spending 10 weeks (and counting) institutionalized has convinced me more then I could ever even imagine about the absolute necessity of psych abolition. one of the more crushing things that I experience in here is the amount that patients are forced to support each other in secrecy. speaking openly about our struggles is prohibited unless we use the most sanitized language possible and struggle in the right way, not in a messy or defiant or angry way. the fact that we have to wait for staff to get out of ear shot before we actually check in on each other or give each other a hug—that fucking kills me some days. when you’re in an environment where your movement is regulated and your ability to go outside and choose how to spend your time and have privacy in the bathroom and wear what you want and have control over who touches your body and have control over what goes in your body is not given to you, it feels incredibly fucking dehumanizing when that control is extended to reach into what you say and even what you think. many patients have echoed the sentiment that some of the most healing moments we’ve found in here is support from other patients and getting to share our experiences and sadness and anger and joy. all of which we have to do with varying levels of secrecy.
residential treatment for eating disorders is not as carceral as psych incarceration that is legally involuntary, but it is still shaped from carceral logic that defines the way our days work. coercion happens every single day and we are denied the basic dignity of acknowledgment of the coercion we are faced with. Patients in here are constantly reminded we are here “voluntarily,” which ignores the many factors of pressure—whether from family, outpatient treatment teams, or simply by the fact that in the United States there are no alternative options for getting meal support six times a day and therapy multiple times a week and time off work and medical stabilization without also having to agree to give up immense amounts of autonomy. that is not a free choice, and the dozens of choices presented to us every week are also not free from coercion: “get a feeding tube or get taken to the ER where you will get one anyway” “agree to come back to residential or get kicked out of program” “stop self harming or you will go to the psych ward”. We cannot make truly free and autonomous choices when there are always consequences for the choice that our treatment team doesn’t want us to make. If there were other options that enabled us to be treated more like humans, I sincerely doubt that all of us patients would be consenting to being on a locked ward where we have a bedtime, are tubed against our will, where we cannot take a shit in peace and where some of us haven’t breathed in fresh air for weeks and weeks.
The residential treatment center I’m at is one where I genuinely feel quite privileged—I can do some art projects, have my phone for parts of the day and can sometimes go outside. These were not things I could have even dreamed of when I was psychiatrically incarcerated in the psych ward and where I faced abuse, restraint, isolation, forced drugging, and institutionalized sexual assault every day. I am very aware of how much worse the psych system gets (something else many patients resonate with—we whisper about psych wards with hushed tones and fear in our voices because we would do almost anything not to go back. ) I am also very aware of how my whiteness has kept some of the worst parts of the system from me and how being white affects the way staff treats me, what threats are used towards me, how having hospitalizations and treatment history on my medical record impacts my future in a different way, how that affects what risks I can and cannot take in treatment and what responsibilities come with that, and how the societal perception of eating disorders as “an issue only affecting white girls” is inseparable from the privileges + dynamics of residential treatment specifically.
the whole psych system is throughly intertwined with so many concepts of weaponized safety, punishment, and control that also shape the prison system + the general American consciousness. as abolitionists we have to be finding these connections and naming them, because otherwise we see people saying shit like “replace cops with social workers and prisons with psych wards,” and we end up with incarceration popping up under a hundred new names. abolition doesn’t just mean abolishing the physical buildings—it also means fighting the cop + psychiatrist in your head, fighting against carceral logic when you see it in your community, and refusing to accept watered down versions of incarceration as a valid option for any kind of rehabilitation and treatment.
Okay to reblog.
