#psychiatric exploitation

[dahliaduvide]

I've been digging into the life of Jeremy Wade Delle, beyond just the day of his death that is immortalized in the Pearl Jam song we all know so well.

One thing Jeremy Delle and I have in common is that we both spent time in a psych hospital in our teenage years. We both ended up in adolescent wards of large chain hospitals. My experience wasn't completely negative, but I don't think it helped anyone but my mother.

Jeremy Delle was hospitalized in April of 1990 after what is believed to have been his first suicide attempt.

His parents put him in Timberlawn Psychiatric Hospital where he started seeing a doctor that continued to treat him until his death by suicide on January 8, 1991. He actually had completed a session with his doctor the afternoon before he died.

The redacted police report gives only a small amount of information about the doctor that Jeremy Delle was seeing. His name is given as Dr. Bob H####, and as Dr. Robert H#### on a card that the police found in Mr. Delle's wallet. This card lists two phone numbers for the doctor. The first if the general number for the Timberlawn facility, but the other number is likely a direct line to the doctor's office.

The information given in the July 1990 list of hospitals printed in D Magazine, a local Dallas publication, about Timberlawn is "4600 Samuell Blvd, Dallas. 381-7181. Psychiatric hospital; 232 beds; offers chemical dependency treatment, occupational therapy, and psychiatric unit". That's the same as the first phone number listed on the card on Jeremy Delle's wallet card. The second is 381-6327.

Without a last name, I couldn't search for any other mentions of the doctor in public records (and I didn't find anything relevant using the phone number), but there were certainly a few articles about Timberlawn. More than a few, I had to winnow them down to the ones that seemed most relevant to what Jeremy Delle might have experienced during his stay there.

This article from June 1990 explains the sudden growth in the industry in Texas. The financial motivations behind it have very distinct consequences that the article outlines: patients rarely stay longer than their insurance foots the bill.

When the money runs out everyone- adult, teenager, addict, seems to be miraculously cured.

There are several claims of misconduct by care providers throughout the time surrounding Jeremy Delle's stay at Timberlawn.

May 1988: A Dallas woman is admitted to the substance abuse program at Timberlawn. In February 1996, when she is in her early 30s, she alleges misconduct by her doctor during her stay at Timberlawn.

May 1991: In March 1993, a patient alleges he was pursued by his doctor after seeking treatment at Timberlawn for depression after the end of his marriage. He also alleges that she initiated an inappropriate romantic and sexual relationship which lasted from November 1991 to February 1992.

Obviously, Mr. Delle would have been, or at least should have been, housed in separate adolescent areas from any adult patients, but he might have seen the same doctors. Particularly because he was treated for substance abuse. I have some doubts about whether he was actually using any drugs or not, but I'll put that together in another post with some supporting documents.

I also found these court documents from 2009 relating to a patient that was hospitalized in the Timberlawn facility as a minor. She claims to have been raped by an older male patient due to inadequate supervision of the patients by staff and a lack of private space available to patients. No dates or ages are given, however, so it's impossible to know if this happened within the early 90s. However, if Jeremy Delle had survived until 2009 he would have been in his mid-20s, which is when childhood traumas begin to be understood by a maturing mind.

I'm not a lawyer and couldn't even pretend to be one on the internet, so I won't claim to understand anything about what is happening, but I can read through it and capture other facts about who, where, when, etc. If anybody with a better understanding of USA or Texas state law wants to shed some light on this that would be helpful.

I wasn't able to find any further information about the progress or outcomes of these cases, so I've chosen not to include the names of the staff accused, but they are included in the media coverage if anyone would like to search through news databases that aren't freely available online. I can only research the documents I can find, and unfortunately I don't have access to any academic databases at the moment, either.

My personal opinion is that whatever started Jeremy Delle down a troubled path started before he got to Timberlawn and the care of Dr. H.

I do think this line of research is important for understanding whether or not Mr. Delle received effective or adequate care as his mental illness spiraled out of control.

It strikes me that these stories about Timberlawn confirm and debunk some of the conceptions we have about this particular young man's life from the song written about him in 1991 by Eddie Vedder and Jason Ament. Jeremy Wade Delle was failed by everyone in his life with the power to help him as he started to sink under the waves of his illness. But his parents didn't ignore it completely, they tried to get him help. Maybe not when his illness first manifested, but as soon as his first 'cry for help' came in the form of a suicide attempt, they put him in a hospital that was known to be the best in their area. One with a developing, supposedly cutting edge, program for adolescents and those suffering from substance abuse. They most likely brought him home when the hospital said he was better. Sadly that might have had more to do with how long the hospital knew that insurance would foot the bill and not Mr. Delle's actual mental health.

The story is no less tragic than the story Pearl Jam spins in their song, but it's far more nuanced.

And it's still a great song.

[eowynstwin]

Friendly reminder to everyone that fiction with shocking, dark, gruesome, or otherwise unpleasant content is not inherently harmful to read, write, or otherwise interact with. Lolita is one of the most disturbing books out there, and not only is it taught in most undergrad lit courses, a whole genre of under-25 girlies have made it their whole personality and blog theme.

UNFRIENDLY reminder that you do not actually have any moral right to publicly call someone out for enjoying dark and disturbing content. You do not have any ethical justification for putting someone on blast as a potential risk when you have no proof they have harmed anyone. You cannot claim that a given individual represents a danger to others when they freely and often express that their work could cause distress and should be avoided by people sensitive to it.

We call that McCarthyism in common parlance, or witch hunts if you’re feeling spicy. Neither practices have, historically, effected much in the way of justice.

[gaystardykeco]

if i see one more commercial with kristen bell telling me how easy it is to treat anxiety with medication and how easy it is to access said medication i will start screaming and never stop

[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.

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

Actually never mind… I scrolled through their Facebook page and it’s just as bad as I remember. Online, they only present historical facts one can easily find on Wikipedia with as little effort as possible; to contrast, another historical institution which I know intimately has LOADS of detailed information on their website.

All these people do is advertise the spooky scare attraction they have and say things like “WHAT LURKS IN THE CREVICES OF [redacted]? JOIN US FOR AN OVERNIGHT STAY!” with stereotypical scary music and flashing lights. The answer to your question is dead people. They are people. Shut the fuck up you’re not edgy; you’re a bunch of jerks.

Listen, I don’t care how beloved your historical institution is; you’re capitalizing on the sensationalization of mental illness. You are insensitive and crass in your presentation of the site. I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you

Oh and every SINGLE person in their videos has the most grating voice ever. What’s up with that?

Okay I won’t do the haunted attraction because I disagree with it on a fundamental level; but I would like to do the historical tour… that seems pretty cool

[transmutationisms]

like it's not that i think that no insurance billing codes psychiatric terminology could ever be useful. altho i do Personally eschew it For Myself, again, i understand why some people find it valuable as shorthand for sets of experiences and accessibility needs, and in a material sense this language exists to gatekeep certain accommodations so, yes it is sometimes terminology you must use to get those things regardless of how you feel about it. what i think is useful to keep in mind though is that these terms are simply descriptions of behaviours, and the behaviours to be described / categorised / pathologised are designated such through a series of medical and carceral judgments about how to produce a 'normal' and economically exploitable population. like. that's what these labels do. they're not describing a 'brain type' that is observable or immutable, they're not predicting your future or providing the key to understand your entire past as a function of reductive neurobiology from which you can never escape. they're social tools that make you legible to the state and the medical establishment, and that these authorities use to justify inflicting violence and coercive control on you. understanding this allows you to 1) decide whether, when, and how you personally find these labels useful or not useful for yourself, 2) be precise and cautious when you are trying to use them to your advantage, eg, to obtain accommodations, and 3) avoid the circular, essentialist, and socially violent logic of "well i do x because i have y condition (which was diagnosed based on clinician observations of x) and my brain is simply broken in a way requiring me to submit to expert clinical management and surveillance"

[txttletale]

Apologies for the dumb question and loads of personal information, but..

I have severe moral ocd, and in the past the exploitation has actually caused me eating issues. I’d get intensely guilty whenever I ate anything bc I couldn’t avoid thinking of the exploitation that occurred to get it here and I honestly started avoided eating.

is that what im supposed to do? I know there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism but my sustained existence is reliant on food from the exploitative world of global “trade”, medicine from the oppressive pseudo jails of the psychiatric system, and technology running on copper and cobalt that people suffered to mine. I claim to be a leftist, but my sustained quality of life, god, my entire life, is dependent on the imperial core continuing to extort the rest of the world. Should I just give up?

nah. ultimately if you're a socialist you have to understand that what you do as an individual is--politically speaking--irrelevant. it's good to be aware of the harms that were done in the process of production, but it's both a political dead end and personally self-destructive to then flagellate about that. (and to be clear, if that awareness is impossible for you to maintain without falling into disordered eating behaviours, you don't need to be that aware--again, this isn't about moral duty. genuine socialist politics are never about individual moral duty, or about being a good person. there is no level of Thought or Awareness or Conscienciousness that can become a lever of meaningful political action.)

the harms have already been done by the time the commodity exists for you to access--you're not participating in or exacerbating them by using the commodity. even if you did find a way to live completely without interfacing with the systems of exploitation, those systems would continue unabated. they don't care about you. the idea that if everyone spontaneously individually decided to stop using the goods that are generated by exploitation then exploitation would end is laughable in both premises and conclusion.

you have to look at this on a material level--the 'harm' is not an abstract quality that gets infused into the fruit or the medicine or the iphone, it's not haunted, you cannot show me an atom of 'harm radiation' emitted by an out-of-season banana--the 'harm' is a series of actual events taking place somewhere in the world. and the way to combat that has nothing to do with the personal consumption of individuals--it has everything to do with organized efforts, with groups of people taking collective action to stop that harm from happening.

you're not god. you're not a dynasty warriors character. you vs. united fruit and foxconn is a losing battle. you alone can't change the world in any way that matters, good or bad. the only thing you can do is join your energy to a group, to participate in class struggle. to unionize or join a party or participate in a mutual aid network. class struggle, the marxist analysis of class struggle, the only meaningful vector of political action across myriad forms, cannot be reached or analysed through the lens of 'do my personal consumer choices make me a good or bad person'. i know it is obviously difficult to do when we live in a society that focuses on consumer choice as the be-all and end-all of personal and political and moral expression, but you have to reject that question outright.

socialism is not catholicism--the aim of left-wing politics is not to live virtuously. it is to unite as members of the working class and improve all of our lives. focus on uniting first--find the people around you who you can form organizational bonds of solidarity with--and then figure out how to participate in the class struggle together. that's the only way forward. everything else is a trap, a dead-end, or in this case, pointless self-abnegation. good luck, comrade.

[full-clown-car]

So I want to elaborate on why I held the unpopular opinion that Joker 2 was good. I think I said it was "responsibly realistic", and there's a series of points I could use to elaborate on that. But I want to start with Lee's relationship to Arthur. Because it did go very much in the opposite direction that fans expected from the Joker/Harley romance - and that's good.

The directors did keep in one aspect of Harley's original character - her unethical and unhealthy motives for getting close to Joker. Originally, Harleen Quinzel was a psychologist who specifically wanted to work with Joker because she was fascinated by him and wanted to write a book about him to advance her own career. She had unprofessional motives and got too close to him - their relationship did not start off on professional footing. With the boundaries broken, she allowed herself to develop romantic feelings about him, which is a MAJOR no-no between psych professionals and patients. He then proceeded to exploit and manipulate the shit of of her attachment to him.

In J2, they altered that a little. Lee is not his counselor, but she does have a master's in psychology and she develops a fascination with the Joker prior to meeting Arthur, which she lies about and exploits when she gets close to him. It's like the women who wrote letters to Ted Bundy in prison, although Lee goes a step above and beyond by having herself voluntarily committed to a low-security wing of the psychiatric facility where Arthur is being held. She lies to him to make him feel the connection to her that she already believes she feels, because she needs them to have that connection - whether it's real or not. Then, when she's about to lose her hold on him, she uses the established fantasy to manipulate him back into his position under her thumb. To keep him being Joker, not Arthur.

And to be clear, I don't think that Joker and Arthur are split personalities - I think Arthur does remember everything Joker has done, and vice versa. But he is somewhat dissociative in nature, and I think Joker is in fact a part of him - an act he puts on to survive and attempt to get things that he needs from the world. Rather than being two distinct personalities in the same body as in DID, they are two halves of a whole.

But Lee only cares about the Joker half. She, like the rest of the world, doesn't give a shit about Arthur. She's obsessed with Joker, not the true and depressing story of the mentally ill victim of the system Arthur Fleck. This is what we can see in the sex scene between them when she sneaks into solitary confinement with him. She brings makeup into the cell and tries to make it into an erotic thing. She paints his face for him, saying she wants to see him as he really is. But the thing is - even though Joker is part of who he is, so is the chronically abused Arthur Fleck. But she's not attracted to that guy. That guy is not part of the fantasy for her.

The sex scene is not sexy, at least I didn't find it to be so. It was disturbing. Lee is smooth and sultry, while the camera focuses in on Arthur's trademark jerky movements. He does not have a lot of experience with women. Actually, he has no experience. He moves awkwardly and comes quickly (sorry to be NSFW.) But it doesn't matter - she's got him now. He's never been with a woman before, and he's desperate for love and easy to manipulate. And she brings out and eggs on the Joker in him, and he goes along with it because it makes him feel empowered.

Until he's not. Because he's in a maximum-security prison and he's not. When the guards get sick of him rallying his fellow prisoners and spreading a sense of empowerment within the prison, they strike back. Against Arthur first, and then against his friends, to remind all of them that the guards are the ones who get to call the shots in Arkham. They are the ones who tell the jokes and they are the ones who get to laugh.

And at this point, Arthur has fired his lawyer, something Harley manipulated him into doing. Because she never cared if Arthur got the death penalty really, or if he was able to access the treatment she convinced herself he didn't need. But Arthur's laywer was the only one who gave a shit what was going on in the prison. She was the only one keeping an eye on the guards. Without her, no one even bothers to try holding them accountable. They assault Arthur and use violent restraint to kill his friend, and no one outside the prison cares, because mentally ill Arthur Fleck and all the other prisoners in E ward are the throwaways of society, the ones who've been abused by society to the point of severe dysfunction and have now been thrown away. No one's coming to save them. There is no grand revenge, at least not here. No one cares about these people. This isn't where Joker lives. It's where Arthur lives, and everyone like him. And he can't act anymore. He's too wounded. He can't put on the Joker persona.

And for being wounded enough to break the fantasy - for being a real abused, mentally ill person instead of a caricature of one - Lee leaves him. She's done. Because the relationship they forged was never sustainable. She didn't love the whole person - the Arthur/Joker duo. She had an obsession with Joker, and the facade cracked.

People who complain about the musical numbers failed to understand what they were for. They were dissociations of Arthur's, yes, because that's a coping technique for him, but the flaws in the relationship already present in their singing and dancing. We see him afraid of her controlling him, her garnering all the attention in her double act. Because he is an inherently unhealthy person, and he needs the Joker to be about garnering him the attention he feels he needs. When he senses her taking control, he has visions of her pulling a gun on him. He could only tolerate her when she was content to play second string in their double act. If he were to have become free and dated her, one of them would have ended up hurting the other because they are two fundamentally unhealthy people in a fundamentally unhealthy relationship.

When everything blew up in the courtroom, I was so sure that it was Lee. That she'd come back to free Arthur. But the audience was skillfully faked out. The bomb was set off by a couple of Joker fanatics who'd heard his slurred confession of wanting to "blow it all up" the day before and taken it literally. And even when they free him, he has no idea what to do with that freedom. He goes to Lee, but she's already gone. And you know what? She blames him for breaking. She has no idea what he's been going through. Because that stuff was happening to Arthur, and it's not Arthur that matters to her. To anyone who idolized the Joker. They only want to see what they already see of themselves in him, but that doesn't mean they know how to give him the help he needs.

Is that sad and depressing and anticlimactic? Of course. But it's real. This is what a relationship like theirs would look like in real life. In past iterations of their relationship, they had a lot of fans - people who thought they wanted the "mad love" Joker and Harley had, who fundamentally misunderstood the unhealthy nature of their relationship. That's why I say it was responsible for the filmmakers to portray them this way. Nobody would look at this dynamic and say "that's what I want for myself."

And they shouldn't. Arthur was in no place to be in a relationship, and Lee made very unhealthy decisions in deciding that she needed to create a false persona to get close to him. I don't think most people are going to leave the theaters romanticizing those two - and given the character of Arthur the filmmakers established in the previous film, that is a very good thing. Unlike Arthur, we need to be able to distinguish fantasy from reality.

[bioethicists]

my wife brought up a brilliant point this morning: a huge problem with the way we view psychology (a problem which is frequently exploited + used to justify a lot of just. shitty work) is that it lives in a no-man's land between "social sciences" + "natural sciences" in the collective imagination.

consider: one of the first works which spurned my interest in psychiatric abolition was durkheim's work on suicide. as a sociologist ("social scientist"), he uses pretty rigorous quantitative methods to show that suicide is much less correlated with levels of depression than it is with cultural factors (like religion, country of origin, marriage rates). however, people do not respond to the medicalization of suicide by saying "well, durkheim proved that suicide isn't a mental illness symptom, so this is unscientific"- this is obviously a drastic oversimplification of his work + it's commonly understood that sociology does not "prove" immutable social truths.

similarly, i would not comment on a study which identifies changes in t-cells over time among hiv+ patients by arguing that it didn't deeply explore the social environments or past traumas they had experienced, (even though those could have an impact on t-cell count), because i understand that is not the purpose of the research + ultimately they had to choose to control for these factors without centering them in order to obtain important medical information. "this information is meaningless because it doesn't include each patient's trauma history" would be an absurd critique.

among the general population + many self-assured researchers, psychology gets both the privilege of being a "social science" (so we can't expect it to be TOO exact; it's complicated; it's not really saying that's ALWAYS true; if it proves inaccurate that's because culture/social factors must have muddied it up; we can't really expect PROOF for most of it) as well as a "natural science" (you can't question its basic presumptions or you're a science denier; the dsm describes real things which existed even before it was written; it obviously is rooted in biology even if we haven't discovered how yet; reducing its measures to quantitative evaluation is fine + unproblematic).

my point here isn't to argue that psychology is a "social" or "natural" science, but rather that we need to rethink what work those categories actually do + whether the distinction between them is as strict or meaningful as we believe it to be. our strict dichotomies between "objectively proven truths" + "social observations which are ultimately just informed opinions" are exposed when we look at a field which seems to be uncomfortably situated within both. what kind of work might become possible if we abandoned this dichotomy, rather than bickering over whose work belongs in which club?

[the-alarm-system]

Anti-Endos are not your Enemy

No, I'm not making this to say that endo systems shouldn't defend themselves from them when they are attacked(they have the whole right to) but I'm saying that actively going after anti-endos is very pointless and heres why:

Anti Endos have NO REAL SYSTEMIC POWER. They are not an enemy, they are an obstacle that we can choose to ignore when it comes to real and true activism. I think it's valid to mention them every now and then, as I would be a hypocrite if I didnt think that lol, but to make them the main target of your plural activism is just not efficient. The only ability they have is to separate the community even more, so if we were to ignore them and go after a larger target they are just another system that's being exploited by THE system. Personally in my practice, I found it better to give them compassion rather than do our best to hurt them. Many, not all, anti-endos are CDD systems projecting their pain onto others because of feelings of brokenness that were perpetuated by the psychiatric system, trauma, and constant plural stigma.

Here's the thing, even if we do not share beliefs, NONE OF US HAVE SYSTEMIC POWER AS SYSTEMS. To CDD systems; You're another insane person in the eyes of others. To Endogenic systems; You're another insane person in the eyes of others.

SINGLET NORMATIVE SOCIETY HATES ALL OF US

YES EVEN YOU, THE ONE WHO ENDURED THE WORST FUCKING TRAUMA OF ALL TIME, SINGLET SOCIETY HATES US TOO

We are not real to singlet normative society, we are all fakers and you calling endogenic systems fakers isn't going to make you any more real to them. While we sit here arguing about anothers validity, there are professionals with actual SYSTEMIC POWER arguing that DID isn't even a real thing in the first place. There are cops and psychiatrists stuffing plurals into prisons or psych wards because we are viewed as DANGEROUS TO SOCIETY. There are plurals that are dying because being plural in a singlet-normative society is intrinsically dangerous no matter your fucking origin.

Anti-Endos are not real enemies, they're in fact insignificant to the movement because nobody believes them either. Yes even the most harmful ones like aspen, do you really think singlets believe they're real? No, aspen is as fucking nonexistent as the rest of us in the eyes of psychiatry and singlets. Defend yourselves of course, but remember who your true enemy is. It's not another system.

Signed Ardyn

[elliegoose]

now that siren's song has clarified that stable states of NHP cascade exist, i think the dichotomy that's been established is really interesting:

even though some of the previous material claims unstable cascade is "inevitable" and thus all NHPs require shackles and periodic cycling, every example provided of conditions under which NHPs enter unstable cascade--e.g. combat scenarios, being forced to commit genocide, being digitally tortured--already made it quite clear that NHPs enter unstable cascade due to reaching a critical level of stress or trauma (which i suppose is inevitable in a society that exploits them and treats them like tools rather than people).

and on the other hand, the bondless was able to enter a stable state of cascade in which they retain their ability to think and empathize on a human level while not being completely restricted to only that perspective because the people around them promoted their autonomy and treated them like a goddamn person.

could this state of cascade turn unstable in response to trauma and cause the bondless (or any NHP in a stable state of cascade) to become dangerously detached from reality? maybe, but something roughly analogous can happen in humans, and society in lancer doesn't forcibly dose up every human with large amounts of space future psychiatric drugs that redefine their entire personality. imo, the danger presented by unstable cascade simply means that the real affirmation of NHPs' personhood is especially important! everything about siren's song makes it clear that ethical alternatives to cycling and shackling have to be found, and that unstable cascade wouldn't be such a problem if NHPs were fully recognized and affirmed in their personhood.

anyway, despite literally being named Non-Human Persons, everything from the game's mechanics (in which NHPs are part of the mech licensing system and mechanically the game is absolutely fine with you treating onboard NHPs as tools your pilot owns) to the way that they're discussed in the lore sections of the core book (in which NHPs are always peripheral and subordinate to humans and evaluated on their usefulness to humanity, and the writers constantly insist that union is definitely worthy of the "utopia" label that it claims for itself despite the exploitation of NHPs being explicitly essential to the logistical functioning of union's economy and administration) discourage thinking of NHPs as fully being people. i'm glad that's finally starting to be addressed with siren's song, given that the treatment of an entire class of people as property should probably be considered the single most important conflict in the setting.

[beguines]

It has been left to a small handful of Marxist scholars to outline a fundamental truth of the mental health system: that its priorities and practices are fundamentally shaped by the goals of capitalism. As Brown has remarked of psychology, it is "more than just a professional field of work. It is also a codified ideology and practice that arises from the nature of our capitalist society and functions to bolster that society." This is less surprising, states Nahem, when it is understood that, as with psychiatry, "[p]sychology arose and developed in capitalist society, a class society. In all class societies, the dominant social, cultural and political views are those of the dominant class." And more so, with the continuing expansion of the psy-professions, Parker argues that psychology has become "an increasingly powerful component of ideology, ruling ideas that endorse exploitation and sabotage struggles against oppression. This psychology circulates way beyond colleges and clinics, and different versions of psychology as ideology are now to be found nearly everywhere in capitalist society".

The dominant norms and values of the ruling classes are reflected in the psychiatric discourse on human behaviour and the workings of the mind. Consequently, the psy-professions are responsible for facilitating the maximisation of profit for the ruling classes while individualising the social and economic conditions of the workers. The mental health system seeks to normalise the fundamentally oppressive relations of capitalism by focusing on the individual—rather than the society—as pathological and in need of adjustment through "treatment" options such as drugs, ECT, and therapy

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

[fuchsiamae]

@mewtwofan1 1976

october 17th, 1976 re: human enrichment & testing initiative, resource acquisition

"low risk" human resource acquisitions

these are all pure caroline. cave fought it at every step -- science needs standards! but their days of testing with humanity's best are long gone. as they learned the hard way, humanity tends to notice when its best disappear. the switch to prison labor hurt cave's pride, but it worked, at least until casualties got SO high HR couldn't fudge them any worse. so they've cut back on convicts, and instead, she has to slowly siphon off the population that won't be missed.

a. hoboes and tramps: when the HR acquisitions team came back from detroit with a busload of able-bodied men looking for work, caroline was over the moon. some are grubby and uncouth, but they'll follow instructions for the promise of a hot meal before the test and $60 after it. some of them make a fuss when they're paid in ApertureBux, but the Aperture Science Official Merchandise Dispensary has all the branded t-shirts and novelty mugs they could ask for.

cave keeps hoping these guys will whip out their banjos and harmonicas and sing something about wanderlust. caroline doesn't bother ruining his hobo fantasy. there's no harm in it -- they look at him funny when he talks at them about the rambling road, but they keep on testing.

b. child orphans and foundlings: not a physically fit as adults, but more psychologically malleable, especially using an abandoned child's inherently low self-esteem. once convinced that their intrinsic value is tied to test completion, a test subject becomes highly motivated to succeed. (see training video series 89 for more on shame-based psychology in orphans. caroline particularly recommends #89-B, "This Is Why No One Wants You." some of her own suggestions made it into that one.)

annoyingly, a lot of the kids surrendered to the Aperture Science Repository for Unfortunate Children are too young even for testing tracks, and putting one in a time accelerator was... unsuccessful. trying to find a use for preverbal infants has led the lab to expand on harlow's "wire mother/cloth mother" experiments, using mothers of ten other substances (straw mother, adhesive mother, wood-with-protruding-nails mother etc), none of which have milk. they're not sure what this will do, but they've gotta do something with all these spare babies, so they might as well find out.

c. psychiatric patients: disappointing. she'd hoped for inmates whose condition has no effect on testing fitness (homosexuals, outspoken women), but that demographic is smaller now than it was thirty years ago. most residents of the Aperture Science Institute for the Mentally Unsound have louder, messier, more inconvenient problems. the pharmacology dept has started playing with drug trials to treat their various ailments, but by and large they're no good on a testing track.

d. seniors: by far the most useless demographic for portal-based testing, but the easiest to acquire -- seems like every family within three states has a spare pop-pop or spinster auntie to palm off. the Aperture Science Sunset Senior Home makes a tidy little income on what these families pay for their upkeep. and around here, a live human never goes to waste.

each acquisitions department has a showroom set up, a small visiting area kept neat and presentable, so any outside guests won't question their loved ones' living conditions. that precaution turns out to be unnecessary. they've never had a single visitor.

oh yknow what might be fun? reply to this with a year and I'll do a few lines on what's going on with cave/caroline/aperture that year

[trans-axolotl]

and this is also why i think that any meaningful community building/advocacy/support around madness/neurodivergence/mental illness needs to be founded on principles of liberation and abolition, and that we need to be able to distinguish between people who are allies based on our shared values + goals, and between people who use some of the same language as us, but are fundamentally advocating for separate things.

One example I see a lot of is the idea of "lived experience" professionals, people who have a career in the mental health system and who also have some personal experience with mental illness. These professionals oftentimes will talk about their own negative experiences in the mental health system, and come into their careers with a genuine desire to improve the experience of patients. But their impact is incredibly limited by the system they have chosen to work in: the coercive elements of psychiatry incentivize professionals to buy into the existing power structures instead of disrupting them. And as a whole, many lived experience professionals end up getting exploited and tokenized by their employers and used as an attempt to make carceral psychiatry seem more palatable. Professionals in this dynamic are not working to effectively challenge the structural violence of their profession: they become complicit, even if they do also have good intentions and provide individual support.

(I do know some radical providers who have found innovative ways to fuck up the system and destabilize and shift power in their workplaces, but this is a very small number of providers and is not most of the lived experience providers I've talked with.)

Another example I see a lot in our spaces has to do with the evolution of the neurodiversity paradigm. I feel a very deep connection to the original conceptualization of neurodiversity and neurodivergent as coined by Kassiane Asasumasu, but in recent years I've seen a lot of people using neurodivergent language in a way that feels pretty dramatically different than the foundational principles. This isn't saying that people should stop using ND terminology or that all neurodivergent spaces are like this--rather, I just want to point out some trends I see in certain communities, both online and in my in personal life. Although people will often use neurodivergent language and on the surface, seem allied with concepts of deinstitutionalization, acceptance, etc, the values and structure in these community spaces often rely heavily on ideas of classification based in DSM, and build very prescriptive and rigid models for categorizing different types of neurodivergence in a way that ends up excluding some M/MI/ND people. Certain types of knowledge are valued over other types of knowledge, and certain diagnoses are prioritized as worthy of support over others. There's a lot of value placed on identifying and classifying many types of behaviors, beliefs, thoughts, actions, into specific categories, and a lack of solidarity between different diagnoses or the wider disability community.

Again, this isn't to say that ND terminology is bad or useless--I think it is an incredibly helpful explanatory model/shorthand for finding community and will call myself neurodivergent, and find a lot of value in community identification and sharing of wisdom. I just feel like it's important to realize that not every ND person, organization, or initiative, is actually invested in the project of fighting for our liberation.

when thinking about our activism, as abolitionists, it's important to be very specific about what our goals, values, and tactics are. For example, understanding the concept of non-reformist reforms helps us distinguish what immediate goals are useful, versus what reforms work to increase the carceral power of the psychiatric system. And when building our own value systems and trying to build alternative ways of caring for ourselves and our communities, we need to be able to evaluate what brings us closer to autonomy, freedom, and interdependence. I need people to understand that just because someone is also against psych hospitalization does not mean that they are also allies in the project of letting mad people live free, authentic, meaningful, and supported lives, and that oftentimes people's allyship is conditional on our willingness to conform to their ideas of a "good" mentally ill person.

[youzicha]

Putting on the sunglasses 🕶️

In the movie They Live (1988, written and directed by John Carpenter) the protagonist Nada comes across a pair of special sunglasses: when he puts them on he can see the subliminal messages behind magazines and advertisements, and can also see that some apparent humans are actually alien invaders controlling us. Soon the aliens realize that he is on to them, so the first concrete thing he does with his newfound knowledge is getting into a shoot-out and killing two aliens disguised as police officers.

The imagery is not exactly subtle, but in interviews Carpenter spells it out: “the aliens are members of the upper class, the rich, and they’re slowly exploiting the middle class”. Or as Slavoj Zizek puts it the glasses lets Nada see the “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom”, the “dictatorship in democracy”, the “ideology”.

As far as I know the Wachowskis have not supplied an explicit gloss on The Matrix, but the plot is quite similar. Neo comes across a special red pill which lets him see through "the world that has been pulled over your eye to blind you from the truth." After some soul-searching, Neo and Trinity are finally ready for concrete action: they declare “we need guns. Lots of guns” and shoot up a Federal Building. Both movies feature a scene where somebody resists the knowledge: Nada’s friend Frank refuses to put on the glasses, and Cypher declares “ignorance is bliss” while eating simulated steak.

Of course these movies work metaphorically, but They Live also allows a quite literal reading. If someone kills two police officers because they are secret aliens controlling the government, the obvious explanation is a paranoid delusion, not an alien invasion.

A movie about a random psychotic guy would be uninteresting, but psychiatric symptoms tend to be exaggerated versions of general human tendencies, and paranoia is contiguous with ordinary ideology and confirmation bias. Compare with the Utøya massacre, where psychiatrists disagreed whether the killer was psychotic or just had bad politics. Or for a purely ideological example, consider guys like the Red Army Faction. They shared Carpenter’s revulsion for “unrestrained capitalism”, saw through the false consciousness into the underlying machinery, and killed a bunch of police officers.

So with all that in mind, I think it’s interesting to see who reference these movies. There’s an article in The Unz Review, Battling the Matrix, which includes a long comparison with They Live, explaining how well it captures the experience of bringing up Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media. In particular, as soon as you try to explain that jet fuel cannot melt steel beams people defensively dismiss you as a conspiracy theorist.

Or religions:

Prince had his change of faith [to become a Jehovah’s Witness], he said, after a two-year-long debate with a musician friend, Larry Graham. “I don’t see it really as a conversion,” he said. “More, you know, it’s a realization. It’s like Morpheus and Neo in ‘The Matrix.’”

Or neo-nazis, who prompted John Carpenter to angrily deny that They Live is about Jewish control of the world, while some poster on /pol/ says that “The J[ewish] Q[uestion] is the final red pill”.

Or Ziz explaining:

According to traditional morality (you learn in the Matrix), if someone tells you you need to split off from the people you are close to who don’t share certain beliefs of yours, that person is a CULTIST and you need to RUN.

All of these examples have an cute symmetry: someone declares that they have finally seen through the ideology, while from the outside we would say that their new theories add a distorting filter. (Like some colored glasses, say.)

[imagining-in-the-margins]

Wait what's wrong with Maeve and Maxine 😭😭 and I do agree that there's sm off with Garcia in CME

There’s nothing wrong with them, really. If you like them, then power to you. The show is fictional and so are the characters, and I don’t ever recommend that people care as much about prime-time television writing as I do lmao.

That being said, I have a few complaints about Maeve as a character and Maxine as a partner for Spencer. I’ll put them below because it’s a lot.

For starters, Maeve is an awful geneticist. I’m also confused as to what the hell her job is. If you have an understanding of medical science, you know that absolutely no part of their story makes sense unless Maeve is an awful person.

(For the record, I don’t think the writers understand medical science, so this is probably unintentional.)

We’re introduced to Maeve as the woman who cured Spencer’s headaches. When he explains how she did that, the “magical cure” is, in fact, the equivalent of a multivitamin. Setting aside how unlikely it is that none of Spencer’s doctors could identify a very basic nutritional deficiency, it’s absolutely absurd that Maeve would recommend high doses of vitamins to someone who isn’t her patient.

(Is she even a medical doctor. Do we ever get confirmation? You don’t need to be to be a geneticist. I know because I’ve worked for one.)

That leads to the next question. Why the FUCK did she agree to read someone’s brain scans? You are NOT a radiologist and you’re not a neurologist. You have NO idea what you’re doing.

Now we move into her even more serious ethical violations.

Maeve identifies this man who is desperately seeking care for (what appear to be) psychosomatic symptoms as a result of trauma and stress. Instead of, I don’t know, helping him access psychiatric care he clearly needs, she…

That’s right! She starts dating him!

Maeve is a master manipulator. We see it repeatedly. Every time that Spencer begins to open up to her or offer her any vulnerability, she responds by either mocking the things he enjoys or by suddenly freezing him out. The one extended conversation we see between the two of them, Spencer expresses the desire to get to know her better, and once again offers his very specialized assistance in her exact problem.

What does Maeve do in response? She refuses to answer. The call goes silent, and she immediately proceeds to heavily guilt him while he apologizes in excess. She starts to vocally cry, but then immediately stops when he retracts his feelings.

Then, when he is devastated by being rejected, she tells him that she loves him and hangs up the phone.

What?

Then we get introduced to Bobby—the very recent fiancé that Maeve completely refused to mention. We hear from Maeve’s parents that Bobby was “controlling,” but when we see him, and how he interacts with Maeve… he’s completely normal? In fact, he seems genuinely concerned for her safety.

We have no reason to believe Bobby was ever acting against her best interests. She sure didn’t give a shit what happened to him, though, or else she could’ve helped him (and herself) by simply letting the FBI help her with a very basic and unsophisticated stalker that was identified in like five seconds.

Maeve didn’t want help. Maeve didn’t want Spencer to be cured. She wanted him to be available and rely on her because she was bored. She was lonely and she exploited a sick man for company. She left Bobby because she was worried about his safety. Didn’t give a fuck about Spencer’s, though.

I think Spencer knew that, too. Because even in his fantasy of her, he playfully corrects her just for her to shut him down for “arguing” with her. Because he corrected something she said that was literally just wrong.

So, that’s why I hate her.

(Don’t even get me started on how nothing they did made sense to avoid a stalker. You had Spencer call the same number every week on the same time through the same mechanism. Her number. She never changed her number. How many times does the BAU tell us that routine is a stalker’s best friend? Come on, man.)

Moving on to Maxine.

She’s fine. Really, I don’t have any qualms with who she is as a person except for the fact she’s a teacher who hates her job (and her name). You’re telling me this woman who went through school for art history hates children’s art? What?

Also, why are you devaluing children’s art? They’re kids. Are you okay?

The first thing we learn about her is that she’s a teacher, but she hates it because children’s art is lame. So, with a man’s permission (Spencer), she leaves that job to go work for the Smithsonian (Finally! A prestigious enough career for her!).

Setting aside how cringeworthy that notion is, it’s not even the worst part about that storyline.

My problem with her is the way they set up their relationship. Saturday begins with Spencer expressing his (very autistic) concerns about connecting with other people. In response, the psychologist essentially tells him to… just be normal, dude.

That’s when we meet Max, who then spends the rest of their onscreen time together constantly reminding Spencer how fucking weird he is and he should just chill out and be normal.

Pass.

That whole idea of “ommmggg we’re not dating okay it’s super chill and casual 🙄 we’re not dating it’s not even that serious 😒 he’s NOT my boyfriend I don’t want to call him that 😬” is also… not cute. It’s very juvenile and sort of insulting. It always came off to me as her repeatedly saying she doesn’t even really like him that much, she’s just there because the narrative needs her.

Then we get Date Night. What a fucking disaster of an episode. Here, we get to see Cat and Spencer reduced to absolute idiots who randomly believe a basic ass young woman’s super manufactured story about how she murdered someone.

Are you serious? Cat Adams, an actual serial killer, can’t tell when someone isn’t an actual murderer?

SPENCER REID, AN ACTUAL GENIUS AND A DECORATED BEHAVIORAL PROFILER, CAN’T TELL WHEN HIS GIRLFRIEND IS LYING ABOUT BEING A MURDERER?

Of course, we’re meant to believe she’s “just that good,” and also seemingly totally fine under the pressure of her family being kidnapped and potentially murdered.

(Maybe she is a psychopath?)

Her little jokes about Cat as a “mean girl but stabby” are so poorly received in the context of the episode. We have Spencer, still reeling from JJ’s forced confession and the upcoming loss of his mother, lamenting about how he really needs to stop basing his whole identity on the women who love him. Yet, that’s exactly what Max is there for. To be “better than Cat” so he has someone new to attach his mouth to.

(Also, super fucking weird she abandoned her family and kissed him after saying how much he liked kissing Cat, but we’ll move past that.)

Max is a mediocre character and a misogynist’s attempt to make a girlboss. She is also a way for the writers to reinforce that Spencer will only be deserving of love when he stops being so autistic “weird” and learns to just be “normal.”

Spencer frankly deserves better than that. This is why I’ve always loved his love interests like Lila and Austin. They reveled in Spencer’s “weirdness.” They found his real personality charming and cute. They were nice to him because they actually liked him.

So, that’s why I don’t like Maeve and Maxine. Feel free to disagree, but you should probably argue with someone else because I’ve developed my opinion after (too) many rewatches. I don’t see my perspective changing much.

That brings me back to how I started this rant, though. This is a fictional serial television show. It’s not literature to be preserved forever. It’s just our fun little copaganda show, and you can enjoy it however you want! That is your right, and you shouldn’t let me rain on your parade.

Just have fun! That’s what fandom is all about.