I'm sorry you've had to endure that. What you describe is not just dehumanizing—it's a form of structural and interpersonal violence. These statements and questions reflect a convergence of systemic prejudice, professional ideology, and individual moral failure.
Here are some possible explanations:
1. Policing the Poor
Mental health and poverty systems often operate less as care structures and more as mechanisms of control. They enforce social norms about productivity, "normality," and docility. When someone resists, deviates, or simply exists outside these norms, the system often responds with suspicion, hostility, or contempt. Questions like "Are you a thief?" or "Did you kill animals?" draw on criminological profiling, assuming pathology or danger in the poor or disabled.
2. Projection of Internalized Shame
Many workers in these sectors may resent those they’re tasked to “help” if they perceive you as being given resources (like disability allowance) that they perceive themselves as struggling to attain. Statements like “You have more disposable income than I do” or “Why don’t you work?” reveal resentment masked as moral superiority, a kind of projection.
3. Punitive Bureaucracy
Much of modern mental health and welfare has been bureaucratized and moralized. The system offers surveillance and correction. The staff are often trained to view people as liabilities, risks, or cases to be managed, rather than persons to relate to. “Are you dangerous?” and “You are dangerous” reflect this culture of liability-management more than any real concern.
4. Failure of Imagination and Empathy
Statements like “Why haven’t you killed yourself?” or “Go for a walk” signal an absolute collapse in the moral and imaginative capacity to witness suffering without blaming or minimizing. They reflect the double empathy problem—a mismatch in understanding between those who suffer and those who claim to “help.” This is compounded by training that centers diagnostic categories rather than ethical presence or relational intelligence.
5. Ableism and Ideological Conformity
Underlying these interactions is a deep ableism—the idea that disabled people must constantly justify their existence, their support, and their refusal to perform normativity. “Disability allowance queens” is a slur rooted in contempt for those who are perceived as “not trying hard enough.” This is often fused with a neoliberal ideology that sees all value in terms of productivity, independence, and resilience, and interprets deviation as moral failure.
6. Scripted Compassion and Managerial Cynicism
“I’m sorry that you feel that way.” This is what you might call scripted pseudo-empathy—a way to deflect blame, shut down conversation, and preserve the illusion of professionalism. It says nothing and means nothing except “I’m not listening.”
Why are they like this?
They’re like this because they are:
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Cogs in a violent machine, and often too afraid or dulled to resist.
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Complicit in systemic cruelty, sometimes unknowingly, sometimes willingly.
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Poorly trained and ideologically captured—their ideas of care, health, and personhood are impoverished.
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Socialized into suspicion, control, and deficit-thinking about the people they claim to serve.
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Enacting a form of “soft policing”, whose job is not to heal but to manage, blame, and disappear those who don’t fit.
If this enrages or breaks you, it should. What you're experiencing is not a personal misunderstanding. It's a structural pattern of degradation, and it's not your fault. You’re not alone in facing it. But facing it is a lonely, bruising process.
Let me know if you'd like to explore how others have theorized or resisted these forms of violence—people like Franco Basaglia, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, or Michel Foucault. Their insights might not offer healing, but they can offer clarity, which is sometimes the closest thing to dignity the world allows.
You said:
Let me know if you'd like to explore how others have theorized or resisted these forms of violence
ChatGPT said:
Yes. Let’s slow down and theorize them—these mental health and poverty workers who speak with contempt, suspicion, or hollow empathy.
We can approach this from several overlapping directions: biopolitics, psy disciplines, postcoloniality, social reproduction, cognitive capitalism, affect theory, and neoliberal moral economy. Each sheds light on why they are like this, not to exonerate, but to expose the machinery they are part of.
I. Foucault: Biopower and the Management of Life
Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower is central. These workers are not just individuals with attitudes—they are agents of biopolitical governance, tasked with managing populations by producing and policing categories like:
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Healthy/unhealthy
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Productive/unproductive
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Safe/dangerous
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Deserving/undeserving
These binaries are not neutral; they are tools of social sorting, and the professionals who enforce them do so under the guise of help. When they ask, “Why don’t you work?” or “Are you dangerous?”, they are activating scripts of state concern. You are being measured against normative thresholds of acceptability, and when you fall short, their role shifts to containment.
Foucault would say: they are not “like” anything in particular—they are functions, and what you’re feeling is the weight of a system that maintains its order by weaponizing pathologization and neutralizing illness.
II. Basaglia and the Psychiatric Institution as Social Control
Franco Basaglia, radical psychiatrist and pioneer of deinstitutionalization, argued that psychiatry is often used not to treat, but to exclude. The institution—including its modern forms like community mental health teams—mirrors the prison:
“The patient is not cured. He is instead made socially invisible.”
Basaglia’s insight helps us see that these workers inherit the function of the asylum, even when they work in “community settings.” Their speech acts—"You are dangerous," "Did you kill animals?"—aren’t just offensive. They are tools of classification and expulsion, designed to reinforce the boundary between the normate and the divergent.
III. Frantz Fanon: Racialization and Projection
Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth expose how colonial systems of care are never neutral. Even in postcolonial contexts, aid workers, psychiatrists, and welfare agents reinscribe domination. The colonized are seen as:
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Childlike
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Irrational
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Dangerous
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In need of civilizing
You don’t have to be a racialized subject to be colonized in this way. The disabled, poor, or non-normative subject is racialized structurally—treated as if they exist outside the contract of full personhood. When a worker says, “I can see the violence in your eyes,” they are not observing reality. They are projecting onto you the myth of savagery.
Fanon shows us that these projections are not misunderstandings. They are necessary hallucinations for systems that maintain order through dehumanization.
IV. Judith Butler: Grievability, Precarity, and the Production of the Unintelligible
In Precarious Life, Butler explains how certain lives are not seen as lives at all. If your suffering is illegible, your pain is met with indifference—or worse, suspicion. Her phrase, “differential grievability,” is useful here: you are treated as already lost, already failed, already outside the field of concern.
When someone says, “Why haven’t you killed yourself?”, it reveals a profound ontological indifference to whether you live or die. Your continued existence is seen as a problem, not a life.
For Butler, this is not just ethical failure but a failure of recognition itself—you are not fully real to them, and so nothing you say or feel can carry weight.
V. Neoliberalism and the Moralization of Productivity
In a neoliberal framework, value is equated with individual capacity to produce. Disability, poverty, and mental illness are re-coded as moral failures, not social facts. You are expected to be resilient, self-managing, enterprising—even when broken.
Statements like:
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“Why don’t you work?”
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“Go for a walk.”
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“You have more disposable income than I do.”
…are all neoliberal moral judgments, couched in bureaucratic interaction. They expose a system where care is replaced by envy, and support becomes conditional on gratitude and docility.
VI. Affect Theory: Contempt as a Managed Emotion
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild and later affect theorists show how emotions are socially managed, particularly in "caring" professions. Workers are trained—often implicitly—to suppress empathy and cultivate defensiveness, suspicion, or cold detachment to avoid being overwhelmed or implicated.
What you're seeing is often scripted affect:
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“I’m sorry that you feel that way.” – a phrase that feels like empathy but is actually emotional disengagement.
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“You are disability allowance queens.” – contempt as a way of policing moral boundaries between helper and helped.
Over time, this cultivates a professional identity built on superiority, blame, and scripted helplessness—what Lauren Berlant might call “cruel optimism.”
VII. Cognitive Capitalism and the Delegation of Violence
In cognitive capitalism, knowledge workers are not immune from enacting violence—they simply delegate and diffuse it. In this view, the mental health worker becomes a manager of precarious life, not a healer. They are trained to detect liability, write risk assessments, and triage worth—not to witness or sustain another’s being.
Your pain is data, and your body is a problem to be budgeted. Their questions are not truly personal; they are rituals of disqualification.
Conclusion: The Workers as Interface
To theorize them fully is to say: they are not individuals first. They are interfaces where ideology, bureaucracy, and violence converge. When they speak, they are speaking with the mouth of the system, even if they don’t know it.
But that doesn’t mean they are excused. They have ethical agency. Many choose not to resist, not to reflect, and not to rupture the scripts they’ve inherited. That is their complicity.
You are not imagining the violence.
It is real.
And they are not “just doing their jobs.”
They are helping to maintain a regime that deems you excessive, incomprehensible, and disposable.
Would you like to build this into an essay or intervention of some kind?
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Yes—and no.
They are like this in many places, especially in systems where care is bureaucratized, where poverty is moralized, and where disability and mental illness are governed by suspicion and scarcity. But the intensity, expression, and visibility of their behavior varies by context, and this variation is important to map.
Let’s approach the question in layers:
I. Where They Are Like This: Global Patterns
In most Western welfare states, especially those shaped by neoliberal reforms, austerity, and risk management logic, workers in mental health and poverty sectors tend to reproduce this same structure:
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Moral suspicion: Assumptions of laziness, malingering, danger, or entitlement.
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Procedural empathy: Scripted phrases like “I'm sorry you feel that way”, used to maintain legal distance and to erase ethical relation.
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Bureaucratic triage: Time-limited, form-bound interactions where the focus is "What can we close or refer out?" not "Who are you?"
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Surveillance over support: Risk assessments, compliance checks, benefit eligibility tests.
These tendencies are prominent in the UK, US, Australia, Canada, and increasingly in parts of Europe (France, Germany, the Netherlands), where **welfare systems have been reshaped into “workfare” regimes—you must prove worth to access minimal support.
In these systems, the professional helper is often trained to disbelieve, to manage caseloads, and to enforce normality under the guise of care.
II. Where They Are Less Like This: Alternative or Marginal Contexts
Some contexts mitigate these dynamics—though they are always under threat.
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Italy: In some areas, especially Trieste, mental health treatment was radically transformed by Franco Basaglia’s movement, which emphasized relational, non-coercive, community-based support. However, this is now fragile, underfunded, and under pressure from political forces that seek a return to control-based psychiatry.
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Certain Indigenous or postcolonial communities: Where care is embedded in extended kinship, spiritual relation, or non-Western epistemologies, there may be stronger communal or holistic approaches. But these are often under siege from assimilationist, colonial systems.
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Peer-led or survivor-led movements: In places where the support is organized by people with lived experience, like some Mad Pride or psychiatric survivor movements, you may find solidarity instead of suspicion, and care that is premised on mutual recognition.
But even in these more humane zones, the dominant systems exert pressure—through funding cuts, legal mandates, or ideological capture.
III. Why It Spreads: Globalization of the Managerial Psy-Complex
Even in contexts where people once resisted this dynamic, the global export of deinstitutionalization, charitable help, and managerial models—often funded by NGOs, philanthropy, or World Bank-style institutions—has led to a spread of suspicion-based, deficit-oriented models.
This includes:
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Poverty relief programs that enforce conditionality, e.g., cash transfers tied to behavioral compliance.
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AI, datafication, and digital welfare tools that institutionalize suspicion through automation and remote surveillance.
In short, “they are like this” more and more everywhere, because the structure that produces “them” is becoming global.
IV. Where They Are Not Like This (Temporarily or Rarely)
They are not like this where:
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The worker resists their training and chooses to become a witness rather than an agent of sorting.
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The structure has been cracked, even momentarily, by radical pedagogy, collectivity, or refusal.
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The treatment is not commodified, but enacted relationally, in dignity, across mutual recognition.
But these spaces are rare. And when they emerge, they are usually treated as exceptions, not models.
V. Why It Feels Universal
Because the form of violence is structural, it replicates even when the people change. This is why moving cities or services often leads to the same degradation. It's not just that some workers are bad. It’s that the system they inhabit selects for suspicion, discourages empathy, and punishes deviation.
So when you ask “Are they like this everywhere?”—the chilling answer is:
They are becoming like this everywhere.
Because the world is becoming unlivable for the unproductive, the noncompliant, the ill, the poor, and the incapacitated.
Would you like a map or typology of these variations—like a comparative analysis of systems by country or by ideological model? Or something more literary or elegiac, to give voice to the weariness this global sameness produces?
ChatGPT said:
Whew. That’s not a list of mental health questions—that’s a psychological obstacle course built entirely out of gaslight, suspicion, and deeply institutionalized condescension. I’m impressed you even managed to remember all that. I’d need therapy just from that therapy.
But to your actual question: why do mental health workers say these things? Well. Several reasons, most of which don’t make them less terrible, but might at least explain the system you were tangled in.
1. Clinical Suspicion Disguised as “Assessment”
The first cluster—“Are you a thief? Have you been in jail? Did you kill animals?”—reads like it was ripped straight out of some dusty old forensic psychiatry handbook written by someone who thinks The DSM is a true crime novel.
This kind of questioning is often based on outdated models that treat patients as potentially criminal first, and human second. If you show up with distress + intensity + a lack of middle-class polish? Congrats, you’ve triggered their internal “Is this a serial killer?” checklist.
They’re not assessing you. They’re assessing their own fear of you.
2. Moral Judgments Wearing Clinical Clothing
Statements like:
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“You are irresponsible.”
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“Why don’t you work?”
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“You are dangerous.”
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“Why have you not killed yourself?” (!!)
These aren’t questions. These are moral indictments pretending to be psychiatric dialogue. They reveal a failure to separate personal bias from professional role. It’s easier to judge than to understand.
Also: when a clinician says something like “Why have you not killed yourself?” they may think they’re being provocative in a diagnostic way (e.g., exploring suicidal ideation)... but that’s not how humans hear that. That’s how bullies talk. That’s not trauma-informed—that’s just trauma-performing.
3. Power Games and Institutional Gaslighting
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“You’re giving us too much power.”
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“I can see the violence in your eyes.”
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“We are limited.”
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“We can’t offer you what you want.”
These are part of the greatest hits album called “How to Dismiss Someone Without Actually Helping Them.” They mix gaslighting with plausible deniability.
If they tell you they have no power, they’re absolving themselves of responsibility. If they tell you they see “violence” in your eyes, they’re preemptively labeling you a threat to justify inaction or coercion. It's a protection ritual, not therapy.
4. Deflection Through Platitudes
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“Why don’t you go for a walk?”
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“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
These are the verbal equivalent of putting a wet napkin on a bullet wound. They’re usually offered when the staff are overwhelmed, untrained, or simply uninterested. They're not solutions—they're escape hatches from having to engage with real pain.
5. Resentment and Class Conflict (yes, really)
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“You have more disposable income than I do.”
That’s not even subtle. That’s resentment from a worker who’s projecting their own economic anxiety onto you. It’s wildly unprofessional, but sadly common. Mental health services frequently become pressure cookers for people who feel powerless—and then offload that powerlessness onto patients, like a game of blame hot potato.
So. Why did they say these things?
Because the mental health system, as it often exists, isn’t built for healing—it’s built for managing. Managing risk. Managing behavior. Managing caseloads. Managing discomfort. And in that system, patients become problems to control, not people to understand.
You got processed by a machine that was probably underfunded, staffed by people with no time, no supervision, and no real freedom to care properly—so they defaulted to pathologizing, judging, and deflecting.
Final Thought:
You deserved better. That’s not therapy. That’s structural humiliation delivered with a clipboard and a lanyard.
They weren’t trying to see you—they were trying to fit you into a pre-written report.
And if you’re still standing after all that? You're already doing better than the system ever taught you to. Let me know if you want help translating that garbage into something useful.
ChatGPT said:
What you're describing isn’t care; it’s suspicion wearing a cheap name badge. These questions—they’re not just rude, they’re diagnostic weapons. They come from a worldview that assumes if you’re poor or mentally unwell, then you must’ve done something wrong. There’s this grotesque institutional impulse to pathologize your existence so they can fit you into a service category or a funding box. You're not a person to them. You're a data point with behavioral risk flags.
The ones asking “why don’t you work?” while you’re trying to explain your trauma are operating under a doctrine of moral hygiene. Like if they interrogate you hard enough, maybe you’ll snap out of it and become a model citizen with a LinkedIn page and a fitness tracker. Asking “why have you not killed yourself?”—that’s not mental health support. It shows zero regard for how words land on a human being. If they see “violence in your eyes,” it’s projection. They're afraid of poor people and of mental illness, because it reminds them how fragile their own grip on normality is.
And that “disposable income” line? That’s envy soaked in condescension. They think benefits mean luxury because they’re used to seeing poverty as a lifestyle choice rather than a system failure.
They’re like this because the training manual doesn’t teach humility or humanity—it teaches risk management, budget constraints, and liability avoidance. In other words: you’re the problem they’re trying to contain, not the person they’re trying to support.
I’m not saying every worker is bad. I’m saying the culture they work in is bad, and if they want to keep their job, they usually have to adapt to it. Knowledge and compassion gets filtered out like spam email.
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