' Check out some excerpts from “Abolition Must Include Psychiatry” — written by two of our team members! 🧠🌱🌻

READ THE PIECE: https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2020/07/22/abolition-must-include-psychiatry/

Image 1: As we talk about prison abolition, discourse that was largely founded and remains spearheaded by revolutionary Black Women, we must reckon with the history of psychiatry, and better understand how the mental health system perpetuates processes of criminalization, policing, and surveillance.

Image 2: Abolition means that all the cages come down, including those that function under the guise of psychiatric ‘care.’

Image 3: There is a dangerous tale in the US, one based on a myth of the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric asylums. We are told that the asylum died and is a thing of the past. We are told that, now, “patients” have rights, are treated with human dignity, and are not criminalized for their neurodivergence. We’re told that restraints and forcible medication only happen in “extreme” cases. We’re told that the mental health care system is here to help us, support us, and “treat” us. And now, when abolition has entered mainstream discourse, we’re told that this very system should be considered an alternative to incarceration in jails and prisons. But those of us who have survived psychiatric incarceration know that not only did the asylum never die — it is, and always was, another prison. Knowing the truth of these myths, we work towards writing a new story.

Image 4: Every state (and Washington DC) allows for a person to be involuntarily held for “treatment, observation, or stabilization.” Though specifications vary by state, the three main forms of commitment are: emergency hospitalization for evaluation, involuntary inpatient commitment, and “assisted” outpatient treatment. This means that other people may decide (without your consent) that you present a risk to yourself or others, and need to be removed from or surveilled within your community for “treatment.”

Image 5: Prison culture is not solvable by ‘funding the mental health system’ more robustly. The mental ‘health’ system is fundamentally carceral, meaning that it is one of the many kindred systems that function to contain and surveil people, take away their locus of control, isolate them from their communities, and limit their freedom. As it functions in America and in all places touched by colonialism, psychiatry is rooted in torture, white supremacy, and a culture of shame and punishment. Yes, the asylum lives on — and the police love the asylum.

Image 6: The abolition of psychiatry does not mean that no one is allowed to identify with psychiatric diagnoses that they feel serve them, or that no one is allowed to continue taking psychiatric medications they find effective. It does mean, however, that the notion of ‘mental illness’ was invented to pathologize logical responses to the stress and trauma that are omnipresent in a world brutalized by colonialism and capitalism. Psychiatry has been described as a “medicalized colonizing of lands, peoples, bodies, and minds.”

Image 7: A notable example of psychiatry’s colonial intentions was the diagnosis of ‘drapetomania’: the mental ‘disease’ that explained why enslaved Black people in the Antebellum south ran away from their death camps (the ‘treatment’ for which was to treat them more ‘like children’). As China Mills states in Globalizing Mental Health, “distress caused by socio-economic conditions (and often neoliberal economic reforms) comes to be rearticulated as ‘mental illness’, treatable using techniques that draw upon similar rationales to those that led to distress initially.”

Image 8: There is no way for us all to be free without dismantling the reductive systems of control that enforce state-serving notions of normalcy and rightness, the consequences of which are fatal for so many of us. Spiritually, they may be fatal for us all.

Image 9: Disability Justice and Restorative and Transformative Justice ask us to imagine the world we want to live in, collectively, and practice those ideas and values each day. These frameworks give us the tools needed to shape a society that supports our healing. Non-carceral, loving forms of community care and crisis response are already evolving around us, to help us write this post-prison story. The foundation has been laid, but together, we must do the work of building, imagining, and creating the new worlds we want to live in. As Frantz Fanon brilliantly stated, “if it is society that is ‘sick’, then it is ‘society that needs to be replaced.” '

https://www.facebook.com/473413859403386/posts/3175277202550358/

Check out these 2 new books on suicide both of which include a chapter co-written by Caroline Mazel-Carlton and Sera Davidow of the @WesternMassRLC:

Alternatives to Suicide: https://t.co/gn8oZNQYtr
The Broader View of Suicide: https://t.co/V3vZwJdcSj

#Alt2su #SuicidePrevention https://t.co/rg2sUotXWM

https://twitter.com/WesternMassRLC/status/1253331039642103808?s=19

What are the (numerous concrete) reasons that Telegram messenger is such a helpful platform for sharing resources and building community?

What makes Telegram messenger different as a social media tool set especially considering what people are discovering about how social media affects them?

1. Lack of predatory dopamine/seratonin alogrythm
2. Easy to view colors, no violent contrast
3. Allows both private and public function
4. Can function as neural network substitute
5. Volume capacity for groups, chat, members allows for developing content
6. Both mobile and desktop applications allow for both on the spot conversations as well as lengthy developed publishing
7. Lack of targeted ads

8. It's easy to change the colors and change to several differently colored dark modes also!

9. This has been a major disability and communications support aid for my neurological function.

10. Does not artificially restrict access to speech to text.

11. Allows for ease of audio recording even with Internet connectivity turned off (supports decreased EMF exposures).

12. Allows for audio communications of severely disabled individuals when no other form of communication is possible.

13. Includes functions that allow for custom bots to help with tasks; for instance, to transcribe audio messages that are a individual's only means of communicating at the time.

Re: Trees —- and trees made of trees —- that heal and stabilize ecologies. Gifts of the Aspen Trees from (the trees! and) our friend Steven Morgan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBmXWWvvWlk

' This is the story of how I became whole. Some days, it feels like both fire and water live within me. They dance and swirl around one another. In the morning when I wake up, each bows to the other, honoring themselves as equals, as beautiful. When I go to sleep at night they wish each other good dreams. They teach me how it could have been when Columbus first stepped upon Taino shores: a meeting of two long lost brothers, embracing each other and celebrating their unique cultures. They teach me how things can be for our children in the future.

Because that’s what matters most, doesn’t it? Not how the story goes… but how it ends. We each hold a pen. Let us co-author a story of how humanity fell in love with itself and its Mother Earth once again. '

http://moonmagazine.org/lyla-june-reclaiming-our-indigenous-european-roots-2018-12-02/

https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10161352224560372&id=733245371