he kept threatening to do (when he controlled every aspect of my life, too, which can undermine anyone’s sense of reality), does not mean that I “had to have been crazy” and therefore that what he did was somehow okay.  (Why is it okay to do that to crazy people but not to sane people, anyway?  It shouldn’t be.  And why is it okay to imply that I’m crazy – and therefore apparently not worth listening to – because I was horribly abused by a psychologist on a power trip?)

TL;DR:  I had a psychologist once who told me that he wanted to kill the person I was and replace me with someone who could function better in the world and generally be a happier and better person or something along those lines.  He told me this, explicitly, many times.  His abuse did more damage to my mind than the rest of the psychiatric system combined.  And the one time I confronted him about the matter, he told me that it was all okay because he was doing it to keep me out of a state institution.  Except he was actually doing it because he got off on power and control.  Everything else was just an excuse.  It was horrible in ways I can’t even describe. 

133 notes

10:44am August 18, 2014

Things You Can do to Help Disabled People That Don’t Cost A Cent

neurodiversitysci:

• Do not talk about an obviously disabled person in front of them as if they can’t hear or understand you.
• Do not talk to a disabled person’s companion instead of them.  
• Ask permission before touching people, or their wheelchairs/other equipment. Even if you want to help.
• Ask disabled people about their lives and really listen to their answers.  (Within reason. Asking people personal questions about their sex lives, for example, is rude unless you are very close to them and they’ve communicated they’re OK with that).
• Listen to what they say whether they are speaking, writing, typing, using text to speech, using a letterboard, using PECS, gesturing, using sign language, or using any other form of communication.  People who cannot speak can still communicate.
• Stand up for people you see getting bullied.
• Understand that disabled people don’t just need friends, they can be friends, too.
• Every public place does not need to have loud, blaring music and TVs with flashing screens.  
• If you blog, put bright, flashing images that can trigger seizures under a cut so that people with seizures can avoid looking at them.
• If a job can possibly be done without a person driving, don’t require candidates to drive/have a driver’s license, and don’t interview candidates and then reject them because they don’t drive.
• When talking to someone who has trouble speaking or stutters, and takes a long time to speak, wait for them to answer. Don’t keep repeating the question or pressuring them. Yes, if you’re like me and your mind is going really fast and you forget what people are saying if they take too long, it can be hard to be patient.  Do it anyway.
• If you are talking to a deaf person, make it easier for them to lip-read by facing towards them while looking at them, and not covering your mouth with your hands.
• If you are talking to someone with hearing impairment or auditory processing disorder, it is more helpful to slow down or rephrase what you’re saying than to just speak more loudly.  
• Some disabled people have difficulty understanding nonliteral language such as metaphors and idioms (e.g., “a stitch in time saves nine”). If you’re talking to someone like this, try explaining what you mean by these figures of speech, or just not using them.
• Recognize that failure to make eye contact does not mean someone is lying to you. It may be uncomfortable for them.
• Recognize that unwillingness to go out to loud, crowded bars does not mean someone isn’t interested in socializing with you.
• If people have difficulty spelling, or using the appropriate jargon/terminology for your social group, do not assume they’re stupid.  You may need to paraphrase some “jargon” for them.
• Recognize that a person can need time alone and it doesn’t mean they don’t like you or want to be with you. It’s just something they need so they can function at their best.
• If a person does not recognize you, do not assume they don’t care about you.  They may be face-blind.
• If a person does not remember your birthday (or other major names, numbers, or dates) do not assume they don’t care about you. They may simply have a bad memory.
• Understand that a disabled person’s talents, however esoteric, are real, not unimportant “splinter skills.”
• Colorblindness affects more than just knowing what color something is.  To a colorblind person, colors that they can’t see will look the same if they have the same degree of lightness/darkness.  That means that to a red-green colorblind person, a red rose on a green background will blend in instead of contrast starkly, and the Chicago CTA El map will be difficult to understand.  Understand that something that stands out to you and seems obvious may literally not be visible to a colorblind person.
• Accept stimming.
• Don’t tell them “but you look so normal.” But, if they accomplish something you know they were working really hard to do, it’s great to compliment them on it.
• Understand that a person can be working incredibly hard to do something and may still not perform as well as you’d like them to, as well as the average person would, or as well as the situation demands.
• If someone has a major medical problem, disability, or chronic illness, then just eating some special healthy diet or exercising more isn’t going to cure it. It might help, it might hurt, it might do nothing, but they’ve probably heard it before, and it’s none of your business in any case.
• A person with OCD knows that checking or counting or whatever compulsion they perform won’t really prevent disaster from happening, it’s just a compulsion. That doesn’t stop them from feeling the need to do it anyway.  A person with anxiety may know at least some of their fears are irrational or unlikely to occur. That doesn’t stop them from feeling anxious.  A person with trichotillomania may know it hurts them to pull out their hair or pick at their skin, but they have trouble stopping themselves anyway.  A depressed person may know they would feel better if they got out of their house and talked to people, but that doesn’t make them feel any more up to doing those things. A person who hallucinates may know the hallucinations aren’t real, but that doesn’t make them go away or feel less upsetting.  You see the pattern?  You can’t cure people with mental illnesses by telling them they’re being irrational or hurting themselves.  If it were that easy, they’d have cured themselves already.
• Do not tell a person with ADHD or mental illness that they should not be taking medication.  This is a personal decision. Furthermore, since medications have wide-ranging effects on people’s bodies and minds and often unpleasant side effects, most people taking medications have thought through the issue, done a cost-benefit analysis, and decided that the ability to function better is worth it.  Their decision should be respected.
• A disabled person with intellectual disability who has the academic or IQ abilities of, say, a seven year old does not actually have the mind of a seven year old. They have different life experiences, needs, stages of life, bodies, and so on.
• If a disabled person is having a meltdown, they are not angry, they are terrified.  They’re not throwing a tantrum or being aggressive, they have gone into fight or flight. The best thing you can do is remain calm yourself and help them calm down. It may help to keep your distance, keep your voice low and calm, let them retreat to a safe place if they know to do that, or remind them to do so if they don’t.  Reasoning with them won’t work well because they’re unlikely to be able to hear and understand you.  The worst thing you can do is start yelling yourself, threatening them, be violent to them, cut off their escape route, or get right up in their personal space.  

Other ideas?  Please reblog and add more.  The more the merrier.

I’d add to this one:

• Do not tell a person with ADHD or mental illness that they should not be taking medication.  This is a personal decision. Furthermore, since medications have wide-ranging effects on people’s bodies and minds and often unpleasant side effects, most people taking medications have thought through the issue, done a cost-benefit analysis, and decided that the ability to function better is worth it.  Their decision should be respected.

That’s what you have, but I’d make it more generic.  I wouldn’t say “Don’t tell someone that they should not be taking medication.”  I would say “Don’t tell someone whether or not they should be taking medication.”  Because most people not taking medications have also thought through the issue, done a cost-benefit analysis, and decided that the bad effects of taking the medication outweigh the good ones.  Or we have already tried taking medications, possibly tried taking more than 10 or 20 different varieties of medications at all different doses, and found that not only did they harm us, they didn't help us, or didn’t help us enough to be worth the harm.

TW for psychiatric abuse:

I don’t like lists of this nature where the decision to take medication is always the one represented as the better one.  Because I’ve been a psych patient who does take meds, and one who doesn’t take meds.  And while you get shit from people either way, the shit I have gotten for not taking meds has always been far more dangerous than the shit I’ve gotten for taking meds.  And nobody ever acknowledges that.  They talk about the “stigma” of taking medications, but they don’t talk about refusing meds, being tied down, and having meds shot in your ass that then had life-threatening side-effects, that you literally weren’t allowed any reprieve from until you agreed to take a less dangerous (but still invasive and mostly useless to you) med.  Or the time a doctor told my parents to threaten to throw me out on the street if I didn’t take my meds.  Or the near a year I spent on more and more meds that actually were at twice the toxic level, giving me entirely new and nasty kinds of seizures, while nobody checked the med levels and everyone blamed me and gave me more and more meds the more symptoms the meds gave me because supposedly all those symptoms were ‘anxiety’ and would go away if I took more meds.  Or the many other violent and dangerous ways I was coerced into taking medications that did really bad things to my body and gave no actual benefit.

I actually do take psychiatric meds at this point, although nothing heavy-duty.  And I do understand that there are people out there who are really nasty to people who are on meds, and try to persuade you not to take them.  I still remember when I was on neuroleptics and had a friend who would dramatically look away from me every time I opened my med box, to show his disdain for the whole thing.  And things like that.  But none of the 'stigma’ I’ve ever experienced for being a med-compliant psych patient has ever come even close to the level of utter horrors that I’ve experienced for being “noncompliant” with meds.  At which point it seemed like anything goes as long as it would force me to get meds into my system. 

And I don’t see a lot of people acknowledging that side of the coin.  I see a lot of people willing to acknowledge there’s a stigma to taking meds, but I don’t see a lot of people willing to acknowledge the price paid by people who don’t want to take meds.  Worse, a lot of the people who are so keen on ending the stigma of taking meds, are also quite keen on making it sound like people who are unwilling to take meds are doing something wrong, and that the things that are done to us to force or coerce us into taking them are for our own good.  Or that if we don’t want meds, we must not want to get better.  Or that it means we aren’t taking care of ourselves.  I’ve heard it all.

I have always been pro-choice when it comes to meds of any kind, even illegal drugs.  (Not that I think illegal drugs are usually good for people, but that I don’t think it does anyone any good to criminalize them or make people feel like shit for taking them.  And sometimes they are actually good for people, see medical marijuana for instance.  But that’s a whole different topic.)  So I think people can put into their body whatever they want to, and shouldn’t get crapped on for doing that.  But I also think people should have a choice not to take medication.  (And that if they want to be forced to take medication in any circumstance, they should draw up a psychiatric living will that states the circumstances where this is and isn’t okay with them.  These things exist.)  

And that’s where many of the people who are so big on ending the stigma of medication end up disagreeing with me.  Because many of them tell me straight out that people who won’t take medication are delusional, or are not to be trusted, or are not interested in taking care of themselves, or all these other things.  Some of them have no problem with forced drugging and have told me so.  (A lot of this ended my ability to attend events at local mental health clubhouse type places run by “consumers”, because it turned out that they were willing to have people involuntarily committed from their premises, and that they believed in forced drugging under those circumstances, and all sorts of other horrible stuff.  So this wasn’t just a thing on the Internet, this was “oh shit there goes the one place I could meet people who understood what I was going through”.  They treated us “non-compliant patients” as if we were “low functioning”.)

Anyway… I have to go burp my g-tube so I need to end this now, this may be over-explaining my case but I wanted to explain why I think that statements like that one should be neutral, as in it should go both ways, people have a right to make a decision about meds, whatever that decision is, and have it respected.

3,653 notes

6:45am August 17, 2014

I say that specifically because I don’t think people will infer ‘disabled’ from the mentally ill part. People expect me to just take pills, see a therapist, and then be able to go out in the world and get a job and do able people things.

Yeah, that.

It makes me enraged that mental illness is not treated as a disability, through the service system.

Lots of mental illnesses involve the same functional limitations that developmental disabilities impose on people.  As in, the exact same ones. In fact, some conditions exist in a strange area of overlap between mental illness and developmental disability.  These include things like:

• ADHD
• Autism
• Tourette’s
• (sometimes even) intellectual disability (given that it’s in the DSM)
• Childhood bipolar
• Childhood psychosis including schizophrenia and schizoaffective
• Schizophrenia in general (which is, in some forms, now being thought of as a neurodevelopmental disorder with clear signs from early childhood long before it becomes “clinical”)
• Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders
• Schizotypal autism
• Multi-complex developmental disorder (MCDD)
• Epilepsy, especially temporal lobe epilepsy, but in the past all epilepsy

All of those things occupy a grey area between developmental disability and psychiatric disability, which illustrates that both categories are accidents of history, not genuinely scientific splits within some objective medical system.

Anyway.

If I had my way.

I would make it like this:

People go to a psychiatric program for people who want to live on their own.  They get assessed accurately for what their skills are.  This would be done the same as it is for developmental disabilities and physical disabilities, with some modifications depending on the nature of the disability.  The assessment of what a person needs, would matter more than their actual diagnosis, and they might not need an actual diagnosis to get services.

The assessment would basically involve two parts:

One would be formal and standardized to some degree.  There would be a pre-made list of areas a person might need help with.  The person and possibly their caregivers or family would be interviewed or asked to fill out forms, or both, detailing how much help the person needs on their worst days.  They would be specifically invited to talk about their worst days, being told, “If we don’t know how things are at their worst, then we’ll plan for the best days, and we won’t be giving you enough services to cover the worst days.  So we know you may be able to do better than this sometimes, but what we need is to know enough to be prepared for the worst.”  Possibly with a built-in apology for making people have to describe themselves at their worst, since that can feel quite degrading, but it can also be necessary to determine the help the person needs.

The second part would be much less formal.  The person (and caregivers and family) would be invited to have written things out beforehand, to describe the areas they have trouble in general.  The things that are important to them, whether or not they are also on the more formal assessment.  They would then be able to talk about all of these things, especially in case the assessment missed any major areas of difficulty they have functioning in the world.  Which any assessment is going to miss.  So this would take place after they already knew what was in the assessment, and had been through that, and maybe had already seen the results written out.

They would also be asked to correct anything written on the assessment that seemed to overestimate or underestimate their abilities (still understanding we’re talking about their worst days).

Then, they would work together towards a plan of how to help with these things.

This could include meds and therapy but wouldn’t have to, at all, and they would not get pressure in that direction regardless of how severely disabled they were.

But the biggest thing, like the biggest part of services for physically and developmentally disabled people?

Having staff person assigned to them for a certain amount of time a week, ranging from 24/7 roommate arrangements to someone coming in once a week for an hour to make sure they’ve got everything in their household running smoothly.  This person could:

• Entirely do the task for them, without any input from them.
• Do the task, but do the task under their direction.
• Do the task under their partial direction.
• Help them learn how to do the task themselves.
• Help prompt them to do the task fully or partially themselves (prompting can be gestural, verbal, physical, handing someone something, and a whole lot of other things).

In whatever combination of those things, that the person preferred, for as long as they preferred it.

That’s the ideal of what physically and developmentally disabled people get today.  The only reason psychiatrically disabled people don’t ever get this help, even though they need it just as much, is basically that they’re looked down upon it’s seen as their fault, psychiatry tries to make it sound like if they took their meds and went to therapy then their functioning problems would disappear, and because psychiatry gives a lot of condescending and false explanations for people’s problems functioning (always stemming from one emotional conflict or another, somehow).  Psychiatry even sees it often as “enabling” someone (I hate that word, in most contexts, but especially that one) if you help a psychiatrically disabled person do what they can’t do.

So if a depressed person can’t get out of bed, then they are going to need someone to clean their house until and unless they become able to do it themselves.  It doesn’t matter if they ever become able to do so, or if they never become able to do so, they need that help so they should have it.

People need help with bathing.  People need help with cleaning the house.  People need help with money management (and if prone to mania, may want to make arrangements in advance for how to handle that situation without becoming patronizing).  People need help with doing household chores like laundry and the dishes and taking the trash out.  People need help taking care of their pets.  People need help paying their bills.  People need help going to work and getting through their workday (in the DD world we have job coaches specifically for this if people need the help).   People need help cooking.  People need help eating.  People need help with all kinds of things.

And psychiatric services in the community don’t cover any of those things.  If you can’t do them, they think you’re not motivated enough so they try to “motivate” people by starving them and letting them live in their own filth, hoping that one day they’ll just magically grow abilities they never had before.  In reality that almost always makes things worse.  People have more and more trouble functioning the more chaotic and messy their environment is.  Forcing people to live that way is both patronizing and degrading.

There are generally no medications that will help a person gain these skills, nor is there any form of therapy that will help either.  That’s for the same reason those things don’t make physically disabled people or developmentally disabled people function better.  Psychiatrically disabled people aren’t some weird magical group of people where you pop in a pill  or send them off to talk therapy and magically they function better.

And it makes me so very enraged that services don’t work this way.

The agency I get services from has three wings:

Developmental services.

Children and family services.

Mental health and substance abuse services.

It’s the same fucking agency and they still won’t give purely mentally ill people the same supports they give you if you have autism or an intellectual disability.  Even if you need the same supports, even if you need them for nearly the same reasons.

If I could do one thing for this so-called ‘mental health reform’ everyone is always talking about it would be to give all psychiatrically disabled people the option to receive services in their own homes, whatever they want that home to look like, designed in the same way that the best services are designed for physically or developmentally disabled people in our own homes.  None of this “hospital without walls” NAMI bullshit that’s all about making sure people take their meds, with force if need be.  Just the ability to live with the same dignity everyone else does, with supports that are controlled by the person who gets the services (to the extent they can, and with help controlling those supports if they have trouble).

This shouldn’t be so much to ask.

The fact that I have never, ever heard of it happening anywhere, scares me.

Because this is how disability services are supposed to work.  FFS.  Seriously, FFS.  Because right now all I see in mental health services anywhere is abuse masquerading as support.  I’ve never seen the kind of support people actually need.

41 notes

2:20pm August 2, 2014

"As a last resort"

realsocialskills:

Content warning: This is a graphic post about brutality towards people with disabilities. ABA and justifications for abuse are discussed. Proceed with caution.

People do a lot of brutal things to people with disabilities, including children.

Some examples: pinning them to the floor, punishing them with electric shocks, medicating them into immobility, putting them in 10-40 hours a week of repetitive behavioral therapy, taking away everything they care about and making them earn it by complying with therapy, taking away their food, and confining them in small places.

These things are now somewhat politically unpopular. We identify, as a culture, as having got past that point. We think of this kind of brutality as something that happened in the past, even though it is still common.

What this means in practice is that whenever people do brutal things to someone with a disability, it will be called the last resort. People doing the brutal things will claim that they minimize them, that there are protections in place, and that they only do them when necessary.

For example, this is an excerpt from the (as of this post) current ethical standards for BCBAs (certified ABA experts):

“4.05 Reinforcement/Punishment.

The behavior analyst recommends reinforcement rather than punishment whenever possible. If punishment procedures are necessary, the behavior analyst always includes reinforcement procedures for alternative behavior in the program.

4.06 Avoiding Harmful Reinforcers. RBT

The behavior analyst minimizes the use of items as potential reinforcers that maybe harmful to the long-term health of the client or participant (e.g., cigarettes, sugar or fat-laden food), or that may require undesirably marked deprivation procedures as motivating operations.”

In other words, the current standards of ethics for ABA practices explicitly allow punishment, harmful reinforcers, and “undesirably marked deprivation procedures”. But, they claim to “minimize” it, and only do it when they consider it necessary in some way.

This is an empty claim. Everyone who has ever used harmful reinforcers and brutal punishments has claimed that they are only used when they are necessary. Even the people who deprived children of food and made them live and study on electrified floors (graphic link, proceed with caution.) Even the electric shocks and food deprivation used by the Judge Rotenburg Center do not violate the BCBA ethical guidelines, because they claim that they are necessary and only used in extreme cases (even though they shock people for things like standing up from chairs without permission.) 

Whenever any of this is done to someone, it will be justified as “a last resort”. Even if it’s an explicit part of their plan. Even if it’s done regularly with no attempt to transition to another approach. Even if nothing else has ever been tried. Someone who is treated brutally will be assumed to have deserved it.

People call things last resorts to justify doing them. They choose to do brutal things to a vulnerable person, but they think of it as inevitable because it is “the last resort”. Calling something “the last resort” means “it’s that person’s fault I’m doing this; I could not possibly do otherwise.”

    

Treating someone in your care brutally and then blaming them for your choices is inexcusable. 

    

To those treated brutally and told it was a last resort: I’m sorry that happened to you. I’m even more sorry if it’s still happening. It’s not your fault. It’s not because of anything you did, and it’s not because there’s anything wrong with your mind. You were abused because others chose to abuse you.

Everything that was ever done to me at a particular residential facility that was abusive beyond belief – from giving me twice the toxic dose of Clozaril, to giving me a diagnosis they knew was inaccurate in order to get me onto said Clozaril, to beating me up in order to get me to make eye contact, to making me walk back and forth from the barn to the house until I walked "normally” enough to deserve to eat, to telling me that he was going to get into my head and never leave and kill the person I was and replace me with himself as well as someone more functional than the real me, to what we strongly suspect was involuntary trance induction…

…I wrote to the psychologist about it and he told me that given “the alternative” was life in an institution, he felt justified with everything they’d done to me.  He also said some weird stuff about “I don’t usually get to work with people like you at all because you’re normally on back wards of state institutions, and they won’t let you near me” like I was some kind of collector’s item.  And he basically told me that if it weren’t for him I’d be in an institution forever, and that he’d saved me and that I should be grateful.

6-9 months of my life at that place, mind you.  The rest of my life trying to recover from the damage.  Talk about CPTSD.

231 notes

1:00pm August 2, 2014

“

You wonder how a system so sophisticated, so technologically advanced, can treat people with such cruelty. Of course, it is not the system at all. It is one doctor, two nurses, an aide, or an orderly. It is people who lock people into seclusion rooms, and it is people who affix the leather cuffs or the chains or the gauze strips. It is people who do this and who do not have the courage to confront the unimaginable. It is people who believe they must do what they must do and that what they must do is the expedient thing. It is people who justify torture. “We’re only trying to help. We don’t know what else to do,” they say, with their refrigerated voices.

Does it really matter what else you do? Or is it enough to acknowledge evil, which is indifference to suffering and indifference to the sacredness of the human person? The only way to fight evil is to unmask it, to speak up, to refuse to participate in it, to not be indifferent.

But to us, the hostages of evil, the feeling of endless time is crushing. For us, even when the door is opened, the restraints loosened, we remain captives. We can never forget.

”

31 notes

1:45am July 26, 2014

Apparently, someone I consider a very good friend thinks my family isn’t autistic

catharticcruella:

And that instead we have social anxiety (what, you can inherit conditioned social anxiety brought about by severe abuse in your parent’s life before or mostly before you were ever conceived!!!!!???! I’m thinking NO), habits (stimming, even blatant stereotypical stimming), and passion.

Because we’re “all too lovely and nice” to be autistic. And nothing like terrible people with the label or suspected of the label.

“You’re the opposite of them!”

Uggggghhhhhh, you have been my friend for eleven years! Don’t dooooooo this! That’s so wrong!

I remember being offended at people thinking me autistic. But that was before the prominent asshole stereotype. Look at me now.

Back in the nineties, a psychologist said “I don’t like people with Asperger’s, and I like your father, so he probably doesn’t have Asperger’s.”  Of course this is the same psychologist who, at least officially, said that I was psychotic since infancy because of my mother, and who used to beat me on the leg, hard, until I made eye contact, so I don’t hold his opinions in very high esteem at all.  But I couldn’t believe he outright admitted that bias.  Once I found out that he’d make or unmake a diagnosis based on something as little as whether he liked a person, I wasn’t inclined to take any of his diagnoses seriously.

15 notes

6:51pm July 23, 2014

➸ San Francisco passes law allowing forced treatment of mentally disabled

nicocoer:

ukiahsheart:

sinidentidades:

San Francisco lawmakers approved a law allowing the forced treatment of mentally disabled patients under certain conditions, drawing swift criticism from patient advocacy groups who say the measure tramples civil rights.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which passes legislation for the California city and county, adopted by a vote of 9-2 a measure known as Laura’s Law.

If given final approval it would allow court-ordered outpatient treatment for people with chronic and severe mental disability deemed a risk to themselves or others or who have been jailed or hospitalized more than once in the prior three years, among other conditions.

San Francisco legislator Mark Farrell, who proposed the legislation to the board, said the program would help vulnerable people “and provide the families the support they deserve”.

Modeled after a similar involuntary treatment law passed in New York in 1999, California lawmakers passed Laura’s Law in 2002 after 19-year-old Laura Wilcox was shot and killed by a mentally disabled patient at a Nevada County behavioral health clinic where she was an intern.

The state law allows family members, police officers or mental health professionals to file petitions requesting the court-mandated treatment of a mentally ill person.

Individual counties can opt out. Laura’s Law has only been fully adopted by three California counties: Nevada, Orange, and Yolo. It is expected to receive final approval from supervisors this week and then be signed into law by San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee, who has expressed support for the program.

The law’s implementation has been slow and sparse due to the concerns about civil rights, resources and costs.

“This is the wrong direction for any community but especially a progressive community like San Francisco,” said Mental Health Association of San Francisco Executive Director Eduardo Vega.

“There’s no real doubt that this is a process that fosters stigma around mental illness,” Vega told Reuters after the vote.

The law requires city health officials to offer a mental health patient voluntary treatment before being forced into an involuntary outpatient program.

It also appoints a three-person panel to each case, which includes a forensic psychiatrist who would review the case to determine if a court-mandate is necessary.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I can see both sides of the argument. One the one, questioning and taking away the facility of a mental ill person to make decisions for themselves is stripping that person away of his/her rights. 

On the other, If someone with a mental illness refuses to get the help they need and is a danger to him/herself or others then there should be some sort of procedures put in place to make sure they get the help they need. 

I remember being about sixteen and watching as my Aunt’s family decided to try and intervene on the behalf of my cousin. He accepted their intervention begrudgingly and sought out treatment for his mental illness. He hated my Aunt the whole time. Wouldn’t speak to her. But he got treatment.

I’m not sure they had much recourse had he not gone through with it and this law might have been their only recourse. 

But don’t think I’m not aware of how this law might be abused. I see so many cases of neglect/abuse through my dashboard because of neuroatypicality/mental illness/disability and this law could just be another form of abuse if we’re not careful. I’m gonna be watchful. 

No this law is NOT needed, as there are ALREADY (over abused FYI) procedures in place to put someone who is deemed “A Danger to themselves or others” involuntarily in the psych hospital. All it takes is someone calling the cops and the cops deciding, with or without basis, that their course of action should be to drop them at the psych ward. (There have been people dropped in by family this way when they weren’t a danger because of convenience, because of care giver stress, and because of property conflicts.) Some cops just automatically assume if they are on a psych call to take you in. It begins a 72 hour “psych hold” where you are unable to be discharged or check yourself out until a judge reviews your case. You no longer have control about your treatment or much of your life until the judge hears from one of those doctors enough to discharge you.

And FYI: Danger to themselves or others? Already an EXTREMELY broadly interpreted category. There are people who WERE NOT an actual danger to themselves who were just visibly mentally disabled who have been picked up on that phrasing because someone saw them alone muttering to themselves and decided they, the abled person, felt unsafe and called 911. There are people who confessed suicidal ideation (thoughts about suicide) who didn’t have any INTENT or actual DESIRE to act on any of the ideas to friends who, because of cultural messages about what to do in that case, called the cops to “check” on them- and their friend got put on a 72 hour psych observation hold. 

I have lived my life in fear that someone would misinterpret my words or behaviors as “dangerous”- and let’s be frank, the way the media has treated people with Mental Health Disabilities, basically looking “crazy” in public can make some people feel threatened- and I would be picked up. I had about half my teen voluntary hospital stays been coerced because the threat of an involuntary stay where I would have less say about leaving and be taken less seriously by the doctors while I was in treatment. 

Oh, and you protesting that it was a mistake? Can be listed as a psych symptom depending on what staff you get. You not meeting their ideas about what you should act like as a psych patient? You obviously are benefiting from the structured environment/medications. You not basically laying back and complying with what they say to do, regardless of if you have serious concerns? You obviously need to stay longer. And it isn’t your perspective or your write up of the situation that the judge looks at to let you go- it’s the case notes with the above “observations”. You best be praying you have compassionate staff who get that forced and coercive treatment isn’t as effective. 

And all of these opportunities for misuse and abuse of the system? ARE UNDER THE OLD STANDARDS. These new standards are even worse. 

I’ve lived under the old standards in California and only rarely was I committed as a “danger to self or others or gravely disabled” when I actually was any of the three.  And don’t forget “gravely disabled” because that’s the third way you can get taken in.  They could finagle anything you did into evidence that you were a danger to yourself, a danger to others, or gravely disabled.  Anything.  I’m serious.  It’s really easy to get committed in California, it’s one reason I don’t live there anymore.  I have been committed for walking down the street looking “disoriented” (i.e. how I look most of the time).

231 notes

9:38pm July 20, 2014

soilrockslove:

youneedacat:

madeofpatterns:

institutions can and do hurt people just by existing

I was never in one.

but a lot of adults in my life made damn sure I knew they existed

and that there were ~worse places~ I could be

Yep I’ve always told people that institutions did serious damage to my life long before I’d ever been in one.  People don’t always understand.

Oh man, I was never in an institution, but the reason I didn’t fight back against the meds and all the psych people and so forth was because the institution was where I would be if I couldn’t straighten up and fly right.

So yes they effected me.

And my whole childhood was lived in a certain shadow. Because I would find descriptions of people who thought and acted like me… and then they would be followed in a few sentences by “this person was placed in _____ institution”.

And the thing was… the drugs and the way the psychiatrists and my parents treated me ended up acting surprisingly like a watered-down version of… an institution.

The descriptions… that was me, too.  Also seeing people who moved like I moved, and then seeing that they were being led around town, in a line, by institution staff.  And yes, the watered-down institution thing happened, I think because my parents didn’t know what else to do, from what they say.  So they emulated what they’d seen, and it turned out badly for all of us.

I feel like psychiatry was a bomb that hit our family, and the destruction was intense, and our family was never the same, and we never talk about it, never fully acknowledge it, but it’s always there.  And I always feel like I was at the epicenter, because it was my ‘breakdown’ that the bomb swirled around.  But the damage was done to the whole family.

79 notes

3:13pm July 14, 2014

“In an attempt to learn more about what happened during a lobotomy, Freeman tried performing them with the patient wide awake, under local anesthesia. During one of these procedures, Freeman asked the patient, while cutting his brain tissue, what was going through his mind. “A knife,” the patient said. Freeman told this story with pleasure for years.”

9 notes

2:59pm July 14, 2014

“Later, when asked about patients whose brains appeared to be damaged by the [lobotomy] surgery, [Dr. Walter] Freeman had this optimistic spin: “Maybe it will be shown that a mentally ill patient can think more clearly and constructively with less brain in actual operation.””

Dully, Howard; Fleming, Charles (2007-09-04). My Lobotomy (p. 66). Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

This is a book by a lobotomy survivor, by the way, and so far it’s been really interesting in a horrific sort of way.  I’d recommend it if you can stomach it.  Be aware, though, that it’s one of those books like “The Last Time I Wore A Dress”, where part of the horror for many readers is that the guy in question wasn’t actually mentally ill, he was just a high-spirited child of a highly controlling mother who was told by every psychiatrist she took him to that he was fine until she found one that would do a lobotomy on him.  So it’s one of those stories, and if you’re sensitive to that kind of thing, be aware of it before reading.  

This would have been just as horrific if done to a mentally ill person, and I think the author is aware of that, but I’m not sure all the readers are.  I had a really hard time reading The Last Time I Wore A Dress, because all the reviews I heard were “isn’t it horrible that they did this because of her gender expression, she wasn’t even crazy” rather than “isn’t it horrible that they did this to anyone at all”.  It’s like… in Canada there were all these people who were locked up and brutalized and raped and they got a public apology after it was determined they weren’t mentally ill or intellectually disabled, but the people in the same institutions who were mentally ill or intellectually disabled got no apology even though they were brutalized and raped as well.

37 notes

12:14am June 11, 2014

soilrockslove:

Read More

That’s what happened in my family.  According to them, they simply had no blueprint for how to handle me so they fell back on how the psych system was treating me as a guide.  They’ve apologized more times than I can count.  I’ve come to accept that.  But many of the things that happened as a result of this were really horrific from my perspective.  The worst was having pills shoved down my throat with water poured into my mouth and my face while they clamped my nose shut, to try to force me to take pills.  I actually resisted them as long as I did one night when that happened, because I’d reasoned that if I got put in a psych ward for refusing my meds, it would be safer, physically, than home.

I really do believe that they meant well and that we were all caught up in the violence of the system, and that the violence of the system did a number on our entire family:  Every one of us was affected, as if someone threw a bomb into the center of our family.  I still don’t think anyone has ever been the same since the psych system got hold of us.  But that doesn’t change how it felt to me at the time, which was that going home was just as bad as being in a psych ward, and that I couldn’t measure my “time in” vs. “time out” in any experiential sense because the same things were happening at home that happened in psych wards.  A lot of that was engineered by the psych system itself, to make my home an extension of the system, and I think that happens to a lot of families.  I can’t blame my family anymore for not knowing how to get out of that or avoid it… it was just a horrible mess, for everyone.  And it felt like violence was just rocketing around the family in all directions, from all directions.

11 notes

3:12am May 27, 2014

“

Fact: Ivar Lovaas, pioneer of applied behavior analysis (ABA) compliance training for autistic people, was first known for using the same techniques and methodologies in the NIH-funded feminine boys study. In that project, Lovaas used ABA to force boys with stereotypically feminine speech, movement, and dress to comply with more stereotypically masculine behavior in hopes this would prevent them from becoming homosexual.

What does this tell you about ABA?

”

661 notes

3:21am September 7, 2013

explosions

What I wrote earlier today seems to have opened up a can of worms in my head.  I don’t think it’s argue can of worms.  But I didn’t realize the extent to which I’ve tried to forget some things.

Particularly the thing where I took any opportunity to get out of that house. And my dad slept in his running shoes so he could catch me.  I think usually in the end he must have caught me. Or gotten me somehow to come back into the house.

But there was also the time I rammed my way past him and I got as far as the sidewalk outside my neighbor’s house. And he caught me there and tackled me. And I was fighting with him and screaming at the top of my lungs.

And all of the neighbors have to have heard the commotion. But only one came out to ask if everyone was okay. And she called 911 and I think I got locked up, and I know that was the time the paramedics took bets on whether I was on PCP.

And I think this was all nobody’s fault not mine not my dad’s not anyone in the immediate surroundings.

Although maybe the psychiatric system had set us up for this. And something about the house I lived in. But the system seemed to rip or family to shreds without anyone noticing what was doing it. People blaming each other and ourselves. And I think there are still gashes in our family that may never heal.

And violence seemed like a tangible thing in the air.  It wasn’t specific to me.  It was something that could happen in any of us.  Directed inward, directed outward. Physical, emotional, sexual, cognitive, whatever. It ripped through all of us, each in different ways.

And now we all look away from it and pretend the explosion in our house never happened.  I think I pretend less than the others, but around them I try not to talk about it because it just sets it off all over again.

And for years every night I dreamed I was trapped in that house pounding and kicking and scratching at the walls or whatever people showed up in the nightmare.  And the dreams seemed to feed off that violence, so I had to train myself, “I am dreaming. I need to get out of this house. Don’t hit anything or anyone. Just get out. Now."  And the air would turn solid or there would be doors on top of doors. But I still learned to get out and keep running until I was out of the neighborhood. Those dreams were too accurate, every blade of grass exactly where it was in real life. I never dream that solid or that accurate otherwise.

But I don’t have as many of those nightmares as I used to. I had to learn how not to react. I had to learn to put distance in the way.

But better to have nightmares now than live the nightmare back then. It was like getting hit by a whirlwind and I never want to experience it again.

But I’m aware of it. I’m always aware of it.  However much I try not to think about things, I’m not capable of deliberate forgetting.

But I’ve never understood. Sometimes I try to force myself to understand things. I’ve learned that’s a very bad idea. When I try to force understanding, I come out with false answers. The same way that when I force language, I get random crap that sounds right but means nothing.

So I don’t have answers. All I know is that an explosion hit the family. That violence of many kinds happened. To all of us. From all of us. And that whether the psychiatric system ignited the whole thing or not, it certainly made things exponentially worse. And that while I’m sure everyone wants to forget it ever happened, the effects are never going to go away, whether we pretend they don’t exist, or not.

9 notes

2:00pm July 9, 2013

My last experience with a mental institution. Which finally pushed me away from psychiatry for good, by subtly reminding me what was in store if I stuck around.

I had a really bad experience years ago, that I’ve only ever described in part. It was my last encounter with mental institutions, and my shortest. And it emphasized to me, above everything else, why I needed to seek help outside the psychiatric system. Parts of the experience were so humiliating that I’ve never spoken about them to anyone. So be warned this won’t be a pleasant post.

It all started when I was severely PTSD-triggered, and found that my supply of my herbal anxiety medication was gone, and would not be replenished for another day and a half. And I somehow had to get through that day and a half.

My PTSD was much more severe back then. And I had a lot of emotional vulnerabilities that I don’t have anymore. And a day and a half seemed like a year. And suddenly I was back into that mind set where I thought that things would never get better, would never end, and I might as well die. I didn’t actually want to die, but the suicidal impulse felt so strong I couldn’t figure out how to stop myself. Some people believe if you’re ambivalent then you’re not serious about suicide. But reality is that people who actually complete suicide, show signs of having been ambivalent to the last second. The survival instinct is a powerful thing even in the face of a strong urge for self annihilation.

So I called a suicide hotline. This was back when I had an elaborate setup that allowed me to use phones while typing.

So they realized I was serious, that I was simultaneously trying my hardest to resist the impulse, and planning out how to do it. They talked me into letting them call the police to drive me to the emergency room.

Everyone told me I was really brave and amazing and doing the right thing by taking care of myself. The suicide hotline people. The cops. The emergency room workers. Everyone told me I was doing the right thing. I let that lull me into a false sense of security.

They wanted a urine sample. I tried, but motor planning problems resulted in me pissing all over my arm, which wasn’t even holding the cup. I told them, and they didn’t believe me. They insisted on feeding me a bunch of soda and then catheterizing me. The catheter felt like punishment. They were pretty rough with it.

They explained to me that for insurance purposes, they would have to put me on a three day hold. But that I could get out the next day, since I had a medication coming that would stop the anxiety and flashbacks. They assured me over and over that it was only a formality, that nobody would really try and keep me for three days.

An ambulance came and took me to the local mental institution. They began interviewing me about why I was suicidal, why I was there. Up until then everyone said I’d just be staying overnight. Now they told me I’d be staying for three days and that there was no way out of that.

I explained about it only being for insurance purposes, that I had meds waiting the next day, etc. She didn’t believe me. She first treated me like an idiot for believing I’d stay only overnight, then acted like I was being dishonest. She said the hold wasn’t for insurance purposes, it was to protect me from myself. I felt like Alice in Wonderland.

She asked me about the origins of my PTSD. I explained it had many origins, but that the most important one was from mental institutions. She didn’t understand how you could get PTSD from a mental institution.

I elaborated that I was abused. She said I would be safe in this institution because they kept male patients separated from female patients. I said it wasn’t patients that abused me, it was staff. She grew very uncomfortable, laughed loudly, and said staff didn’t abuse people here so I had nothing to worry about.
I went to bed to the sounds of violence from the men’s ward.

Unlike my previous stays in mental institutions, I felt a stark contrast between outside and inside. Because as a child I had little freedom and was abused, so institutions were not a big contrast. As an adult I had lots of freedom and less abuse. And I found being locked up and bring unable to do anything about it, unbearable.

I looked out the window and couldn’t believe how close I was to freedom and how far at the same time. My wallet and house keys were in the nurses station. I strangely enough felt more trapped at that moment than I ever felt tied down in isolation rooms as a kid.

And the atmosphere was intensely violent. The violence swirled through the air so thickly I had trouble seeing through it to the other side of the room. I already knew from my involvement in the local ex patient movement that this place was violent and abusive, that they paid no attention to medication reactions, that if I gave them any reason to use Prolixin on me I’d die. And I’d come there to avoid dying.

So I sat in the dayroom all day long, rocking and praying that the violence would not enter inside me and cause me to do something I’d regret. I felt like I was being battered on all sides. Most psych wards are full of violence, but the contrast to my adult life left it unbearable to be around.

I watched the other patients. One of them was waging her own war against the violence. She was hallucinating and talking to people who weren’t there. And the violence went all through her like she had no skin, and she’d thrash around. Staff laughed at her and made cruel remarks. No abuse, my ass.

Another woman was going to court for a hearing about whether she could leave. She was putting all her effort into looking normal. I could still see her though, tense and anxious and fighting despair.

And another woman was becoming the focal point for the violence as expressed through staff. They were making her beg like a dog for clean socks and water. She was so passive she was doing it.

I’d called my staff person from the developmental disability system and told her they weren’t letting me leave. She said she’d be right over.

Hour after hour I sat rocking, trying to steel myself against the violence, only typing to repeatedly ask if my staff was there yet.

Finally she came in. She’d been in state mental institutions in the seventies. She took one look around and said, “omg, these places haven’t changed one bit”. I could see her taking in the violence, shrinking a bit. She’d had to fight to get in at all, outside visiting hours.

When I was a teenager, I knew a girl who had watched me in mental institutions and residential treatment facilities. And she had a lot of problems herself. She called me one day really excited. She said she’d persuaded her mom to put her in a group home. But it all seemed weird to me. She had glee and pride and excitement in her voice when she told me their visiting hours. I still remember the exact tone of her voice – today they’d call it squee – as she said “Did you hear that, I have visiting hours!” She said it like it made her important. I felt sick. To me visiting hours were the way people controlled my access to the outside world. Not something to squee over. I still don’t know what all that was about. I’d forgotten until today.

Soon staff told us we couldn’t be in the dayroom because patients were complaining it was unfair she was here outside visiting hours. We moved into a conference room, and waited all day long for the doctor to arrive. He arrived during the two minutes I took a pee break, and refused to wait for me. So we waited longer. It was a nervewracking wait. I felt like pounding on the walls and screaming, but kept controlling myself, trying to stop myself doing anything that would make them keep me longer. I knew if I stayed three days, I’d never resist it, and then possibly never come out.

Finally the doctor and a nurse arrived. I knew I had to go along with whatever they said yet emphasize why it was safe for me to leave now.

Fortunately they were uncomfortable keeping me because I had a developmental disability and thus, to them, was the DD system’s responsibility, not theirs.

But they made sure they humiliated me as much as possible before they let me go. They treated me like I’d just been making “dramatic” statements about suicide without really understanding the consequences of talking that way. As if any psych survivor could know otherwise. But because I was DD they treated me like I must have not meant it. Like I didn’t really understand. And they rubbed that in as much as they possibly could for the rest of the conversation. They also said my staff had to take full responsibility for me and everything that happened to me.

I just knew I was lucky, that they were doing the impossible and shortening a three day hold, that I must say and do nothing to stop them from letting me go. Which meant a lot of agreeing to things that I never thought, felt, or believed. Going along with everything they said. Making sure they had no reason to think me further danger to myself.

And then I was out. And in the car. And wondering at being outside after all of that. I’d gone in because everyone told me I was doing the right thing. Up until the doors closed and locked and I was trapped in the institution, everyone was saying how brave and wonderful I was for taking care of myself by agreeing to go in. Once I was in, they treated me like an idiot at best and a liar at worst. Nobody on the inside said I did the right thing. The last thing they did before I left was try to ensure that I would never mention suicidal thoughts again, or someone might think I meant it.

And I let them. I let them frame me as an idiot who didn’t know what I was saying. Because it got me out. And I needed to be out, to survive. And going in had been about survival, but once I was in I realized my best chances for survival, even if I was drastically suicidal, were outside the psych system entirely.

And that’s what I did. I had to overcome severe PTSD and severe depression without any help from the system. I had no further choice.

21 notes