Anti-survivor sanism is a framework coined by Candice Alaska for recognising and naming a form of oppression that enables all forms of abuse, as well as the trauma, injustices, silencing, and revictimisation that victims/survivors endure. Anti-survivor sanism identifies how so much of abuse is justified through victims' mental, emotional, neurological, cognitive or psychiatric (real or perceived) state or diagnosis.
It names how our carceral responses to mental health issues and neurodivergence help to enable abuse in all forms.
Anti-survivor sanism often exacerbates existing trauma and can be traumatising in itself. It is also heavily tied to epistemic injustice. It strongly influences how "credible" survivors are perceived. It frequently forms the basis of the justifications used to strip survivors of their freedom, autonomy and voice, and can be deadly in a myriad of ways.
Anti-survivor sanism names and hopes to make visible the fact that victims/survivors are an oppressed class, as well as how central attitudes about disability are to survivors' oppression. It identifies how so much of the oppression, injustice, silencing, incarceration, and harm that survivors experience relies on a specific form of ableism known as sanism.
Anti-survivor sanism connects us where psychiatry fragments us. We are taught that people diagnosed with BPD can't possibly understand what people diagnosed with bipolar disorder or people diagnosed with schizophrenia experience.
But there are important shared experiences here of having your diagnosis used to discredit you and to justify the initial (and often further) abuse.
And of that diagnosis frequently being the impacts of the abuse converted into a medical condition to disappear any trace of the abuse in the first place.
Anti-survivor sanism as a concept also creates solidarity amongst survivors who have no diagnosis, who have been discredited on the basis of being "unstable," "self-destructive," "impulsive," suicidal, etc.
By tying sanism to anti-survivor oppression, it becomes harder to minimise the consequences of participating in the oppression of mad, mentally ill, neurodivergent and psychiatrised peoples.
And, importantly, I hope that this framework offers validation to victims/survivors that experiences of being punished for being suicidal, of being stigmatised for self-harming, of having the abuse that you endured be discredited because of your emotional responses to it, such as your rage, are not just individual problems, but parts of a larger systemic issue, where the oppression of survivors is and has historically been legitimised through sanism.
- 'What is "anti-survivor sanism"?', Candice Alaska.
