Let's Talk

every single article, post or mention of a Muslim or Latino person on a Visa or Green Card getting dragged off the street by masked men in broad daylight has the same exact comments: "wow, they're gonna start doing this to citizens soon." some of these people have lived here since they were 8 months old and have lived here for over 30 years. it's very telling that Americans are still are managing to separate them in their head from a "citizen" and that their outrage will be far greater when it's someone who "actually lives here" as if 3 decades in the same country shouldn't qualify you for the same rights as everyone else.

“autistics would’ve been able to sniff out ted bundy like fucking scent dogs” is one of the craziest takes i’ve ever seen

you are not special because you are autistic . you are not special because you are neurodivergent. you do not have a secret sixth sense of who is a good or bad person because you are neurodivergent . you are not an empath or a fae child. you are not a morally better person because you are autistic

Dudes healthcare is so fake. My ADHD meds are $940 without insurance. But they gave me a website of "coupons" which straight up looks like a scam website, and I got it today for $60! Just a coupon from a random website and it was $900 cheaper. America, I am confusion!! America explain!!

For all my uninsured judys out there it's for Walgreens only: walgreens.rxsense.com

as a pharmacy technician i can share with you some websites that give you those "coupons" for your meds!

goodrx is the most well known one, but if i'm trying to find the cheapest price for a patient i compare it to scriptcycle, and use whichever is offering the best price. you just type in the medication (PLEASE make sure you're getting the right drug, dosage, and quantity) and your zip code and they will spit out some offers for you

some pharmacies may have their own discount card to compare to as well!

if you are getting a name brand medication, you can also look at the manufacturer's website to see if they offer any evouchers for you to use too

good luck out there 👍

How to Pay Hospital Bills When You’re Flat Broke

another one is singlecare.com, brought my duloxetine from $240 a month to $20

and there are coupons for hrt on there as well :) different options for different pharmacies

dollarfor.org saved my broke ass, it can save urs too

"Since then, there have been many times when thoughtful and delicate models and codes of ethics drawn up by caring minds and offered to the public--or just as often, to politicians--in hopes of a paradigm shift have been readily absorbed into the segregative function of mental institutions or ended up in the hands of wardens and cops. The introduction of psychiatric frameworks in corrections has only served to euphemize the violence of punishment, as in when veritable trauma-factories like prisons have unironically imported the language of 'trauma-informed care,' or has even paradoxically concentrated such violence in a monstrous hybrid like the psychiatric ward of a maximum-security prison examined by Lorna Rhodes in Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. In the 1970s, one of the central demands of the antipsychiatry and psychiatric survivor movement was that any mental health care practice must integrate the experience and expertise of the patient or sufferer. This has roots in the disability movement's demand for 'nothing about us without us.' At various times and place, this is--in itself--a radical political demand that fundamentally challenges the way knowledge is formed and practice is legitimated. But the incorporation of mental health service users does not in itself guarantee fundamental or radical transformations: increasingly, clinical and institutional workplace employ peer-support specialists, researches of all stripes have made strides to incorporate accounts from patients and service users in their studies (however superficially), and some psychiatrists and social workers have no qualms referring patients to peer-run alternative support groups, like a Hearing Voices Group, so long as it doesn't disrupt their own work.

What does this suggest? First, that no model and language is universally applicable and will not have the same effect in every locality or with every group of people under such a massive umbrella as 'psychiatric patients.' Second, it signals that we must be wary of the risk of confounding the production of novel ethical principles (like the centrality of peer voices or the modification of language) or prefigurative models for a transformation of the social matric through which power flows. This matrix can withstand a breakage with a single link (a certain language, a particular practice, a specific law), while still maintaining the general relations ( of guardianship, of imprisonment) in general stability."

-Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia and Revolt by Sasha Warren, pg 45-46

y'all know that whole left-brained/right-brained thing is fake right? and the "brain fully develops at age 25" thing? and the "we only use 10% of our brains" thing? yeah they're all complete horseshit please yell at anyone who says them

okay people are doing nuance in the notes about the kernels of truth in neuroscience myths but I really really need you to understand that that is not important here. people don't believe there are "right-brained" and "left-brained" people because they've misunderstood lateralisation of the central nervous system, they believe it because that binary framework was deliberately pushed by people who wanted to define who was logical enough to lead, and surprise surprise, white adult heterosexual men are left-brained. people don't believe the brain "finishes developing at 25" because they've misunderstood life stage differences in neuroplasticity, they believe it because the idea that children, teens, and young adults have inferior brains is a convenient rationalisation for a society that marginalises them. people don't believe you "only use 10% of your brain" because they misread an fMRI study, they believe it because it's useful bullshit for everyone from hyperindividualist historical revisionists pushing the great genius concept of scientific progress to hucksters recruiting for cults that will teach you to unlock your latent telekinesis for just $5000 a month. that's why it's fucking important to know that many popular science ideas are false and to push back on them loudly and frequently, because they're not just mildly incorrect, they are often active components of systems of violence.

See also "chemical imbalance" and ~93% of anything involving "trauma."

American Indian Movement

Photo ID: a person with long black hair holds a sign which says, in all caps, “Amerika - you are living on the blood of the Indian nation.” Above them is a banner of the American Indian Movement. The motif on the flag: an arrow with A. I. M. is below a clenched fist with a broken shackle bursts from a gun, holding an axe. End of ID.

when i say i’m from ukraine, people assume i live somewhere else now. when i say i live in ukraine, they assume i’m somehow immune to war, and there’s a logical division between a ukrainian they chat with on discord and a ukrainian on the news. bitches my yaoi is written from the bomb shelter

Just an ordinary day in Ukraine. You live on the very edge of being killed at any moment.

I wanna all of you to know that majority of my MM fic is written during night air attacks. Russia attacks Ukraine basicly every night with drones nowadays, so you end up filling time of sitting in shelter with something, uncluding writting.

In the future, I really wanna read about the fact how (fucking disgraceful) russian invasion on ukraine expanded ukraine literature

Humans continue to human in the most hellish of circumstances, and by "human" I don't mean "do bad things," I mean, "tell stories."

trying to explain to tumblr that the Middle Class in not their enemy

saw someone say that someone complaining about only having 7k in savings makes them contemplate “doing something bad”

you know that 7k covers like. one hospital visit WITH insurance, right?

“people who make six figures shouldn’t be allowed to complain —“ most people who make six figures are, these days, solidly middle class. where i live, a combined household income of $110k is *lower middle class*.

“people who can afford homes —“ are typically 400-600k in debt for them. also if “can own your own home” is your threshold for the rich you are contemplating eating, i think you are genuinely stupid

“boohoo your investments dropped, stop complaining rich boy” idk how to tell you this but. most of us have a retirement account. you should probably open one

"Since then, there have been many times when thoughtful and delicate models and codes of ethics drawn up by caring minds and offered to the public--or just as often, to politicians--in hopes of a paradigm shift have been readily absorbed into the segregative function of mental institutions or ended up in the hands of wardens and cops. The introduction of psychiatric frameworks in corrections has only served to euphemize the violence of punishment, as in when veritable trauma-factories like prisons have unironically imported the language of 'trauma-informed care,' or has even paradoxically concentrated such violence in a monstrous hybrid like the psychiatric ward of a maximum-security prison examined by Lorna Rhodes in Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. In the 1970s, one of the central demands of the antipsychiatry and psychiatric survivor movement was that any mental health care practice must integrate the experience and expertise of the patient or sufferer. This has roots in the disability movement's demand for 'nothing about us without us.' At various times and place, this is--in itself--a radical political demand that fundamentally challenges the way knowledge is formed and practice is legitimated. But the incorporation of mental health service users does not in itself guarantee fundamental or radical transformations: increasingly, clinical and institutional workplace employ peer-support specialists, researches of all stripes have made strides to incorporate accounts from patients and service users in their studies (however superficially), and some psychiatrists and social workers have no qualms referring patients to peer-run alternative support groups, like a Hearing Voices Group, so long as it doesn't disrupt their own work.

What does this suggest? First, that no model and language is universally applicable and will not have the same effect in every locality or with every group of people under such a massive umbrella as 'psychiatric patients.' Second, it signals that we must be wary of the risk of confounding the production of novel ethical principles (like the centrality of peer voices or the modification of language) or prefigurative models for a transformation of the social matric through which power flows. This matrix can withstand a breakage with a single link (a certain language, a particular practice, a specific law), while still maintaining the general relations ( of guardianship, of imprisonment) in general stability."

-Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia and Revolt by Sasha Warren, pg 45-46

psych survivor archive just updated with all the stories from the past year and a half. i am so honored by the stories and writing people shared--it means a lot to be trusted with your experiences. thank you for your patience with the slow updating (being insane + being incarcerated + being institutionalized caused a lot of delays this year.)

keep an eye out for more updates with this project in the next couple weeks!

A Palestinian street vendor sells candy and sweets in Hebron, Palestine. Photograph: Hazem Bader

"Just as 'most prisoners walk into prison because they know they will be dragged or beaten into prison if they do not walk,' we can say that most of the psychiatrically committed walk into hospitals because they know they will be restrained or dragged in if they don't walk. Often, this power has not required the psychiatrist to know the exact source of the ailment they treat nor exactly how their methods act upon the mind; what matters is that the machine is running. A whole system, a tightly interwoven mesh of relays and discourses is in place to transform the psychiatrist's judgment into effective action: a working theory and classificatory system to organize the clientele and separate them from other objects of care or punishment (taxonomy or nosology); institutional spaces (the asylum is historically the most pervasive, but also clinics, group homes, psychiatric wards, etc.); judicial codes defining the status of the mad (generally analogized to animals or children); prescribed roles for legal actors (police, judges, forensic experts); a chain of bureaucrats to sort out matters of insurance, finance, and property in cases of institutionalization or guardianship; and approved mechanisms or surveillance and reporting to translate individual complaints into the state's administrative codes. There are as many points of contact as there are spaces of encounter and discourses of legitimation in the social world. One or more of these elements can be revolutionized without fundamentally changing the connection between the parts. For example, at various points throughout its existence, as we've already seen, a theory of 'social causation' prevailed over a biological one without changing the matrix that defines modern psychiatry, and the same can be said for some of the legal alterations to the patient's status throughout the twentieth century.

There is no psychiatrist-patient encounter set apart from a broader circuit of relations: patient-apartment-work-family-cop-partner-school-neighbor-psychologist-state-guardian-probate-judge-psychiatrist-hospital. And to be clear: our biology itself is shared and leaks throughout this chain at every step. Our bodies are permeable, open, they leak, bleed, consume, excrete; our bodies flow out into a common world, and are open to outside influence, as the COVID-19 pandemic has made so excruciatingly clear. A patient of the Utica Asylum put it beautifully in The Opal in 1852: 'Like fermentation in the chemical world, [humanity's] atomic adhesions are in constant enlargement and in silent operation, seeking out relations, and forming relations of unsurpassed beauty and comfort, because in conformity with nature and adapted to its condition, means and end.' Attempts to neutralize this network by relegating every actor and space in the chain external to the domain of the psychiatrist onto the order of natural history ('we're just responding to the demands of the family...' or 'that's a matter for the police...I just deal with the patient once they arrive here') expose this posture as a naively religious one. In denial of the profane world and its complications extrinsic to the holy circuitry of neural or endocrine highways of the One in isolation, they declare a monastic fealty to an object of study over and above the matrix that makes its study possible or their conclusions efficacious in any real encounter...

...If psychiatry still takes refuge in the desert of scientism--speaking in tongues of prolix jargon--it's because a paradise of healing did materialize, but not as a Promethean forge of liberated humans, nor even as solemn resting place of broken souls, but sank so low as to appear as nothing more than a mundane prison. Burdened by the unbearable weight of their failure, the next generation abandoned their project and ran away to the labs, relinquishing responsibility for the armies of the living dead. At least they hung a sign at the door of the asylum on their way out. It read: 'abandon every hope, who enter here.'"

-Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt by Sasha Warren, pg 32-34

not donald trump singlehandley uniting the world against america and encouraging mass boycotting

A hero without a cape

Her name is Theresa Kachindamoto, and she is a senior chief - political leader of a region with a population of about 900,000 people.

She didn’t run for election; she was appointed, without her knowledge, while she was living and working in a completely different part of the country. She just received a call one day telling her to come back to her childhood home, because she was in charge now.

So she did; and when she arrived, she discovered widespread sexual abuse of children. She browbeat 50 uncooperative local leaders into accepting her decision to annul all the marriages. She then fired four of them when they continued to allow children to be married off in their areas. She still faces widespread opposition from parents who consider it their right to sexually abuse their daughters if they want to; but Kachindamoto very evidently does not give a fuck, and is continuing to use political and legal means to protect children in the region.

She’s not just an anonymous do-gooder; she’s an effective political leader despite incredibly difficult circumstances. Theresa Kachindamoto.

[Image Description: a twitter post from user Al Jazeera English @ AJEnglish that reads “This woman has broken up 850 child marriages and banned sexual initiation camps in Malawi”

Below the text is a picture of Theresa Kachindamoto. She is a dark skinned woman with short hair. She is outside and smiling. End ID]

got worried checking the dates on this post and seeing 2016, knowing how risky this kind of political activism is

good news: Kachindamoto is still in office, and last year (2024) she received honorary doctorates from 2 universities and was given the African Genius Award 🙏

@chamomile-crow I have so many questions

"Tumblr is for everyone! This isn't like other sites!"

Tumblr, when you're Black and upset at hypocrisy in action:

😭😭 where are the "good white people" to get in these folks' asses 🤣

@blackfilmmakers I had the audacity to point out the hypocrisy of the "self defense" argument in gun toting white folks' hands versus Black people's hands. And they are having a Time about it.

something that's really funny to me is when marauders fans act like they're somehow not harry potter fans? like when they want you to pretend that their thing is like this completely separate thing from hp. like girl, they're not different. you're a harry potter fan in current year and i'm going to judge you accordingly. you're just somehow even more annoying about it.