The Toll of FAAB on FAAB Childhood Sexual Abuse
This is a highly subjective account of my experience with FAAB on FAAB childhood sexual abuse. Trigger warning for detailed account of abuse. In addition, I want to emphasize that this piece is explicitly about *my* process, and I will be focusing on outlining the difficulties I encountered in my recovery, and discussing what I believe could have helped me heal more quickly and fully.
...read moreBeing an Advocate and an Ally
One of the discussions that I’ve seen pop up on Feministe a lot lately has been the question of how one can be an ally or an advocate without crossing the line into paternalism or playing savior. When it comes to madness or special education, I feel that the best way to be an ally is to be educated. The problems with how we see madness are so deeply rooted that, in my opinion, the only way to really start changing the way we think is by actively challenging the ways in which we experience madness as a concept and mad persons as individuals.
...read moreBloodied Yet Unbowed
As some of you might know I’ve had the dubious privilege of sitting on a lot of different sides of the educational world. When I was very young I was given a series of trendy diagnoses and pumped full of drugs that made me sick, when they didn’t work I attended was sentenced to survived several behaviorally-based programs for children with severe behavioral, emotional, and learning disabilities. These were the kinds of schools where “reasonable goals” were about as ambitious as eventual independent living and a closely supervised service job.
Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain
Years of anti-gay bullying, teachers afraid to confront students for calling other students faggots because of a policy against supporting “gay lifestyles,” and a school district too cowardly to confront Evangelical political interests lead to a rash of teen suicides in Minnesota. Whats this got to do with madness and diagnosis? Well, as it turns out, the story includes two very good illustrations of the ways in which certain assumptions about madness serve to privilege certain interpretations of an event.
...read moreWho I am, how I see the world, and a question for the Feministe community
One of the things that has always struck me about how we discuss madness is the terms we use. “Words mean things” has become something of a trope in the feminist world, but its especially important to remember when we’re talking about madness because, in a very real way, all we’ve got in the world of psychology is language.
...read moreBDSM versus Sex, part 2: How Does It Feel?
Every once in a while, someone will ask me a question about something BDSM-related that I feel “done with”; I feel like I did all my thinking about those topics, years ago. But it’s still useful to get those questions today, because it forces me to try and understand where my head was at, three [...]
...read moreUnhelpful Thought or Basic Truism?
I’ve been trying to get my post traumatic stress disorder under control lately, and one of the things I’m trying is an online course you can do from home. I had the first session yesterday. It took me through what PTSD is, including outlining what it called “Unhelpful Thoughts” that can be caused by PTSD. [...]
...read moreWhat could possibly go wrong?
Well, this sounds like a well-made piece of television heading our way: MTV is debuting a new reality show in October in which a small town girl moves to Los Angeles to pursue her dreams in the fashion industry. The twist? She’s fat. (Note: the linked article actually lists her weight, so if that’s triggering [...]
...read more12 Steps to Institutional Neglect and Compounded Violation
I feel like there should be a trigger warning for “just so generally horrible it makes me lose what little faith in humanity I had left,” but I will go with this: This story concerns sexual abuse of an intellectually disabled middle-schooler. If you can keep reading without cringing, you’re a stronger person than I. [...]
...read more“I Can Handle It”: On Relationship Violence, Independence, and Capability
[This piece may contain triggers on relationship violence.] I. In early 2001, a group of friends who had introduced me to my then-boyfriend sat me down at a kitchen table. “We’re worried about you,” one said. “Has he hit you?” The answer, at the time, was no. Ten months later, I stumble into the emergency [...]
...read moreMental illness, Disclosure, and Emergency Services
Disclosure is an issue that most people with mental illnesses struggle with. Stigma against mental illness is widespread, and can range from ideas that we are unreliable through to beliefs that we are downright dangerous. Mentally ill people can be characterised as liars, as unbelievable, or as unreliable witnesses, which is something that becomes an [...]
...read moreJailing women who try to commit suicide
Bei Bei Shuai tried to kill herself with rat poison last year. She survived. But she was pregnant, and her fetus died. Now she’s being charged with murder and attempted feticide. Shaui’s downward spiral began in late December, when her boyfriend blindsided her. It turned out the man who had fathered her baby and promised [...]
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