“But the reality for my patients who are hospitalized against their will is that they have been running naked in the streets, or spending tens of thousands of dollars that they do not have, or screaming at their bosses and coworkers for poisoning them, or attacking their elderly parents, and so much more.”
The first time I was committed, I went to a appointment set a week in advance to see a social worker about legal and financial protection against my abusive parents. She lied and told me I was going to a domestic violence shelter. When I realized I was being committed, I asked the nurses why, they said I had scared the social worker. What did I do or say that was so scary? No one would answer. The attending psychiatrist threatened to financially destroy me if I did not acquiesce to violating HIPPA by giving them the contact information of my violent father.
The second time I was committed, I was walking down the street talking on the phone like a normal person when I was assaulted by FIVE police officers and prone restrained. The official report said I was off my head on drugs and exhibiting superhuman strength. I am a visibly gender non-conforming POC person, and I was visiting a friend who lived in a very nice, very white neighborhood.
These were some of the worst experiences of my life, I hate and despise nearly every person I met working inside the system. I smiled at the people who treated me like a subhuman animal and thanked them, and told them I felt better. Because that was the only was to melt back into the shadows and escape the brutality.
You will never see or hear the truth while working inside the system. People like me are invisible to you. The harms you put us through will always be invisible to you. We will lie through our teeth and put on a happy smile and treat you like the saints you think you are because that is the only way to escape the subhuman status you impose on us.
I function pretty well without “psychiatric treatment”, and I would function even better without the societal bigotry and persecution that only intensifies against me should I openly acknowledge being subject to such oppressions.
” yoga, tai-chi, mindfulness”
Yes, I’m sure being prescribed westernized white-washed versions of our own cultural practices will be very helpful, on top of the fact that meditation has been contraindicated for treating long term persistent trauma.
Or is it the view that Asians don’t count as BIPOC?
“Helping clients to better understand the harmful social structures that contribute to their distress”
Do you think we are not already aware? It’s amazing, I’ve written on the establishment twisting Fanon into some kind of ignorance/internalized-colonialism indictment against those underserved by healthcare. And here it is.
” Additionally, the authors call attention to approaches that address underlying societal issues, such as access to healthcare, housing, and safety.”
Why is this considered a sub-category of social work? Why can’t social workers lead with this as their professional purview, and leave our internal lives alone when uninvited? Continuing to gatekeep access to social services and material aid behind a gentler, friendlier psychiatric evaluation doesn’t sound like decolonization. It sounds like Mother Theresa.
The Situational Therapist on youtube has compiled a video of testimonies from minorities’ experiences of racist attitudes from mental health professionals.
“Rather, the aim is to break the vicious cycle by intervening at the belief level, primarily by bringing about experiences that challenge and disprove the beliefs.”
When the “therapeutic space” attempts to disprove beliefs rooted in narratives that the dominant classist, racist, patriarchal, gender biased, queerphobic, ableist hegemony will not and cannot acknowledge, this is called EPISTEMIC VIOLENCE, or more popularly, GASLIGHTING.
MINDFULNESS as practiced by the anglo-western-psycho-hegemony has proven to be RETRAUMATIZING for those who have lived through sustained violence and abuse. Not to mention alienating to those raised in the eastern traditions from which you borrowed and sanitized. Not to mention offensive to those with extensive experience and understanding of how this tool of RELIGION has been used to suppress the political conscientiousness of the oppressed classes time and time again.
The therapy room often serves as a staging ground for colonization. The minds of the subjugated other: the last unconquered territory.
“Wow you are very well spoken”
“But this is America”
“You know, this asian american political scientist said identity politics is divisive”
-Actual therapist
Translation: The dominant class should be free to racialize and otherize me, but I should not politicize the fact that I am being categorized differently.
(Frances Fukuyama is a realpolitik neo-con of the Reagan and W. Bush administrations, famously one of the forty signatories on a letter calling for war against Iraq)
Bonus: speak with praise and envy of indigenous culture, but through a lens of exoticism and fetishization, speak as if they are extinct, and reject contemporary social practice of such values as unamerican.
Extra credit: demand seamless assimilation from second-generation inheritors of multicultural legacies while referring to these natural born citizens as immigrants in the same breath.
Extra, extra credit: Blame institutionalized prejudice on the targeted demographics through endless articles expounding on minority populations for having “stigma” against mental healthcare, for being prejudiced against psychic ailments, for collective ignorance of “science”.
MY BODY MY CHOICE.
No. The problem begins with the broken, non-empirical, and culturally biased and fluid definition held by the established hegemony on what activities even constitutes “Self-harm”.
Leaving that aside, allowing for your “self-harm” paradigm: it is not always a cry for help or an attempt to communicate. I’m so sick of this narrative. Devaluing attempts to convey meaning through dialogue and pedestaling physical drama is a pathology of the bio-psycho-western medical establishment, eternally projected onto its victims’ systems of meaning. The audacity to presume epistemology on behalf of others without doing a shred of inquiry. Forget medical science, this does not even strike within the wider circles of what constitutes social science.
I bang my forehead against the wall as a symptom of sheer overwhelming mental pain. I cut as a private personal ritual. I cut as a form of tension relief. Others engage in “self-harm” activities as a way to regain a sense of control over their bodies and lives.
And it’s nobody else’s business, INCLUDING when and if I ask for help for other problems, the “self-harm” is PRIVATE unless I CHOOSE otherwise, and authorities are NOT ENTITLED TO PRY.
My visceral suffering alters how my physical form moves through space. These assumptions continue to prove that the majority of those with enough privilege to join the ranks of titled professionals simply lack intellectual/emotional capacity to understand the BENTHIC DEPTHS of social oppression and human suffering.
leftists and liberals hold extremely divergent views on ethics and civics.
Your rhetoric betrays a dead giveaway that you have never actually witnessed or spoken to someone on the left; there is nothing more insulting to a leftist than to be lumped in with establishment Democrat values. Even the “authoritarian Marxists”, as you put it (they’re called tankies, dude, more proof you have never spoken or listened to anyone on the left) despise having their brand of state authoritarianism conflated with liberal corporate authoritarianism — two wildly different sets of principles.
Liberal refers to values passed down from Enlightenment era philosophers, and is the bedrock of American political thinking. What are referred to as Republicans and Democrats in this country are both liberal. Those associated with the “alt-right” have referred to themselves as “classical liberals” as a distinction from “neoliberals”.
The “Left” (anarcho-syndicalists? social/civil libertarians? marxists? trotskyites? social democrats with their by-definition-pretty-credible political organizing? Unionizers? Noam Chomsky?) includes many of the OGs when it comes to standing against coercive medical practices and monopolistic trade interests, when it comes to actually winning battles that we benefit from to this day.
You preach nuance and adopt a username that refers to the taijitu iconic of my spiritual faith, Daoism, yet you lump the “entire so-called Left” into a single monolith. Many who follow Daoist principles can be considered a Chinese parallel for the extreme far left. In fact, Leftism in the west has a fairly well known streak of falling in with Daoism, there is an entire branch of thinking unique to the Anglosphere that is derived from philosophical inspirations through studying the Dao blended with anarchist political principles.
If you think lockdowns are bad you should look up what happened in the company towns of coal-mining Appalachia and how they fought and lost. The name by which those leftists revolutionaries were identified? Rednecks. Do you think that crowd – historically or contemporaneously – would appreciate being referred to as upstream of corporate liberals?
i liked your whole write-up in this thread, just one little point regarding “marxism as practiced”
considering historic states like communist china or the soviet union – technically speaking the economic and governmental structure is classified as “state capitalism” — as in the state owns all the capital.
This structure is about as marxist/communist as the nazis were socialists: in name only.
As for other socialist states, like in Latin America example, there is no way to meaningfully analyze the success/failure of those state and economic structures, due to imperialist interests (usually American, usually in service to the agenda for neoliberal capitalist hegemony), through various tactics like exploitative international trade practices and political interventionism conducted through the CIA.
This is a fairly crude summation and does not get into the nuances. (such as Vietnam, Revolutionary Catalan, or the anarchist aborigines of Taiwan, a few more topics for anyone who is curious to learn more)
as the feminists say: “The personal is political”
different political paradigms throughout history have had better or worse success at combatting crime, illiteracy, malnutrition, etc.
psychiatry has been used as a political weapon throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
it is highly relevant and entirely appropriate to assess the institutions of mental healthcare, especially coercive elements, through a civic-minded lens.
I can’t believe that slipped my mind. There’s just so many glaring issues.
The fact that you promote CBT for those with cPTSD and childhood trauma indicates you have little experience in this arena.
One way to improve suicide prevention is to stop using police with handcuffs as the first point of contact.
Another improvement would be to force hotlines to be transparent about call-tracing.
Another would be to actually keep proper records on involuntary hospitalization, something that does not exist in over half of the United States, according to UCLA public health research.
Another would be to crack down on the misuse of restraints, a widely documented epidemic condemned by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
Another would be to make even the slightest effort to combat the institutionalized racism and misogyny in coercive care as evidenced by countries that do collect complete records on forced psychiatric practices.
Another would be to reform the kangaroo court of involuntary commitment to their obligation to honor habeas corpus.
Another way would be to reform the sham psychiatric intake process to align with evidence-based diagnostic discipline.
Another would be to provide watchdog access to locked wards to protect a population that cannot defend against malpractice as victims of testimonial injustice.
Another would be to demand mental healthcare legislation and funding to set trackable KPIs.
Another would be to draw a hard legal line between voluntary and involuntary psychiatry and enforce consequences for institutions that fail to provide informed consent for “voluntary” patients.
Another would be to include trauma-informed care to suicide services which everyone can keep pretending exists but public health data across the board indicate otherwise, which fail to document whether patients are being abused, which causes institutions to empower and enable abusers and thwart victims’ attempts to escape abuse.
Another would be to investigate institutions that commit fraud and warehouse patients under for-profit forced “care” illegally, something the DOD and FBI are looking into right now with UHS Florida.
Another would be to fund investigative journalism into how many private prison companies also own involuntary psychiatry facilities for ~noncriminal~ patients.
Another would be to formalize Psychiatric Advance Directives and make them legally honored documents.
I got more. This is an abbreviated list.
I was never stigmatized for having a mental illness diagnosis. I was stigmatized for rejecting a persecutory label that obscured the fact that I was legally, financially, and physically vulnerable to my abusive family and daring to criticize the mental healthcare industry and exercising my right to revoke consent when the person who has not lifted a finger in violence — unlike psychiatry, unlike my family — is scapegoated as the dangerous one.
As an Asexual Aromantic I can personally attest that despite the lukewarm changes made to HSDD diagnosis in the DSM-V, Ace and Aro communities online report multiple cases every month of individuals being subject to both blatant and edge cases of conversion therapy within secular mental healthcare. Occasionally we also get reports of people being referred to sex(conversion) therapy through GPs and OB-GYNs even when patients indicate that they are perfectly comfortable with their A-spec orientation.
some vocabulary that might be helpful to bridge this dispute:
“centralized economy” vs. “market economy”. ergo: Centralized communism (USSR), centralized capitalism (CCP), market capitalism (most countries today, but oligarchic influences feel very much like centralized capitalism that took the scenic route), market socialism (hopefully someday, hopefully less of a disaster). Still a rough outline, there’s more if you keep drilling down into the nuances: syndicalism, neomercantilism, corporatism, tribal-/clan- based economic systems, Shari’a…
The term persecution is a fairly useful umbrella that covers political disenfranchisement, ethnic bias, racism, cultural erasure, ideological suppression, economic exclusion, physical subjugation, oppression through soft power, etc.
Liberal racism is when a therapist tells me that an asian american political scientist once said identity politics is divisive.
Translation: The non-racialized person should hold the unique privilege of politicizing minority identities, but that same privilege should not extend to racialized personhoods in how we view and speak of ourselves or acknowledging how we are viewed and spoken of by others.
Of course neither party should mention the concept of whiteness, that would be WILDLY inappropriate.
I made an appointment to see a social worker at a free clinic, for assistance to severe lingering legal and financial entanglements with my violent parents.
She told me she wanted me to go stay “somewhere safe” and we would talk again tomorrow. She gave me her number “just in case”. I thought I was going to a shelter.
When the psych ward doors shut behind me and my belongings were taken away, a psychiatrist came in to see me. The first thing he asked me was what insurance I have. Confused, I said I was coming from the free clinic.
This agitated him. He told me medical care isn’t free, they need my insurance information. I said I was covered under my parents’ insurance, one of the things I needed help severing ties with, and in the meantime I can pay out of pocket.
This enraged him. “Call your daddy, YOU NEED TO CALL YOUR DADDY”. I stood up and informed him I will be leaving. He told me I could not. This was when I learned that I had been involuntarily committed. Confused, I asked “what do you mean?”.
He became apoplectic. “You think this kind of thing is cheap? They are going to send you upstairs, it’s over a thousand dollars a night. You think you can dodge this? We will garnish your wages, we will garnish your student loans payments, CALL YOUR DADDY.”
I screamed for a nurse then invoked my entitlement to a printed copy of patient’s rights, the only piece of legal knowledge I had of the system at the time.
I called the social worker the next morning and she did not answer. Later I asked the head nurse to call for me. She could not reach her either. I asked the psychiatry intern to call the social worker. He informed me she had gone on vacation.
Based on this behavior, I was diagnosed with psychosis, paranoid delusions, and borderline personality disorder.
“But the reality for my patients who are hospitalized against their will is that they have been running naked in the streets, or spending tens of thousands of dollars that they do not have, or screaming at their bosses and coworkers for poisoning them, or attacking their elderly parents, and so much more.”
The first time I was committed, I went to a appointment set a week in advance to see a social worker about legal and financial protection against my abusive parents. She lied and told me I was going to a domestic violence shelter. When I realized I was being committed, I asked the nurses why, they said I had scared the social worker. What did I do or say that was so scary? No one would answer. The attending psychiatrist threatened to financially destroy me if I did not acquiesce to violating HIPPA by giving them the contact information of my violent father.
The second time I was committed, I was walking down the street talking on the phone like a normal person when I was assaulted by FIVE police officers and prone restrained. The official report said I was off my head on drugs and exhibiting superhuman strength. I am a visibly gender non-conforming POC person, and I was visiting a friend who lived in a very nice, very white neighborhood.
These were some of the worst experiences of my life, I hate and despise nearly every person I met working inside the system. I smiled at the people who treated me like a subhuman animal and thanked them, and told them I felt better. Because that was the only was to melt back into the shadows and escape the brutality.
You will never see or hear the truth while working inside the system. People like me are invisible to you. The harms you put us through will always be invisible to you. We will lie through our teeth and put on a happy smile and treat you like the saints you think you are because that is the only way to escape the subhuman status you impose on us.
I function pretty well without “psychiatric treatment”, and I would function even better without the societal bigotry and persecution that only intensifies against me should I openly acknowledge being subject to such oppressions.
” yoga, tai-chi, mindfulness”
Yes, I’m sure being prescribed westernized white-washed versions of our own cultural practices will be very helpful, on top of the fact that meditation has been contraindicated for treating long term persistent trauma.
Or is it the view that Asians don’t count as BIPOC?
“Helping clients to better understand the harmful social structures that contribute to their distress”
Do you think we are not already aware? It’s amazing, I’ve written on the establishment twisting Fanon into some kind of ignorance/internalized-colonialism indictment against those underserved by healthcare. And here it is.
” Additionally, the authors call attention to approaches that address underlying societal issues, such as access to healthcare, housing, and safety.”
Why is this considered a sub-category of social work? Why can’t social workers lead with this as their professional purview, and leave our internal lives alone when uninvited? Continuing to gatekeep access to social services and material aid behind a gentler, friendlier psychiatric evaluation doesn’t sound like decolonization. It sounds like Mother Theresa.
The Situational Therapist on youtube has compiled a video of testimonies from minorities’ experiences of racist attitudes from mental health professionals.
“Rather, the aim is to break the vicious cycle by intervening at the belief level, primarily by bringing about experiences that challenge and disprove the beliefs.”
When the “therapeutic space” attempts to disprove beliefs rooted in narratives that the dominant classist, racist, patriarchal, gender biased, queerphobic, ableist hegemony will not and cannot acknowledge, this is called EPISTEMIC VIOLENCE, or more popularly, GASLIGHTING.
MINDFULNESS as practiced by the anglo-western-psycho-hegemony has proven to be RETRAUMATIZING for those who have lived through sustained violence and abuse. Not to mention alienating to those raised in the eastern traditions from which you borrowed and sanitized. Not to mention offensive to those with extensive experience and understanding of how this tool of RELIGION has been used to suppress the political conscientiousness of the oppressed classes time and time again.
The therapy room often serves as a staging ground for colonization. The minds of the subjugated other: the last unconquered territory.
“Wow you are very well spoken”
“But this is America”
“You know, this asian american political scientist said identity politics is divisive”
-Actual therapist
Translation: The dominant class should be free to racialize and otherize me, but I should not politicize the fact that I am being categorized differently.
(Frances Fukuyama is a realpolitik neo-con of the Reagan and W. Bush administrations, famously one of the forty signatories on a letter calling for war against Iraq)
Bonus: speak with praise and envy of indigenous culture, but through a lens of exoticism and fetishization, speak as if they are extinct, and reject contemporary social practice of such values as unamerican.
Extra credit: demand seamless assimilation from second-generation inheritors of multicultural legacies while referring to these natural born citizens as immigrants in the same breath.
Extra, extra credit: Blame institutionalized prejudice on the targeted demographics through endless articles expounding on minority populations for having “stigma” against mental healthcare, for being prejudiced against psychic ailments, for collective ignorance of “science”.
MY BODY MY CHOICE.
No. The problem begins with the broken, non-empirical, and culturally biased and fluid definition held by the established hegemony on what activities even constitutes “Self-harm”.
Leaving that aside, allowing for your “self-harm” paradigm: it is not always a cry for help or an attempt to communicate. I’m so sick of this narrative. Devaluing attempts to convey meaning through dialogue and pedestaling physical drama is a pathology of the bio-psycho-western medical establishment, eternally projected onto its victims’ systems of meaning. The audacity to presume epistemology on behalf of others without doing a shred of inquiry. Forget medical science, this does not even strike within the wider circles of what constitutes social science.
I bang my forehead against the wall as a symptom of sheer overwhelming mental pain. I cut as a private personal ritual. I cut as a form of tension relief. Others engage in “self-harm” activities as a way to regain a sense of control over their bodies and lives.
And it’s nobody else’s business, INCLUDING when and if I ask for help for other problems, the “self-harm” is PRIVATE unless I CHOOSE otherwise, and authorities are NOT ENTITLED TO PRY.
My visceral suffering alters how my physical form moves through space. These assumptions continue to prove that the majority of those with enough privilege to join the ranks of titled professionals simply lack intellectual/emotional capacity to understand the BENTHIC DEPTHS of social oppression and human suffering.
leftists and liberals hold extremely divergent views on ethics and civics.
Your rhetoric betrays a dead giveaway that you have never actually witnessed or spoken to someone on the left; there is nothing more insulting to a leftist than to be lumped in with establishment Democrat values. Even the “authoritarian Marxists”, as you put it (they’re called tankies, dude, more proof you have never spoken or listened to anyone on the left) despise having their brand of state authoritarianism conflated with liberal corporate authoritarianism — two wildly different sets of principles.
Liberal refers to values passed down from Enlightenment era philosophers, and is the bedrock of American political thinking. What are referred to as Republicans and Democrats in this country are both liberal. Those associated with the “alt-right” have referred to themselves as “classical liberals” as a distinction from “neoliberals”.
The “Left” (anarcho-syndicalists? social/civil libertarians? marxists? trotskyites? social democrats with their by-definition-pretty-credible political organizing? Unionizers? Noam Chomsky?) includes many of the OGs when it comes to standing against coercive medical practices and monopolistic trade interests, when it comes to actually winning battles that we benefit from to this day.
You preach nuance and adopt a username that refers to the taijitu iconic of my spiritual faith, Daoism, yet you lump the “entire so-called Left” into a single monolith. Many who follow Daoist principles can be considered a Chinese parallel for the extreme far left. In fact, Leftism in the west has a fairly well known streak of falling in with Daoism, there is an entire branch of thinking unique to the Anglosphere that is derived from philosophical inspirations through studying the Dao blended with anarchist political principles.
If you think lockdowns are bad you should look up what happened in the company towns of coal-mining Appalachia and how they fought and lost. The name by which those leftists revolutionaries were identified? Rednecks. Do you think that crowd – historically or contemporaneously – would appreciate being referred to as upstream of corporate liberals?
i liked your whole write-up in this thread, just one little point regarding “marxism as practiced”
considering historic states like communist china or the soviet union – technically speaking the economic and governmental structure is classified as “state capitalism” — as in the state owns all the capital.
This structure is about as marxist/communist as the nazis were socialists: in name only.
As for other socialist states, like in Latin America example, there is no way to meaningfully analyze the success/failure of those state and economic structures, due to imperialist interests (usually American, usually in service to the agenda for neoliberal capitalist hegemony), through various tactics like exploitative international trade practices and political interventionism conducted through the CIA.
This is a fairly crude summation and does not get into the nuances. (such as Vietnam, Revolutionary Catalan, or the anarchist aborigines of Taiwan, a few more topics for anyone who is curious to learn more)
as the feminists say: “The personal is political”
different political paradigms throughout history have had better or worse success at combatting crime, illiteracy, malnutrition, etc.
psychiatry has been used as a political weapon throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
it is highly relevant and entirely appropriate to assess the institutions of mental healthcare, especially coercive elements, through a civic-minded lens.
I can’t believe that slipped my mind. There’s just so many glaring issues.
The fact that you promote CBT for those with cPTSD and childhood trauma indicates you have little experience in this arena.
One way to improve suicide prevention is to stop using police with handcuffs as the first point of contact.
Another improvement would be to force hotlines to be transparent about call-tracing.
Another would be to actually keep proper records on involuntary hospitalization, something that does not exist in over half of the United States, according to UCLA public health research.
Another would be to crack down on the misuse of restraints, a widely documented epidemic condemned by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.
Another would be to make even the slightest effort to combat the institutionalized racism and misogyny in coercive care as evidenced by countries that do collect complete records on forced psychiatric practices.
Another would be to reform the kangaroo court of involuntary commitment to their obligation to honor habeas corpus.
Another way would be to reform the sham psychiatric intake process to align with evidence-based diagnostic discipline.
Another would be to provide watchdog access to locked wards to protect a population that cannot defend against malpractice as victims of testimonial injustice.
Another would be to demand mental healthcare legislation and funding to set trackable KPIs.
Another would be to draw a hard legal line between voluntary and involuntary psychiatry and enforce consequences for institutions that fail to provide informed consent for “voluntary” patients.
Another would be to include trauma-informed care to suicide services which everyone can keep pretending exists but public health data across the board indicate otherwise, which fail to document whether patients are being abused, which causes institutions to empower and enable abusers and thwart victims’ attempts to escape abuse.
Another would be to investigate institutions that commit fraud and warehouse patients under for-profit forced “care” illegally, something the DOD and FBI are looking into right now with UHS Florida.
Another would be to fund investigative journalism into how many private prison companies also own involuntary psychiatry facilities for ~noncriminal~ patients.
Another would be to formalize Psychiatric Advance Directives and make them legally honored documents.
I got more. This is an abbreviated list.
I was never stigmatized for having a mental illness diagnosis. I was stigmatized for rejecting a persecutory label that obscured the fact that I was legally, financially, and physically vulnerable to my abusive family and daring to criticize the mental healthcare industry and exercising my right to revoke consent when the person who has not lifted a finger in violence — unlike psychiatry, unlike my family — is scapegoated as the dangerous one.
As an Asexual Aromantic I can personally attest that despite the lukewarm changes made to HSDD diagnosis in the DSM-V, Ace and Aro communities online report multiple cases every month of individuals being subject to both blatant and edge cases of conversion therapy within secular mental healthcare. Occasionally we also get reports of people being referred to sex(conversion) therapy through GPs and OB-GYNs even when patients indicate that they are perfectly comfortable with their A-spec orientation.
some vocabulary that might be helpful to bridge this dispute:
“centralized economy” vs. “market economy”. ergo: Centralized communism (USSR), centralized capitalism (CCP), market capitalism (most countries today, but oligarchic influences feel very much like centralized capitalism that took the scenic route), market socialism (hopefully someday, hopefully less of a disaster). Still a rough outline, there’s more if you keep drilling down into the nuances: syndicalism, neomercantilism, corporatism, tribal-/clan- based economic systems, Shari’a…
The term persecution is a fairly useful umbrella that covers political disenfranchisement, ethnic bias, racism, cultural erasure, ideological suppression, economic exclusion, physical subjugation, oppression through soft power, etc.
Liberal racism is when a therapist tells me that an asian american political scientist once said identity politics is divisive.
Translation: The non-racialized person should hold the unique privilege of politicizing minority identities, but that same privilege should not extend to racialized personhoods in how we view and speak of ourselves or acknowledging how we are viewed and spoken of by others.
Of course neither party should mention the concept of whiteness, that would be WILDLY inappropriate.
I made an appointment to see a social worker at a free clinic, for assistance to severe lingering legal and financial entanglements with my violent parents.
She told me she wanted me to go stay “somewhere safe” and we would talk again tomorrow. She gave me her number “just in case”. I thought I was going to a shelter.
When the psych ward doors shut behind me and my belongings were taken away, a psychiatrist came in to see me. The first thing he asked me was what insurance I have. Confused, I said I was coming from the free clinic.
This agitated him. He told me medical care isn’t free, they need my insurance information. I said I was covered under my parents’ insurance, one of the things I needed help severing ties with, and in the meantime I can pay out of pocket.
This enraged him. “Call your daddy, YOU NEED TO CALL YOUR DADDY”. I stood up and informed him I will be leaving. He told me I could not. This was when I learned that I had been involuntarily committed. Confused, I asked “what do you mean?”.
He became apoplectic. “You think this kind of thing is cheap? They are going to send you upstairs, it’s over a thousand dollars a night. You think you can dodge this? We will garnish your wages, we will garnish your student loans payments, CALL YOUR DADDY.”
I screamed for a nurse then invoked my entitlement to a printed copy of patient’s rights, the only piece of legal knowledge I had of the system at the time.
I called the social worker the next morning and she did not answer. Later I asked the head nurse to call for me. She could not reach her either. I asked the psychiatry intern to call the social worker. He informed me she had gone on vacation.
Based on this behavior, I was diagnosed with psychosis, paranoid delusions, and borderline personality disorder.