We are living through extraordinary times, with a zillion different societal issues demanding our attention, time, and resources. What is our civic responsibility to ensuring that our humanity continues to thrive?
For me, there is a deep fire within my heart asking that I take a radical stance on civic issues that have personally affected myself and my loved ones. For a long time, I assured my ego that internal alchemy is sufficient for social responsibility. This is no longer true for me. It was easy to disassociate in order to escape having to deal with some of the modern day horrors that exist in the form of corrupt institutions and structures all vying for power and control over us. It is time for me to break free from this mentality and I encourage you to embark on this journey with me. Let us take back our inherent freedom, liberty, and dignity.
One of the most truly dehumanizing systems in existence are carceral practices, also known as locking up people in jails, prisons, asylums or psychiatric hospitals. How did we get to this point in our humanity where people in positions of power function as society’s saviors, equipped with a “god-like” complex and the self imposed power to control, and influence who is locked up and who lives free.
It is impossible for our humanity to live and function as essentially slaves to a few “masters” at the top. I believe in a decentralized system with creative webs of interdependence flowing back and forth between communities that share resources, skills, and joy. In order to bring this vision to life, I went back in our history to find movements and moments that speak to this spirit of radical change.
Deinstitutionalization is a movement that advocates for the transfer of “mentally disabled” people from psychiatric hospitals back to their families or into community based homes. The goal is to move towards a less restrictive environment and allow individuals to be active participants in their recovery with their trusted communities.
As a psychiatric survivor, I found my experience with involuntary inpatient treatment abusive and dehumanizing. The “mentally ill” are often treated as subhuman, animalistic, afforded no respect and forced into treatment against their will. The deinstitutionalization movement, which developed roots from the 1960s, birthed a wave of radical voices from disability and mental health rights advocates to survivors, ex-patients, mad folks, and their families. The core ethos of self determination, body autonomy and dignity of life sparked a wave of community building centered on sharing personal stories, lobbying for rights (to be free of forced state sanctioned treatment), providing alternative forms of care and educating the public.
In some ways, the advocacy for this movement was successful. State governments created stricter policies around who could and should be committed. Over time these state sanctions were defunded. Psychiatry wards and asylums across the country closed down. Many people with “mental illness” and disabilities found recovery through family, caring communities, and with other survivors outside of these confining walls. Unfortunately, the money used to create these psychiatric institutions DID NOT go to the families who needed the support. Money was directed towards jails and prisons instead.
Sixty years later, we see a resurgence of people and institutions of power sharing in the ideology that deinstitutionalization created a mass increase of unhoused folks, criminals, and severely mentally ill people who are now clogging up communal spaces, disturbing the peace, and perpetuating violence. Their solution is to RE-institutionalize mad and disable people under the guise of “community care” via state sanctioned forced treatment for their own good. But in reality, this is their way of “cleaning up the streets” under false care promises. States have created tons of jails and prisons in the last several decades AND profited from them. Now “elected officials” want to build up more hospitals to incarcerate more mentally ill and homeless people. “The prison and the asylum are (NOW) two sides of a carceral coin.” Prominent activists and advocates Leah Harris, Liat Ben-Moshe and Vesper Moore share this concern in their journalistic op-ed from Truthout, a nonprofit and independent news organization: Psychiatric Incarceration isn’t Treatment It’s Violence Survivors Say.
When you create moral mandates and arbitrary measurements for what constitutes insanity, you create systemic imprisonment of certain groups of people. The way forward is deinstitutionalization. “Deinstitutionalization could be characterized not only as a process or an exodus of oppressed people outside the walls of institutions, but as a radical anti-segregationist philosophy. It is not something that ‘happened’ but an ideological shift in the way we react to differences amongst us” states, Liat Ben-Moshe, professor and author from Chicago.
California recently passed the CARE Court legislation which will take effect this fall in San Francisco and six other counties with the goal of expanding state wide by December 2024. (CARE is an acronym for Community Assistance, Recovery & Empowerment.) This CARE Court plan as been crafted, messaged, and packaged to have most civilians believing in its great new approach to supporting folks with “severe mental illness.” The plan states that it will help people with “schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders, who may also have substance use challenges and who lack medical decision-making capacity”. Their goal includes a “less” restrictive community based care settings and “less” restrictive conservatorships or incarceration.
There are many flaws and concerns with this legislation. In order to get help, CARE Court involves court orders, which means that a judge mandates recovery following a bio-medical model. This means treatment primarily in the form of psychotropic medications. It also ORDERS punishment (such as conservatorships or institutionalization) if the person does not voluntarily comply.
Instead of CLIENT self determination, this CARE court framework, allows anyone from family members, county personnel, to community mental health workers, the ability to initiate a referral which means the client must participate against their will for up to two years. California’s CARE Court is just a new system of coercion. CARE court undermines client centered care, taking power and dignity away from the client and putting it into the hands of the arbitrary people in positions of power to decide how a person should be able to live.
Ironically as Disability Rights California argues, CARE Court does not order that more housing is built for unhoused people. Instead, the parameters are left vague in terms of who will provide the “housing plan” and what that would look like. There is no promise of secure housing listed in this new legislation. This is just another crafty scheme packaged under the guise of empowerment and community support, when in fact, THE OPPOSITE IS TRUE. CARE Court will marginalize and dehumanize people who are disable, poor, and struggling with systemic inequalities.
Fierce resistance to institutionalization has existed since the beginnings of the anti-psychiatry movement. This movement popularized the notion of being a psychiatric survivor; overcoming prejudice and abuse from the bio-medical and psychiatric systems. During my initial deep dives into this realm, I found plenty of writing and perspectives from affluent European psychiatrists largely supported by their elite universities as practitioners, professors, and researchers. I did not feel or sense my experiences reflected in their work. I was grappling with my own psychosis, energetic sensitivities, forced hospitalization, addiction, and trauma. I just wanted to deeply witness other survivors and their stories, hoping that it would soften the isolation I felt. Luckily, the time spent in solitude allowed for deep rabbit holes to be discovered. I found light at the end of the tunnel through survivors’ stories, their art, poetry, organizations, podcasts, books, YouTube videos, and films. Survivor led movements and collective healing deeply inspire me.
Mad folks are such lights for each other~ offering their stories, hope and renewal, true mutual aid, and transformative care.
One of the most comprehensive resources page I come back to all the time is The Psych Survivor Archive. They are an abolitionist organization deeply invested in mad liberation and cross-movement organizing. Liat Ben-Moshe also has a well curated resources page that I frequently refer back to for tools and reading materials. Project LETS launched a FREE online Psychiatric Survivor Clinic for folks who would like community care and peer support. The Kiva Centers provides voluntary short-term housing for people experiencing acute crises. Hearing Voices Network and MindFreedom International also contain a wealth of information, resources, and networking within safe communities. The Withdrawal Project helps folks who are interested in tapering off psychotropic medications safely. These are just some of the tools I’ve found helpful on my journey towards wholeness. I am eternally grateful for the ability to safely access information, join online communities and networks and download free workbooks, care plans, crisis mapping tools. This, to me, is true mutual aid, survivor led support, and believing in each others’ humanity instead of fearing our quirks and differences.
There is hope. I believe more and more folks are opening their eyes to all of the systems and institutions that don’t serve humanity anymore. We are not slaves to these systems. We have self determination, it is our birthright to be sovereign and free. My hope and prayer is that everyone is able to discover what makes them want to move and act, even in tiny little ways, so that we can collectively create a new world that includes everyone.
