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2:18am
August 4, 2015
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
7:48am
November 15, 2014
Watch out for this, really closely, in your own life and your friends’ lives. It may save someone a lot of heartache.
I knew someone. I’m not going to give his name, or any other identifying informatioin, because that’s not important and I don’t want to embarrass him publicly. But I will call him Zeke for the time being. This happened a long time ago.
He was very emotionally stable. I mean, he had his problems, some of which may have even been clinically diagnosable as as a mental illness. But he was never suicidal. Events in his life had led him to value life so much that regardless of how depressed he got – and it was severe at times – he never thought of killing himself. Ever.
Then he started dating this woman. I will call her Lucy, after the Peanuts character with the uncredentialed psychiatry booth that she charged money for. I knew her, and she was highly manipulative. If she couldn’t find drama that already existed, she’d create drama. Even if it meant lying or manipulating people to do sol As such, not a lot of people trusted her.. But this guy was new to her, and had no idea what she was capable of.
She was one of those psych majors who runs around diagnosing their friends. Worse, she was one of those psych majors who tried to practice therapy on her friends without a license. She also loved the martyr role, the role of the long-suffering caregiver to a hopelessly mentally ill person.
So she took this guy who was rock-solid stable than most people I’ve met. So much so that even in severe depression he never wanted to kill himself. And he wasn’t even always depressed, by a long shot. The period this takes place in was a stresful period in his life, for sure. But… yeah, the things Lucy described do not match up with anything I know of Zeke, and I was extremely close to him for much longer than Lucy had even known him.
So Lucy and Zeke started dating. Lucy’s first move was to create mistrust between Zeke and his family. She took concerns he had about his pareints, and amplified them by making up stories that seemed to support them. She even involved his siblings, none of whom were aware how dangerous she could be. Then they moved far away from the family, so at that point Lucy was the only person Zeke had much contact with.
And then the letters started coming back, posted on her blog and the like. They were all about how she had to spend every waking hour watching Zeke so he wouldn’t try and kill himself. That already struck me as false or exaggerated, because Zeke and I had had long discussions about suicide. I was the one who gave in too easily to suicidal urges. Zeke was the one who tried to persuade me that life was an amazing thing that you didn’t want to just give up, and that if I’d been through what he’d been through, I’d never think of killing myself no matter how bad it got, I’d value life too much. And I believe him. I won’t post the circumstances (they are too identifying), but they are absolutely compelling.
So first off she acted like she spent every waking moment keeping him on suicide watch (yet never called a mental institution to have him committed, even though she had no problem with mental institutions… my guess is the reason she didn’t do that is because there was no actual case for him being a danger to himself). Second off, she started trying to recover abuse memories from him, which became incapacitating. I could totally believe the memories were real, but in situations like that, you don’t just go playing with someone’s head.
I’ve seen way too many situations that all look stunningly similar: A friend or significant other or therapist (yes, being professional doesn’t make it better) “helps” a person by recovering memories of abuse. Then they systematically teach them the proper ways to respond to that abuse. By which I don’t mean they provide solutions to the abuse memories. I mean they teach them to become totally incapacitated by them, to find triggers everywhere, and to go into flashbacks at the drop of a hat All of this works whether the memories are true or false.
So you’ll get someone who a month ago was more or less functional. And now they’re incapacitated. Now they curl up in a ball and cry every time anyone so much as mentions a word that could be remotely tied to the abuse. Now they also curl up in a ball and cry at random moments, at which point their “caregiver” rushes over to them and asks them “Are you having a memory?” and they say “yes” and then the “caregiver” coaches them through deep breathing while trying to get as much detail out of the person as they can.
In the case of Zeke, I’d known him almost my whole life, we grew up on the same street, and I knew something was going badly wrong. I didn’t know how badly wrong until he got out of that relationship for good and started telling horror stories about Lucy.
But if you, or someone you know, gets into a relationship with someone – friend, significant other, therapist – and they start trying to give you psychiatric help, with or without a license, and you seem to be getting worse and worse rather than better and better, then run, run far away, and never speak to this person again. Anything you say will probably be repeated anyway. Lucy liked to describe her S.O.’s sexual practices online without their knowledge or consent. People who cross boundaries in one way are likely to cross them in others. But people who exploit your emotions in the name of helping you are not your friends no matter what they call themselves. And while there are sometimes where you have to feel a little worse before you get better, it shouldn’t become an ongoing thing that creates more and more dependency on the person who is making you feel this way.
This is a form of abuse, I don’t know if it has a name, but it’s a definite, specific form of abuse and I have seen it turn very ugly on more than one occasion. I’ve had it done to me as well. (Beware of anyone who deliberately triggers you until you start crying, and then is right there to “comfort” you and tell you “it’s okay you’re safe now” and stuff. Then claims to have made an emotional breakthrough where they have connected with you over these experiences. No, just no.)
6:27am
December 21, 2013
What I think when I see twenty bazillion posts about the JRC on my dash.
Close the Judge Rotenberg Center. For the love of everything holy, close the Judge Rotenberg Center. Stomp it into the ground and dance on its fucking ashes.
But.
You won’t be done.
You’ll just have eliminated the most obvious of a huge number of places that torture and abuse their patients in the name of treatment.
Skin shock is showy and scary and it makes a good story and it makes it easy to see what is hurting people.
But people can be hurt just as bad or worse without it.
People can be hurt just as bad or worse by places that don’t brag about the torture they inflict on their patients.
People can be hurt just as bad or worse in the institutions everyone loves to love because they’re so beautiful, they have such wonderful grounds, they seem so loving.
You can’t understand, maybe, why this is true.
You think, maybe, that abuse, trauma, PTSD, CPTSD, can be measured in volts.
It can’t.
You think, maybe, that the destruction of lives is proportional to the visible destruction heaped on the body.
It isn’t.
It’s so much more complicated.
I have a friend who gets really upset every time some over-the-top institutional horror story makes the news. So do I, for that matter.
One part of it is because, obviously, it’s horrible, and we’ve both lived through horrible things. She’s been to both state and private institutions (and found private ones worse, by the way, so much for stereotypes). I’ve been to private institutions and private residential treatment facilities and what I like to call ‘community institutionalization’… too hard o explain in such a short space.
I spent most of my teen years in the psych system (and to some degree was exposed before that) and sometimes in mixed psych/DD settings, and pretty much all of my adulthood in the DD system. I have physical disabilities that could easily put me in a nursing home, and developmental disabilities that qualify me for admission to an ICF/MR. Staying free takes up more of my energy than I’d like.
I’ve been abused and tortured and traumatized and almost-killed in all kinds of settings, inpatient and outpatient.
At one time in my life, with severe self-injury, I’d have made an ideal candidate for the Judge Rotenberg Center. I am not somehow different from people who go there. You’d be surprised at the people who go there and how not-different they are from many people you’d imagine would never go there.
(That’s true of all institutions. The people who live inside them, and outside of them, are identical in every way. The only difference is how the support takes place. When it’s support at all and not just hell on earth.)
Anyway.
What I want to say is.
One reason that my friend and I get upset by these stories is because we’ve lived through some horror stories of our own.
Another reason that we get upset by these stories is this fear we have, that we don’t think is irrational at all.
We fear that when people focus on the outrageous, the flamboyantly awful, then they won’t see the way the outright ordinary, even the seemingly wonderful, can do the same degree of harm, or worse.
The worst harm in institutions is, by the testimony of many, many inmates, not just the physical torture that takes place in some places – sometimes above-board, sometimes secretly. Often it’s things you can’t even name. Those things are happening in the JRC too. Those things hurt people there as much as the torture does. Nobody is doing a huge campaign to shut down those things.
Many people, if the JRC is closed, will simply be sent to other institutions.
They will then be told that they are lucky and that those other institutions are better.
They may come to believe those other institutions are better.
Those other institutions may actually be better. But they may not be. It may just be that the badness has seeped down deep into some underground place where you can’t count it, can’t name it, can’t even describe it, and therefore it…. isn’t there.
And they will continue to get hurt by that. They may not realize they’re getting hurt by that. They may attribute the hurt to themselves, to their mental illness, to anything but the environment that is causing or contributing to it.
And that hurt may be harder to recover from than the JRC.
How do I know this? Because while I was not in the JRC, I was in mental institutions that physically tortured me (not with skin-shock), and was then moved to a 'better’ place that tortured me in harder-to-explain ways, and hurt me in deeper places, and I learned to say and believe how 'better’ they were while living how worse they were deep down. I still live with how worse they were.
And I know many other people who have the same story to tell.
And I know that unlike me, many people who live at the JRC won’t be able to escape the institutional system the way I was. My situation was unique to me. I didn’t get out because I was better off disability-wise than others, I got out because I was in a particular, unique set of circumstances. The difference between people on the inside and people on the outside is not their disability.
But once you’re in a long-term institution, it’s harder to get out. I was lucky, I was usually in a string of short-term institutions (even if I spent longer time periods in them than other people there), then when I was in a longer-term one, my residential facility closed and it became useful to them to decide I was recovered enough to leave, and to “transition” me to a “less restrictive environment”. Which was still a hellish environment, mind you, but more chance of freedom, there, too. And I had people around me savvy enough to advise me how to take the chances I had.
And most of the people in the JRC won’t be leaving to freedom, if it gets closed. They’ll go to other institutions. And however grateful they are to be out of the JRC, they will get hurt in those new places. Because that’s what institutions do. Invariably. You don’t have to know you’re hurt to get hurt there. You don’t have to understand how deep the hurt goes, to get hurt there. You just have to be there. And you’re often the last person to know how deep it goes, right down to the level of your self and identity and everything important to you. You can get turned inside out without anyone laying a finger on you.
Nobody will ever be able to pinpoint the institution that inflicts the worst of this sort of damage on its inmates, because this sort of damage is, by its very nature, secretive, even from the person it’s being inflicted upon. And because nobody will be able to pinpoint the worst of it, there will never be a massive, targeted, decades-long campaign to close the worst of these institutions. Anonymous will never catch on and take part. The world will not be outraged by the damage inflicted, no matter how devastating.
And if the people damaged by these institutions show that they are grievously psychologically injured by these institutions, people won’t connect it to the institutions. They’ll connect it to the nebulous concept of 'mental illness’, and quite possibly try to construct more of the exact same kind of institutions to deal with it. Nobody will notice that the 'increased mental illness’ is correlated with the institutions themselves. Nobody ever does notice.
Nobody catalogues this kind of damage. Few people study it. Few people understand it. Few people can see when and where it is happening. Few people can understand the damage in the first place. Most people who describe the damage won’t be believed.
Worse than merely not being believed:
When we describe the damage inflicted upon us, we are invariably described as ungrateful for the advantages that we had in not being in “a place like the Judge Rotenberg Center”, or not being in “a state institution”, or not being in a place that the world universally recognizes as horrible. Because some of the worst damage is inflicted on us in places that other people see as wonderful.
They will ignore the abundant testimonials by ex-patients who have experienced a wide variety of institutions. There are tons and tons of people who have been to both state and private institutions and found the private ones immeasurably more damaging, because the extra funding means extra ability for staff to mess with the heads of the inmates. There are tons and tons of people who have been to both state institutions and group homes and found the group homes immeasurably worse. There are tons and tons of people who have been to both locked private traditional-institutions, and unlocked residential facilities and group homes, and found the residential facilities and group homes immeasurably worse. There are tons and tons of people who have been physically tortured at one institution, moved to another institution where no apparent physical torture was present and found the second institution immeasurably worse. There are people who have been moved from 'bad’ institutions everyone loves to hate, to wonderful paradise-like 'intentional communities’ where they had, in the eyes of others, everything they could possibly want, and described how much more horrible the intentional communities were, the ones formed with the best intentions of parents and staff.
People ignore this.
People ignore this completely.
No, worse.
People ignore this and they utterly disparage any current or former inmate who says these things. They say we don’t understand what we’re talking about. They say we have no vision. They say we have no comprehension. They say we don’t understand how good we have it.
And it’s even worse for people who have only been to the 'better’ (in the eyes of the public) institutions, and complain about how awful they are. They’re told that they don’t understand how good they have it, only much worse. And they are told they should be grateful for what they had, that they wouldn’t last a day in a 'real institution’.
Hell, i’ve been told I haven’t been in a 'real institution’ just because I was in locked, private, short-stay institutions a lot of the time. (And one private long-stay institution that was on a ranch in the country so it didn’t count as an institution, somehow.) Never mind that, at the time, I was referred to as institutionalized by everyone in the system, including people in these institutions… apparently it’s not an institution until it’s a big-campus state institution.
So people who’ve only been in much fancier, much 'better’ institutions than I’ve ever set foot in, are told this only ten times worse than anything I’ve ever gotten for talking about my experiences. Especially if they’ve been in the pseudo-utopian farm communities, or the 'intentional communities’, or things like Camphill, which are all billed as not institutional somehow even though they totally are. You can’t change an institution by changing the shape of the building and slapping on a new coat of paint.
Anyway.
People who have been through the worst kinds of hell that institutions can provide are not believed, because the worst kinds of hell that institutions can provide are not things that people outside of institutions can understand in any way. People outside of institutions want the blood and gore and skin shocks to prove a place is horrible. They don’t want to understand that there are things more horrible than any of that. They don’t want to understand. They just don’t want to understand.
And people in institutions often don’t want to understand either. I didn’t want to understand what was happening to me. I wanted to believe that now that I wasn’t being tied down and tortured on a daily basis, then I was free. I wanted to believe that really badly. You have a vested interest in believing you’re someplace better now, that things will get better. Sometimes believing things are better is your only defense against how awful things are.
But once I really got out, and I had to deal with the intense emotional and psychological injury I’d been done by all of these places, the truth gradually began to dawn on me. It’s easier to heal from physical wounds than it is from psychological and emotional wounds. It’s easier to heal from the obvious horrors than the hidden horrors that lurk behind the scenes, turning you inside out and upside down, piece by piece, one bit at a time. You can heal, but I can tell you that it’s not being tied down, not physical or sexual assault, not even the horrifying restraint practices I sometimes endured, not the physical pain, that continues to haunt me. I mean, it does, to some degree. Things like that always do. But there are things that have damaged me deeper, in ways I can’t even articulate.
And my friends and I, when we see coverage like this, we’re so afraid.
We’re afraid of the 'better’ institutions.
We’re afraid of the public’s idea of what a 'really bad institution’ is.
We’re afraid of some of the disability community’s idea of what a 'really bad institution’ is.
The JRC is a really bad institution. It’s doing that horrible kind of damage at the same time that it’s doing the physical damage. I can see that. Because it’s got enough funding, it can really fuck with people’s heads.
But you could force the JRC to remove every piece of physical punishment it owns, even restraints. And it would still be horrible. It could even become worse. Because when places can’t focus on hurting your body, they have more time to focus on hurting your mind. And hurting your mind does the most lasting damage there is.
The JRC needs to be shut down, period.
But there are places just as bad that will never be shut down if we use the JRC as the model of what the worst kinds of institution look like.
And there are places even worse that will never be shut down either.
And the worst places in the world, generally, are the same ones that will get propped up by the shutting down of the places the public has the most visceral unpleasant reactions to.
There’s problems in the disability community, too, and until they’re exposed for what they are, there will be a lot of difficulty changing things.
There’s… a lot of disabled people out there who engage in the completely unproductive practice of competing to talk about who stayed in the worst institutions, who had the worst treatment.
Understand that when I’m talking about the worst institutions above, I’m not talking about the worst institutions in any kind of competitive sense. I’m talking about, the worst in terms of the overall amount and kinds of damage done.
I’m not saying that there aren’t people who had worse experiences in state institutions than private ones, or that there aren’t people who had worse experiences in traditional institutions than in pseudo-utopian farm communities. I’m not trying to negate any one person’s personal experience. I’m just trying to explain… things are not what they seem, what everyone believes to be true is not necessarily the truth.
But I’ve seen disabled people who compete with each other about things like this. They say that they, unlike so-and-so, had experience with REAL institutions. Or they, unlike so-and-so, had REAL bad experiences. Or they, unlike so-and-so, were REALLY traumatized by what happened to them. That because they stayed for months rather than days, or years rather than months, their experiences were automatically worse and more deserving of recognition. And there’s… absolutely nothing productive that happens there. That’s ego-driven bullshit. It’s not activism, it’s not helping anyone at all. It’s a competition in self-pity.
So understand, again… when I’m comparing things, I’m doing so not with the aim of undermining any given person’s experiences in their own life. I’m doing so with the aim of showing people things they don’t want to see. I’m saying that what most people says is best, in terms of institutions, is often the worst of all. That often, the most damage is done where it can be seen the least. People have to understand this if they’re going to have any hope of actually reducing damage.
So close the JRC, close it over and over and over again until it’s really damn closed.
But… don’t focus on it to the exclusion of places just as bad or worse that don’t necessarily look as bad on paper.
Understand that your visceral reaction to the idea of skin shocks doesn’t make it the worst possible punishment that can be devised. It’s a pretty diabolical physical punishment. But sometimes – no, more like often or usually – people are damaged worse by things that don’t touch them physically at all.
Your instincts here are not necessarily a good guide to what is truly awful.
And I worry so so much about what will happen to people after it closes.
And I worry so so much about people enduring unspeakable damage, sometimes far worse than skin shock would hurt the same people, in institutions considered progressive and even utopian.
(Trust me, behind just about every utopian institution lies a dystopia beyond imagining. And I worry about the “He loved Big Brother” effect obscuring people’s views of what actually goes on in those places.)
My worst nightmare. And when I say my worst nightmare, I mean, these are actually real actual dreams I have that are worse than any other nightmares I’ve ever had. They vary in content, but they go something like this:
I’m living in a place with lots of other people with disabilities. There are staff there. The staff try to give us every freedom they possibly can, at least as visible from the outside. In one of these nightmares, I’m climbing a tree, outdoors, and totally allowed to do so. But there is someone following along behind me to make sure I don’t get hurt. I feel like a child.
I feel like I’m suffocating. I feel like I’m suffocating in cotton candy. But I can’t point to anything particular that’s wrong. There’s this fog that lurks over the entire place. It’s white, maybe slightly yellow or pinkish white, but mostly white. And it obscures the ability to see anything. And it smells like sweetness. And it feels like death, in the worst possible sense. But you can’t tell where it’s coming from. It’s everywhere and nowhere at once. You can’t see it except in your head, and only out of the corner of your mind’s eye.
Staff are nice to us, in the same way that people are nice to young children. They giggle at us as if we’re cute. They hug us a lot.
They also make us do what they want us to do. It’s not possible to know how they do it. They don’t use physical torture or restraints. They don’t even always use drugging or anything like that. We just… somehow always end up moving in the direction that they want us to move in, so to speak.
When I wake up, I feel an intense longing for the place I just woke up from, just for a minute or two. And then I realize what’s going on, and I want to vomit over and over and over again until the experience is gone from my head forever.
This isn’t the best description, because the problems of these places can’t be described. I once spent six days in a place very much like that, though, and the sickly-sweet-death-fog clung to me for years before I could get it to dissipate.
Nobody will ever get the kind of backing to close a place like that, that they will to close a place like the JRC. Even though a place like that could potentially do more damage than the JRC, after a person is moved from the JRC to a place like that. And if we close the JRC, it’s quite possible idealistic people will be building places like that to take its place.
I can’t explain why it’s as bad as, ,or potentially even worse than the JRC or a place like it.
I can’t.
But it is.
Please trust me on that.
Please understand what I’m trying to say here, because it’s incredibly important, and not enough people are saying it. (And no, it’s not “don’t close the JRC” or “the JRC is good”. Somehow, people are really fond of reducing important, complex things I say to simplistic bullshit like that.)
I’m trying to say this, for the sake of all the people who won’t be helped if we focus only on closing the JRC.
Now I’m going to try to get some sleep again. I hope I don’t have nightmares.
ETA: Before anyone tells me, as they always tell me when I say this, that the Judge Rotenberg Center will call attention to the issue and everything will follow from there and the public will be interested in closing all the other institutions then, later, once we get to the JRC first, that’s not at all how I’ve ever seen it work, not with Willowbrook, not with anything. (And a friend of mine worked in a “good institution” that killed a former Willowbrook client, mind you. She got fired for trying to stop them from killing her. So she survived Willowbrook only to get killed by staff in a 'supported apartment’ group home setting. So… that’s a very specific example for a very specific reason.) The public doesn’t want to close all institutions when they hear of things like this. They want to make good institutions and then forget about the matter. And the good institutions can be worse than the old ones in many ways.