This came up in my health care forum.
Right now, you can legally detain someone medically when they are a danger to themselves or others for up to 72hrs. The details vary by state, but this is how we lock down individuals trying to suicide or someone mentally off the rails making threats of violence.
This variation on that law would also make opposition to Trump qualify.
Civil commitment can follow as with individuals who have profound mental illness and are not safe to be out in the world.
This is the loudest scream that democracy is dead short of hauling people out into the street and shooting them.
It’s important to note the police are currently the people who bring individuals in for the 72hr mental health holds.
LOL, the stuff of nightmares.
Quite literally in my case.
PTSD from “psychiatric care” is pretty difficult to deal with (and understudied. fascinating how PTSD only garners you empathy and understanding if you’re a combat rep, despite the fact that most with PTSD do have it from sexual abuse and possibly inpatient experiences - suicide rates skyrocket after involuntary commitment, but why do any form of investigation into something that might hurt profits?)
If you’re afraid of wasps, you aren’t expected to go ask a wasp how to deal with it. If, however, you experience severe abuse at the hands of mental health professionals and you live in an area where mental health care = the police, getting any form of help is pretty difficult.
Especially when they consider your gender identity and sexuality as manifestations of mental illness/further evidence that they don’t need to look into the tech beating the shit out of you.
You’re speaking directly to me. I am a veteran with PTSD. It was from sexual assault and the accompanying involuntary mental health lock up after I went to the doctor to seek help with my sleep.
I was told I could not claim the sexual assault because I would have been kicked out for sleeping with someone that was married and for being gay (this was before they repealed don’t ask don’t tell)…… I would have been court martial and thrown out they said.
Lucky for me I’m an infantry marine with a combat tour so my PTSD gets assumed to be combat and I don’t have to explain much to anyone. But fuck, how am I supposed to go and talk this out with doctors that I don’t trust? I don’t trust the system at all. I was let down by low command (squad), middle command(battalion command), and high command (regimental command). I was then failed by the nurse (corpsman), PCP (battalion doctor), psych (some fuckface colonel), his nurse (another corpsman), and the facilities personnel (nurses, doctors, psychiatrists).
And to compound on all this, I was involuntarily locked up when I was 14(??) because my parents let me get so fucked up that I blacked out and they called cops saying they didn’t know what was wrong with me……. What was wrong was that I was 14 and handed booze and pills…… the fuck did they expect?!? Obviously both times I ended up getting released but that doesn’t remove the inhumanity of it all. The treatment as if you are “other” to them. Like a dog or some shit.
So I’ve had trauma from psych wards from adolescence and also my time in the marines.
Sorry for the rant. Just triggered so much inside me with your comment.
I don’t know if you’re seeking care (and I hate unsolicited mental health advice on the internet)- but something that has helped me is seeking out specifically a sex therapist about the abuse and the way it manifests elsewhere. Her philosophy is more holistic/social cultural.
I also have another therapist that comes to my apartment. The power imbalance is less scary - it’s my castle.
I also start any convo with a prospective shrink by letting them know that I strongly am against CBT and do not believe that it works for trauma. A therapist doesn’t need to be anti-CBT, but the way that they react to a self-advocate is really helpful in seeing if they respect their patients autonomy or not.
The dicey thing is that our system is not at all set up for dealing with chronic suicidal ideation. There’s so much fear around mandatory reporting, the idea that someone might talk about not wanting to live, go home and off themselves, and whoops! there’s your license. Having a conversation with a prospective shrink about what their “line” is there is very helpful - that you can make Luigi jokes and not be sectioned.
I have met and hung out with a staggering variety of monsters. so much so I might be doxxing myself if I really described the breadth. If you can think of a kind of monster that exists, I have probably met them. I might even have known one well.
I have never met anyone who can reach quite the degree of sadist or control freak as a psychiatrist. Psychopaths aren’t as willing to lie spontaneously and throw people away. future cult leaders aren’t as quick on the self justification trigger. I genuinely believe sydney gottlieb was one of the less malignant assholes that profession has ever produced.
which is a shame, because the pharmacology of the mind is something I’m deeply interested in. there’s cool fucking science there, and we will never see it done.
I think it’s even worse than that. Some of us actually rely on psychiatry. Some of us for controlled medications no less. I can’t just decide to not partake in the system because I cannot function without psychiatric medications, but can with them. And so I’ve had to learn to play their games and play into what they think my mental illness is like.
And that’s before we get to the abuse. I’ve been gaslit by psychiatrists and I’ve had it easy. I know for certain that I will never voluntarily commit myself after the stories I’ve heard.
I can’t deal with it. my choices are street drugs, or just embracing being fucked up. no amount of nightmares or hallucinations is worth dealing with a psychiatrist. you can do a shit ton more towards fixing your shit without drugs than they tell you, if you figure your shit out. it’s rarely enough, often involving major changes and adaptations, and there’s basically no chance you’ll exist within normative society, but there’s more than nothing out here.
The power dynamic is the scary part. PTSD isn’t just trauma - it’s trauma with powerlessness and an invalidated narrative.
Saying “hey I need help, I’m struggling with not wanting to leave the house or be alive” - and then losing your rights. Being forced into a room which isn’t clean. The threat that they can medicate you if you annoy them to much (asking to speak to an advocate, asking to file a grievance).
It’s strange that suicidal ideation is considered enough to make you “crazy.” I don’t understand why the response to someone cogently explaining the reasons they want to die (and most of those reasons being fairly rational responses) = “this person is crazy and should be a ward of the state for the next couple days.”
They also get to present this as the only option - “oh, you want 988 to let people just die over the phone?” Well, the research indicates that suicide rates spike not just immediately after institutionalization - but the effects continues for YEARS LATER.
The charge nurse joked that even with the 72-hour hold, weekends didn’t count and they would be happy to keep me for five days if I didn’t shut up.
They also didn’t properly discharge me/provide paperwork. I lost my job because of this. I was already reluctant to seek out help (my mother was a serious Munchausen by proxy - she sent me to institutions as a child telling them I was violent/on drugs/etc - I was a straight edge teen that didn’t even look at porn because I was scared of what she would do.)
Instead of help, I got another set of memories to crush me at 4 in the morning. I got mistreated for being trans, which further contributes to the atmosphere of fear I live in. I lost my job, which is already a struggle because I need to save up to get out of here.
I’m sick of people suggesting therapy as the first response to anyone describing mental health struggles. I’ve met so few capable of anything more than providing the CBT worksheets that seem to be all they’re trained to do nowadays.
Psychiatry and psychology as fields ultimately seem more about the enforcement of social norms than about benefiting the patient.
It’s also incredibly fucked up that some forms of suicidal ideation is considered normal religious behavior too. Longing for heaven because the world is a sinful place is considered normal and healthy in my area, but longing for death because the world is fucked up means you need to be locked away.
I’ve got persistent ideation because I was raised with the former, but as soon as I stopped believing in the afterlife, people started getting real weird about it.
Interesting I’ve had the opposite experience. All the psychiatrists I’ve met, worked with, and been treated by have been kind and wonderful. The only bad experience I’ve had has been dealing with a cruel PhD psychologist, who I think just hates men because of something in her past and took it out on the people she had power over.
are you, by any chance, a straight cis white dude with some amount of class privilege, and possibly some professional qualifications? I ask, knowing the answer.
This reads like low-key Scientology propaganda.
Plenty of people who are not scientologists believe psychiatry and psychology are corruption incarnate. Sometimes I wonder whether scientology was invented by psychiatry to discredit those who point out its lack of efficacy, cruelty, and financial exploitation of vulnerable and naive people.
I have trouble telling the part sometimes, to be honest. I guess scientologists tend to be better actors and worse scifi authors than psychiatrists, but how often does that come up when you’re meeting someone?
Only in that it’s critical of the field of psychology as it is on the ground? I’m not a Scientologist, and I don’t think the cans are a substitute for care.
The state I live in was under DOJ investigation for using the police/prisons as default responses to behavioral health care. Even the people I call to report my own experience of abuse or children I advocate for - they are all like, yeah, all of the facilities here are like this.
It’s not that psychology is fundamentally bad (although we need to excise Freud entirely) - it’s that in practice there’s very little accountability and a lot of abuse that is covered up due to differences in power. I was able to call and report the fact that I was physically assaulted - the man I saw drugged in a holding cell will probably never be able to express what happened to him a way that will ever be taken seriously or lead to meaningful action.
CBT is flat out ineffective for many people and conditions. It is a serious problem that the majority of practitioners are only taught CBT and will outright lie if you tell them you don’t want CBT.