#cause i had never been anywhere but psych wards b4

[trans-axolotl]

thinking a lot today about the different ways that carceral logic shows up in the different arenas of treatment in psychiatry, and something i keep coming back to is the societal perception of eating disorders. this is absolutely a myth, but society views eating disorderes as a thing that only thin white women get. and i think that's foundational to the structure of eating disorder treatment across many levels of care, but especially at higher levels of care. this is fucked for a lot of reasons, because it makes treatment so inaccessible to people of color, trans people, fat people, disabled people, and the amount of bigotry you're going to face in almost all treatment centers is really preventing people from even accessing treatment. or like coming into treatment and being the only person of color in the entire place--that's also another barrier to treatment, and the fact that treatment is so fucking expensive and lots of treatment centers don't accept medicaid, fucking over disabled and poor people. i could go on listing reasons for a long time about how the eating disorder recovery industry is really fucked up and excludes many marginalized groups, but also what i'm thinking about is comparing ed residential treatment to psych wards. treatment is carceral in both places, but there's a big fucking difference in the way treatment is structured in ed residential treatment, even comparing ed treatment to other types of residential treatment. when they know that most of their clients are going to be white women who are more well off, there's a lot of very particular mindsets and structures set up that reflect that particular dynamic of paternalism + fragility. whereas psych wards are incarceration and function almost entirely as social control + have a lot more association with schizophrenia, psychosis, suicide + with those diagnoses come the whole racist history of how those diagnoses changed from being like. like in many ways i think eating disorders are treated now, the way schizophrenia used to be treated back when it was thought of as like, melancholia for housewives + before "protest psychosis" became the new drapetomania. this feels very relevant to any analysis of like, looking at carcerality as a whole throughout the full specturm of psychiatric institutions to understand how ed treatment really does come with a lot more privileges and different underlying assumptions if you're white in ed treatment. the fact that in my residential center there is no forced drugging, no isolation rooms, no restraint of any kind, and also some of the dynamics of the fact that i can tell a lot of employees here are getting exploited by their bosses in terms of unfair working conditions + probably wage theft. and although residential treatment still operates under carceral logic and i fully believe that many things happening here are very much violations, it feels important to understand how instituional racism is shaping these different instituions + to understand some of the reasons why ed res is so vastly different from the psych ward while still very similiar, + also really understanding how my own white privilege is affecting my experience in res.