Degradation

I am one of the forgotten ones who refuses to be forgotten. -Michael J. O Reilly

I noticed that I was too to even want to speak to people who think of justifying his death in any way. It seems that a lot of us have had enough.

I know that a lot of people think there s nothing wrong with saying stuff like, If you don t give parents respite hours, parents will kill their children. Regardless of how much respite the murderers had, for that matter, but that s another story.
All any of you are doing, when you say those things, is holding autistic children and adults hostage.

Yes, it s dressed up, and pretty, and fancy, and sounds like concern for parents and the safety of children. Yes, you may even believe that s all you re doing.
But if you take off all the sparkly ornamentation that distracts people, what you re left with is the image of a person holding a gun to the head of each and every autistic person, and saying, If you don t do what we say, we ll murder them, one by one.

And you re degrading parents too, by the way, because you re painting them as potential killers.
It s no shock to me that autistics are fed up with this treatment. Many of us can see through that kind of thing quite easily and see the threat that lies behind it.

Using killing as a bargaining tool only begets more killing, as and others have pointed out. And nobody should be surprised that autistic people are sick and tired of being the ones whose lives are used to bargain with.
So I will join with many others I know in saying: If you have any shred of respect for autistic people, stop using us as hostages.

Find some other way to lobby for respite hours and other assistance. Stop devaluing our lives. We are people.

And we notice fully what you are doing to us, when you take off all the shiny doodads that distract most people from what you re really saying about us. dc:title="Holding autistic people hostage is not a way to fight for our rights."

I m not feeling the greatest again today, so here s another post I found in my archive of drafts. I m not at all sure when I wrote it:
My mind is currently in a rather boggled state.

I m reading an old review of Irit Shimrat s book Call Me Crazy, in the Women s Review of Books. Call Me Crazy is about the mad movement in Canada, and it s entirely by people who ve been in the psych system.
As a psychologist who for several years (eons ago) worked in a psychiatric hospital, I had some trouble with this seeming wholesale dismissal of psychology and allied professions.

It was a bit of an injury to my professional narcissism. But one of the motifs of Call Me Crazy is that Shimrat and many of her fellow survivors feel that in their times of personal crisis they were treated by psychiatrists and psychologists, social workers and nurses, as incompetent or simply bad: their value as human beings was derided and their opinions dismissed. My feeling of being discounted and unfairly stigmatized in this book parallels what Shimrat and her colleagues often felt as patients.

Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay. (I had to stare at that last sentence several times over, and try not to laugh, and stare at it and stare at it and try to get it to make any more sense, and it didn t, so I m writing this.)
Am I to assume then, that Irit Shimrat and her co-authors locked Dr.

Bienenfeld in a small room and would not let her out until she renounced her profession? Did they put her in a building where her every movement, statement, and feeling was noted and controlled by anti-psychiatry activists who repeatedly put pressure on her to stop practicing? Is she unable to practice her preferred profession or even state it openly for fear of housing, educational, and job discrimination?

Do the police watch her more carefully when they find out that she is a psychology professor?
Are there a constant stream of articles in reputable newspapers that imply that violent criminals tend to be psychology professors? Does Bienenfeld lack any sort of standard recourse when Shimrat publishes her views on people like Bienenfeld?

Does Bienenfeld have to worry, when she publishes opinions like this in a book review, that people will not take her seriously anymore, and may even discriminate against her?
Would it be possible for most people to truthfully relegate Bienenfeld s views to a relic of the seventies (even though they re being expressed in the nineties) and totally dismiss what she has to say on that basis? Is psychology treated like a joke by people with the real power?

Would Bienenfeld have to struggle to get a book published about her views on psychology and keep it in print? Would it be close to the only psychology book out there, and then fade into obscurity almost as soon as it was published? Does she have to constantly have to remind people she s not a cult member?

She got it right when she talked about professional narcissism . The things I just described have happened to the people who wrote the book. All she did was pick up a book and feel insulted by the fact that they took issue with people who had, and almost undoubtedly abused, power over their lives.

I see no parallel between Bienenfeld s experience reading Shimrat s book, and Shimrat s experiences at the hands of people in Bienenfeld s profession.
This is an excellent example, though, of what happens when people do not take note of power imbalances. Being an inmate in the psych system, or even an ex-inmate or the sort of person most likely to become an inmate, is nothing whatsoever like being a psychology professor who dislikes a book written by ex-inmates of the psych system.

This is a common mistake, though. Shimrat and her co-authors experienced threat to almost everything good about their lives (and sometimes their lives themselves) at the hands of people in the psych professions. Dr.

Bienenfeld got her feelings hurt. I know where my sympathies lie on this one. Some people will go to great lengths to act as if power relationships don t exist.

dc:title="What happens when you ignore power relationships."

-- meta --> . It s apparently a blog in which people put objects on top of their cats or clothes on their cats and take pictures of them.
It s hard to describe what s wrong here.

Maybe it s that I ve had people put me into various poses when I couldn t do anything about it, and thought it was hilarious.
Maybe it s that I know a guy whose staff treat him like a living doll, and give him things like mohawks and dress him in strange clothes for fun, when he doesn t ask for any of this.
Maybe it s that I see the look on those cats faces, and it reminds me of the way my cat looks when someone picks her up without asking permission.

And the fact that people like that always seem oblivious to the fact that she s a living creature, not a toy.
I bet it s the same sensation in my stomach that some people got in their own stomachs, when they thought that I didn t really write , and thought that I was merely having my picture exploited.
Cats can t tell you, in English, to stop it, and a lot of people take the inability to say Stop it as an invitation to do whatever you want.

A cat s clear No! signals can be ignored more easily than a human saying no, or even Stop that or I ll report you for assault. A lot of people think that once speech isn t there, you re an object, not a person.

That must be why that site makes me queasy. There s something really not right, not about the website itself, but about the mentality that makes treating living creatures like dolls and stuffed animals, okay. That mentality seems to be pervasive, especially towards people of whatever species who can t talk back in unambiguous English, or who have so little power that what they say in English can be safely ignored ( English here is because I m in America, it d be other languages elsewhere obviously).

(Side note:  The solution to this is much more about shifting power imbalances, than teaching all animals and non-speaking people their native language .  There will always be animals and non-speaking people who can t speak their native languages .  Making it totally socially unacceptable to treat people like dolls is feasible, training everyone to say things in the majority language is not.

) dc:title="A website that makes me feel ill."

-- meta --> The Amorpha Household, who sometimes comment here, put together a great list of things they ve learned from their therapist. Much like , it s a sarcastic list, and very funny. Much of this describes well the reasons I won t have anything to do with psychiatry, at least no more than I absolutely have to ( have to entails bureaucratic reasons, such as SSI reviews, not emotional ones).

I should note, also, that many of the reasons that I don t trust laws that say You only get locked up if you re a danger to self, others, or gravely disabled, are encompassed in here. (Besides the fact that what is done to you after you are declared those things, is not good even if you are any of those things.) Many people don t realize how if you re the wrong kind of person, that law gets bent and bent and bent and bent, and that the determination of such things is a matter of having a box checked off on a form while they re already admitting you.

I ve gotten danger to self for such atrocities as picking scabs or having chapped lips that bled easily. When s the last time you ve been committed or tied down for absentmindedly picking a scab? It all depends on what kind of person you re already judged to be.

also reminds me of it.
Anyway, I ll shut up now and present Amorpha s list, everything below the line is theirs ( ):

---

Traditionally, a lot of recovery-type multiples have put lists on their pages of stuff like Things I Learned From My Therapist. Here s our list of what we learned from therapy and doctors.

When you are really having problems, nobody believes that you are suffering. When you are all right and working things out on your own, nobody believes that you are not disturbed and suffering.

Refusing to commit yourself to any kind of long-term medical relationship with a therapist because s/he was a useless, arrogant, condescending, and/or uncompassionate ass does not mean you are exercising your power of choice as a consumer, it means you re a snob who thinks they re too good for anyone.

This can be fixed with patronizing, authoritarian lectures and drugs.

Waiting to seek help for a problem due to bad past experiences with therapists entitles the therapist to lecture you like a child on how stupid, foolish and irresponsible you are, for not running off to the great pill dispenser the moment you start to feel the slightest bit of unease.

If you don t make eye contact, it means something is wrong with you, or that you re being dishonest.

If you make eye contact, it means something is wrong with you and you re trying too hard to pretend to be honest when you re not.

If you don t express enough emotion in your voice, it means you re a fake who doesn t really have any of the problems they claim to. If you express too much emotion in your voice, it means you re a fake who doesn t really have any of the problems they claim to.

The Internet is dangerous to your health. People you meet online should never be trusted and are dangerous to you somehow more dangerous than people you meet in the 3-D world, even when you have a track record of being taken advantage of due to inability to read other people s body language well. They might do horrible things like convince you that you re not being helped by your doctor.

If you come in wearing an old shirt because it was the only clean thing, or if your jacket is a little rumpled, you are exhibiting deteriorating self-care skills, and these are symptomatic of your condition worsening.

If you get too upset and cry too much, it means you want to harm yourself and are at risk of suicide. You can never just be letting things out.

If you sit on the couch and look at your feet, you re depressive. If you get up and pace, you re manic. If you do both, you re bipolar.

Group therapy which consists of letting the other patients verbally abuse and insult you and each other, while the supervising therapist sits around like a potted plant in the corner of the room and occasionally asks how does that make you feel? , is somehow supposed to be helpful. Not sure how.

But it is. Take it from them.

How does that make you feel?

is somehow the most important question that can ever be answered in a therapy session. Not that, if you can put into words how you feel, anything will ever actually done to help if you re not feeling so great.

If you ever, ever, at any time, even consider the possibility that you might possibly be able to figure out a way to work things out without the use of drugs, this is a dangerous delusion you must be talked out of at once.

Anyone with a degree is qualified to speculate on the psychological health of your entire family after a five-minute description of them.

If you say something early on in a session, then forget later on that you said it due to the fact that the therapist s interrogation was making you flustered and nervous and confused, this is symptomatic of a horrible mental problem, although they will never tell you what it is.

Always trust the doctor s perceptions over your own, no matter how much they conflict.

Theirs is the Official view of reality. They have achieved total enlightenment in earning their doctorate and now reside on a higher plane from which they view everything with total objectivity.

Pills are the solution.

Always. If one doesn t work, just give more of it.

If it does exactly the opposite of what it s supposed to, you also need more of it somehow.

If you really feel you need a short term course of a particular drug and ask for it specifically, however, you are just a junkie trying to get the doctor to hand out your fix.

Drugs do what the doctor tells you they will, not what the label and warnings say they will. Reality is different inside the doctor s office than out of it.

For example, in the Doctor s Office Bizarro World, Thorazine is not a high-potency neuroleptic but merely something to alleviate anxiety.

Do not ever expect to be given anything resembling a realistic assessment of the possible side effects of any given drug.

If you disagree with the doctor s assessment of whether you need a certain drug, you are being noncompliant.

Noncompliance is bad. Noncompliance means you need more drugs.

If you disagree with the doctor in any way, seem unsure when agreeing to let them throw more pills at you, look away, look too unhappy, look too happy, look away too much, look at them too much, etc, you are also being noncompliant.

Sometimes doctors will decide to arbitrarily up your dosage anyway. No reason. Just don t argue with them.

They re always right.

Many doctors will refuse to prescribe minor tranquilizers, warning you of the possibility of withdrawal symptoms, and will then turn around and try to shove things at you for which the withdrawal symptoms are potentially much, much worse.

If you ever state that you don t need medication or help, or not the kind they re giving you, anyway, this just means you re too sick to know how sick you are.

Everything you tell the doctor about your personal history will be hacked up and mangled beyond the point of recognizability by the time it gets to your official report in your file. This can range from elimination of very important facts (such as the fact that a past episode of depression resulted from being bullied every day at school), to re-interpretations of things you tell them (because, being mentally ill, you can t be trusted to interpret incidents in your own life accurately), to just making shit up out of thin air.

Even if your anxiety or depression stems from something perfectly understandable, such as the death or serious illness of a family member, reacting to it in a way that leaves you unable to perform some daily tasks in the same manner as before doesn t mean you re having a natural stress reaction; it s a symptom of your illness.

In fact, any time you have any kind of extremely strong emotional reaction in response to a life event, you re never really acting in response to that event. It s just a by-product of a chemical imbalance in your brain.

Many doctors will not take no for an answer in response to the question of whether you ever want to hurt yourself or others.

They re determined to ferret out the real pathological impulses that underlie your actions.

Although the doctor is furiously scribbling notes the whole time you re talking to him, he is, in fact, writing down few or none of the pertinent facts you relate to him. He s probably writing alliterative verse about his cat or something.

Rule of thumb: The nicer the doctor s office, the more horrible your experience in it is likely to be. If you see soothing, relaxing decor in the waiting room, with rugs on the walls and potted plants and dimmed lights and white noise machines and little miniature waterfalls, turn around and run. Do not walk.

Do not pass Go or collect 200 dollars.

Never suggest that you might have self-diagnosed. This will get you nothing but smarmy, condescending sneers and Did you read that on the Internet?

If you get a learning disability assessment, if you are female, your chances of being diagnosed with depression or bipolar disorder increase by approximately 200%. If you are male, your chances of being diagnosed with ADD or ADHD increase by approximately 200%.

Do not ask to see the DSM.

Do not ever suggest that you have even read it.

Never, ever, ever, ever, answer any of the following questions with yes , even if they re true: Do you hear voices? Do you get thoughts racing through your head?

Do you feel that people are plotting against you?

Never trust anyone who smiles at you in a grandfatherly manner. Say just the wrong thing and they ll suddenly turn on you, although this is all for your own good, of course.

If drugs don t help you in the way they re supposed to, or if you ultimately find ways to get along without them, or are forced to find a way because the drugs cause too many problems, this means that you never actually had that problem to begin with, even if you had every single symptom of it or sounded exactly like someone else s account of a worst-case scenario, the kind who need certain kinds of treatment.

And if you talk about your experience of how you learned to deal with things without drugs, you re harming and undermining the people who are really sick, not mildly afflicted like you were (even if, again, their definition of someone who is really sick could have fit you exactly at some point in your life).

Or if you talk about this, you re automatically a $cientologist.

(Even though $cientologists are all batshit anyhow more than most mental health clients, anyway.)

If the Very Scientific Studies By Experts don t match up with your personal experiences, it s never that the experts studies are the ones that are flawed and failing to account for you. If they don t represent your experience, it s because YOUR LIFE IS WRONG!

But don t panic! Diversity of human experience is curable. With modern medical intervention, everyone can be made to be exactly the way They say you ought to.

No matter what actual, valid problems you might have, that have nothing to do with your being plural, everyone will always be much more interested in the fact of your multiplicity no matter how many times you say it isn t a problem for you to the point where this overrides any chance of your actually being able to discuss the things that are real problems.

If you are a smoothly-functioning system and completely accepting of it, the doctor will get far too fascinated by this, and every therapy session will end up being you on display as the circus freak show.

Apparently, there is some nebulous you in here whom everyone else is a part of.

As in what part of you feels that way? , when the person speaking mentions that someone else has an opinion that differs from theirs.

It s okay to have imaginary people in your head as long as you never commit the horrible, horrible crime of actually thinking those people are real, or that they re autonomous persons rather than parts of you, or treating them as though they have as many rights as you (the speaker).

And, of course, the ultimate goal, even if they are just imaginary, is to integrate them back into you, so you no longer need this way of coping.

If you leave therapy without having integrated, you can never go without the friendly advice of being told to find another specialist in dissociative disorders to help you.

(These can be redistributed, at your discretion, with credit given to Amorpha Household in the byline somewhere.

)

I haven t gotten very far in , (edited by Duncan Mitchell, Rannveig Traustadóttir, Rohhs Chapman, Louise Townson, Nigel Ingham, and Sue Ledger) but I ve happened upon a very familiar institutional mode of communication and resistance: Singing.

And this is . I m sure it s been going on since anyone s been locked up anywhere. Too often self-advocacy is equated with formal groups, I ve seen self-advocacy since I ve seen people struggling for autonomy and a sense of humanity.

It s just not always as pretty and tidy, I suppose is one way of describing the difference. But there s nothing at all pretty and tidy about the situations a lot of us find ourselves in.
They have some great institution songs in there.

Some generally passed around, some very much based on other songs, some composed in isolation rooms (so we weren t the only ones who did that ), etc.
Goodbye all the nurses!
And jolly good riddance to you!

It s really hard to describe how doing things like that are vital in places like that. The penalties for singing things like that can be pretty severe. But people found ways to do it, out loud or in our heads, because that s what people did, that s one way people resisted captivity.

So I m very happy to see that someone is collecting these songs, but sad to see that one person who knew most of the songs for one institution has died. These are songs that need to be collected. I ve heard a lot of variants on them myself.

They re important.
And I remember Birger Sellin s words A song for mute autistics to sing in institutions and madhouses. Nails in forked branches are the instruments.

I am singing the song from deep down in hell I am calling. Out to all the silent people of the world. Make this song your song.

Thaw out the icy walls. Make sure you aren t thrown out. We will be a new generation of mute people.

A whole crowd of us singing new songs. Songs such as speaking people have never heard. [ ] And people won t be able to shut their ears to our singing (from I don t want to be inside me anymore)
One of the institution songs I wrote (I think the tune is a pop tune or something, but I don t remember what song it comes from), directed, of course, at staff, who did not like our singing (no matter what we sang).

There are a lot of possible verses (I end up with a few different ones every time it composes itself), but these are the ones I remember:
dc:title="And people won t be able to shut their ears to our singing."

-- meta --> I can understand how you feel, said the staff person as she was busy strapping me to a bed, and I was busy struggling. During our trainings, we had to get strapped down for five minutes. It was really scary.

I think this was intended to calm me down. Needless to say it didn t.
, promoting horrible views of disability that don t match actually being disabled.

  I would argue that a reverse effect is true with disability-torture simulations:  People get an idea that it s much better than it really is.  The only way someone could understand how that would feel, would be this:
Without any warning, to have someone break into their home and find them (or find them taking a walk, or pull over their car, or get them at work, etc), grab them, subdue any struggling, and strap them to a board, where they are then put into a van. The van drives to a place with many, many locks on the doors.

They are admitted and not given a chance to speak for themselves, and when they do speak, whatever they say is treated as nonsense or meaningless. They are told what to do at all hours of the day, their every movement, even potentially eye movement, is pathologized, and they are made to witness other bewildered people like them being tortured, especially if the other people fight back or stop responding to their environment the way their captors want them to. Punish all possible responses to the environment, and punish responses to punishment.

Either at random during the course of the day, or as soon as they do something that appears non-compliant, have ten people jump on top of them, pin them to the ground, and then carry them into a little room with straps all over the bed, and then strap them down. Tell them they will not get out of the little room until they finish struggling and crying out. Tell them they may never get out of the place at all until they show signs of believing that who they are is sick and that in order to get well they must become or at least strongly emulate something they will never be, and above all stop reacting to confinement as confinement.

If they begin fighting for breath, tell them that if they can struggle that much, they can breathe just fine. Tell them they ll be out in certain periods of time, and then extend those periods arbitrarily. Tell them You ll be out in ten minutes, and then wait four hours.

If they ask why it s taken four hours, tell them Oh, you re not quiet, that ll be another ten minutes. Repeat for days. Contradict everything they see as reality, get them convinced that nothing they perceive is real is actually real.

Shame them for their ordinary acts of defiance in these circumstances, tell them that it must just be for attention because obviously resisting is pointless.
That is a simulation that would truly mimic the effects of institutionalization, and give the entire context in which restraint is experienced. Simply strapping someone to a bed in a controlled exercise entirely among staff is not the same and will never be the same.

Of course, the simulation I describe above would be considered unethical. Which makes me really wonder why it becomes ethical when it s done to people who aren t staff.
.

This apparently is a point in favor of the ethics of using it.
However, that s not a real simulation either. Here s the real simulation:
Go through the entire above scenario, preferably several times.

If the person survives, transfer them to a new location. In that location, have someone strap a device to their bodies, above any protests of theirs if necessary. Any time they do some particular action, zap them with said device.

If they don t get it, zap them harder. Periodically, tie them down and tell them they ll be zapped several times within the next hour, but they won t know when. Let them know that they ll be there, and be getting zapped, at least until they stop whatever the undesired behaviors are.

Be sure to be fairly arbitrary, at times, about which behaviors are prohibited and zap-worthy. Do not permit them to take the device off. For extra bonus points, talk to them in a foreign language that they have no knowledge of any languages even related to it.

Until someone goes through that simulation, especially without even being told that it s only a simulation, I m not going to trust a word they say about knowing what it s like to receive strong aversives. It s like saying that you understand the sleep deprivation involved in formal torture situations because you ve been sleep-deprived while studying for tests. Just no.

Not even close. dc:title="Disability simulations are not the only kind that don t work."

Meanwhile, I m wondering, how do we stop things like this in general, not just at the JRC? (None of the pictures on this page, if you are wondering, are of the JRC or any other institution that is named on this page.

)
The things that happen at the Judge Rotenberg Center are medieval, to put it mildly. But one thing they are not is unique. The torture of disabled children and adults is commonplace.

Judge Rotenberg Center is a place that flaunts what it does, which is why it receives so much publicity. Not everywhere writes it down, not everywhere tries to justify it, lots of places just do things like this.
Things I have, personally, either experienced or been direct witness to, in places that showed no outward sign (to people who weren t intimately involved in it) of being anything like this at all:

Children being forced to eat their own vomit.

Preferred method of transportation for autistic people being grab them by the arm and yank hard, restrain if they resist .

Repeated, hard hitting that only let up when you did what they wanted.

Drugging you to the point of near unconsciousness and then screaming in your ear or blasting loud music or tapes in your ears in order to prevent you from falling asleep.

Basketholds and other similar dangerous techniques.

Using mechanical restraints in ways that cut off circulation, caused near-dislocation of joints, or caused excruciating pain.

Taking advantage of deadly situations in order to fail to rescue people if they did not become compliant, in ways where nobody would be held responsible for any death that did occur.

Punishment for purely physical things such as movement disorders, seizures, constipation, reflux, and atypical perception.

Using struggle or reaction to extreme provocation as excuse for abuse.

Failing to give necessary and routine medical treatment.

Withholding of food for punishment purposes.

Restraining people in ways that suffocate and then laughing about it.

That is just off the top of my head.

I could probably fill pages with exact descriptions.
And that is only the most physical aspects of captivity and torture, the most easily described. I would rather experience all of those combined, again, than experience some of the other things that went on.

Pathologizing every action or inaction you could possibly take including thoughts and emotions.

Standing over you. While you are tied down and have no way of moving much of your body at all, even to turn your head.

And then putting their faces right up next to yours and making the most derisive and degrading comments they can come up with. And then taunting you if you try to look through them or look away.

Breaking up any two or more people who showed any remote amount of affection or friendship with each other overtly.

In fact, pathologizing friendship and human connection and publicly mocking people for having friends or lovers.

Making people beg like dogs for things like clean socks, coffee, water, or cigarettes.

Standing by and watching and doing nothing (or, for that matter, laughing) while sexual assault occurs.

Treating all of the standard, documented reactions to confinement (sitting doing nothing, trying to break all the rules, attacking your captors, etc) as if they are stupid, melodramatic, attention-seeking, naughty, and childish. In fact, taking anything suggesting the fact that you know you are a captive, as stupid, melodramatic, attention-seeking, naughty, and childish.

Treating you as if you are something disgusting and not really a person to begin with.

This is hard to describe. It s like people look at you as if you re a piece of moldy vomit only with more contempt involved. Like you are something that is embarrassing to even be in the presence of, kind of gross, worthless, and definitely, definitely not a person.

(This attitude being pervasive.)

The air in those places. It s thick with all kinds of nasty crap.

It s hard to describe though, unless you ve been in there.

The attempts to convince you that you are someone else, who has different thoughts, feelings, and motivations than you have, and the punishment if you do not accept this.

The requirement of accepting several contradictory and wrong ideas, either in succession or all at once, as totally valid and real.

The use of deliberate confusion and disorientation to get you to think things you wouldn t normally think.

The constant threat of violence, or death, or worse kinds of incarceration, for things that for most people are normal things to do.

Little things like a fire plan where, in the event of a fire, all inmates are to go to the rooms furthest from the exits, lock the door, and stay there.

Being told or forced to do something, and then punished or humiliated for actually doing it.

Having people work their hardest to convince you that you need, really need, everything horrible that is happening to you, that you d die without it, or other dire consequences, and having people work their hardest to warp your mind until you will defend everything they have done to you and even try to come back for more (at which point all this hell becomes your choice ).

Again, the list could go on, and on, and on, that s just off the top of my head.

As compared to my experiences at Topeka State, Menninger s was more destructive and painful through its more subtle yet undermining techniques. In the state hospital faced with a harsh reality you had to work hard physically and otherwise to keep up with it. Menninger s on the other hand led to a total disintegration of personality and personal autonomy.

Treatment aimed at restructuring the personality of unwilling subjects is rightfully viewed by them as torture.
— Sarah , quoted in On Our Own, by Judi Chamberlin, and then Chamberlin s response.
Sarah in that book spent nine months in a seclusion room at Topeka State.

She was no stranger to brutality and torture. She understood, as most people who have not lived both do not, which environment was worse. Many people are unaware of this, and many people fight to create more places like Menninger s, in the belief that it s automatically better than places like Topeka State.

That shouldn t have happened. Emphasis on that. They talk about regulations, oversight.

I think of the glossy literature my parents read, the architecture they admired. They bragged about the place that cared for me. I think of the reality of that place, the powerlessness, the punishment.

I cannot wish it on anyone.
I want the Judge Rotenberg Center gone, as much as anyone. But I don t want to stop there.

There s another thing that a lot of people don t understand, about places like this, that Laura Tisoncik sums up very well.
I m really quite certain that there s kind of a floor in human experience, where you can t get much worse, you can t get any worse. Because after a certain point, you just sort of turn off and walk through it like it s a dream, and you can t actually be hurt any worse than that.

Yes, you can be physically damaged worse than that, but the basic core experience after you reach that particular point of hellish, remains pretty much standard.
People can get very hung up on the details of these places. Aside from misjudging the relative badness of various places, they can get very focused on which kind of places have the most bizarre and nasty-sounding kinds of torture.

They forget that past a certain point, getting more bizarre and nasty doesn t change anything for the person experiencing it. That the experience of someone in a place with far less exotic forms of torture than the Judge Rotenberg Center, can be identical, in terms of badness, to the experience of someone at the Judge Rotenberg Center. There s a certain point past which gradations of badness no longer exist.

I ve been to that point.
There was an iron cage, it was a one-man iron cage. And it was so small that you d have a hard time sitting down in it.

You d have to have your knees up against your chest. And there was a person in there. And that was one of their punishments.

She described to me one time, which was exactly tarring somebody. They would take this black stuff and put it in their hair and on their bodies. It was just like being tarred and feathered, that s stuff that I read about in medieval times.

And she was telling me about this.
If things from medieval times could happen in the twentieth century, I wonder why so many people are resistant to believing that things that happened in the twentieth century still happen in the twenty-first. I have already lived through one period in which things that did not happen anymore since the 1950s were done to me, and now I am told that everything has changed since the 1990s.

It keeps moving up, but things keep not changing.
My horrified friends saw the six sided wooden box (about five feet on the long edge, about eighteen inches on the end edges) opened to reveal an adolescent boy lying flat on a vinyl mat. His hands were strapped to his waist in leather wrist-to-waist restraints which were secured around the hips and with a strap between his legs.

He was clad in a white long john set that was stitched together to allow no openings. His hands were wrapped in gauze and one hand was further strapped to a flat board that resembled a table tennis paddle. There was no light or objects inside the box.

The group home director described the various procedures which she indicated were necessary because of Job s extreme self injury. In addition to the restraints, she had additional restraint procedures which were used when he was to be fed, which were per G-tube only. He had a wheelchair, but she indicated he didn t like it, that the only place he liked to be was the box.

He had long ago between withdrawn from school; she had worked with a local physician to have him withdrawn because she felt like he was extra susceptible to infections there and she needed to protect him from that. She had also petitioned the court successfully to have all of his teeth removed; this had been done one year before.
The boy in that situation was successfully removed from that situation, and is now doing very well, but the same group home director continues to try to invent things that are not really wrong with him.

Things this extreme really happen. But as Laura Tisoncik pointed out, it s important to note that, by the time you get to things like that, things are long since so bad they can t feel any worse.
I used to spend a good deal of my time being totally immobilized and tortured.

But if you removed all that, it wouldn t have made anything I was experiencing good.
Things like this are wrong. But things much less lurid and exotic and terrifying, are just as wrong, just as damaging, and just as bad.

Some things much less lurid and exotic and terrifying are actually worse, from the standpoint of the people they are happening to. I am not saying this to diminish the horror of these things, which I have experienced many of, and they are horrible. I am saying it because I worry that these things, and only these things, will be focused on and removed.

I have put a lot of pictures in this entry. All of them are pictures from institutions in which all the things I described and more have happened. I know because I ve been at all of them.

(So, by the way, tell me that my experiences are unique to a few bad apples in one particular place and I m likely to laugh.)
Moreover, many things like this happen within the guise of community programs as well. Take away the building, leave the power structures intact, and all you have is a widely distributed institution, with the inmates isolated from each other.

The horrors of the Judge Rotenberg Center are not particularly unique to the Judge Rotenberg Center. The Judge Rotenberg Center is flagrant, many places using the same techniques are not. The Judge Rotenberg Center has impressively medieval-looking forms of torture, those are not the only kinds of torture that people are subjected to.

You can look at the final two pictures. Here I am in the last one, in a work program that did, yes, actually pay us. Does the place look much more beautiful than the rest of the institutions pictured?

It is the worst of all of them. (It was so bad that I am still afraid to put in print, next to these pictures, that it was the worst.) None of them were good.

This one was just the worst.
The first picture (on the whole page), the one that looks like an office building with palm trees, is of the place in which staff tried to kill me, by the way. It s the same one as the later aerial photograph of the buildings arranged around a central courtyard.

It s now been converted to a nursing home. One kind of institution, into another, into another, is all that place has ever been.
No matter where you live, something like this is happening in your backyard, in your neighborhood.

You may not even know some of the places you see are institutions, not all of them have signs. You will not likely see the brutality, and if you do, it will be explained. Explained as these people have severe behaviors, severe this, severe that.

Danger to self or others (as if what is done to us isn t even more dangerous than anything we could dream of doing). Explained as you don t understand the medical reasons behind torture. Please, don t buy that line of bullshit.

Torturers lie. Torture is always done by the strong and valued, to the weak and devalued.
Everybody knew what happened, but nobody was talking about it.

With the investigations that would go on that were never, never finalized. Because it was too hard. You would have the individuals with mental retardation and the person without, and of course the person with mental retardation couldn t give you accurate information, according to what people thought, so the person that had abused, was often times exonerated.

One of the worst parts of any of this, to me, is the fact that I am automatically suspect in anything I say about this, and all the supposedly wonderful, heroic, devoted, compassionate professionals have all the credibility.
I can t count how many times I have tried to talk about this sort of thing, and been told that I have a bad attitude, any number of emotional problems, and a distorted sense of reality, and that I am somehow commiting a mighty sin, dissing all these sweet compassionate people. Guess what, once you have a bunch of sweet compassionate people try to kill you for who you are you don t really start viewing them as all that sweet and compassionate anymore.

(Describing this is not the same as hate , either.)
I m very well acquainted with the fact that the rest of the world has no idea. They just have absolutely no idea how bad that is, how much it transforms one, or even what the experience is.

It does transform one. Notice it provides that kind of an environment, where in order to survive, and I mean literally to survive, because there is overt and threatened violence, of which one has no defense, and this violence can come from any direction, and I mean any direction[ ]
One very quickly develops a whole set of skills or lack thereof in some ways, just one ends up learning a whole bunch of ways of acting in the world that are completely unlike, they re necessary for surviving in that kind of environment, but they re completely unlike or irrelevant to, they don t belong in the outside world. They re sort of anti-skills.

Take those skills out into the world and you become completely ineffective in a way. It does change one[ ]
There s, I almost want to call it a level of naïveté about what can be, in people who have not been through this. A kind of, I m trying to describe something that I sort of know it when I see it but I don t know I guess many people don t live with I am trying to find words for concepts that it s a level of naïveté.

A failure to understand how bad it is or can be. A failure to understand how the issues are really that of life and death, a failure to understand the importance of yes, a failure to understand. There s a level of unseriousness there, a level of too much faith in the system as it is now, too much misplaced faith in it.

And too much, I would almost call it eagerness to try to prove or establish that they are not like these people almost. Like that these people are not them, that they re better than people who ve been through that and in any case those people deserve it and in any case it was good for them, and in any case, you know, and if it wasn t good for them it was not a systemic issue. It was just, that one instance.

That exception.
— Laura Tisoncik,
At any rate, this stuff is going on. Now.

Here. Wherever here is for you, it s going on. Whenever now is for you, it s going on.

It s not something that s only done over there . It s not something that s only done back then . This is ongoing, this is everywhere.

Solving the problems at the Judge Rotenberg Center is only the beginning. dc:title="Extreme measures, and then some.