withasmoothroundstone:

How the fuck did you get that from what I said? I said institutions shouldn’t exist.  I didn’t say there should be no constraints on people who hurt other people.  Institutions cause more violence than they solve.  

And mentally ill doesn’t mean likely to hurt people.  Most people who hurt people are not mentally ill.  Most people who are categorized as mentally ill don’t hurt people.  (I’m using your words and concepts here, not mine, mind you.)  The question of what to do about people who hurt people is entirely separate from the question of whether people with psychiatric disabilities belong in institutions.

Like… I’ve been in mental institutions, okay?  I’ve been hurt by other patients but I’ve been hurt worse and more consistently by staff with no known mental illness diagnosis.  The best institution staff I ever encountered was a psychiatric nurse with a diagnosis of bipolar.  She was good because she treated us like human beings.  She never had to use violence to stop us doing anything because none of us wanted to do anything to her and even those of us who got worked up would calm down when she talked to us because she fundamentally treated us like human beings.

Other crazy people have saved my life.  I hope a crazy person saves your life one day.  Maybe you’ll think differently about us.

Mind you, I’m not saying we’re all totally innocent people who would never hurt anyone.  I’ve hurt people before.  I’ve been hurt and gotten death threats from other people who’d probably be categorized as mentally ill.  I’ve also been hurt and gotten death threats from people who are categorized as completely sane.  I’ve had more sane people than crazy people hurt me.  By your logic all sane people should be locked up, since they’re the source of most violence, both inside and outside of institutions.  And most violence of institution is staff-on-patient, not patient-on-patient or patient-on-staff, although those two certainly happen.  Worse, a lot of the violence is invisible to those committing it.

I’ve had wonderful fine upstanding sane heroic citizens try to kill me.  As in, literally fucking try to kill me.  In a mental institution.  That kind of experience is the root of the violence problem I later developed.  The violence in institutions is contagious.  Being constantly on the bottom and stepped on can create in some people an unpredictable rage-violence that comes out at random times.  It would happen to anyone in our position, not just crazy people, either.  It develops in people in other kinds of institutions that are not specific to crazy people.

And that stereotype of mentally ill people as violent is exactly why they were able to try and kill me.  It’s also why they were able to get away with beating the shit out of me until there were bruises on every part of my body – everywhere.  And that was just the violence done to my body.  It’s the violence done to my mind, heart, and soul that are much harder to take, and much harder to put a finger on and explain to people.  And I doubt someone whose response to “institutions are terrible and shouldn’t exist” is “then crazy people will get out and kill everyone” would even understand that kind of violence or that it matters or that it can be the root cause of the stereotypical unpredictable violence supposedly found in so many crazy people (but actually found in few of us compared to the amount of violence found in people in general).

Because people saw me as crazy they jumped up and down on my hands in front of teachers and when asked to stop said “But she doesn’t feel it” because I couldn’t moe when they were doing it.  It’s why my first-ever stay in a mental institution a guy was able to insert his foot up my butt and wiggle it around sexually in front of an entire room full of patients and staff and nobody did anything except later whisper to me that it happened because they thought I hadn’t noticed because I couldn’t move.  (Being unable to move, in such contexts, is almost always thought psychiatric.  It was actually an early sign of a progressive movement disorder I  have to this day that was made worse by some of the meds they put me on.)

Like… I’ve had both sane and crazy people hurt me.  I’ve had both sane and crazy people help me.  People who hurt people need to be stopped.  Systems that hurt people also need to be stopped.  This goes no matter what category people do or don’t fall into.  Institutions are systems that always hurt people on a level far deeper than you can probably imagine.  They are not full of people who hurt people naturally.  They are full of inmates and staff.  Staff almost inevitably hurt inmates even without trying because the system forces them into that role.  That’s why institutions are far more dangerous than what you’re talking about:  They take people who would not ordinarily hurt people and force them into a power relationship that can’t easily avoid people getting hurt.

It’s interesting though when you talk about closing institutions.  People – no matter what their stance on things in general – almost always think that you mean just instantly removing everyone from a building without changing anything else about the society you live in.  Most people who want institutions closed are not talking about doing that.

So to be clear:

Closing institutions means finding ways to support disabled people without forcing us into a building with other people like us where we’re treated like non-persons and where the system forces an unnecessarily adversarial and sometimes physically violent relationship with the people who are supposed to be taking care of us.  Most people in disability institutions are not there because they hurt or try to kill people.  Those who are, will probably become more violent as a result of the institutions, and will definitely – like everyone else – experience a kind and level of violence that cuts much deeper than physical violence ever could.  

I personally was never particularly violent until I’d experienced institutions, and was only able to stop being violent by staying away from them.  And it’s other crazy people running around loose like me, who taught me how not to be violent and helped me heal from the violence I’d experienced.  As i said, I hope a crazy person saves your life one day.  Many crazy people have saved mine.  And I don’t mean indirectly and figuratively, I mean without these people I would have died many times over.

At any rate, as I said, there is absolutely nothing done in institutions that can’t be done better without them.  And that includes keeping people from being violent, although I honestly don’t think institutions do a very good job at that.  

Also, if things were the way you want them to be, then I would in no way be protected from violence. Because I would still be locked up.  And if crazy people are as violent as you say, and if we were all poised to kill people all the time, as if we’re nothing but violence-creating machines… that would mean if you lock us all up together, we’d be at more risk of violence from each other.  I suppose you probably think that’s okay.

That’s one thing I learned from disability-segregated settings.  We were all removed from being around nondisabled people for various reasons.  Many times, the reasons were simply that they didn’t want to have to deal with us.  Sometimes because we were loud.  Sometimes because we were violent.  Sometimes because we were “distracting” (read: did things that were unusual or unexpected, not necessarily violent).  Sometimes because we had “too many needs”.  Lots of things.

But fundamentally we were put there because other people refused to adapt to our presence near them.

But somehow, even though we were supposedly more limited in all areas including social ones.  We were supposed to adapt to each other.  And we mostly did.

It’s interesting how other people see us.  They throw us out of where they are, thinking we’ll become someone else’s problem.  They don’t care that we then have to deal with each other.

Which among other things means that people who get thrown out for doing things that harm other people, get thrown into the exact same places as people who are more vulnerable to harm or less able to tell anyone (or to be believed) if this harm happens.  And there is little to no effort made to protect us from each other.

In special ed this meant there was a boy who hurt several girls sexually and none of us were allowed to warn anyone about him because “confidentiality”.  And then it was our fault for being near him when he decided to do that to us.  And it was basically seen as okay that we were hurt by him.  He was removed from regular school for doing things like that.  But when he did things like that to other special ed kids, there was nowhere to remove him to, and we had to adapt to his presence, we had no choice and nobody would help us when he did something.

Mind you I’m not saying there should’ve been another more restrictive place they should have put him, away from us.

I’m saying there’s something broken about the whole idea that we can be removed from regular classrooms for reasons that just come down to convenience so that regular people don’t have to deal with us.  But then we have to deal with each other.  It shows that nobody actually cares if we get hurt, and that the segregated disability system is not designed to stop people from getting hurt.  The people within that system are simply not people and what happens to us doesn’t matter.  So lock us all up together and let us get hurt by each other as much as possible and nobody gives a shit as long as we’re not hurting them.

That’s what’s broken about your idea, about the whole idea that institutions protect people.  They sure as shit don’t protect the people inside them.  And despite everything I’ve just said, the people we most need protecting from aren’t each other, it’s the people who work there.  The sane people.  The nondisabled people or disabled people who can pass as nondisabled to some extent.  The people who, plugged into a violent system, will always to some degree become an automatic delivery system for violence that you can’t even imagine probably. And that violence automatically happens to people you don’t seem to give much of a shit about.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  Who guards the guards themselves?  My favorite Latin saying.

Anyway.  There has to be a better way to deal with violence than to put people into a system that is inevitably violent and that creates more violence than it stops.  There has to be a better way to protect everyone from violence than to remove the violent people to a place where they can hurt people with impunity because the other people they are hurting, like them, have become nonpersons to society at large, and are also usually assumed to be violent whether we are or not.  

(And apparently if you’re violent then you are a nonperson who it doesn’t matter what is done to you.  But I’d think even if we’re all nonpersons to you you’d give a shit that the system makes us more violent, not less.  I did not seriously hurt people until I’d been in institutions a few times.  It took me years to unlearn the violence I learned there.  I didn’t learn it from other inmates.  I know someone who very non-coincidentally, almost did a school shooting immediately after being released from a psych ward.  If they’d done it, people would’ve blamed mental illness.  The psych ward stay was actually the final trigger that made them almost go through with it.  This was before school shootings were a well-known thing.  If they’d done it, the consequences in copycat crimes would’ve been like the consequences of Columbine.  And the despair that drove them in that direction was triggered by witnessing and experiencing severe violence at the hands of those fine upstanding saintly sane citizens who just happened to be horribly violent, sometimes murderous, to the people under their “care”, but who were seen as saints for dealing with crazy people at all.)

Institutions have a weird habit of creating the problems people claim they solve.

People think mental institutions protect people from violence.  They actually subject people to horrible violence, and do things in a way that makes even nonviolent people sometimes become violent, and violent people become more violent, as a result of what happens to them there.

People think nursing homes protect people from falls and dying and things.  Disabled people in nursing homes die younger and faster than people with identical disabilities receiving the support to live outside.

People think mental institutions somehow make people less crazy.  In many cases they make us more crazy or do nothing.  One of my experiences of them was I was told they were the only place I could turn for help when suicidal.  Suicide is sometimes a response to a feeling that you have no options and no hope.  When the system was seen as my only hope, and presented as my only hope, then when I didn’t feel any better there, and actually felt worse, I lost hope and became more suicidal not less.

I know that sometimes institutions do what they’re supposed to do.  But more often they do the opposite.  And even when they do what they’re supposed to do, there’s always a way to get the benefits presumed to exist in institutions, without the whole power structure that makes an institution an institution.

They’re also supposed to save money.  They generally don’t.  Sometimes they do.  Often they don’t.  People need to be cautious throwing this fact around because it can suggest that if we really are more expensive outside of institutions (and sometimes we are) then we belong in institutions because of the “cost to society”.  But nondisabled people have their needs (some of which are both very expensive and unique to people without certain disabilities) met without institutions for the most part, and so can we.

I currently live in my own apartment.  I get services through a system that gives services to people with developmental disabilities.  I qualify for admission to either a nursing home (institution for people with physical disabilities and chronic illness and old age related disabiliites) or an ICF-MR/ICF-DD (institution for people with developmental disabilities).  I’m not in either one of those things because people before me fought for the rights of people like me, to live in our own homes and receive the support we need here.  The support I need is pretty extensive.  

I can do very little entirely on my own.  I have complex medical needs, two feeding tubes (long story, but one’s for putting stuff in and the other is for taking stuff out), other medical implants and equipment, and a tendency to almost die in random ways that people barely figure out in time (my last ICU stay was almost exactly a year ago, I’d stopped breathing).  Until a couple conditions were properly diagnosed and treated I was in a complicated motorized wheelchair that tilted you back on the rare occasions I wasn’t in a hospital bed.  Throughout all this i’ve lived in my own home except for hospitalizations when very ill.  Throughout all this I’ve had to fight for my right to live in my own home as people freaked out by my care requirements tried to persuade me and/or those around me to put me in a nursing home or group home or etc.

People who would normally be put in mental institutions deserve complex, appropriate support.  Of a kind that rarely happens for us either inside or outside of such institutions.

People need to be stopped from being violent to other people.

The two groups of people referenced above are far from identical.

If you want to stop people from hurting or killing other people, creating an institution is the absolute last thing you should be doing.  Institutions take people who would never hurt anyone and make them hurt people, sometimes without even realizing what they are doing, sometimes realized but rationalized to themselves in various ways.  Institutions take people who normally would hurt people, and give them a mostly-blameless outlet for their violence.  And I’m talking mostly about nondisabled people here – the people who work in institutions.  If you want to save people from their violence the last thing you want to do is create a system that encourages and even mandates violence.  That would be obvious if you cared as much about stopping violence as you did about locking up crazy people.

And it also causes inmates to be more likely to be violent, whether we were originally prone to violence or not.  This hardly seems like a place for getting rid of violence.

I don’t know if you’ll listen to me, especially because I’m not giving you a lot of credit here.  I can’t make myself after what I’ve seen and the mood I’m in right now.  But maybe someone will read this and understand what I’m saying.  Like, I don’t care that people disagree with me, I do care that you seem to sincerely believe that institutions stop violence.  Or that you institutions would protect me (someone likely to be an inmate) from people you presume to be violent (other people likely to be inmates).  When they haven’t and they don’t.

Like, I’m not some starry-eyed utopian optimist.  I’m someone who’s seen the underbelly of a system I hope you never have to see the underbelly of.  And who can’t turn off that knowledge just because some people assume crazy = violent.

And yes I can use the term crazy, for anyone offended by it.  I prefer it to diagnostic terms or the idea that our minds are sick in the same way bodies get sick.  Other people have their own preferences and that’s fine.  This is mine.  I can’t say mentally ill for long without feeling like a liar.  Psychiatric disability is a term I sometimes use in mixed company to be polite or something but it doesn’t quite cover it for me.  YMMV.

If you want a more coherent and organized view on this, try Critic of the Dawn.  You’ve just basically brought out the ‘Bruce’ caricature she mentions and made it stand in for everyone in mental institutions (except staff, who are actually almost invariably more violent than inmates when taken as a whole).

Again, who guards the guards themselves?  That’s the problem with institutions.

[ETA: I corrected the Latin spelling. I didn’t bank on autocorrect… It’s “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Translated variously as “Who watches the watchmen?” “Who guards the guards themselves?” “Who watches the watchers?” etc.  You can see the Latin root of English words such as custody, custodian, custodial, etc. And to the person who commended me on my patience, thank you, but I didn’t feel patient, i felt pissed.  Because it’s one thing to disagree with my views on institutions, it’s another to act like I’ve seriously never thought through that question despite the amount of thought i’ve clearly put into it.  And because that mentality that crazy people are dangerous is quite dangerous to crazy people and justifies some of the worst things that happen to us.]