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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. 

9:48am August 20, 2014

lichgem:

‘Chill, it’s just the fur’

I have never wanted to punch anyone so much in my life

Considering cats are covered in fur, is there some sort of zone where they would finally find it unacceptable to set a cat on fire? What the fuck were they thinking? That cat had to get emergency treatment. ‘Just the fur,’ fucking asshole.

This story is disturbing on multiple levels, so be warned.

I was living in a residential facility for teens in the psych system.  At first, it was only for teens who had labels of severe enough mental illness that otherwise we were going to be in a state institution.  But they stopped being able to get enough of such people, so they decided to start taking parents’ obnoxious kids off their hands, for a fee.  Which usually meant bullies who didn’t give a shit about anyone but themselves.  Which is a horrible bunch of people to mix in with people with, say, severe schizophrenia or bipolar or autism.  Which were the sort of labels most of us had coming in.  (They tended to change our labels as we came in, so I had an autism diagnosis but it was changed to “infantile psychosis with childhood paranoid schizophrenia starting in adolescence, caused by bad mothering”.  Because they were psychoanalytic douchebags who were throwbacks to the seventies.  But anyway.)

So one day I opened my door and it was surrounded by the newer, bully kids.  And I smelled what smelled like burning hair.  And they said “We set the cat on fire.”  And the staff were trying to tell me this was impossible, but one of my biggest triggers ever is cat abuse so I was already flipping out and they knew it.  They had burnt their own hair with a lighter to make the smell.  And they were talking all about how badly the cat had died, and going into gruesome details, and stuff.

And they were going after my roommate, too.  I forget what they were telling her.  She had a delusional disorder and believed her family was part of the Irish mafia, and they were using that against her somehow.

At the time, I still identified myself as non-human, specifically I called myself an elf.  And right when they’d gotten me as freaked out as they could possibly get me, they started saying “When a cat dies, an elf dies next!”

At which point the only decent staff in the entire place, took one look at what was going on, scooped up me and my roommate, and drove us to the other house for the night.  (There were two houses, down the road from each other.)  He did his best to convince us that they were just fucking with our heads and that no animals had been harmed, but I couldn’t believe him until I saw the cat the next day.  And my roommate didn’t look too sure of herself either, she kept muttering about how she’d have her family kill the families of these other kids.

At any rate, this is a problem I saw over and over and over in my time in the system:  Places would have kids who were very vulnerable to being abused, and to make more money, they’d also take in kids who were being kicked out of their parents’ homes or their regular schools for victimizing other kids.  And they’d put us in the same schools, or the same institutions, together, and it would be the perfect environment to make sure the actually disabled kids were victimized by the kids whose only disability labels were basically fancy words for “habitual bully” and “asshole”.

But that was one of the worst nights of my life, thinking that they’d killed a cat in such a horrible way and were coming after me next.

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.

12:43pm April 25, 2012

What you probably don’t know about some caregivers.

Please, before you read this post, it’s really important to me that you first read I don’t have to allow people who hurt me to use pieces of my brain for their own purposes. Because this is my first attempt to write about something extremely serious while avoiding that dark, focused state I described. If at any point during this post, you end up feeling like that, then try to resist it. Because this topic is scary, but feeling like you’re trapped in a world so horrible and terrifying that the good things about it are a long way off if they exist at all? That plays right into the hands of the kind of people I am going to write about.

The reason I have decided to write about this is that very few people we aware of it. Some people work out parts of it but few people work out all of it. I found it in an obscure, out of print book called Violence and Abuse in the Lives of People with Disabilities: The End of Silent Acceptance? by Dick Sobsey. It’s one of those books that cites sources several times a page, and it’s out of date but as far as I know it’s the only book of its kind. Any bolded parts are mine:

These five considerations for training and service delivery provide important directions for law enforcement. They also suggest two interrelated areas of concern. First, these five stated considerations arise from the perspective of family violence; however, many people with disabilities are victims of institutional violence, which has its own unique considerations. Therefore, police need training relevant to institutional, as well as to family, violence. Second, successful police work will require an understanding of the nature and dynamics of human services systems and the social realities encountered by people with disabilities, as much as an understanding of disabilities themselves. Law enforcement must be prepared to address the special needs of people immersed in the service system and the unique features of conducting an investigation in service environments.

For example, an investigation of 29 highly suspicious infant deaths in Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children led to the quick arrest of a registered nurse for the murder of the most recent apparent victim (Bissland, 1984). The nurse was charged because she had been assigned one-to-one supervision of an infant whom the police felt certain had been murdered, and they believed that she was the only one who had the opportunity to commit the crime. However, more thorough investigation revealed that the nurse who had been charged was not working on the dates of some of the most highly suspicious deaths and had been relieved on lunch and breaks by other staff on nights that children in her care had died. The murder charges were dropped, and a civil suit for wrongful arrest soon followed. In the end, the probable murder of at least 8, and probably as many as 29, children by Digoxin poisoning went unpunished.

According to Bissland (1984), some of the complexities that thwarted police were a lack of knowledge of hospital procedures, apparent reassure to make a quick arrest so that the hospital could return to its normal routine, and an apparent lack of cooperation on the part of some hospital staff. For example, police were told that critical records of nursing assignments at the time of the deaths had been destroyed, but the missing records resurfaced long after the investigation had gone astray. This pattern of less than enthusiastic cooperation from within institutions is not unique.

Police in Grand Rapids, Michigan, were more successful in securing the conviction of two nurses in the suffocation of six nursing home patients; however, a similar pattern of institutional resistance plagued their investigation (Cauffiel, 1992). Available evidence indicates that similar serial murders in hospitals and nursing homes are likely to be as common, if not more common, than serial sex slayings or thrill killings (e.g., Hickey, 1991) that are typically given widespread public and professional attention. Despite this fact, little research has been conducted on the part of law enforcement to develop profiles of these medical murderers or specific investigative procedures for the institutional settings where these offenses occur.

Better success in policing institutional offenses can only occur when the principles of community-based law enforcement are adequately applied to the ethnographically distinct communities and cultures of hospitals, residential schools, group homes, and other service delivery systems. Police must understand the internal dynamics of service institutions to perform their job effectively within these environments. Before this can be accomplished, police, and society in general, must identify this as a law enforcement priority.

Often this commitment appears to be lacking, and abuse and violence in institutions remain hidden or are rationalized. For example, in the case of the Grand Rapids nursing home murders described above. Cauffiel (1992) quotes Ken Wood, the estranged husband of one of the convicted killers, saying:

How much life did she really take? All of the victims weren’t even living. They enjoyed nothing, experienced nothing and were going to die. The families at the time of death were relieved at the end of suffering … I know they had no right to play God … but when you decide how much of her life should be taken or lost to prison, shouldn’t it be equal to what was taken from their victims? (p. 485)

Although these were the words of a husband pleading for leniency for his wife, Cauffiel (1992) suggests this was “a view not uncommon in Grand Rapids, in Michigan, or in America, among those who became familiar with the coverage of the Alpine Manor murder case” (p. 485). This view contrasts sharply with the reality that most of the patients killed were not particularly debilitated and perpetrator Cathy Wood’s own statement that “we did it because it was fun” (quoted in Cauffiel, 1992, p. 254). Such rationalizations that trivialize serious crimes against people with disabilities can only be seen as denying their right to equal justice. Progress toward reducing risk of violence and abuse for people with disabilities quirks that equal protection of the law is applied to all members of society.

Elsewhere in the book it describes people who deliberately go into caregiving fields for the purpose of finding easy victims. So not only that. But this kind of serial killer is at least as common, probably more common, than the kind you hear about on the media, that popular culture is obsessed with. Some of them are suspected of killing hundreds of people. And yet the media doesn’t give a shit and neither does law enforcement. So you never hear of it.

You do hear of some people like this though, just hidden in various ways under other guises. Many of the most famous figures in the right to die movement were either serial killers or wannabe serial killers, people who clearly got off on death, rather than people who had any ethical interest in the subject. And you can bet there’s more hiding in plain sight that we don’t know about. I know someone who is almost certain his significant other, active in that movement and obsessed with serial killers, has killed people in their job as a nurse. But lacking evidence he can’t do anything about it. Mind you, even if I don’t agree with them, I know there’s plenty of people in that movement because of a sincere commitment to their personal ethics. But it takes naïveté or wishful thinking not to notice that some of the leaders are really creepy.

And not only all that. But even though this is known to be a big problem, the media doesn’t care much and neither does law enforcement. Which is about typical when any of the “wrong kind” of people get killed on a regular basis, whether it’s disability or something else.

But what this means is that disabled people have plenty of reasons to be wary of our caregivers. I thought of posting this because someone responded to a part of my post where I said I refused to be alone with a caregiver after they know they’ve been fired. This sort of thing is exactly why. You never can exactly predict who will become abusive, whether it’s emotional abuse, physical abuse, or even killing. I found that out the hard way in institutions, where I am absolutely certain that some of the people who worked there had actually succeeded in killing other people even if they didn’t succeed with me.

But as I said before. Being completely terrified about this only plays into the hands of the people who do it. Be aware. And be careful. And take precautions. But don’t let this sort of people have control over your emotions, because that doesn’t help anybody.

Please tell people these facts though. Because few people seem to even realize that not everyone in healthcare or caregiving professions is there for good reasons. Let alone how many serial killers there have been. One group of caregivers is even suspected of 49-300 murders according to this book. That puts them up there among the worst of other kinds of serial killers.

It must seem perfect to such a person, to get to kill people without as much chance of getting caught, and even if you do get caught people may still make you out to be a hero. People die all the time in nursing homes, even people whose conditions shouldn’t be terminal. That’s taken as normal by people who equate disability with being halfway towards death anyway. In most kinds of institutions colleagues will cover for you – that’s how you get so many deaths from heart problems and seizures in people who didn’t have heart disease or epilepsy. And lots of people think disability is worse than death so killing us is doing us a favor. Or at least they’ll excuse it on the grounds of caregiver stress and burnout. And the cops don’t investigate much anyway, since we aren’t valuable to them. It all adds up to a situation where any serial killer who truly didn’t want to get caught, would jump at a chance to take that kind of job.

So let people know about this. Let people know it happens at at least the rate of other kinds of serial killing if not more. And take precautions with even caregivers you trust. But don’t get trapped in fear or despair, that’s what such people want of us. It helps them, not us.