Thank you Teresa, I am grateful for your work too. Mutual work is so important when working across cultures and power divides. And really we are always doing that. I believe we need to rebuild Madness as a culture and welcome people into it and include each other rather than being in competing factions.
I am in the process of job hunting because our clinic is being destroyed by people who think treatment is a dinosaur. It’s amazing how one or two people can disassemble and destroy, a community of hundreds. Job hunting is a terrifying prospect for me, but I hope it works out okay and I can keep working. Meaningful work is what has saved me from myself.
I am happy to reform what I do and make it better. I would cut my salary willingly for a better system. Unfortunately this is not the way things work.
I agree. I was locked up for three months involuntarily and it did a world of harm to me. It was very hard to find people who would still treat me like a human being and shrinks and the rest of the world were mostly united against me. In fact, I had such a horrific experience with an imposed shrink, it informs much of what I do now.
I happen to be a good mental health worker who knew how to cut through the shit. It was a hard decision to come back into mental health after what I experienced. The result is that I remain isolated and I accept that. I do not get along with other shrinks.
But there were maybe three people who treated me like I was a human in my captivity. I have to say they helped.
I try to be one of those people. Therapists are essentially like buzzards. I accept that. I feel guilty. I also work hard.
But what I have learned is that there are people in roles who can be helpful when they work against the grain.
Incarceration is rarely helpful, but I have met people who were grateful for it. I guess I am saying it is a wide world and I agree with you, labels are bad, and roles in the system like clinician and patient are bad, but there are ways to find middle ground once you have been incarcerated. I think middle ground is being squeezed politically and it becomes something we have to fight for.
Thanks for your comment. It was powerful. It made me think about my current situation a lot.
Thank you for reading my post so thoroughly. you have a very interesting story. I too have recaptured some dissociated memories that explain much of my experiences and it often feels like psychiatry and psychotherapists by using a phony DSM world are just out there to cover up and protect perpetrators. It is amazing how strongly people in my life are defended against the idea that I went through some abuse. Maybe they’d rather I just rot in an institution. And if I had never been on psychotropics to start, I likely wouldn’t have pissed off the FBI. But now I need them to live in balance so I can be a mole in the system.
In the new EHR I use, I do have to click on DSM diagnosis to bill. I feel bad about it and I work hard to counter it in my work, humanizing peoples experiences. I pray that if someone read my records they could see my efforts and accept the compromise that I must live with to survive.
Anyway, love your comments and thanks for taking time to read my work!
Thank you Teresa, I am grateful for your work too. Mutual work is so important when working across cultures and power divides. And really we are always doing that. I believe we need to rebuild Madness as a culture and welcome people into it and include each other rather than being in competing factions.
I am in the process of job hunting because our clinic is being destroyed by people who think treatment is a dinosaur. It’s amazing how one or two people can disassemble and destroy, a community of hundreds. Job hunting is a terrifying prospect for me, but I hope it works out okay and I can keep working. Meaningful work is what has saved me from myself.
I am happy to reform what I do and make it better. I would cut my salary willingly for a better system. Unfortunately this is not the way things work.
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I agree. I was locked up for three months involuntarily and it did a world of harm to me. It was very hard to find people who would still treat me like a human being and shrinks and the rest of the world were mostly united against me. In fact, I had such a horrific experience with an imposed shrink, it informs much of what I do now.
I happen to be a good mental health worker who knew how to cut through the shit. It was a hard decision to come back into mental health after what I experienced. The result is that I remain isolated and I accept that. I do not get along with other shrinks.
But there were maybe three people who treated me like I was a human in my captivity. I have to say they helped.
I try to be one of those people. Therapists are essentially like buzzards. I accept that. I feel guilty. I also work hard.
But what I have learned is that there are people in roles who can be helpful when they work against the grain.
Incarceration is rarely helpful, but I have met people who were grateful for it. I guess I am saying it is a wide world and I agree with you, labels are bad, and roles in the system like clinician and patient are bad, but there are ways to find middle ground once you have been incarcerated. I think middle ground is being squeezed politically and it becomes something we have to fight for.
Thanks for your comment. It was powerful. It made me think about my current situation a lot.
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I really enjoy your blog and made some comments there. Maybe we can collaborate?
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Thank you for reading my post so thoroughly. you have a very interesting story. I too have recaptured some dissociated memories that explain much of my experiences and it often feels like psychiatry and psychotherapists by using a phony DSM world are just out there to cover up and protect perpetrators. It is amazing how strongly people in my life are defended against the idea that I went through some abuse. Maybe they’d rather I just rot in an institution. And if I had never been on psychotropics to start, I likely wouldn’t have pissed off the FBI. But now I need them to live in balance so I can be a mole in the system.
In the new EHR I use, I do have to click on DSM diagnosis to bill. I feel bad about it and I work hard to counter it in my work, humanizing peoples experiences. I pray that if someone read my records they could see my efforts and accept the compromise that I must live with to survive.
Anyway, love your comments and thanks for taking time to read my work!
Report comment