#/ psychiatric abuse

[sickness-stricken]

I know I clown on Taylor Swift for using a “psych ward aesthetic” but if I’m being honest I feel like it’s a broader issue among writers trying to talk about psych abuse. Even if it’s not actively trying to be romanticized, it bothers me that every book I read where abuse in the ward is a prominent theme, it’s always the same idea: takes place before the 60s, shock therapy, the character strapped to the bed with leather belts in a straight jacket, etc.

It unintentionally frames psych abuse as this thing of the past and I don’t fuck with it. Like… you know this kinda stuff is happening now, right? Sure, I was never subjected to shock therapy, but I was restrained and I did have meds forced on me. But I guess that mental image doesn’t invoke quite the same kick.

[neuroticboyfriend]

involuntary hospitalization should be considered kidnapping. or abduction. that is all.

[hyperlexichypatia]

I'm not, generally speaking, a fan of punishment as a solution to social problems. Punishment is often overly harsh, ineffective as a deterrent, and doesn't solve the actual problem. The punitive mentality is more focused on making sure the "bad guys" "don't get away with it" than on actually solving the problem.

But I get a lot more worried when people talk about "alternatives to punishment", or when they support their proposed solutions because "it's not punishment."

Because what that means, in practice, is "I'm conceptualizing this form of coercive control as 'not punishment,' and therefore not subjecting it to the rigor, due process, or evidentiary standards of punishment."

The U.S. loves punishment. It's one of our favorite national pastimes. But we do have, both legally and culturally, some limitations on punishment, at least in theory. Punishment isn't supposed to be "cruel and unusual." It's not supposed to be inflicted without "due process of law." You're supposed to be convicted by a jury of your peers.

But if you call it "not punishment," none of that matters!

You can force people to register under a law that didn't exist when they committed their crimes, because it's "administrative," not punitive.

You can subject disabled people to shocks similar to a cattle prod -- which would surely be cruel and unusual punishment -- but it's okay, because it's not "punishment," it's a "treatment" called an "aversive" (that's therapist for "punishment").

You can have people locked up and forcibly drugged solely because they can't afford housing, but it's okay, because it's "help," not "punishment."

Police can kill people in cold blood -- judge, jury, and executioner -- and it's fine, because it's "self-defense," not "punishment," even if they argue after the fact that the victim "deserved it."

It's also a matter of cultural attitudes. If you said "The punishment for trespassing should be life in prison," or "The punishment for loitering should be permanent loss of the right to control one's body, money, or living space," or "The punishment for turnstile-jumping should be lifelong forced ingestion of drugs that numb basic cognitive functions," most people would think this was horrific, much too harsh a punishment for a relatively minor crime.

But if you change it to "Instead of jailing and punishing unhoused people with mental health issues, we should respond to their minor crimes by Getting Them Help, like institutionalization, conservatorship, or outpatient commitment," people now think this is completely reasonable.

Even being the victim of a crime can get someone not-punished far more severely than the perpetrators are "punished." People might serve jail time for financial fraud, but not usually a life sentence. Being the victim of financial fraud, however, can lead to a life sentence of institutionalization -- which fraud investigators have cited as a barrier to getting victims to report fraud. I personally know of multiple disabled young adults who were afraid to report being the victim of sexual assault or other kinds of assault because they knew that if they reported it, the perpetrator might or might not face some kind of punishment, but they would definitely face some type of "not-punishment" coercive control, like forced therapy, forced drugging, supervision, or having to leave school.

You want a society with less punishment? Me too. But only if you acknowledge that "punishment" includes all forms of coercive control. If you do something to someone against their will, if you restrict someone from their right to live as they choose, that's a punishment, regardless of whether you call it that.

[somebodytolove31]

I have never been to a psychiatric ward or a mental hospital in general (outside of therapy sessions) but it bugs the hell out of me that like 9 out of 10 of the people I know who went to one come out with more trauma and problems, like idk about you but if I went to a place where I was meant to get better from my mental issues and I came out with more of them I would sue. Why is this allowed

[crimeronan]

pretty much everyone positions modern AU philip wittebane as a hyperconservative westboro baptist style cult leader for obvious reasons, which i think he 100% could be, like. that's not a stretch.

HOWEVER.

in my heart of hearts. if you REALLY want to preserve the Horror that is belos and How He Is in the canon....

....then. modern AU philip wittebane is a christian psychologist.

[worldwidewet]

Can I have advice on how to advocate for myself?

I am one of the alters in a system, I think I front the most often after the host, and I have met a mental health professional I feel very unsure of.

I have developed some skills to stop and analyze situations before I act thanks to a DBT skill course, but I have currently only come to the "stop" and "notice I feel bad" stage in this analysis. Anything else feels fuzzy and difficult.

On one hand, he seems like he is genuinely interested in our general wellbeing.

On the other hand, in my opinion, he seems to be pushing towards integration without having us on board with that. I understand this is not necessarily bad, and that I am in a strong emotion right now, but it is setting off all of my alarm bells. I feel like he isn't listening. I feel like he doesn't understand. I feel like he is pushing us to talk about ourselves in a very specific way as to go towards integration. Some things that I can't put into words makes me feel like we are like a project to him, a problem to be solved, and that disagreeing would make him personally upset. I recognize logically that I could be wrong, and that my impulse to change care provider is just that, an impulse guided by a strong emotion.

Okay, therapy speak nuance over. Cancelling therapy forever. In self defence...

Basically, how do I figure out if this is a real threat or a perceived threat and how I should act in order to get to a place that is actually safe?

(I'm tagging this with different related tags in order to find help, I'm not claiming all these tags apply to me)

[beguines]

Revisionist historians of medicine are keen to interpret psychiatry's enthusiastic involvement in the sterilisation and mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people labelled as "mentally ill" during the Third Reich (1933–1945) as an aberration, a perversion of correct medical practice (see, e.g., Birley 2000; Burleigh 1994; Lifton 2000). The official line is forwarded that German psychiatry was progressive, humane, and on the cutting edge of mental health care and treatment until the Nazis came to power in 1933. Hitler's National Socialism then manipulated the institution for its own—ultimately genocidal—ends. Thus, it is argued that a "Nazification" of German psychiatry took place, where the appropriate medical values for the care and welfare of the patient were replaced by a fascist ideology. While there were a small minority of power-hungry, racist psychiatrists who were happy to follow Hitler's orders and send mental patients to the gas chambers, such scholarship suggests that most within psychiatry remained morally opposed to and critical of the regime. Certainly, this version of events is reassuring for workers in the current mental health system, yet it is far from the truth. Belatedly, established figures in German psychiatry such as Michael von Cranach have recently admitted that the psychiatric genocide was "not, as we liked to think in the first decades after the war, a small group of Nazi criminal doctors, but the majority and the elite of German psychiatrists." These seldom uttered admissions from within the profession echo the words of another psychiatrist, Frederic Wertham, who stated of the profession's activities during the Third Reich,

"The tragedy is that the psychiatrists did not have to have an order. They acted on their own. They were not carrying out a death sentence pronounced by someone else. They were the legislators who laid down the rules for deciding who was to die; they were the administrators who worked out the procedures, provided the patients and places, and decided the methods of killing; they pronounced a sentence of life or death in every individual case; they were the executioners who carried out or—without being coerced to do so—surrendered their patients to be killed in other institutions; they supervised and often watched the slow deaths."

"[H]ard though this may be to wrap one's head around," states Burstow, "psychiatrists can be reasonably theorized as architects of the Holocaust." This claim was supported by observers at the post-war Nuremberg trials, including Leo Alexander who stated that psychiatry's operations in the 1930s could be understood as "the entering wedge for exterminations of far greater scope in the political program for genocide of conquered nations and the racially unwanted."

Bruce M.Z. Cohen, Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness

[mamabearwonders]

psych wards are just places where it's legal to abuse folks who are seen as less than by society. if you fight back against an abusive nurse or psychiatrist, they extend your stay or sedate you. patient is always blamed. you can't even text for help. you basically have to lie to get out. like you're surviving a dystopian novel.

[sickness-stricken]

If you look up what the woman who the Last Great American Dynasty is about and what she did with her mentally ill daighter....

Swift has a really dodgy history with mental health and abliesm

Okay so I did some digging and just a general trigger warning for talks of sui (in pretty gorey detail might I add) because holy shit

For context, The Last Great American Dynasty is about a debutante named Rebekah Harkness. Edith was her daughter.

This is an excerpt from quite an old article, around 1988, but the fact they labelled a young woman clearly struggling as a “failed sui****” is fucking horrendous Jesus Christ

Hey Taylor, you wanna talk about being raised in an asylum while living in a mansion? A mansion YOU now own, just to clarify? Edith would be a good place to start.

[neuroticboyfriend]

not that people who've been to the ward are immune from being pro-psych, but if you've never been to a psych ward*, i sincerely don't want to hear about how psychiatry/psychology is good because you've had such a good experience with X provider, or X medication saved your life. *i also don't want to hear about how the forced treatment was what you needed or how the ward you went to let you have your cellphone etc. etc. i genuinely do not want to hear it.

like. the first hospitalization traumatized me so bad, i became dangerously delusional, was re-hospitalized, and sent to state. when they transferred me, i was strapped down into a gurney at all points on my body, *head and neck included*, and loaded onto an ambulance. my parents lost most of their parental rights; i was a ward of the state and had near zero rights. when i got there, they made me choose if, "if necessary," if i wanted to be wrangled down and forcibly injected with a sedative... or wrangled down and locked in a padded room all by myself (but at least i had a choice, right?). i signed consents and paperwork that i did not fucking understand. then i was told i'd be locked inside for 2 straight weeks (which yes, they followed through with). the psych ward was remote, nothing but barbed fences and trees around us. cant even see the sun through the heavily tinted windows. that was the *start* of the stay. i'm sure you can imagine nothing good came after.

so like. if you walk out of a place like that thinking it was good for you, then i can only imagine how traumatized you are and i hope you heal someday. but if you've never faced the destruction of your autonomy like that and go around being like "oh this is good actually" then shut the ever living fuck up.

[iphigeniacomplex]

My name is Camille. I am a born transgendered woman. When I was a child I said that I was a girl but the world called me a "faggot." Under the sky of pain called psychiatry I was locked away for many years and had the requisite tortures: the terror of electroshock, my bones broken, my body drugged and raped. I was not raised as a gender but as a bug of a child to be smashed. I am nobody's victim. My body belongs to me & so does my holy brain. I am the ghost of the untapped conscience of shrinks, a lurking justice, a part of the gathering truth that is rising with a common voice out of the wake of their evil blue fire. Transsexuals are born into the book of labels. We may be genetic but we are not genetically defective sub-human creatures. By the very nature of our difference, the independence of our alien spirituality, and the passion of the power of our will, we are a threat to the ruling delusions of the mental death profession. No one has our permission to debate the validity of our existence, to define our reality, to dismiss our pain, and to name us. We name ourselves. If you could look into the collective genetic memory of your humanity you would find us in the rivers of your dreams, for we were always here, we were here when Earth was a green spirit. We were a natural occurrence in a singing world. In times of absolute horror and destruction I wish for you all the transformational creativity of an utterly beautiful madness, and I offer you the blessing of a holy human freak.

"Why A Transgendered Woman Calls for Psychiatry's Destruction" by Camille Moran, published in the Fall 1993 issue of Dendron.

[unstablemotions]

Thinking about how different my life would have been if I had been treated for my adhd at any point and that I might have had graduated with my masters degree and practicing as a licensed psychologist, have a stable social life and a routine keeping my body cleaned, fed and healthy and my home tidy and clean

I will forever mourn the youth I could have had. The life I might never have. I am trying to stay alive and fight to get help, but my body is tired of treading water and the black bottom of the sea is feeling more and more like peace

[hyperlexichypatia]

The DSM can and will be replaced by something with a better design.

I know.

They will come up with a new, "improved," reworded classification system for which people should be categorically disbelieved about their own subjectivity and which people should be subjected to coercive control "for their own good." And people will say it's "better" and "more scientific," and people will still be categorically disbelieved about their own subjectivity and subjected to coercive control.

And there will probably be several more rounds of rewording and reworking and Really For Real It's Better This Time, trying to narrow down and perfect exactly how people should be categorically disbelieved about their own subjectivity, and exactly which people should be subjected to coercive control "for their own good."

Until we eventually overthrow the entire system and abolish the entire premise.

[pinkxcloudz]

many years ago i told my friends (at the time) that i was delusional and actively experiencing delusions. they said they couldn't help and to talk to a doctor. i told my psychiatrist and she said i'm not delusional because "being delusional is believing in things that clearly aren't real" even though that's what i was going through, and even told her as much.

it was a year later, after she retired, that i got access to my records and saw she had diagnosed me with major depressive disorder with psychotic features. i was 14 and had been seeing her since i was about 11 and she lied the entire time. it took even more time for me to be diagnosed as schizospec (this year).

so never tell a psychotic person to "just tell a doctor". if they have genuinely never seeked psychiatric help before, it may, may work. even then, psychs and therapists often will not or cannot help you, malicious intent or not. a lot of psychotic people have been abused by mental health 'professionals', and seeking help is a death sentence in some cases. we are forced on drugs that can have major symptoms, are lied to about the risks, aren't believed, and further abused and neglected by physical health doctors.

calling 988 sometimes doesn't help either if your symptoms are severe and you can't take care of yourself- they will send the police.

we have to carefully pick what to say to avoid being hospitalized, and some of us are hospitalized simply because we're psychotic.

while i do not expect anyone to be able to help someone actively experiencing psychosis- you should educate yourself about the history of psychotic people, past and present. you should ask us how we need to be supported. you should stop recommending to go to a doctor. we know the risks, that's why we don't go.

[selfmedblves]

Went to a place expecting care and experienced the worst psychiatric abuse of my life.

I got restrained and tortured. I was also mocked for wondering about ssri side effects. This is why I don't trust psychiatrists. This is why I avoid a lot of mental health services. I shouldn't have to endure more trauma in services that claim to want to help mentally ill people. We need to face that psychiatric abuse is still a thing, as unfortunate as it is.

This is not a mistake though. Psychiatry is an often abusive field as psychiatrists act like codescending, know-it-alls who play with their patient's lives for a paycheck. Patients who question their psychiatrists are often faced with ridicule and gaslit about their concerns.

I deserve to be informed about any medications I might be put on. There is a reason I trust street drugs to solve my problems more than psychiatrists. Drugs make me feel good and I know how they'll make me feel. Psychiatry has only harmed me.

[crimeronan]

i absolutely get the fantasy inherent in those posts about wanting house to be your doctor (it's about being diagnosed in a week by a team of specialists who run exhaustive batteries of tests and take your medical mystery seriously and actually know things about medicine unlike the average GP) but they also make me cringe because like. you guys... you wouldn't... you wouldn't be the patient of the week. none of you would be the patient of the week. unless you're literally already so close to death that you have organs shutting down and are actively admitted to the hospital, you would NOT be a patient of the week. if you can ever get out of bed without collapsing then you are not the patient of the week. if you can breathe then you are not the patient of the week. if run-of-the-mill doctors keep telling you to exercise and take NSAIDS and stop bitching then you are not the patient of the week.

what you ARE is one of the comic relief clinic patients. you come into the hospital complaining about how bad you hurt and the show takes great pains to illustrate that you're a whiny lying faker with a booboo whose mommy coddled you too much because you're from an entitled generation of able-bodied pissbabies. the audience hates you for wanting medical help for your ailments. you are resoundly mocked for the entire episode and house is eventually validated when it turns out that combining ibuprofen and acetaminophen makes you capable of doing one entire dish in your sink, so you're an exaggerating asshat who's monopolizing the time that could be spent on REAL problems.

at MOST -- at VERY MOST -- you exist as a foil to make house angry, in which he'll throw something at the wall and scream at you about how you should just get addicted to vicodin to manage your pain and then maybe you'll actually HAVE something to bitch about. and if you're not willing to do that then it's proof that you weren't all that fucking sick to begin with. (50/50 this is portrayed as a negative interaction and a sign that house is Getting Worse but he won't suffer any social or licensing consequences for it because you don't matter.)

you are not the patient of the week. you are not going to be the patient of the week. real life is full of doctors who grew up on house md and who think they ARE house md and this is how they're going to treat you, because you are not the patient of the week.

so in real life you absolutely need to look up healthcare reviews online before you book a doctor's appointment and NEVER go to ANYONE with ANY negative reviews from ANY chronically ill patient. PLEASE.