Tuesday, March 21, 2023
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Comments by anotherone

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  • JIM FLANNERY (from this interview) IS CURRENTLY LOCKED UP! MindFreedom has sent out a shield alert on his behalf:

    Copy and pasted from shield alert:
    Updated Shield Alert for Jim Flannery, January 28, 2023

    RE: Important Correction to Earlier Shield Alert.
    Thank you if responded already to the Shield alert of Jim Flannery to win his release. Unfortunately, the previous email for Dr. Latif turned out to be invalid. If you wrote to Dr. Latif and it bounced, please desist from notifying us. Please resend your letter using this UPDATED email:
    [email protected]
    The Shield program relies primarily on volunteers. Please help us crowdsource additional knowledge that may be helpful for this campaign. Write tips or suggestions to [email protected] or post them as comments on our website HERE and scroll down to the ‘comments’ section of that page.
    Original Shield Alert for Jim Flannery, January 27, 2023
    Jim Flannery is enrolled in MFI’s ‘Shield Program’ which aspires to leverage people power to protect the rights of enrolled Shield members. Jim activated his Shield because he is being held involuntarily at the Behavioral Health Unit of Middlesex Hospital located at 28 Crescent St. Middletown, CT 06457.

    Jim has been incarcerated there since Monday, January 23 and is being subjected to daily forced injections of powerful neuroleptic drugs (frequently referred to as anti-psychotics by their manufacturers). According to Jim, the drugs he is being subjected to are Zyprexa and Haldol.

    MindFreedom first heard about this egregious violation of Jim’s rights on Wednesday, January 25, through a friend of Jim’s.

    Jim was granted a hearing on Thursday which he lost. This had the result of changing his 36 hour emergency hold or ‘certificate’ to a fifteen day certificate. The basis for Jim’s incarceration is not clear; he is not charged with a crime.

    This all started following Jim’s performance as a part of ‘The Anything Goes’ open mike at the Buttonwood Tree Performing Arts Center located in Middletown, Connecticut. The police and a mobile crisis team were called to the scene and Jim was transported to the Middlesex ER, where he was put on a 36 hour hold.

    Jim identifies as a comedian, psychiatric survivor, and activist who recently announced his candidacy for President of the United State. He has been a long-standing supporter and volunteer with MindFreedom, using his computer programming skills and video editing skills to help us with various campaigns for human rights. Only a few days ago, Jim generously donated his time to update MFI’s website.

    TAKE ACTION TODAY!
    Please call the psychiatrist (Dr. Tariq Latif) who authorized Jim’s force drugging and demand that he immediately release Jim! Also, demand that Dr. Latif direct the staff to cease and desist from subjecting Jim to dangerous shots of Zyprexa and other so-called ‘anti-psychotics’ against Jim’s expressed consent.

    Dr. Latif, on an online profile, is listed as the Medical Director of the Psychiatry Dept at Middlesex Hospital. He probably does not work on the weekend but we urge you to leave a voicemail on his office phone today or tomorrow. Jim states: “I hope he comes to his office on Monday morning and finds that his voicemail is full of messages from Shield members!”

    Call Dr. Latif at (860) 358-6765

    (hospital # which routs callers to a switchboard operator who transfer callers to his voicemail)
    Additional untested phone numbers for Tariq Latif obtained from the internet:
    (203) 912-9721
    (cell)
    (860) 398-4284
    (Middletown unspecified)
    Email Dr. Tariq Latif at
    [email protected]
    Share this alert via social media by using the link HERE
    Guidelines:
    As always, be respectful and civil when you leave messages or post comments.
    Send copies of your written messages to MFI — cc correspondence to [email protected]
    MFI will publish model letters on this page or in the comments section (to view comments scroll down to the bottom of this page. We will always ask your permission before publishing your letter.
    MFI will update this page as needed, as additional actions become warranted. Share the link to this page freely on social media. To obtain link cut and past the URL address that appears in the URL field above.

  • “Be careful about making blanket statements. DBT is not CBT…if it’s bad it’s most likely because of how it’s taught.”

    since this post is blowing up again, I want to point out this threat? warning?

    DBT is bad!

    I think we should educate MIA faithful professionals on the evil behaviorism influences they teach, IRREVERENT THERAPY and its links to attack therapy, and their Holy Emporer Supreme Marsha Linehan.

    DBT is terrible! Always make those blanket statements, please. It is a cult.

  • Great article! New research, useful, and REAL. I have been impressed by and eager to engage with any and all research surrounding algorithm discrimination. Algorithms massively impact our lives! I hope more MIA authors follow your lead! This is the next frontier, and an under-investigated facet of life needing courage and unbiased integrity. Good work to Gaeta and good reporting to Samantha Lilly

  • Psych nurse,

    why is your field so obsessed with describing psych patients like this: “But the reality for my patients who are hospitalized against their will is that they have been running naked…”

    So creepy.. psych trolls are so proud to boast of their (creepy) violent fantasies about subduing naked patients. Such a gross profession! No wonder there are so many Harvey Weinstein-types in your field, “Andrew”.

  • KateL, agreed. That is *such* a trope with modern MH advocacy organizations- big promises with zero intention to fulfill, followed by ghosting.

    This interview’s descriptions of expansion and their ongoing work is discombobulating. One may assume they are now fully focused on college campuses, though their intended consumers remain unspecified: do they only respond to college students now? Further, it’s unclear why the lawsuit at Yale brings pain to ProjectLets.

    A win for some of us is a win for all of us! Any class action lawsuit by psych survivors (these students) against a massive authority (yale) will yield cascading abolitionist effects. The Yale students get my applause, not my grievances.

  • I think this was a great article and I’m glad this kind of research is being done, but it’s so absurd that the clinician’s fear of a diagnosis can provoke the clinician into forcing their client to take pills that make them sick. Some of these clinicians take advantage of this field’s cult-like bias against their clients. Domestic violence via psychiatry comes to mind.

    Suffice to say, this article summarizes the experience of the service user. My prior comment was written in good faith, from the perspective of a former service user. I mean to agree with this research, add my own voice and vent.

  • Ha!

    A for effort, but I have notes… Yall know this field is all violence and coercion, right? I feel nauseated on behalf of MH pro hopefuls who still believe that antipsychotic drugging is nuanced. That disillusionment will be brutal. In practice, “Shared decision making” to assist a “patient” in med-compliance is the usual absurdly grim dystopia

    Here were my barriers :

    1) antipsychotics were forced on me when I was a child

    2) You’re not allowed to ever get off antipsychotics.

    3) After a while, antipsychotics start to kill you

    4) Psychiatrists treat the physical ailments caused by antipsychotics with more antipsychotics

    5) When you are dying from antipsychotics while fleeing the MH system, your opportunities for a successful life are nullified. The social stratification of the SMI status= forced drugging.

  • Thanks Steve,

    For people with SMI diagnosis, the body-shaming is blatant and intended to be cruel.

    Personally, I sometimes feel shocked by the mildness of the professional’s viewpoints. These articles seem to be too gracious. The MH system bullies their clients, especially if their client is “disabled” or considered “seriously mentally ill”. This protocol is as regular as not informing patients about side effects…

  • This is a helpful article, but I don’t know many therapists who can even begin to implement these steps. Some prerequisites for therapists who just fat-shame their clients as a power play, because of their ‘therapeutic process’. Written in step-form, as follows:

    1) Know that antipsychotics do cause weight gain. Refrain from saying the favorite line “do you want to be FAT OR CRAZY?”

    2) Do not directly mock your fat/ large body clients. Do not say this: “BUT YOU ARE OVERWEIGHT. I see your fat all over your body. I know that I am more thin than you. You need to lose weight because anyone who bullies you about your weight is correct.” (almost a direct quote from my former practitioner of the mental arts)

    3) Do not give diet advice to your clients, do not give diet advice after your clients specifically asks you to stop: “I am just trying to share things that make ME feel healthy.” The egregiously bad bad diet tips they would give me in sessions were always by a *therapist* who had zero training in nutrition

    4) Do not have your clients diagnosed with “binge eating disorder” simply because they gained weight on antipsychotics. Don’t send them for “med checks” for the sole purpose of bringing in a nurse practitioner to ambush them about their weight.

    5) This is for everyone- understand that this field is incredibly abusive and many therapists behave so horribly that they don’t even meet the bad standards we debate here.

  • Thank you Emmeline Mead!

    I know this isn’t a reply to me, but I’ll follow up on the parts that involve me.

    I appreciate these clarifications. I read each of your points carefully. My assertions, made in response to Bob Whitaker’s comments, were from my (perhaps outdated) knowledge of the posting guidelines.

    When I visited those guidelines now, I saw that they have been updated.

    If I may seek further clarity: When did the submission guidelines switch to this seperate site known as ‘submittable’?

    From what I know, there used to be a strong emphasis on real names. ‘Creditbility’ or ‘Reliability’ or some similar word was used throughout. That you must first submit, then explain why you don’t want to publish with the full name, then MIA mantains the right to decide on their own if they use your real name.

    So I thought (perhaps incorrectly) that if MIA decides to publish with the authors full name, despite request for anonomity, the author can be vulnerable, hence my response to those “greatest regret” comments

    This explanation is comforting but I am still unsure if we are debating semantics, or if my knowledge is actually outdated/incorrect.

    In short:

    Have the rules changed in the past 6 months?

    Are your posting guidelines that you have explained here clarified on this new website ‘submittable’?

    Also, thank you for everything you do for the people of mad in america.

  • Birdsong, absolutely! I always notice that when the professionals speak of “their work” they unironically portray themselves as these dystopian Don Quixotes, hero- worshipping themselves as warriors against malice. When in reality, their professional lifetime is spent destroying wonderful people who simply weren’t lucky enough to avoid them. They are the malice

    Psychiatry today is equal parts horrifying and pathetic

  • How are ex-patients supposed to read these words and not feel furious?

    “Black youth suicidality has been rising in the US for years. In addition, other youths of color have also experienced worsening mental health. With this new research, the question becomes less about an increase in mental disorders and more about an increase in community alienation and a decrease in opportunity.”

    Nowhere in this does the blame go where it is deserved: to the psych field. The mental health field is exempting themselves from this study because systemic and structural racism and classism is partly their fault. Psychiatry has always, since its inception and still, existed to socially stratify alongside every other injustice. They perpetuate injustice.

    They decrease opportunities

    then they control the narrative so they can pretend they’re helpful.

  • How is this new research? Have no mental health orgs researched systemic racism or the effects of poverty?

    On a related note, they still give people GAF scores aka a pro is allowed to tally the points that determine their degree of violence towards the client.

    GAF scores- GLOBAL ASSESSMENT OF FUNCTIONING/ giving another human’s life a grade score.

    The pro’s own systemic racism and implicit bias = lower GAF scores

    Maybe they should start banning GAF scores? Maybe the pros should understand their own implicit bias? Maybe there should be constraints on their authority to determine someone else’s life?…. Maybe healers shouldn’t also be cops? Maybe doctors shouldn’t be jailers? What if they just separated the MH Field from the judicial field and ensured human rights?

    Here is an example: I used to get GAF Scores in the 50s because paid domestic work aka cleaning houses, walking dogs counts as unemployed. I am certain that these GAF scores correlate to all systemic racism and classism.

    The bar is way too low that this counts as new research. Anyone with lived experience as a SMI patient knows that the MH field hates the marginalized

    Would be better if the professionals were fixing their field

    Actual change > performance

    *Just checked and they’re rolling out the WHODAS score now to replace GAF. idk if it’s better or worse

  • To Robert Whitaker,

    I read what you wrote. I also read the transcripts of the podcast, including this:

    “The message I would give to Mad in America is that you are part of the solution. You have the obligation to be part of the solution.”

    To solve this communicative quamire, I will reiterate my points alongside your respective quotes:

    “Now the biggest failure or disappointment is that we haven’t been able to bring forth the voices of people aren’t really heard at all in society ” I detailed how your posting practices are exclusionary in a prior comment

    Then you say “Our personal stories, which are so important, do not convey the diversity of experiences in the psychiatric system that exist across racial diversities and across class diversities.” Agreed. There seems to be some obvious explanations for that

    “We’ve tried, and while we haven’t succeeded, we will continue to try. Sometimes these populations we are trying to reach are so isolated from any sort of mainstream approach that it’s been hard…” You could just make minor changes to accomodate more people. there is no great mystery to solve.

    You keep reiterating your one point. That singular adjective of “important” does not show gratitude, rather it softens the rest of your disparaging remarks. So another colleague of yours will say “thank you” to your unpaid authors… next week?

    Then you go on…

    “So much of what we get right now is the story of people of a certain class having been harmed. Sort of an educated class, a literate class who are able to tell their story or even are motivated to tell their stories.”

    Robert, a cursory search through your website shows that you and most of your staff all went to Ivy leagues.

    I fulfil some of your schrodlinger’s psych patient requirements though I do not feel spectacularly valued here as a low-class, non-educated person. If you genuinely want to facilitate this conversation, you can communicate with your current commenters.

    The summary of your speech is directed towards your readers and commenters. Our criticism does satisfy your request that we change the paradigm.

    “You need to help us think about how we as a society can change the paradigm. The only way it’s going to change is through a societal discussion and a societal demand about what is possible and how we should organize ourselves and how we should care for others who are struggling in these difficult ways.”

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5376720/#:~:text=Epistemic injustice is a harm,of one’s experiences (interpreting).

    Here is an article in epistemic injustice in psychiatry.

    Here is an exerpt:

    “Epistemic injustice is a harm done to a person in her capacity as an epistemic subject (a knower, a reasoner, a questioner) by undermining her capacity to engage in epistemic practices such as giving knowledge to others (testifying) or making sense of one’s experiences (interpreting). It typically arises when a hearer does not take the statements of a speaker as seriously as they deserve to be taken.”

    Epistemic justice is needed on mad in america and so is an examination of unconscious towards psych survivors

  • Steve,

    Thanks for your clarification. I genuinely did not know. My comparatively more biting comments tend to be held in moderation for longer, so I just assumed because I have violated the rule against personal attacks..I will reach out to you privately if I encounter this concern again, as per the guidelines you clarified.

    My apologies and thank you for the work you do for the commenting community

  • I see that my comments are held in moderation, so I want to cite the rule by Mr. Whitaker that criticism of Mr Whitaker is exempt from the rule against personal attacks. My criticism is of Robert Whitaker

    Mr. Whitaker, I am deeply grateful and profoundly proud to be a member of this community, though I still regularly see your organization uphold the passive bias that has harmed so many of us.

    Unconscious bias requires effort to undo. The type of unconscious bias against the “mentally ill” is pernicious, hidden, partly because it is encouraged by the experts. Genuine humility is required to do anything other than uphold the status quo. If this website prioritizes/ prizes professionals over former patients, please give us a warning because psych survivors aren’t safe on a mental health professional- centered website.

    I have suspected that you give the experts the benefit of the doubt to be biased while survivors are treated with condescension. I did not expect you to confirm of my suspicions, especially not on your own fundraising podcast, and not alongside a snide remark to another survivor. I am disappointed.

    In epistemic justice, anotherone

  • Before I quote each comment, here is a brief translation of your requests. Hopefully this clarifies,

    You want poor people to write/ you want free labor from people who need to make money to eat

    You want formerly incarcerated to write/ you want them to potentially violate their parole, get in trouble with the police for you

    You want people in bad neighborhoods who were bullied into psych services/ you want to enlarge the target on someone’s back

    …and so on.

    All of your requests are ridiculous given that you don’t pay, protect, or ensure the safety of anyone who contributes.

  • Robert, with all due respect, I also took offense. I’m going to come back and quote each of your insulting comments but the gist was disrespectful, blithe, arrogant, and ignorant to those who contribute (for free).

    The people who submit personal narratives do so at enormous risk to themselves. You urge people to publish with their real names and give zero protection! Perhaps the lack of gratitude, security, or compensation could explain why you’re not receiving submissions from the most discriminated against psych survivors…. SMI diagnosis aren’t easy to survive, you wrote books about that so try reading what we keep telling you.

    Plus, there are currently narratives on your site from people who do fit your chosen demographic! You don’t need to outsource a “thank you”. Some gratitude is expected, especially to your personal narrative contributors who bring the most value to this site. maybe thank your commenters too, instead of harranging us for not doing enough?

    Per the science section, many articles are at odds with our lived experience. Some are offensive, when we explain what we know as obvious, your staff “educate” us like you are now doing to KateL. She’s right, she earned her POV and I second her points, especially those points you don’t seem to understand.

    Best of luck with your fundraising efforts. I hope this next podcast can remedy your mistakes. I am similar to KateL in that I also dislike being exploited and/or insulted.

  • Steve, yep!

    It evens works with my example.:

    “You have non-haircut compliant disorder, so I cannot treat you/ cut your hair but can insult you and ensure you will never have access to a salon. That will be $1000 and God have mercy on your soul, you non compliant”

    they can always pathologize and criminalize anyone they target too.

    Thanks to everyone for speaking truth to power and for holding space here for our psych-survivor reality.

  • Birdsong,

    you are 100% correct. It is a disgusting paradigm. The jobs are not comparable.

    Even if they were compared, the fact remains that therapists do not need to prove results. If I seek a professional for a haircut, I expect to pay to receive a haircut by someone who is licensed, whose shop complies with safety regulations. No comparable expectations exist with the mental health hustlers.

    I cannot add anything else to your comments but just wanted to show solidarity with your point of view.

  • Hi,

    After some deliberation, I have decided to only follow up here. My primary problem with this article’s advertisement is the hedging. I know that a program seeking the same customer base as the troubled teen industry without disavowing the troubled teen industry often becomes the troubled teen industry.

    I apologize for my lack of kindness. I am terrified of the TTI and of family scapegoating ideology and it showed in my comments. This organization is not within NATSAP nor part of the synanon ideologues, though some concerns remain.

    I understand now that your intentions may be pure but the execution of this advertising article is still alarming. Campaigners for the TTI may get the same impression, then they will seek to donate and to undermine.

    This is the crux of my complaint. My backstory: my family sent me through the troubled teen industry and then smear campaigned, isolated, limited, and sabotaged me for years. They became heavily involved in fundraising for TTI- affiliated mental health organizations while using their smear campaign as “my story”. My brutal reality is not uncommon in this niche. Your case studies and the website’s reviews suggest to me that some of your clients’ are in my former situation. It would be pedantic and unfair for me to scrutinize each of those so I will refocus my main point.

    There are thousands of families like mine who felt validated by the troubled teen industry and who seek control over organizations like yours. They donate, host gatherings, and
    fundraise. These types of people are virtually unlimited by society and will corrode anything good you seek to accomplish. Please shield yourself against them.

    My suggestions (if you want them)

    1) change the language- there are active tti’s now who have near identical websites to yours. They can be found on a website called “allkindsoftherapy” (I don’t want to link it). This may be a good resource to contrast your language.

    2) fundraising and donations- if a group or individual is donating, disavow the troubled teen industry. this should ward against some of the DARVO-types of TTI families.

    3) Study the TTI- a few websites exist now that are incredibly helpful sources of information. Lots of survivors like me have contributed to them. unsilenced.org is one of my favorites.

    Thanks for your effort and for your courage. I am genuinely happy to see mental health organizations seeking to do better, though too many falter through pride, ignorance and naiivety. The roads we have traveled to become psych survivors are nightmarish. Another famous mental health industry critic said “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”, this quote may contextualize my response. I wish better for humanity than what we have all endured here in the comments of MIA and so I wish your organization enormous success.

  • Thank you Dr. Susan Swim,

    I appreciate your effort. I will email you the individual concerns as well as a summary of the reasons your program “rung my bells” . In my email, I will also reiterate the concerns that you did not actually address, and add follow up questions that I alluded to but did not clarify.

    I also hope this website continues to be a safe place to dialogue.

    If I created a program to help troubled teen survivors which was specifically triggering to a member of that population, I would want to know why so that I can remedy.

    I plan to write this email in good faith and I hope it is received in good faith. You are a mental health professional, you have all the power in every realm of the world aside from this tiny hamlet of the internet.

    I will proceed if given assurances that my email will be welcomed and received by you without retaliation by you. Otherwise, I still plan on emailing a contact at mad in america.

    You wrote about safety which illuminated another possible misconception between us. My understanding of safety, before we proceed:

    Voiced criticism- safe

    the troubled teen industry- unsafe

    Globalized retaliation by a powerful authority against voiced criticism i.e. retaliation from a mental health professional-unsafe

  • Follow up,

    I would love to be proven wrong! If this program’s marketing is only coincidentally akin to the TTI, if there is absolutely no affiliation with any TTI- related ideology, no affiliation with any TTI- related businesses, nor TTI-related expansion efforts, TTI marketing groups, TTI advertisement directories, TTI conglomerate corporations, TTI lobbying organizations, TTI financial insitutions, TTI- affiliated RTCs, I will write that in the proposed email with an apology and a follow-up comment here with an apology. If what I heard and know turns out to only be conjecture or unrelated to their genuine efforts of self-purported enormous success in mass-scale community healing, I will apologize

    As of now, I seek understanding

    -A

  • Hi Miranda Spencer

    I believed I was clear when I quoted individual blirbs from their website alongside my individual concerns.

    Though I understand the defensiveness so I will do more leg work to sufficiently evidence my lived experiences. I will e-mail the entirety of my findings, with followable evidence to whatever contact is available in Mad In America within the next 2 weeks. Thank you for opening up this dialogue as it is incredibly important.

  • I agree that the words said were decent, but check out the website. Birdsong, some of the most notorious tti’s to have ever existed marketed themselves as equine therapy and used the same talking points. Their website has an entire page on their connections with the troubled teen industry, while trying to, I guess, disclaim themselves from liability.

    All of my bells went off with this article, even more so with the name recognition from their organization. I know I’m sounding dismissive to this pro but the best defense against authoritarian violence from the mental health field is epistemic justice. Our actual experiences are the front lines against concept creep. This concept creep appears to be from the large swaths of pros seeking to expand the Troubled Teen Industry

  • There were quite a few indicators that this organization is the very same TTI affiliated feeder program I had heard about, but none so glaring as this quote from your website..

    “… All the research points to seeing and treating our clients as human beings and not an illness leads to complete and sustainable recovery. Can you say something here taken from the MAD in America article of which we have a link

    In 2018 we expanded our services to family and life coaching programs to create generational and inter-generational change for under-served populations experiencing trauma, severe family conflict, and parental alienation. where can we add this?”

    Diamond Ranch Academy? This you, natsap? A tti by another name smells just as fishy…

    Honorable mention to these quotes:

    “No horses are ridden. No horses are physically used. Instead horses create a therapeutic backdrop of natural, nurturing, and healing relationships within conversation formed between clients’…

    “…We believe that horses give us an legitimacy as therapists because maybe people can begin to trust us as therapists more as we take good care of the horses. What we see is a beautiful chorus of love that occurs of trust and safety for clients to heal and it’s also a win-win situation for the horses as they get love and attention all day long….”

    The TTI never shuts down, they rebrand and reopen. They are now scrambling for clout. This is a billion dollar per year industry seeking to recoup their lost revenue. Survivors finally have federal and societal oversight. MIA, please don’t get duped

  • From my own background knowledge, I am concerned that this organization is heavily affiliated with the troubled teen industry.

    Please disprove. I found this from your website:

    “Now I See A Person Institute attempts to prevent the Troubled Teen Industry through strength based therapy of what is right rather than wrong”

    Is this a fancily worded disclaimer? Or are you genuinely outside of the tti umbrella?

  • KateL,

    I’m not feeling particularly grateful either. These articles are uncomfortable. I can see that the right words are said, but there seems to be an endorsement of harm throughout, including the othering language and “savior” point of view.

    I think more epistemic justice is needed. I don’t want this site to be undermined by psych pro’s seeking to be seen as metaphorical “good apples”.

  • Bob,

    This is ridiculous… most of us here have been personally victimized by someone with your same credentials, singing the same tune, demanding that the “others” dance along. My local psych ward social worker, who could have written this article himself, used to take me into a secluded room by myself to intimidate me into “confessing” that my family is great and its all my fault. He’s still climbing the ladder, profitting from harming people. Uncoincidentally, he also support 12 step programs!

    So you all “gave” this peer support worker $50,000 to set these up? Why not more? All of your salaries are higher and what exactly are you doing to fix the system? Seems to be that his work is more beneficial to “patients” than whatever the pro’s are doing

    Maybe you should focus your attention towards your colleagues in social work. If there were standards and an actual regulatory body for your field, I bet the change would be more than incremental.

  • Birdsong,

    you are so correct. My prior response was to you also. (they’ve taken out the editing function and Im a messy writer)

    But with regards to any cluster B diagnosis, even NPD, I prefer to call out the behaviors of exploitation, sadism and violence without naming a diagnostic concept. I don’t think the DSM or psychiatry earns any validity. Plus, the victims of organized abusers are more likely to be diagnosed than the abusers themselves.

    All the cluster B diagnoses obscure and mystify the psych system’s power to enable widescale shunning and shaming of scared, hurt people.

    You make a great point when you touched on the male/ female dichotomy. I did write “femme” for that reason! Even when straight, cis men are diagnosed with BPD, there seems to be some element of misogyny.

    Their diagnosers profer some condemnation of “BE A MAN!”. It seems like the BPD concept is creeping into all variations of the system, like a putrid smog further poluting this already diseased moral police.

    After all, they can’t even decide if we’re human!

  • Joanna and Birdsong,

    glad you appreciated! The psych system in my region is so overtly absurd that the absurdity in itself can be identity-sparing. I’d imagine that if I had just gotten one stigmatizing diagnosis by a competent or organized authority, would be harder. Specifically, their overuse of bpd and schizophrenia diagnoses are so easily traced to classism, racism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia that the authorities have deprived themselves of credibility.

    Sending my support and solidarity to you against that exploiting abuser. Stigmatizing, socially punitive diagnostic constructs set up their diagnosed to be exploited, abused, and hurt. You are not alone. You are in good company here. I am so sorry that happened. Forgive my impropriety here, but eff him.

  • Joanna,

    glad you opened this dialogue. Some of this difference in diagnosing is explained by the unique healthcare system in the US.

    1) Privatized companies run medical charts. These charts tend to disallow updates to diagnoses so a diagnosis that is inputed cannot be corrected

    2) Any professional with access can write a diagnosis in your medical chart. Sometimes, a misguided or sadistic punk med student will dig through old records. (A med student humor account publicly bragged about this. It’s considered a pasttime to mock mentally ill people’s charts). For me, they hit their goldmine because Im a troubled teen industry survivor. Those tti records are read by any medical professional because my family decided to share them with the the state to get me onto a conservatorship.

    3) Sometimes doctors will feel like they need to write a mental illness diagnosis and they will. this happens when someone is taking antipsychotics. I have been told this is a necessary procedure. “doctors have the right to know!” But its just bullying. I think medical training encourages some inhumane behavior.

    4) A few of my diagnoses are mispelled and don’t actually exist in any DSM. I’m not allowed to get those removed, despite extensive effort. Any doctor can see them when I need medical attention. So, a routine medical appointment can begin with an aggressive confrontation from a doctor like “YOU HAVE PSYCHOXIC ANOREXIC MANIA?!??” which can spiral into extreme danger for me. I have to avoid all doctors or find a way to escape the medical records. It’s tricky but not impossible.

    5) Conservatorships and disability- if you’ve been put into a conservatorship or disability, diagnosing prioritizes quantity. So this is the track that most “severely mentally ill” are put onto, where if that decision is made on your behalf, they need to have multiples of the most disabling diagnoses in your chart to prove needs.

  • Hi David,

    Just checked out your website and I love this. You’ve got a positive reaction from me. I’m usually very critical so its no small fete. Thank you for opening access to this treatment.

    In general, I have found the biggest obstacle to trauma treatment are untrustworthy practitioners. this eliminates the threat, no added unsafety of a potentially bad therapist. Could be quite useful for people like me whose trauma responses began in the troubled teen industry. I’m going to look into this more and may recommend. I appreciate your work and your efforts to share it here, David Busch. thanks

  • Joanna,

    In the US, at least in the southeast, its widely acknowledged that patients who advocate for themselves get a supplemental PD diagnosis. Commonly used as a code for “difficult patient” in the way that KateL described.

    If someone has good insurance or if their family is financially involved in their treatment, the diagnosis get piled on regardless of reality. I’ve gotten a dozen diagnoses so far, many are intended to call me annoying rather than address any real problem.

    Most people who’ve been labeled “severely mentally ill” in my region have an added diagnosis of BPD (if femme) or an NPD (if cis, straight male)

  • This was a great article! Vindicating but brutal

    This article discusses the technicalities which secure the gates of psychiatric research, ensuring that only academia can publish research on the mental health consumer.

    The MH field has such an egregiously violating, dehumanizing M.O. Juxtaposed this with the fact that many of their historical academia idealogues were fascists, just compounds the nauseating absurdity.

    They need to publicly disavow Aktion T4 and purge their eugenicist academics from the lesson books: Asperger and Dalton and the rest

    Unsuprised, but always grossed out to see this paradigm up close, it doesn’t need to shift, it needs to disintegrate into nothing and make way for something human

  • Reply to myself,

    This response was written last night in a slightly salty tone meant to explain my meaning to another commenter.

    I do agree with both Joanna and Birdsong. This work is nuanced, requiring a nuanced response. I have found that the surest way to end reform is binary praise. An ‘A for effort’ should not be expected, especially given that the power dynamic already invites practitioners to demand and enforce our praise.

    I can acknowledge that the work done so far was difficult. I think that acknowledgement must invite more effort, more fire for change. To applaud for a worthy effort is not to resign the imperative to continue.

  • OMG please read the exchange before being rude to me specifically:

    1) I don’t want anyone to answer me. I specified Joanna’s points

    2) This is Mad in America. They’re posting here and we are all here, to facilitate discussion. Yes, I am trying to facilitate discussion. No breaks should be needed for a benign comment, designed to…facilitate discussion…

    3) It’s not impossible to do another interview or to continue on with current work, while keeping in mind Joanna’s points. Nor is it impossible to address them here.

    4) Paid researchers who are paid to research *our experiences* , are discussing their work to us, so it’s ok for us to reply with an alternative to applause and praise. Why else are we all here if not to rethink the current paradigm?

  • Joanna, your comments are apt.

    Anyone who profits from the psych field needs to integrate the reality of the psychiatrized into every tenant of their work.

    Further, if these psych professionals are working on our behalf, they need to sufficiently respond to the grave concerns you have so graciously illuminated.

    Julia Lejeune or Dr Morgan Shields, will you answer Joanna’s comments?

  • John Hoggett,

    You are absolutely correct, but its also already affecting the UK. International children, including those in their countries’ foster systems, have been trafficked to Utah for decades. The troubled teen industry is a global crisis, requiring a global effort

    If you have the stomach for it, look up the most recent lawsuit against West Ridge Academy in Utah. Involves the UK

  • Thanks Birdsong! I looked up the author again. His name is Carl Elliott. This is from his article called ‘Response- Corruption of Character in Medicine’,

    “While my reasons for leaving medicine were complicated—the anti-intellectual attitudes, the authoritarianism, the thinly veiled hazing rituals—the most important one was this: I had come to believe that medical training was turning me into a terrible human being.”

    I got the term, bulverism from his writing. Apt description for the current paradigm.

  • Birdsong,

    Always a big compliment when you agree with me. Glad you showed up to this big, sprawling debate.

    To the unconsciously myopic: I think rigid thinking and unencumbered ego are mandatory to snag the requisite degrees. There was an author shared here who writes about bulverism in medicine too. He’s written books on the field’s cruelty. Suffice to say, the pathology of psychiatry has been peer-reviewed.

  • Lilybit

    This is Laura’s experiences with a segment of the mental health system that enables, works with, and lends legitimacy to an unregulated, terrifying other segment known as the troubled teen industry. The troubled teen industry (TTI) is a network of for-profit punitive, carceral facilities for teenagers. “Private pay” signifies that the incarcerated children have not commited any crime. They are *not* sentenced to these facilities by any court, but rather a family pays to imprison them. Most of these secret prisons are in Utah. I was another “private pay” TTI-Incarcerated.

    Her article is profound and its contents are harrowing. However, her article and your comment are not related. Its important to read more than the title before leaving a comment.

  • Brenda,

    Your comments are a bit mean. I’m a bit mean myself, so take it from me, there’s an upper limit to making your point. Beyond that you’re just insulting others. We are all people. Even when we disagree, we’re still people. You’re welcome here. None of the criticism is against you personally. People have different experiences, viewpoints, and voices and we share those here. This cite is unique because you can share whatever your view, even if it’s pro-status quo.

  • Thank you Laura!

    Hello fellow TTI survivor! I was sent to Utah too: white vans, utter despair, solitary confinement, no love, no affection, no friendships, just shame and cruelty within the prison of propaganda. All of this was so similar to what I survived. Thank you so much for your account! Your courage and genuine kindness are restoration for all of us coming up for air. So many of us survivors are here speaking out. I feel like part of me never really left Utah but like you, I gathered the pieces and made myself back better. I vouch for every part of your painstaking account. We made it out! We are safe! We are free! and we’re going to get these places shut down.

    I see you survivor

    Draper, Utah and West Jordan, Utah 2006. 11 months
    I’d be happy to connect if you’re open.

  • Joanna,

    you’re welcome. And yes, I do notice which posts are by an author and which are an author’s repost of another author. And yes, to be fair it can be tricky to understand endorsement. I am somewhat confused about why this reposting and summarizing is done.

    I can see how my insistence can be seen as rude, I believe strongly in epistemic justice. There are too many mental health conversations that exclude us. Too few where we can safely express dissent without retaliation. I understand that my views are my own, I do not care to prosleytize. I like this site for the freedom of discussion but I feel a personal imperative to speak against concept creep from the more egregiously violating aspects of the MH industry. i believe that particular reposted article was both an endorsement of harm and concept creep so I spoke accordingly.

  • TY0987,

    I also compare it to feudalism!

    Absolutely concur with this point:

    ” anyone who suggests that capitalism is an advancement from feudalism needs to understand that there are no differences between the two.”

    Hello fellow southeasterner! Brutality and assigned scapegoat roles- cronyism is law in my state too. Could not agree more with this:

    “I have a front row seat of what capitalism does to people. Capitalism is a biased system whose modus operandi is always getting the dough via oppression of the “other.”

    With regards to the anti Chik-Fil-A movement, you are correct in that it did snowball into reductivist brawling. But its origins were valid and warranted. It wasn’t about gay marriage. It was about conversion therapy, which is legal in the segments of the troubled teen industry that misuse religious protections.

    The former CEO had a charity that funded much of the conversion therapy in the US. those protests were successful since Chik-Fil- A stopped funding conversion therapy.

  • TY and Nijinsky,

    I’m really enjoying each of your points of view.

    My prior support withstanding, this article seems obfuscating. The premise is valid, but any nuanced debate on this can obscure the actual issues. I just want to be safe, have a good life, be free. I don’t need to get into the weeds about the new terms for the same bs.

    I’ll wave my identifier flags anyways: I’m on the left and LGBT. I can still overlook myself to identify the social dysfunction profiteers. The MH system makes money from societal suffering. I’d prefer solutions and less complicated explanations.

  • José G. Luiggi-Hernández,
    This article is an improvement: a stark contrast from your prior article of pro-misogyny pontificating. I am hopeful you heeded our feedback

    These theories deserve the platforming: we all live in capitalism so the data is real, measurable, repeatable, and is based on reality (unlike the assumptions of dsm labels). The mainstream embraced this too, even the best-sellers lists. Johann Hari, a sociologist and author, often details similar links between suffering and disconnections in modern neoliberal/ individualistic capital-driven society.

    More researchers should pursue a stronger union between psychology and sociology that focuses on real problems and real solutions. If psychology stopped the carceral, punitive, enabling of drug profiteering and just fully embraced human reality- my god- A mental health system that helped someone’s mental health?! would be wonderful

  • Bcharris,

    You make a good point with the lead. When I was young in the early 2000s, almost half of my grade year was diagnosed with ADHD. Most of my other friends had the diagnosis. The only non-ADHD diagnosed people were privileged outsiders with loving families- so no mainstreamers. Parents sought out ADHD diagnoses without prompting from schools. Sometimes, getting their child an ADHD diagnosis and stimulants was a status symbol

    We also had normalized family violence, lead contamination, lead pipes and lead paint chips.

    I recently found a series of articles confirming the high rates of diagnosed ADHD in the southeast, it was a profit machine in the early aughts. The psychs claimed an ADHD epidemic in leui of acknowledging our broken neoliberal culture and our poisoned environment.

  • John, Good for you for seeing the truth. It probably did help him

    I can speak from my own ‘lived experiences’ to say I am grateful for the many concerned laypeople who planted the seed that I was normal, good, and could one day be free. Still, the identified patient role cost so much. This whole industry is trash. If there is any chance my writing here can spare someone else, I can get value from all this garbage

  • This article is painfully relevent. ADHD was my gateway diagnosis. I was one of the drugged kids constantly made worse by stimulants. Without stimulants, I was calm, collected, smart, studious, sensitive and responsible.

    In my teenage years, I had a stimulant-induced psychotic break, which hurled me into the world of “serious mental illness”. It is a sadistic industry.

    Now that I survived well into my adulthood, I am extremely proud to be part of the whistle-blowing efforts by people like you. This information has the power to liberate and to restore dignity.

    Great article. Thanks for your contributions

  • Sam plover is correct: there would be no adverts if not for psychiatry.
    Drug advertisement is integral to psychiatry’s purpose. Psychotropic drugs were originally created by other specialities. Usually, they are anti-convulsant medications or allergy meds that failed testing in those fields. Psychiatry repurposes trashed drugs to create profit.

    Psychiatry sells drugs that other specialties cannot

    Whataboutism fallacies don’t apply. lol -come on-

    Great article! Very helpful info

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