TLDR: I’m changing my username because the word “recovery” no longer reflects my values or goals for myself
This has been a long-time coming. Years ago, during what became a lengthy string of hospitalizations, I believed wholeheartedly in the idea of recovery being a destination. To have “recovered”, I thought, was to have been “fixed” with no trace of ever having been “broken” in the first place.
I now understand “recovery” as a commodity sold to us by the mental health industrial complex. For centuries, those who have dared to question the status quo have been ostracized, assumed dangerous, hunted down, and forcibly removed from society. We’ve been labeled “mad”, “crazy”, “insane” and “mentally ill”, but how could we not be ill when our society has been poisoned by corporate greed, corruption, colonialism, white supremacy, and the myth of meritocracy? Perhaps the “threat” we pose to society is not in our supposed violence, but in what they cannot control or understand about our minds.
Perhaps the “threat” is less so one of violence, and more so one that threatens to destroy the building blocks of society that maintain oppressive power structures. Thus, so-called “treatment” and “recovery” for our illness target our autonomy and right to our own conscience by using surveillance and forced compliance to ensure that we conform. The mental health system strips us of our individuality as unique beings, yet claims that we are individually responsible for our own suffering.
If recovery and wellness are defined by what society deems important, I do not want to recover. I cannot achieve wellness without sacrificing myself in the process and that is a price I’m not willing to pay.
