"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''.