Berenstain/Neal

The phenomenon that Lorde, Britto Schwartz, Morrison, and many others have identified and criticized is what I term epistemic exploitation. Epistemic exploitation occurs when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to produce an education or explanation about the nature of the oppression they face.[1] Epistemic exploitation is a variety of epistemic oppression marked by unrecognized, uncompensated, emotionally taxing, coerced epistemic labor. It maintains structures of oppression by centering the needs and desires of dominant groups and exploiting the emotional and cognitive labor of members of marginalized groups who are required to do the unpaid and often unacknowledged work of providing information, resources, and evidence of oppression to privileged persons who demand it—and who benefit from those very oppressive systems about which they demand to be educated.

Epistemic exploitation is ubiquitous. It is common within institutions of higher education, activist coalitions and alliances, and interpersonal relationships. Despite its pervasiveness, however, it is not widely recognized as a component of epistemic or social and political oppression. Rather, it masquerades as a necessary and even epistemically virtuous form of intellectual engagement, and it is often treated as an indispensable method of attaining knowledge. Epistemic exploitation goes by many other names. Standard conversational norms allow epistemic exploitation to masquerade as any number of acceptable and normalized practices—‘exercising harmless curiosity,’ ‘just asking a question,’ ‘making a well-intentioned effort to learn,’ ‘offering alternative explanations,’ and ‘playing devil’s advocate’ are a few of the labels used to describe epistemically exploitative interactions. These innocuous euphemisms all help to mask the oppressive power dynamics at play in instances of epistemic exploitation.

That many of these euphemistic covers frame epistemic exploitation as a virtuous epistemic practice related to the pursuit of truth is one reason that the practice is both widespread and vigorously defended. This creates a burden on the marginalized to educate and enlighten. Though the privileged demand the epistemic labor of the marginalized, they often perpetuate epistemic oppression by dismissing the knowledge produced. The marginalized are excluded from the realm of recognized knowledge creators despite contributing novel conceptual resources and epistemic frameworks. 

Nora Berenstain

Consider the first harm: the potential opportunity costs faced by the oppressed due to the labor of producing an explanation. On Berenstain’s account, such costs include the fact that the labor will be “financially uncompensated, time-consuming, and mentally draining” (573). As the relevant acts of inquiry will always request explanations from marginalized persons, and all explanations will be time-consuming and mentally draining, any such act of inquiry will request the time and mental energy of marginalized persons. Given that 4 There is textual evidence to suggest that (E1) is a plausible interpretation of Berenstain’s position. First, in describing instances of epistemic exploitation, Berenstain frequently describes scenarios in which none of the three harms appear to be present. For example, she argues that epistemic exploitation “can be perpetrated through wellintentioned requests to help one learn about oppression” (571), and that epistemic exploitation occurs even when “upon being educated the privileged start pushing back in tangible ways against the oppressive systems” (575). Moreover, Berenstain explicitly states that what we generally think of as a virtuous act of inquiry by a privileged person into the conditions of a marginalized person’s disadvantage is, in fact, epistemic exploitation: “it (epistemic exploitation) masquerades as a necessary and even epistemically virtuous form of intellectual engagement, and it is often treated as an indispensable method of attaining knowledge” (570). Finally, within a list of the “many other names” of epistemic exploitation, Berenstain includes the phrase “making a well-intentioned effort to learn” (570- 571). While ‘a well-intentioned effort to learn’ might produce one of the three harms, none of the three harms can be plausibly held to be constitutive components of such an effort. Each of these points suggests that (E1) is a plausible interpretation of Berenstain’s position. 5 Berenstain considers the request of the time and mental energy of marginalized persons by the privileged to be indicative of an epistemically exploitative sense of entitlement (575, 576, 577), her account entails that the first harm of epistemic exploitation will accompany any act of inquiry by a privileged individual into the conditions of a marginalized individual’s oppression. Alternatively, consider the second harm: the double-bind produced by the presumed expectation of the privileged that an explanation will be given. Berenstain argues that such a double-bind is produced by the penalties which accompany any potential response to an inquiry: if the marginalized person gives into the pressure to provide an explanation she will be required to provide uncompensated labor, and if she does not give into the pressure to provide an explanation, then she will often be perceived as having committed an affront (576). However, such double-binds are produced by the complex interaction of systemic pressures, rather than the conduct of any one individual (Frye, 3). Moreover, as highlighted by Laurence Thomas, the social reality of marginalized individuals is such that when discussing the conditions of oppression with privileged individuals, there will always be an underlying vulnerability, even if the privileged individual is a trustworthy friend (366-367). This vulnerability stems from the fact that any response could elicit some form of penalty (367). As such, any act of inquiry into the conditions of a marginalized person’s oppression will confront her with a double-bind, forcing her to choose which penalty to risk subjecting herself to. All acts of inquiry will thus be accompanied by Berenstain’s second harm. 

Berenstain is thus advancing a normative framework in which privileged individuals ought not to ask marginalized individuals about the conditions of their oppression. 3 Barriers to Resisting Oppression Berenstain’s restriction on inquiry might first appear to be a welcome outcome, as it prevents the isolated harms from occuring. However, the restriction ultimately sustains oppression, rather than preventing it. In particular, her restriction sustains hermeneutical marginalization, an epistemic injustice highlighted by Miranda Fricker in “Epistemic Injustice and the Preservation of Ignorance.” As defined by Fricker, hermeneutical marginalization occurs when some social groups are less able to contribute to the pool of conceptual and interpretive resources that are deemed as legitimate by broader society (2016, 158). Importantly, hermeneutical marginalization arises when the flow of information between social groups is restricted. This is a consequence of the mere fact that for conceptual and interpretive resources to be deemed legitimate by broader society, they must first be successfully communicated to broader society. Consider the process through which the concept of sexual harassment was legitimized (Siegal, 18). The concept was first developed by Carmita Wood and her contemporaries in 1975, yet it took nearly two decades before the concept was legally recognized, yet alone socially recognized (Fricker 2007, 150). If Wood had been unable to communicate to persons of privilege (i.e. men) about her experiences, then the concept of sexual 7 harassment would not have been legitimized within the pool of hermeneutical resources. At the time, men occupied a clear majority of the positions of legal authority, meaning that for the concept to be legally recognized, a critical mass of men would have to deem the concept as legitimate (Siegal, 18). Had Wood been unwilling or unable to communicate...her experiences, she would have been left hermeneutically marginalized, unable to contribute to the pool of hermeneutical resources. Berenstain, through the restrictions she places on inquiry, leaves disadvantaged social groups hermeneutically marginalized.

BRENNAN NEAL 

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”

“People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.”

"My friends were now “downtown,” busy, as they put it, “fighting the man.” They began to care less about the way they looked, the way they dressed, the things they did; presently, one found them in twos and threes and fours, in a hallway, sharing a jug of wine or a bottle of whiskey, talking, cursing, fighting, sometimes weeping: lost, and unable to say what it was that oppressed them...

"One did not have to be very bright to realize how little one could do to change one’s situation; one did not have to be abnormally sensitive to be worn down to a cutting edge by the incessant and gratuitous humiliation and danger...

"For the wages of sin were visible everywhere...in every disastrous bulletin: a cousin, mother of six, suddenly gone mad, the children parceled out here and there; an indestructible aunt rewarded for years of hard labor by a slow, agonizing death in a terrible small room; someone’s bright son blown into eternity by his own hand."

"I was icily determined—more determined, really, than I then knew—never to make my peace with the ghetto but to die and go to Hell before I would let any white man spit on me, before I would accept my “place” in this republic. I did not intend to allow the white people of this country to tell me who I was, and limit me that way, and polish me off that way. And yet, of course, at the same time, I was being spat on and defined and described and limited, and could have been polished off with no effort whatever. Every Negro boy—in my situation during those years, at least—who reaches this point realizes, at once, profoundly, because he wants to live, that he stands in great peril and must find, with speed, a “thing,” a gimmick, to lift him out, to start him on his way. And it does not matter what the gimmick is. It was this last realization that terrified me and—since it revealed that the door opened on so many dangers—helped to hurl me into the church. And, by an unforeseeable paradox, it was my career in the church that turned out, precisely, to be my gimmick".

James Baldwin

Byung Han

"Today, we exploit ourselves – I exploit myself under the illusion that I am expressing myself."

"If a system attacks my freedom, then I have to resist. The perfidious thing is though that the system today doesn’t attack freedom, but instrumentalises it."

"The crisis of freedom is that we perceive compulsion as freedom, so no resistance is possible. If you compel me to do something, then I can fight this external compulsion. But if there is no longer an opponent who is compelling me to do something, then there can be no resistance. That’s why I chose the motto for the beginning of my book: “protect me from what I want”, the phrase made famous by the artist Jenny Holzer."

Byung-Chul Han

Han: The digital society of today is not a classless society. Take for example Acxiom, the data company: it divides people into categories. The last category is “waste”. Acxiom trades data from about 300 million US citizens, which is almost all of them. By now, the company knows more about US citizens than the FBI, probably even more than the NSA. At Acxiom, people are divided into seventy categories, and they are offered in a catalogue like retail goods, and you can buy one for every kind of need. Consumers with a high market value are in the “Shooting Stars” category,,,This is how Big Data is generating a new digital class society.

ZEIT Wissen: And who is in the “waste” class?

Han: Those with a poor score value. They can’t get credit, for example. And so, alongside the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s ideal prison, we have a “ban-opticon”, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called it. The Panopticon monitors the enclosed inmates of the system, while the ban-opticon is a measure that identifies people as undesirable and excludes people who are outside of or hostile to the system. The classic Panopticon is used for discipline, the ban-opticon however ensures the system’s security and efficiency. It is interesting that the NSA and Acxiom are working together, that is, the secret service and the market.

ZEIT Wissen: Is it possible that the “waste” class reaches critical mass eventually, so that it can no longer be controlled?

Han: No. They hide, they are ashamed, they are on unemployment benefit, for example. They are constantly being made to feel afraid. It’s crazy how much fear job seekers live with here. They are imprisoned in this ban-opticon, so that they can’t break out of their fear prison. I know many job seekers, they are treated like waste. In one of the richest countries in the world, in Germany, people are treated like scum. Their dignity is taken away. Of course these people don’t protest, because they are ashamed. They accuse themselves, instead of making society responsible, or accusing it. No political act can be expected from this class.

Galeano

"To narrate is to give oneself: it seems obvious that literature, as an effort to communicate fully, will continue to be blocked so long as misery and illiteracy exist, and so long as the possessors of power continue to carry on with impunity their policy of collective imbecilization through the mass media". 

"The population becomes the internal enemy. Any sign of life, of protest, or even mere doubt, is a dangerous challenge from the standpoint of military doctrine and national security. So complicated mechanisms of prevention and punishment have been developed...To operate effectively, the repression must appear arbitrary. Apart from breathing, any human activity can constitute a crime...State terrorism aims to paralyze the population with fear". 

"Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations". 

"We live in a world that treats the dead better than the living. We, the living are askers of questions and givers of answers, and we have other grave defects unpardonable by a system that believes death, like money, improves people". 

"What happens when we integrate rather than refuse the pain, toil, and doom of surviving?" 

"...not offering financial support structures early on with a very weak attempt at educating and encouraging protective behaviors left more people uninformed, skeptical, angry and vulnerable."

Eduardo Galeano

Adorno

"And the persecution fantasy is infectious: whoever encounters it as a spectator is irresistibly driven to imitate it. This succeeds most easily, when one gives it justifiable grounds, by doing what the other fears. “One fool makes many” – the abyssal loneliness of delusion has a tendency towards collectivization, which cites the picture of delusion into life. This pathic mechanism harmonizes with the socially determining one of today, wherein those who are socialized into desperate isolation hunger for togetherness and band together in cold clumps. Thus folly becomes epidemic: vagrant sects grow with the same rhythm as large organizations. It is that of total destruction. The fulfillment of persecution manias stems from its affinity to bloody being [Wesen: nature, essence, character]. Violence, on which civilization is based, means the persecution of all by all, and those with persecution manias miss the boat solely, by displacing what is wrought by the whole onto their neighbors, in the helpless attempt to make incommensurability commensurable".

"The question of whether an exaggerated suspicion is paranoid or realistic, the faint private echo of the tumult of history, can thus be solely determined retrospectively. Psychology does not reach into horror".

"Panic breaks out once again after millennia of enlightenment on a humanity, whose domination over nature as domination over human beings surpasses in horror whatever human beings had to fear from nature".

Garland

So, despite their other differences, archaeology and genealogy share a certain critical intent with respect to the present, though each method pursues its historico-critical aims rather differently. Archaeology wants to show structural order, structural differences and the discontinuities that mark off the present from its past. Genealogy seeks instead to show ‘‘descent’’ and ‘‘emergence’’ and how the contingencies of these processes continue to shape the present.

David Garland

‘‘The body is the inscribed surface of events... Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history’’ (Foucault, 1991: 83). By reconnecting contemporary practices (or contemporary bodies) with the historical struggles and exercises of power that shaped their character, the genealogist prompts us to think more critically about the value and meaning of these phenomena. As Foucault put it in 1979: ‘‘experience has taught me that the history of various forms of rationality is sometimes more effective in unsettling our certitudes and dogmatism than is abstract criticism’’ (Foucault, 1979 in Kritzman, 1988: 83). And again the same year, ‘‘[I]mportant and even invaluable political effects can be produced by historical analyses... The problem is to let knowledge of the past work on the experience of the present’’ (Foucault, 2008: 130).

David Garland

The meaning and importance Foucault imputes to his objects of study (in this case, the Panopticon, but his treatment of the technology of confession in his History of Sexuality, Volume 1 raises the same issues) are not those of the historical period in which these practices first emerged but emphatically those of the present. Such practices may have been marginal in the social and political life of the 17th and 18th centuries, but Foucault regards them as absolutely central to the genealogies and to the functioning of regimes of power–knowledge that operate in the present.20 For Foucault, the principles of observation and individuation, visibility and discipline, power and knowledge contained in Bentham’s design provide a grid of intelligibility for understanding how power operates in our own present-day society. The historian of the present does not commit the error of anachronism by reading the present onto the past. He or she is instead engaged in the historicocritical project of identifying traces of the past (historic power struggles, modes of control, alliances and associations) and their continuing operation today.21

David Garland

Foucault

In attempting to uncover the deepest strata of Western culture, I am restoring to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts, its instability, its flaws, and it is this same ground that is once more stirring under our feet. 

Michel Foucault

One may also speak of a strategy proper to

power relations insofar as they constitute modes of action upon possible

action, the action of others. One can therefore interpret the mechanisms

brought into play in power relations in terms of strategies. 

Michel Foucault

I was interested in [the subjects of his archaeologies] because I saw in them ways of thinking and behaving that are still with us. I try to show, based upon their historical establishment and formation, those systems that are still ours today, and within which we are trapped. It is a question, basically, of presenting a critique of our own time, based upon retrospective analyses.

Michel Foucault

What is questioned is the way in which knowledge circulates and functions, in relations to power.

Michel Foucault

That is to say, power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted “above” society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. In any case, to live in society is to live in such a way that action upon other actions is possible – and in fact ongoing. A society without power relations can only be an abstraction.

Michel Foucault

What I’m trying to pick out with this term [dispositif] is a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements.

Michel Foucault

Smail

It certainly seems that a large part of the actual activity of professional academics, scientists etc. is aimed at keeping their knowledge as a kind of intellectual capital which maybe employed to make money at interest without itself becoming dissipated into the beliefs practices and preoccupations of ordinary people. Hence perhaps the enormous energy put quite overtly by professional groups in these fields into protecting their rights and claims to exclusive knowledge and competence etc. The economic basis of production and consumption in which we are all, willy-nilly, caught up, is thus reflected in the structure and functions of our scientific and intellectual institutions. Psychotherapy for example is as much an industry as is steel manufacture and entertainment; universities have in many fundamental respects become factories for the production of knowledge. The primary function of which is to perpetuate the academic industry itself by manufacturing the raw material which keeps it going, if this later seems a harsh judgment one need only reflect that both teachers and students in universities are in their own (not consciously perceived) interest forced to act (produce) like teachers and students if they are to justify their continued existence in an over crowded and competitive academic world. It is obvious that in these circumstances mere quantity of output will become more important than quality of work, (it is also, let it be noted, more easily and objectively measurable). Thus I have seen academic boards set up for senior university appointments make preferences for one candidate rather than another on the basis of the number of publications listed in the candidates curriculum vitae without any attempt being made to consider the content or intellectual quality of the publications. Similarly, considerable debate has taken place in the pages of the main professional journal of British psychologists (the bulletin of the British psychological society) seriously advocating the measurement of psychologists academic worth by the number of publications they produce. The parallels of this kind of approach with industrial production seem to me inescapable, as does its irrelevance to anything one might naively associate with academic excellence. Again Students have complained to me that their teachers, although sometimes representing extremely opposed intellectual positions, will not confront each other in public over their differences but instead advocate a kind of tolerant eclecticism in which the concept of truth quietly disappears. This seems hard to understand as anything but a function of the setting in which teachers depend heavily for their academic advancement on winning research grants from both public and private body’s so that they cannot afford to be wrong, and hence unconsciously suppress public disagreement amongst themselves as well as the opportunity for outsiders to criticise their activities, this is highly understandable (which of us would not do the same?) but nevertheless militates against traditional (possibly even mythical?) values of intellectual honesty and debate, and at the same time subtly appropriates knowledge as the production of a particular professional group. That self interest and greed play a large part (all be it unconsciously) in these processes, as indeed they do more overtly in our economic institutions is perhaps easy enough to see. What may be less readily appreciated is the extent to which the general population becomes intellectually subjugated thereby. One result of this is the enormous gullibility and ineffectiveness of the ‘ordinary’ person in matters which have become professional property. For example, laymen’s expectations of science and medicine are almost boundlessly naive (and their surprise when confronted personally with medical and scientific failures correspondingly exaggerated.) Since they have, in a sense, given up their right to consider or criticise. Consideration and criticism have become part of the professionals special prerogatives; for laymen, theirs is only to wonder and consume…It is not the case that those who embody the system – e.g. academic teachers of psychology see themselves as guardians of a repressive orthodoxy. I’m sure they would be appalled at such a suggestion. Rather is it the case that this is the result of their conduct whatever they may claim to be doing.

     David Smail 

Judith Butler

The possibility of whole populations being annihilated either through genocidal policies or systemic negligence follows not only from the fact that there are those who believe they can decide among whom they will inhabit the earth, but because such thinking presupposes a disavowal of an irreducible fact of politics: the vulnerability to destruction by others that follows from a condition of precarity in all modes of political and social interdependency. We can make this into a broad existential claim, namely, that everyone is precarious, and this follows from our social existence as bodily beings who depend upon one another for shelter and sustenance. As much as I am making such a claim, I am also making another, namely, that our precarity is to a large extent dependent upon the organization of economic and social relationships, the presence or absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and political institutions. In this sense, precarity is indissociable from that dimension of politics that addresses the organization and protection of bodily needs. Precarity exposes our sociality, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency. Whether explicitly stated or not, every political effort to manage populations involves a tactical distribution of precarity, more often than not articulated through an unequal distribution of precarity, one that depends on dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable, and worth protecting, and whose life is ungrievable, or marginally or episodically grievable and so, in that sense, already lost in part or in whole, and thus less worthy of protection and sustenance.

In my own view, then, a different social ontology would have to start from this shared condition of precarity in order to refute those normative operations, pervasively racist, that decide in advance who counts as human and who does not. My point is not to rehabilitate humanism, but rather to struggle for a conception of ethical obligation that is grounded in precarity. No one escapes the precarious dimension of social life– it is, we might say, our common non-foundation. And we cannot understand co-habitation without understanding that a generalized precarity obligates us to oppose genocide and to sustain life on egalitarian terms. Perhaps this feature of our lives can serve as the basis for the rights of protection against genocide, whether through deliberate or negligent means. After all, even though our interdependency constitutes us as more than thinking beings, indeed as social and embodied, vulnerable and passionate, our thinking gets nowhere without the presupposition of the interdependent and sustaining conditions of life.

depression

Spontaneous feeling, fleeting impressions, a shared story, moments of unconscious closeness – everything demands the energy of motion, and all motion is too fast, too tiring. I get nervous, look at the negative, the annoyances, the things I need to slow down. All I can do is guard the perimeter, keep the inner domain safe, stay on the lookout for the sudden shift, the threat of a shaking earth or a high crashing surf. Colors confuse, pulling my eyes and mind in too many directions at once. Shadowy sight is less demanding, less shrill.

But night has its own demands of total dark, a stillness too still. Depression pushes me farther in distrust of living toward no living at all.

Even my vision slows down. Rapid movement is a blur. My mind can only process a still photo, not a movie. I want to catch one frame at a time, like old-fashioned film editing. You crank the film one frame at a time through a small viewer, stop, back up, cut several frames, splice the ends together. Edit out the confusion.

I want to piece the world together in visual patterns that stay put, like fitting words into sentences that don’t change until you rearrange and edit them.

Everyday living is the shove into that free fall. Anxiety, fear, exhausting action that’s too much to take in and react to. People need responses, feelings, words, smiles, laughter, sympathy, time. They...need all of you, and I’m in retreat to slow motion solitude.

'Thought pushes one word at a time into speech like boulders uphill. Then each sound rolls slowly across tongue and teeth. My jaw’s like lead.'

John Folk-Williams

Chronic pain develops or worsens. Chest pain, migraines, stomach problems, and a weakened immune system are some common symptoms.

There’s a bone-deep weariness that becomes a constant companion; no amount sleep or coffee can shake it off. When people say they can’t get out of bed because of depression, this is what they’re talking about.

That day at the beach, I told my coworkers about depression’s physicality. Every part of me ached from resisting gravity, as though my cells wanted to collapse in a puddle on the ground. My skin stung like lotion on a fresh sunburn and my throat hurt from the lump that lived in it. At one point, I was seriously underweight because I couldn’t force food down.

          Sarah

The most important thing to remember about depression is this: you do not get the time back. It is not tacked on at the end of your life to make up for the disaster years. Whatever time is eaten by a depression is gone forever. The minutes that are ticking by as you experience the illness are minutes you will not know again.

      Andrew Solomon

Bloomfield, Code etc. (on Fricker)

"In chapter 2 the analysis expands to focus on stereotypes as themselves stereotypical vehicles of prejudice, in what Fricker calls "the credibility economy" (30 ff). Rather than viewing them as epistemically-morally-politically pernicious forms of hasty generalization by contrast, say, with Gadamerian pre-judgements or putatively more benign practices of categorization, Fricker argues plausibly for a "neutral" sense of stereotype which catches their frequent reliability as part of a "hearer's rational resources" in making credibility judgements. Yet she acknowledges a widespread human susceptibility to relying on negatively, harmfully prejudiced stereotypes, and shows how difficult it is unequivocally to attribute culpability to their users, given that stereotypes and images "can operate beneath the radar of our ordinary doxastic self-scrutiny, sometimes even despite beliefs to the contrary" (40). The analysis of multiple, often subtle, but sometimes cruder operations of prejudice, deftly exemplified in literary and "real life" instances, is one of the most impressive sections of the book. Within this rich store of examples, ever more intricate readings of Tom Robinson, the wrongfully accused black man in Harper Lee's novel, are particularly effective in exposing the effects of stereotypes in excluding members of certain social "kinds" from relations of trust, contributing to their degradation qua knowers, "undermining them in their very humanity" (44).

"Again, there is no algorithm for achieving such reflexivity or for showing whether or how it can unseat stereotypes embedded in the social imagination. Prejudice, as Fricker well knows, is "a powerful visceral force" (98) condoned, perpetuated, and insulated against condemnation in social-cultural situations where there are no obvious reasons, no pay-offs, no rewards for examining it or, a fortiori, for attempting to purge it. Indeed, acknowledging the unjust benefits gender or racial prejudice afford to people as members of the dominant sex or race exacts a price: it entails losses, not just of psychic or doxastic comfort, but of the privileges and self-certainties such prejudices confer. Why would a hearer, whose life and the lives of whose semblables have been constructed around the social meanings they install, consider relinquishing those privileges?"

Lorraine Code

"In turning to the bearing of these virtues on matters of epistemology, it is not hard to see the injustices that Fricker discusses as being caused by either injustice or intemperance, depending on the case. We may arrogantly discount the value of a witness’s testimony because we believe he or she is claiming an authority that we unfairly think is not theirs to claim. But we may also discount people’s testimony because we have a desire for their testimony to be false. When we allow our belief-forming mechanisms to be unduly influenced by our needs, desires, appetites, passions, or emotions, then the root cause of the injustice is, perhaps surprisingly, not epistemic injustice but epistemic intemperance. The familiar problem of ‘confirmation bias’, as well as many forms of prejudice, especially insofar these are defense mechanisms against psychological insecurity, are best explained as failures of temperance: we believe what makes us feel most comfortable. Thus, we may better understand many of the epistemic injustices we do to others through a better understanding of epistemic temperance."

Paul Bloomfield

"In Epistemic Injustice, Miranda Fricker introduces hermeneutical injustice, which ‘occurs when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences’. A hermeneutical gap is often owing to an absence of concepts or language which can help those marginalized to make sense of their experience, and, can result in their exclusion from the pooling and spread of knowledge. But, equally, and sometimes inseparably, a hermeneutical gap can be due to the style or form of expression in which knowledge is conveyed. In this paper we elaborate this latter type of hermeneutical injustice by concentrating on what we term ‘form of expression bias’. This occurs when a particular form or style of expression is intrinsically associated with negative epistemic qualities, and, consequently, is not heard as fully rational irrespective of its content with respect to knowledge". 

Elianna Fetterolf

In this paper I want to conceive of epistemic injustice within the two-dimensional theory of justice proposed by Nancy Fraser. Epistemic injustice would then be a type of status subordination which (a) prevents those targeted from participatory parity in a domain or across various domains and (b) due to a lack of parity restricts the value of deliberative processes in which this subordination occurs (at the very least by preventing relevant information from being given adequate consideration). Status subordination in Fraser’s framework is always systematic injustice, due to institutional set-ups and practices. This focus on systematic, institutional injustice has implications for the way in which injustice can be combatted (i.e. the focus must be on particular steps taken to change institutional set-ups rather than changing attitudes of individuals directly).

Axel Gelfert 

The Introduction offers a clear statement of the author's aim: to explore "the idea that there is a distinctively epistemic kind of injustice", of which she distinguishes two species, testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice, each of which consists "most fundamentally, in a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower" (1). The analysis centers around a conception of social power which Fricker glosses as "a socially situated capacity to control others' actions" (4), and which manifests in patterns of incredulity, misinterpretation, silencing. Within this frame, her particular interest is in "identity power" and the harms it enacts through invoking identity prejudices under whose sway hearers deny or withhold credibility to/from speakers qua members of a certain "social type" (4). That a person's capacity to claim recognition as a conveyer of knowledge, a bona fide informant, is essential to her or his achieving human value in a first-, second- and third-personal sense is the deep thought that grounds the argument and carries it forward. Thus, with testimonial injustice, speakers are, variously, thwarted in their claims to acknowledgment as subjects of knowledge, and thereby harmed in their self-development. With hermeneutical injustice, speakers' knowledge claims fall into lacunae in the available conceptual resources, thus blocking their capacity to interpret, and thence to understand or claim a hearing for their experiences. When such harms go deep, Fricker suggests, people are "prevented from becoming who they are" (5). Even though they may be experienced and performed individually, these are not merely individual harms: testimonial and hermeneutical injustices come from and refer back to a social fabric within which the biases and prejudices that animate and sustain them are tightly entangled, and conceptual lacunae are more and other than places of unknowing, ready to be "filled in" by inserting the appropriate facts. Structurally, members of some social groups are ill-understood, marginalized, reduced to unintelligibility through patterns of testimonial and hermeneutic injustice that often seem to be everyone's and no one's responsibility. For Fricker, contesting such injustices and harms requires "collective social political change" -- and, in her view, contentiously I shall suggest, "the political depends upon the ethical" (8).

Lorraine Code

Bacchi

 A “what’s the problem represented to be?” approach to policy analysis, therefore, has as its goal opening up policies and policy proposals for the kind of critical analysis offered in the examples above. It produces a methodology to identify the problem representations implicit in policies and policy proposals, and to reflect on their ethical implications. The approach shares a basic insight with sociological framework theory – that how “problems” are “framed” matters to perceptions of the issues and the outcomes that follow. However, the differences between framing theory and a problem representation approach are significant. For example, a good deal of framing theory is concerned with intentional or strategic framing, either to accomplish a particular goal or to resolve a dispute. By contrast, a focus on problem representation moves us outside the realm of intentional “impression management” (Provis 2004, Chapter 9) to consider the deep-seated conceptual logics implicated in specific policies and policy proposals. Moreover, the overriding purpose of frame theory is to find ways to understand the dynamics of policy making (Hajer and Laws 2006, 260) in order “to learn how to make better decisions” (Goodin, Rein and The Ethics of Problem Representation - 17 Moran 2006, 11). Framing is understood as an “ordering device” that assists in understanding how policy actors deal with ambiguity. By contrast, a problem representation approach is an analytic method for scrutinizing the deep-seated assumptions and preconceptions that underpin particular policy directions. The intent is to point out “on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest” (Foucault 1981 in Pálsson and Rabinow 2006, 91).

Conventional approaches to public policy restrict the understanding of public policy to “what governments do, why they do it and what difference it makes” (Edwards 2004). In these accounts public policy is understood as simply the output of government. Some years ago Bachrach and Baratz (1963) expanded on this understanding of policy-making processes by noting that government policy includes not just what governments do, but also what they do not do, not only decisions, but also non-decisions. Steven Lukes (1974) famously pushed the boundaries of analysis to include three dimensions of power in policy making. A one-dimensional view of power is concerned with “who prevails in cases of decision-making where there is an observable conflict” (Lukes 1974, 10), that is, what gets on the policy agenda. A two-dimensional view of power, associated with the work of Bachrach and Baratz (1963), directs attention to the way power “may be, and often is, exercised by confining the scope of decision-making to relatively ‘safe issues’” (Lukes 1974, 18), limiting the issues that make it to policy agendas. Lukes’ three-dimensional view of power extends the analysis to consider how power is exerted by influencing, shaping or determining people’s wants. This way of exercising power prevents people “from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things …” (Lukes 1974, 23-24). Developments in post-positivist policy analysis (see for example Shapiro 1992, 11) take these insights a step further, pointing out that the ways in which issues are represented have wide ramifications that need to be considered part and parcel of policy analysis. Governments in this interpretation are not reactive, addressing political “problems”; rather they are active in the creation of particular understandings of political “problems”. Because policies and policy proposals identify what needs to change, they also imply what the “problem” is. Hence representations of the “problem” are implicit in all policies and policy proposals (see Turnbull 2006, 20, fn 3). Crucially, these problem representations matter for what is done and not done, and for how people live their lives. Deborah Stone (1988, 106) describes how representations of a problem define “interested parties and stakes”, allocate “the roles of bully and underdog”, and affect power relations. These implications invite ethical reflection. In other work (Bacchi 1999) I have constructed an approach to policy analysis, which I call “what’s the problem represented to be?”, that assists in identifying 14 - Carol Bacchi the ethical dimensions of the problem representations that lodge within existing and proposed public policies. The approach consists of a set of questions. First, ask how the “problem” is represented in a specific policy proposal and/or in a specific policy debate: what is the “problem” represented to be? Then consider the assumptions and presuppositions that underlie this representation of the problem. Next, reflect on the impact these presuppositions and assumptions may have on possible outcomes: what is likely to change with this representation of the “problem”? What is likely to stay the same? Who is likely to benefit from this representation of the “problem”? Who is likely to be harmed? Identify who is held responsible for the “problem” and how this attribution of responsibility affects both those targeted and the perceptions of the rest of the community about who is to “blame”. Consider what is left unproblematic in this representation of the “problem” and how “responses” would differ if the “problem” were thought about or represented differently. Finally, examine the means of dissemination of identified problem representation/s as an exercise of power and scrutinize reflexively one’s own representation of the “problem”. A focus on problem representations directs attention to all three of Lukes’ dimensions of power. The analysis starts with policies that are proposed or have made it to the policy agenda (one-dimensional power) but the purpose is to identify what is missing from or suppressed (silenced) with those policies (a form of two-dimensional power). In addition, a specific goal is to scrutinize the implications of particular representations of the “problem” for political subjects, their positioning in society and their subjective reactions to that positioning (three-dimensional power). However, whereas Lukes (1974, 45, 34) seems to endorse the idea of false consciousness and talks about “interests” as if they are readily identifiable, in a problem representation approach there is no pure outside from which to exercise these judgments; hence, the insistence in a “what’s the problem represented to be?” approach to subject one’s own problem representations to reflexive scrutiny. In addition, in this approach there is a broadening of the understanding of public policy to include the roles played by experts, including doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists and indeed ethicists, in producing particular representations of social “problems” and particular kinds of governable subjects. That is, in this approach, governance extends beyond the institutions of government to include “an inventive, strategic, technical and artful set of ‘assemblages’ fashioned from diverse elements” (Dean and Hindess 1998, 8), including the human sciences (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983, xxiv).

Carol Bacchi

“We cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster.”

James Baldwin

"To be honest, it fills me with deep shame and rage. Shame because of having to represent this brutality and because I know how much better it could be. Rage because of the indifference and ignorance of so many of my colleagues and bosses and because of how powerless I can feel...I have to own that I thought it was a resource issue. Of course I’ve seen the bigotry...However I don’t think I realised how much I relied on the resource problem as a screen to hide the fact that the system functions as it does."

The current system is based on an arms-length procurement relationship in which people's support is commodified into hourly units that are sold competitively to contractors. The person is fossilised as a static number of 'need-hours'.

Adrian Roper 

“…most of us…were being broken down by social conditions in our personal lives before psychiatry identified us as “deviants.” Returning to those lives (trying to reconstruct them) has placed many of us back in the frying pan – back in living situations in which we are lonely, poor, treated with no respect, and denied decent food, housing, work, and companionship. Racial and sexual discrimination are additional burdens for many of us – they are daily realities, not abstract political ideas.”

Rather than a hierarchical structure in which some participants are clearly in charge of others, true alternatives feature a cooperative and democratic structure. Although there may be divisions of function, they are fluid, and one who takes the helping role at one point may be the one who receives help at another.

 Judi Chamberlin

“Directly seeing the adverse effects of being "the other" results in so much fear, that you respond by intensifying your performance of belonging to the dominant group”.

Someone who moves out of the social sphere they are ‘supposed’ to occupy is always in danger of being overcome by feelings of vertigo, panic and horror: “…isolated, cut off, surrounded by hostile space, you are suddenly without connections, without stability, with nothing to hold you upright or in place; a dizzying, sickening unreality takes possession of you; you are threatened by a complete loss of identity, a sense of utter fraudulence; you have no right to be here, now, inhabiting this body, dressed in this way; you are a nothing, and ‘nothing’ is quite literally what you feel you are about to become.”

       Mark Fisher

The therapeutic relationship always involves an imbalance of power…Time, place, number and duration of sessions and holidays are in the hands of one party. One person is thought to be an expert in human relations and feelings. Only one person is thought to be in trouble.

Jeffrey Masson

 

For what seems to me to have happened over the years is that a mechanistic and objectivist approach to people's distress that, while it didn't overtly blame them, dehumanized them, has been replaced by a 'humanist' and 'postmodernist' one that interiorizes the phenomena of distress and – often explicitly and nearly always tacitly – holds people responsible for them.

       David Smail

"Free time" is actually *not* time for sustained repetition and cultivation, and a major chunk of it is also without free energy. When you're done recovering, you don't have enough time to sustain what you might call spontaneous action, so your only action is on owned time, not free time. And you only have enough free time to use your energy in a way that can't really cultivate anything substantive. So, you consume and veg out or perform actions that give immediate feedback without cultivation."

One is observed without being able to observe properly. Ones state of mind, mistakes, awkwardness and transgressions are catalogued diagnosed and studied; whereas ones own observations are held in suspicion and doubt and are called unsound, resistance, arrogance, transference and the like. Making an examination of ones conditions, including the state of mind and therapeutic intentions of all our caretakers, more or less prohibited. It is a situation bound to evoke paranoia.

Edward Podvoll

'The bludgeoning effects of an unjust, disenfranchising, alienating, brutalising society is more to the point, but outside the awareness of a bourgeois presentation'.

When we are on the receiving end of the system's administrations, it is most common to receive a ‘correction’ when any of ‘us’ intend to accuse anyone else (‘them’) of wrongdoing. “We can’t blame others” is an often repeated, even expected, complaint stopper.

Patricia Lafave

"An overarching trend here is the creation and maintenance of an illusory world-space. Which allows some to see and experience the world as they wish it to be, as such they get upset when these illusions don't comport with reality. This version of the hyper-real is almost like a fetish: a protective illusion to save the sensitive from experiencing harsh brutal socio-economic positions".

"I realized that not only was the state killing people, but slaughtering them in the thousands. And unlike war which was always presented as some kind of grim necessity, a 'lesser evil', people just celebrate this genocide. There's no reconciliation to be had with anybody who disregards the disabled, to see another human as a human is honestly the lowest possible bar, and there are still those that can't even performatively pass it".

Patient quarters and possessions can be entered and examined by any staff member, for whatever reason. His personal history and anguish is available to any staff member who chooses to read his folder, regardless of their therapeutic relationship to him.  

David Rosenhan

You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who’s saved? Who’s not?"

Amy Tan 

"It’s a culture of toughness and stoicism, for some of us. For those who govern us, though, no comfort can be spared."

It’s common to hear writers say that an individual (or a community) living with a mental disorder is voiceless or invisible.  However, writer and activist Arundhati Roy talks about how a justice framework challenges the impulse to feel sympathetic for the “voiceless” and instead think critically about how social injustices shape their experiences. We can borrow this analysis to see how unjust power dynamics privilege the able-bodied.

“We know that there is no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced and the preferably unheard.”

– Arundhati Roy

Martin Macias

The second tenet the de-person antagonizes is the promise that neoliberalism can reduce everything, including the decision to survive, down to personal choice, a matter of willpower, and a problem the market can solve.

      Johanna Hedva

“People think they can get away with much ill treatment so long as others can’t articulate, thus prove, that they feel, experience, have soul, bear witness, remember.”

"Shifting responsibility to the individual for the management of their own feelings conceals and trivializes the social, political, and economic significance of subjective feeling, exhaustion, and depression'.

"One very powerful ‘origin’ of morality is reciprocity. I.e. if I have a social interaction with an individual who has the capacity (or power) to inflict the same actions on me as I on him, I will avoid anything that harms him as it would potentially harm me in the same way. In this situation morality arises, very much in a Kantian way. When, however, this reciprocity is not given, morality can break down within hours. Look at the genocide in Rwanda, once the Tutsi were not acknowledged as equal anymore by the Hutu and could be killed with impunity, neighbors remorselessly slaughtered (in a very literal sense) their neighbors regardless of age (babies) or gender (e.g. pregnant or old women). There are countless examples of that, the holocaust, Yugoslavia, Cambodia…The famous Stanford experiment (students being grouped as ‘prisoners’ or ‘guards’) showed the same basic erosion of morality within hours in the USA. As a last example you might take a Roman slave owner killing every tenth slave to restore discipline. Which would have been regarded by other Romans rather as outrageously expensive but not illegal much less immoral. Empirically there is just no evidence that there is such a thing as a universal moral foundation (or gut sense of morality), history proves that there is none. Morality emerges as reciprocity in a social context, this is why removing this reciprocity (e.g. by denying an ethical groups legal rights and protection) has led, leads and will lead to genocides".

"I work with some of them and it’s exasperating. Sometimes I want to scream: ‘Are you aware of the words coming out of your own mouth?".

 

“It's all set up by design to try and finish people off who can’t defend themselves.”

The educational system, whether lay or clerical, the structure of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary honesty of workers who are given a medal after many years of good and loyal service, and the affection which springs from harmonious relations and good behavior - all these aesthetic expressions of respect for the established order serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably. A multitude of moral teachers, counselors and "bewilderers" separate the exploited from those in power.

Frantz Fanon

Quarantining otherness, locking people out, breeds an ignorance that engenders hatred. It is openness that makes us safe.

Andrew Solomon

We have built our country based on citizen cooperation aided by the government and other institutions. I work in a university that receives money in study grants, work programs, student loans as well as industrial research grants. The difference is that the external support focuses on our capabilities. It is absurd to suggest that we are saying let them just take care of themselves. If you go to any meeting of faculty or corporate officers, sitting in the room will be men and women with serious deficiencies – financial problems, marital problems – but their institution focuses on and supports their capacities. Let's just do unto others what we have done for ourselves.

John Mcknight 

"There's plenty of discussion about how terrible an industry is - discussion that focusses on individual abusers and the poor practices of specific organizations. The idea that we often push, is that all that's needed is to improve standards, weed out abusers and everything will be fine. We seldom describe problems as systemic, or attempt to explain why exploitation is able to happen, or explore the socio-economic forces that enable abusive people to abuse without repercussions".

“The system encourages us not to look at things systemically.” 

“For me, capitalism affected me in that my mom had to work so much, leaving me home alone and lonely, dependent upon the TV. The screen evolved but the isolation is the same. The problems you named as the result of capitalism are real and affect me but not nearly as much as the trauma of neglect, and having a stressed out parent to care for”.

''She touched on one aspect of it which was people sometimes assuming he's being lazy. That's just the tip of the iceberg, especially when someone has a condition that can't be seen & is undiagnosed or difficult to diagnose. Many times these people suffer from mental abuse even from their own family for many years''.

“I used to pray for physical illness so I'd get help or support in some form”.

"Being compassionate and rational are great virtues, in a healthy situation they will shine. But here they are turned against you. When this bad system is torn down, and the injustice it is causing gets resolved, then you can spend some time being compassionate towards the people who upheld this system. Right now - your virtues are better spent elsewhere".

"A lot of people working for non-profits are in an alien situation. Just out of college, they landed their "dream job saving the world." Spoon fed their whole life, they can't handle being called out".

"I started a Master's degree in Biomedical Sciences (in Italy), because I wanted to study neuroscience and improve the lives of people with mental health conditions. In the meantime I also found out I have ADHD and that I'm on the spectrum, and online learning helped me a lot, because it was the accommodation I never knew I needed. Also, I was blessed by the algorithm and I started learning much more about socialism, disability and the various systems of oppression. The point is, while reading the papers for my assignments, I often found expressions like "disability X is a burden on our society", "diseases lead to X money lost because of loss in productivity" etc. and I was confused, because I found it disgusting, but apparently it was an okay thing to write? Now I'm on my thesis project on autism and I realized that a big chunk of research is literally trying to prevent new autistic people from being born, instead of improving their quality of life...So yeah in some months I'll graduate, and on one hand I'm completely disappointed in medicine and research, on the other one I just hope I'll do something meaningful with it, instead of helping modern day eugenics".

"Can you separate the goal of medicine from money? Because, like any institution it mostly reflects the beliefs of the privileged, or it would not exist...it is a flaw in their institution that allows teachers to exist who actually teach their students to think critically for themselves, and medical scientists who aren't social Darwinist or eugenicists and want their work to improve the health and quality of life of the people around them. So, in that context, you have choices to make because, what you have learned about the society you live in cannot be unlearned, only embraced or denied. You have seen the Portrait in the Attic and must look upon the people around you differently. As each one of them is potentially complicit".

"When I was in the Army, we used to say that the Army prefers to "solve" the complainer, rather than solving the problem. This looks similar".

"Disabled body is abjected to force the working body into one place. The identity of a late capitalist agent is encoded in their exploitable labor potential. Abjection serves as a means to unite the disabled subject into a singular identity with the past. Disability forces a subject to split into new surfaces like a broken mirror. The attempt to reconcile this distributed body in a world of egos results in disability due to the delay in coordinating these parts. As such, abjection also serves to contain unified capitalist identity, and to socialize a specific view on identity that limits us to our bodies. It's no surprise that naïve Darwinism was and continues to be such a popular answer to these problems - encapsulating phylogenetic lines that confine our existences to nodes of the bloodline".

"I've been poor and I've been homeless and I've also come across a lot of middle-class people who romanticise poverty, etc. It's not an accurate reflection of reality, though and not any different from the concept of the "noble savage". What's pernicious about it is that it obscures the reality of economic injustice and the suffering that it causes and mainly serves to make the people who believe it feel better. I still don't have much but I'm not poor like I was (I have a decent roof over my head, decent food, can pay my bills, sometimes have a little extra) and I'm a whole lot happier and less anxious. 100% of people I know who've had a similar experience say the same. Poverty is awful and day-by-day grinds you down and there is nothing romantic about it. That you find community and connection and mutual aid and small joys doesn't change this reality, it just makes it a little easier to cope with. There is also considerable empirical data that shows that up to a certain threshold (i.e. enough to have a basic decent standard of living and not be in economic anxiety), money does bring happiness/contentment. Also, in some cases, poor/homeless people feel that they have to put on a performance for their middle-class saviours - because not doing so comes with consequences...including being subject to abuse and/or denial of help - so...workers and so on are not necessarily getting an accurate reflection of how people feel. These "helpers" have considerable power over you and I've found that a lot of them are completely oblivious to the power dynamic. If you're on the receiving end and want a good outcome you have little choice but to play the game''.

"I have been gaslit by colleagues telling me "it's not that bad" either through their blind ignorance or toxic positivity. It...gets difficult when you're contributing to a system that is actively failing people''.

"I am a trans woman who works in the NHS as a clinical educator...I find it an incredible struggle to communicate in that one day the enormity of the atrocity of our experiences with the NHS. How we are probably coming to a mental health service with zero good expectations because of how we will have been treated elsewhere in the system".

"I can see the angle of perceiving my response as “white man tears” (emotion without action) because I believe the problem is systemic and beyond whether I am a good person or not, only collective action and a recognition of the political can change that. Every post on any form of systemic oppression gets a bunch people responding to simply show that they are one of the good guys, and of course it totally misses the point. I thought it was more important to own the very real harm that my profession is causing''.

"They leave us out in the cold...we're expected to struggle through a world that treats us like some magical other who just exists elsewhere by some other set of rules. There's often a presumption that despite what disability actually means, we're somehow more able to tolerate being isolated, to give up on having a life, give up on having an income...because the system is made to fit them and the way they live their lives, it's largely invisible to able bodied people. I developed my illness in my thirties, and while I'd never been OVERTLY ableist before that, I didn't really put a lot of thought into it. I'd studied issues to do with accessibility and thought of things like building design, parking spots and educational aids, but never really got it when it came to social norms and how that effects access to care, benefits and policy, and just...life. I had no idea how many hurdles there would be and how neglected and alone I would feel...there's a quote that crosses my mind a lot, that explaining culture to the people who live in it is like explaining water to a fish. Those who fit predominant social and cultural norms don't notice the system because it's designed for them to experience their lives with minimal disruption. None of us, no matter how educated, are really able to understand just how intertwined with it we are until we no longer fit. We aren't truly capable of getting it until we're the ones being excluded".

"I was medicated despite there not being any medication that treats autism because it isn’t a mental illness it is a developmental disability. By age 8 I was routinely losing weight due to severe panic attacks and impaired interoception. For example in the spring of grade three I lost ten pounds when I already weighed less than 60 pounds and became severely anemic. I was engaging in self injury, had significantly impaired social and academic skills, couldn’t make eye contact, etc. And my parents were incredibly supportive, they were educated, they knew something was wrong, they were good at the system and still they failed. It was not until I was an adult, had gone through several severe mental health crises and had waited over a year for a formal diagnosis. The diagnostic process was an entire day, over 7 hours. Questions were invasive, humiliating, infantilizing. My mother had to be there to corroborate everything I said (reminder I was in my twenties at the time). Most of the tests I received were designed by twentieth century eugenicists, designed for young children, or both. Bigotry is pervasive in health care, in trans health care, in the care of disabled people, the list goes on, and it is fucking cruel. It is a slow, orderly method of eugenics”.

"Just as a document creates the appearance that an institution is doing something, the very institutions themselves create the appearance that a government is doing something - but it's almost all a Potemkin village that prevents the public at large from recognizing state failure, until as individuals, they are compelled to rely on one of its institutions for its designated purpose. The existence of these institutions also creates plausible deniability for the state's failure in order to gaslight individuals into blaming themselves for their inability to access the rights and services those institutions are ostensibly designed to provide".

"If we give names, and that person resigns, it might look like the problem is fixed. When in reality the person's replacement will likely be just as bad or worse. Keeping them anonymous except for their job roles keeps us focused on actions, not names. It's not the individuals causing the problem, it's the entire system. It's the job they were hired to do".

"Being compassionate and rational are great virtues, in a healthy situation they will shine. But here they are turned against you. When this bad system is torn down, and the injustice it is causing gets resolved, then you can spend some time being companionate towards the people who upheld this system. Right now - your virtues are better spent elsewhere".

"Modern institutions tend to internalize and utilize the fear of liability to prevent their private and professional autonomy. This avalanches into the autonomy of others, but in true Hot Fuzz call-back, they believe it's for the greater good. No matter what horror and pain is caused...Systemic stressors reduce variations...The fear stressor for liability becomes an existential stressor to people who staff an institution, which will in turn antagonize them to their supposed clients. It reduces to their way of life vs. your quality of life".

"In computer engineering, we have a term for this sort of system, where any single delayed or incorrect result might kill someone or destroy something expensive. We call them "hard real time". "Real time" meaning that the system needs to keep a schedule, and "hard" meaning that the schedule must be met without any exception whatsoever...In a hard real time system, ONE single failure doesn't merely raise suspicion - it PROVES that there is a MAJOR problem. A competent system designer would take such a failure, and launch a detailed investigation to determine how the failure happened, in order to fix the system".

"That one's pretty easy to figure out bud, people that are, for one reason or another, dealing with mental health issues, which is a common side-effect of not being treated properly, listened to or taken seriously for example, tend to feel really, really bad...and do take their lives. It's sad that it comes to that, when something so simple as being taken seriously could have saved that person. That is how most of them are dying".

"So my condition is depersonalization and derealization disorder...the the lack of help, I think, is probably the most difficult thing and it's certainly something that I've said to people before: that, yes, living with the condition is hell but the grind of dealing with the mental health services is often worse".

Joe Perkins

"Where I find myself nowadays is, I've been through all the help I can access and I'm now worse than when I started, significantly worse, I've tried everything possible, I've tried every medication I can get somebody to prescribe for me and nothing's made a difference and now I find myself still getting worse having every angle I've tried become a dead end, thinking, well, where does this stop, what does my future look like because I'm struggling so much now".

Joe Perkins

"I often described it as "climbing up a slope that only you can see is wet, and people getting mad at you for sliding down, telling you you're not even trying when you're trying as hard as you ever have in your life."

"As my shrink today said, she see's too many co-workers that don't care more than that they get a decent wage. Their clients? Eh, whatever. I've become bitter and I hate it".

...neuroscience, a discipline that in its unrelenting focus on genetics, neurotransmitters, and circuits often forgot the dynamic interplay between the brain and its environment, how through plasticity the brain continuously integrates its social context into neurobiology. What would neuroscience look like if it adopted an ethos of neurodiversity? What if neuroscientists were trained to study difference rather than disorder? By giving scientific legitimacy to ableist ideologies, neuroscientists are implicated in upholding oppressive institutions such as the special education and mental healthcare systems that lead to mass incarceration and homelessness.

         Alexis Takahashi

"My friend f**king matters, the years of preventable suffering inflicted on them matters, and the fact that it’s over for them now doesn’t mean it’s no longer a problem''.

"People are resistant to change until the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of changing". 

"I used to pray for physical illness so I'd get help or support in some form. I'm doing a lot better thanks to resources, though limited. We need more honest conversations, less comparisons, and a lot more community''.

"Any accomplice who feels that our anger separates us from them needs to do some soul searching; first, why do you think we're angry at you? Why don't you think our anger is valid? Why do you think our anger at the historical status quo contributes more to that stasis than your blind support of the same? Let us skip the part where you deny either the support or beliefs. If both were false, it wouldn't occur to you to blame us for our oppression. Ask who benefits from you trying to convince people who have been victimized that their victimization is nothing to be upset about (it's the rich and powerful who benefit). Lastly, ask yourself whether it's nobler to support what is right only after those who are wronged become saints or to support what's right regardless of the sins of those abused. If violence was the answer, I would endorse it but that just plays into the oppressor's hands, the idea of us being violent is what they want. Focus on exposing the results of their violence, record interviews with staff, record interviews with GPs and clinics, don't just tell neutrals how humiliating it is, let them suffer with you. You need their compassion and "suffering together" is the Latin root of the word compassion. Make sure everyone in the business or out has to see the harm the system does - that they do. What causes change is showing people the monster at work along with collective action to get people the care they need and save as many people as we can. With this, improvement can be had, you can graduate from nonhuman to vaguely 4th class citizen, as Black people have in the US. Almost 2nd class in most of the West. Know that justice and equality are like nuclear fusion. Always getting closer, never here. (Also, fundamental to existence and proven to work at other scales. One day it - fusion power, social justice - will happen and it will solve many problems. But it remains unlikely you will live to see that day). Those who want a system built on economic slavery are hostile to the rights of all people but themselves. The wealthy attack us to distract the majority while they rob them and get them to help rob us. Almost all humans think they are good people. Not capable of good. Not working to be good. Intrinsically good. And that's exploitable. They can be slowed or even stopped in their blind trample by showing them the suffering they cause."

"Once had my family GP ask me what I wanted him to do when I was actively suicidal and was asking for help. Took a lot for me not to ask him to kill me that day. He also told me I didn't have an eating disorder. Took me going to a different GP to get help, where she spent some time checking stuff online and speaking to me at length about what services were available, where I was being referred, and what out of service options were available. Thankfully because of that 2nd GP I'm now recovered. I only ever ask for her, my family GP can do one."

"Felt very much like this, as someone who has struggled in the mental health system. My heart breaks for the endless avoidable deaths and pain''.

"Sometimes, it feels like people want you to die on the waiting list. Mentally ill teenagers will become mentally ill adults who are a burden to capitalism, so they must die". 

"These experiences have made me passionately, angrily, eager to do something about the systems in place, but I have never been able to figure out how. I'm sure you're familiar with the way in which depression, anger, fear, desperation and the erosion of confidence in our fellow humans is paralyzing. Just about every friend I have has even less drive to continue trying to fight these systems than I do. And I've run out of it".

"You can spend years and years going through doctors and these mental health
partnerships and getting assessments and being referred from one person to the
next, onto the next and back to the original person and onward again...I think the average diagnosis time for this condition is seven to twelve years...I want to see...some of that

stress of dealing with mental health services reduced, the stress of trying to fight to get to somewhere...but meeting resistance the whole way."

    Joe Perkins

"...only the liberating feeling of shame may help to recover...moral significance...The choice is between the pride of morally purifying shame, and the shame of morally devastating pride...only when feeling ashamed for one's weakness can one finally shatter the mental prison which has outlived its builders and its guards." Zygmunt Bauman

"It's easier to put everyone into neat little boxes, especially when the system encourages/enables this type of behavior and gives one person too much power. Autism isn't my problem, society (and the system) is. Any divergence from the "norm" (whatever that is) is going to fall through the cracks, as people claim to understand, but do they? Maybe I should've told her what she wanted to hear. Maybe then I wouldn't have been denied further treatment for the damage this fucking system filled with egomaniacs on their sick little power trips has done to my mental health. But hey, fuck me, right? "You have autism? Great, we have special institutions for r*****s like you".

"That people with mental illness are still treated with so much hostility and ignorance in this day and age is is unforgivable. Instead of care and understanding this man was systematically re-traumatised''. 

"I have always said that mental illness/psychiatry/psychology medicine is stuck in the 1950s. You’re treated as if you are a prisoner instead of someone who is hurting and has a medical condition...no matter what you tell yourself and how many demons get to you and lie to you, I hope you understand what a wonderful human being you are and how many people that you have provided comfort to by...sharing your story''.