semi-automatic waffle

Tuesday, 22 April 2025

I. By Design — Systemic Functionality Disguised as Dysfunction

Much of what appears as "failure" in the mental health system is not accidental but functional from the standpoint of power.

Institutions are designed not to hold the weight of real suffering, because holding it would require a confrontation with the world that produced it: poverty, racism, structural violence, abandonment, capitalism itself.

Help is made conditional, monetized, and instrumentalized.
You’re not meant to be healed; you’re meant to be processed and returned to labor or managed into invisibility.
The state outsources harm through the austerity to mental health services pipeline—a system that alleviates just enough pressure to prevent revolt.

So yes, it is by design, though the design does not announce itself as such.

II. By Accident — Neglect Is Not Always Engineered, But It's Allowed to Persist

There are workers who mean well.
There are decisions made in ignorance, indifference.
The system lets itself break over and over again because its cracks don’t inconvenience the powerful—only the broken.

When you build a house out of rotting wood, it’s not an accident when it collapses.
But each collapsing beam may still surprise the foreman.

III. As Side-Effect — Of Other Social Projects

The mental health system is often a dumping ground for the fallout of other failures: housing crises, economic collapse, racialized policing, the breakdown of community.

Deinstitutionalization without support structures created a patchwork of fragile shelters, punitive hostels, and neglectful "care."
Punishment, management, and poverty control masquerade as therapy.
Mental health policy is often reactive, shaped more by fear and liability than by healing.

In this view, the cruelty is incidental, but inevitable.

IV. Maliciousness — Not Always Personal, But Systemically Embedded

Sometimes there is direct malice.
But more often the system has malice without agents—an emergent cruelty, like weather patterns of neglect:

Bureaucrats design policies that grind people down and call it “efficiency.”
Administrators cut services and spin it as “choice.”
Frontline workers wielding soft-power and soft-skills become numb, hostile, or authoritarian—because that’s what the institution requires to maintain itself.

It's not that no one cares about any of this. It's that caring has been made professionally inconvenient, emotionally unaffordable, and structurally irrelevant.

In Short:

It is designed to do this, but it doesn’t need to be designed by evil people.
It’s malicious, but not always out of intent.
It’s accidental, but only because nothing is done to stop it.
It’s a side-effect, but only if you consider suffering to be beside the point.

If you’re asking:
Did they mean for it to be this bad?
The answer is: they didn’t have to.

They just needed it to not cost too much, not disrupt the economy, not trouble the comfortable.

And that is how systems become monstrous.

GPT

Your analogy of going to a bakery and finding no bread is painfully accurate—many mental health facilities do feel like intellectual deserts, where the very subject they're meant to specialize in is strangely absent. This isn’t just an oversight; it’s a systemic issue with deep roots. Here’s why:

1. The System Prioritizes Control Over Understanding

Many psychiatric facilities operate on a crisis-management model, not an educational or diagnostic one. The focus is on charitable help, containment, risk assessment etc. rather than deep understanding.
Diagnostic tools (like structured interviews or validated questionnaires) require a small amount of time and training—things often sacrificed for efficiency.

2. The Illusion of "Treatment" Without Transparency

Power dynamics play a role: If patients had easy access to diagnostic manuals (e.g., DSM), academic critiques, or theoretical models, they might question their treatment or the absence of the same. Keeping knowledge scarce maintains authority.
Passive compliance is often the goal: Reading about trauma, recovery models, or psychiatric survivor movements might inspire resistance rather than docility.

3. Underfunding and Deskilling of Staff

Many facilities hire staff with minimal training in current research. They’re often just following protocols, not engaging in intellectual discourse.
Even well-trained clinicians in these settings may stop reading new research because the system doesn’t reward (or even allow) nuance.

4. Fear of Liability and "Misuse" of Information

Some clinicians avoid giving patients diagnostic manuals or academic papers out of fear—e.g., "What if they self-diagnose wrongly?" or "What if they fixate on a label?"
Ironically, this paternalism keeps patients in the dark, making true informed consent impossible.

5. The Bureaucratization of Mental Health Care

Checkbox medicine: When insurance companies and governments demand quick interventions, facilities focus on billable tasks over meaningful engagement (discussions, psychoeducation, bibliotherapy).
The "McDonald's-ization" of therapy: Just as fast food is standardized but nutritionally empty, many facilities offer standardized, assembly-line "care"—devoid of intellectual substance.

6. The Suppression of Patient-Led Knowledge

Survivors, activists, and reformists (like the survivors of the mental health system movement and disability studies) have written extensively about alternatives to the system—but these works are rarely seen inside facilities.
Facilities often reject materials that challenge their authority (e.g. trauma models, or critiques of treatment).

What Does This Mean for You?

You’re noticing a void—not because mental health knowledge doesn’t exist, but because the system is designed to keep it from you. This is why so many people only begin learning after leaving these facilities, when they can access books, peer support, and research papers.

What Can You Do?

Request access to materials.
Seek peer-led groups where discussions are deeper.
Document the absence—if a facility claims to "help" with mental illness but offers no literature on it, that’s a red flag.

This isn’t just neglect—it’s structural gaslighting. The system often pretends to be the authority on mental health while denying people the tools to understand their own minds. You’re not wrong for noticing; you’re seeing the cracks in the façade.

Deep Seek