Does Prison Abolition Include Psychiatry? | That Dang Dad
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- Опубликовано: 5 сен 2024
- In a previous video, I suggested that we could get rid of prisons by strengthening the mental health system. This got some pushback because modern psychiatry is much closer to modern prisons than we'd like to think.
#psychiatry #psychology #prison #abolition
Sources:
Leah Ida Jones - docs.google.co...
Stefanie Kaufman - projectlets.or...
Drapetomania - www.pbs.org/wg...
Bracken & Thomas "Postpsychiatry" - www.researchga...
T. H. Luhrmann "Social Defeat" - www.luhrmann.ne...
Stella Akua Mensah - disabilityvisi...
Elliot Fukui - madqueer.org/r...
Transcript - pastebin.com/r...
Title music by me
Fancy Pants Music - "Handel - Entrance to the Queen of Sheba for Two Oboes, Strings, and Continuo allegro" by Advent Chamber Orchestra
Asylum footage by The Proper People
Pexels stock footage by Tima Miroshnichenko and Rodnae Productions
Special thanks to Fern!
A prison sentence has an expiration date, being committed does not.
You have to be proven guilty to be imprisoned, you have to prove sanity when committed.
Being committed is worse.
I never considered that. Putting it that way makes me realize just how terrible that is. Theoretically, can just hold people forever. That's terrifying
@@brandonbohan7281 not just theoretically... A lot of people die in those institutions
@@ronethan apologies I used terrible vernacular.
Much worse
An important part of meeting the needs of neurodivergent people is an accurate system of diagnosis that considers external AND internal causes of psychological unrest.
Excellent point
exactly
The commercialized science of psychiatry will never prioritize symptoms they cant sell a cheap fix for. For us neurodivergents, this non-magic world will never be for us. But Good Wizard (G-d for short) believes in all of us (NTs too) and his Holy Text tells us how Harry Potter's victory over Voldemort won scholarships to Hogwarts for all who believe. The only hell in this nagical new religion of Tadaism is the metaphorical one humans are making in this non-magic world. The magic world and the new educational system established there by The Boy Who Lived Free so he wouldnt Die will be much better equipped to help this world's mental misfits.
r/PsychotherapyLeftists is a great place to continue learning about this stuff. I'm disabled by depression and PTSD. I've been hospitalized against my will three times, and I've never been psychotic nor otherwise unable to consent to or refuse treatment in my opinion. I never was "out of my mind". Realizing this, I no longer view my disabilities as pathology. I am certain my brain is not broken. Holocaust survivor, neurologist, and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote: "An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior." Which very nicely describes PTSD as a learned response to trauma in order to keep ourselves safe. However, the "condition" is disabling because I'm no longer profitable. Working with the social model of disability, I am still very clearly disabled.
My final job before applying for SSDI was at a mental hospital. The type they put people in after they break a law and are ruled to be "legally insane" and essentially have no chance of ever leaving. There were four trans women in this men's prison. I also met a guy who had bipolar disorder who got relocated after the prison refused his meds which stabilized his condition and he took his frustration out on a guard who destroyed his room. I met a lot of people who absolutely were not "crazy", but were traumatized at a young age and left without resources to manage their emotional dysregulation.
Anyway, I'm glad you made this video.
This kind sof stuff is why we can't let the conversation be derailed by questions like "what about murderers and serial rapists?" Like yes we need a solution for that but what about all the NON murderers, etc. who get swept up in this? They are a much larger population and there are many ways to help besides locking them up (probably cheaper and definitely more humane too)
I was psychiatrically incarcerated (without cause) as a teenager for almost a year, way back in the 70s. I’m really really glad you addressed this-thank you.
SO.
As a person with C-PTSD, whose family has a history of schizophrenia?
I have been put in psychiatric incarceration against my will. It was unnecessary and used by my abusive parents to prevent me from escaping their abuse. I was violently and unwillingly apprehend by police, cuffed behind my back, and forced, half-clothed, again with cuffs behind my back, into a car for a ninety-minute ride.
I was told that I was being held for three days for evaluation. Instead, they held me for 7 days under a suicide watch. I was medicated against my will with benzodiazepines and antidepressants. I was misdiagnosed with mild clinical depression, eventually, and released.
I was forced to continue with the medications. My parents believed that on the medication, I would become docile and submit to their abuse.
In people with C-PTSD, which they could have easily diagnosed as PTSD at the very least at that time if they'd listened to and believed my stories of abuse, depression medications are not effective and often lead to dangerous spikes in suicidal ideation.
This is exactly what happened: one of the darkest, most suicidal periods of my life.
I have alternated in desperation turning to psychiatry and going my own way without it throughout my life, because modern psychiatry is absolute trash. Psychiatrists (at least the ones poor folks without insurance can afford) do not give a fuck about accurately diagnosing you. Mine asked me the same few questions about my background every session for three years without learning or writing down the answers that whole time.
(Not questions like 'have you been sleeping', 'have you had slurring of your voice, talking faster/slower than usual' or the usual intake questions. Stuff like: did your parents hit you or sexually abuse you.
This meant I had to go back over my history, over and over, every session, without him EVER remembering the basic details of what he was treating me for.
He misdiagnosed me again and again, prescribing medications that had horrific side effects and did nothing to alleviate my pain. One of them caused a horrific rash that sloughed the skin off my back. He suggested I give it a "couple of more weeks to work" until I physically took my shirt off to show him the bleeding and informed him that my research indicated this could, in fact, be lethal. He had also at one point put me on so many benzos that when my GP, who I went to for a refill and to continue those (surprise surprise, I still wanted those) and he saw how many I was taking, he was aghast. Turns out I had quite a fucking habit to kick, and it was torture. I was told, "take two of these twice a day" and not "take one or two of these as needed, AT MOST two twice a day". So I did what the doctor told me. And got super fucking addicted.
(The rash was my last session with him. He threw a temper tantrum and yelled at me in his office about how unfair and childish I was for not wanting to see him anymore.)
On the other hand, talk therapy with young, recently-educated LPTs or LPT-interns? Very useful. They tend to work for almost nothing (I pay $50 an hour to see my therapist) and they work overtime - I haven't had an LPT that hasn't made it clear that I can call or email them at any time between sessions if there's an emergency. They learn to know me intimately and often do in-depth research, mastering whole new therapeutic techniques (which likely takes dozens of hours and probably costs them quite a bit of money).
When I think about how much work my therapists do, I believe firmly that they work for nearly minimum wage. When I stopped being able to afford my therapist for awhile at the beginning of the pandemic, she kept my slot open for me for SIX MONTHS until I could restart therapy, and told me when I came back, "It's my policy that once you're a client of mine, you're always a client of mine."
Abolishing mental health care is not, IMO, what psychiatric abolition is. Just like we'd still have a justice system (hopefully restorative justice) if we abolished prisons, we'd still have mental health care if we abolished psychiatry.
But the institution of psychiatry as it currently exists is abusive. No one should be imprisoned "for their own safety". Despite being firmly against suicide and fighting tooth and NAIL to stay alive myself, I do not believe that anyone should be firmly kept from committing suicide if they have truthfully decided it is the least painful thing for them - because I have been in many places where it was torture merely to exist, and can very much see where it would be cruel to prevent some suicides. I do not believe anyone should be medicated against their own will or incarcerated for mental health. We deserve support, aid, and care - not imprisonment and torture.
That Pdoc sounds totally incompetent!
Stevens-Johnson syndrome is rare, but it's a rash wherein it's *YOUR SKIN ROTTING AWAY,* and you'd think that would impress a doctor to watch for it.😨
Benzos are really freaking addictive, and they are not supposed to be the first choice for treating anxiety.
My clinic has me on buspirone.
(My ex-fiance says heroin is easier to get off than benzos. I'm not going to experiment.)
I had a crappy childhood too.
I have Cptsd, depression, performance anxiety.
I take the buspar, an SSRI, lithium, and topiramate (I'm one of the minority for whom it has a mood effect). I'm in therapy.
I'm lucky, very lucky, in that there's a county medical system here for poor people. It's socialism! Yay!
Sympathies extended, too.
If the pills don't work for you, then they don't work.
Stories like yours are always so horrifying to hear, which makes them so important. I agree completely with abolishing the terrible psychiatry system (and honestly most of the mental health systems we suffer through need extensive reform), but of course that all falls back into other issues, like capitalism. The more we understand how interconnected these issues are the more apparent the systemic forces become.
I think that the parallels between incarcerated as part of the medical system and the criminal justice system are so revealing. When someone can be locked up against their will, have their dignity and right denied, just because some guy said they thought it's be for that person's benefit, to the extent that they use *police* to lock that person up, is it really much different from prisons? No doubt marginalized people are targetted worse. I've even heard of someone getting sent to one because her *partner* came out as trans. It's the same system of dehumanizing people, whether with the excuse of "they need help"/"they're not in their right mind" or with "they're a bad person"/"they're dangerous".
I cannot imagine how traumatizing it must be to be put through that, especially when it follows you reaching out for help. If this could happen to you, would you risk telling anyone? On that note I also agree that forcing people to not commit suicide is at the very least dubious. As I understand it, most suicides happen in the moment and if interrupted can be avoided, though naturally they're often part of a pattern of behaviour that the deserve support for. If we have good support systems we can do so much to reduce the likelihood of suicidal episodes and give people tools to help with it. I have helped a lot of friends through suicidal episodes and just having a sympathetic person to talk to can do so much good. Shaming people for making attempts or threatening them with drastic actions only makes it harder for them to reach out. (As for the matter of letting people die of their own volition, I support euthanasia as an option for people, especially since it'll never be something one coulld do on a whim)
The most important thing for helping people with mental health issues is to treat them with respect and trust. Defying their agency and boundries just causes more harm. We can do better, together.
I empathize and sympathize with you. Your hope your healing is important, stay safe.
@@grmpEqweer
Yeah. Benzos are no fun to be addicted to.
Fun fact: benzos are 1 out of only 2 drugs that can outright kill you by quitting cold turkey. (The other is alcohol.)
Today I saw a story about Italian cops (our Carabinieri) getting called to an old man's house because he was alone for Christmas, celebrating with him and teaching him how to videocall his grandchildren on the phone. That's the kind of service we could demand of social institutions.
Yeeeh🎉
As a trans and neurodiverse person, I have mainly encountered the psychiatric profession in the rôle of gatekeepers of medical treatments I needed in order to be happy and functional-both in accessing medical transition and then more recently obtaining drugs to help with my ADHD. I guess that’s the other side of the same coin: the doctors claim the right to decide what treatment you do or don’t receive, whether it’s by forcing people to take meds they don’t want to or by preventing people from accessing treatment they _do_ want and need.
i prefer the neurodiversity movement over the anti-psych movement. the neurodiversity movement is based in the social model of disability and most branches are against involuntary treatment. the anti-psych movement is often so focused on discrediting psychiatry that it denies the existence of neurodivergent people
Thanks for mentioning this, I'll check it out! The current system is garbage, but the anti-phych stuff sounds like yet another organization who thinks if they phrase "It's all in your head" just right I'll suddenly be tricked out of adhd (not diagnosed because I'm poor, but probably adhd)
@@bretthansen3739 Great place to start with tons of resources for further reading, is the paper "Avoiding Ableist Language: Suggestions for Autism Researchers". It's the best paper I've read in a while, has some great sources for further reading, and really succinctly describes a lot of foundational concepts and current controversies around language use and disability models. It's available free online
I'm from Italy, where psychiatric hospitals have been shut down and nothing has replaced them. You have a crisis, you go to the regular hospital (where people won't know how to handle you) or get arrested. Otherwise, you get in the crowded and confusing public psychological and psychiatric net, or you pay for a private therapist. It sucks. I've never been hospitalized or arrested, thankfully, but in 9 years in the public and private net I've constantly met incompetence, unwillingness to do anything more than badly translated and outdated American diagnostic tests, me having to explain common knowledge psychological stuff to my therapists, people unwilling to believe me, and I'm not even yet diagnosed with anything more official than "unspecified personality disorder" besides one that is clearly a stretch and was given me when I was 12. I also am going through a lot to get a gender identity disorder diagnosis (not even a gender dysphoria one, a GID one) because the current law for the recognition of (binary and dysphoric) trans people has never been updated since the '80s, and I should be thankful I'm binary, dysphoric and would want to be sterilized either way, because other trans and nonbinary people who don't want those things are just ignored and possibly diagnosed with anything else. I've recently met a better psychiatrist, so I can't complain too much right now, but this is all absurd.
As someone who is both neurodivergent and who works with adults with special needs, this video hits close to home for me. I am someone who has been helped by psychiatry. The people I work with have by and large been helped by psychiatry. And yet they've also been hurt by it, one more than the others.
We have one client who is blind, mute, autistic, and suffers from anxiety. It's not unusual for him to have panic attacks. Prior to him coming to us, he was severely overmedicated to deal with 'problematic behaviors'. He would get aggressive, grab at people, rip open skin, pull hair, sometimes deliver slaps. He was having panic attacks, had no way to communicate, and his previous caretakers had responded to his behavior with aggression, which made it worse. As a result, he was medicated to a state of near-unconsciousness with drugs that quickly build dependency and have severe withdrawal effects, and that was just how he spent all his days.
Since he became our client, we've been slowly reducing his doses of those drugs (because just taking him off them all at once would be very dangerous). He's been waking up. No longer dozing his way through life. He's been working with a behaviorist to learn communication strategies, and he is actually able to tell us when he is hungry or thirsty now, which he never could have done before. We take him out into the community, he's getting exercise, and is healthier than he's ever been. He's still overmedicated, but we're working on it, lowering the doses as quickly as is safe with the intent of only keeping those medications that he actually needs, and I can't help but wonder just how many people are in situations similar to his: rather than having their needs met and being supported to be as independent as they are able to be (and always erring on the side of what they choose, what they want), just being drugged to the gills and forgotten? Our client is slowly finding his voice; how many will never find theirs?
Wow, thanks for sharing. That's both awesome (for your client) but also heartbreaking
I have never felt as alienated as in the care of the mental healthcare system.
I had 3 encounters with it:
1. From 8th to 12th grade I had massive problems attending school, I didn't know why at the time and I'm still piecing it together today. I sought help with a child and youth psychologist, my father was against it and had vetoed me going a few years earlier. The therapist didn't really know what to do with me. He seemed mostly of the opinion that whatever my problem was was too intangible and usually only talked to me about surface level life events. When he tried to get a better picture of me by talking to my parents my father gave him his spiel about how I was making it all up, was lazy and addicted to video games. Sadly he seemed to by it. In one of the later family sessions he left me to sit outside behind the "sound proof door". I couldn't hear what was said, but my dad basically screamed at my mum for almost an hour while I was sitting in the waiting room room. I stopped seeing him shortly after.
2. During my first year in uni I started degrading even further. I lived in a room of a shared flat that barely fit my computer and my bed and that filled itself knee deep in garbage. I had mental breakdowns predictably every 8-10 days like clockwork. My mom helped me move out and my doctor referred me to a 4 week therapy at a mental hospital with a diagnose of severe clinical depression. I was assigned a therapist to see once a week for an hour and a counselor to also see once a week, as well as some other activities like sport, art and play. After two weeks during my second session I got a little anxious that nothing was going to actually happen. I accidently used the word "normal" and my therapist seemed really intent on breaking that down, essentially changing the topic away from what I wanted to talk about. I told him I knew that normal isn't a good word to use and that its a subjective term. As he kept insisting I told him I was afraid that my time was being wasted. We ended the session without coming to a proper conclusion and he went on holiday for the rest of my stay, so did my counselor. I had to start from scratch with both of their replacements. Once when I was anticipating a breakdown i went from my room to an empty public room in hopes that a change in scenery could help keep it away. When that didn't work I was later accused of having done it for attention and that if my breakdown was genuine I would've had it in my room. My second counselor also once remarked that it was weird that I was much more responsive than a week ago, as if that wasn't normal for depression. I was released after 4 weeks of no help with the same diagnosis I arrived and no treatment.
3. Predictably I had a suicide attempt later that year and was locked up for 2 weeks in a closed facility. Nothing else was done. Curiously I was sleeping roughly 14-16 hours a day in multiple stints I don't want to sound conspiratorial here, but if you told me there was something in the food to make me tired I'd believe you.
Today I'm afraid of seeking help from the system again, especially because I'd have to be on a waiting list for months and I just can't bring myself to invest faith and trust for so long only to not be heard again. I'm pretty stable, turns out that shortening my work week and taking out of high stress environments helps pretty well. I'm even getting better with the trash problem. I'm lucky in so many ways and I can't imagine what a person with conditions that much more rely on intervention must go through. I got a glimpse at it in 3. and I'd wish it on no one.
This is important.
Having been treated, and worked in a psychiatric hospital (in Germany) myself I can definitely see where people are coming from, but I think the problem is capitalism, rather than psychiatry, and has more to do with stressed nurses than the institution of psychiatry.
When I did an internship in a psych ward I definitely saw people who were there not just to protect themselves, but also others. I recall two cases in particular. One was a priest who came in literally kicking and screaming. He tried to attack me, because I had red hair, which clearly made me a witch who needed to be burned at the stake. He left as one of the kindest old men I've ever met.
The other was young, broad, tall, and was stalking me through the ward. When he got better he apologized, and told me he thought he was in hell, and I was a demon with a key. I don't think I need to explain what could have happened if he was even slightly less inhibited.
So, psychiatry helps people. Great!
Well, not so fast.
I also was stressed beyond belief. We were understaffed, and overcrowded as a matter of course. I had no time to really consider the patients much, and a significant part of patient interaction was them not following the rules, and overworked me having to deal with the result.
I never hated a patient, but we all made note of who was compliant, and who made problems. We talked to the psychiatrists about it, and they - taking non-compliance as a symptom rather than a sign that needs aren't met adjusted the medication.
The problem here was, as I realized during my own time as a patient, that for profit health care puts nurses in opposition to the patient's individual needs while also putting them in a position of power over them, giving both motive, and means to come down on any perceived misbehavior. A common issue in nursing homes for old people, too.
So, the whole thing is awful! Burn it to the ground!
Not quite. Psychiatry is an institution that is necessary imo, but really badly implemented. Despite that, I've received the best psych health care in my life while I was there.
What would you do better, and what does all that have to do with capitalism though?
Simple. A communist society lacks much of the alienation that is responsible for the vast majority of depression cases, cutting the number of people in need of psychiatric care dramatically.
That's not all though. In a communist society, we can make sure that there is enough personnel to give individual, effective care, and with an anti-authority mindset, we can make sure the patient is included in all discussions about them to make sure their perspective is included as equally, or more important as that of the nurse, and doctor, depending on the circumstances.
Lastly, I want to say that there will always be serial killers, rapists, and pathological sadist, and we need a way to deal with that. I'm opposed to the death penalty, and prison both. There is something wrong with people like that, and they need treatment. Study at the very least. Will there be far fewer than under capitalism? Of course. Will there be none? Of course not.
This was a pain to type on my phone.
I have so many mixed feelings about psychiatry because, on the one hand, I have a mental condition that is not merely disabling in the social construction sense but very literally makes my life barely worth living (borderline personality disorder). It's only through the work of a handful of "good" psychologists that I've been able to understand why my experiences are so dramatically different from other people's, why I'm so "broken", and that there is hope.
On the other hand, I've also spent a decade and a half in therapy and on meds, deteriorating all the while. For at least half of that time, my psychiatrists had secretly diagnosed me with BPD, but chose not to disclose this to me or refer me to effective therapy, but instead to continue prescribing a handful of medications with severe side effects while noting in my chart that they were expected to have no positive effect on my condition. I've been locked up against my will, one of the more traumatic experiences of my life, and I've also been repeatedly hospitalized consensually and had positive experiences.
Psychology/psychiatry is necessary--I certainly can't live without it and would probably be a 'borderline' even in fully automated luxury communism. But it's also terrible. It's a dialectic.
I think the solution is to tear it up by the roots and replant.
i was involuntarily hospitalized a few years ago for my own safety and i can honestly say that it made my mental illness worse. in my time there, all i got better at was masking my symptoms. when i did get out, i was terrified of being honest with my therapist for fear of being sent back. i understand the concern with abolishment in terms of cases where someone poses a genuine threat to themselves/others, but i, and countless other people have been barred from seeking help for fear of being held against our will (and i imagine, for a lot of americans, fear of going into debt).
The scene in _Terminator 2: Judgment Day_ that I find most difficult to watch is not one that has either of the two Terminators in it. It’s the scene where (CW for psychiatric abuse) Sarah is held down by the security guards while a psychiatrist injects her without her consent.
Yeah Sarah's lockdown experience in T2 is really tough to watch
How did she actually end up there?
I am someone who needs psychiatric care, probably for the rest of my life. I have never been hospitalized, from what I've heard from peers is that institutionalization does more harm than good and is often used as a power trip for doctors dealing with "unruly" patients. Elliott's story gives me hope that there is an alternative that doesn't involve institutionalization, as well as an alternative where the doctor-patient dynamic is more horizontal.
This was something I didn't get into, but one of the aspects of a post-psychiatric society that Mensah talks about is a quote from Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan who said, “psychiatry like any therapy should be the meeting of two ‘free’ people.” So yeah, I love the idea of horizontal power dynamics
@@ThatDangDad horizontal power dynamics are bomb! I will definitely be doing more reading on this subject. Thanks for making this video.
@@ThatDangDad I'm kinda new to your videos, so forgive my ignorance if this is something you've already elaborated on.. but why do speak like you're trying not to wake someone sleeping near by in all your videos? Does it have to do with the philosophy of speaking more quietly to get others to quiet down and really listen? Or, are you trying to not wake someone sleeping near by? 🤷♀️ Just curious. Regardless, great videos.
@@computersrevil in one of his earliest videos I remember him mentioning speaking softly so as to not wake his kid at night. Since then it must have stuck
@@basil3663 Cool, thanks! It's no biggie, it doesn't bother me or anything.. was just curious. He speaks quieter than those golf commentators trying not to wake up the viewers at home. Lol
I have, as of writing this, just recently been discharged from a psychiatric hospital. I have been homeless, and prior to admission was staying at a friend's house; my friend's housemate, an older woman, took it upon herself to contact my abusive parents and bring them to the house to pick me up, 2 days prior to the date we all had agreed upon for me to leave. My plans for finding shelter were dismissed, and I was told that I was being irrational and unreasonable for trying to get away from the abusive home - I even reached out to my friend, who did not defend me at all, and even repeated some of the things that were being said to me. All of this was triggering to the point that I ended up in a shutdown and was unable to make decision due to the internal confusion and disorientation. I felt like I had no other option but to get in my mom's car and be taken to the hospital.
When I got there, I went through the intake process, where I tried to explain my situation. They essentially railroaded me into "consenting" to be admitted, even though I felt as though I had no other options, and was not in a state of mind to make decisions. I spent the following 3 nights there, having medication that only confused me more, worsened my sensory issues, made me even less emotionally stable be forced on me (I agreed to taking the meds while in a state where there was no option but compliance.) I saw people with bipolar, bpd, and other conditions suffer as the nurses and techs did absolutely nothing to help, until they became too much of a nuisance, at which point they were restrained and medicated against their will. We saw a therapist most days, who was thoroughly unable to validate a single thing I said about my situation. Not once was my undiagnosed neurodivergence addressed or considered, either the ADHD or the autism. I was catapulted into feeling compelled to provide emotional support for the other inmates, being overly empathetic in a place like that, which whittled my energy down to the bone. My hormone therapy was denied for a long time, until eventually they put in the wrong prescriptions - I was given the run around between the nurses, techs, psychiatrist, therapist, and medical doctor, and no one took responsibility as my hormone levels became erratic. I was eventually discharged, with no where to go but downtown to look for shelter, exhausted beyond imagining, and with a feeling that I was LUCKY.
I am still struggling to secure shelter for myself now, and have not had time to emotionally process what happened to me. I understand that I was fortunate in my experience, I was not there for long and had the option to leave whenever I met with the psychiatrist (even if it was not presented to me, and given the stress of the situation, and the uncertainty of what would happen should I leave, didn't even occur to me) but what I saw alone is enough for me to be for psychiatric abolition, at least in regards to the detention of neurodivergent people. Meds are pushed on you even if they are not necessary, and practically no proper therapy is provided - there was no case manager assigned to help you with your problems, and the problems facing you while detained simply whitewash the larger problems that brought you there in the first place, leading to a system that harms you and then seeks treatment for THOSE harms, rather than the harms that existed before they were ever involved. I questioned my own sanity and felt suicidal at times during my stay - I am lucky that I kept my mouth shut.
Thanks That Dang Dad, this is an important addendum to your last video, and an important topic.
Thanks for sharing your story. That sounds like a very frustrating and scary experience. And very draining! You don't deserve to be treated like that
As a person who is of the antipsych variety of political positions, a transperson, a person with significant neurodiversity that makes my basic existence a very different prospect than most folk, and as a person who's seen a lot of people suffer and benefit from the practice of psychiatry, I gotta say that I'm not impressed with what we have in America. In many ways, for too many people, the mental healthcare system in America is a significant danger to your ability to live life. Pressuring is almost ubiquitous, and the reason why is that folk actively work to misconstrue what consent and coercion actually mean. Old techniques that do more harm than good are being taught commonly to people who won't know to not use them. Problems are being made worse. And while this does not invalidate the overall science or our ability to learn more about the mind and how it works, its rather sad to me that people can't seem to see that people are being harmed, lives destroyed, and that it is having real effects on everyone's lives.
Could you elaborate on consent and coercion? What are we being taught?
@@kiara-kh7nh In my last experience with the Mental Health System (MHS for short) my family had found a person who was claiming they could go through the process and paperwork involved with a lot of stuff and make it easier to get help. I was 22 at the time, obviously asocial (the leave me alone socializing is harder than math kind, not the violent/disruptive kind which is called antisocial), still an egg of a transwoman, living with my mother and was (and likely still am) dealing with various traumas that make it rather difficult to lead a normal life. From what I've seen I fit the bill for CPTSD, but I've never had a professional even acknowledge that I could have had trauma in my life so its hard to say for certain when you have been aggressively pushed back on that.
2 weeks into this, she's telling me that 1) she thinks I have Schizophrenia or something on that spectrum of disorders (schizotypal, schizoaffective, etc) and she's telling me that basically anything I'd do to express that I don't want to have her in my life anymore is a symptom. Then, we get into a conflict over the fact that I smoke pot, didn't tell her, and she didn't tell me that this was relevant information. Then, in that conflict she proceeds to start to gaslight me. In order to keep me "invested" in this thing she was trying to do she kept talking all about how I was making this decision that I was trying to say I didn't want to make. She also pressured me with my mother's reaction. And when I called her out on this, I got browbeaten into submission.
Fastforward a couple weeks, and I'm brought to this psychiatrist who she wanted me to see. This person is sadly part of a study on antipsychotic medication though, so telling you all her name is sadly something I don't want to do because it can dox me. She talks at/down to me for an appointment, and then she sends us off to this particular nurse practicioner that gives me a test that measures Social Norms (I looked for the name for like 10 minutes, sorry I can't find it). The test had questions on it like "Have you ever been attracted to the same sex?" "Have you ever had sex with someone of the same sex?" "How many partners have you had in the last year?" "Do you have any nonstandard political beliefs?" "Do you believe in aliens?", and when the results came back they said it meant I had schizophrenia or some sort of schizo-spectrum disorder. Thing is they were never actually consistent on whether or not I had one, they just assumed I did because of that test and started working to get me on the study that the Psych was doing and antipsychotics to boot.
Now here's probably where I'm gonna throw you for a loop in this story. The antipsychotics I was put on did help me for a little while. See, I have issues with compulsive thoughts and memories, severe issues with anxiety, and a tendency to go a bit fuzzy around the edges of the mind when I've been too stressed for too long. And all my life I had been pushed to excel beyond my limits and punished for not being able to exceed them. Standard "You aren't trying hard enough" "I'm doing my best" "No you aren't" shit, not the point besides the harm that we know this kinda thing can do to developing impulse control. And for a good week, Paliperidone, the antipsychotic I was on, did help me with that. It honestly allowed me to get a foothold in my own thoughts that has not only lasted to this day but been exceedingly helpful in helping myself get better. But the problem is that after that week this medicine wasn't something I was taken off, wasn't something I was weened off or had the dose lowered on severely. Instead I would continue being given this medicine for the better part of half a year, I think around 5 months the last time I asked someone. And I bring up the name of the medicine because if you go and you research that medicine, you'll find something interesting out about it: Taking it for more than 2 weeks increases paranoia, makes it hard to regulate thoughts, practically turns off your ability to self motivate and practically left me an increasingly agitated zombie. And its also worth noting that it harmed other cognitive processes, such as my ability to fantasize or come up with novel solutions to things.
During this whole process my desires were repeatedly suppressed in favor of what others desired me to do. I was made to be a Guinea pig for a study I would never have willingly agreed to. I was pressured by a mother that is still using the idea of this "diagnosis" to attack my confidence and self control. I was threatened implicitly with "be too unruly and we'll get you committed". And the only reason I made it out of this situation instead of falling deeper and deeper into that pit was because my stepmother backed me up enough to give me the confidence boost I needed to stand up to my mother, and came with me to an appointment with this psychiatrist, told her off for browbeating me like she clearly demonstrated, and proceeded to tell me we were never going back.
I'm going to repeat that last bit with a different framing to hopefully be able to communicate something that may not come across easily: *If it was not for the fact of someone I had no guarantees of meeting in my life and having the relationship I do with them today, it is very possible I would have had a psychotic break, I would have not been able to live and enjoy a life not clouded by the inability to think properly, and/or I would not still be alive. To repeat, the only reason I'm able to share this with you is because someone else decided to ignore tons of social pressure, "common sense judgements" that are forced on us by society, and the outward appearance of someone meek and not able to stand up for themselves or live life, and took a difficult course of action that can get them judged and shamed In Order To Help Me.* If it was not for them you would not see the same Shada posting this. You likely would never see a person named Shada posting their experiences with the psychiatric field. *My life was nearly thrown away by the careless actions others still believe are best to have taken. It is a question whether or not I would still be alive would I not have experienced this all the way I did.* Looking back at those memories from almost 4 years ago now this realization was one I know I needed to share even if I am able to share nothing else about this experience that is useful to others. *I stared death, either of personhood or of biology, in the face, and most of the people in my life who should have protected me were the ones responsible for getting me there in the first place, and they did this because they genuinely believed it was the best options available.*
@@ShadaOfAllThings Thanks for sharing your story, it really resonated with me. I'm glad you're in a better place now, and glad you can use your harrowing experiences to educate people like me about the issues we never had to deal with. Good luck
Important when abolishing psychiatry is to not smash it, but to have something good to replace it, as some people might depend on it for help. It's a sad thing, that people might depend on a system, that oppresses them, but that's the story of our world in a nutshell. :/ However what Fukui suggests sounds good and very human to me. There should be more dialogue about it.
As anti-psychiatry as I am, I really do respect you for not doing a complete 180 on your beliefs after learning a bit more from the other side. It's clear you think about this stuff deeply and even just hearing you affirm the legitimacy of people's stories and letting them question your position in the first place is an immensely valuable thing. Take your time, learn and listen as much as you can, and at the end of the day we will still all have slightly different beliefs but if we can feel some comfort in knowing others have taken ours seriously then I think that makes for a pretty good community.
I think it's also worth mentioning how extraordinarily difficult it is for people are actively trying to seek psychiatric care of their own volition to actually get the care the care that they need. It took me almost 2 years and a trip to the er for something unrelated for me to be able to set up an appointment with my current therapist and for him to begin to even possibly consider giving me a bipolar diagnosis when I've been displaying symptoms for years and it's only gotten worse with time. Every single time I've attempted to get my symptoms addressed they've either been ignored or misdiagnosed as something else. For the longest time psychiatry has been either used as means to abuse vulnerable populations or outright denied to them when they attempt to utilize them
My only experience with the mental health system was within the prison system. You could wait weeks after filling out a medical slip to see even a nurse, but all new inmates see a psychiatrist within 72 hours of reception.
This poor lady was determined to slap some kind of diagnosis on me. Everyone gets the “depression and anxiety” like it or not. She also was convinced I was EDNOS eating disorder not otherwise specified. For the record, I’m not. I just foolishly confessed my fear of getting fat from the horrible nutrient content of institutional food.
She wanted to put me on mood stabilizers and something for sleep. They want everyone on them, I’m assuming to keep everyone nice and compliant. I refused, but suggested better nutrition might make inmates healthier and happier.
Our state passed a law that fresh fruits and vegetables had to be offered. Fresh veggies are too expensive apparently. Some places donate apples and oranges, but the COs are constantly fighting back against that, because they say inmates just use them to make pruno.
There DID seem to be a lot of women with mental health issues there; legit ones. But beyond medication , I didn’t see them getting any other kind of help.
Last year I was looking into mental health help for a friend of mine, and the waiting list for a psychiatrist in her area with her medical insurance was 7-12 months. And that was before Covid.
I work as a social worker for something called an ACT (Assertive Community Treatment) Team. We work with citizens with the most profound and pervasive mental illness disabilities. Our folks have schizoaffective disorder, PTSD, BPD, major depressive disorder with psychotic features, etc. Our job is to work with folks who have had frequent hospital visits and/or jail stays, working in the community to avoid those visits. We're lucky; our team consists of highly empathic social workers, nurses, peer support workers, and a very strong psychiatrist who I've seen cry when one of our folks was so impacted by her psychosis that she was unable to hold a conversation to tell us what we could do to help.
One of the biggest sources of pride in my life is that we have been able to reduce hospitalizations so dramatically for our clients - not because it's a "success measure" but because I recognize that involuntary hospitalizations can be traumatic.
That being said, hospitalizations have been a secular miracle for many of my clients. Usually voluntary stays are the most beneficial, of course, but the same person I shared above came out of her involuntary hospital stay on medications that work for her, happier and about to start a new chapter of her life.
This is just anecdotal evidence, but I've seen the importance of hospitalization on folks, especially those with psychotic disorders who are hurting and not able to rationalize or process the need for treatment in their most acute times. It's akin to treating someone unconscious after a car accident: they're not able to consent to treatment, so the people with the appropriate skills and experience do what they feel is right to treat them with what they need to be as healthy and well as they can be.
That ALSO being said, hhospitalization, especially involuntary, should only ever be used as a last-resort option. For people agreeing to needing treatment and willing to stay at a temporary treatment facility, less restrictive settings are available and should always be used whenever they are appropriate.
Mental health care is medical health care. And just like in medical health care, sometimes hospitalization is needed to save someone's life.
Great info, thank you for talking about it. The ACT model sounds really interesting and definitely in line with the kinds of things we need to build more of.
Psychiatry has helped and hurt me. I’ve been treated terribly in certain facilities, treated like an inmate, denied needed pain medicine, and constantly talked down to. On the other hand, after sexual abuse, violence and serious neglect in childhood, therapy has been a lifeline. I wouldn’t be here without it. Good topic, Dad
There has also been reporting that, like the prison industrial complex, the psychiatric industrial complex is heavily motivated by profit. People are held for extended periods of time in order to make more money from them.
This was good.
As someone who was almost violently attacked by a fellow patient in psych hospital due to her seeing me as a horrifying monster I... I'm also not sure about not restraining people or not medicating people, but also like... I did see instances of infantilizing adults and racism there as well. This has given me something to think about.
The difference being I had committed myself. Most of my friends have legitimate horror stories from psych hospitals.
Thank you for sharing the information you learned with us.
I will continue to reflect on this further
i’ve been on a “abolish everything” kick for about 6 years now and i’ve yet to meet any institution worth saving
My rule of thumb: if Foucault compared the institution to a panopticon, it should probably be either abolished or reformed to the point of being unrecognizable.
The problem is, every institution exists to serve an actually necessary purpose - otherwise it would never be tolerated - but in a manner that suits the needs of those in charge, and their imaginations and worldview. It is not possible to simply "abolish everything" without first figuring out how to meet the actually necessary purpose each institution serves - the reason anyone would call on it in the first place, bad as it is - in a way that accomplishes that purpose in a way that suits _our_ needs.
We need to figure out how to do public safety and all the associated things in an entirely different way - and this is already happening, as we've seen. As these new methods and practices develop into something more widespread and systemic, the old institutions will lose their basis for existence.
@@dwc1964if you think capitalism is necessary?
It very much isn't.
@@theaureliasys6362 capitalism is a _system_ not a single institution - and it was, historically, necessary, but has long outlived its progressive phase
this is quite possibly the single coolest thing i've ever read
Psychiatry has hurt me. I eventually found a good psychiatrist who listens to me, and a good psychologist who believes me, and I still rely on medication to live but I know not to trust the medical establishment of psychiatry because it is intrinsically tied to the harmful power structures in our society.
Speaking as myself:
I've found personal psychological and psych med intervention useful, and mostly positive.
I do have to say ECT was also useful, but I didn't notice how my memory recall for words, random facts, etc was getting...a bit fried. Too bad, the treatments relieved depression very well!
So I won't be doing those again unless I'm really terrifically bad off.
I didn't find the psych ward horrible. Just boring.
What was going on in my head while I was there was awful, which is why I asked to be there.
When I am at the point of wanting to end my life, I'm really in a rather altered state. I'm usually rather dissociated, spacy, can barely focus.
...I often do think of myself as a broken person. Not only do people inevitably hurt me even if they mean well...I inevitably hurt them, despite never meaning to. And that's simply how it is.
My ex-fiance and friend in England is still alive because the police hauled him to a horrible NHS psych ward multiple times. He became suicidal and psychotic.
My depression, PTSD, and anxiety is certainly aggravated by the totally ruthless variety of capitalism we have in the U.S.. Lots of double binds, lots of ableism and shaming.
If you're a prison abolitionist, it's safe to say you don't support a psychiatric institution that works like a prison. Whether that means serious, radical, thorough reform of psychiatry or abolition may be a terminological quibble.
I continue to be amazed by your thoughtfulness, insight, and willingness to challenge your own thinking and biases. Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing your exploration of these very important topics, I learn something new everytime you upload.
The fundamental purpose of psychatric hospitals isn’t nearly as broken as prisons, because the shittiest doctors have a better idea of who actually needs to be physically restrained than politicians do. Well, slightly better. Forced psychiatric stays need to go, but I think they’ll stay around a lot longer than prisons because of how they can be bent to appear good without challenging the fundamental injustice of incarceration :/
I gotta say I’m in awe here of the stuff people are bringing to the table. Dang Daddy here has given and attracted an absolute treasure trove of lived experience and perspective
As someone who spent close to six years in what was essentially a combination school/psychiatric Day-Program, I can affirm both the positives and the negative aspects of Psychiatric care. On the one hand I might have ended my life before I'd even made it into High School without that opportunity, and on another, well... I've SEEN things- people not helped, people harmed even- by the same system.
As someone who will never be completely free of the issues (and also, institutions) that landed me there in the first place, and as someone married to someone who has a profound long-term treatable-but-not-curable psychiatric disorder for over 15 years, I have mixed feelings about how "mental illness" is treated- and continues to be treated.
While I feel the "psychiatric industrial complex" is partly to blame, I also have to acknowledge that it is- itself- a product of broader social biases very much present in our body politic and culture not only at the time of it's inception, but also today- and that it is those underlying structures and assumptions which have to change.
Because when we do deal with issues of mental illness in this country- there continues to be a persistent disingenuous, cynical attitude towards the matter that continues producing the structures which perpetuate both the failure of the system itself, and the failure to help the people we purport to want to help.
Anyone remember our few-years ago reactions to a string of horrific mass shootings? If you were of a certain persuasion- say one that was heavily inclined to play what-aboutism to begin with with the topic, you might say something like "We need to have better mental health care in this country!"
As this is the same sort of person who has a sort of hero worship for authoritarianism, police, and a sort of hero-fantasy about being "the good guy with the gun" in some action-movie knockoff of every day life, it's very hard to believe that these are the same people who sincerely believe in the actual hard work that good mental health care would require.
What they really want of course is to keep these "deviants" away from them- and preferably away from situations where they might have to question if the ready availability of guns for just anyone in any situation with no reservation is overall a good one. But this kind of cynicism about mental health care is hardly unique to the right, the left has similar issues with it- a sense of "squickiness" and a tendency to regard the people it concerns as "inconvenient".
This is a bias present among a lot of different sorts of pearl-clutchers- many of whom have never really had to deal with a mental health crisis up close and personal- and would prefer on the whole if there were some sort of system in place that would make sure they never have to. Because let's face it, like nursing homes, hospice care, and so on, profound mental illness is a stark reminder of our own mortality- and we've never had an easy time coming to grips with that- or things that remind us of it.
If you want better mental healthcare systems, then we need more honest motives in the politics driving them.
Chill dad voice was just the ticket this cold winter evening.
Great piece to encourage thinking outside of the box!
As someone who has been hospitalized twice (once voluntarily, the other time because I was _so close_ to suicide and thought I had no other choice but to be heavily monitored), the whole mental hospital thing is a fucking _nightmare and half._ Sure, we don't have straitjackets or legal lobotomies or anything anymore, but the first go-round saw me coming _out_ of the system hearing voices, and hallucinating that I was other people (I was around 15 years old at the time with no history of DID or any DDNOS diagnosis or behaviors that even looked like it, well out of the woods for actually having the thing). What made my brain snap enough that I started having those sensations and behaviors? I was administered an injection of a concoction colloquially known as "booty juice" due to the fact that it's usually injected via buttcheek so it can act quicker against my will. I was having a panic attack in which I was trying to provoke one of the more consistently erratic patients in my ward to kill me because suicidality mixed with severe anxiety and a very stressful environment is the Worst Concoction For Stability Ever, and they decided that instead of just isolation until I came down from it that they'd do this because "it was what was best". I do think the attendants that did this thought it was best and would legit help me. It however did not, as I woke up to an internal voice that didn't sound or feel like my own telling me to hurt myself and others in the most assertive tone I've probably ever heard- and shortly after, a kind reassuring voice to talk me down that also did not feel or sound like my own. Thank goodness for internal balancing at least, right? The Bad Voice was called Sylvia and went by she/her and sometime before or during when I was transferred to outpatient daily (which was EVEN WORSE SOMEHOW) I started hallucinating that I was her or that she took over my body or some shit when certain triggers were presented. Later came that but with the character Fran Bow from the video game of the same name, and I even entered my second bout of being in the mental hospital while thinking I was her! _NONE OF THIS WOULD'VE HAPPENED BEFORE I WAS COMMITTED._ The worst part was the unpredictability of the other patients, with one notable case being a girl braided my hair so I could have pretty waves in it when I woke up one night and then the next day it turns out she was part of a small group who committed _battery_ on a new patient for bearing superficial resemblance to Dora the Explorer. Also? The attendants? They had no idea how to handle my sensory stuff due to my ASD diagnosis and like constantly misgendered and deadnamed someone in the same ward as me who was nonbinary. This was the same stay where they readily accepted my "turning into" Sylvia and Fran Bow, and allowed me to even sign papers as Fran when I thought I was her. It's a fucking mess.
Yeah, it is because my psychiatrists treat me like a person worthy of respect that I was able to get better.
Now, since I am an autistic person, I realize full well how much the problem is with society not letting me (or others) have a place.
Thank you for this. My mother was paranoid schizophrenic, and it was so hard when she was still with us to get her help. Being very poor and isolated from other members of our family, we had no other recourse but the mental health system. It was really tough and it probably exacerbated her condition. I hope we can one day make these ideas reality.
I love your videos and insight! The problem I have with meds is this....my nephew was diagnosed a social psychopath at the of 16! He is NOT, but the meds they put him on caused severe depression and suicidal tendencies. This went on for months while they tweeted his meds. Anyways, you have to find a good Dr.
There is an informal term used in the psychological and care community. The term is SLS (shit life syndrome) usually referring to things such as material conditions and community or family life that care workers and professionals cannot or are not allowed to address. I mention this only to point out that several people are aware of the systemic problems present in the treatment and care of mental illness and emotional problems. Obviously, much like our law enforcement problems, almost everyone agrees a real problem exists but most either feel powerless to change anything or believe that a better system is not possible. This is made worse by people who want to ignore or exacerbate systemic problems because they have a political axe to grind. I think the only thing that will really help is to at least bring these problems to light as much as possible.
I work in an emergency department psych ward in downtown austin and can definitely tell you there’s far little difference between the police bringing in the people having the crisis and the ward nurses who are there to medicate you and keep you restrained and in place. The absolute horrors I’ve witness at work and the behavior of healthcare workers who work so closely with the police have really pushed me to get into psychiatry. I basically drive home each morning after my night shift from 7pm-7am usually in tears knowing the poor bastards who came in just looking for food, meds, and a bed will continuously be treated like animals and nuisances. The options are always send them inpatient to another facility to just be pumped with drugs for 3-5 days or just get sent back to the damn street
Thank you for making this video. I’ve had some awful experiences in psychiatric hospitals and it’s been difficult to get people to see how complicated this issue is. I don’t think inpatient care needs to be abolished completely, but there needs to be an emphasis on informed consent and community-based treatments. Modern psychiatry tends to conflate irrational behavior with an inability to understand the implications of one’s choices. This makes it easy for doctors, regardless of their intentions, to force treatments on a patient who is capable of making his/her own decisions. Mental illness often doesn’t intellectually impair a person, but makes irrational choices seem rational. Modern psychiatry also pays little attention to the influence a person’s material conditions have on their mental health. People in poverty, abusive situations, or disabled bodies are expected to become as healthy as more privileged people while little to nothing is done to address those conditions. I believe building dual power involves community-based emotional support in addition to other forms of mutual aid. Improving material conditions may not eliminate mental illness, but it will make it much easier for mentally ill people to get help.
I was put into psychiatric care at 17 by my dad, because my mom just died, he didn't know how to take care of me, and was trying to impose all manner of control over me when she died. I was not responsive to the level of control as he is somewhere on the narcissist line of personality. He was/is extremely manipulative and I didn't appreciate how he treated me as it was abusive. So after winter break ended on my senior year he put me into a psych ward designed for teenagers. I can talk a bit about how it was for me.
They advertised the facility as a place for answers and help. I thought I was going to get help, I was manipulated into thinking this would be good for me as I do have issues, especially after my mom died, and due to the domestic violence I grew up with. Once I was admitted however they changed their tune and stated that they refused to diagnose that all disorders can be treated the same and made me take a medication without a diagnosis. Turns out, years later when I got my diagnosis that I am bipolar, and anti depressants alone are actually really bad for me. The med they put me on I hypothesize that it put me into my first manic state. I am type 2 so I don't get that state outside of the meds they had me on. I was forced onto the drugs and compliant so I didn't resist the horrible treatments they had there, I can only look at the experience with my memory of it now and a currently clear mind.
If the children, because many of them were that, children, did anything kids did, they were told they were oppositionally defiant and put into a padded cell or the fishbowl room. No one wanted to go to the fishbowl room as everyone walked by it at lunch time so everyone could see that you messed up. It was all terrible. They couldn't legally hit you, so instead they restrained, confined, or shamed you publicly. So I would say based on my experience as a teenager, it at a minimum needs harder regulations, reform, or something. People with mental illness are not something to be thrown out of society and locked up.
We were abused, ignored, and mistreated and the ward had a green light to do so. I would say I am in agreement of the current system being abolished completely. There should be something helpful in place, but the current system, from my experiences and from what I have heard from others in my community with mental illness, is that it is not helpful. There is a saying among us that if someone is having a mental health crisis, to not call 911. Many folks have actually been killed by cops for being suicidal, and others just get ambulance bills that they cannot pay off, which will put them in that position again, but worse. Normally we band together to help them out, as we can. So a community mindset for mental illness would be a plus. All I know is that the current system is really bad on all sides, except for the parts of society that just wants us to go away so they don't have to see or experience us and our existence.
Location this happened in was Salt Lake City, Utah(USA) for anyone who wants to know. Utah also has some of the highest rates of suicide in the nation.
Also wanted to add that one of the very best fictional depictions of some of what you talk about, particularly in terms of women and POC (not to mention one of my favorite visions of a possible anarchist quasi-utopic future society) is in Marge Piercy’s novel Woman on the Edge of Time. She wrote it in the 1970s, and it takes place in that contemporary time and a far possible future. It’s damned revolutionary, and I recommend it to pretty much everyone.
Given that the comment in the previous video was responding directly to something that I said (not that I was the only one, obviously), I feel fairly confident in saying that you and I were thinking pretty similarly about this. I thought it was clear that, when you said psychiatry would be a part of a post-prison world, you meant some hypothetical form of mental health infrastructure that wasn't just a re-skin of prisons. But of course, that's because you were addressing a comment I had made and I knew where you were coming from. I understand how it might not be clear if someone were coming at it from the other end. Now I'm actually glad to leave this fairly banal comment here just for the algorithm, but I promise I do have a point with this.
What I'd like to suggest is that the problem lies with the unclear definition of the word abolition. You said that you want to abolish prisons, but didn't say that you want to abolish psychiatry, and that was presumably taken to mean that you didn't think they need to be overhauled. But what does it mean to abolish psychiatry? If we're comparing to the abolition of slavery, then legally speaking, abolition would probably mean banning the practice outright. But to me, abolition just means rebuilding it from the ground up. These systems are performing necessary functions. They're doing it incredibly poorly, and with a lot of damaging side effects, but crime will always need to be addressed, and so will mental health. So abolition doesn't necessarily mean shutting down every police station or jail or mental hospital; because something will still have to exist in their place to perform that function, even if it's completely unrecognizable from what we have now.
Consider this. Slavery was abolished, yet we still effectively have slavery, just under a different name. So are slave abolitionists really done? On the other hand, imagine some hypothetical correctional system, one which segregated people from society only in the most extreme cases, when it was absolutely necessary and did everything in that hypothetical, ideal way. If it was still referred to as a prison, would we still need to abolish it? How about if the hypothetical community engagement officers were still called police for the sake of familiarity? This may seem like a purely semantic argument, but I think it's very important to think about where we're trying to end up.
If psychiatric institutions no longer modelled themselves after prisons, and began to adopt all of the practices mentioned in your video's description- and more that haven't even been thought of yet- that would be the point where we say we're done, wouldn't it? You've pointed out flaws in all of these institutions, and I think you've done a very good job of arguing for change, but when we're talking about an end that's so far away from us, where most of what we're talking about is purely hypothetical and would require extensive research to flesh out the logistics of the new system, I think it's a mistake to use such specific language for how you want to effect the change. If we can reach the same goal by reforming the existing system incrementally as we could by abolishing it and replacing it with a new system that we built from the ground up, then why be so specific about the "how" when we only care about the goal?
With all that in mind, I think the only appropriate way to use the word abolition is as the ideal final outcome and not necessarily as a tangible next step. When talking about how we get there, regardless of the specific mechanisms, the process of reaching that point would just be reform.
PS In case you remember me, and for anyone else reading this who draws the connection, I'm not talking about optics here. This isn't an argument meant to stop people from saying "Abolish the Police". Optics are a whole other discussion. If you want to say that we should specifically abolish the police or prisons or psychiatry as an immediate action, that's a discussion we can have too. I'm just trying to establish that we all are in agreement that the end goal is to put a stop to the toxic aspects that surround the necessary functions performed by these institutions, even if our individual ideas about the language make that unclear.
PPS If you actually read this whole thing, treat yourself to a cookie. You've earned it.
I: As a student of linguistics (Translation Studies in particular), for what it´s worth, I´d say you make great points about the need to be concise and precise with language to ensure communication meets all its goals.
@@iamnohere Hahahahaha. Rhetorically, though perhaps not in practice.
@@philipvipond2669 I: What do you mean?
@@iamnohere I would not describe my comment as "concise".
@@philipvipond2669 I: Ah, I get what you mean now, hahah
such an important conversation. Love you that dang dad!
When my brother was a child, maybe eleven or so. He had a mental breakdown in school, and was basically shipped out to the "child mental health facility", against my mom's will and against his own.
He still refuses to talk about everything that happened to him. But it really turned him off to getting any other "mental health services" beyond talk therapy. Which I get.
For some context. We were homeless at the time, fresh off the Reservation and with a single mother who's health was declining (she's fine now :) ) and a father who wasn't able to be there emotionally and physically.
It was the most raw emotive time of our young lives, and we still have yet to fully recover.
wow, that sounds really tough. Thanks for telling me about it. I hope you all (especially him) find some peace eventually
@@ThatDangDad It's something he'll be working through with his new therapist (we finally got health insurance this year, thank god), cause it still messes him up. I know it does.
Because of that incident, he's also super weary around teachers and people who try and prod him into joining activities. As his selective mutism kicks in, and he can't talk at all in that state.
I found the article your friend sent you ableist as hell, to the point that I couldn't finish it. The opening to that article was utterly dismissive of neurodivergent people, acting as if no action taken by the mental health industry REALLY affects anyone's life except to lock them up or threaten to do so. It treated people with diagnosed illnesses as if their diagnosis was a little mantra they could keep for their own comfort, but ultimately meaningless. The brain is an organ, and mental health care IS health care. People who advance this myth that mental healthcare is different and shameful are exactly why I can't find help covered by my insurance, and my state is better than most. Maybe it would work in a post-capatalist system where it would be just fine if I couldn't work for a few years, but right now I'm hungry and I need help, and I wish so very much people like your friend would stop trying to "help" keep me from getting it. (I got turned down by two more doctors today, a lecture on how what I really need is to just feel free and somehow then just be better was not what I needed)
Yeah something interesting in the comments has been people saying "Yes the modern psych industry is horrible buuuut it did keep me alive when I would have taken my own life. It did help me do X, Y, and Z when I wasn't in a position to know I needed that." Like I said in the video, that's why I'm not myself a full-on psych abolitionist, though I am very open to some extreme reforms and reimaginings.
@@ThatDangDad Thanks for your reply, I'm in pretty rough shape and I know I sounded harsh. I liked the video, and I appreciate people being open to radical change in the long term. I just get very concerned at people seeming to want to tear the system down before building the new one, and you can't do that with medical care. The research you showed made it very clear that many of the people the system is "helping" are prisoners in terrible conditions, but that isn't the whole system. People who actually have disorders like ADHD live painful and frustrating lives without help, and no involuntary commitment is required or recommended for treating it. I know I'm biased, my former therapist probably saved my life. But I think my bias is valid. There's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, even if the bathwater really needs to go.
From to drapetomania to Lovecraft. Mental health definitely wreaks of racism.
Thank you for this. It's frightening how the system can be used against people.
I think the sciences and anything can be used to rationalize harmful actions as we have seen through history. To me this is a related issue of hierarchy and not putting importance on people's experiences
Thanks, Phil. 💖 My experiences with mental health industry have been very hit or miss. I had what I felt was a pretty good CBT therapist recently before some unexpected insurance changes (medicaid + medicare) were thrust on me without warning. And my autism diagnosis (and those for my kids) came from the industry. Those were all positive experiences. But I've also had a variety of crappy experiences with it as well.
My parents took me to a psychoanalyst for a while as a kid... or I think maybe 2 of them at different times... and I've learned from more recent research that aside from those sessions being mildly annoying to me, the practice of psychoanalysis has never shown any tangible experimental proof that it works at helping people with their mental health (as opposed to CBT) and yet the industry still supports it as a practice, along with a variety of debunked techniques like Rorschachs and the "draw a person" test where they declare you're paranoid if the person you draw has large eyes... I always knew there was something wrong with Disney and Anime artists! :P
And then there's the time we tried to get an autism diagnosis for my oldest daughter through the school and the school psychologist (who was seeing her as his very last appointment before retiring) waved his hand at it and said "she makes eye contact, so she's not autistic", belying a lack of understanding that a) not al autistic people present identically and b) we learn these things to get by.
For me personally one of my big frustrations is not having got the autism diagnosis until I was in my early 30s after a decade of trauma trying to get by in a working world that, even when it knew I was an expert at my job (later software engineering jobs, not early retail jobs), often wanted nothing to do with my expertise and would just as soon cast me aside simply because I didn't seem to click at drinks after work. But in that regard the only criticism I can levy against the industry is the torturously slow pace with which professionals learn about changes in their own industry, which if I'm being honest, is also true even in "innovative" tech fields.
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@@grmpEqweer Hey, Pitchy! 👋
I can write a novel about how mental health and the system has been weaponized and even caused me more trauma and cause PTSD since I was a child.
Having being committed when I had a significant mental breakdown. The care I received was good and one thing to remember about mental illness is it affects all demographics of people. I have bipolar my grandmother had bipolar and at times we needed to be committed due to not being stable. But one thing that makes psychiatry different from policing is it evolves with data while policing has largely stagnated and gotten worse. While our understanding of the brain and psyche has largely expanded over time giving new light to issues within its practices. Another point is it isnt profitable to give people psychiatric care and to be committed so locking people up indefinitely is unlikely unless we're dealing with a largely oppressive government. Which I do believe is a valid concern. But I do feel that using psychiatry and psychology is very important to address people's psychological needs. While like with anything It can be abused and needs to be regulated and improved upon. But to use a history against a science that has largely expanded and improved over time isnt all that genuine give the horrific experiments a lot of our modern medical science comes from. Just because the way people extracted the data was awful or the people who made the discoveries were awful doesnt mean we discard the work. What it does mean is we look at it with a microscope and extract what works while getting rid of the biases and problematic elements which takes time. Over time medical science and the understanding of the human brain has vastly expanded and largely improved. So as long as we move forward ethically and challenge old biases I believe It is very useful.
Keep up the great videos 🤘
I’m not someone who has any personal experience with this issue, but it was still very relieving to hear someone with any large audience address how degrading and downright disturbing treatment in mental facilities can be. I remember being even younger than I am now watching depictions of these places in movies and television and being mildly upset and confused at the fact that random background characters were being so violated, while the movie or show I was watching didn’t seem to consider that treatment at all concerning. There were characters that were horribly physically forced to take pills against their will, and from the way the main characters talked about it in the show, it seemed like the audience was supposed to find it HUMEROUS?
I work in the field as a nurse's aid in an involuntary institution and it is a struggle having a part of my job being to 'help' people against their will. It is complicated by seeing both people turn around and get better as well as seeing others becoming just as institutionalized as they might in prison. At the level where the government is involved the system is quite broken and as much as I would like to think if it were properly funded and staffed it would be only positive for the neurodivergent people cared for there I worry that the people thinking if we abolish prisons the mental health facilities would become prisons might be right
Good video! Just one small critique: You say that those with a more radical opinion than you are "further along" than you. But more radical doesn't necessarily mean more right. At times it does, at times not.
Like you, despite being horrified by abuses in the name of mental health care, I think it would do more harm than good to abolish involuntary commitments or involuntary medicating. I speak as someone who has experienced and witnessed abuses within psychiatric facilities.
When I was 16 I was involuntarily hospitalized and then involuntarily committed in a psych institution after a suicide attempt. When I woke up in the hospital I still wanted to die, so I decided I would leave the hospital to go lie down on the train tracks. As I tried to sneak towards the elevator, two security guards saw me and they dragged me, literally kicking and screaming, back to my room and pinned me to my bed while I continued to struggle and scream and curse them. I hated them so much for stopping me, for making me feel so powerless, and as someone with trauma from sexual abuse it was triggering. But because of them I'm alive, something which I later became extremely grateful for.
This doesn't mean my involuntary experiences with psychiatry have always been for my own good in the end. I could tell other stories of things I experienced or witnessed which were harmful or just annoyingly useless. But I think the solution to this is not abolition but reform.
Another anecdote is not my own but comes from someone I know. In his late teens he had his first manic episode and it had psychotic features. He thought he needed to make himself pure by drinking water and he drank so much it made him sick (it can kill you if you drink too much). He also thought his mom was possessed by a demon and attacked her with a knife. He was involuntarily medicated (and committed) and thanks to this his delusional symptoms vanished. In a world where involuntary mental health treatment is abolished, he would likely have killed himself or someone else.
This brings up an interesting question about consent. If you suddenly find yourself in a radically different mental condition that radically distorts your usual perceptions, and people try to bring you back to your usual mental state, but this requires doing things that you don't consent to, but your lack of consent is due to your altered state, and you almost certainly would consent if you were in your usual mental state, then how valid is your lack of consent in that moment?
I don't think any answer to this is totally satisfying or without problems. But if I were in that situation, I would hope that others would do what's needed to restore my usual mental state even if it's against my will.
Sorry for the long comment. Your videos are often quite thought provoking. I know it can be draining to reply to comments, especially long ones, so if you rather not reply or just reply briefly that's cool. I just hope you have a great day.
Hey LBC! I always love hearing from you and I appreciate your feedback and sharing your stories. You were actually someone I was hoping to hear from because I remembered you saying you were pro-police abolition but iffy on prison abolition (or, not pro FULL prison abolition). Your consent comment also echoes some other people's comments basically saying "When I'm in my right mind, I consent to being medicated against my will when I'm NOT in my right mind." And I think that's a pretty crucial idea here. It's not a way I've really thought of consent before and it really set my brain a-spinnin'.
Oh and for the record, I meant for my comment about being "further along" to be about people who had a deeper or more developed sense of empathy than me, not necessarily people who were more radical. My journey leftward has really been me learning to care (or more accurate, unlearning how not to care) about people on the margins or people being crushed by systems and hierarchies that I used to think were just "normal life". So FWIW I agree with you that radicalism in and of itself is not necessarily a marker of being "further ahead".
@@ThatDangDad "I meant for my comment about being "further along" to be about people who had a deeper or more developed sense of empathy than me, not necessarily people who were more radical. "
Ahhh, yeah, that makes sense! I love that your politics center empathy, caring, love, compassion. That's what it's all about! I also like that you've come to leftist politics a bit later in life than most leftists, that gives you a rare and valuable perspective since you have more insight into how non-leftists think.
Haven't had experiences with psychiatry like this. I'm learning a lot! This is an issue I had not heard (compared to prison abolition) about so I will definitely dig in more.
CW: abuse, violence, sexual violence, transphobia, and trauma
I have personally hurt multiple times by the psychiatric system as it stands. My ASD remained undiagnosed and still does to this day, all because I was born with a vagina. Even when I displayed clear signs of overstimulation / lack of understanding neurotypical social environments.
In the mental hospital and day programs, I was physically threatened (though not hurt) and verbally abused by other patients. I watched a boy break another boy's spine. I was flashed and was too scared to speak up about it. When I was hospitalized as an adult, my audio overstimulation was not taken seriously and I pretended to be okay just to get out. I have had my agency stripped of my by my mother, who insisted that because I went nonverbal that I was suicidal, when even she herself would not read my text messages or communicate with me in a way that worked.
Later, when I came out as trans, I was misgendered and deadnamed by patients and staff alike when I had to go to the hospital again. I had to stay in the girl's sections.
In all seriousness, it was prison. There were people that were okay to socialize with, but in general it was very thoroughly traumatizing, and I can't advocate for it in the slightest. We need different support systems for sure.
In addition, for cases like mine with my egg donor, we need supports for children who aren't in physically abusive situations, but are clearly being mentally/emotionally abused. Because none of what she did to me over the years (PS. she did more than force me into the hospital) was okay in the slightest, but somehow I was never taken away from that just because she didn't hit me.
Great addition to the last video. This is definitely something that should be talked about more.
In the way religion often convinces people to feel good about doing terrible things to one another, such as shunning your best friend if they have a beer, or staying in an abusive relationship, or denying a child livesaving blood transfusions, our criminal justice system ruins an utterly insane number of lives, both those locked up and their loved ones. We focus on punishing, instead of restoration of whatever the crime took from the victim, and instead of trying to reform someone into a better person, we just wreck them and stigmatize them so they're unemployable and end up back inside... Because they messed up once, and their life is forfeit. The parallel here is that many Americans feel *good* about this setup, because we're condioned to.
Thanks for putting the work in, TDD, to put your thoughts out. Dog knows I'm too depressed to finish anything. Keep it up brother. Lookin' forward to your next one, as always.
this is why i hate the cultural obsession with pathologising criminality. It is necessary to understand the position of those who do harm, to understand the motivations and causes. BUT it positions the justice system and by extension the culture to conceptualize criminality as mental illness, to assume criminality is inherent and lurking in the physiology of people who are broken, and therefore 'not truly human'. To assign criminality to mental illness and mental illness to criminality.
I hate it, because, like you said, its used as a way to psychoanalyze away real societal issues and the situational motivators that affect real, human, beings. To reduce real people to what makes them strange, and act like that's a valuable way to respond to 'social misalignment'.
Psych wards suck, but I'm still torn about them. My girlfriend is bipolar, and she had several stays at the ward. I've been to see her there last time she stayed, and yeah, a lot of things reek of prison in there. People there speak the same language as prison inmates, for example (can't provide examples, I'm french and don't know how to translate most of them, as I don't know english or US prison slang) ; I know that my girlfriend has been in solitary the first time she was committed ; I know that last time things went dark for her, she went out of her way not to go back there. I also know that wihout it, she would be already dead. Thing is : I don't know if what saved her was the ward, or the medication ; I also know that the fear of going back actively worsens her care, as there are things she doesn't want to talk about about with her psychiatrist as a result.
Back in my youth, I was involved in student politics and participated in demonstrations against the raising of tuition fees for colleges and universities. When I became hospitalized for mental health reasons at age 20, I told the doctors that I was angry at the government. As a result, I stayed in the hospital for the entire month of December. It was the most miserable Christmas of my life. Even today, I still don't celebrate Christmas
This is really interesting. While I did know some of these things, I hadn't quite made the connection in my head. As someone who's had experiences with psychiatric "care", I think there might be some good there. I also think there's A LOT of bad that needs to be addressed. Very nice video, thank you for sharing this
Phil, I absolutely love this video and the swiftness with which you produced it in response to the responses your the prior one. This is wonderful.
It's worth remembering as well, that while homosexuality is no longer considered a disease, it is still considered a symptom. Myself and others hide our sexuality and/or gender in case it negatively effects our diagnosis. Psychiatry and psychology are more centered around the egos of the shrinks ime, and less centered around listening to the experiences of the people they're treating. Unless it becomes about treating people, and not about doctors patting themselves on the back, there is very little psych can offer us.
I am so glad I found your channel! Been learning a lot
Very important points raised here, as well as the links to Elliot's writing. I've worked in services for folks with cognitive disabilities & complex support needs for years; being autistic myself I've been driven by a desire to help others who've gone through similar experiences. However this has really made me reflect on how much genuinely helps and how much is actually perpetuating social norms which oppress ND & disabled people. While the place I work holds an ethos of fostering autonomy & rejects use of coercive force to control, I think that I and other staff can still too easily fall into a paternalistic, we-know-what's-best-for-you mode, defaulting to the mode of the heirarchical society around us. This has really made me wanna try to notice this and counter it, and spread these ideas. Thankyou
This is amazing work. Eye opening and reaffirms the anxiety of working in psychology fields due to maybe we're not doing the good we assume we are. Thank you for making this. Loved it, A tired therapist.
I love that you provide your sources!
Thank you for this. This isn't talked about enough. I'm glad you're honest about where you sit with this. I can say good therapy and nutrition and gaining more agency in my life helped me, the psychiatric system did not. It caused a lot of harm. I've seen people that it's helped but why can't we make a system that works for more people?
I’m in a psychiatric facility right now. I made my last video inside here. The state I’m in has very good mental health treatment services. But part of the reason I keep coming back is because I have been in and out of jail and programs so I’ve become institutionalized. I’ve been addicted to opiates 1/3 of my life and that clearly isn’t good for your mental health. The biggest thing these places need to do is help people like me who are institutionalized reintegrate into society with resources like step down programs (for substance abuse, mental health or dual diagnosis), job training, economic resources, and wider support to find supportive communities to escape the alienation that comes from the type of society we have created. I often find myself wishing I was back in a psych facility, rehab, or other type of treatment center when I’m back out because I’m able to get my basic needs met and I can be around people who understand the struggles I’ve gone through because most of my circle of friends have died from opiate overdoses or other “deaths of despair”. When I get spit back out into society without meaningful work or support I don’t know what to do with my time and go right back into the life of a heroin/fentanyl addict because after a while it’s not just all you know but you become comfortable with this shit. When you are trying to get money for a shot you aren’t thinking about your other problems and when you are high you can actually feel some of the pleasure you felt before life beat you down and you lost everything.
I would also like to say while I’ve benefitted from psychiatric hospitals I’ve also had horrible experiences being physically and chemically restrained. I’ve also been sentenced to a psychiatric jail without charges for 60 days. My best friend there died of an overdose when he got out because he lost his tolerance. The same thing happened to 4 other fellow inmates during stays in regular jails. One of the most dangerous things you can do to a heroin addict is remove all opiates from their system and letting them back out onto the street. I still struggle with this shit and have had long term consequences I still deal with. Unfortunately I sometimes tell people who view my channel if I stop uploading it’s safe to assume I’ve passed and to also assume I’m not suffering anymore.
I really appreciate you sharing your story, I think it's really important for people to know
@@ThatDangDad Hey I appreciate what you’re doing. We really need help breaking the stigma of ex police officers and veterans that are leftists. Sometimes people just assume if someone was a cop or a solider they must be reactionary but that’s not true. Especially not true with veterans so there is less of a stigma around that so that makes what you that much more essential because y’all have knowledge and training that is very valuable. But yeah my content strictly used to be about my experience with mental health and addiction from a leftist perspective but there is only so much you can do with that. But the stigma still is very real which is choose to conceal my identity to avoid future employment and shit like that.
Some of the recent research in cognitive neuropsychology that I have come across certainly points to this promising direction
if my mom was never held against her will (at the time), we would have never found out that her doctors prescribed her drugs that should have never been taken together. The system needs extreme reform, but without it she could have died, killed someone, both, or worse. We cant just abolish it and have nothing to replace it and help those that desperately need help.
15:01 - my personal-experience-based current take, with caveats similar to your own:
It has both helped and hurt. For me, reform does seem possible, though I’ll be thinking more on this, too. I think the “industrial complex” part, and capitalism (in general, and in relation to this) needs to go, though. While there were direct harms done to me by doctors, the bigger harm was not being able to continue useful treatments that insurance (when I’ve been lucky enough to even have it) wouldn’t cover any more of.
OTOH, I think if I lived in a world where we all lived in villages or communes or whatever with lots of social supports, might be a world where I’d never have had any need for any of it. More parental support when I was young, because I had parents who were also getting support, might have led to me not having experienced the levels of trauma and neglect that I did, and thus I’d be better at maintaining relationships in adulthood which would be able to provide all the support I need, and me better able to provide the support I know I’m sometimes capable of.
I'm one of the few that can say that being sectioned saved my life (and possibly the lives of both my mom at the time and my brother the other time). That said, during my stay, there *were* several instances of weird dx based off of limited info (for instance, one dr put me on mood stabilizers because I made a point of expressing that I didn't want to be there). I was suicidal and, because of suddenly coming off of meds I should have been taking regularly, I became psychotic and violent. It was the right call in my case- but the fact remains that it's not the right call in many many cases- and even when it was the correct thing, in my case, there were many things within the system and protocols that were damaging or needless etc. When I later worked on psych wards while in grad school, I saw these issues from the other side. Issa mess basically- but like all complex things, there are many ways things can be done right
Yeah, I think cases like yours are why I'm not like 100% all in on full abolition. Yours mirrors some family issues we've had so it's hard for me to see how full abolition would've kept some people in my life alive.
as someone with aspd, the big scary antisocial condition most ppl fear, people wouldn't have uncontrollable aspd in a world without severe child abuse and neglect. idk, taking away and freedom from people for what is ultimately the result of not being properly loved never sat right.
The psychiatric system has sort of helped in the sense of having someone to talk to back before we had comrades but it's still a system that gets in the way of hormones and a thing we need to hide our plurality from, since psychiatrists tend to believe in killing people who share a brain until only 1 "personality" remains.
The actual problem I think here is that help, GOOD help, isn't available when you ask for it. Psychiatric confinement is for when everything's falling apart.
If we lived in a society where mental health was funded, better trained, and not socially ostracised, most people would never reach that state in the first place, because no one would feel weak or disempowered for asking in the first place.
Thank you so much for talking about this.
I could tell horror stories about my experiences at the hands of the mental health system all day & all night, but I'll just lay the most recent one on you. Last winter I had told them at the local emergency room I was having suicidal thoughts so I could get out of the cold. After I was taken to the hospital, I was interviewed by a psychiatrist. I told her I didn't want to take medication. She laughed at me. Said they'd hold me down & inject it if I refused & 302 me. I took the pill. They 302'd me anyway.
I support abolishing the mental health system, but only if we replace it with something that can serve the needs of neurodivergent and disabled people who benefit from the current system.
Also: What course of action do mental health abolitionists suggest regarding violent antisocial individuals? If you can't medicate or restrain them without consent, they pose a threat to other innocent people.
As someone who *has* had their agency taken away and been a victim of an uncaring medical and psychiatric establishment... you're right to be wary of blanket statements. Total abolition isn't realistic. There will always be disorders and illnesses out there that render people unable to swallow food let alone consent to medical care. Psychiatric and criminal institutionalization have a lot in common, but they're not the same!!
A lot more people would be willing to make use of the psychiatric resources if they weren't punitive.
I have had both very positive and very negative experiences with the psychiatric industrial complex including multiple inpatient hospital stays. The worst of which was probably when the doctor refused to treat my opiate addiction so I was held for a week going through cold-turkey withdrawals when I had come in because I was suicidal not because I was trying to kick suboxone.
The system hasn't hurt me, but they certainly haven't helped where I live.
I feel like ideal systems are designed in good faith. So ostensibly, in a world that has been substantially liberated from prisons, and poverty, and systems of force and violence for a few generations you would have very few "edge cases" where more forceful and consenual action would be necessary.
How few? I dunno. But I do know that already the number of people who True Crime blogs like to tell bedtime stories about are rare.
And that we dont yet know if even those cases were preventable.
And if one day there is a person who is still bent on malevolence "for fun" I think a community where people have learned to support one another would be better able to come together to defend one another. And then to decide, democratically as peers, how to best preserve justice.
Definately, for all the folks who want to talk about the "maybes", I have only 1 thing to repeat: that we can't design systems around edge cases and hypotheticals.
We need to design it for a community and go from there.
And who knows? Maybe the people who have grown up in that more fair and equal world will have better ideas as to how to keep it that way.
hear hear!
To answer a question at the end... Tear it down. Ever notice how every film portrayal of a mental institution is basically hell? They're no good. They might make some people capable of functioning in society, but not in remotely healthy ways. Also, side note, the harsh surfaces and resulting echoes of, well, anywhere people are incarcerated, is not something that makes humans feel good. It's the opposite of a cozy bedroom or the silence after a snowfall. It's unnerving and it makes you feel crazy.
We're capable of caring for each other. All we have to do is, you know, actually care about each other.
I have diagnosed cortico-subcortical brain atrophy from psych drugs.
Thank you for doing what you do, as well as being so open minded.
I generally that forcing people to take drugs against their consent, but aren't there legitimate circumstances when a person is being a danger/negligent to themselves? I've had times where I needed people to coerce me to take medicine.
Me, seeing the title: Well yes, but actually no
We will need psychiatric services but much like every other institution the whole thing will have to be torn down and completely restructured to not be oppressive and abusive
Phil: *covers all of that and more*
Just reading the title: yes.
I say this as an autistic bpd trans ADHDer.
Many of my partners share at least 3 of these. Some have NPD.
Does all this sometimes lead to problems? Yes. Has committing somebody against their will ever helped? No. It just made stuff worse.
This is my favorite video yet!
Was this the video you recommended to me? If so, well... Obviously I have significant experience with political prison. I have some experience with forced psychiatry. Most of it was on the helping side. I started only the second program in the United States to teach English to residents of a psychiatric hospital. That got me the I was, however, involuntarily held for whatever-you-want-to-call it, because somebody misheard me. That was only for six days, though. The law isn't supposed to allow that much, but Florida's Baker Act is hardly a model of clarity.
I doubt I can add anything to your political analysis, so I'll say something about anthropology. There are two kinds of prison staff: thugs (about 95%) and mavericks (about 5%). Everything functional in prison happens because of the mavericks. In contrast, psychiatric staff are about evenly divided into professionals, ex-thugs, and clowns. The professionals are worse than useless. The ex-thugs are usually there because they were helped by the system in the past. Only the clowns help people, and they're very good.
Sadly we get echoes of the Enlightenment-era's disregard for those societal/institutional factors that, shall we say, _facilitate_ distress. Conveniently enough, though, putting the onus on the sufferer for their own healing helps protect the mechanisms of the status quo from scrutiny and (shudders) potential change.
To make an analogy, it might feel like being slowly fed into a woodchipper, and despite your agony, the woodchipper cannot be turned off. Instead, you'll be asked if you've tried mindfulness, or examined your cognitive distortions via CBT.
Definitely thought provoking about an issue most don't even realize exists.
Excellent video
First time I've commented on RUclips in years, there's that whole you can be so progressive but you'll eventually find something that you push back against because it's so ingrained and you don't even realize there's another answer to what we do.