#institutionalization cw

[suguwu]

i am so obsessed with a reader for suguru being a sorcerer whose main job is to go and get sorcerer children who have been committed, etc.

you and what you do haunts suguru long after his defection. has it always been like this for you? how many versions of his daughters have you seen?

there are plenty of sorcerers for suguru to recruit, but there are only a few that he wants.

and he wants you.

[irrealisms]

i don't know where i'm going with this. i might make another post in a bit about a different psychiatry thing.

my part-time job isn't giving me tasks so . do you ever think about false choices? eat your food or you'll have to drink ensure; drink ensure or we'll have to increase your level of care (<- this is a euphemism for hospital + forcefeeding). drive to the hospital or we'll call the cops to take you there. once you're at the hospital you can either check yourself in or we'll baker act you. before i went to the hospital, they asked, do you want to be alone with therapist #1 or therapist #2? shortly before i quit the psychiatric system altogether, i told my psychiatrist i didn't want to be on antipsychotics. i had been telling her this for weeks while she tried to convince me to try them. she told me i had a month to research risperdal and zyprexa and choose which i'd rather be on and come to terms with it. and then she pat herself on the back for a few minutes about respecting my autonomy because she was giving me choices and also because she didn't baker act me on the spot. it's all consensual in my records. i followed my meal plan. i drove to the hospital. i checked myself in. i've been on antipsychotics three distinct times and each time i technically agreed. they get to say i chose this. it was voluntary.

when i was in the waiting room of the hospital, my mom argued with them for hours: you say she's going in voluntarily. if it's voluntary, that means she can also choose to leave, right?

the waiting room had a locked door, because sometimes real life will just give you a piece of heavy-handed symbolism on a platter like that.

[m0retapes]

-- a nightmare , of things looming outside the hospital window, peering inside. Watching, always watching him, of the few good people he'd known inside those walls being turned into not-themselves. Being turned into remind-me-your-name-again.

Forgetting, being forgotten. For Rodger it was a blessing and a purpose.

And he woke, shot up in bed. Some underwater noises, someone calling his name. Tim's name. The sound dulled beneath his racing heart.

"'m fine." Tried to remember how Tim spoke nowdays, he wasn't thirteen and terrified anymore. Felt the stubble on his face. Tim hadn't needed him for a while. Good.

But. But he was needed now. The one thing Rodger was best at-- fight or flight. Getting away, away, away.

He crossed to the door of this strange room. A hand on his shoulder. He tensed. The man-in-the-woods trying to drag him away? He tried the door handle, a small satisfied nose, a strangled little laugh as he found the doorknob turning, the door unlocked and opening!

So rarely was he anywhere the door was unlocked. Hope, as warm as the sliver of bright light through the door, filled his chest. The doctors must have left it undone. He could go, he could leave and run away. He slipped out the door and started running.

The hallways were carpeted, not tile. The doors he passed were all decorated and interesting. Oh. Where was he? Certainly not a hospital.

Rodger ran, looking for an exit. A stairwell, a door, anything.

// @hxlpimalive :))))))

[humanfist]

The hospital I work in really does try hard to make things more tolerable for our autistic patients. It’s never enough. Fix all of the contingent things, and you just bump up against the fact that humans were not designed to live in psychiatric hospitals, autistic humans least of all. I have met many well-intentioned people who believe that institutions are only bad because of stigma against the mentally ill, or insufficient budgeting, or ignorance of people’s true needs. These people should visit a nursing home someday. The people there don’t have some kind of exotic stigmatized hard-to-understand condition. They’re just old. Yet nursing homes and other institutions for the elderly have every bit as many problems as the institutions for autistic people. I don’t think that mental health institutions will get better anytime soon, because I would expect the average person to be a lot more concerned with nursing homes – where their grandparents live! Where they themselves will end up one day! – than they are with mental health institutions. If we can’t even get our act together on that one, what hope do we have for the harder problem? Having good involuntary communal living institutions is just plain beyond us as a civilization at this point. It has nothing to do with stigma or prejudice. Even if everybody loved autistic people exactly as much as they love their own grandmother, the best we could hope for is institutions that treat autistic people as well as they treat grandmothers. Which is to say, abysmally. -Slate Star Codex

[fancyfade]

you know, if the writers really wanted black manta to have a redemption arc, they could have chosen literally any strategy besides "earlier black manta was evil (autistic) and confused so he did bad stuff, and now he's good (autism cured) and not confused and an aquaman ally"

like! It would be extremely confusing to grow up in an asylum and subject to medical abuse your whole life! But also you don't have to change his neurotype if you want him to be good now!

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

usually when i write up posts about the talking animal stuff in sdmi, i try to tag the ones that are more coherent than venty.

sometimes though i am struck by just, oh my god the asylum thing is so so so awful, whose fucking idea was that. pretty much everything to do with the talking animal worldbuilding manages to combine some incredible nastiness re: both racism and ableism, and the asylum (which is made specifically to incarcerate them indefinitely--in practice, for the rest of their lives--instead of the set sentence they'd get in prison) is already horrifying both in-narrative and out.

then you realize that the deal with the talking animals is just recreating the historical dynamic of physically disabled people being kept as literal pets, but dressed up in the veneer of Cutesy Hanna-Barbera Animal Mascots, and it uh. jesus fucking christ. what the fuck lmao

[uselessheretic]

i feel like i see the thing relatively often where someone will say that ed's not actually that mentally ill, fans are just racist and also somehow this is izzy's fault because the only time he shows symptoms of mental illness is through izzy supposedly. even though in episode four alone we see him talk about suicide ideation, how discontent he is in life, and how burnt out he is.

but when people urge others to add an antiracist lens to their analysis and point out the historical racism within the psychiatric system it seems like?? they think that the only explanation is for ed to just be a lil depressed and that poc who are otherwise perfectly fine are constantly being slapped with extreme diagnoses. which, that is a thing that happens btw. people will call the cops on and forcefully institutionalize black folks who they have disagreements with and weaponize psychiatry against them.

that said, when talking about something like the uneven diagnosis distribution between poc and white people of schizophrenia (since that's something that's been researched) it's not that doctors are talking people who are otherwise perfectly mentally healthy and attributing their behavior to mental illness (although again it does happen.) usually though what people are referring to is how doctors are quick to diagnose poc with schizophrenia before doing their proper diligence and going over the other possibilities including histories of depression, trauma, and abuse. certain traits they exhibit are overemphasized and others minimized or ignored. a black person and white person may show the same exact symptoms, but the doctor will first have the white person tested for PTSD or BPD and try alternative treatment plans, while marking the black person off before considering other possibilities.

it's dangerous and disturbing where poc will be put through a series of medications that do not help, receive no treatment for the actual root of the problem, and then in the process often be criminalized as well since there is a much greater social stigma and forced state control over people diagnosed with schizophrenia.

i just feel like if you're gonna talk about ed and misdiagnosis through a racial lens, it'd be more accurate for him to immediately get diagnosed with something like schizophrenia without the doctor doing anything more to look into him. ignoring things like his history of child abuse and how trauma can cause certain responses. or for something he said metaphorically to be taken as literal where he might describe himself when angry as "the kraken" and the doctor marks that down as a sign of delusions. overemphasizing verbal expressions of angers as signs of violence. hearing ed say "it feels like my boss is out to get me" where he means that the boss keeps picking on him and it feels racially motivated, and the doctor puts on the record that he suffers from paranoia.

also just saying but there is actually a LOT out there you can read about māori mental health and the issues surrounding NZ's system. about 1 in 3 māori adults meet criteria for a mental disorder and this is a result of a racist health system, poverty, and, very importantly, colonialism. but like? i promise you don't need to create your own theories on how ed's identity interacts with mental health as if you're the first person to considered that. kaupapa māori mental health services are literal resources in place to address māori mental health needs within a cultural context. like! it's very cool actually for these things to be made available through hard community work that rejects colonialist psychiatric systems and instead utilizes a holistic and indigenous approach to wellness.

idk it's just so much more complicated than ignoring ed's very real mental illness and writing it off as no biggie. tbh it feels very um american centric as well to make assertions about relationships to mental health and race without ever acknowledging the specific community history here and that this isn't a new conversation. if you want to say you're examining ed through an anticolonialist framework then it would help if you did literally any work to find out what that looks like currently.

[midrashic]

driving is the most stressful thing i've ever done and i was forcibly institutionalized once