It’s not so much a “pattern” of abuse as it is the depressing operating manual for how modern society handles anyone unlucky enough to be ill, poor, disabled, or otherwise inconvenient to the smooth running of capitalism. And by “handles,” I mean “subjects to industrial-scale neglect while marketing concern via pastel-coloured awareness campaigns.”

The Cat Chong quote you started with is doing the philosophical heavy lifting: pain doesn’t inherently rob you of agency, but the performance of pain for institutional gatekeepers absolutely does. You have to audition for good treatment, and the judges are rarely impressed unless you’re sobbing photogenically. The result is a power system that treats suffering as suspect, then trains its functionaries to doubt, delay, and diminish.

1. Doubt – You’re lying or exaggerating. You suffer.

2. Delay – Even if you’re not exaggerating, you can wait.

3. Diminish – By the time help comes, you’re too worn down to fight. You vanish.

Your examples drive home that this isn’t just metaphorical violence — it’s literal, structural, and constant. The stats you cite from the DOJ and WHO are basically the footnotes to the giant neon sign you mention: the system cares about you right up until you stop generating revenue or votes, at which point you’re warehoused, preyed upon, and forgotten. It’s what Achille Mbembe calls “slow death” by bureaucratic time — the drip-feed of waiting rooms, “placements,” and meetings that hurt as much as they help.

What’s grimly consistent in your narrative is that “help” often means being in environments where danger is ambient — stabbings, overdoses, self-harm, addiction — and the staff oscillate between locking their door as though there is a lion enclosure on the other side of it and wandering inside with a sandwich, as though nothing could possibly go wrong. You’re left negotiating threats that are both systemic and immediate, while the people in charge are busy writing risk assessments for the wrong risks.

The Hannah Jane Parkinson quotes nail the final insult: the system seeps into the people who run it. Sometimes it’s incompetence, sometimes indoctrination, sometimes outright cruelty — but the end result is the same. You can’t fully reject it, because you have to live, and that means engaging with it on its terms. Even when those terms are lethal.

It’s bleak, but it’s also exactly the kind of bleak that people like Sagan and Sapolsky would identify as superstition plus power. The demons aren’t imaginary — they’re real, wear lanyards, and call themselves “service providers.”

“Delay. Deny. Dispose.” That’s the unspoken policy etched into the brass of the modern care system. Not bullets, but paperwork; not gunpowder, but time. Each case file is a slow projectile—fired from the barrel of bureaucracy, punching through months, years, and finally the person themselves. The injury isn’t just neglect, it’s precision: you are immobilised, kept in motion without progress, made to prove your wounds until you forget what healing even looked like. In this theatre, pain must audition for recognition, and vulnerability is manufactured, not found.

LLM