#psych survivor

[dysmotility]

please please please don’t forget to include intellectual disability, psychosis / schizospec disorders, level 2-3 autistics, folks w dissociative disorders, and others with “severe mental illness” from ur conversations about mad liberation.

these are some of the most vulnerable and disenfranchised mad people, and we need to give them a voice.

these are the places where liberation is needed the most

[neuroticboyfriend]

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

[psychabolition]

[yellowyarn]

wish people we're normal about self-harm.

can we please let people exist as self harmers without telling them they are wrong/bad for self harming or not wanting to "recover" (at all or in the expected way)? can we let people talk about it without telling them their too triggering all the time? can we let people and art exist with scars without requiring them to warn everyone that their body is too disturbing for people? can we stop trying to categorise reasons/types of self harm as (more) acceptable and unacceptable? can we stop shaming people for not taking meds or doing therapy?

[stuffieautism]

going through a whole realization right now that the psychiatric system was never trying to actually help me, the treatment for my psychosis and trauma caused me years of harm (and more trauma) without ever solving the issue, every time i spoke up that something was hurting i was shamed and blamed until i internalized it and my reaction to ever being upset or unproductive or uncomfortable or angry or in pain was to feel deep and horrible shame, and the reason i took so long to get better is because the therapy was not doing anything to help me accept myself (i did it on my own) and what actually helped was getting the support i needed for my autism and disability that wasn’t trying to make me “better” but was allowing me to be the person i wanted to be and unlearning the shame that i was taught my entire life, and in summary capitalism is evil i’m going to go play animal crossing and cuddle my stuffed animals

[emohorseboy]

Shelving books at my new job and reacted to this like a vampire next to a stack of bibles

[catboys4recovery]

"grippy sock vacation" "omw to the loony bin" "haha i need a lobotomy" SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!!!! SHUT! THE! FUCK! UP! IF YOU'VE NEVER BEEN FORCED INTO THE HELL THAT IS A PSYCHIATRIC WARD THEN FUCKING QUIT MAKING FUN OF US AND OUR PAIN!!! THAT SHIT IS TRAUMATIZING! IT'S WORSE THAN PRISON! DISABLED PEOPLE HAVING OUR AUTONOMY AND IDENTITY STRIPPED FROM US IS NOT A GOOD SUBJECT FOR YOUR UWU DARK HUMOR YOU ABLEIST SHIT

[cyberabbit]

being hammered with psych violence is great, because every single time you express any emotion ever it's a Symptom™ and you never are allowed to have any genuine expression ever again.

[schizophrenicnatsuo]

Being a psych survivor is just a constant parade of people refusing to respect you, refusing to see your abuse as real, claiming your abuse is unimportant because talking about it might make some people not want to take meds or whatever, prioritizing (presumably) sane doctors' feelings over your safety, telling you that you're not really mentally ill or that you don't really understand how bad mental illness can be, justifying violence against you, and attacking you if you do so much as point out the reality that psychiatric abuse exists

[cthulhu-cat]

Vent Post:

When I was suicidal, I called a hotline:

I was picked up by the police.

One of the officers told me, "You can either come with us or we can drag you there."

I was handcuffed and was driven to the hospital.

Put into a "quiet room" which was the most traumatic experience of my life.

I was given the "choice" of being committed involuntarily or signing a consent form for being "voluntarily" committed.

Was told it was my decision, even though it was coercion.

I felt humiliated being wheeled around on a gurney or wheelchair.

Was put in an unfamiliar environment with no privacy and little to no control over my life.

I fell asleep so they made plans for follow-up treatment without me, the singular thing I could really control in that environment.

Was chemically restrained, uninformed, and only realized it years later (which was recently).

This is unsurprising, since I called a hotline, but I had no idea this would happen. I just had no one else to talk to.

It has been more than three years and it haunts me every single day.

I get flashbacks - pervasive and persistent memories of the traumatic experience and/or re-feeling what I felt during the experience. I get nightmares.

I am so afraid of going back that I cannot trust mental health workers. I do not call hotlines. I do not have a support system anymore.

Going back is my greatest fear, my worst nightmare, and is my personal hell.

I am more suicidal after the experience than before.

[trans-axolotl]

content note: discussion of suicide.

this next monday will be the six year anniversary of losing one of my friends to suicide.

when he died, my high school barely mentioned his death, even though for other students who died by things like car crashes or illness, there were so many public expressions of grief. they believed that having any memorials for a student who died by suicide would encourage other people to die the same way. in their rush to erase the circumstances of his death, they erased the memory of his life.

there are so many things i am angry at that high school about in terms of how they treated mental health (mandatory reporting and collaborating with cops, their refusal to recognize the ways in which that system led to peer-to-peer crisis support, their refusal to recognize the ways that trying to keep each other alive through trial and error was scary and exhausting, carceral disciplinary policies, etc etc etc). but i think one of the things i am still angriest about is the way they enforced shame around his death. it felt like they were retroactively blaming him for the constellation of circumstances that made suicide an option in his life. it felt like they were blaming those of us who missed him and cared about him and wanted to grieve him. it made those of us still there who were actively suicidal feel even more scared about the reaction if we did reach out for help from one of those mythical safe adults.

as an adult now involved in psych abolition/mad liberation work, it makes me so fucking mad to see the ways in which he was discarded by people in authority positions. and the older i get, the more options i have found in my life for making sense of the world and finding healing and community and support which were never available to him because he died when he was 16 and the only things offered to him were a carceral psychiatric system that blamed him for his own fucking death. it feels so incredibly unfair.

i miss him and i think i always will; i can't remember his laugh or the sound of his voice or his favorite color any more and that aches. this grief is so heavy and it feels harder in a new way each year, when i become older than he will ever be. sometimes meeting new comrades or seeing new anticarceral suicide support models hurts because i wish so fucking bad that we had that back then. i remember how close we came to losing even more people that year and i know it is simple fucking luck that i'm still here when he's not.

i remember another letter (never sent) that i wrote to a friend while they were in an ICU bed after a suicide attempt when i didn't know if they would live or not. i have spent so much time in the past 10 years begging for anything to keep me and my friends alive, but even in that letter i knew that there is so much fucking violence that is hidden beneath psychiatric logics of cure and safety that promise a "solution" to suicide. I knew that institutionalization, coercion, and shame would not have helped build a life more liveable for him or **** or any of the people i've loved and lost since.

there needs to be more fucking options for care and support that aren't so incredibly cruel to suicidal people. i know so many people doing incredible work in alternatives, peer respite, a million different frameworks for healing and liberation. but it makes me so mad every day i have to live in a world where there are still people restrained, locked up in psych wards, having all autonomy and personhood taken away from them. knowing there are dozens of people every day getting blamed for their deaths the same way he was blamed for his.

i miss him. i cared so fucking much for him. and he died by suicide, and all of those things are true. he has been dead for 6 years and he lived before that and the people who loved him want to remember all of him; our celebrations of his life should not require hiding the way that he died.

Image description: [1000 origami cranes in all different colors and patterns that are tied together in strings of 25]

(these were the 1000 cranes we made to give to his parents, in memorial and recognition of how much he meant to us.)

[dysmotility]

one of the scariest things about being a psych survivor is that you don’t know what to do anymore when you need help.

hospitals don’t feel safe. residential don’t feel safe. and yet i still have the same mental health issues that caused me to seek care in the first place, plus the additional trauma.

i’m having a hard time right now. i wish i could just “get help” but it’s not that simple anymore. these programs just chew you up and spit you out, and i don’t want to go through that again. but it’s terrifying ti be on your own.

[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.

[dissociacrip]

unsure if i rly have any right to call myself a psych survivor when my experience w institutionalization was only "violent" in the barest sense of coercive circumstances and otherwise like, feeling caged/stripped of agency/punished for my attempt; i think more about the assault & abuse that has happened to other people, and idk if it's really comparable. does anyone have thoughts on this?

[yellowyarn]

Sometimes i wonder what the people at the psychiatric hospital did with the cords from my pants. i wonder what they do with all the tings they take from us. do they just get thrown away like they are nothing? i cried over losing the cords from my favorite frog pajamas i wonder if the nurses knew i would cry about that.

[intersexfairy]

they put me on this mood stabilizer and i am much more unstable than i was now. it's almost like being locked up for 3 weeks and near totally disconnected from the outside world fundamentally changes a person