“At Vancouver General Hospital, one of the first tests is which sandwich you choose. Word on the ward is, those who choose egg salad are flagged, betraying the many good reasons one might hold such a preference at the specific and strange moment of its offering in PAU. It’s easy to believe once you’ve spent enough time on the inside, seeing how decisions about these prisoners are conducted. They don’t really conduct much for medical or adequately scientific examination of mental health, they judge the choices, the suffering, the behaviour, the words and beliefs of the subject, ripped from the true context of the human they judge, distorted through the lens of the beholders. Nobody asks or listens as to the “why”, they just watch and tally points toward their juked profiles. The beholders are systematically selected from a caste that would never understand the subjects whom they wield such power over, and are trained and conditioned extensively to make their subjects fit a profile which enables our disempowerment and disenfranchisement. Rich kids from good families who do as they are told qualify for medical school to reign over the kinds of people they were taught not to talk to. These doctors, ironically, never actually seek to investigate the truth of their patients claims, they just decide if it could be true according to their own sense of the world, which excludes the realities of those whom they assume to preside over. It’s hard not to be mad at them, to remember that they are victims of misinformation as well, when they do such disproportionate damage with their disproportionate power. Golden handcuffs glisten with a curse. These misdirected healers would never want to imagine themselves as weapons, so they don’t. Those who do, leave one way or another. The system that spits us in, spits them out. The curated cognitive dissonance that remains amongst the staff who get to remain form walls that keep the patients caged more than the walls of the towers built to contain us. These places are not about mental health, they are about conditioning and compliance, about criminalizing dissidents and anyone who contradicts the Order they serve.
You would think by now the victims of such a program would revolt, alas, the program works quite well. Subjects leave thoroughly drugged, coerced and intimidated into denying their own realities and admitting to whatever they are told. These are the prerequisites for freedom, which we have returned in the physical sense albeit robbed in the psychological sense. Contrary to the false claim of mental health, we leave mentally weakened, beaten down by cops with clipboards. Many internalize the rejection and project it onto others. We have all been conditioned not to retain the indirectly outlawed stories and ways of being which the psychiatric industrial complex has framed as pathology- open suffering, genuine human emotion, suppressed stories and perspectives, not trusting psychiatry, speaking out against the state, critical inquiry, being victims of certain kinds of violence, being indigenous, anyone who said ACAB or protested local tyranny, non-linear thinking and other forms of nonconformity, anything and anyone revolutionary that might contradict the current regime, or anything else I’ve just said or will say on the subject. If you reject the modern programming, you will be deemed invalid.
There is a case to prove that those deemed mentally ill may in fact have a greater fortitude than those chosen to treat us, we just have a lot more to bare. I suppose it all depends how one defines health. By their definition it is a matter of embodying containment and the dominating narratives . By this definition, I believe, they would still fail in comparison if ever subject to the conditions they treat their patients to. I have seen the kinds of things that make nurses, security and doctors fritz, and it’s often not much. They are quite unreasonable and reactive, but with power to take it out on whoever they react to. If ever recipient to the torture they enacted, I imagine they would find themselves injected in a solitary cell screaming, “I don’t belong here!” pretty dang quick. If the definition were about a full range of healthy human expression and flexibility, they fail again. They antagonize us for seeing patterns they do not, and as such, blindness becomes the new standard under the paradigm they serve. It’s no coincidence that those who enact psychological violence and spread these illnesses like a parasite or virus are rarely (if ever) detained for study or treatment, only their victims. They are top donors at the facilities. I looked out at The Jim Pattinson Pavillion every morning I was held. Ask for a different lawyer than those they provide and they will ask like it’s a dare, “can you afford that?” If only they would really wonder of the true reasons why we cannot. This is a setup.
The staff have been given their falsified framework to fortify with their compounding fallacies, but they are not alone. The whole nation seems to have their own juked understandings of lamens psychology that they unwittingly weaponize as well. I was little different before coming to understand that this was malicious propaganda designed to slate target demographics with mass dehumanization. People have openly admitted to me to stalking mental patients for the sake of community safety, as though our names were on a list. (I’ll resist getting started on the file security of our healthcare system for now, but to say that it’s so bad, it would seem to be intentional.) Far & wide, people are calling each other narcissists and nut jobs, saying “trauma is no excuse” and ostracizing each other and themselves, not seeing how they have been tricked, by an algorithm informed by their data on exactly how to trick them, into destroying the fabric of our communal and individual psychological integrity. Nowadays, like so many things, sanity is a matter of fragmented literacy, a class and caste issue. As an example, if I were to say “fuck” right now, I’d lower my own rank in the point system considerably. It’s abusive language to those who don’t use it, a linguistic essential to those who do. Fuck, eh?
…..
Computers, having been modelled to mirror the human brain as well as larger social structures, run programs that translate between them. This is to say that the algorithms that curate our information for us don’t just work online, they work IRL as well. The programs are a product of minds which are products of the society they are formed in, the society is formed by minds influenced by programs. We have been siloed into echo chambers that make the information we receive seem to be the information that “is”. When the people who do have education in medical sciences are so woefully misled and misinformed, how could the general public ever hope to get it right. Many are basically slinging ancient superstitions about demonic possession and subhumanity under the guise of better science at this point. Of course, I must account for how this may just be my own lenses distortion coming from sociopathic abuse which very intentionally exploits such concepts against its victims. Then again, it seems that we might all qualify as such a victim. Then again, using terms of psychiatry to describe the violence it perpetuates (as it does in hidden legalese) may be a fools errand. Then again, I’ve always been a fool, by my own meaning.”
X carried on through her old notes to find an unfinished plead from the year before, the last time she had been detained for crying for help from the genuine persecution she had faced, disheartened to learn that from within her stigmatized position, would be translated into paranoia by those who had not seen what happened to her,
“The current grosse misconduct being waged in the name of the Mental Health Act pathologizes activists, artists, natural humanists, empaths and true patriots.
Since February 2nd, and not for the first time, psychiatrists have pathologized my being unique and controversial to their own held biases and beliefs….”
Some proof of her perspective through the drastically shifting landscapes that remained through the attempts of the system to bully it out of her.

Leave a comment