Reparations – a deeper look

I have written several blog posts, articles and advocacy statements about reparations for psychiatric violence. This has a personal meaning to me that describes my journey as a survivor – first bearing witness, then seeking healing and justice, which are intertwined. The personal and political (or simply collective and interpersonal) dimensions of these are intertwined as well – for me, bearing witness, healing and justice are for the purpose of stopping the atrocities for me and everyone, repairing what has been torn in the social fabric by people choosing to ask the state to incarcerate their loved ones or by workers in a healing profession to become part of a machine that harms and kills. My own healing becomes this justice in the world, and gives back to me possibilities of a new world that is also one with more ancient values stemming from wholeness that is originally female and that sings in the stars, stones, water and trees, in me and in my connections with belly laughing women and women with whom I can share soul-meaning in my life.

Reparations has meaning in my professional work as a human rights lawyer that both carries forward this vision – is its primary instrument – and is irrevocably at odds with it. Reparations in international law is a holistic call to repair harms attributable to a state, focusing on state responsibility to right wrongs towards individuals, groups of individuals, and communities. Yet what is the state in our lives, but a source of alienation from our original meanings and knowledge, our capacity for mutual responsibility? If the state is a means of coordinating large-scale projects (as it can be, at its best, subject to democratic processes and human rights norms which are mutually recursive), it is also the organization of power to control, suppress, punish and kill. For women especially the state can never be ours.

Reparative justice is a concept some of us have used to invoke a ‘whole society process’ that goes beyond what states can do. In reality this already is part of what any social justice movement that seeks reparation is pursuing. Think of the movement for reparations for slavery, which has seen some institutions and descendants of individuals who profited from enslavement make concrete economic and social reparations to those they harmed (descendants of enslaved Africans who still suffer from the long-term consequences to themselves and to American society). Think of the #landback movement and the rematriation of cultural objects, human remains and burial grounds to their indigenous communities.

In contributing to the Guidelines on Deinstitutionalization of the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, I was able to advocate successfully, together with other survivors and allies, for inclusion of a substantive section on reparations for institutionalization in the draft issued earlier this year (it is expected the Guidelines will be finalized by October). Institutionalization is a broad concept that takes many forms, including psychiatric violence. (I argue that it encompasses forced psychiatric drugging outside institutions as well as any instance of psychiatric incarceration and the forced drugging and other violence that takes place there – as even forced drugging outside institutions is backed by threat of institutionalization for noncompliance and is part of a ‘logic of institutionalization’ that substitutes coercion and control for support and medicalizes and suppresses human diversity.) I expect to write more about the Guidelines when the final draft is issued.

For survivors of psychiatric institutionalization, the actors who harmed us are not only the psychiatrists, nurses, and institutional staff who turned themselves into machines to abuse us with their exercise of dominance, not only the shock manufacturers and drug companies who turned instruments of torture into a huge profit-making industry. Our family members – mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, spouses and partners, grown children, and others – and our friends, lovers, neighbors, bosses, co-workers, teachers; our therapists and our family members’ therapists – those we trusted and those we didn’t trust but were in complicated relationships with that were not of our own choosing – any of these may have collaborated with the state’s repressive machinery to take away our freedom, our sense of safety, our last remaining ground of refuge. When they weren’t safe ever, but we thought we had figured out our work-arounds, they one-upped us with lies, deceptions, and the willingness of the state and the evil industries of medicalized repression to believe anything that feeds their machinery, their egos and their pockets.

We need reparative justice to work on this level and to have an interfacing relationship with the work of reparations mechanisms that states create in collaboration with survivors. This should, as CHRUSP advocated in our submission to the second phase of consultation on the Guidelines, be fully acknowledged in the Guidelines so that both deinstitutionalization and the reparations mechanisms of states will actually be reparative in nature. Justice requires true and full confrontation with the harms, and those who have caused harms cannot control the process or require carve-outs that exempt them. They do have a right to have their say on justice needs of their own – reparative justice has to be complete in all directions and dimensions.

**

Please see also the webinar that CHRUSP convened on Remedy and Reparation for Institutionalization as a side event to the 2022 CRPD Conference of States Parties, where I bring together survivors and allies with whom I have been thinking about the significance of reparations for psychiatric institutionalization.

Power

I think we need a renewed excavation of power, among feminists and other movements.

Power has gotten a bad rap because for many women it is associated with men, with abuse, with violence. Anger has similarly gotten a bad rap. It seems the only time power and anger can be made safe for women (or anybody, but only women are paying attention) is through therapy. If a therapist, or your collective, affirms that you are in the right, that you are defending yourself, that your power has been taken away by an abuser who is definitively in the wrong – and of course that abuser is characterized as someone who is in love with power, who likes being powerful, who isn’t ashamed of their power – well, then go ahead. Do what you have to do, you have the stamp of approval.

But watch out – somebody else may be paying attention who didn’t go through that program with you. They might call you a Karen (see Glosswitch’s post) or crazy, they might lock you up or get you killed depending on who you are and who they are and your relative power and privilege on a social scale.

So what do we do if we genuinely don’t want to abuse anyone at the micro and macro levels, we want to be conscious of both internalized oppression and implicit bias (against ourselves or others) and the ways we inadvertently oppress others? How can we do this internal and external work to upend and destroy the hierarchies that construct power at the collective level, while understanding power simply and neutrally as the force we wield through our will and action and communication, apart from hierarchies and not in itself good or evil?

When I was learning Aikido, my male teacher – someone who I sensed did not think well of himself and who was a combat veteran and probably an abuse survivor – responded nervously and misogynistically to my delight at completing a technique successfully at an early stage of my training. I had done a wrist lock on a very nice large and gentle man, done it fast and just as I was shown, and it made him wince and brought him to his knees. Being able to subdue someone twice my size, doing a martial arts technique successfully, was not a power trip. But my teacher responded, ‘You like the power, huh’ as an implicit criticism. My technique never really recovered.

Three years or so later, my teacher eyed me quizzically with another implicit criticism, after I had taken a fall when another (male) student had actually failed to perform the technique successfully. I was somewhat intimidated by this student’s advanced standing and felt unsure of myself in calling attention to his failed execution, though we were all supposed to be each others’ teachers.

I can’t make a direct link between the two incidents, but both reflect a misogynistic environment that denied women the free use of our own power – in the one case our physical power and in the other, our authority as knowers of the art we practiced in common. (I use the plural but for most of my time there I was the only woman present on a regular basis.)

I liked the dojo and enjoyed casual friendships with some of the men I practiced with, hanging out after class. It was small, in my neighborhood, and I practiced nearly every day for much of that time.

It ended after an act of sexual abuse by a senior male student in the act of doing a technique, when we were attending a seminar given by the teacher of our teacher, at another dojo. My teacher gave me no support when I told him about this, and only years after I left and encountered him in the street he told me that I was right to consider it a problem of the dojo and he had eventually spoken to that student about his behavior. Too little, way too late.

I don’t think that women should have to create our own female-only spaces in order to experience our power safely and freely. I treasure female-only space and especially lesbian space. There is a richness to our connections, seeing each other, toughening up in our mutual abrasiveness and basking in our mutual tenderness, that nourishes me to my roots.

But if I am obligated to seek out that space for safety, I am not free and I am not strong. And it’s not only physical safety, safety from violence and aggression that we should be and are concerned about, it’s safety *to* be our full, big selves. We can and should share our knowledge and strategies for exercising our power out there against male aggression and its collective, corporate and institutional organized forms. But we have to understand that power is not something that needs sanitizing or processing through a feminist collective, or therapy, in order to be safe for women, in order to be satisfying, in order to be good.

The good or evil of power is our choices about how to use it. We have to own our power in order to make these choices – not power as privilege, which becomes an obligation to political correctness, but power as power, inherent in all human beings or any life. Power as the force behind one’s will, and will (as readers of this blog may know) is the human right to universal legal capacity.

We don’t need to point to some kind of intersectional identity – anything but the status of being female, which is once again being shoved into the mud, made animalistic, shameful, and irrelevant to human rights and non-discrimination discourse – in order to understand ourselves as having and using, wielding and exercising power. It does not have to be butch or femme, does not have to be Jewish or Black or Brown or Indigenous, though we need to know, analyze, feel and move with the ways these intersectional oppressions take power from us and complexity the barriers we face in exercising it (and the strategies we use in affirming and claiming power for ourselves).

We do not have to see power as all or nothing either, or shared as if it were a pie. My power is not the same as yours, I don’t have to divide mine for you to have some. ‘God(dess) bless the child that’s got her own.’

On Not Throwing Anyone Away

This workshop took place on April 24, 2021, presented by Tina Minkowitz.

Description:

“This workshop brings together concerns and interests of mine in the areas of disability human rights (abolition of forced psychiatry, guardianship and institutionalization), restorative justice, and how lesbians and feminists create community.

“I am interested in our politics towards the world outside our lesbian communities – which impacts us and in which we also play active roles as leaders, activists, workers, etc. – and in our internal community practices and relationships.

“I am committed to feminism that is relevant to all women (female human beings) as liberation from male domination and all other forms of oppression. I am also committed to the abolition of forced psychiatry and similar practices, and have shaped international human rights law to uphold this position.

“I have more questions than answers, regarding some big and little issues where disability, restorative justice and feminism intersect. Two of these are the question of women’s relationship to the state, and whether calls for inclusion – ‘everybody in, nobody out’ – end up exploiting women, or if we can envision and create practices that make this work. (By inclusion, I am not referring to males in female-only spaces, but such things as the right of all adults and children to live in the community and not be institutionalized.)”

Recording can be accessed here: https://soundcloud.com/user-855766643/on-not-throwing-anyone-away-1

On not throwing anyone away 

Tina Minkowitz 

What does it mean? 

Societyʼs garbage cans – prisons, psychiatric institutions, other institutions – what else? 

ʻThrow it (them?) away where? The world is roundʼ People arenʼt fungible – relationships not commodities 

Challenges 

Freedom to separate and set boundaries Freedom to refuse care and attention Kinship-based societies vs market-based 

State as both oppressor enforcing hierarchies/exploitative relations, and guarantor of safety and basic needs 

What has been your experience? 

Have you ever experienced one or more of societyʼs garbage cans? Been threatened with one? 

How does that affect your relationship with the world? 

Do you have good experiences with caring and attending in times of crisis? 

How do we deal with each otherʼs needs, flaws and limitations, without being overwhelmed or making outcast? 

Large-scale and small 

On small scale, we can all develop personal resilience and collective resilience – I mean that in the sense of, over time, learning enough from ups and downs to not be harmed by them 

Separation for a period of time or forever, is always possible – there are no guarantees 

We give each other slack as imperfect people relating to imperfect people – enter into honesty to create structures, values, practices that reflect who we are separately and together 

… and large scale? 

On large scale itʼs harder, isnʼt it? 

State and the big wide world that is defined by racial capitalist patriarchy, but in which we all move and act nevertheless – in resistance and in ordinary creativity and agency 

Defund the police/ decarceration/ transformative justice/ community safety – how do these relate to women? 

Do police and prisons stop rapists/rape? Do they stop/prevent femicides? (Is there anything that does?) 

Caring isnʼt actually optional 

Letʼs pick apart the patriarchal overlay
Mothers and infants canʼt separate from each other without harm 

We often have ongoing relationships that are not entirely our own choice – not because anyone is forcing us but because they involve complex obligations, interrelationships, needs – we canʼt make everything to our liking 

On the larger scale, we have duties to one another – we are all connected – women originally have public role but how do we claim it now? 

Matriarchies, gift economy, the earth 

Do matriarchies allow for societal garbage cans? 

Can we guarantee universal caring/attending without corresponding control? 

Speech and gift – ʻhearing into speechʼ, incipient speech/communication, can everyone be ʻheardʼ? 

ʻSitting with discomfortʼ – prescription or description – (why/when) is it worth it to listen? 

ʻFractal binary of the giftʼ – circles connecting with circles 

Law, politics 

Dismantling the features of law that maintain hierarchy and oppression 

(including targeted paternalistic control such as guardianship, psychiatric commitment, juvenile PINS, economic policies that result in disability-related institutionalization) 

State as organizer of resources? 

Does community safety/ transformative justice work stop rape and femicide? Can it? What would it take for that work to deeply be accountable to women as women, along with all the other dimensions it needs to be accountable to (race, class, disability)? 

Identities and who gets to have them

Identity is a paradox. We’re all human, and society – well let’s say patriarchal, capitalist, colonialist/racist society – constructs all kinds of ways to select some people to rule over others and exploit them. Those who are on the bottom don’t get much say in their identity, or anybody else’s. Those at the top get to hide behind a mask of neutrality and objectivity, they are the gods naming everybody else and can remain unnamed themselves.

There is a paradox in oppressed people finding their own voices, because we are embedded in culture that has defined us as the objects for others’ use, for their manipulation and management. Yet every oppression also entails the oppressors knowledge that oppressed people are human beings, subjects with will and creativity and the power to turn their gaze on the oppressor, unmask the oppressor, appropriate even the oppressor’s language to change the common fabric of culture. (It is only by being aware of the humanity – the personhood – of those you oppress, that you instrumentalize their capabilities and seek their compliance; punishment and reward, manipulation and deception all demonstrate this paradox. Oppressed people develop strategies of resistance and accommodation both within and against an oppressive system, and suffer moral injury from compliance; political consciousness is not a given and cultivating it can be both painful and prolonged.)

It seems that there is first a sense of not being able to speak (or naming the reality that one’s speech is made an impossibility), having no words and no context to name the reality of who we are that is crossed out, named to death against us. Listening to ourselves, using the inherent creativity of a conscious being, what Hannah Arendt calls natality, by paying attention in new ways, we find what it is we need to say. Post-colonial studies, women’s studies, pedagogy of the oppressed, ‘hearing each other into speech’, creating separatist spaces to encounter one another free from the exempted gaze and discourse of those who speak from outside this reality and put together the shards of what needs to be made whole; or talk about the brokenness and witness the whole emerge.

Identity and material reality

I’m going to talk about survivor identity here, and the concept of psychosocial disability, users and survivors of psychiatry, and also women as in women’s liberation. Who the ‘we’ is that gets to define who ‘we’ are – that gets to name ourselves, to take the reins of power from the oppressed, to define the oppressed. So starting with women, because the identity has now become convoluted – if anyone can define themselves as a woman, and the oppressor class is now those who would gatekeep and deny such definition…. we see the oppressed pushed back into silence, denied the power and even the linguistic possibility of naming ourselves. We are defined out of existence as an oppressed class, by virtue of a theory that can admit even that society constructs oppression based on sex – what gender theory cannot admit is the existence of oppressor and oppressed classes that are materially constituted not as biological essentialism but as power, so that female human beings can be understood as a class naming themselves. (We do not have to claim a universal female experience; nor do we have to claim any universal or monolithic experience of any other oppressed group – e.g. every oppressed group contains both male and female human beings who are differently situated, and that is intersectionality.)

OK, so material oppression can be analyzed, and posited as a fact underlying this politicization of identity, a fact or a ground on which people who are experiencing oppression can recognize themselves as oppressed, separate themselves from the oppressor, and begin to speak against the oppressor and construct a new consciousness that leads toward a deliberate strategy to end the oppression materially.

Psychiatric oppression and madness-related identities

How does that apply to psychiatric oppression? Or, what does it mean to combat psychiatric oppression as a survivor of it, and how does that relate to the other identities that it has been linked to? We say there is no ‘there’ there, that the material reality of psychiatric oppression is the selection by psychiatrists of their victims through the acts of diagnosis and hospitalization and treatment that may be formally voluntary or involuntary but in which the person has no real power to negate the material fact of this selection if the psychiatrist insists on it through involuntary commitment actually carried out or threatened in order to gain compliance. But what about people who present themselves to psychiatry seeking services, who may use psychiatric drugs and struggle to go off them but have never been involuntarily committed and lead full lives? What about people who go through a period of madness without being locked up? And really what about those of us who were locked up once, got out and never looked back? What is it that defines all of us as a collective? Is there a material reality to madness – again a kind of black-box, what does it mean? – we can reframe it as distress or unusual thoughts or perceptions, does that help? Is that actually an experience common to all people, and could we say something about this experience significantly impacting a person’s life either for a period of time or long-term? Including the long-term impact of the profound discrimination and violence entailed in the psychiatric selection and subjugation? (Maybe, maybe not; do we need to refer to madness and define it – if we refer to it I think it has to be defined so as to avoid romanticism and circular subjectivism; is it useful to define a material reality as a basis for our collective reference group, and is ‘madness’ the starting point for such definition that makes most sense?)

The reason this becomes important is that we cannot actually rely on people to come out about their experience in any uniform way; this is true about any identity that is not immediately visible, including (for some people) being gay or lesbian, and even about identities that are immediately visible such as people who have limited mobility – no one is required to claim any particular identity even if others might apply it to them. (Note that madness is imputed and therefore visible in some sense, and the markers for perceiving someone as mad say more about the social construct of madness than about any characteristic of a person; this can be said about other identities as well but madness imputes an internal state of being to the person that is impossible for anyone else to directly ascertain, even if it can be well defined.)

The madness-related identities, including simply being labeled and treated as a mad person by others – and perhaps madness amounts to this exact disconnection – but then what about those who simply use mental health services, who might identify as having a mental health condition, or might simply say, I see a therapist for trauma counseling, or I use a psychiatric drug to help me stay alert and focused – are they all on the same continuum? We might have converging interests for example in banning electroshock and banning or seriously challenging the prescribing of neuroleptic drugs (the equivocation about neuroleptics in contrast to the banning of electroshock reflects the state of negotiated consensus among the constituency; more people use neuroleptics satisfactorily by choice than have satisfactory experiences with electroshock, among activists in the human rights-focused – as opposed to medical model – movement of the collective); we might converge in caring about reform or abolition of psychiatry and mental health discourse, or psy disciplines (again the equivocation reflects ongoing debates about reform vs abolition of psychiatry etc and what this might mean; it is a separate question from abolition of involuntary commitment).

We might also converge on fighting for abolition of psychiatry’s power to select and subjugate, i.e. all the powers related to involuntary commitment, because anyone close to the mental health system can get sucked under in a moment if a drug wreaks havoc unexpectedly, perhaps from a new prescription or change in the dosage, or by confiding newly emerging deep and raw feelings to a therapist or psychiatrist who is unprepared and decides this makes you a danger to self or others.

Does it matter that we have different experiences? Does it matter that some of us experienced a crisis (also somewhat of a black box requiring explication) only once, and whether or not we were locked up and therefore claim a survivor identity? Does it matter if we still experience trauma from being locked up? Does it matter if the only discrimination we currently face is by identifying as a survivor, bearing witness and fighting for abolition, and thus confronting all the prejudice that reads ‘survivor of psychiatric violence’ as ‘mental patient’, ‘mentally ill person’? Who has the choice to identify in or out, and how much depends on political solidarity? If my identification as a survivor and indelibly part of ‘this collective’ is based on bearing witness, declaring ‘never again’ and understanding that no one in ‘this collective’ of identities related to madness is differently situated than me in that we all have been or are vulnerable to being exposed to psychiatric violence and related oppression – is it a personal identity? Does it say anything about me, other than that I refuse to exempt myself, refuse to escape a collective fate? (Well, I personally stay far away from psychiatry and there is no one left in my life who has an agenda of psychiatrizing me, so I don’t feel myself to be at risk except as a form of political retaliation that could mobilize my identity and acknowledged history, and this comes to the surface when I am called upon to take risks in any kind of activism for human rights. But beyond that, is there a survivor guilt or simply a political commitment and calling to do the work I do?)

Problematizing identities and the choice to not identify

I need to problematize these identities and the diversity within our collective, because the choice of whether to identify or not is political, especially when a person is doing work on ‘our issues’. That is to say, when a person is in a position of advocating ‘for the human rights of people with psychosocial disabilities’ or pronouncing on these rights in an official capacity, and has had relevant experiences but feels that they do not really qualify or prefers not to take on the identity in doing the work. Sometimes people in such roles openly acknowledge that they use mental health services, and may also consider that they are being treated for a ‘mental health condition’, but balk at the suggestion that this places them within the collective of ‘people with psychosocial disabilities’. (They should know, by the way, that the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities instructed Spain that it could not maintain a false distinction between people with mental health conditions and people with psychosocial disabilities; for purposes of the Convention all people with mental health conditions are to be treated as people with psychosocial disabilities. This came in the context of Spain having argued that the Committee’s recommendations to repeal legislation authorizing deprivation of liberty based on psychosocial disability had nothing to do with Spain, because their legislation only authorized involuntary hospitalization based on a mental health condition. Well, that was a non-starter for the CRPD Committee which emphatically told them otherwise. (This illustrates a material convergence of interests irrespective of whether or not an individual chooses to self-identify.))

The point is that playing word games about identity doesn’t get to the real issue. If you say you’re not a person with a disability, large numbers of people who identify as mental health service users or as survivors of psychiatry also don’t like the term disability and don’t identify with it personally; it’s a tool to claim our human rights and the concept of disability non-discrimination works well as applied to core issues of this constituency; our version of the social model of disability is that every person is fine just as they are and society needs to accommodate them and act in solidarity with them rather than trying to ‘fix’ the person – not the version that parses out impairment from social disablement and links them through the existence of barriers. If you say you’re not oppressed – well not all of us who identify have been either. Not all of us have been locked up, not all of us struggle to go off psychiatric drugs, not all of us experience long-term or intermittent distress or unusual thoughts or perceptions. Not all of us have been electroshocked, not all of us have been neurolepticized, not all of us have been put in restraints or institutionalized long-term, not all of us have been locked up. Not all of us live in poverty, not all of us experience racial oppression or oppression based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or sex. It is a heterogeneous identity or heterogeneous collective, in that it includes people whose experiences do not overlap with each other. (So what is it that leads some to identity and others not, and why does it matter?)

Sometimes people disclose experiences privately that inform their passionate advocacy for legal capacity or abolition of forced psychiatry or, perhaps more problematically, ‘human rights in mental health’. I don’t out people unless they are disclosing experiences of another person – e.g. if someone discloses that a family member is a person with psychosocial disability, I do inform my colleagues in the movement that this person is a family member because that’s an identity to watch out for especially when the person advocates the permissibility of any forced interventions. But I don’t disclose a person’s confidences about having used mental health services or having experienced madness. I think we have a right to our own privacy. (If someone has once put themselves forward as a member of a delegation of a representative organization of users and survivors of psychiatry, I may also clarify that I was under the impression that this person was a member of the collective, as we do not put forward others to speak for us. There are material interests at stake, in terms of reputation and credibility, and I do reject the simultaneous attempt to benefit from such elevation and denying a personal stake in the issue as to which expert status is claimed.)

Keeping these confidences puts me in an awkward and problematic position. I want to challenge those who confide in me, or who might think of doing so, to think about the self-exemption that they have chosen in contrast to my choice of solidarity. I would like them to understand that there is no inherent difference between us – and especially that appealing to the question of whether or not a person has been oppressed by virtue of madness-related experience is not read by society as the meaning of ‘psychosocial disability’. (If this applies to you, reader, you might consider the impact of occupying space by virtue of speaking on issues about which you disclaim any personal stake, which is a privileged position, and either come out about your own stake in the matter or give up your space to someone who possesses human rights expertise and is willing to claim their personal stake as well. It is not by claiming an identity, but by claiming expertise, that you occupy a space illegitimately. The world needs more of us who challenge society’s disconnect between madness and reason, not fewer; and you cannot escape your personal contradiction by doing the work while remaining closeted.)

The world reads self-identification as part of this collective, whether as a survivor of psychiatric violence, mad person, mental health service user, etc., as categorically meaning a person with mental illness who then must always speak as a patient, as a petitioner for others’ attention, and never as an authority – never as a legal innovator, except accidentally and exceptionally; never as an official of state. If we have these extra identities, they are superimposed on ‘mental patient’ rather than understood as who we are in the world, coming from a standpoint as survivors of psychiatric violence, etc. It’s important for those who use mental health services but don’t identify with the collective, to consider what you are keeping by remaining separate, and to reflect on and be open about your own relationship to mental health services or madness – yes, including ‘distress’ – when you are discussing mental health policy, abolition of forced psychiatry, legal capacity.

Nobody can make you identify in a way that you don’t, nobody can make you join a group that you don’t want to join or to speak in a representative capacity. But if you don’t identify your own particular stake in the work, if you speak in a voice that claims neutrality and objectivity, you are in effect privileging your own position by refusing to put it in dialogue with others in the heterogeneous collective. Everyone ought to put their own standpoint on the line publicly, including family members, friends, people who have no relationship to it whatsoever and might be curious – it can’t be that self-identified survivors, people with psychosocial disabilities, mental health users are ‘marked’ and those who choose not to self-identify, or who never had any connection on the receiving end of the drug or the needle or therapy, get to stay outside as ‘unmarked’ and their position privileged as having no axe to grind.

Anyone working on these issues needs to ask themselves, what is your connection to ‘mental health’, to madness and to forced psychiatry? Did you ever call the police on somebody to involuntarily commit them? Did you ever exclude somebody from your land group or political committee because they were too difficult and you decided they were bipolar or had borderline personality disorder? We’re all in this in our real lives, and nobody is exempt.

‘Occupying space’ as a mad person, as a woman, as a lesbian

There is the question of whether you are taking the place of someone who deserves it more than you, if you are only seeing a therapist and have never been locked up or taken psychiatric drugs, do you really count? But I would like to say, there are not a finite number of ‘spaces’ to occupy. Nor is it a particular space that one occupies in a figurative sense, by coming out about one’s personal relationship to an issue. The identities as such don’t matter – except when someone categorically sets themselves apart from this identity that they see others as falling within. Nobody – certainly not I – chooses to occupy space as a mad person, as the mythologized stigmatized other created by societies and augmented by psychiatry. I put myself forward to represent this collective as an affirmation that nobody deserves to be placed in that role – to erase the identity by claiming our rights in the context of the CRPD. It deserves to be a disappearing identity, is not one that I have any desire to hold onto or make meaningful. I suppose I differ in that regard from those who claim ‘mad’ as a positive identity meaning something like, resisting society’s normality. (I am revisiting here an issue I addressed in an earlier blog on madness and identity.) My work on CRPD is a bearing witness, an act of reparation and transformative justice, that calls for the opening out of those labeled as mad, into simple humanity, really a spectrum of intense and often painful experiences that are unintelligible until the way is found to articulate them.

Can gender work the same way? Well if it’s only gender in isolation sure, we can say gender as sex-linked roles and expectations (stereotypes, or constellations of meaning) is not necessary and can be abolished. And society’s construct of sex-based oppression, not just a conceptual but a material construct, can be dismantled, and we are all human beings finding our own ways to flourish. The sexed body is its own reality as our experiences of distress or unusual thoughts or perceptions are real, and as madness in the sense of radical disconnection and unintelligibility that can transform itself in an instant, is real. But we don’t get to that abolition by substituting mere subjective identification for a material analysis of the basis of oppression and how different people are situated in relationship to it; in this case based on sex as well as based on different kinds of conformity or non-conformity to sex stereotypes, including the impact of deceptive or assimilative self-presentation (passing) or apparent sex contrary to one’s actual embodiment, and the complications introduced by hormones and surgeries. Again, we need to look at the actual situated positions and their implications for a person’s standpoint on any given issue. We don’t disappear gender by waving a magic wand, only by everyone speaking especially those who are gendered as the class whose reproductive labor is appropriated by the other, unmarked gendered class. Nobody wants to be a ‘woman’ unless they are romanticizing oppression or unless they are remaking the meaning of solidarity and self-regard, coming to consciousness, of those of us with female bodies and experiences related to socialization as this subjugated gender – or unless they are members of societies that avoided gender oppression so that the meaning is a word of strength and centrality to human community rather than victim of predatory exploitation.

Lesbian, I have to add, is an irreducible identity. It may be a historically situated one, as everything we do is historically situated. But it is an identity that once found, I would not like to see disappear. It has meaning as a core of female sexuality and the autonomous mutual relation of female beings to one another, it has a spiritual dimension and a political one as well as being social and sexual. Lesbian cannot be merged into LGBTQI, and it has been contested, or has had to contest for space, in the context of ‘woman’; merging lesbians into LGBTQI further pushes us out of the context of ‘woman’ and pushes ‘women’ back into compulsory heterosexuality in which their reproductive labor for men cannot be refused. It doesn’t matter if ‘every woman can be a lesbian’ in a literal sense; heterosexual women’s sexuality is as authentically theirs as lesbians’ is ours; it is in a societal sense that lesbians relate to the existence of an autonomous women’s movement as part of a continuum that rejects the gendered compulsory linkage of woman with man while man is able to stand alone.

I’d like to bring these themes together, but I can’t. Lesbian is an irreducible identity to me, that I find joyful. Being a survivor of psychiatric violence is a fact stamped on my life by oppression, I take it as it comes and work with it, work through it, towards human liberation. (Being a woman is a stamp on my life as well, that leads me to solidarity and to separation of female embodiment, and the culture we create as female-embodied persons, from gender oppression that encompasses male subjugation of females and the ideology, including sex stereotyping, that rationalizes this subjugation.) They don’t intersect so much as coexist. And this complexity is fine, because we don’t need a complete theory of identities, we need theory that is useful for the purposes at hand.

Dislocations – political and personal

– This reflection piece was first written to an email group in a discussion I had started about marriage and disability (for many of us from a lesbian or queer perspective), that brought up issues of care/support in our old age, which is on my mind, as well as loneliness. –

I am thinking about how dislocations shaped my relationship to community, always a qualification or limitation, this but not really or fully this, that but not fully that, etc. again and again.  I am an American Jew, never a Jewish American (until perhaps now when facing antisemitism directly in the political sphere).  My people were never at home here, not just as settlers but as Jews; and our previous homes were also precarious and then wiped out; my only relatives overseas that weren’t wiped out are in Italy and there was some strangeness about the familial relations that we never got to know them.  My parents treated their background culture and language (Yiddish was still spoken in their homes alongside English) with a mixture of pride and shame; my mother in particular strove to assimilate both in terms of class and culture, and there was a lot about that process that was head-scratching for me, just confusing in ways I didn’t know how to understand or even begin to articulate.  Because of ups and downs in that attempted assimilation process I never made lasting friends in my childhood as we shifted from one school to another and one neighborhood to another (unrelated to the schools); then I internalized some of that and became a person who stood to one side.  

But also we were focused on the family, there was little real sense of community belonging aside of that; there was the sense of being a Jew but as a relationship to culture and not so much community.  The Yeshivas I went to, we were class outsiders and also outsiders by not being religiously observant; I tried once going to a neighborhood synagogue by myself (as my family didn’t go) but it’s not a kind of place a child can go alone unless maybe they are very gregarious.  And nothing about the wider social or political existence in terms of how it affected us as citizens; my mother told me later she supported the civil rights movement but she never talked about any such activity to us.  So adulthood seemed like it was ‘leaving home’ but also leaving culture and any kind of belonging at all, there was nothing in the wide world expected to welcome, just the market economy and how you might become part of it, or get the college degree and do something more fulfilling.  

Without a sense of responsibility and mutuality as belonging to something bigger than my family, though there was cultural Jewish political imperative of Tikkun olam – repairing the world – that I did internalize! – there is a way that my wanderings that ended up being locked up in psychiatry reflect the dislocation that became a break and that I could then grow up differently out of, though it took years and painstaking effort to do that.  I don’t mean grow up in a psychoanalytic developmental sense, rather like a tree growing up new out of a stump struck by lightning.  

I’ve been thinking about this because of the question of individualism and community that is on my mind – related to the pandemic and also to my big piece of writing on social model crisis support, which some of you have read and commented on and that I’m finalizing now with revisions.  It feels like this is the root of my need for community and inability to actually achieve it so far, and in a sense replicating the dislocations.  I think it’s important to excavate historical dislocations and traumas in a way that isn’t rote, that starts from our own lives and not (only) from some particular historical event or set of events; there are always the particularities (multiple) and how they come together in any person’s life and legacy.  

I’m realizing in the pandemic what it is I need in many different ways; and making some tentative feelers towards deepening friendships while being open to what might present itself, and staying close to what matters to me; it is important to not lose your center or unbalance yourself in order to try and fit in some community, to not leave part of yourself outside and hope for the best while accepting some lesser connections.  I tried that, thinking it was going to be just easy and casual (with a local recreational group) but that failed too, my personality and culture and politics had to emerge somehow and were too much for that group and their narrow ways of thinking.  

Does this resonate with anyone else?  The thing about individualism as a strategy for class and cultural assimilation that is actually counterproductive and backfires is what feels important to me politically and personally.  And it’s not about prescribing anything to counter it, but just to understand it and see what changes.  

On identity politics

There are three meanings of identity politics.
1. developing group consciousness, organizing, and developing analysis and political strategy from your own situation.
2. group identity as the decisive factor in agreeing with positions or supporting political candidates.
3. group identity recognition as either a collective or individual right; based on the criteria determined by that collective or individual and deferred to by others. 

In the CRPD negotiations, identity politics in the sense of #1 and #2 to create a workable structure for decision-making in the disability community (steering committee based primarily on constituencies) and to speak for ourselves and take the major role as authorities about our own human rights, politicizing our subjective agency against structural oppression that treated us as passive and spoken-for by family members or service providers.
This was a foot in the door, it did not substitute for analysis. (Analysis is also part of #1, we made bridges of the analysis developed by the various disability movements, to the UN human rights and non-discrimination framework, to situate ourselves in relation to that framework and indicate where discrimination existed and what forms it took, and how to redress it.)

I have been putting forward the idea that women as the female sex need to claim our identities (plural because it includes the identities of subgroups of women, such as lesbians) in the sense of #1 and #2, and perhaps in the collective sense of #3.  
The disagreement between women’s-liberation feminists (feminists fighting for the liberation of the female sex from systematic male domination and exploitation) and the transgender movement boils down to:
– a disagreement about the categorization of women as being based on sex (biological and political, responding to sex-based oppression), or being based on gender (as a cultural or psychological phenomenon)
– a disagreement about collective vs individual authority about membership in the category of women

In my view women have to claim our collective identity as the female sex, and all related identities such as lesbian that meet the criteria of being sex-based and politically relevant to women’s liberation from male domination and exploitation, in order to combat the invisibilization of women and of an analysis of sex-based oppression in intersectional movements. We have to name ourselves, otherwise we allow opponents of women’s liberation to name us and dismember our identities. 

This does not mean accepting the negative aspects of identity politics that amount to making identity the end goal of political advocacy, or making it a proxy for analysis that is used to shut down argument. 

If we don’t recognize that identity is the root of what is being contested, and that we have a stake in it, we are left with either analysis that doesn’t have a driving political force, or with a focus on biology that has led too many feminists to align themselves with reactionary Christian theocrats who oppose the concept of gender as distinct from biology from the standpoint of their agenda to maintain patriarchal rule.

Context: in the left (socialist), and in feminism, we sometimes hear opposition to ‘identity politics’ as dividing the movement. This gets used against the left and against feminism also; e.g. I remember when two other lesbian feminists and I wanted to create a ‘Women’s Collective’ of the ex-psychiatric inmate organization ‘Project Release’ a woman in the group spoke vehemently against it, saying it was divisive. Against this, we have identity politics that was put forward by Barbara Smith as a way to organize with other Black women to create a politics based on their situation, which later became understood as ‘intersectionality’ (coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw). The two concepts are not identical, intersectionality is more focused on analysis and different kinds of representativity, but they are related.

The religious reactionaries and others associated with the political right (‘conservatives’) decry identity politics which they take to be any standpoint that disagrees with the existing political, economic and social order. They oppose workers’ movements (class consciousness), feminism (consciousness of sex-based oppression), certainly racial justice and national liberation movements; they deride affirmative action especially and consider it a kind of charity instead of what it really is, a reparation of past and present structural disadvantage. (Affirmative action alone is never enough, there has to be real structural change, which takes into account race and class at the same time, as figures in the Black liberation movement including Martin Luther King, and more recently Michelle Alexander, have promoted.)

Reactionaries also use terms like ‘special rights’ for anyone whose rights they disagree with, such as lesbians, gay men and bisexuals as well as transgender and other gender nonconforming people. They oppose any recognition of these groups as having equal rights with everyone else as ‘identity politics’. Their opposition is not the same as gender-critical feminism which opposes only the categorization of people as male or female based on individual gender identity rather than the biological and political category of sex.

Feminists and others who talk about identity politics, whether in support or opposition, need to understand the different meanings and the context and to be clear about what it is that they oppose or support.

Solstice meditations

1. On envy

Envy as need for belonging, wanting to fit in, to be included, to be safe, to find a home. In childhood we may have been denied a safe home or our trust and safety was violently disrupted. We may have been bullied or just not fit in. Others may have characterized us as strange or different, we may have seen ourselves as different.

Envy as imitating others who seem to have a better right to speak, whose needs are attended to, whose existence is more legitimate than our own.

Envy as being replicated by being drawn to derelict places, wastelands, and also to the places where no one else has seen the beauty. Sometimes this is a path of choosing work that fills a historical or spiritual need.

Envy as linked to sex and love, themes of wanting love and fearing to lose the self, amplified by patriarchy which demands women to lose ourselves and men to extract women’s soul energy.

What or whom do you envy? Where does it start, and where does it end?

Free will and determinism in a dialectic, thinking about Jane Rule’s novel This is Not For You. A heart-breaking story of lesbian love rejected, and the rejected woman becomes a nun. It is presented as the inner logic of her destiny while at the same time if both women had had the courage – not bravery but courage that starts from self-acceptance – to love each other, if everything around them had not built walls of fear and shame and denial, a different destiny could have manifested itself.

Believing in good luck and and allowing good fortune.

Shoving off the chains of caring what nay-sayers think. They don’t hold my destiny. Who are you? Finding the truth, the kernel of light and shining it where you are. Diffused light, diffused power of growth, keeping time.

2. On feminism and progressive politics in this historical moment

Several times on this blog I’ve addressed my feminist sisters including about rejecting mental illness accusations. This time I am addressing my progressive, leftist, anti-racist community, including my psychiatric survivor and disability community.

We are living a significant historical moment for the transformation of society to eradicate police terror and other systemic racial injustice against Black people in the US. At the same time we are living the decline of feminism as a movement for liberation of the female sex from subjugation to males, and the submersion of lesbians into an LGBTQ+ acronym that erases our unique existence as same-sex attracted females and the intersectional struggle we bring to feminism and to the politics of lesbian/gay liberation. Progressive spaces fighting racism can be unwelcoming to those of us fighting for lesbians’ and women’s liberation, and we are subjected to ageism as well, treated as dinosaurs who should die out and leave the young to their innocence.

Some background for pride month. The word ‘gay’ can include lesbians, but often a bar, gathering, organization, event, service advertised as gay turns out to be exclusively male or to be centered on gay male sexuality. Saying lesbian/gay was our way to make women visible in the movement of homosexual, or same-sex-attracted people. The additional of bisexuals, and then transgender, then queer and other letters, was a different kind of political intervention – a move towards redefinition of the politics of gay/lesbian liberation into a politics of diversity encompassing sexual orientation of any non-heteronormative kind and gender nonconformity in expression or identity.

The role of butch lesbians in the Stonewall uprising has been obscured by a focus on drag queens and transwomen, who are male. Stormé DeLarverie and other butch lesbians fought with police who arresting them and beating them for being at a gay bar, and according to some reports, Stormé’s call to the crowd, ‘Why don’t you do something?’ sparked the collective rebellion. Stormé, a Black lesbian, was a drag king performer and remained active in the gay liberation movement; she was honored with awards and Michelle Parkerson made a film about her. Lesbians’ place in our own movement (lesbian/gay liberation) needs to be honored, respected, uplifted, and continually remembered.

When progressive spaces make us into pariahs some white women avail themselves of privilege to jump to alliances with reactionaries, who are willing to use feminist concerns as a front for anti-trans, anti-gay/lesbian, anti-female, anti-poor and racist agendas. Progressives have to do their part to fight the mainstreaming of reactionary politics by opening a door to feminists and lesbians – women of color as well as white women – whose feminism excludes males and includes all females.

The use of feminism by reactionaries has extended to the fight against exploitation of women in sex industries and surrogacy – public sexual and reproductive exploitation, in the capitalist market, that unsurprisingly affects disproportionately black and indigenous women and other women of color, and women without economic resources. Reactionaries’ objections to these industries are that they undermine the control of women by the patriarchal family, but they are happy to have feminists front for them while they steer the agenda.

There is a difference between converging on a particular policy at a moment in time, and making organizational alliances, conducting joint projects, creating relations of dependence and interdependence. There is also a difference between such alliances and lobbying of politicians or government officials who may be diametrically opposed to one’s political views. The US disability movement has encountered similar issues in its position that Terry Schiavo should be maintained on life support, and in legislative work including the Americans with Disabilities Act. It is not always easy to draw the lines and the issue is one of politics and impact – the impact on feminism, on women, in this case, of succumbing to a strategy of co-optation that steers us away from our own ultimate objectives. Cooptation is an issue we have faced in the US psychiatric survivor/anti-psychiatric oppression movement, when the federal mental health agency decided to fund our organizations to provide peer support and consult on mental health programs but not to do anti-psychiatric oppression work.

Male violence has been named as a problem by feminism in three respects that have to be disentangled. The most central is men’s violence towards women that is specifically enacted sexually through rape, including rape aimed at enforced pregnancy and rape as a weapon of war and genocide; that is aimed at controlling women’s sexuality and reproduction, including anti-lesbian violence, ‘honor codes’ legitimizing the killing of women and girls who are sexually active or who are raped, the criminalization of abortion, female genital mutilation; that is aimed at subjugating women individually and collectively, including the beating and killing and coercive control of intimate partners, misogynist femicides against one or more women chosen to represent women as a class. This is sexual politics per se.

Secondly, violence itself, including sexual violence, and including war, is itself predominantly a practice of males. It can therefore be examined through a lens of gender, or sexual politics in an extended sense, to consider analytically and historically, what is the linkage between the male sex-role, the premise of male sexual entitlement and sexual aggression under patriarchy, and the maintenance of violence through war, particularly aggressive and imperialist war, violent and militarized policing and penal systems and other violent carceral and repressive systems including psychiatry, violence between groups of men and individual men, violence related to criminalized economic activity such as the drug trade, violence against feminine males whose existence threatens sexual politics and the feminization of male enemies. Analytical and historical research on these questions links to the complementary need to research matriarchies – societies ‘beginning with the mother’ – that are egalitarian, consensus-led, based in economic reciprocity with distribution under the control of women, in which structural violence is eliminated. Are these societies peaceful in general, and are they also characterized by an absence of and intolerance for rape? What is the relationship between women’s centrality socially and culturally and women’s economic control, and the ability to live harmoniously? What lessons do these societies hold for us to un-build capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy?

Thirdly, some women hold men to be essentially violent, and equate violence with either male biology or with a male sex-role. This view can lead to diametrically opposed positions, either aiming for complete separation or the fantasy of eradication of males and reproducing parthenogenetically or in other ways controlled entirely by women, or eliminating sexual politics entirely and viewing feminine or feminized males, and those who are sexually assaulted, as being equivalent to women and butch or masculine women, and women who commit violence, as being the same as men. The resurgence of interest in evolutionary biology among feminists in a more narrow sense of theorizing a difference in reproductive strategies between males and females differs from these other positions as the antagonism it implies is not necessarily violent or irresolvable but would need to be taken account of, which could point towards a matriarchal organization of society. I am not comfortable with such an account, since it posits biology as an explanation of behavior, flattening out culture and history and any initiative for change outside the posited parameters. While biology constrains us – e.g. we can’t fly without mechanical constructions, our sexed bodies can’t be self-adjusted like the blowfish though they can be modified through hormones and surgery – the linkage between biology and behavior at individual or species level is a different kind of proposition. That type of theory has been invoked to uphold racism, male dominance, ableism and violent practices associated with those ideologies including eugenics and forced psychiatry, so while I want to learn more about this position from a feminist colleague who holds it, I am skeptical.

Which way forward? We have to continue to think, and act, in all dimensions that we move, with as much consciousness and deliberateness as we can. It is likely that partial movements, constrained by the limitations of politics in liberal capitalism and the violence of the state in suppressing uprisings outside those constraints, will continue to arise, and that suffering and oppression will increase worldwide as capitalism tries to postpone the inevitable running out of material for its pyramid scheme of constantly increasing wealth. I am tempted to think, my life is finite and it won’t be my problem, but I am not yet dead and the year 2020 continues to show us that we will be surprised if we aren’t paying attention. Better to meet the future with open eyes and tools to fight for the whole of what we believe in.

The psychiatric state is a rapist #UnVioladorEnTuCamino

gripping cry in the throat out at the cemetery
where my mother is buried
and the grave cannot hide her crimes or take her beyond my need for forgiveness
to forgive her or be forgiven i am not sure
as they say it’s a sin to put temptation to do wrong in the path of someone who can’t resist
yet ‘la culpa no era mía’
ni por buscar asilo ni por sentirme aislada y confundida….
el violador, el violador, el violador eres tú
the state
the psychiatrists with their eyes like metal bars already incarcerating me and turning the key
for nothing
a female animal brought in crying
by the female keeper
deserved to be locked away in their kennel
el estado
los psiquiatras
el estado opresor es un macho violador

y los demás
the ones who look on with peanut chewing eyes
the nurses
with their injections
the straitjackets
the ones of us who turn to comply with a system of washing machine circularity to discuss who is ready to be the next ones to decide about the next ones
not to get out but to circulate through this mock government
of mock lunatics created by the real ones in their white coats
el violador eres tú

the state
the psychiatrists
the bitter pills and the pharmaceutical grandiosities that create them
the shockers
the electrocuters
the nazis declared and undeclared
los violadores
de nuestros cuerpos inocentes

we are not at fault
not what we did to ourselves
not what we failed in making money
in keeping up appearances
la culpa no es mía
de nada

la sociedad que quema todo lo que queremos
el violador eres tú

***

Why a rapist in particular?

Many reasons, but these are some.

1. Many women, as well as men, experience a disturbance in sexuality from the toxic restrictive psychiatric drugs particularly neuroleptics.  Feminists might not care about ‘poor men’ who can’t get an erection any more.  But the disturbance for women is real and is part of patriarchy’s forced dissociation of women from our own sexual self-knowledge, a dissociation which serves and facilitates men’s sexual exploitation and aggression with women as its target.
2. Women have reported being unable to fight back to resist rape and other sexual aggression after neuroleptic drugs and electroshock.  This effect can be long lasting.
3. Women who have experienced both rape and forced neuroleptic drugging and/or electroshock commonly talk about forced psychiatry as a rape.  This is not a misused or misappropriated analogy.  We have to look at the details of why and how we experience forced psychiatry as a specifically sexual invasion of the body.  I think it has to do with subjugation of will, a disruption and disturbance directed at core energy that ties body and soul together, a turning to the aggressor’s purposes of another human being’s bodily existence.  In forced psychiatry the purpose is the state’s repression of either resistance or the potential resistance by useless/surplus labor.  For that reason the linkage of the state and individual perpetrators in the feminist anthem #UnVioladorEnTuCamino resonates.
4. Sexual abuse is routine in psychiatry with or without other force, as in any institutional setting and any service provided by men to women and girls.  Psychiatrists and psychotherapists rape their clients and/or engage in romanticized manipulation (as I wrote on this blog about the pioneering psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein abused by Jung and Freud); psychiatrists and nurses and orderlies who rape and who allow male inmates to rape women in institutional or ‘hospital’ settings.  But that is only the tip of the iceberg.  If we don’t interrogate the levels at which all forced (as well as manipulative) psychiatry functions as sexualized aggression, we refuse to acknowledge what victims of psychiatry bring to feminism as a doubly marginalized population.

Here are links for the original #UnVioladorEnTuCamino by Chilean feminist collective LasTesis:

http://biut.latercera.com/actualidad/2019/11/un-violador-en-tu-camino-de-lastesis-quienes-estan-detras-de-este-colectivo/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/06/chilean-anti-rape-anthem-becomes-international-feminist-phenomenon

Mental illness accusations have no place in feminism

For my feminist sisters who can readily accept that the conditions of oppression women face affect our self-perception, sense of power or entitlement, happiness and satisfaction and joy in life, self-confidence, and expectations of life and other people – how do you think it relates to your life?  And how do you think it relates to other women’s lives?

Who do you think knows what part of your suffering is due to patriarchy and what part is due to the mysteries inherent to life?  Do you think that there are inherent weaknesses in your character, in your brain chemistry, inherited or transmitted from your parents, stamped on you from harm inflicted by others?  Do you think there is some authoritative knowledge that can tell you who you are?

Some of us have had the power to resist others’ claim to authoritative knowledge about us taken away violently and often abruptly, by psychiatry, responding either to our own reaching out for relief from pain and confusion, or to others’ fearful concerns for us and about us when they have decided that communication with us has reached the limits of their tolerance.  Can you feminists see us as your sisters?

Can you see that when you participate in using mental illness accusations against other women, you are arrogating to yourself a portion of patriarchal authority to use as a weapon, to silence another woman or place her outside the bounds of sisterhood, outside the bounds of lesbian-feminist ethics that require us to deal with each other face to face and honestly, or honestly simply withdraw and acknowledge a failure in communication?  Can you see that when you use mental illness accusations even against men you are increasing the hegemony of that patriarchal system and its availability for weaponization against women?

Disability consciousness has many linkages with feminism.  The movement first known in the US as ex-mental patients liberation, later and in other places as ex-psychiatric inmates, psychiatric survivors, psychosocial diversity, survivors of psychiatric assault, mad pride, started with consciousness raising inspired by feminism – a process of mutual respect and vulnerability creating knowledge together and giving each person the space to be heard.  Honoring our self-knowledge and the power to articulate it among others who won’t stick a de-legitimizing label on us, is what feminists have done and psychiatric abuse survivors have also done.  (Some of us have a hard time with that vulnerability; I passed up an opportunity at my first conference ‘for human rights and against psychiatric oppression’ to join a women’s group and regretted it.)

The politics of these movements have both been based in the principle, the personal is political, but there are nuances.  Psychiatric oppression, like men’s violence against women, is both private and public.*  By virtue of the part of psychiatric oppression that claims a beneficent motive, to provide care and treatment (words that belie the fact of detention and subjection to others’ control including their invasion of the brain and body with mind-altering drugs and procedures), psychiatric settings and their practices are given leeway both in law and in public opinion to function outside the normative framework that governs the state’s acknowledged repressive apparatus for criminal detention and other detention that does not claim a beneficent motivation towards the detainee.  (Madhouses, poorhouses, and prisons were not differentiated at an earlier period of European history according to Foucault’s History of Madness.  All function as repression directed against the lower classes.  Psychiatric wards and the mental health system as a whole still function as poorhouses, with people entering and/or unable to leave because of poverty, and so do prisons.  It is commonly said that prisons function as psychiatric wards, and this claim is usually coupled with promotion of diversion to locked psychiatric wards of people who have been criminalized; this is obviously no solution.  The underlying reality is that most people who are criminalized have been severely traumatized by life experiences so it is not hard to psychiatrize them if the motivation is there to do so.)  The claim of beneficent motive, as well as the outsourcing to privately owned and nonprofit enterprises, places psychiatric oppression in at least a semi-private realm together with men’s violence against women, where relations of domination are both excused and ignored.

However, unlike men’s violence against women, psychiatric violence is an institutionalized form of violence linked closely with the state (i.e. ubiquitous state-run madhouses; and also legislation that sets explicit substantive and procedural standards for the exercise of control and coercion).  In this way it is undeniably public, and psychiatrized women like myself can be in a position of insisting in feminist circles that the public realm cannot be invoked uncritically as a boon for women to counter privatized male violence.  Women of color have had to make this point as well; in 2019 we are very much aware of police violence against women and men of color.  As mentioned by a law professor of mine many years ago (Penny Andrews), women of color can experience their homes as a refuge from white society and its authorities, to be defended against intrusion, unlike the narrative that privacy of the home only serves to protect male violence and should be dismantled.

Another linkage between feminism and the movement against psychiatric oppression is a heightened consciousness of bodily autonomy.  Many psychiatrized women have expressed that forced drugging or electroshock is a kind of rape.  This deserves exploration.  It is not merely a metaphor, which would be offensive.  It is also not only about the sexualized abuse that often accompanies forced drugging in particular, where stripping, holding down and injecting the person in the buttocks is how the drugging is accomplished if the woman or man resists or if the goons simply want to add physical brutality.  Similar to how rape is now understood to include coercive circumstances or absence of free (and informed) consent, and women are not required to prove resistance overcome by physical force, the core violation of psychiatric assault, similar to that of rape, is an intimate invasion that is per se harmful, that turns a woman’s body to an instrument for domination of the woman as human being.  In rape, the woman’s own sexual potential is what is violated; in psychiatric violence, her consciousness as potential for engagement with the world and self is violated.  There are resonances between sexuality and consciousness, and psychiatric drugs particularly neuroleptics can both disrupt hormones and cause specifically sexual dissociation.

Yet, because of a gap between the survivor (of psychiatric oppression) movement and the feminist movement, because of feminist therapy and the debates around it, because of the male domination of the survivor movement or simply the impossibility of naming deep female experiences in a mixed space (along with having to face or avoid misogynistic fantasies that men share when it’s their turn to be heard)…. we have only talked about these linkages in small spaces (often one on one), in marginalized asides that end up being reinterpreted to exclude us.  (E.g. ‘sure, we have to de-medicalize women’s oppression.  But, there are women who are simply psychotic, and that’s a different thing.’)

Also, until 2006 (when the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was adopted by the UN General Assembly) or 2014/2015 (when the treaty monitoring body, the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, issued crucial interpretations of the right to equal recognition before the law and the right to liberty and security of the person), survivors of psychiatric oppression were a voice in the wilderness without any support in public authorities or institutions at all.  The CRPD prohibits deprivation of liberty based on disability, including all detention in mental health facilities, and prohibits deprivation of legal capacity to make decisions, with a heightened concern for decisions about physical or mental integrity such as psychiatric treatment.  Deprivation of liberty based on an actual or perceived mental health condition amounts to arbitrary detention, and forced or nonconsensual psychiatric interventions are a form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or torture.

Recognition in international law (over 170 countries have ratified the CRPD; unfortunately the US is not among them) has given us a political platform, but even more basically, it has constituted us as political actors whose individual and collective subjectivity and voice matter.  (This too is similar to women’s emergence as a political constituency, which as I’ve written about elsewhere in this blog, is currently under attack due to the failure of the movement for the rights of transgender people to respect women’s definitional, political, personal and collective boundaries.)  But we still face too many situations where our sisters are vigorously promoting their belief in mental illness and its weaponization against those whose subjective realities a particular woman disagrees with, and/or whose behavior she finds objectionable.  The weaponization of mental illness accusations has been used against transgender people, including those who are female and identify as men or transmen, saying that they are mentally ill and need treatment.  The transgender movement on the other hand has conflated the value of personal subjectivity, which has been elevated by survivors of psychiatric oppression as a right of autonomy and integrity based in the equal worth and dignity of every human being, with a claim to have personal subjectivity judicialized as the basis for legal classification uniquely with respect to sex, undermining the political settlement that has recognized sex (at least grudgingly; US still has not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment for constitutional equality of the sexes) as an axis of discrimination and oppression.

We have to mobilize an intersectional feminist/disability rights analysis in order to politicize theoretically and practically the relation of gender identity to feminism within a human rights framework that can serve as a space for discourse of mutual recognition and debate on terms that do not automatically invalidate either side (trans movement’s current definitional invalidation of women, or some feminists’ weaponization of mental illness accusations to invalidate transgender identity as a claim for a recognition of a specific type of gender nonconformity as social identity).  The politics of gender have to be debated, including the question of whether all gender is patriarchal (does gender = sex stereotypes = masculinity/femininity; are these in turn equivalent to dominance behaviors and submission behaviors); whether all cultural symbolism related to sex is equivalent to gender (goddess, or god; representations of female and male genitalia and bodies, always a sexualized domination or not? differences between female and male in this respect, and why?); the relationship between sex stereotypes and men’s systematic material subjugation of women through sexual and reproductive exploitation; the relationship between sex stereotypes and female and male sexuality; the relationship between gender nonconformity and female and male sexual orientation; how we characterize the ultimate goal or marker of women’s liberation from male domination (e.g. my position: female autonomy and option of separatism at every level personal and collective, from sexual to political and economic; ‘at least’ equal power and resources of women compared with men); and the relationship of social and legal recognition of nonconforming gender identities and this ultimate goal – is the recognition of nonconforming gender identities unacceptable, a temporary accommodation, a way to undermine sex stereotypes, a necessary feature of a society that has achieved women’s liberation from male domination?

Finally, it occurs to me I haven’t argued the claim that mental illness accusations, psychiatric classification and psychiatric oppression and violence are patriarchal in nature.  We all should know about Freud and Jung, notorious abusers of women and rape apologists, whose psychological theories, those of Freud in particular, have shaped our assumptions about the authoritative viewpoint of mental health professional practitioners as knowers of the supposed unconscious subjective realities of others who are supposed to have hidden those realities from their own awareness for psychosexual reasons.  (I wonder if the original ideas of Sabina Spielrien, a psychiatrized woman who became a psychoanalyst, which were stolen and distorted by Jung and Freud, would point in a different direction, or not.)  The paradigmatic analyst is male with a female patient, just as men in patriarchal culture have punished women for knowledge of their own sexuality and enforced rape (marital or otherwise) as an opening of women through violence into supposed sexual knowledge responding to male direction.  The violation of intimate knowledge either privately (creation of a relationship of domination when a woman seeks help from mental health services and is required to expose herself to the power of the practitioner to dominate and assert control over her; anything she discloses in a relationship of trust can be used against her to involuntarily commit and ‘treat’ her) or publicly (by the social and legal act of domination exercised by involuntary commitment and ‘treatment’, which stamps her with a claim of knowledge of her psyche even if she has said nothing and given nothing of her trust or participation into an interaction with them; observation rather than interaction marks her as an object and her own narrative as raw material for the practitioner as designated knower, similarly to colonial dynamics as well) terrorizes and twists our sense of ourselves in the world, making the public (our self-narrative) go underground for private conservation, and putting out our actual private lives disclosed in trust or a narrative about our private selves made up by others, for public consumption and ridicule.  (This also is similar to sexual exploitation in prostitution and pornography industries.)  Women survivors of psychiatric oppression take extraordinary risks in talking about any of this, and we should not have to do it again and again.

There needs to be a right to privacy that is female-centric, and that complements a different kind of public space as well that is horizontal and discursive rather than hierarchical and coercive, and that incorporates female autonomy and the absolute eradication of rape as a first principle.  The convergence of feminism and anti-psychiatric oppression survivor politics opens up space for the fullness of women’s lives, as we express them, to emerge into both feminism and the political institutions we are working to transform or re-create.

Note: edited slightly for greater clarity Nov 15, 2019

 

Relationality

Thinking about relationality, in many dimensions.  As a lesbian married to my partner, living in a rural area in the woods of northern New York State, there are times when loneliness is very intense.  Online work and activism, combined with periods of travel, connects me to community; my marriage and the home and land we live on connects me to a place in the world where I know I belong.  There’s no other home that is my home, no other woman I am bonded with as with my wife.  These are intimate things and new to me, or unexpected that it could be so powerful.

Nevertheless thinking about getting older (both of us now over 60), and participating in the Open Ended Working Group on Ageing, I started to think about the need for positive and strong relationships with more people beyond my partner in real life, as they say, as we both age.  Desire for community and search for community has always been with me, but I have been confronted with barriers at almost every turn, some of which I have written about in this blog.

At the International Academy for Law and Mental Health 2019 conference, I was most interested in certain philosophical papers and sessions.  A session on ‘The second-person perspective in medicine and bioethics’ especially drew me.  While I had some disagreements with each paper in that session, the power of a second-person perspective in how we understand any issue of law and policy is worth exploring.  That’s something I still need to look at – there’s both the issue of intersubjectivity as an ethical approach to relationships (e.g. in context of respect for legal capacity, and decision-making support) including collective relationships (e.g. policymaking processes subject to contesting structural oppression), and more deeply, as a value to be promoted for human community and our community with the non-human world.  (This is a strong thread in justice practices and ecological practices of indigenous communities that have inspired me, that I’ve written about also on this blog.)

Practicing in my own relationships I have come to understand a difference between background relationality and a more deliberate intersubjective relationality.  I have often talked about intersubjectivity in an abstract sense, perhaps in a more cognitive sense of negotiation.  But in reality intersubjectivity – an I-I relationship – is something deeper, it’s interpenetration and mutual reflection to infinity, seeing the other in oneself and oneself in the other.  It’s an encounter between two beings, giving myself to the other directly in her presence and as presence.  I see this as being related to the fourth chakra, the heart chakra.  When I intentionally lift a response into that place, intentionally act from that energy center, I relate differently.  I see the other’s wellbeing not only abstractly as connected to my own, but experientially and literally inseparable from my own.  This doesn’t mean having no boundaries, it means talking about needs and boundaries through the heart and as part of this space of interconnectedness.

Related on the collective level, on the plane going to the conference, I watched the movie ‘The Best of Enemies‘, about a process in the civil rights movement era for a community to decide about school integration, that brought together Black activist leaders and Klansmen with an unexpected result (spoiler) that the central Klan leader was changed and became friends with the leading activist in the Black community.  I am naturally and politically skeptical of such a thing, but it was based on a true story.  At some level in most of what we do, oppressed people have to risk ourselves in processes that involve those of the oppressor class, and when any of us seek to become allies to oppressed people (e.g. for me as a contingently white (Jewish) person to be anti-racist), we have to risk ourselves in facing truths that require us to reorient our loyalties and our view of the world.

I’m not sure how this is going to relate to my conceptual policy framework to address support and non-discrimination in crisis situations as a positive alternative to the violent practice of forced psychiatry.  The practices that will lead to the right kind of support will have this genuine approach and value of an I-I relationship.  Looking into and through one another to a truth that is found and not made.  The IPS concept of co-creation and also intentionality in relationships fits here.  It’s not a cognitive intentionality I think, but a deliberate shift of consciousness in relation to the encounter and the moment, that can be especially brought into play when any of us feels challenged in a relational context that is nonetheless important to honor and preserve.  But it seems to go further, and I’m not sure where it will lead.

I had the opportunity to talk with Sarah Knutson about the conceptual framework together with what I’m thinking about relationality.  Sarah has worked out a way of thinking about high-stakes situations and the stress response that is an alternative to the psychological and medicalized model of ‘mental illness’ and crisis in particular.  Through that conversation I could refine my understanding of crisis as being composed of an objective situation that I don’t know how to deal with, and a stress response that makes me feel a great deal of physical and emotional discomfort.  Support for decision-making as well as practical support for comfort, safety and well-being from the person’s perspective can address both of these components, e.g. the stress response can be addressed through bodywork, calming or meditative exercises or in the process of talking about things in a heart-focused way or in an intersubjective I-I way that relates to the other person’s pain with deliberate ethical empathy and accompaniment.

It’s hard to talk about this without using the ‘heart’ reference, and I would not have found that at all meaningful or useful without the direct subjective experience.  I don’t know how it can be communicated in policy discussions or human rights language.  Maybe it can only be pointed at, and communicated directly in experiential contexts.  Interested to explore further, and welcome feedback to know if this makes sense to you or not, and why (or why not).

Edited postscript: Another aspect of this has been reading about African conceptions of the person, in writings by African and non-African philosophers and ethnographers, who  address the existence of a social as well as (and distinct from) personal self (see chapters in parts 1 and 2 of African Philosophy as Cultural Inquiry).  The social self sounds similar to what one of the authors at the IALMH session talked about, in relation to our being constituted by our relations.  That was meant, as I understood it, in both a wide social-cultural sense relating to the transmission of worldview that determines who we think/feel we are and also in a more direct interpersonal and present-tense sense that I was surprised the author was prepared to take for granted.  I recall a conversation I had with a much younger fellow student in law school (as I was in my early 40s) who said he saw himself as an isolated bubble trying to form relationships with others; I saw myself as a node in a web of interconnections but his view seemed to me more common.  I would now describe that view of myself as amounting to background relationality.  There is more to how I see myself now, but that background relationality is still important.  For me it’s essential to become conscious of those relations and become more deliberate in affirming them, sometimes loosening or strengthening them; it is possible to sever them and one needs the option of distance but in some constitutive way they remain part of me through my past even if I have no need or desire to interact with the person again.  And I can see the value of what’s sometimes called forgiveness as a way to make peace with severed connections.

Also, I’m interested in the relationship between the first-person and second-person perspectives.  One of the papers at the IALMH conference rehabilitated the third person as a technique of observation and talking about an external reality; in the example given, a doctor begins with a second-person interaction expressing concern and listening for the patient’s concerns and troubles and needs, what brought him there.  She is also trained to be aware of the appearance of the body and signs of potential illness, and notices that the whites of his eye are yellowed; this leads her to eventually shift the conversation to a third-person perspective in which doctor and patient jointly look at his body from an externalized standpoint.

Two things – his perspective on his body is still different than the doctor’s; she only observes (and does it through her body), while he both observes and experiences.  And when he is engaging with the doctor he is likely to be primarily focused on his subjective experience, rather than on the interaction itself.  There was no mention of a first-person perspective; I suspect because the doctor’s standpoint was the one ultimately being taken as central.  In another paper, the author invoked second-person perspective as a foundation for supported decision-making, somewhat in contrast to a first-person perspective viewed as isolated and decontextualized.  I continue to think that is problematic because it blurs the actual distinctions between one person and another, the existence of two subjectivities however much they may interpenetrate, they are ontologically and physically distinct.   First-person perspective, one’s own direct experience including but not limited to self-awareness of experience and the faculty of directing one’s consciousness and becoming able to shift it, is crucial to the kind of intersubjective second-person perspective that ensures an ethical relation rather than one that ignores boundaries or that denies the presence of self to other, with the effect of dominance and/or subordination.

And (the second thing related to the doctor-patient scenario described) – instrumentalizing another person as an object is not the same as observation, which can be directed towards oneself or another in search of a dispassionate grounding for knowledge.  Witnessing one’s thoughts and feelings is a common strategy for meditation, as is also observation of breath or minute observation of something in the natural world.   Instrumentalizing another person is related to a third-person perspective (subject-object)  as well as an unethical dominance relation within a second-person perspective.  As feminist theorists have pointed out, e.g. Carole Pateman and Gerda Lerner, dominance relations of patriarchy require women’s participation as subordinated subjects.

Where is conflict situated in all this?  Bitter, painful conflicts can’t always be solved by heart-connection, or can they?  Can we value ourselves enough to say no, ‘learn to leave the table when love’s no longer being served‘?  Are we trapped by situations where there’s still just a little love left, begging us to hold on or hold out, to keep it going so long as we can?  Maybe the heart-connection helps us to let go.