#Mental health and psychiatry

[bioethicists]

it's actually terrifying how quickly the concept of self care (originally a radical concept rooted in the black panther party's efforts to support other black ppl living through racism) became another tool of self-management which is viewed as both a moral obligation + an individual responsibility. businesses + employers + other institutions now easily wield it as a progressive way to say "if you're upset about xyz, make yourself get over it". "we are going to treat you like shit + you need to learn how to cope with that or else you're doing something wrong"

i have seen job listings where "ability to practice self care" was listed as a requirement for employment. as a case worker, we were repeatedly drilled on "self-care" as a response to unconscionably high case loads, traumatizing experiences, dead end job obligations, + poor living conditions due to subpar pay/high stress. my clients would go to appointments regarding their evictions, food insecurity, active domestic violence situations, etc + receive tips on "self care" without any tangible community, legal, or structural support to follow.

everyone absolutely deserves to care for themselves + it is useful to circulate affirmations + advice on how to do this. this should happen within communities, through a sincere concern/love for one another, as a way of helping everyone live the best life possible while we work towards total liberation. it should not be a replacement for caring for one another!!! it should be one of many ways of caring for one another!!!

[not-terezi-pyrope]

"Don't use terms that refer to specific mental illnesses as quirky personality trait metaphors or insults" is something I strongly agree with in every case, except probably the word "narcissist", which did not originally refer to a disorder but has been a descriptor meaning self-centered since the early 1800s, taken from the allegorical character from Greek myth.

It was only coined as a term for a psychiatric diagnosis in the late 1960s, in what was I think we can all agree an incredibly short-sighted and judgemental move typical of the field at the time, and the correct response should probably be to rename the personality disorder to something that isn't a long-established negative descriptor, rather than push to re-define the word to exclusively refer to the disorder (largely impossible, unless we want to collectively forget the several-millenia-old character of Narcissus, or pretend that he somehow has nothing to do with the word that clearly derives from him).

[prokopetz]

All I'm saying is if you can take a DSM label and replace a random word in that label with "haunted" and the provided diagnostic criteria still sound reasonable, there was probably not a great deal of rigour involved to begin with.

[positivelyqueer]

solidarity between people who want to take psychiatric meds to function and those who don’t.

What’s important is that we both have autonomy, informed consent and safe access to treatments we want, and to not be forced, coerced or pressured into those we don’t.

[gor3sigil]

I’m Trans and Insane and I’m doing fine.

[TW Psychosis, transphobia, psychophobia, medication, psych ward]

“Are you sure ?” she asked.

I remember looking back at her in disbelief, because that was certainly a question I never asked her when she came out.

“Why do you ask ?” I say.

“Dude, I’ve seen you go into depersonalization so hard you even thought you were a human soul in a robot vessel and now, you want me to trust you when you say that you, too, are trans ?”

That’s the memory that comes back to me as I fold and put in my bag my psychiatrist’s note attesting that I suffer from gender dysphoria, NOT LINKED to any psychotic symptoms. Here it goes in my folder with my prescription note, an increase - again - of my anti depressants and Xan, and my endocrinologist’s HRT prescription, increased too - finally.

I go to two separate pharmacies to pick up each prescription for two reasons:

There is only one in this godforsaken town that always had testosterone in stock.

I can’t explain to you with words the look you can get when you give back to back, to someone who, despite not being a doctor, works in healthcare, a note for trans HRT and then a note for psychiatric meds.

And I’m lucky, because I’m not taking antipsychotics anymore. Contrarily to what you could think, it doesn’t magically makes the voices and the shadowy people disappear, but it can make a mess of your head pretty bad and my doctor and I both agreed that I didn’t need more damage up here than what I already had. And no, it doesn’t make your delusions vanish magically too: in fact, I was still pretty certain that I was talking to my soul family out here in Argentine telepathically about my mission on Earth, the meds just made it more difficult to understand their voices, but the belief was still solid.

Anyways, I’m back home with the Hoy Grail I fought tooth and nails to get: a letter from the Sacred Council of Mental Sanity also known as Psychiatry that I was, indeed, a bit delulu, but also trans, and that both things didn’t play into each other. My transness wasn’t a delusion, my delusions didn’t have anything to do with being trans.

Or did it ?

Chicken or egg, you know the drill. Did I have my selves fractured before and one of the piece that shattered my brain happened to make me trans or was I just trans with a shitload of traumas in the back that made me insane ?

But don’t worry, at least, trans people when we’re together, we have each other’s back ! Right ?

“Transidentity ISN’T a mental illness !! We don’t DESERVE to be FORCIBLY LOCKED UP and MEDICATED and MADE TO CONFORM FOR OTHER’S SENSE OF SECURITY !!”

Neither do I, RIGHT ?

Oh

Or do I ?

Remember what she said, my girlfriend, right at the beginning ?

How I can’t be trusted about myself when sometimes I don’t even have a sense of self anymore or I have too much selves who fight against each other ?

And what do we say to that ?

Get treatment. Get in-patient. Take medication. And for the love of God, shut the fuck up about it, you’re giving us a bad name.

Because being trans and crazy can’t exist. It’s absurd. You have to fix one of these two things. Choose which jacket I’ll wear, and they call it a straitjacket for a reason it seems, so am I queer or am I insane ?

All I know today is there isn’t a universe in which I’m a trans without any mental illnesses, or mentally ill without being trans. And yet, I can’t tell you how many time I got asked “do you think you’d be trans if you never got through [x trauma] ?”. I. Don’t. Know. I’ll never know. And I deserve just as much agency as you get despite being mentally ill. If you don’t believe in that, don’t come yapping about “liberation for all of us”, but “if one of us is crazy they’ll all think I am too and that can’t happen”.

No LGBTQIAA+ person deserves to be told they need to be put away, to be cured, to be allowed out in the open only if they’re deemed “acceptable” by society’s standards. And no mentally ill people deserve to either.

No trans person should be going through years of counseling to have the access to HRT.

And I shouldn’t have had to threaten my own mother’s life to avoid being locked in an adult psych ward at 14.

If you ever think, for one second, that these two things have nothing to do with one another, you are far removed from history.

To hear queer people say “yeah but some mentally ill people are dangerous !” feels like you don’t even know where you come from.

And if I want to say, that me being trans is linked to me being mentally ill, or at least, that both are connected in a way, all hell breaks fucking loose.

So I’ll explain very carefully.

See, when I was young, my mind got shattered into a thousand of pieces I had to try to glue back on. All these pieces of myself broke further more down the line because I couldn’t catch a fucking break. And now, it happens that the final puzzle does not have the same face it had before. It happens that its shape changed over time, for reasons over the control of all of us who tried to build ourselves back. Now there’s a bigger picture, less pieces, a few other shadows, and me. Built from the shatters. With my own needs and afflictions.

And whoever you are, whatever your agenda might be, I will not let anyone take any agency away from me under the false pretext that I can’t know anything for myself. They say that about children, they say that about minorities, about physically disabled people, about the people they want OUT. And my trans siblings, you know that.

I came out for the first time 7 years ago, to my then girlfriend, who was the one asking the question that is the first sentence of this text. I came out a second time 3 years ago. Been on HRT, had top surgery, had psychotic breaks, got my meds changed, switch therapist.

Because I am trans and crazy. And yet, all these choices I made, I made myself. It didn’t have to be that hard to get the basic care I needed. It didn’t need to be. But it WAS. And I’m part of the lucky crowd of people who had access to out-patient treatment, who never have been locked up in ward, who managed to stay alive through meds withdrawals without medical assistance when I had no therapist.

Be very careful of when you start to put conditions on the rights you think you deserve. Be very, very careful about your definition of sanity and of how it warps the way you see people. When you start to say “I have access to that, but there’s people like X or Y who shouldn’t BECAUSE”, pause and ask yourself what led you to think this way. More often than not, you’ll find yourself playing the same mind games as the ones you swore to fight against, and when it gives them the upper hand, they won’t hesitate to come for you after that.

[pixelpriestess]

moodboard

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[whereserpentswalk]

I 100% believe that the main reason people are scared they'll lose their creativity after they get help isn't because of some sort of self hatred most of the time, but because of the very material reality that the psychological industry exists to make people "normal" rather than happy. Like, when getting "help" means conforming to social standards, and your art is something that actively makes you less normal in the eyes of society, than it makes sense that you see that "help" as a threat to your existence as an artist. Most psychiatrists would openly admit that they'd consider turning an independent creative into an emotionless businessman as a win, why is it suddenly a conspiracy theory when the patient understands that just as well?

[she-is-ovarit]

Wow.

"This tendency to misdiagnose victims was at the heart of a controversy that arose in the mid-1980s when the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association came up for revision. A group of male psychiatrists proposed that "masochistic personality disorder" be added to the canon. This hypothetical diagnosis applied to any person who "remains in relationships in which others exploit, abuse, or take advantage of him or her, despite opportunities to alter the situation." A number of women's groups were outraged and a heated public debate ensued. Women insisted on opening up the process of writing diagnostic canon, which had been the preserve of a small group of men, and for the first time took place in the naming of psychological reality.

I was one of the participants in this process. What struck me most at the time was how little rational argument seemed to matter. The women's representatives came to the discussion prepared with carefully reasoned, extensively documented position papers, which argued that the proposed diagnosis concept had little scientific foundation, ignored recent advances in understanding the psychology of victimization, and was socially regressive and discriminatory in impact, since it would be used to stigmatized disempowered people. The men of the psychiatric establishment persisted in bland denial. They admitted freely that they were ignorant of the extensive literature of the past decade on psychological trauma, but they did not see why it should concern them. One member of the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association felt the discussion of battered women was "irrelevant". Another stated simply, "I never see victims".

In the end, because of the outcry from organized women's groups and the widespread publicity engendered by the controversy, some sort of compromise became expedient. The name of the proposed entity was changed to "self-defeating personality disorder." The criteria for the diagnosis were changed, so that the label could not be applied to people who were known to be physically, sexually, or psychologically abused. Most important, the disorder was included not in the main body of the text but in an appendix. It was regulated to apocryphal status within the canon, where it languishes to this day."

Judith L. Herman, M.D., Trauma and Recovery.

[lottiestudying]

13.09.2024—being discharged home today, looking foreword to being back in my own space. final diagnosis for this admission is adhd and unspecified psychosis

[schizoetic]

They aren't "just" psychiatric wards. Nor are they solely hospitals. They're places where you lose fundamental rights... from using something as simple as a ballpoint pen, as common as mouthwash, a belt, a smartphone, you name it. They're locations where you are isolated from your loved ones. Areas of boredom that make you dive further into your head. Spots where if you fail to comply you'll be sedated, strapped, limited or locked away. But don't get me wrong... people do need psychiatric care. Absolutely. It's just that we need a more compassionate approach to be used more often. One that is more sympathetic, understanding and sensitive to people's specific needs.

All in all there is a lot of advocating to be done still. A massive amount. Psychiatric assistance isn't perfect yet. There is a lot to be improved. So much is still unacceptable.

[is-this-yuri]

the best parts of psychiatry and the mental health field are derivatives of various eastern spiritualities and maybe a bit of stoicism. the rest of it is just a way to get you to become a good little cog in the machine. these two areas of treatment conflict and directly oppose each other, and if you're feeling lost or confused in your mental health journey, that may be the reason

[girlcalledwhatsername]

This shouldn't even be need to be said but don't fucking report people who express being suicidal. I don't care how much you think you're doing it for someone's own good, it does NOT help us it only harms further

READ that AGAIN

You are ACTIVELY harming those people when you try to be a goody two-shoes and tell on them when they get suicidal

Don't fucking report them to social media app features that have the report for self harm option. Don't fucking call a suicide hotline on them. Don't fucking report them to therapists, paychiatrists, cops, controlling parents or partners

It does not matter how uncomfortable it makes you - this isn't ABOUT you - it doesn't matter how much it goes against your cute little saviour complex thinking you're being oh such a wonderful kind heroic person by "saving" someone from themself.

When you report a person to any of those places it heavily risks hospitalisation and incarceration. Where I live it's technically still a crime to attempt suicide, they never overturned the law. And if you think being in a ward might help them - do everyone a favour and go check out the actual conditions in the wards and talk to psych survivors about how they actually are. Otherwise shut up about things you have no experience with.

Everyone should have a right to autonomy, especially bodily autonomy, and you don't have to like what they do with their own body for you to know not to take that away from someone. It's not your place to judge, it's not okay to be moralistic about bodily autonomy suddenly because you can't handle the reality of mentally ill people.

And it's not fucking okay to lock us in and remove us from society just because our disorders are too fucking ugly for you to look at.

If you absolutely have to help just talk to a suicidal person if they're up to it, just ask them what will help, and if you can't do that then leave us the fuck alone you snitches

And don't come at me with the law, if you had to be an ally to mentally ill people, to queer people, to women, to any kind of marginalised people, historically a lot of it has always included standing against the law and with us.

STOP REPORTING US

[4spooniesupport]

[starfishinthedistance]

One thing (among many) that people need to keep in mind when they say things like "oh if you think you have a mental disorder, consult a professional" is that a lot of professionals will not consider evaluating and/or diagnosing you with something you bring up yourself. Especially the more uncommon/complex the disorder is. For things like MDD or GAD you likely won't have that problem, for things like OCD or ADHD they'll likely be suspicious but still comply somewhat, but for things like personality disorders or DID most professionals will completely brush you off and refuse to evaluate you. Because they think you're attention seeking and diagnosis shopping, and that you couldn't possibly have it, even if you haven't done anything to earn that suspicion.

For disorders like that, unless the professional themselves suspects you have it and comes up with that idea themselves, good luck getting evaluated at all. Especially when it comes to disorders most professionals don't even think they'll encounter, like SzPD or DID.

It'd be nice if we lived in a world where you could go see a psych, say "hey I think I have this", and they'd do a proper and fair evaluation for you the way a physical doctor would (moreso should but that's another can of worms).

It just isn't as simple as "ask a professional".

[innerangeltoadlover]

IDEOLOGY : LIFE IN SCHIZOPHRENIA

1. I was inspired to write this because I believe a diagnosis of schizophrenia silences those who suffer from the illness. I wrongly believed after my sister took me to Court in an effort to make me homeless that I would never have to fight for my truth to be heard again. Poor outcomes for patients are linked to expedient treatments - ones which may ignore salient indicators of abuse in order to place mental illness as the cause of behaviour and the only valid truth. There is probably nothing more demeaning and disheartening than telling your therapist about abuse and having it received as a fairytale. My story will show the consequences of skepticism and disbelief in the treatment of schizophrenia which allows for the generalisation of experiences without differentiation. We are better than this.

Sometimes , well often, when we read a memoir there’s an assumption that the person writing has overcome some insurmountable hardship. It motivates us to think that we can do the same – and at some point we , like the author, will walk into the sunset with clarity, humour and perhaps in hand with another. These are the kinds of books I usually stop reading after the first chapter because life , and in particular my life, has not been like this. I want to write about the ugly side of mental illness and the reason why there are so many of us who exist without that longed for happy ending. For those of us who don’t crawl out of the mire our lives are not improved by the application of lipstick or the urging of those who have. Despite our travels through a social media polluted with inspiring memes and motivational scenarios real hardship is present and remains unchanged despite its synonymous pairing with choice.

So my story isn’t going to be particularly uplifting -there has been no victory here – I write because I have to – not because I want to. I’m hoping in writing that I might gain some internal peace over the war my mind wages with me, particularly at night when the lack of distraction makes sleep elusive. I think publishing is a bit of a minefield for people like me. I’m wary of writing anything that resembles some clueless manifesto but at the same time I think it’s important for people with this illness to write something real that isn’t Instagramable and also at nearly 60 I’ve come to view my illness as a valid part of my individuality and I wish to defend it rather than have this unique part of me trampled into submission by doctors who view me like a bacteria in a Petri dish. The truth is this illness is crap but the treatment is crappier and you are trapped in it , well I have been anyway. However the older I get the more I’ve realised that much of the prejudice and stigma linked to this illness has much of its origins in treatment. I used to have a social conscience and was concerned about the plight of my fellow sufferers but it has been chipped away. When my Shrink tells me of advances in care it sort of hangs in the air like a fog in a windowless room. These days I say very little when these professionals say this nonsense which I’ve heard so many times– I’m nearly old but I was young once and I wasn’t born in the Dark Ages- I was hopeful , though that hope has disintegrated. The old mantra “you can’t reason with a schizophrenic” is alive and well in most psychiatrists offices however it is often only the benefit of hindsight that allows us to see the stark relief against the empty rhetoric. It also painfully exhibits that in my case my treatment was inhibited by doctors who could not tell fact from fiction and who had ultimately decided that some lives are worth more than others.