Hi I'm teaching herbalism online this winter like usual. Honors-system sliding scale + no one turned away for lack of funds. Topics include pain management, rash care, and sleep support. As always these workshops focus heavily on independent/self guided practice in quality-of-life situations where available options from Industrial Western Medicine range from unsatisfactory to virtually nonexistent; & cover EBT-eligible/urban foraging (literal and figurative) options. Information sources range from official western medical, anecdotal, & contemporary + historical folk medical traditions from the general western canon; and i feel strongly about disclosing what context & school of thought an idea is drawing from so ppl can decide what/why/how they trust info for themselves.
It's fun, people usually like my stuff pretty well, if you're interested in herbalism in the abstract but not a fan of pop health weight loss/sugar addiction/Nebulous Toxins nonsense, AND are kinda tired of "listen to SCIENCE!!!!!" people, I'm probably gonna be right up your alley.
So when i was a kid, like many kids, i was extremely excited about the "test tubes full of glowing goop you get to measure and mix" image of chemistry. This is one of the things about my adult life that kid me would be fucking thrilled about; they don't glow, but i get to mix all kinds of goops and liquids and it fucks.
I do not, however, get as silly with it as whoever decided this was necessary:
Preparation.—Formulary number, 166: "Lactucarium, in coarse powder, one hundred grammes (100 Gm.) [3 ozs. av., 231 grs.]; ether, one hundred and twenty-five cubic centimeters (125 Cc.) [4 fl℥, 109♏︎]; alcohol, water, each, a sufficient quantity. Add the lactucarium to the ether contained in a tared flask having the capacity of six hundred cubic centimeters (600 Cc.) [20 fl℥, 138♏︎], and let it macerate for 24 hours; then add three hundred cubic centimeters (300 Cc.) [10 fl℥, 69♏︎] of water, and shake the mixture well. Fit a bent glass tube into the neck of the flask, and, having immersed the flask in hot water, recover the ether by distillation. When all the ether has distilled over, remove the tube, and, after thoroughly shaking the contents of the flask, continue the heat for ½ hour. Let the mixture cool, add one hundred grammes (100 Gm.) [3 ozs. av., 231 grs.] of alcohol, and enough water to make the whole mixture weigh five hundred grammes (500 Gm.) [1 lb. av., 1 oz., 279 grs.]; after maceration for 24 hours, with occasional agitation, express and filter the liquid. Return the dregs to the flask and macerate them with two hundred grammes (200 Gm.) [7 ozs. av., 24 grs.] of a mixture of alcohol and water made in the proportion of 1 part of alcohol to 3 parts of water; repeat the maceration 2 or 3 times, successively, with fresh portions of the mixture, until the dregs are tasteless, or nearly so. Mix and filter the liquids thus obtained, and concentrate them, by means of a water-bath (the first expressed liquid by itself), until the combined weight of the liquids is sixty grammes (60 Gm.) [2 ozs av., 51 grs.]; mix the liquids, add forty grammes (40 Gm.) [1 oz., av., 180 grs.] of alcohol, and let the mixture cool in the evaporating vessel, stirring the mixture frequently, and during the intervals keeping the vessel well covered. When cool, add enough alcohol to make the mixture weigh one hundred grammes (100 Gm.) [3 ozs. av., 231 grs.]; transfer the liquid to a flask, and add enough water to make the mixture measure one hundred cubic centimeters (100 Cc.) [3 fl℥, 183♏︎], using the water so required to rinse the evaporating vessel. Shake the mixture occasionally, during several hours (and frequently, if a portion of the precipitate is found to be tenacious), and, when a uniform mixture results, set it aside for 24 hours, so that any precipitate formed may subside. Decant the clear liquid, transfer the precipitate to a filter, and, after thoroughly draining it into the decanted liquid, wash it with a mixture of alcohol and water made in the proportion of 3 parts of alcohol to 4 parts of water, until the washings pass tasteless. Concentrate the washings, by evaporation, to a syrupy consistence, mix with the decanted liquid, and add enough of the last-named mixture of alcohol and water to make the whole measure one hundred cubic centimeters (100 Cc.) [3 fl℥, 183♏︎]. Lastly, after 24 hours, having meanwhile shaken the fluid extract occasionally, filter it through paper" (Nat. Form.).
I...guess you could do that, if you really wanted to? The ~impurities~ in lactucarium are just, Shit That Is In Lettuce, this isn't gonna taste any better bc alkaloids just Taste Like That pretty across the board, it is gonna be more concentrated but like...to what end tho....
it's funny/sad to me how many anti-diy med people whip out their mood stabilizers or antidepressants as examples of irreplaceable pharmacueticals when actually, plants LOVE making alkaloids! Yes, there are BIG question marks in terms of keeping people alive that are scary. For example, some stopgaps exist for some types of diabetes-- therapuetic diets and mediating metabolic processes via plant-derived medicines give people much better odds of hanging on while further work towards community-based insulin production and/or alternative medications are being developed; but people are HUSTLING on insulin, HIV medication (antiretrovials), and other projects because we need more solutions NOW and ACUTELY, not just for the future.
Brain meds tho? That shits fucking gucci. On lock. Would it take YOU, PERSONALLY putting in research time and trying stuff out to land on something that works for your needs? Of course!!! Everyone taking virtually any medication goes through that process anyway! Are there direct analogs for you to switch to seamlessly from what you take now? No, you will likely have to take a different approach using different pharmacological basis--but even those bases exist already, many of them have simply been discarded in scientific research or clinical practice for reasons OTHER than their efficacy or risk* (such as socially-born risk like the war on drugs or good old market competition). AND, that's only if you are the most staunch evidence-based person out there; there's exponentially more information available if you're at all willing to experiment based on anecdotal evidence, something your doctor abso-fucking-lutely does nearly every time they customize a treatment plan, or choose between closely-related members of the same class of medication.
For most people, especially if you're starting from a place of skepticism, nobody's gonna hand you a resource you won't come up with some kind of beef with. GOOD. it means you have a critical eye. Hone that! Discard what you think is bullshit and hold on to the handful of principles in every source you think could be valuable and you will start building a base of knowledge and expertise that is practical and relevant to your own needs and context.
Expansions of "mental health and addiction services" as an "alternative to" (read: alternate form of) the criminal justice system are nothing to celebrate. Under US law, we need to be especially concerned about attempts to expand psychiatric hospitalization and ACT nursing--These systems afford even FEWER rights to people caught in them than the criminal justice system.
Do not fall for fascism under the guise of expanded services. Do or don't take whatever drugs you want, get them however is accessible and worthwhile to you based on your own risk assessment, but if the next person in line at the clinic faces psychiatric incarceration and/or being forcibly drugged if they don't smile and graciously accept their prescriptions, you're not exercising your right to healthcare. You are simply keeping your head down to get through the prison with good behavior.
Comin at u live (or reccorded) this June 4 sum more autonomy-focused collapse-aware herbalism & health knowledge baybeeee. We're gonna be talking about SLEEP, what it is, why u need it, how to get it, and why those extra-strength OTC & herbal sleep aids are most prone to failing for the folks that need the most help. We're gonna cover shit that is Actually Fucking Useful if ur poor, fucked over, use drugs, etc. We will also b talking abt chemical and subjective differences btwn different sleep herbs and useful protocol points for different sleep issues and tendencies.
More deets at the link, suggested donation $15-$45 w/ no one turned away for lack of funds, sign up via email or dmmmm
-You are welcome to excerpt, adapt, or transform any amount of this text
-You are welcome to use any amount of this text in any curriculum
-You are welcome to share, print, host, or give away physical copies of this text
My only ask is that you please share this work in the spirit in which it was created and if you chose to SELL physical copies with any form of MINIMUM price, you also find some way to direct potential readers to somewhere they can access the work for free, such as here
If there are any file formats or assets you would like for any of the above mentioned activities that are NOT available at the above link (such as a .doc), please feel free to message me!
Something that bugs me is that autonomous health & medical experimentation is widely accepted and celebrated--only when it succeeds *and is accepted by the wider establishment (usually bc it makes money and doesnt drastically contradict establishment ethos and/or profit.) Laypeople who become experts out of desperation or love or passion or whatever reasons and have a celebrated breakthrough in medicine are lauded only once they transcend into honorary members of the Medical Professional Class. I've seen people freak out at the idea of bathtub insulin and go on to talk about how openinsulin is doing it the "right way" when like. Buddy? Hon? The thing you're scared of resulting in nebulously dangerous medicine is their goal, it just looks different when they say it because they know what they're talking about and they have a nice website. The trans women making huge strides in DIY HRT are carrying on the legacy of the women who INVENTED HRT, you're just terrified of them because the people of the past have either been erased by the licensed docs that stole their work uncredited for personal glory or, or those women have retroactively been lifted to Honorary Professional Status. You're applying the same transphobia and transmisogyny and classism to the people in front of you that their foremothers faced. We gotta shoot the medical licensing boards in our heads and focus on building working knowledge because the bum (affectionate) on ur Street corner can DEFINITELY know more than many doctors. Our culture recognizes this in all kinds of places, like the relatively widespread recognition that disabled people need to be experts in our own care because the docs sure as shit usually ain't, but then when it's all put together into a real, useful praxis it gets screamed down because of all of these oppression structures and brainworms and learned helplessness; not to mention all of yall that go around beefing theory about medication production with 0 even beginner-level knowledge of how these things work or what real risks are involved or what the mitigation strategies currently in place look like.
are you terrified of the fact that western medicine is dependent on an extractive industrial complex that's collapsing at increasing speed?
Me too buddy :/
...at a complete loss for where you'd even start without access to a pharmacy? I CAN help with that!
An Anarchist Free Herbal is a zine that's intended to help people start thinking about autonomous medicine in concrete, practical terms. It won't answer your dire questions--because we all start as beginners! What it will do is get you set up with some skills to start turning those big, scary, hard to think about questions into a set of smaller, researchable, solvable questions. Itll give an idea of some of what's out there in terms of medical approaches that aren't reliant on industrial production, and an array of basic skills (from research to making medicines) that you can build on as you continue learning.
You can read it here as an ebook/pdf for free, or not free if you want to be very nice to ur local cripple herbalist. Got money? Lucky you! You can get a physical copy in the mail at-cost AND donate one to someone else in one fell swoop right here for $12 (or more!). Don't got money? Me neither! You can request one o them donated physical copies by emailing mildewamyx(at)protonmail(dot)com and telling me where to send it.
Not to be an asshole, but this isn't gonna help those of us who are severely disabled. Herbal medicine ain't gonna do fucking shit when I need a feeding tube or when my friend needs a respirator because their lungs are paralyzed. I can't replace my mood stablizers and insulin with this. This is a piece of scotch tape on a bullet wound. If the medical system collapses, those of us who depended on it with no alternatives will die regardless of whether there is a plant based alternative to some common over the counter meds. Maybe we should focus on trying to build robust community healthcare through the training of skilled medical staff and how to make it as easily accessible as possible and the support of the severely physically disabled instead of shoving some plants at them and think it’s gonna solve our life threatening medical issues. Fuck I don't wanna fucking starve to death when my stomach finally stops digesting food and no one the commune knows how to place a feeding tube. This isn't a practical solution.
Not to be an asshole but it's going to helpful to someone and that's what matters.
You're right, herbal medicines aren't gonna help my tachycardia or withering muscles or shitty blood. But then I wouldn't expect them to. Especially not herbs in a book intended for beginners. They aren't going to be discussing complex medical issues.
Should people Not be trying to help anyone but people like us? Everyone can fuck off if they aren't severely and terminally disabled?
No.
I'm glad this book is gonna help people even if it's not me. Which is why I reblogged this. Cuz I'd have to be an asshole to only care about the solutions that help me. Especially when it's just a beginner level book. I shared this for the people it will help.
It's not enough and yeah we do need a better healthcare system. But people are also running out of meds and even are having to resort to DIY hormones.
The fact that they're resorting to a fucking zone for healthcare is a statement itself. NONE of us are being taken care of, yeah even the people with treatable illnesses. Healthcare is inaccessible for ALL of us. Clearly. Or this zine wouldn't exist.
You ARE being an asshole.
We can reblog this zine and fight for a better healthcare system at the same time. They aren't mutually exclusive.
It's a good starting point to learn more. Like how to use a feeding tube and provide one and maintain it. You have to learn the basics first. Everyone has to start somewhere. I dont want anyone on the commune providing me healthcare who thought they were too good to learn how to help a fucking headache or now how my headache tea is gonna affect me on a chemical level because that could fucking kill me. Thanks.
There ARE in fact ways to make SOME of the medicines that we rely on. Nobody is saying we should fuck off into the woods and skip antibiotics
But there are anarchist collectives that ARE creating antibiotics. And birth control, and insulin. Most are “staffed” specifically by educated pharmacologists and other people with education and access to proper tools.
But meth and cocaine are not the only strong drugs that are possible to create outside of the closed loop structures that currently handle this infrastructure
I too am disabled and no not all of my medicines could easily be replaced by other ones.
But some could. If there were herbs that could reduce my need for pills down to slightly fewer ones then I’d take those
Like I get where you're coming from but I did in fact do that and the simple fact of the matter is civilization is unsustainable and collapsing regardless of your politics so like
Everyone who takes this seriously is RACING to skill up regardless of their access 2 formalized education and to CREATE proper tools. You may note, four thieves vinegar collective, the most above ground and well known of the groups youre referencing, was started by mixael laufer, a MATHEMATICS professor, and their major accomplishment is a bioreactor/synthesis device that you build out of a fucking Mason jar and an arduino.
The point is that it's not about possible or impossible or ideal or whatever. This is the world we live in and it's try or die, and trying entails a bunch of small boring shit like learning how to identify and carefully harvest plants (so they keep growing on our dying planet) and reading an assload of bad books with bad ideas to get the 2 nuggets of useful information contained within it, and reading weird annoying zines written by insane extremist hermit junkies (hi, but I'm not the only one, check out Sprout Distro for some others) because having a bunch of wingnut educated guesses about what to do is better than absolutely nothing, which is what most of us are facing down.
Making medicine exist in the future isn't The Only Thing to be doing, there is other useful shit to work on and it's OK if it's not ur bag, but don't treat those of us (DISABLED, FUCKED OVER, CURRENTLY LIVING IN A POST-ESTABLISHMENT-MEDICINE WORLD BECAUSE OF POVERTY) folks who are working on it as some distant force of nebulously qualified and trustworthy ~professionals~ or unqualified and Evil bathtub tainted drug peddlers. We're just fucking people doing the best we can figure out how to maximize chances for ourselves and our loved ones facing the same shit the people in this thread are and literally anyone can join us if they put in the time (which is infinitely more worthwhile than yall discoursing about some shit some rando wrote that yall clearly did not read because all of this is addressed in roughly the first 20 pages plus sections 3.1, 3.3., and 3.4).
When people are arguing about a thing you wrote and the points being made are all kinda whack because nobody Actually Picked It Up even tho it's free and doesn't actually take that long to read
are you terrified of the fact that western medicine is dependent on an extractive industrial complex that's collapsing at increasing speed?
Me too buddy :/
...at a complete loss for where you'd even start without access to a pharmacy? I CAN help with that!
An Anarchist Free Herbal is a zine that's intended to help people start thinking about autonomous medicine in concrete, practical terms. It won't answer your dire questions--because we all start as beginners! What it will do is get you set up with some skills to start turning those big, scary, hard to think about questions into a set of smaller, researchable, solvable questions. Itll give an idea of some of what's out there in terms of medical approaches that aren't reliant on industrial production, and an array of basic skills (from research to making medicines) that you can build on as you continue learning.
You can read it here as an ebook/pdf for free, or not free if you want to be very nice to ur local cripple herbalist. Got money? Lucky you! You can get a physical copy in the mail at-cost AND donate one to someone else in one fell swoop right here for $12 (or more!). Don't got money? Me neither! You can request one o them donated physical copies by emailing mildewamyx(at)protonmail(dot)com and telling me where to send it.
Not to be an asshole, but this isn't gonna help those of us who are severely disabled. Herbal medicine ain't gonna do fucking shit when I need a feeding tube or when my friend needs a respirator because their lungs are paralyzed. I can't replace my mood stablizers and insulin with this. This is a piece of scotch tape on a bullet wound. If the medical system collapses, those of us who depended on it with no alternatives will die regardless of whether there is a plant based alternative to some common over the counter meds. Maybe we should focus on trying to build robust community healthcare through the training of skilled medical staff and how to make it as easily accessible as possible and the support of the severely physically disabled instead of shoving some plants at them and think it’s gonna solve our life threatening medical issues. Fuck I don't wanna fucking starve to death when my stomach finally stops digesting food and no one the commune knows how to place a feeding tube. This isn't a practical solution.
hi, yes. You are being an asshole because your points here are already covered in the original post ("not going to answer you dire questions because we all start as beginners") and the zine itself. It's free, you can download it right now and flip through the introduction if you wanna talk more accurate shit, hell I'll mail you a free hard copy if u wanna talk shit about it idgaf it's there for people to engage with.
I wrote this zine because I, too, am severely disabled and I, too, have loved ones whos survival is medication dependent, and because I would like people to continue fucking living and I agree with you that that doesn't happen without robust network and skill building. Hence, yknow, the accessible starting point for more people to learn how to engage with medicine on practical terms (plus a ton of other shit like finding people to build medical skills with and how to start doing that.)
Additonally: we live in a world of non-satisfactory solutions. If you have actually gotten the medical care you needed on the ideal timeline your entire life, CONGRATULATIONS. I mean that genuinely. However, for most people (realistically, probably including you) having a halfway-or-less measure to try to increase time/chances/whatever + minimize misery while getting to higher care fucking MATTERS, and ot MATTERS to know how to do that in a way that is not going to fuck up whatever ideally will happen next (another topic that is covered!). This is street medic/advanced first aid and harm reduction 101, and it's definitely "practical" to learn how to do it right.
Its amazing to me how people can look at industrialized diets and see a surplus of processed sugar and processed fats and not a void of complex nutrients.
The problem isn't decadence. It is starvation.
Im not talking about grocery store lettuce either. I'm talking about fish. About meat from animals that didn't just eat corn. About plants grown in a rich ecosystem. About nettles and wild greens and nuts and mushrooms.
Your diet is not the opulent dreams dead kings couldn't hope to attain. It is the liquid bread of ancient Egyptian slaves. It is meal. It is sand.
It is not your fault. It is not a moral failing. It is not a failure of the strength of your will. It is not a problem with how You Are or how You Consume. It is something you can fight against.
Western medicine is not that old. CHARITABLY its like, 400ish years old, but all the most popular ways of defining western medicine (e.g. based on the modern scientific study) really only apply to information-generating and medicine-distribution practices that started in the late 1800s and were codified in THE TWENTIES. Sure, no ideas come out of nowhere and modern western medicine absolutely has a lineage and if you want you could make a good argument for tracing that lineage back to say, Galen. (Side note: american Doctors love to claim Galen when it makes them sound Storied and Dramatic but foist him off on us stupid herbalists as soon as anything controversial by modern standards comes up). But what's a lot more important to think about is that prior to the past hundred years or so, the diversity of actively-practiced, available medical traditions that existed in "the west" was so much greater than it is today, and if you go back another hundred or more years it's bigger and bigger. For most of human history in most parts of the world medicine has been a great, fluid cultural field (like cuisine! or religion! in fact these three subjects overlap quite a bit!!) that becomes forcibly homogenized and codified as part of nation-building. That has happened and is still happening here in the west as empire seeks to homogenize culture, through, yknow, genocide; and minority medical philosophies are deligitimized, criminalized, and culturally persecuted. Indigenous and folk traditions survive in small bubbles of people desperately trying to keep them alive.
Following from #1, the majority of people on the "left" to postleft & whatever recognize, at least nominally, that this is Bad. However, what most white people seem to be doing with the idea that Cultural Extermination Is Bad is grant some kind of nebulous exception status to their nebulous idea of "Indigenous medicine" while otherwise paying lip service to the western medical progress narrative: What "we" do now is so much better than what "we" "used to" do. First of all, "we" here is an incoherent concept unless you want to buy into the idea that dominant western culture (or civilization more broadly) is an inevitable evolution that all cultures will come to, which is uhm. Social darwinism. Second of all, "used to" is just a straight up lie in most cases unless it's very narrowly referring to any number of practices that were codified in like, 1930 by the still-budding medical establishment and have since been discarded by the extant medical establishment. Diverse, Indigenous & folk medical traditions are still fucking around and alive and being used, adapted and added to. Some are holding on by a thread and plenty are very closed practices now out of defensiveness, while others struggle to be known more widely because of medical licensure laws that claim to be about "safety" but were always about stamping out minority medical traditions. What a lot of motherfuckers miss is that when the western medical establishment tells the story about how everything is so much better now and we know the right way to be, they are telling the same story I told under heading one. The nonviolent story of progress that "we" just "discovered" "new ideas" is conveniently shuffling around the genocide and criminalization that are STILL actively trying to stamp out the """"old"""" ideas.
Does all of this mean that we should just willy nilly accept/use/treat as valid every single thought anyone has ever had about medicine? Fuck no! People have bad ideas sometimes! Medical traditions are LIVING traditions for good reasons. It just means that I wish people would sit down and THINK for a second before making a claim about non-western or historical medical traditions, ask themselves "is my only source for this claim the current western medical establishment?", and if "yes", spend any amount of time trying to find an alternate perspective. If you can't find any source that isn't affiliated with genocide and forced cultural assimilation on the practice you want to talk shit about, ask yourself "why isn't there a proponent of this practice around to defend it?" and like, go from there.
I truly do not care what medical philosophy any given individual person feels most comfortable using for themselves. Your reasons for preferring western medicine might very well be rooted in shit i disagree with/find abhorrent, I might think you could be happier (or more likely to survive climate collapse) if you were at all open to any strategy other than the one that's entirely dependent on empire and extraction, but I am frankly too tired and too busy to be remotely invested in what people I don't know are doing with their bodies. What frustrates me is how little critical thinking is being done when it comes to medicine, how comfortable everyone seems to be with incoherent cognitive dissonance when it comes to criticizing specific instances of oppression/nationalism/racism/etc in western medicine but still buy the overall narrative in a way that renders those critiques superficial, and how successful the project of western medical nationalism has been at claiming a monopoly on the story.
Hi I do education stuff including public facing sliding scale online workshops and classes n shit. More deets below cut
This workshop covers a variety of holistic pain management strategies for individuals and practitioners, primarily focusing on chronic pain.
Upcoming class date: Sunday March 3rd, 4:00PM-5:30PM EST
Registration: Send an email to mildewamyx(at)protonmail(dot)com and specify the email or phone # you would like me to send the class link & recording to. You don't have to attend live to recieve the recording but you do have to register.
Requirements: This is an intermediate-level workshop that assumes familiarity with western herbal terminology and herbal medicine making. (pssst! All background knowledge required is covered in An Anarchist Free Herbal)
Suggested donation: $15-$45; No one turned away for lack of funds
Recording policy: Registration is required to receive the recording. There will be an UNRECORDED q&a portion at the end of the class.
Background
I’ve been in pain every day for over half my life, from a varying combination of joint instability, neurological problems, and repetitive injuries. Like many chronically ill and disabled people, my experience of pain is not just a sense of urgency or a signal to stop doing something: It’s brain fog, immobility, dissociation, low empathy, a short temper, mood swings, both an ever-present sensation and something I have to actively remember to address. Naturally, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about and discussing extreme pain. Many friends and accomplices and I have been dissatisfied with pain management options available via western medicine; especially when we’ve been presented with potentially-dangerous long-term NSAID prescriptions or non-indicated medications with unpleasant side effects. Herbalism can offer a wider range of potential management strategies that can be compatible with western medical treatment for underlying conditions or offer relief to those of us who have chosen not to pursue or continue medical treatment for any number of personal reasons.
Course Description
Over the years, I’ve developed a set of specific indications centering around different experiences of pain, which I will now share with you! We’ll talk about ways of conceptualizing and communicating about pain and explore a wide variety of pain management options—Not just analgesic herbs (although don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty!) but strategies and practices for living with chronic and long-term pain like sensory redirection, ritual, nervous system support and more. This workshop intends to develop a rich, multifaceted and adaptable toolkit that focuses on increasing quality of life in difficult situations with strategically-targeted, doable steps.
are you terrified of the fact that western medicine is dependent on an extractive industrial complex that's collapsing at increasing speed?
Me too buddy :/
...at a complete loss for where you'd even start without access to a pharmacy? I CAN help with that!
An Anarchist Free Herbal is a zine that's intended to help people start thinking about autonomous medicine in concrete, practical terms. It won't answer your dire questions--because we all start as beginners! What it will do is get you set up with some skills to start turning those big, scary, hard to think about questions into a set of smaller, researchable, solvable questions. Itll give an idea of some of what's out there in terms of medical approaches that aren't reliant on industrial production, and an array of basic skills (from research to making medicines) that you can build on as you continue learning.
You can read it here as an ebook/pdf for free, or not free if you want to be very nice to ur local cripple herbalist. Got money? Lucky you! You can get a physical copy in the mail at-cost AND donate one to someone else in one fell swoop right here for $12 (or more!). Don't got money? Me neither! You can request one o them donated physical copies by emailing mildewamyx(at)protonmail(dot)com and telling me where to send it.
A little over a month ago, I began posting about upcoming changes in my practice, which I’ve been working on since. As I said in an instagram story, I realized that I’ve been pretty bad about replacing surface-level words instead of actually challenging underlying concepts; so, I’ve been taking some time to work on learning to better articulate my philosophy.
In the following essay I am going to try to explain my critique of psychiatry and offer a framework to replace it. You don’t have to agree with anything I say to receive herbs, advice or education from me. If I only wanted to work with people that believe the same things as me, I would stick to caring for my network of friends and accomplices. I have a public-facing practice to offer something immediately and materially useful to (broadly speaking) anyone that asks for it. I’m writing this because—while we may or may not be/become friends—my services are a personal gift, and I do not want them to be received as a function of psychiatry.
Most of all, I believe that everyone has an idea about what the future will hold, and everyone is trying to bring that idea to fruition. Ultimately there is nothing in my lifetime that will result in everyone being on the same page about what we all “should” be doing; and we are all relatively powerless on a global scale. What I can do is help the people I can touch, and walk away from those that want to force me to believe things I don’t want to believe in. I can’t make universal healthcare happen, right now or decades in the future; but I can fight tooth and nail to help heal the people around me for free, and I can share, liberate and generate knowledge to help others do the same.
I’m writing with a very limited scope here—if I was having an easier time writing this it would very quickly become an entire book, not a 3,700-some-odd word essay. I’m asking to you believe at face value that this is what I consider to be true; unfortunately I don’t have the capacity to write out an argument containing all the applicable historical evidence and referential sources right now. I hope at some point I do.
Part 1: Groundwork
Lobotomistic violence
I’m going to start by laying out a definition that I think is important to understanding where I’m coming from. I started using this term because I think it marks a useful distinction in how certain people are treated by psychiatry.
Lobotomistic violence is the set of psychiatric “treatments” that intend to make someone “normal” by reducing/inhibiting function in certain parts of their brain. While surgical lobotomies are generally considered outdated and barbaric in mental health culture, the root concept is still very much alive and well. Several antipsychotic drugs have similar effects to surgical lobotomies, and many more otherwise limit brain function in other ways. These drugs can prevent the people they’re prescribed to from thinking abstractly or feeling deeply, and often cut them off from meaningful parts of themselves.
According to the psychiatric framework there are people who need support, understanding, and accommodation; and people who need their bodyminds* to be physically altered and parts of them literally removed/made nonfunctional. Lobotomistic violence is a “last ditch” effort, when less extreme forms of medication or therapy are considered “ineffective”. Sometimes this comes after a long process of trying different treatments—but a lot of people are subjected to lobotomistic violence because they occupy a social position that society sees as a lost cause from the start, like people kidnapped off the street by ambulances in the middle of a psychotic break, or kids in state custody.
*Bodymind is a popular term in mad liberation that refers to the mind and body as a cohesive whole–it invokes the idea that we do not just inhabit our bodies, we ARE our bodies.
Defining mental health
(In this section, I’m using a very charitable interpretation of psychiatry from a scientific standpoint. Even the most advanced neuroscience cannot reliably identify specific mental disorders or their causes—but even if it could, it would still be fundamentally bad, and that’s the point I want to make.)
Civilization is an organism and an ecosystem in its own right, with structures to achieve equilibrium and to perpetuate itself. The choices that we make and options we see as available have been formed by thousands of years of accidents and choices that shape patterns of behavior and create social constructs. It is these structures I’m referring to when I talk about control.
In order for civilization to exist as it currently does, the people and things subjected to it must be easily understood, because things that are understood can be controlled. An example my friend used was a small, early agrarian state—a ruler wants to collect tax, with the goal of collecting as much as possible to enrich his position against neighboring states. He cannot collect too much tax, or else the population will either starve, or get angry and refuse to participate in the state; so to maximize what can be taken he has to know how much is produced, and in turn the farmers have to know how much they produce to know what they owe and what they need to meet immediate needs. Civilization needs to reduce complicated questions to knowable categories in order to respond in ways that benefit itself. This legibility occludes true understanding, pares down the messy, beautiful, difficult-to-communicate nature of life into one-dimensional criteria to be accounted for and processed. To see how these criteria are constructed, let’s look at an oak tree.
The name “oak tree” refers to a thing that exists, pretty indisputably (at least until you get into existentialism but, uh, let’s not go there). However, the name “oak” is something people made up. There are many different perspectives one might understand an oak tree from. Whatever lens you want to use impacts what characteristics you focus on and how you understand them in relation to the whole. You focus on certain attributes to create a story—if you’re using a scientific lens, you might look at DNA and draw connections to other DNA to tell a story about genetic history. Genetic history is also a human construct that only focuses on the pieces that are significant to the stories our culture wants to tell. These stories are what we use to build knowable categories; but a squirrel doesn’t give two nuts about the genetic history of an oak tree, and likely has its own stories that are entirely alien to us—because different attributes are significant to its life.
Mental disorders are real in the same way an oak tree is real—and fake in the same way an oak tree is fake.
The experiences that diagnostic labels describe are real, but the way disorders are defined is 100% a social construct that is entirely dependent on what is significant to our culture, scientifically backed or not.
“Health” is defined as bodymind states that are convenient for cultural perpetuation; and illness is bodymind states that are not. What experiences and attributes are constructed as diagnostic categories is dependent on what is valued and relevant to the dominant culture—and more importantly, what is conducive to the reproduction of that culture.
In our modern society, people who do not fit squarely into the mold of a responsible, reproductive citizen are either validated or marginalized. These are both methods of control, pushing people into legible categories to make them more easily understood and influenced by society. Validation might look like a kid who’s disruptive in class getting diagnosed with ADHD and working more closely with the school to receive accommodation, whereas marginalization might look like a disruptive kid getting diagnosed with ODD and being treated as if any resistance to an authority figure is a symptom of disease for the rest of their life.
In psychiatry, validation is “positivity”. This extends from clinical practice to what I’m going to call “mental health culture”, the expansion of psychiatry from a form of medicine to a fixture of culture. I’m going to talk about this more in a minute, but for now the point is: mental health does not identify a list of “problems” that exist in a vacuum. It constructs sicknesses in order to justify control. Which leads us to…
This wouldn’t work if we didn’t care about each other
Unfortunately, there’s no simple malice to blame here. A lot of the ways psychiatry hurts people are made possible by compassion. I try not to make generalizations about the human condition OR evolution-based arguments, but I do believe very deeply that humans are a fundamentally social species and that we are physically predisposed to caring about each other—evidenced in part by how much of the coerced labor necessary for society to function depends on making it hard to even SEE enslaved and low-class people, let alone extend solidarity and care to each other. The history of modern psychiatry (mostly over the past 200 years) and the birth of mental health is a chaotic mash of capitalistic profiteering, attempts to stifle liberatory movements, and individuals who are genuinely trying to take care of other people, all informed by the underlying assumptions about what “mental illness” is that I just described.
Brief digression: I’m always tempted to put “mental health” into quotes, but “mental health” implies a distinction between what I’m referring to and some other legitimate, non-fucked-up mental health that just doesn’t exist, so assume whenever I say mental health I’m using a slightly sarcastic tone.
Mental illnesses are, by and large, defined and diagnosed based on suffering, and the treatments, by and large, are designed to reduce suffering—or, the assumption that someone is suffering. How that suffering is measured and defined is still dependent on the basic assumption that correctly reproducing culture is good for you and not doing so is bad for you. For example, many diagnostic criteria measure one’s ability to work productively, and our society assumes wage labor is the norm for a healthy life. Sometimes, this is obfuscated by so many layers of reformed language and liberal feel-good-ism that many people who would disagree with that assumption when said so plainly (reproducing culture is good for you and not doing it is bad for you) are still deeply invested in mental health culture.
Diagnostic categories pick out certain experiences and characteristics to name as symptoms of a disease—but human brains are not very easy to put into boxes. Who is pathologized—labeled as diseased—is heavily dependent on their class status, and how well their behaviors contribute to the status quo. A lower-class non-Christian is more likely to be labeled as psychotic for describing their spiritual beliefs and experiences; whereas a richer person who talks about “being spoken to by the Holy Ghost” is simply a religious fanatic. We see consistently demographic-based diagnostic biases for disorders that are supposedly an issue with predetermined brain “hardwiring”, such as autism and ADHD being diagnosed more in white children, whereas Black children receive ODD diagnoses. By associating abnormality with suffering, and enforcing suffering for the abnormal, attempting to make people normal can represent reduction of suffering and a kindness. This dynamic is even more heavily enforced when people actively choose non-normative lifestyles: someone’s body state is not conducive to them living a “normal” life and they don’t even WANT to change, that means they are extra unhealthy. Under this logic, (attempting to/)forcing them to change is doing a good thing for them and thus the kindest course of action.
Everyone who advocates for broader mental health services is contributing to psychiatric and lobotomistic violence through kindness. There are plenty of people who think positively of their interactions with psychiatric institutions or mental health culture, AND there are ways to reduce harm when participating in mental health culture/be more honest about the risks involved; but encouraging people to participate in clinical settings is still encouraging people to put themselves in vulnerable, potentially dangerous positions.
Madness vs. pathology
Anyone can be crazy. I highly recommend trying it. Experiences are individually varied and highly personal—some people see and hear things other people don’t, some think in ways that are strange or confusing to others, and so on—but madness is simply refusal to conform to normative categories of mind-state and behavior. It is not bowing to social norms and the embrace of abnormal experiences that get in the way of a middle-class aspirations.
Pathologizing is the process by which madness is constructed as sickness. Pathology includes all the things that are “unapproved” about madness and it increasingly includes things that are only minorly inconvenient to our legibility and our participation. People re-contextualize experiences they never thought twice about as part of a disease, simply because they were given a label. “I never knew that was a BPD thing!”
Mental health culture encourages and facilitates this creep because even though its participants will often nominally criticizing practitioners who enact psychiatric violence, they continue to rely on the frameworks this violence is based on. Mainstream criticism of psych focuses on the idea that individual doctors (and/or institutions) apply psychiatry poorly, but it caries the implicit assumption that if it was only used correctly it would be a benefit. This can look like social/support groups of people identifying with a common or related diagnoses criticizing the way psychiatrists behave while encouraging people to self-diagnose, seek certain medication or therapy, or otherwise enforcing mainstream assumptions about the ontology of mental disorders.
Pathologizing talk surrounds us: “I think you might have ___”, “I’m like this because I have ___”, etc. It feels very similar to the ways in which certain queer spaces invent and push labels to describe every possible facet of gender or attraction, because well, it is. Both fixations gain traction because we are told that making ourselves legible to the outside world and making those around us legible in the same way will make us feel less lonely or invisible. Unfortunately, only letting people understand us in terms of our categories instead of on our own, unique terms continues to compound this loneliness. In an effort to make the system “work” we expand what experiences are known, create new labels and try to champion “inclusion”, instead of addressing the forces and dynamics surrounding the things that feel lonely, invisible, and difficult to communicate… A list of abbreviations doesn’t tell the world who you are, it tells the world how to react to you.
Many people who ascribe to psychiatric frameworks still live in ways that resist legibility. There are also plenty of people who are both mad and mentally ill, who use diagnostic labels but do not seek to conform to standards of “treatment”. There are also many people who use these labels to pressure conformity from themselves and those around them. It seems to me like the majority of people who, for example, encourage everyone around them to go to therapy, have never had a practitioner make good on the implicit threat of psychiatric violence.
The role of saneism
It would be incomplete for me to talk about the role of kindness without talking about the role of prejudice.
Saneism is a different form of bigotry than say, racism. It is not hatred of an “other” group that the “perpetrator” is not and never will be a part of. It’s more like fatphobia: hatred of a body state that every human being has the potential to experience. It is self-inflicted as much as it is wielded against the other.
Saneism is a tool to select who is and isn’t crazy. It should be clear at this point that there is no “sane” human being; sanity is only the ideal they beat you with. If you can emulate sanity well enough, driven by fear of internal and external hatred of madness, you are sane. If you can’t, you are insane, and either you can be mentally ill, assimilate to the categories and modes of behavior that are deemed acceptable for people like you; or, if you can’t do that, you’re crazy, and your options are either to submit to lobotomistic violence or to refuse to participate in psychiatry.
Part 2: Praxis
As I said at the beginning: The experiences that psychiatry addresses are real. Critique is all well and good in that it helps us name and understand the systems we live in, but it is only part of the process towards doing something better. Here is my attempt at building a model. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.
A lawn is an artificially maintained shape, but a prairie is created organically through small and large events, which lines up nicely with the idea that mental health, as a noun is a standard that must be maintained, but desire, as a verb is a process of seeking, experiencing and evaluating that builds and grows in symbiosis.
Mental Health is a Lawn
The process of maintaining mental health through the reduction of suffering is like the process of maintain a lawn. A lawn is a pre-defined shape created through the prescription of behaviors and chemicals (weeding/mowing; herbicides/pesticides); regulated to be non-challenging and “safe” (no spikey plants, bee or wasp nests, etc) in the name people’s comfort and at the cost of native species; and prioritizing a certain socially-imposed aesthetic at great cost to the environment. Lawns have to be nourished (fertilized and watered) to grow, but are not allowed to get taller or more robust than a set value so that they’re easy to trim regularly with minimal effort. Lawns are monocultures with shallow roots that do not stand up to environmental conditions like drought without intervention. Lawns are also a standard everyone knows–and holds each other to, judges each other based on.
Likewise, to maintain “mental health”, people are regulated to a predefined standard that prioritizes “normal” aesthetics and the “safety” and comfort of others through the prescription of chemicals and habits (medication and therapy). Everyone knows the rules enough to police themselves and each other. Peoples’ material and emotional needs are taken into consideration enough for them to survive (and not commit suicide), but no one is well-supported enough to not feel the pressure to work; and people do not have the freedom to self-regulate on their own so when crisis occurs, you either have to keep working or rely on psychiatric intervention such as hospitalization.
Desire is a Prairie
Seeking desire is like how a prairie or grassland maintains itself as an ecosystem. Many types of plants grow deep symbiotic root systems that create resiliency and allow the ecosystem to survive through many environmental changes. Critters and bugs may kill/destroy plants at times, but they also reuse and decompose detritus and allow the ecosystem to recycle material and stored energy, spread seeds, etc. A prairie is too tall to be mowed easily by a conventional lawn mower and must be poisoned or crushed via heavy machinery. It is a complicated, compelling and beautiful organism that takes years of interaction to understand.
Desire cultivates varied experiences that let us practice the flexibility to survive distress emotionally, and shapes our lifestyles to prioritize self-regulation. Pain, whether external, self inflicted, or both, is an inherent part of life; but pain can allow us to grieve, process and grow, to clarify our desires, and maintain our bodyminds. When we live by desire we become unwilling to bend to social rules that don’t suit us, become uncontrollably mad, and are accustomed to freedom such that we can only be recuperated through incarceration and lobotomistic violence.
A prairie takes a long time to grow, and is difficult to support in a society that demands lawns. Switching from a mental health model to a desire model isn’t a simple or quick thing. Most of us will resemble something more like an overgrown lot, which is just as valuable.
Part 3: What this means for me
It’s taken a long-ass time to be able to articulate these concepts, so it feels extremely good to have finally made the pieces click.
Ultimately, what I offer isn’t substantially changing—at least right now, though I do have a new offering I’ll be announcing in the near future that incorporates herbalism into pleasure-seeking activities. I’ll still be here for consultations, workshops, and informal support; but the foundations are different, and I will be more explicitly incorporating these ideas into how I teach and discuss concepts. You might notice that the pages on my website have been rewritten and restructured, hopefully in ways that represent these ideological changes.
Something that comes up fairly frequently in conversation with my friends and accomplices who do similar public-facing non-hierarchical healing work is how to respond when people come to us expecting more standard frameworks: When people talk to us expecting to be told things about their bodies, or for us to diagnose a sickness and tell them what to do about it. To me, figuring out how to deal with these interactions is a matter of building and improving social skills; figuring out what questions to ask to break the script. This is just as much practical as it is ideological: What I do is in no way compatible with Western Medicine or psychiatry—the tools I have work granularly, effecting a few parts of the body at a time in specific ways. I can help you sleep, eat, relax, play, reduce fear, increase focus, cope with grief, ground thoughts and emotions, feel pleasure… but I do not use diagnostic categories, I do not offer “antidepressants” or treat disease. Someone telling me they have PTSD gives me exactly 0 information about what they want me to be doing for them. In some ways what I think what I already do in these interactions does more to ground my practice outside of psychiatry than any long-ass manifesto or theoretical explanation; but if you want to know why I do what I do, well, there you have it I guess.
Here's how I bind very thick zines with a bunch of random crap for tools and almost nothing that costs real money! There's a whole long blog post about it here which I really recommend if this is something you're interested in doing for a big project--I talk a lot more about the tricks and stuff I've learned from doing this for like, three years at this point?
(psssst and if the zine looks cool--you're in luck! it is free! digital / print)
oh also if you want your own big ass press I highly reccomend it, i use this thing literally all the time. The one in this video is actually mainly a tincture press (it has a set of two stainless steel mixing bowels, I line one with a cloth, dump my jar in, wrap it up, nest the other one in it and crush them together then pour out the side), I also use it to make cheese and crack black walnuts.
The frame is super basic and just screwed together, you just need a friend with a saw and a drill, something like this, and a paddle bit or small hole saw to drill the hole to seat the clamp in. Easypeasy. Like $25 if you have scrap wood and good screws laying around and probably $40 if you don't. I honestly recommend spending that on making something like this over buying a low end tincture press because it's SO multi-use
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