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.
