Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), Tarot, Major Arcana.
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oh yes I keep forgetting to make a post about it but if you like deep space 9 and/or you like hearing my opinions about things you may also enjoy dabo! a ds9 podcast in which my beloved spouse and I talk about everyone's favorite political star trek season set in the food court. it's been a blast to do so far and Han made a very fun theme and cover art <3
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Hey, oomfies! This Eid, let’s spread some more love to Gaza. Grassroots orgs there are doing incredible work despite the many limitations...getting food, meds, and shelter to families who’ve lost everything. Even a few bucks can make a real difference. Donate the cost of a coffee!
Reblogged peacereturnedtothevalley
statement from mahmoud khalil shared by the center for constitutional rights
Reblogged beeelderly
Well this bell could be tolling for anybody
whoosh, clink
my contribution to @hieronzine! naturally, i had to do a tribute to my beloved maelgwyn :) i started the first version of this piece all the way back in, like, 2018 and i'm so glad the zine finally gave me an excuse to finish it 🌱🌺
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Anonymous asked:
forgive me if I'm being obtuse, but isn't every medical diagnosis an artifact of human taxonomic schemes? I know I'm not treading new ground here and that diseases/medical conditions aren't like, drawn from thin air in the way a lot of psychiatric conditions are i suppose it just confuses me a bit
no, & this is ancillary in some ways to what i'm actually criticising about psychiatry. it's true there are non-psychiatric medical diagnoses that work analogously to psychiatric ones: think ME/CFS, hEDS, fibromyalgia, most things that have 'idiopathic' in the name. these are names given to clusters of symptoms, like the way that psychiatric labels are just names for a certain set of behaviours. we don't know what causes these issues, though people have various theories and there is (a varying amount of) research ongoing that aims to find the etiologies.
however, that's not the case for all non-psychiatric diagnoses. think about a viral or bacterial infection, a torn ACL, or Down syndrome. these are diagnoses that do refer to specific infectious agents, anatomical problems, genetic variants, and so forth. that doesn't mean the diagnosis is always easy to make, or that it's always made correctly, but it does mean that when you are diagnosed with one of these problems, a specific cause is being identified (& sometimes they might even be right). it's not just a convenient shorthand name for a group of symptoms, even though of course, most things that are diagnosed are done so because they cause and are associated with symptoms. (most but not all lol.)
psychiatry is distinct as a discipline in that all of its diagnoses function the first way i described. they are not referring to disease entities or processes; there is no credible hypothesis for a biological etiology. why? fundamentally, because the psychiatric diagnoses generally exist to pathologise socially unwanted behaviour: the taxonomy is a reflection of a political agenda and the priorities of clinicians. it's not even really an adequate framework for grouping patients together, because you get placed in a category based only on, again, external manifestations (behaviours). who says any two people who hallucinate or cut themselves are doing it for the exact same reasons? well, no one, because again, even getting the same psych diagnosis doesn't indicate anything about an actual etiology or underlying biological process or anything. there is no referent; the psychiatric diagnosis is only defined heuristically and circularly.
many people are confused by this because, in both popular and professional discourse, psychiatric diagnoses are consistently spoken about as though they DO refer to an underlying discoverable disease or disease process. despite hundreds of years of looking for such things, psychiatrists are yet to find any, and if they did, the condition in question would be reassigned to the relevant medical specialty, because psychiatrists also cannot treat infectious agents, anatomical problems, harmful genetic variants, and so on. (when i worked as a bibliographer we used to have extremely funny arguments over whether materials pertaining to the psychiatric search for biological disease processes should be categorised under psychiatry, neuroscience, medicine general, philosophy of medicine, 'science and society,' or just 'controversies and disputes' with no real subject label.)
to be clear, when i say psychiatric diagnoses aren't referring to known or discoverable disease processes, that's not a moral indictment. it's not an inherently bad diagnostic process, provided the patient understands that is what the process actually is. sometimes we just don't know yet what we're dealing with; sometimes a heuristic diagnostic label is just a way of billing insurance for a treatment that we know helps some similar patients, even if we don't know why.
however, with psychiatric diagnoses, evidence for such efficacy is widely lacking and often even negative; this is fundamentally because psychiatric diagnoses are not formulated on the basis of patient needs but on the basis of employer and state needs to cultivate a productive workforce and by corollary enforce a notion of mental 'normality.' all medicine under capitalism has a biopolitical remit; psychiatry has only a biopolitical remit. it has never at any point succeeded in making diagnoses that refer to demonstrable disease processes, because that's definitionally not even under its purview. these diagnoses have never been satisfactorily shown to be related to any disease process—and why should we expect that? historically, that's not what they exist for; it's not the problem they were invented to solve. they are social technologies; they're not illnesses.
This is not a fully formed thought because I am no expert in patholgization or antipsych but I think one big difference between HEDS, IBS, and the like with psychiatric disorders is that generally there is an admission that we *don't* know the underlying causes. Like that's what syndrome is meant to imply medically. When I was diagnosed with HEDS, that was something explained to me directly and my doctor even said there is efforts to disambiguate the processes that create HEDS and that's part of how we have so many EDS variants that are genetically or biologically provable.
Psychiatric diagnoses obscure this relationship entirely and create beings that are ontologically "mentally ill" that need to be medicated into productiveness within capitalism. I just think the approach here is very different between the two taxonomies, but please let me know if this does not seem accurate to what you understand of these things.
in theory, yes, there's a distinction here. as you say, there's a fundamentally different goal and consequently a different approach in psychiatry. doctors in other specialties are expected to explain these kinds of diagnostic limitations to their patients, at least if we look at guild & professional practice standards.
in practice i think it's a lot messier actually lol. lots of physicians do a really bad job of actually discussing any of this with patients; lots of people don't understand what their own diagnoses mean, or the difference between a 'symptoms diagnosis' and an 'etiology diagnosis.' i'd argue there are also edge cases in non-psychiatric medical practice: diagnoses that we have partial explanations for, or that we might be able to explain etiologically in some patients but not others, for example.
but also, even if psychiatrists did do all of this explaining (they won't, because it's contrary to their material interests as delegates of disciplinary power, but let's pretend), it still wouldn't have any bearing on the underlying problem of the psychiatric profession being essentially an attempt to scientise the process of socially and economically punishing unproductive ('antisocial', abnormal, etc) people. again the problem isn't the diagnostic process itself, it's the actual purpose of psychiatry; it's just that this political character also causes it to manifest certain medical characteristics like not having any actual diseases or disease entities to refer to, and instead delineating social judgments of what is 'normal' and what is 'pathological.'
non-psychiatrist doctors do this too, though. often this is referred to as medicalisation (think 'prediabetes', or many historical medical discourses on menstruation or menopause), but it certainly is also a part of 'normal' medical practice under the same capitalist conditions that birthed the psychiatric discipline. so, the difference really comes back to the extent to which any given medical discipline or practice is motivated (in a historical sense) by this process of creating and disciplining deviants, versus to what extent it is capable of identifying and ameliorating suffering.
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VN adaption news!
Got a different sort of announcement than the usual chapter one (which I forgot until days later again…) this week! As many of you are already aware, a visual novel adaption of The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere has been tentatively in the works for a while. Since I don't really like keeping secrets for the broad-strokes details of something like this, I thought the time was ripe to do an informal 'announcement'. So here's that!
(Example of our current art and interface direction. Actual sprites and background used for this scene very much not final!)
Though honestly, there's not a lot to say. The project will be more or less a direct translation of the work into a new format, though with some… minor adjustments to the storyline, in the interests of keeping the mystery elements fresh and amending a few of the bugbears I've personally built up regarding the plotting over the years. The game will be built in Ren'py (predictably), and joining me in development will the very talented Zerovirus, who'll be handling the art, while Benedict (Cordyceps, Star Seeker in: the Secret of the Sorcerous Standoff) is helping with some of the programming. Contributing to the OST will also be Xeecee, creator of lesbian murder nun game Misericorde, with the remainder handled by myself. (At least assuming I don't flub it and end up resorting to stock music lmao)
(The character bio menu. Also WIP.)
While we're undecided on the release model, the tentative plan is to release a short free demo at some point this year. After that, we'll put out a series of further updates semi-episodically, playable through a one-time purchase on itch. This will continue until we have enough for what feels like a 'complete' release - probably 1/3rd-ish of the story? - at which point we'll put this on steam or something, then start the process over for the next segment.
…and that's it! Stay tuned for future updates. I'm obviously in the privileged position of already having a fair few fans of the work, so I'd love to get feedback from people on things like the script changes or the character designs, so we'll hopefully be showing tidbits off semi-frequently going forward. Thank you as always for reading!
Reblogged transmutationisms
it's devastating to see the aftermath of the israeli genocide on gaza. an entire city that was a home to two million people has been turned into rubble and made into a mass grave for hundreds of thousands of people.
we maintain hope that gaza will be rebuilt. that her people will return and be able to live with some sense of normalcy despite the events of the last fifteen months.
it's just so surreal to see people believe that the fight for a free palestine is over and that we've 'won'. a ceasefire is a very crucial step but it is the first of many steps in the liberation of palestine.
im here to remind you to continue to escalate for palestine until it is free. continue to help in whatever way you can. continue to donate to families who are trying to recover from the horrors they've survived. continue to care for other human beings.
i also request you to donate to alaa's fundraiser and help her give a better life to her children. her fundraiser has been verified.
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mohammed has asked me to make a new post to support his campaign. this is a campaign that 27 extended family members must live off. mohammed's sister is pregnant and malnourished, and needs a daily heparin injection that the family are struggling to cover with how slow the donations have been. additionally, multiple other family members are suffering severe burns, respiratory & skin infections, a bullet wound, and other injuries. with rumours that rafah will reopen soon, mohammed wants to get his most vulnerable family members evacuated, but the campaign is moving so slowly they're not even covering minimum daily expenses right now. they're verified here.
mohammed desperately wants to raise the funds to evacuate his most medically vulnerable family members when rafah crossing reopens (which will be seven days after the first phase of the ceasefire deal begins being implemented). please help if you can. their extended family members outside gaza are ready to coordinate evacuations with the travel agencies, but they don't have even close to enough funds for this yet!
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once again it's @secret-samol time, the part of the year where all the people who followed me for DC go "what the hell is friends at the table" and all my good personal friends say "oh thank god they're back to writing about the gay podcast." I was very lucky to get to write a little post-Marielda castille character study for @oziads in revenge for many years of her making me sad on twitter. <3
She wonders, sometimes, if this stone was always at the core of her.
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Post-Marielda, Castille makes a visit.
if wicked songwriter wrote a baru cormorant musical it'd be like "i'll show them who they can't debase. no, i'll hide my mask behind my face! the empire will seeeee -- that i'm their prodigy!". if hadestown songwriter wrote a baru cormorant musical i'd be like 'the noose that binds the traitor man / it makes sure he won't lie again! / but the NOOSE that binds the CORMORANT / it STRANGLES him with what he wants / and that, my brother, that's much worse". if falsettos songwriter wrote a baru cormorant musical it'd be like "My father's a homo."
If Hamilton songwriter wrote a baru cormorant musical it would be like “I’m climbing the ranks, now this is the thanks / i GET! For setting and netting an economical BET! / That’s right, mess with the cormorant and you get the beak! / All the FISH have gone MISSing, that’s the word on the street! / Now a word to my rivals: you can see to the sea / But you’ll be sure to the shore / They’re crying BANKRUPTCY!” Or whatever.