#what a weird carceral mentality to have!!!

[arihi]

On my bullshit again but I still maintain the (once again very bastardized and westernized) idea of ‘healing’ a la “you don’t owe anything to anyone” and “cutting people off is maintaining healthy boundaries” is a brain rot and people are so caught up in their moral superiority of [have had a single thought of introspection at least once] they don’t realize how black and white and inconsistent these ideals are

[schizosupport]

Hello! I have a weird relationship to psychosis and I'm not sure if you might have any insight. I think I've had psychotic experiences my whole life, but the experiences I've had don't seem to fit into any named framework I can find (schizospec, etc.). I call it spicy anxiety, because on top of my existing anxiety I also am very prone to fairly brief (hours to days) bizarre delusions with insight. As a kid that would mean reading a fantasy book and being convinced that I had whatever magic powers I read about. As an adult it's more like... What if the car behind me in traffic is a robot-dragon trying to eat me?!?! And I can tell this is Not A Thing, logically, but I also can't stop panicking about it. I tend to be pretty paranoid in general, even when I'm not actively psychotic. Sometimes it's sorta fun, just like Imagination+, now with maybe more suspension of disbelief than is good for me! I have no negative symptoms, only some cognitive symptoms and those are better explained by my AuDHD than anything, I think. I don't think I'm schizospec; my delusions are too brief even for something like Brief Psychotic Disorder, and I think too bizarre for something like Delusional Disorder. I don't care that much about diagnosis, nor am I seeking a diagnosis, but I do want... I guess reassurance that other people experience this in similar ways? And language to describe what I experience? I also know that I have a family history of this type of mental illness (completely untreated) that seems to get worse with age, and if my symptoms ever become debilitating enough that I do need help...I deeply deeply distrust the carceral nature of the psychiatric institution, and I want to have knowledge of my own going in. To be clear: I am not asking you to diagnose me. I am asking if you (or your followers) have ever heard of experiences like this. Thanks for your time, either way!

Hi there! Yes, boy, I sure have!

So the "spicy anxiety" is something that I relate to a lot. I call it "psychosis flavored anxiety", personally. For me it's obviously not my only symptom, but it's something that is a fundamental part of me and also my own way of being schizo spec.

I used to think of this as just anxiety. I remember my gf's face when I first got into specific about the types of things I'm anxious about. They got kinda quiet and was like "honey are you sure that's anxiety" 😂 .... And it IS a type of anxiety, right, because it's a what-if scenario that scares you, rather than something you're convinced of, like a delusion. But it's definitely psychosis-flavored.

More clinical terms could be paranoid ideation, magical thinking and quasipsychosis, depending on your mileage.

I'm also someone who, aside from direct symptoms of schizophrenia, also just has an overactive imagination. Imagination+ is one way to describe it! My brain will come up with all kinds of bizarre and paranoid thoughts all the time. And depending on how well I'm doing I can dismiss it, I can be anxious about, or I can have a breakdown and feel temporarily convinced of it. There's often a grey area where I do act to protect myself from perceived threat, but I also acknowledge that it's an unlikely threat. But "just in case"..

Tendency towards psychosis or adjacent experiences does run in families, so having family members with psychosis means you are more likely to be having this type of experience - and it doesn't have to mean, that you're going to go on to develop fullblown psychosis.

I hope this was helpful!

[atthebell]

(same anon) [banging fists on table] HES A PERSON HES A PERSON HES A PERSONNNNNNNNN AND HE'S THE ONLY ONE OUT OF EVERYONE WHO DOESNT BELIEVE IT. EVEN THE PEOPLE WHO WERE HURT THE MOST BY WHAT HE USED TO DO BELIEVE IT. I NEED HIM TO BELIEVE IT SO BAADDDDDD

it honestly drives me nuts bc yes there are people who are still hurt by what he did during the regret arc & before then (namely pac for the latter, obviously) and they STILL think of him as a person and care about him and want him to be better. they care about him not in spite of what he's done but because he chooses to continue trying to be better and is a person deserving of love and companionship.

i think what also drives me crazy is that he thinks that he's the worst person on the island, and i don't care to measure out who did what and whatever counts and weighing souls, so i'm not gonna argue about who's actually done the worst shit. but, regardless, there are plenty of people on the island who have also done horrible things that they feel they can't be forgiven for. he's not alone in that. many of them wouldn't (and don't) bat an eye at what he's done. which is partially just due to the nature of how insane mcrp is and the fact that being an ex cannibal and murderer isn't really that weird of a backstory, but is also important imo because these are people who don't have that same carceral mentality cellbit has. they don't think he should be punished forever, or that he's lost all personhood through his actions. and i wish he could realize that those people are right.

[dandelionjack]

now that i’ve deferred because a uni degree is nothing but an entrance ticket into moderate financial security and not worth utterly obliterating my mental health over i am compiling my own curriculum. all the posts i’ve ever tagged with #ref because they contain essays articles and other texts that i want to read but have never gotten around to, all that goes on the list. around fifty academic articles and book chapters downloaded onto my laptop from jstor while i still have access to it, tailored to fit my personal interests.

rearranging my self-education. little mx autodidact. carving out a passage through the brambles with a freshly sharpened machete. make no mistake, the thorns are piercing and will continue to tear at my exposed limbs, but the pain is worth the fruits of knowledge at the end, real knowledge and not something superimposed from above. i know, i know, undergrads aren’t afforded that freedom of narrowing our study, it’s something earned with time and effort and only fully permitted at a “higher” level of education, but who determines these levels?

it sounds silly and rash, but it’s a long-deliberated decision. the university environment is not right for my weird brain despite my literary inclinations, and i prefer to select my own path towards learning while working a low paying job on the side. perhaps i’ll return in a year’s time after all, matured and mellowed, hardened or roughened with real-life experience and online self-teaching, to pursue liberal arts as the most, well, liberated pathway. maybe not.

maybe if i had gone to one of those colleges where they allow you to pick and choose your own modules for your degree entirely (like one of the people that i most admire on this website did in its time) things would have gone down differently, but alas. let the world keep turning and let everything that serves no purpose any longer decompose and compost into something new .

“what has this got to do with autism?” you may ask, “i’m autistic and i completed a normal bachelors’ degree just fine.” your answer: having been in a place of moderate autistic burnout for years that abruptly turned severe in the past few months, my bodymind has shifted into what is known rather disparagingly under the medical model as “autistic regression” or “regressive autism”: a gradual distancing further and further away from accepted neurotypical standards of moving through and navigating the world around me.

one of the ways in which this unmasking presents itself, apart from the more noticeable characteristics such as outwardly visible stimming and a complete absence of eye contact, is a total inability to focus on, be motivated by and/or engage in any (textual, literary, cinematic etc etc) materials that do not connect at least tangentially or superficially with my special interests (that being ghosts/hauntings, hauntology, folk horror, lovecraftiana/cosmic horror, horror in general, the gothic, neurodiversity, alternative music; narratives/storytelling, folklore/fairytales; queer theory; carceral abolition and liberation; and a few other subjects here unlisted). according to normative capitalist logic of usefulness and productivity, that makes me “severely disabled” by virtue of “restricted interests”. i would say it makes me a interesting person with tall twisted tales to tell, but nevermind that silly nonsense, it’s a mad person speaking.

at this present moment i have no motivation, wish nor desire to continue wasting time and energy attempting to study and remember things that do not connect with the key concepts that my mind is constantly orbiting around. if that makes me incurious or annoying or limited, so be it — this neurological difference affects every aspect of my personality and i do not wish to change it. if the world around us refuses to change, we must either alter it ourselves or construct our own pathways out of the shadows and into the moonlit garden.

[librarycards]

what sorts of things do you think can help people deal with their mental illness besides therapy/meds? i’m not saying i disagree with anti-psychiatry, and i have had bad experiences with psychiatrists/therapists for multiple reasons, but what kinds of things actually help? i’m on wait lists for free therapy and multiple of them have long way lists and hotlines don’t help me, i feel at a loss. and i kind of feel like being being this mentally ill would be a burden upon any friend/partner i could potentially have. i honestly don’t know what to do bc i haven’t improved in years

first, a clarification: i'm not anti-med, i am only anti-forced treatment. i think you'll find many, though not all, anti-psych (and adjacent) ppl with this view, which is often shoehorned in with broad anti-med shit both because of the dubious history of some antipsych figures and because of strawmanning by pro psych forces. but i digress.

there is no simple solution for crisis/ongoing suffering, especially because the actual biggest help to all of us would be the abolition of white supremacy / ableism / carceral neoliberal capitalism / settler colonialism / cisheteropatriarchy. absent this, we're left trying to fill in the gaps, collectively, as best we can, while always acknowledging that we are putting interpersonal band-aids on systemic harms.

with all that being said, i think the best place to start would be to take stock of what and who you have as resources: are there any friends you feel comfortable sitting beside or watching a movie with, even if you don't feel ready or comfortable sharing "deeper" stuff with them? do you have internet people, or a place where you can shout into the void (like tumblr)? is there a public space you can go to, like a park, where you can at least get out of the house for a little while and be alone among others?

i personally take medication, though i'm tapering one of the last ones i'm on, and chose to discontinue the myriad pills i was prescribed as an involuntary psych inpatient. this isn't because meds are inherently evil, but only because i didn't like who i was when i was on them, nor could i tolerate the conditions under which they were forced on me. absent these meds, i have found other ways to move through my own brainstuff: occasionally weed (e.g. right now), more often forcing myself to sit next to other people who i know will make sure i don't do anything shitty to myself (even if we're not in active conversation). i have a bunch of youtube videos, books, audiobooks, podcasts, etc. on deck.

i have throughout the last few years cultivated an online and in-person community in which i'm not "burdening" / "dumping" my shit onto one or even a couple individuals all the time. you're right that the full extent of what we experience is definitely too much for one other interlocutor to take - we're designed to live in community, not in isolated couples. it's also true that, while occasionally and contingently helpful, a professional counselor or therapist can be inaccessible, abusive/violent, etc. etc.

while you're waiting to experiment with the free therapy you mentioned, it might be a good idea to reach out to people you do trust to have a frank, meta-conversation about your respective relational needs. this can feel weird at first, but i autistically love it, and it's also common in a lot of kink/bdsm communities (of which there's plenty of ND overlap haha). rules can be freeing. you don't have to worry about violating unspoken boundaries when you've spoken them, and established nonjudgemental ways of enforcing them and holding each other accountable when you haven't. in the past, i've established these both verbally and in google docs, etc. i've also established it - and found it especially helpful - in situations where myself and the other person(s) experience different axes of privilege and marginalization. but regardless, it's a great way of self-designing the boundaries that in many cases we expect therapy to do for us - except, without the carceral impulse endemic to the psych practice.

i also think it's okay to acknowledge that you might be a burden sometimes, and that the people who love you will carry you. they know you'll do the same for them. part of being in relation to others is sometimes receiving more than we give - it's part of being alive, being vulnerable. let yourself be cared for, let yourself be heavy. think about how good it feels to fall into bed at the end of the day. rest is the first step to feeling a little better.

[trans-axolotl]

Sorry that this topic is heavy, but your posts are always very well thought out and I value your insight and antipsych perspective. What are your thoughts on some countries (now possibly including canada) allowing medically-assisted euthanasia for young mentally ill people if they request it? There was a story recently about a belgian terror attack victim being euthanized at 23 at her request. I personally believe that committing suicide is a right that every person should have because I think that punishing suicide attempters is the worst thing you can do for them, and ultimately, it’s their life and they deserve ultimate autonomy over it. Not that I think suicide should be encouraged, either, and having a specific government-endorsed suicide program seems sort of bad…? Like euthanizing young people comes with a lot of ethical complications — but I don’t know how to express why it feels weird given my personal beliefs about suicide being a right. (additionally, it feels even weirder because I do support these types of programs for the elderly (although i know what an ethical minefield those are too)). What are your thoughts?

Hey, anon. Thanks for bringing this up!

I have a lot of mixed thoughts about MAID (Medical assistance in dying) and also about what it means to consider suicide a right and in what ways I think that should play into mad organizing.

Firstly, I think the way that Canada's bill C-7 was written and the way it's being put into practice is just blatant eugenics. The rhetoric while legislators were debating and passing the bill made it clear the way they saw disabled lives as unworthy. In a context where many disabled people are forced to live in poverty, where treatment is often impossible to reach, where accessible affordable housing is often nonexistent, where the medical system is filled with ableism and stigma--it is incredibly fucked up to add suicide as an option on the table when there are so many coercive factors at play. Instead of working to make society more accessible and do things that improve the quality of life of disabled people of any age, the government and doctors are using MAID as a way to completely ignore structural ableism and spread narratives that disabled lives are not worth living. I am incredibly, incredibly infuriated about the way MAID was expanded in Canada. I would recommend that people check out the amazing work of the Disability Fillibuster to learn more about MAID in Canada.

Although I don't think every instance of MAID is inherently unethical, I am VERY wary of any bills that expand MAID like Bill C7 because I think that in the context of an ableist society that already doesn't consider disabled lives worth living and tells marginalized people every day millions of reasons why they wish we were dead, MAID bills will come with dangerous levels of coercion that cannot be safeguarded against. For example, the American medical system, with a long history of eugenic sterilization, medical experimentation on Black Americans, and widespread institutionalization, is not a system I ever trust to be able to handle the power of MAID without treating marginalized people's lives as disposable. (Link to read more about the history of medical experimentation: content warning for antiblack racism, sexual exploitation, slavery, and medical abuse of many types. )

At the same time, I am deeply invested in noncarceral approaches to suicide, and I believe that in order to effectively fight against psychiatric incarceration, we have to expand our understanding of the right to autonomy. The psych system, like many institutions of total control, weaponizes a fake concept of safety to justify depriving people of autonomy. In the context of prison abolition, Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie use the phrase "carceral safety" to talk about the ways that police use the rhetoric of "safety" to continue perpetuating a violent system of incarceration:

"The state’s carceral safety robs our communities of the conditions and nutrients that would allow true safety to grow, forcing us into the position of constantly reaching for more security from the very institutions that make us collectively less safe." (from Reclaiming Safety, August 2022).

Similarly to police and prisons, the psych system wants us as mentally ill people to believe that the only way safety and suicide prevention can occur is within institutions where autonomy is deprioritized and any kind of abuse is acceptable if it can be explained as a "life-saving" measure. So part of noncarceral suicide prevention involves rethinking the way we think about autonomy, and prioritizing autonomy and freedom as inherent rights, regardless if people are making risky or harmful choices about their own wellbeing. Suicide should never be criminalized and I think that a step towards decarcerating suicide requires us to embrace the importance of autonomy.

Rethinking autonomy to include the right to harm ourselves is something that I think is an important topic to grapple with in noncarceral suicide prevention, but I think it's one we also have to be careful with and approach with a lot of nuance when talking about it publically. Approaching suicide prevention with a bodily autonomy framework does not mean that we need to support government-sanctioned suicide, does not mean we need to advocate for eugenic policies, does not mean that we should advocate suicide for marginalized people who are already so used to being told that the world wants them dead. Suicide prevention is incredibly important to me, and it will never feel liberatory to me if I'm using my understanding of bodily autonomy to promote suicide in any way. Liberatory suicide prevention includes more than just noncarceral crisis response and helping people map through their distress. It also includes advocating for the material conditions we need to survive in our everyday life, and in my mind, that includes things like advocating for disabled people to have our basic needs met so that we don't have to live in poverty, inaccessible housing, and aren't coerced into suicide through eugenicist bills like Bill C7 in Canada.

Definitely think there is a LOT more to say on this topic and that my opinion is not the only way of looking at this, so I absolutely encourage followers to jump into the discussion.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

Seems weird for you to describe the fixation with portraying media consumption and other essentially neutral acts as important political choices as being a "communal online mental illness", especially given what I understand of your general beliefs about psychiatry and mental illness. They're just bad beliefs and social norms - it's stupid, but not *diseased*.

…yea this is probably fair

I was… very upset about several things at once when writing those posts (the carceral state slowly starving ppl I care about to death, gf’s struggles with the medical system, my own struggles with the medical system, etc) and so was less cautious in wording/implications than I should have been. Soooowwwwyy ûωû

[thistlecrimes]

Hi I hope you feel better, I'm recovering from COVID right now too, just fyi the National Alliance on Mental *illness* (not health) is a pfizer / eli-lilly astroturf group that's pro-carceral and has actively been campaigning against legal human rights protections in California in recent years, and farms 'support groups' for the *family members* of dx'd people, teaching them to see their disabled relatives as 'delusional' for ever disagreeing w/ them or with the 'experts' (thus justifying medicalized detention and forced interventions which in turn make a profit for them.) They wrote a book called "I'm Not Sick I Don't Need Help" which is about the 'problem' of Bad Disableds who assert their autonomy when their doctors or parents don't want them to, and how to bully and police them out of it.

I hadn't heard about any of this, I only linked the NAMI warmline in my covid resources post because I found it on The People's CDC website when I was looking for resources for what to do if you have Covid. I didn't realize the org had all sorts of fucked up issues like that. I'm kind of having a time(tm) right now and don't have the energy to look into every statement being put forth here but after digging around and googling I am inclined to believe you. I did find info about it being funded by pharmaceutical groups like Pfizer and advocating for committing people without their consent.

I really thought the People's CDC would be aware of that kind of stuff! I suppose it's possible volunteers on the peer-warmline are not like, deeply involved with whatever weird other crap NAMI is doing, but yeah, didn't realize the org was sketchy! I'll edit my post and take out the Nami bit. Please feel free to come off anon next time and to send some sources, I've been kind of overwhelmed lately (still struggling with fatigue, just starting to test negative) and I just don't have a lot of energy to do a deep dive right now! But I appreciate being let know. I hope your recovery goes well as well! It's a shitty fuckin' time we're living in. 😵‍💫

[bilbobagginsomebabez]

not reblogging the whole addition

LMFAO FAIR

in no particular order

how to incentivize people to take these jobs

teach them and pay them. we're a caring species and we like to help each other. million and a half psych majors graduate every day with a vague idea of 'helping people.' social work is A HUGE field. put em through some extra training and send 'em out. like i work in the nonprofit sector so i'm surrounded by bleeding hearts every day but seriously we dont struggle to source/staff bleeding hearts, its more a race against the burnout clock as we do our work in extremely hostile environments. and what burns you out isnt exposure to Bad Shit, its impotence. the idea that no matter what you do, you're never gonna make a dent in the avalanche of pain and hardship you're fighting. helping somebody? the success case can power a social worker through for months. a part of caring for people who do communal care work is actually letting them really help. you know how i mentioned somewhere that we live in a society that intensely incentivizes ruthlessness and cruelty? it also suppresses and punishes care workers. like, let us fuckin live and we'll do it all and be very happy about it.

ways in which e.g. American policing in particular derives some of its worst excesses from a culture that prioritises* the officer always feeling safe and able to defend themselves (with violence) over the safety of the citizenship at large

i would develop this a bit further. its not just that american policing has a culture that prioritizes their own safety over their citizens, its that when you make an army, they're going to find an enemy. our police force is highly militarized with lots of super special violent toys that they very badly want to play with. here's confessions of a former bastard cop for a baseline. they will on purpose fuck up restorative initiatives as will many Huge American Industries that heavily rely on harsh exploitation. any transition period would be shaped by those factors to a HUGE degree.

realistically messy transitional period... a realistic treatment of the people who work in it, as well

concepts to play with:

-warring institutions. this happens all the time in govt but a transitional period between a carceral and restorative justice system would have two active institutions at direct cross purposes with each other. cops in different jurisdictions already fight about cases, throw in a new institution in the justice system that is antithetical in every way to a carceral system, and you've got a recipe for interdepartmental chaos. social workers' clients being arrested and harassed. social workers demanding to keep cases that are too 'violent' according to the current division of the carceral/restorative system. you can bet they'd fight like hell about it too if they really believed they could stabilize the client.

-What Laws Do We Keep And How Do They Work. like a social worker with a homeless client who got high on the street is going to try to give them a house to get high in, not send them to jail. and like. that's required for a restorative justice system to be restorative. weve decided we dont want people getting high on the street so we have to make sure they have a house to get high in. or have we decided! do we care about people getting high on the street? is it necessary to intervene or can we all actually just be chill about a guy being kinda weird in your general vicinity.

-severe and persistent mental illness. like de-escalation and care for SPMI patients is a ROUGH fucking field, esp with psychosis. states of psychosis can pull from any element of your memory, so if the patient experienced a lot of violence, they may respond with a corresponding level of violence to the memory and not the situation. it is not their fault and it is HARD to manage and currently it's damn near impossible to do it well. you have to be able to maintain an extremely stable environment long-term and the people who are trying just do not have the funding. the revolution will not be funded and all. imagining how that works in a restorative system, when you KNOW that the risk can never be lowered below like 50 or 60% and they still deserve compassion? like people literally already volunteer for that job and they do it in far more dangerous circumstances than they deserve with far less pay so its not like you won't be able to manage it, but there's still a big fat fucking HOW. and how you protect them from a carceral system that would further abuse them and make them more dangerous. (i have firsthand knowledge of this lmao ask me about the ed and charity test of human rights its based on my parents)

-like it will be messy as FUCK and absolute chaos but i think not in the ways you're imagining. like genuinely i can't tell you enough people do not like pain and will take the easiest available option to avoid it. they dont wanna be hungry, they dont wanna be stressed, they dont want to be in the violent situation just as much as we all dont want it to be happening. (mindfully keep your definition of violence to include stuff like 'poverty' and 'suffering treatable health problems.' anything that is going to unjustly steal another humans patience coins and put them on trend towards a violent deficit.) 99% of every person you meet is choosing the path of least resistance most of the time and would prefer resistance-free paths in general (fun pop culture detective video about this using wall-e). but there are HUGE hurdles in the form of cultural imagination and How We Are Used To Managing Ourselves. the US is an extremely bureaucratic society, as most empires are. dont get me wrong i fucking love a bureaucracy but the level & type of bureaucracy we experience here and now is a surveillance state and also. ok like systems in general are designed to take varied inputs and create consistent outputs. empires do not generally produce outcomes that prioritize the people's wellbeing, they prioritize order and control and suppression. so all the systems they built no matter how you shake them out are going to produce suppressive outcomes. you can't take a machine built to make carburetors and say it's going to make solar panels now unless you also replace all the parts. like it will just keep spitting out carburetors.

so you can ABSOLUTELY create systems that produce positive outcomes for people, but they do not react well to 'institutionalization' as we understand/think of it. like restorative justice is at the very limits of our cultural imagination (why the only good examples we've got are indigenous.) that essay about the abolition of the family--they're talking about creating multiple layered systems of communal grievance management so no one person or group ever has final say. child abuse is a very good example of how our concepts of institutionalization play out. current system: parents have Ownership And Authority Over Child Until Age 18 And Nobody Can Intervene Unless Their Behavior Is Literally Illegal And Actionable In A Court Of Law. breeding ground for isolation and control and lots of silent abuses ignored until they're unbearable or life-threatening. now if you get out of that, you dont gain any more autonomy, you become a ward of the state and speaking as a foster kid you're fuckin lucky if your circumstances don't get worse. your parents make the decisions and then a social worker appointed by the state does. a program like CPS is what americans imagine when they picture restorative justice. but unfortunately that also is violence! 1. CPS intervention and being stolen from your family is fuckin traumatic you're not removing violence from the cycle there. the imposition of an institution's will over your own after you've been harmed is another act of violence. 2. what do child welfare law and age of majority even look like when parents no longer have legal control over their childrens bodies

so you can't just make a rival social worker police force that replaces the carceral police force and call it a done day. useful to make a line in your head between 'system' and 'institution.' its honestly very difficult to totally re-imagine who is present and how they're 'authorized' and how your community reinforces those bonds. how it protects people in advance, how healthy your social web is. like with child abuse, robust and socially protected bonds with a wide range of trustworthy adults is the first step. how do you create a system that effectively bonds a community intergenerationally so when a kid gets hit, they can go to a teacher or faith leader or aunt or social worker or That Nice Guy From The Gas Station and they have so many options that even if one of them falls through, more than one won't. then how do you systemically protect those bonds to give each and every one of those trusted adults the right and social reinforcement to step in and the literal laws encoding the child's right to Decide How To Feel Safe Again. all of it geared towards restoring communal trust and safety.

+ resilient, responsive systems need redundancies. the same thing in multiple different places made in slightly different ways. so how do you do that? on a practical level, who gets put where and what are they allowed to do? when they do whatever they're allowed to do, what's the next step after that, how does it escalate? there will be situations where someone would be safer if they were controlled, and how do we navigate those? what do we do if we suspect that someone is getting close to violence but hasn't committed it yet--how do we identify them outside of an invasive surveillance state and intervene without punishment? how do you respect cultural knowledge and expertise denied by institutions (.....like indigneous justice systems and indigenous ecology) without leaving the door wide the fuck open to our culture's extremely real predisposition towards fantastical thinking. we are a whole country of marks highly recommend fantasyland by kurt anderson.

I think the cumulative effects of this sort of thing contribute to toxic cultures within not only policing but (probably more so, perhaps not uncorrelated with the ways in which the relationship is better and the people less armed) also within medicine and social services

spot fucking ON concepts of medical abuse are HIGHLY applicable to restorative justice and i do not remember enough about the specifics to speak on it but it's an area of Hot Debate because of the inherent power imbalance of needing to trust another person's expertise for your bodily wellbeing. that shit is MURKY and fascinating because it's like "the social role of nurses is currently undergoing a social self-selection process for bullies--how can we alter that system of incentives to socially self-select for Nice People and disincentivize Mean People." and another bit is that the social self-selection process for doctors is a lot of self-important 'i like being The Smartest Guy In The Room and Unquestionable' types. stuff in development with medical panels and changing how medical school is done so it's not like A Brutal Feat Of Will And Intellectual Might but teaches stuff like empathy instead.

re-- specificially a transitional period (not actually a quote just a new topic)

so one of the difficulties with that period is you don't get a ton of opportunities to represent what a restorative justice system does with perpetrators (esp serious perpetrators) as long as a carceral system is in play. because when things are too scary, people default to the familiar. and we're very afraid of The Big Bad Criminals--the malicious rapists and the unrepentant pedophiles and serial killers. the worst of the worst the jeffrey dahmers and shit. and we use those big bad monsters to keep our fear alive and our belief in the necessity of carceral justice alive. but like. that shit is uniquely american and its still rare here. so the need and request for americans to See how a restorative justice system handles their boogeyman is like--well. restorative justice mostly stops us from creating boogeymen out of people. indigenous accounts of colonization are brutal but SO good to read when you can find them to really nail it home. they could not comprehend the inhumanity and depravity of the europeans. these motherfuckers seriously wiped out everyone who was normal and spent the last 200 years convincing us we're all fundamentally evil selfish animals who must be controlled. doughnut economics by kate raworth has a fantastic explanation of the development of the 'modern man' as we understand him--the economic animal, the "rational actor." [1] we're not rational. we're rabidly social. when you create paths of least resistance that allow people to manifest that extremely real human trait? it works. it actually works better and easier than when you're forcing a lot of people to do everything through complex threats of violence.

*brit spotted

[1] as a very petty aside, the man who invented the concept of the rational actor (john stuart mill) SAID THIS HIMSELF: "the resulting depiction is an arbitrary definition of man based on premises which might be totally without foundation... No political economist was ever so absurd as to suppose mankind are really thus constituted." ITS BULLSHIT.

I would really be interested in reading a story written by a police abolitionist who has a good sense of how police would/should be replaced in society. It would be a procedural of sorts, inasmuch as it would be about the process of discovery of the facts of a wrongdoing and how the wrongdoing is handled during and after the fact, and it would follow the various groups of people involved in facilitating that process/processes.

I just think this would be both interesting and a really good way of introducing your vision to people and getting them to read it. In fact, I would be open to collaborating on this project with any interested party who had a strong sense of a system they thought would work but wasn’t so much the this-kind-of fiction writer.

[ethicsessayprisons]

Art therapy with prison inmates: a pilot study - DavidGussak 2004

the exercise wasn't designed to be perosonally reforming to the participants. it was too prescribed for that - we had a goal/ a brief which was to create honey labels but this stunted the room for emotional development of the men involved. should we have designed it diffirently even thought that might have compromised the x of our design or would that actually have maximised it. But I think it was effective enough that its not as if we were bluffing. but it wasn't as if we were letting the men express themselves because they were very much restricted to the guidelines we had enforced on the exercise. it thus limited the room for personal expression which might have been the most useful form of therapy. but we weren't there for therapy. it was a very measurable outcome yet the goal was something far more unmeasurable. weird that something so intangible was then embedded into a very straightforward brief of label making. but we could never label the effectiveness of our efforts. once we left the prison there was no follow up and if the men had been our primary concern there would have been. we didn't agree for our motives of the trip but in hindsight it becomes clear that our motive was ourselves. Im not saying this inherently makes it unethical because a good outcome can still be born of a selfish intention. 

would be naïve to come in and ask the inmates to spill their innermost honest feelings, exposing their vulnerabilities to us and classmates. the knock-on effects of that actually might be really destructive if it tampers with the relationships of the prisoners eg. bullying. 

I don't think im concerned with the effectiveness of art therapy in the carceral classroom. then what? 

many books and art and ideas emerge from prisons. as if this void gives rise to creative outlet. 

it felt as times as though we were sidestepping topics. we were afraid of taking in too much imagery of beehives and our uni etc etc. also the conversations with the men felt at times a tension between how much we were allowed to disclose but wanting at the same time for the interaction to feel genuine and not fabricated. wanting to forge a relationship while still complying with rules of not making ourselves vulnerable. also where do the ethics lie in coming in, knowing full well we probably wont see these men again. it is unethical of us to come and go, give them our attention and then never show up again. with some of them struggling with mental issues and probably quite unstable it feels like maybe knowing that we wouldn't keep it up was quite unethical. a bit like when westeners go and work in a school in asia and the kids form attachment issues and then the british kids come back and post pics of them at the orphanage having done some life changing work but hadn't actually accessed the consequenses of their efforts. fuelled by good intentions but bad outcome potentially- is this unethical? or is it unethical to have selfish intentions with good outcome? 

such interventions can also prove potentially dangerous and counterproductive since it can act as a token effort towards the cause. 

‘ correctional environment‘ - what is correctional and by whos standards. 

a speculative way of xraying art work and getting a diagnosis based on this. 

we didn't allow the prisoners time to think through their desings rather we just expected them to produce. be productive. it seems it doesn't escape even the outmost fringes of society- this notion to produce and be productive. to use our time productively and be useful. our every moments are injected with productivity and this seems to be the way we rehabilitate prisoners back into society - through work. because they who don't work will surely come into our work worshiping society and fall back through the cracks into crime. anti work becomes criminal. liken to the lobster where being single is a crime - although its not actually it does at time feel like it and that fictional narrative higlights it for us. what if a fictional narrative of a work where its illegal to not work is created. it already exists but maybe I could expand on that. not working warrants arrest. 

measuring the success of art therapy remains provisional/ quasi-experimental. tentative outcomes/inconclusive conclusions. none of the studies I read have a control group - theres no evidence to support whether the cause for social improvement is due to the art sessions or whether there is an improvement at all. 

[onbearfeet]

Episode 5

*internal screaming*

*external whimpering*

*werewolf being squished*

Hey, guys, guess what! It's possible to tense all your muscles with anxiety in such a way as to fuck up at least half your back!

...yeah, I'm lying down now.

So, uh, hearing the name "Randall" was a whole-ass flashback, and not in the good way. I'd forgotten Randall Spector existed, but as a kid I read the '90s run where he was introduced and hooooooo boy. Weird to be asked to sympathize with a child version of, uh, that dude. Good call not nicknaming him Randy this time; I don't think Steven would have been able to keep a straight face.

Yes. Yes, I am avoiding talking about the upsetting thing. I will talk about it now because I commit to the bit, apparently even at the cost of mild self-harm, and if that isn't the story of my life ...

So. Um. Two things about my brother that caused this episode to poke me REAL HARD in the trauma. Thing one: DID is often set off by childhood abuse, as it was with Marc et al. In my brother's case, it was his biological parents beating the shit out of him, usually with an electrical cord, but sometimes with, yes, a belt. And like with Marc/Steven, the trigger to those beatings was usually an extremely normal child behavior like crying or making a mess. I was not present for these beatings; I wasn't born yet. But I saw the results, including some marks on my brother's arms and the fact that he was the largest man in just about any room and he still flinched when someone used a sharp voice.

Thing two: receiving the shittiest mental healthcare imaginable made my brother's life indescribably worse! In the United States, the largest single source of mental healthcare is the prison system (or rather systems--federalism). After Reagan shut down most institutional mental-health facilities (not that I am defending those--nightmare for another day), the US started shoving as many mentally ill people as it could into the carceral system, including my brother. And because the pay is shit and the working conditions are appalling, it is not a preferred working environment for therapists, so there's a lot of turnover. My brother got a new therapist every six months or so, and guess what the first step in his treatment was every time? Yeah, it was a case history. Apparently nobody shared notes, ever, so he had to relive his traumas over and over again every six months. For fifteen years. Until he died. That is, no shit, a major part of how Child Me came to understand the Christian concept of hell: as being forced to re-experience the worst things that ever happened to you, over and over, forever, possibly while someone pretends to "help" you but actually hurts you worse.

This episode was distressing to me.

I hung on by my fingernails because at least Steven and Marc are finally getting to understand one another a bit, and Steven isn't treating Marc like a monster 100% of the time anymore. Good job, boys. Bonus points for Steven pointing out that Khonshu had been manipulating Marc from the beginning, and for Steven getting to kick a little ass. Here's hoping Marc has to deal with some of his self-hatred in the next episode.

This was not a great episode to watch at the end of an otherwise emotionally taxing day (ironically, therapy kicked my ass). But I'm gonna finish. I'm pretty sure the guitar music at the end was connected to Jake, and after all this, I want to hear Oscar Isaac speak Spanish.

Werewolf requests an intermission, though. He's concerned I'll pull something important if I don't take better care of myself.

Oh, and he has a name now! Russell. Thanks to @abirdie for suggesting it.

Kat watches Moon Knight

Okay, so with the encouragement of several people on here and the emotional support of my roommate, I have finally (in February 2024) started watching Moon Knight, a show whose basic concept scares the shit out of me.

Context: I had an adopted older brother with DID. Note that I said "had". That's past tense because life treated him so appallingly poorly that he died (horribly, in prison) when I was 19. Part of that abuse was enabled by pop-culture depictions of DID in the 1980s and 90s that convinced everyone who knew about his condition (including the court system) that he was a walking time bomb.

One of my earliest memories is of my brother as a young adult, playing Super Mario Bros with my toddler self. Another is of him patiently teaching me how to make friends with a large dog. I never met any of his alters, afaik; I was small and cute and safe for him to be himself with, so he probably didn't need them around me. He was a profoundly gentle man when he was allowed, and it hurt like hell to see him turned into a monster in movies and on TV. I've turned off a lot of "psychological thrillers" in sorrow and disgust.

Ironically, I loved Moon Knight comics as a kid in the 90s, BEFORE he was retconned to have DID circa the mid-2000s. Because those comics came out right after my brother died in 2002 and leaned HARD into making people with DID seem like violently unstable monsters (for reference, see the cover of Moon Knight: God and Country), I stopped reading them around 2008, when I couldn't take being poked in the trauma by a comfort character anymore.

But I do love Werewolf By Night, and there's been a lot of good fic mashing Jack up with Moon Knight without dehumanizing anyone, and several people have encouraged me to try the show. So this post will be a place for my thoughts as I try to work my way through with my Essential Editions in one hand and my memories of my brother in the other. I'll add to it as I watch.

If this entertains the Moon Knight fandom or provides useful fic reference, so be it. Just don't be jerks on my post.

Also, anyone who chooses to be shitty about my brother will be eaten by bears. I don't make the rules.

Episode 1

Okay, we open with Steven as our POV character, and he's...convinced he's a sleepwalker. All right, not terrible. Steven is now a bumbling nerd, which is probably an improvement; good luck making a billionaire playboy sympathetic in the 2020s. Jake would be the logical everyman POV from the comics, but I understand from fic that he's got a different role now. I'm confused about the accent, but it's only episode 1, and Steven clearly doesn't yet know who Khonshu is, or that Marc exists, so obviously there's a ways to go here. (Is Marc ... undercover inside Steven? Ugh, this is a trope I have seen and do not like.)

Did Marc kill Steven's fish? Did Khonshu kill Steven's fish? I'm baffled by the fish. Which is a nice break from the larger anxiety. I'm gonna try to worry more about the fish.

The bits with Steven losing time and finding himself in odd situations were distressingly close to the old tropes, but both of those happened to my brother, so I'm not going to bitch about them quite yet. I want to be as fair as I can.

Oh, hey, I recognize Harrow from the comics. What up, dude. How's the cult biz treating you?

The end of the episode, with the jackal thing chasing Steven into the bathroom, came RIGHT up to the line for me. I realized that what I was most afraid of was that the story would assign "good" and "bad" labels to the alters--make Steven the sweet, innocent one and Marc (or maybe Jake, I guess) the monstrous killer. The early flashes of Steven covered in blood didn't really help allay that anxiety. And now Marc is demanding that Steven let him have control in a pretty threatening manner. But so far, it seems like the contrast between Marc and Steven is one of competence--Marc is better at fighting and Steven is better at ... panicking? Unclear. At least Oscar Isaac is playing the protagonist, so his character(s) might remain sympathetic. Nobody has been monsterized quite yet.

I finished the episode with every muscle in my body locked up, waiting for the emotional punch in the face. But I did finish it, and I think I'm gonna try episode two.