Category: Activism

The DIM US framework

By Shaun @SGV_UK autistic.blog

I was feeling traumatised this morning and needed an outlet for my experiences. So I have created my alternative “Recovery in the Bin” framework that attempts to mirror the realities compared to the CHIME Framework for personal recovery. I call it the DIM US framework #RITB.

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Image Text
CHIME Framework for personal recovery
Connectedness
Having good relationships and being connected to other people in positive ways.
Hope & Optimism
Having hope and optimism that recovery is possible and relationships that support this.
Identity
Regaining a positive sense of self and identity and overcoming stigma.
Meaning
Living a meaningful and purposeful life, as defined by the person (not others)
Empowerment
Having control over life, focusing on strengths, and taking personal responsibility.

DIM US Framework for a “Recovery in the Bin”
Disenfranchisement
The state of being deprived of a right or privilege.
Characterised by poor access to social programmes, no adjustments for a disability in employment, not being listened to by people in authority etc..
Impermanence & Faith
All things undergo change including life to death and powerful to powerless. Suffering is not permanent.
Characterised by a change in new leaders in authority, Change in ideologies, salvation in an afterlife etc..
Misrepresentation
A false statement of a material fact made by one party on another.
Characterised by the belief that one is lazy, of immoral character and commits social sins. E.g. Stigma
Utility
The state of being useful, profitable and beneficial.
Characterised by peoples values only measured by their economic utility. E.g. Someone is worthless because they do not work.
Subjugation
The action of bringing someone or something under domination or control. Characterised by removing or creating barriers to social programmes such as access to housing, income, health services or food to control an individual’s behaviour.

Mental Health Professionals Need To Help People With DWP Processes To Save Lives

By @444blackcat

I’m a AMHP an a MH social worker in an Adult Mental Health Social Care Team we used to be integrated with Health but the Care Act led to a split We have average caseloads of 40 people the vast majority entitled to state benefits ESA and/or PIP an repeatedly they have to prove that entitlement again and again. All workers need to consider the impact this has on people, not only the financial impact but the stress of having to share their personal lives with the DWP It’s an essential part of our job including if you’re a CPN OT or Lead Professional to make sure you help with forms or get someone who will, write supporting letters an make sure people know they can put your contact details on.

Please don’t think of this as a favour, more as an essential part of your role and yes nag the Consultant or GP to do their bit. I’ve never had a DWP worker complain there’s too much evidence. And to appeal perhaps to the selfish side of things. A person been denied benefits can easily lead to a crisis giving you more work an your organisation more costs We’re lucky enough to have a great CAB worker but they are overwhelmed but resources are online to make sure people get the points they need and deserve.

5 Ways To Help

By Tony Roberts. Former RMN and Public Health Specialist @FosterChangeUK

I used to work as a MH nurse for a CMHT. Occasionally, some patients were re-referred or dropped into crisis for an unknown reason. I had a colleague who always dismissively suggested that it was “just because their benefits are up for review”. Their cynical hypothesis was that the patient was manufacturing a “crisis” for the purpose of getting their benefits renewed. Once this objective was achieved, the patient “wouldn’t be seen again for two years” Our response, therefore, should be to ignore said “crisis” (air quotes were a common thing for this colleague). We should refuse to assist or write a letter, because that would be rewarding and perpetuating their manipulative behaviour.

I don’t think this is an uncommon view in MH services. It is a failure to see how much our mental health (and I do mean for all of us) hinges precariously on our financial stability. Some of us fortunately have a wider tolerance for financial upset – we may have savings, a generous credit limit or others we can lean on for help. But for many patients of mental health services – especially those dependent on welfare – this tolerance is a knife edge. Any slight change to their finances can have a catastrophic impact on their ability to live a humane and decent life. And it’s not hard to see why, if we choose to spend a few minutes thinking less cynically than my former colleague. Paying rent and bills is a pretty non negotiable chunk of income. From what is left, we have to prioritise. Hopefully, there is enough left to eat healthily, be able to get into town, heat the house when it’s cold, visit friends and relatives, watch some TV, have phone credit, get to appointments, and do things that make our lives more enjoyable – maybe odd treat, rewarding activities or a Netflix subscription.

But what if that financial stability is threatened by the Brown Envelope of Doom? What do we cut back? Do we downgrade our food? Cancel Netflix? Walk into town in the rain? Stop seeing the people we love? All the things that keep us well are under threat. And some people don’t even have those luxuries to cut back on. Reduced income threatens the essentials – bills, rent – risking eviction, arrears, homelessness. The stress of a benefit review cannot be underestimated. They threaten everything a patient has. Their entire life.

But what can we, as MH professionals do about it? Easy. Here are 5 things:

1 – Spend a few minutes of your time familiarising yourself with the DWP and review process.

2 -Talk to patients about their very real concerns. Find ways to mitigate the potential impact, help to take some of the distress from the process by planning contingencies.

3 – Talk to colleagues who know more than you – social workers, welfare rights etc who can give you and the patient advice.

4 – Offer to assist the patient through the process. It is hard enough to navigate as it is, without all the additional stress it causes. Give patients some spoons and take some of the load off them.

5 – Unlike my former colleague, write that letter of support. DWP letters often ask specifically about things like diagnosis, treatment, medical opinion etc. You may have views about the “validity” of such “constructs” That’s fine. But now is NOT the time for your philosophical views on psychiatry. Now is the time to sign a letter that means your patient won’t starve, be isolated, cold or desperate. Save your philosophy for Twitter. Sign the letter.

Book Re-release- Mass Murderers in White Coats by Lenny Lapon


This books covers a range of psychiatric abuses but is of particular interest for current service users in helping us know the history of how Nazis treated psychiatric patients and our survivor history of resistance and organising against psychiatric abuses.

Lapon was a militant activist beginning in 1978 with Mental Patients Liberation Front in Boston (MPLF) and the Alliance for the Liberation of Mental Patients in Philadelphia (ALMP), participating in organizing, demonstrations, civil disobedience, advocacy and writing. He was arrested on several occasions and completed a 60-day fast against psychiatric oppression.

Review by Sharon Jean Cretsinger, Tijuana, July tenth, twenty-twenty-one

I am happy to see that Mass Murderers in White Coats (1986) by Lenny Lapon is now in a digital edition.  It is an impressive collection of essay and research that needs a much wider audience, especially now.  While this book technically falls in the category of non-fiction, it is structured more like a doctoral thesis.  This is not to say it is not eminently readable.  The style is spare and intelligently rendered.  I mention the overall construction of the book because the forwards and the appendices are important to the subject and should be read equally with the text.  Lapon’s updated preface (May 2021) serves to contextualize its significance in historical place-time.  He notes that the book is a kind of point-in-time look at the psychiatric inmates’ liberation movement.  It was an important point in time because it was at almost exactly then that the radical and resistant arms of this movement were effectively (and perhaps intractably) broken by the government.

In the original preface, the book’s objectives are carefully laid out:  to document the mass murder of “mental patients” by psychiatry in Nazi Germany and in the U.S (psychiatric genocide); to show common ideological roots of the killings in Nazi Germany and harmful, sometimes fatal, psychiatric “treatments” in the U.S.; to give the ex-inmate’s perspective on the oppressiveness of psychiatry, its violence and danger; to present excerpts from conversations with members of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) who are connected to Nazi Germany; to present a history of the organized resistance to psychiatry by its victims; and, to bring all of these issues into the light of public awareness.

The book achieves all stated objectives except for the last one.  Hopefully, wider access to this digital text will help to publicly illuminate the pervasiveness of contemporary psychiatric atrocities and the almost-lost history of radical resistance to same.

Relevance to Intersectionality and Identity

In contemporary culture, there are emerging and increasing texts and discussions about marginalization and identity.  Mass Murderers is important to this discussion because it clearly illuminates issues belonging to survivors of psychiatric atrocities.  It reaches back to Nazi Germany and documents real conversations the author had with Nazi clinicians.  This aspect of the book’s research is irreplaceable.  Appendix 3, “The Myth and Politics of ‘Mental Retardation’” bears a special mention.  This community remains one of the most oppressed in first-world cultures, with many individuals who carry this label still institutionalized and exploited for pennies a day in sheltered workshops.  The fields of psychiatry and related behavioral health disciplines support the dynamic through large-scale drugging with psychiatric pharmaceuticals and various abusive and reductive behavioral “therapies”.  

The author’s introduction makes the wealth of information presented in the text personal, and perhaps more importantly, relatable to “ordinary” folks.  Psychiatric and behavioral health abuses and atrocities can literally happen to anyone.  Yet, in the context of intersectionality, they happen more frequently to individuals who are otherwise marginalized such as people of color and those with disabilities.  As these narratives become increasingly visible, the perspectives of ex-inmates and survivors are crucial to this body of work, but often missing.  Mass Murderers is so valuable because it subverts basically every authoritarian attempt to control the narrative of the atrocities discussed.  The importance of proletariat scholarship in the narratives of the marginalized and the working-class cannot be over-emphasized.  This book is a beautiful example.

Relevance to the Present-Day, Ex-Mental Patients’ Movement

Particularly relevant in the context of today’s “movement” is Appendix 2, titled “Alternative Therapies Criticized and the Role of ‘Mental Health’ Workers in the Fight Against Psychiatry”.  When seen together with Appendix 5, “Psychiatric Inmates’ Liberation/Anti-psychiatry Groups*”, we find a comprehensive picture of a movement that barely exists today.   In place of most of the liberation groups listed in Appendix 5, we have many government-funded and pseudo-clinical organizations.  These “practitioners” and “non-profits” have replaced radical organizing groups with various “alternatives” ranging from the clearly self-pathologizing to complicated systems of contrived, facilitated communications such as the “Hearing Voices Network”, “Wellness Recovery and Action Plan (WRAP)”, and “Intentional Peer Support”.  The rhetoric of revolution and abolition detailed in Appendix 2 has been co-opted and replaced with these various pseudo-clinical “interventions” and “positions” such as “peer supporter” and “case management aide”.   Lapon states it quite simply in this appendix: “They make money off our pain and suffering.  Some of them have ‘anti-psychiatry’ conferences and invite a token ex-inmate or two.  As with other oppressed groups we buy into our oppression in various ways.”  

Mass Murderers in White Coats is ostensibly a book for those interested in doing serious antipsychiatry organizing.  These individuals may wish to go directly to the chapter five, “The Resistance:  A History of the Psychiatric Inmates Liberation Movement” to find inspiration.  There is also plenty for those who are interested in antipsychiatry and historic and contemporary psychiatric and behavioral health atrocities and their intersections with other forms of marginalization and discrimination.  Hopefully, this e-book will offer resources to readers and researchers interested in antipsychiatry, its intersections, and adjacent aspects of historical and Holocaust scholarship.  

#StopSIM Coalition Consenseus Statement

StopSIM Coalition Consensus Statement relating to The High Intensity Network (HIN) and Serenity Integrating Mentoring (SIM), 21/04/21

We are a coalition of mental health service users and allies who have grave concerns about the rapid, widespread rollout of the High Intensity Network’s ‘Serenity Integrated Mentoring’ (SIM) intervention across NHS England. The intervention is designed for people who have not committed a crime, but are in contact with mental health services, are frequently at high risk of suicide and self harm and are deemed “high intensity users” of emergency services.  Key intervention components include a co-ordinated withholding of potentially life saving treatment by multiple agencies (A&E, mental health, ambulance and police services) and, using SIM’s own words, the “coercive” approach of a police officer as an interventionist.  

We call on NHS England to:

  1. Halt the rollout and delivery of SIM with immediate effect, as well as interventions operating under a different name, which are associated with the High Intensity Network (HIN).
  2. Conduct an independent review and evaluation of SIM in regards to its evidence base, safety, legality, ethics, governance and acceptability to service users.
  3. Respond to this statement within 7 days to communicate the actions taken by NHS England. Communications should be directed to contact@stopsim.co.uk. 

Our concerns about SIM relate to its evidence, legality (including GDPR, Human Rights and Safeguarding), aims, governance and ethics. Interventions or service models operating using SIM principles may be known by alternative names, however, for brevity, this statement equally applies to those services, interventions and models.

This is a preliminary consensus statement. We have been researching SIM and the HIN for a number of weeks in preparation for the release of a detailed and referenced statement.  However, we are releasing this brief statement since becoming aware that, due to the hard and concerted effort of service users, survivors and allies over many weeks – and in some instances, years – that high level conversations have been prompted.  We felt it was critical to make our position public as soon as possible. A longer version of this statement, with citations, is shortly forthcoming.

We expect to be involved in any high level conversations concerning the High Intensity Network and SIM as a coalition of service users and allies.  We can be contacted by email at contact@stopsim.co.uk or via Twitter DM: @StopSIMMH. We will be publishing further updates on our Twitter account.  

In solidarity with survivors, service users and allies who have worked tirelessly to shine a light on injustice,

The #StopSim Coalition

Copied to:
Sir Simon Stevens, CEO – NHS England Lord David Prior, Chair – NHS England, Claire Murdoch, National Mental Health Director – NHS England, Martin Hewitt, Chair – National Police Chiefs’ Council, Sir Tom Winsor, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Service.

Black Lives Matter – What White People In The UK Can Do

Text on black background saying Black Lives Matter UK @UKBLM

Nila K and C&P

Some things UK white people can do:
1. Get educated.
2. Learn about bystander intervention, practice and use it. If that’s not accessible/safe for you, then tell people about it who can do this work.
3. Donate to UK black led grassroots/radical groups. Or groups that do street medic/arrestee support. They might be about to get VERY busy.
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1. Get educated

For starters – read or listen to Reni Eddo-Lodge’s fantastic book Why I’m No longer Talking To White People About Race. Google Books

Reni Eddo-Lodge has asked that people borrow/share her book if possible, and send the money you’d have spent black grassroots groups
“This book financially transformed my life and I really don’t like the idea of personally profiting every time a video of a black person’s death goes viral.”

****

2. Learn about bystander intervention
If they’re happening/its accessible, consider doing stewarding/action medic/arrestee support training. Even if you can’t get to demos, i promise you it’ll make you feel more confident about daily street intervention work – which is bloody important too.

Fantastaic ‘riot medic’ manual here: https://riotmedicine.net/
De-arrests are Holy. They save lives.
Persuade other ppl to donate/boost too.

****

3. Donate to black-led grassroots/radical groups.
Examples include BLM UK, Green and Black Cross, UK Mutual Aid, or INQUEST, an incredible organisation who work on Deaths in Custody and holding UK state to account. They work on ALL deaths in custody whether police, psychiatric, prison, immigration detention. And they do all this on no fucking money. Like, they’d have to save up for a shoestring. If you have spare cash, send them some. I guarantee you they’re already busier than usual and gonna get more so.

The Double Life Of The Recovered Professional

In or Out

I find myself in a dilemma.

I have spent the past 15 years engaging in ‘recovery’. I have spent the last six years (or thereabouts) shouting about how utterly grateful I am to the services that ‘saved’ me. I have worked hard to come off benefits and pay my way. From being the most difficult patient, I have become the poster girl for the recovered individual. I have been an (unpaid) service user facilitator in a DBT group, I have a chapter in a book edited by a renowned clinical psychologist and I have delivered motivational talks to groups of professionals. The dilemma I find myself in is that I no longer believe what I have said. My dilemma is further exacerbated by the fact I work in mental health services.

I would not be writing this if my internal self was congruent with my apparent external state. I keep thinking, ‘well, I am in a much better position than I was 10, 7, 4 years ago’, and this is true to a point. I am not attending A&E every weekend; I am not getting myself so drunk, I wake up two days later; my financial situation is much more stable. I have been able to maintain a relationship to the point of marriage, and I am able to interact with others in a socially acceptable way. In all of that, however, I do not state I actually feel better.

I imagine I must feel better because I am not doing the things I used to do…although I am. Recently, my spouse went away for a few weeks and I was left to my own devices. I took a ton of codeine (not to harm myself, just to get off my head, to feel better), I drank a fair bit (a litre of whiskey in one sitting), and I self-harmed (pretty fucking badly in all fairness). Not having work to go to and actually still being as isolated as I was 10 years made brought home the stark reality of my existence. All I have done is supress how I feel, ignore my experiences and distract from reality. With work removed, I am scrabbling around, afraid of myself and wondering what the fuck is it all about?

I thought I wanted to be a clinical psychologist, but it turns many of them are narcissistic, egotistical, elitist sociopaths. Furthermore, the selection process for the clinical psychology training is based on many things, a key one having the ability to interpret statistical data. I’ve met too many clinical psychologists who are excellent with graphs yet not so skilled with people. As long as I adhere to their way of thinking, then I am doing just dandy. Any deviation from their thought processes, then we are being difficult, wilful, and defensive. Their toxicity is disguised, however, as they talk about trauma as opposed to personality disorders (which isn’t a bad thing, as at least experiences are being somewhat acknowledged). What further happens is that the good ones think, ‘fuck this shit’, and they leave. Whilst I’m definitely not a clinical psychologist, I’m at that point of wanting to leave. Everything I thought I wanted has fell around me, and I realise that recovery is but a concept coined by the professionals who have no peripheral vision.

As someone who grew up in the care system, what am I trying to recover? I was sexually, physically, and emotionally abused. I did not see my biological mother for over 20 years. My child was removed from my care. I have struggled, but been made to feel guilt and shame for my responses. I was instructed to hide old self-harm scars during DBT. We were not allowed to talk about self-harm within group, because of the risk of glorifying or romanticising it. I have been indoctrinated just as much as the people from my childhood indoctrinated me.

I work as a mental health care support worker. Some of the people I work with are genuinely nice people, but I see their limitations created by the system. Terms such as, ‘it’s personality’, ‘they’re med seeking’, and ‘they’re a nightmare’ are bandied around without thought or reflection. How offensive is it to term someone’s personality as disordered following a whole heap of childhood trauma? Why are we ok to dispense diazepam when ‘patients’ are not asking for it, but when they request it for the same problem, we no longer see it as a beneficial? What makes someone a nightmare?

What I am left with is a fear of someone finding out about me and my ‘stuff’. I work in an office with a whole bunch of mental health ‘professionals’, yet I am terrified they will find out my secret. This fear comes from the stigma I have witnessed and been subject to throughout both my non-working and working life. I was stigmatised as a service user with a diagnoses of BPD, and I am unwittingly stigmatised within my profession. There are mental health nurses who quite happily state that people with mental health difficulties CAN NOT work in mental health. When asked what recovered, ex-service users can do, they cannot answer, just that we shouldn’t be working in mental health.

Why can’t I find someone to talk to, without them trying to fix me? Why can’t I say, ‘you know, I feel shit, and there’s a good chance I will always feel shit given my start in life, but I accept that. I might self-harm from time to time, as safely as possible, I might engage in some other behaviours, but I am not asking anyone to patch me up. I’ll do that myself. I just want space to talk about it’? Why is this not acceptable? Why am I not accepted as I am, cuts and all? Why do professionals only care if you are ‘engaging’? Engaging in what? I have done everything asked and expected of me, and more. I’m lonelier than ever because I have been trained to put up and shut up.

The mental health sector does not believe in the recovery they try and push, but they do not recognise this. If difficult, PD, nightmare patients cannot recover or work in mental health, what are the mental health service doing with their service users? What are they working towards? There is such a blatant, screaming irony in the system, yet most are blind to it. I see people who have started out with good intentions, but they quickly get swallowed by the toxicity around them. At least two thirds of the employees talk about how they won’t come out of the NHS because of the bloody pension. Right now, I feel trapped by the money, and hate myself for it. I do not want to be that person. I have been that person, in the past, screaming at professionals that they are simply ‘doing it for the money’. That’s me, right now, in this moment in time, doing my job for the money. I care about the people I work with, but that care is overshadowed by the misery of what I am witnessing. I am at the bottom of the pile, sneered at for being a band 3 HCSW (I am asked ‘why don’t you go and do your nursing?’ at least twice a week). The hierarchy is real, and damaging, and people are made to feel shame.

I am in a quandary, a place of unease. I need to live, survive, so I need my wage. For a few years, I believed that people were not doing ‘this’ for the money, but we are. When our motivator is money, what have we become? Our priority is us, not the people accessing the service. It’s not a bad thing to want a wage, to have the right to earn a living. It’s certainly not a good thing, however, when the wellbeing of others is dependent on the wage being offered. Every day in work, I hear judgement and disdain, frustration and contempt for both users of the service and for the system as a whole, yet people continue to work in the same environment for many years. I am not the only one who hates their situation, but I see few, if any, doing something about it. Those in-office attitudes should remind us of how the system is run, and who is running it – a group of unhappy individuals, entrusted with the care and treatment of unwell individuals.

Mental health services need a complete reform, yet I do not see that happening any time soon. The good ones leave, the weak ones follow the crowd, and the leaders bully and intimidate. Stigma remains rife and continues to grow, and treatment is based on the egotistical needs of the practitioner. Where therapists have told me, ‘it’s not your fault’, they have instilled a deep shame within me regarding my reactions. My words are out there, on paper, as the model patient, and I cannot undo that. I was so desperately trying to please, that childlike need in me still searching for a mother, and professionals have either been blind or willing to take advantage of it. I’m trapped, and I am afraid of becoming ‘one of them’.

About the Author: I would like to be able to be transparent with who I am, but it is difficult to do so right now; Because of the institutional nature of current services – once in, you cannot have a voice, or as a service user, you don’t have a voice unless it is tokenistic. I hope to be able to come out of the NHS safely and be more open about my experiences.
– L

Transphobia at Mad In The UK and British Psychological Society, An Open Letter

Dear Mad in the UK and the British Psychological Society,
We are writing in regards to the article ‘Prescribing Rights for UK Psychologists – Should We Be Cautious?’, written by prominent psychologists who are members of the British Psychological Society. Whilst we recognise that prescribing rights for psychologists is a complex issue, we are contacting you specifically about a passage in the article that appears to express transphobic views.


We refer to the following passage, which we also note is the only section without any references, suggesting strongly this is a work of personal opinion by the authors:

‘Gender services
The prescription of hormone blockers for people who identify as transgender is a highly controversial trend, raising profound issues, both conceptual (about the validity of a diagnostic category of ‘gender dysphoria’; about the relationship between biological sex and gender roles, and so on) and ethical (the long-term effects of these drugs is untested and unknown). We do not believe that prescribing rights should be extended to psychologists working in these areas unless and until these wider issues achieve some degree of resolution and consensus.’

Hormone blockers are a legitimate and common treatment for those who are transitioning to their identified gender. It is unclear why the authors view hormone blockers as ‘controversial’ or a ‘trend’. No references are provided to support the use of these words. Both words are value loaded, and on reading, appear to undermine the legitimacy of the process of transitioning with hormone blockers to one’s gender identity. It should be noted that taking hormone blockers does not by itself imply an irrevocable commitment to transition, but merely leaves open the option to do so with less dysphoria and potentially less exposure to societal prejudice. Undermining and describing the process of transitioning as ‘controversial’ and a ‘trend’ is transphobic.


We also note that the passage refers to the ‘profound issues’ ‘about the relationship between biological sex and gender roles etc’, again without references to support these statements. We note that the authors use the phrase ‘gender roles’ rather than ‘gender identity’, however, we read this as a veiled statement referring to the opposition by some to the very idea of transitioning, emphasizing biological determinism over trans people’s lived experience as a different gender to that they were assigned at birth. This is a transphobic view, and by including these controversies in their article, the authors legitimise these views.


To provide a context to our concerns, please see the current Stonewall definition of transphobia:
The fear or dislike of someone based on the fact they are trans, including the denial/refusal to accept their gender identity.


We are therefore, writing to you as publisher (Mad in the UK) and professional body (British Psychological Society) to request that you investigate these statements. We would also like to highlight that this is not the first time some of the authors have expressed transphobic sentiments.

Signed

Recovery In The Bin
Manchester Disabled People Against Cuts
The London Bi Pandas
Mental Health Under Capitalism
Leeds Sisters Uncut

Service User Research Enterprise (SURE) team:
Diana Rose
Stan Papoulias
Akriti Mehta
Ruth Silverleaf

Alison Faulkner
Jayasree Kalathil
Len Demetriou

CliniQ CIC
Michelle Ross (founder cliniQ CIC)
Vincent Turner (psychotherapy lead cliniQ CIC)
Martha Dunkley (director cliniQ CIC)

National Union of Students
Piers Wilkinson, NUS Disabled Students’ Officer
Eden Ladley, NUS Trans Officer
Rachel Watters, NUS Women’s Officer
Liam McCabe, NUS Scotland President
Robert Murtagh, NUS-USI President

Daira Hopwood
Shabaaz Mohammed
Dennis Queen
Mx J.M. Welch
Dr Sally Morgan, Clinical Psychologist
Ms Sali Owen, LGBT+ Group Facilitator for Forensic In-Patients
Sally-Anne Beverly (University of Leeds)
Sue Sibbald
Dr Joanne Edge, survivor
Robin Edwards, Notts Trans Hub
Stephanie Allan
Sue Phillips
Josephine Sirotkin
Edie Boon
Dr Aylwyn Walsh, Associate Professor, University of Leeds
Clare Bonetree
Dr Alexandra Richards, Clinical Psychologist
Rachel Rowan Olive, service user / survivor
Karen Pollock GRSD specialist counsellor
Dominic Davies, Pink Therapy
Jamie Draper
Sam Hope, MBACP (Accred.)
Neil Loffhagen GSRD therapist / counsellor
Esther Kaner
Nāgakuśala Frugal
Sam Feeney, Dip Coun, Dip Gender/Sexual Diversity, Reg. MBACP
Dr Mari Greenfield
Ronete Cohen, GSRD Psychotherapist, The Rainbow Couch
Debbie Helen Wood, trans and talking therapies lead with Outreach Cumbria
Rachel Yates, Counsellor
Jules Haley, GSRD Therapist / Counsellor
Hannah Ryan, Trainee Clinical Psychologist
Gary, patient and activist
Tony Roberts, Director, Fostering Change Ltd. North Yorkshire
Charlie Rodgers
Lorna McArdle, Support U
Alyssa Henley, Support U
Zoe Ereni, writer, training psychotherapist
Debra Shulkes

If you wish to add you or your organisation’s signature to the open letter please email recoveryinthebin@gmail.com

Mad At Work

Madlove Designer Asylum project madlove.org.uk

Workplaces blame or punish individuals for madness, exclude mad people from work, and fail to recognise the role of work in making people mad in the first place. This is true even of measures supposedly designed to enable accessibility or promote mental health. Sick of this, I asked some members of radical and peer-led mental health groups, along with some friends and fellow weirdos, what they think would make it better to be ‘mad at work’. I collected all the responses, merging duplicates and re-writing stories into demands, to make the list below. 

Of course one of the best things workplaces could do for mad people would be to improve their economic conditions. Many folk brought up precarious employment as especially harmful, including short-term and zero-hour contracts, as well as people having to re-apply for or apply for funding for their own job. As long as there is capitalism there will be suffering for mad people at work, exclusion of mad people from work, and madness as a result of work. Although this list is not primarily about economic conditions, is not intended to justify wage labour or erase the harm it causes. 

Yet many of the suggestions made below are perfectly compatible with the logics of capitalism. Some mad people just want to get through the day however they can. They want to have a nap sometimes, dress more comfortably, mask less, not get lied to and – perhaps most of all – be subject to less surveillance. These things are cheap, straightforward, and would even enable mad people to ‘more productive’ workers within the grim logics of capitalism. So why are most items on our list still completely unimaginable?  

OUR DEMANDS

  1. No glass walls or doors for maximum privacy and minimum surveillance 
  2. All toilets to be accessible and all-gender
  3. Provision of private nap cubicles
  4. Abolition of gaps around toilet doors to allow for privacy for purging and panic attacks
  5. Provision of luxury harm reduction rooms, including beautiful soft furnishings, safety equipment (wipes, clean needles and razors, sharps bins), and gold boxes for everyone to keep their individual stuff in
  6. No dress codes or norm of dressing gowns, blankets, pyjamas, slippers, bare feet 
  7. No more defining mental health as the ability to work
  8. Abolition of counselling as gatekeeping for jobs
  9. End of the use of health and safety and risk assessments to punish and restrict autonomy of disabled people
  10. Abolition of small talk (replace with standard red/yellow/green communication badges every door) 
  11. Police uniforms for Human Resources & Occupational Health staff to make their roles clear
  12. Paid time in all workload models for collective organising (including but not limited to trade unionism, direct action, feminist consciousness raising and zine-making)
  13. Free workers’ canteens (with no coercive ‘health’ or ‘normal’ eating) 
  14. All contracts mandatorily available as job share 
  15. All workplaces to circulate and commit to Recovery in the Bin principles
  16. Worker feedback forms to be located over the shredder for clarity around purpose
  17. No more macho pretend-its-fine culture
  18. Actually flexible working hours
  19. Recognition of workers as humans for whom work is only one part of life 
  20. Abolition of workplace communication by whatsapp, ‘fun’ group chats that include bosses and all social media (except personal or political social media use at work)
  21. Time in all workload models for private, skilled, on-demand clinical supervision for anyone who works with ‘vulnerable’ groups
  22. Recognition that learning, not-knowing and lack of enjoyment are inevitable elements of work and not signs of unprofessionalism
  23. Resources to support working from home (e.g. printer and scanner)
  24. Option to get paid based on hours or on task, your choice, with no reduction in pay (maximum 25 hour work week either way)
  25. A sensory room with sensory toys AND integration of those things into rest of work place
  26. No forced disclosure ever
  27. Sound proofed screaming cubicles
  28. Screaming normalised everywhere, ear defenders supplied at all entrances
  29. Employers to pay employees’ union membership 
  30. No more suffering as a rite of passage
  31. Education for all employees about madness BY mad people
  32. Abolition of the idea of ‘professionalism’ (otherwise known as ableism, racism, misogyny, etc) 
  33. Abolition of ‘reasonable adjustments’, replacement with actually accessible workplaces including accessibility budget for all workers with no monitoring
  34. Wages for housework, care labour and all social reproduction 
  35. No more rest or breastfeeding areas in stationary cupboards 
  36. Repurposing of ‘common room’s for crafting, animal therapy, prayer, dart boards and punch bags with bosses faces on, meditation, etc. 
  37. No more token wellness activities or ‘pledges’
  38. More sharing of unsantized stories (NOT ‘it all got a bit tricky but I’m totally better and promotable now’)
  39. Abolition of requirement to perform trauma and healing for job 
  40. No more blaming our mental health for impossible working conditions

By Darcy Leigh.

The making of this list was inspired by the Mad Love Designer Asylum project, in which mad people design their own asylum.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The Invisible Prison – Panopticon Of The DWP

Invisible prison 1 art

One of the things I’m feeling a lot at the moment is the massive divide being successfully constructed between:

1. Those of us who are long-term dependent on state disability benefits to live.

2. The rest of society.

This is absolutely deliberate.

People who aren’t dealing with the DWP for disability benefits have no idea how traumatic and violent and all-encompassing it is. It is an ongoing trauma for a lot of us.

Pretty much everyone I know who, like me, relies on disability benefits for rent/food/bills/life money, has had multiple traumatic experiences. And that’s on top of the GIGANTIC amount of work that the assessment process involves: do to it successfully requires a lot of specialist knowledge, writing skills, capacity for loads of admin, having to contact people, arrange medical appoints which are a total waste of patient and NHS resources, attend horrific ‘assessments’ , try to find advocacy etc

And being forced to do this all to the tightest timescale possible.

We deal with a level of surveillance and arbitrary punishment that, rightly,
has been judged by multiple independent analyses to be a state driven deliberate breach of the human rights of disabled people who have the fucking gall to be poor and/or unable to work.

Loads of the techniques of psychological pressure were developed first in one of the home office/ foreign office/ DWP, and then exported to the others. Nice, huh?

If you’ve a strong stomach and/or are not directly affected, more on that here.

“Nudging conformity and benefit sanctions: a state experiment in behaviour modification“

Basically the gist of this is, in which we discover until recently there really was a controversial government department which researched and tested “behaviour modification techniques” for implementation in aggressive state policy:

“Conservative anti-welfare discourse excludes the structural context of unemployment and poverty from public conversation by transforming these social problems into individual pathologies of “welfare dependency” and “worklessness.”

The consequence is an escalating illogic of authoritarian policy measures which have at their core the intensification of punitive conditionality. These state interventions are justified by the construction and mediation of stigma, which is directed at already marginalised social groups that the policies target. The groups, which include sick and disabled people, people who are unemployed, are painted with a Malthusian brush, as a “burden on the state” and a drain on what are politically portrayed and publicly seen as scarce resources in an era of austerity.”

Political processes of scapegoating, stigmatisation and outgrouping have been amplified by a largely complicit UK corporate media. Examples of its work are all over the DWP. PREVENT. The whole Hostile Environment project. There’s plenty more, I’m sure.

Which is why I’m not exaggerating when I name this as state terrorism.

A bunch of disability and civil liberties activists/campaigners/lawyers discovered  the existence of the ‘nudge unit’.  So they made Freedom of Information requests to try and find out what the hell government money is being spent on.

Government solution? To privatise the department and turn it into an ‘institute’ to avoid scrutiny. And to drain more state cash into private pockets.

Anyway, back to us, trying to survive in an increasingly violent and reactionary society with the vast machinery of the  right wing state bearing down on us.

This shit and much more stuff like it = many of us are scared to leave the house, post any pictures of us looking happy on social media, be photographed at events/protests.

We’re cut off from participating in civil society.

Police force admits agreement to share information about protesters with DWP

It’s absolutely deliberate: the more surveillance, the more the DWP poke their nose and disclosure agreements into every area of our lives, the scarier it is to be out in the world even when we aren’t disabled by society.

And – for many of us – there are multiple other oppressions we’re dealing with too. Disability is inextricably entwined with race, class, gender, gender id, immigration status, sexuality and poverty.

Our lives are FUCKING HARD.

The surveillance/sanctions regime is a deliberate tactic to put extra pressure on already vulnerable people. It’s punishment for being vulnerable and in need. It’s also eugenics: it’s about disabled people being regarded as disposable/barely/not human. It’s an idea with deep roots in British society.

And they’re only just getting started. Looking at Bloody Boris’ fucking cabinet terrifies me, eg right now the DWP is trying to get its hooks into NHS files. The proposal is dressed up in fake nicey language but basically it would mean that if you claim disability benefits, you have no privacy or confidentiality during medical appointments. It would be horrific. I know that there’s a lot of pushback against this from loads of NHS groups, thank fuck.

I don’t have much hope, and I feel a lot of the time the clock is ticking on how long I can survive before they break me, or make me homeless again or otherwise fatally fuck me up. That worry never leaves me. Which is another reason for stopping dealing with them for now.

Because I realise now: I’ve become institutionalised. I live inside an invisible cage built by the DWP (and Social Scare, of course. Let’s not forget them. Bastards)

By institutionalised, I mean, for eg – I anticipate and strategise against DWP sanctions automatically whenever I think, open my mouth, and especially if I leave the house. Any time I think about doing anything out of the house that might improve my life, (eg an art class, or an event that a photographer is at) I freak out over whether it will trigger sanctions.

Because although it’s not likely, it does happen.

It’s a perfect panopticon. They fuck over just enough people to make all of us realistically terrified about it.

And it’s a deliberately and increasingly asymetric system.

Ie: getting the benefits takes huge amounts of work, and can take years. But the state can take them away in an instant.

There’s also the alienation: I deal with this monster that infests every area of my life. People who don’t deal with it mostly have absolutely no idea how hard our lives are. How we don’t go a week on social media without hearing about yet another death caused by the system we’re reliant on.

A system that is our right.

And it should be the right of anyone living here, btw. And isn’t anymore – that’s a whole other pile of DWP fuckery that’s been happening over the past decade or so.

Fuck borders and fuck nativist politics always.

But my one hope is that I see so many grassroots people/groups/organisations/communities doing mutual aid, advocacy, support, skill sharing etc. A lot of it is very informal and grassroots and it’s amazing. So you get people on random fb forums putting hours into helpful /detailed/informed responses to questions. You get people sharing often traumatic details of the assessment process because they care about someone else going through the same thing. It’s fucking amazing. But we shouldn’t fucking be going through this shit in the first place.

More specific stuff re the ”invisible cage’/panopticon:

CW: moar DWP ranting. Also, tho, theory.
Which isn’t actually fucking theory for me. It’s my daily life.

The DWP is absolutely a panopticon. I’m living in a fucking panopticon. Except it’s invisible. And specifically designed to marginalise already vulnerable people.

So most people don’t even know it exists. And often don’t believe you when you tell them. And it fucks you up so sometimes* you forget that you’re living in a panopticon and just blame/hate yourself.

I’m living in a panopticon in twenty fucking nineteen in a rich White Western country that likes to think of itself as:

1. Liberal (it isn’t. There are important  traditions of liberalism in this country. Traditions of radical internationalist anti colonial/anti racist socialism, communism, anarchism. Powerful histories of working class people of all races doing practical radical political work. And loads more. Britain’s dominant character as a ‘nation’ in general, in practice ends up  defaulting to English norms’ . Which prize conformism, hierarchy, subtle powerful coded signals.
Its all about us ‘knowing our place’.

Riz MC nails it in ‘Englistan’:
“God save the queen
Nah she ain’t mates with me
But she keeps my paper green
Plus we are neighbours see
On this little island
Where we’re all surviving
Politeness mixed with violence
This is England”

Track: Riz MC Englistan on Bandcamp
Lyrics: https://genius.com/Riz-mc-englistan-lyrics

2. Modern. Modernity isn’t inherently good – in English, it’s a category inseparable from white supremacy and capitalism and patriarchy and and and.

But my main issue is that the idea that the UK is modern is fucking laughable. UK = basically feudal neoliberal empire-hangover capitalism. Doesn’t that sound just GREAT?

If you think I’m exaggerating – bear in mind that our new Prime Minister is related to the royal family. In twenty fucking nineteen.

Thinking about the DWP as a panopticon also usefully reminds me that there’s a reason that a fucking White English public school-and-oxbridge man came up with with the panopticon. These same people still largely run the country OVER TWO HUNDRED YEARS LATER.

“Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher and social theorist in the mid-1700s, invented a social control mechanism that would become a comprehensive symbol for modern authority and discipline in the western world: a prison system called the Panopticon.

The basic principle for the design, which Bentham first completed in 1785, was to monitor the maximum number of prisoners with the fewest possible guards and other security costs. The layout (which is depicted below) consists of a central tower for the guards, surrounded by a ring-shaped building of prison cells.

The building with the prisoners is only one cell thick, and every cell has one open side facing the central tower. This open side has bars over it, but is otherwise entirely exposed to the tower. The guards can thus see the entirety of any cell at any time, and the prisoners are always vulnerable and visible. Conversely, the tower is far enough from the cells and has sufficiently small windows that the prisoners cannot see the guards inside of it.

The sociological effect is that the prisoners are aware of the presence of authority at all times, even though they never know exactly when they are being observed. The authority changes from being a limited physical entity to being an internalized omniscience- the prisoners discipline themselves simply because someone might be watching, eliminating the need for more physical power to accomplish the same task. Just a few guards are able to maintain a very large number of prisoners this way. Arguably, there wouldn’t even need to be any guards in the tower at all.”

“Michel Foucault, a French intellectual and critic, expanded the idea of the panopticon into a symbol of social control that extends into everyday life for all citizens, not just those in the prison system (Foucault 1970). He argues that social citizens always internalize authority, which is one source of power for prevailing norms and institutions. A driver, for example, might stop at a red light even when there are no other cars or police present. Even though there are not necessarily any repercussions, the police are an internalized authority- people tend to obey laws because those rules become self-imposed.”

* ie almost all the time.

A final thought:

The tories are trying to kill me.
And a LOT of other people.
And they’ve already killed so many.

Black people. Muslims. People of Colour.
Migrants, particularly guess what, black people, muslims, people of colour.
Disabled People. Mad people.
Trans* people
Queers
The ‘wrong kind’ of women.
Working class people

*

Think about what it’s like for those of us who tick most or all of these boxes.

Try to conceive of the firestorm that we’re living in.

quotes are from here Internalized Authority and the Prison of the Mind: Bentham and Foucault’s Panopticon

Recovery In The Bin (RITB) is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
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