it is so incredibly unfair that inpatient psychiatrists are given the legitimacy to make sweeping judgements about our madness, twisting and shaping and classifying it into the schema that reassures their worldview when they have only ever seen us in conditions of confinement. if i am locked up, put in restraints, drugged against my will, kept from seeing the outside world for sometimes weeks at a time—my madness will respond incredibly differently to the hostile conditions of a total institution. How in the world can psychiatrists extend their analysis to make judgements about my illness/wellness/way of being in the world/way of being in my head? they have only ever seen the way I am Mad when i am surviving confinement. they have no idea what I look like when i am free.

of course i will start pacing for hours when I am locked up with nowhere to go. of course i will start screaming, and tear apart my room, and hurt myself when i am given no other options for exercising autonomy. of course i will become paranoid and start hearing things when I am under 24/7 surveillance, 15 minute checks, and cameras in every room. but every action i take is then used as evidence to fit me into a system of symptoms and diagnosis that are further used to justify my continued incarceration—it becomes an inescapable labyrinth, it becomes an irremovable cycle. every attempt to argue against their flawed interpretations just ends up as another bullet point on my medical record: "Patient lacks insight."

psychiatrists treat themselves as inherently and perfectly neutral—seeing themself not as an actor who is actively engaging and contributing to our experiences but as a removable spectator who can somehow cordon themselves off from madness (lest they catch it from us—don't you know madness is contagious?) the first confinement of psychiatry is the kind of confinement the psychiatrist does to themself: locking their emotions/perceptions/opinions behind the guise of scientific, objective neutrality. there is no psychiatry without confinement: they are bedfellows who rely on each other from the very conception of the field.

i could make a satirical joke about diagnosing psychiatrists with "Thinks They Can Be Neutral While Ignoring Their Material Conditions" disorder, but i don't want to reify their system of classifications even a little bit. What I want is to destroy the entire fucking system. it drives me crazy to watch this dynamic play out again and again and again with no recognition that putting people in conditions of confinement drastically shapes the way that we can then exist in that space.

it makes me sick—it makes me MAD.

The Woman and the Dragon, Apocalypse of John of Bedford, 13th century

ALT

Born in the USA in 1910, Pauli Murray was assigned female at birth, but was in his own words “...one of nature’s experiments, a girl who should’ve been a boy…” Pauli spent his life fighting for the rights of women and Black people in the USA. His groundbreaking legal theories and ideas about intersectionality remain as important today as they were over 50 years ago.

Check out our podcast on Pauli to learn more

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#my #photography

she’s so beautiful…

youll be able to find books and movies and music that change your life until the day you die. that's pretty good

The Night of the Hunter
1955 | dir. Charles Laughton.

is there any way to turn off the tumblr update i hate this

sorry but like this is the aesthetic blogging site. the update ruins any flow we had before. scrolling my following page is so disjointed now??? it's no longer the posts that are visually weighted as most important. really fucking unfortunate.

and if staff truly wants things to be more accessible they’d let ppl choose to make text bigger including (and most importantly) on posts themselves. tumblr does not work with my text resizing accessibility tools. fix that first. or yk make an actual accessibility setting for text size.