Reply #138: I think I'm coming at this from a very different standpoint... [View All]

[Banazir]

I don't want to discuss my full personal history with you, but I think I might be coming from a very different standpoint than you. It's not dishonest, though. It just comes from too much exposure to that system (it wasn't a one-time thing, it was years) and the realities of it which are so much messier than they look on paper. With dangerously violent or even murderous staff who are respected in the community and get away with things, while inmates can get in trouble for putting a toe out of line and whose stories are not believed because of who they are. Everything I saw made me into a psychiatric survivor/ex-patient activist once I left.

Having been there for a long time, rather than just brief visits, I saw a lot of people. I saw that we were all being force-fitted into a model that didn't work for many of us. If we were not fixed (whatever that meant) by their particular brands of psychotherapy and medication, we were deemed unfixable (since I was born the way I am and my particular condition is not curable, I rapidly acquired that label among countless others). Our problems were viewed exclusively as located inside ourselves, because the purely medical model was more expedient to the staff, and we were viewed as having 'illnesses'. We were not allowed to see it any differently than they did. Even violence in self-defense got you labeled a 'violent patient', and that was of course a very bad thing.

I wouldn't dare try to evaluate someone based on their actions while living under those conditions. Because you become something a little less than a person when you enter, you become a case. And cases act differently than people normally do. Were there people there I didn't want to see with a gun? Certainly. Do I just mean the inmates? Certainly not. And if anything my experiences there taught me that you cannot predict from the outside who is going to do something awful and who is not, and also that often the most respectable-looking people are the ones committing some of the worst atrocities.

Have I recovered? I don't think I'll ever recover from institutionalization. I've never talked to anyone who's been there very long and not changed on some fairly fundamental levels. A lot of what I learned there, though, is that what is written and what is actually done are two different things. There are false parts of my records, whether by carelessness or deliberately lying I don't know, probably a mix. Those parts of my records have more credibility to many people than I myself do because the words of professionals, even careless errors and lies, trump the accurate actions and words of a
crazy and developmentally disabled person.

I do still have a few different DSM diagnoses. They describe me, as far as descriptions go. But I am wary of viewing everything related to them as an illness (or even, in the case of the way I was born, something to recover from -- how and why would I recover from being born with an atypical brain?). Wary because I have trouble with turning every part of how I function (or don't function -- I'm considered in medical terms to be severely disabled) in the world into a symptom. Wary because the world is more complex than that.

That complexity, which is the real truth I have seen in the system, is why I don't think that having been commmitted is a good predictor of dangerousness for the rest of a person's life. I would even go so far as to say that many people who would become violent in a psychiatric ward would not become violent elsewhere.

I am not ignorant enough to think that means everyone, but I am also not ignorant enough to shut my eyes to the fact that things are more complicated than dividing the world into 'dangerous crazy people' and 'safe sane people'. I do think that people who've been in the system are scapegoated for violence a lot (and a lot of that is spearheaded by people who want harsher commitment laws), a lot more than we as a whole deserve.

I also think a lot of people can do things that outside the system can be considered normal but inside the system are considered dangerous horrid violence and immediately punished. For instance someone might occasionally get frustrated and hit a wall. If a person does that in a psychiatric ward they will often get restrained and it will be taken as a symptom of an illness, whether it is or not. That double-standard is what I am wary of, and I don't think all of this can be brushed aside too lightly.

That, if I have to be honest (and actually I have a great deal of trouble with lying so I don't know that I could lie effectively if I tried), is why I am wary of stereotyping people from being in the system. There are simply too many variables at play. I personally think I'm too much of a klutz to own a gun (I'd probably shoot myself in the foot), but I don't think I'm any more likely to deliberately harm anyone with one than the average person on the street. This is despite a lot of things about me, including still today, that would probably horrify people if they saw me with a weapon.

This has been a long post, but I'm trying to get across how much more complicated things are in this area, which I've studied in a fair bit of depth, than people make them sound. It's certainly more difficult to deal with the world in this manner, but I think it's worth trying rather than stereotyping a whole group of people wholesale. Commitment involves so many factors, only some of which even originate within the person, that it's simply not a predictor of a person's future behavior. I know people who have been committed in the past, I would not consider them 'recovered' in any conventional sense, and I'd trust them with my life, in fact I have legal documents that state exactly that. There's simply more to a person than an event in their life.