#defining reality

[hexpatient]

ive only had a few comments/tags like this thankfully, but i have seen a few from mental health professionals on my posts. and they do this thing where they make a comment that they probably think is a corrective one, because they probably think that they are the best source of what actually goes on in psychiatric treatment.

my post that said "refusing to consider that mentally ill people ARE acting rationally is one of psychiatry's main violences" got a tag saying basically "actually yeah we modern psych professionals usually do assume patients are acting with reason". which is a really wild thing to say. (please do not track down and berate this person)

i have not been every single mental health patient ever, however i have been me, and um. the idea that i was acting rationally simply was not an option to my therapists and psychiatrists for 9 years. it was absolutely not considered.

psych professionals obviously think they are a good and authoritative source on what psychiatry does, however its more like psych professionals are a good source on what psychiatry claims it does. like i have heard all this lip service and rhetoric before about respect and dignity and patient rights and so on. the problem is that it is absolutely not followed through in reality. the problem is that its not true. <- the problem. words do not speak louder than actions.

[hexpatient]

in mental health care, "thoughts" and "beliefs" are not simply imperfect parts of everyone's internal workings. for a mental health patient, thoughts and beliefs are inherently suspect. they cannot be any kind of result of facts or logic or material reality (imperfect or not!), they are only random brain whizz. there is no such thing as knowledge of a mental health patient to share with the professional, because mental health patients are dehumanized too far to be capable of knowledge. if i say i know something, its beliefs and thoughts that are inherently wrong because of my sick sad brain. if i say i know things because of extremely basic observation, thats inherently wrong because of my sick sad brain. if i say i choose what to believe based on repeating patterns of evidence, thats inherently wrong because of my sick sad brain. the guy im talking to (the professional) divines the true facts about the situation (the opposite of what i said it was) with their education and training (making up things). now Thats... knowledge. and my "knowledge" must be "challenged" with the fucking thought rules until i dont know how to know anything anymore.

[hexpatient]

like some are more overt than others, but every single mental illness diagnosis (and also miscellaneous labels like "victim mentality" or "negative thoughts") carry an explicit association with: This person is Too Insane to be able to know things. Dont listen to them or believe them. whether its depression and anxiety, schizophrenia, personality disorders, OCD, ODD, or psychotic disorders, etc. They are all a process of ongoing violence even when the diagnosis is accurate in what the symptoms entail.

i was depressed and anxious because i was being abused. i was diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorders to turn the fact that i was being abused into a mind distortion of my brain disease. that is the kind of violence that is done constantly to mental health patients. i think its probably the most acute in cases of psychotic disorders, but its present in all of them.

the next time you want to label someone as "crazy" or any other mental illness related term (psychotic, insane, BPD etc) to malign and dismiss, instead, consider that there are real reasons why this person is acting like that that does not entail them just having Stupid Bad Person Brain Disease. that includes people you hate and disagree with too btw. irrationalizing behavior you dont understand or agree with immediately is, at best, a convenient way to not engage with critical thinking. at worst, it is literally gaslighting and violence.

[hexpatient]

the terror of "enabling" mentally ill people is so deep that therapists think gaslighting me into the nth dimension is the safe option. like. literally abuse is preferable to what i Might Do if they Validate me Too Much. if they're too nice to me i might blow up the whole world or something.

[hexpatient]

its not "processing" when theres rules about what im allowed to think and feel. it's not "processing" when theres a single ideological pre-approved conclusion i am allowed to come to. thats not processing. its conditioning and indoctrination.

[hexpatient]

its probably normal to hear a stranger/acquaintance talk about their own life and have some doubts about the accuracy. or their trustworthiness. thats very valid. i dont think it would be realistic to expect psych professionals to immediately fully trust their patients, even if bias and prejudice was not a problem. however there is zero excuse for:

immediately deciding im wrong

immediately deciding im wrong because im TOO INSANE to be able to know

deciding im unable to know things accurately ABOUT MY OWN LIFE...

...but THEY CAN ... somehow 🔮

deciding that i need to be immediately told of this conclusion

deciding that i must come to those conclusions too, immediately, because they told me to

AND never ever ever reconsidering. never considering i might just be telling the truth. no matter what.

[hexpatient]

and of course when i was trying to understand my own therapy abuse and gaslighting, none of the resources online said shit about therapists weaponizing cbt or my (accurate) ptsd diagnosis or my ~negative mentality~ or any other slop as being part of it. but it was. i had to figure it out myself and give myself the permission to acknowledge what i already knew. they 10000% used psychiatric rhetoric in so many forms to regular gaslight me. and i had to piece it together almost entirely by myself, because either there is no knowledge, or there is no care that regular common psych rhetoric is a perfect tool of gaslighting too.

they never called me the word "crazy". they do not need to. there's an entire world of synonyms in the psychiatric language that are used to annihilate my ability to think i know anything at all.

[hexpatient]

telling the truth so consistently for9 years and not being believed would supremely fuck up anybody. i spent so much of my time outside of therapy sessions practicing how to tell them things in different ways because i was literally trying to find the 1 weird trick to make therapists believe me when i tell them the truth. i never found it. like all the ways they treated me simply do not allign with their goal of making me believe that people are good. like you need to demonstrate that, not just beat it into me with conditioning and gaslighting.