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so left but she's right though

@lifeafterpsychiatry

An anti psych perspective on life with mental health issues. Previously known as compassionatereminders. Please read my pinned post before sending me asks! Run by Kat - 28 years old, Danish, she/her, on disability pension, aroace. Officially psychiatrized as a cognitively disabled schizophrenic. Also has experiences and symptoms associated with autism, generalized anxiety, OCD, trauma disorders (mainly OSDD) and addiction.
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Read this before sending me an ask

I am not comfortable taking on a responsibility for anyone's recovery.

  • Don't ask me to diagnose you.
  • Don't ask me to tell you how to recover/cope.
  • Don't ask me how to help a mentally ill loved one.
  • Don't ask me how to cope with/escape/recover from a traumatic situation.
  • Don't ask me to talk you out of self harm or suicide.
  • Don't ask me to provide comprehensive in-depth resources or final answers to big questions.

I'm not comfortable taking on the responsibility for representation:

  • Don't ask me for writing advice.

I am limited by my personal experience, so don't expect me to speak specifically about:

  • Studying or working. I'm on disability benefits and never had an education or a career, so don't come to me for advice related to those subjects.
  • Marginalizations I haven't experienced. These include being a person of color, childhood abuse, being physically disabled, being poor, being gay, being homeless, being fat and being transgender. Discussions of all these experiences are in fact welcome in my inbox, but don't expect me to have relevant personal experience with them.

I am not comfortable with my blog being used for promotion by strangers since I don't have the skills to check up on the validity of a tumblr strangers claims, so I have decided:

  • I won't be sharing any fundraising efforts.
  • I won't be signal boosting anything no matter how important.

Keeping this in mind, I love to talk to my followers, and the asks I'm comfortable answering include:

  • Sharing my advice or opinion on something (while keeping the above guidelines in mind).
  • Answering personal questions of all kinds.
  • Responding to vents that don't expect me to be the one to provide specific solutions.
  • Providing a bit of compassion and encouragement (though I don't intend to agree with everyone in my inbox and might state my opinion even if it's negative).
  • Comments or questions related to something I've posted.
#kat gets personal#anti psych#kat gets serious#kat shares stuff#chat with kat
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Anonymous asked:

I don't know you, but I am proud you are here. You have been through a lot and continue to go through a lot, but I am proud of you. This is for the blog admin, the blog followers, and anyone who has stumbled upon this today or ever.

Thanks - passing on your message to whoever else might need it!

#chat with kat
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Anonymous asked:

To add to what the anon said about how we're expected to form an opinion on everything too quickly. It's created an assumption that everyone knows literally everything about everything at all times and any sign of ignorance must be malice. So you might have someone jump down your throat and assume you're some kind of apologist for something awful for not speaking out about a cause immediately, for missing the memo about boycotting something or someone, or for using a slightly outdated term. Genuinely everyone is just assuming the absolute worst of everyone and jumps to icing them out, when the most likely explanation is just ignorance and it's not hard to communicate before making baseless assumptions about people's characters and ruining their reputation as a result. Plus, for a cause that in theory is supposed to care about disabled people, disabled people in particular are accused of not caring enough because they're not able to contribute in ways abled people would like them too. Or for actually showing signs of the disability they literally have - whether that means struggling to retain new information, not being able to read the room, not going to protests because no one is wearing a mask or it's in a physically inaccessible space, etc.

And on top of that, abusers hide in social justice spaces so sometimes the call out posts are just part of the smear campaign. I'm literally queer and my cis het "ally" abuser successfully managed to ice me out of my local community space by saying fuck knows what about me. Those were people thinking they were doing right by the cause because he probably claimed I'm some kind of phobic to some part of the community when actually, he just used their morals to manipulate them into enabling his abuse. And because there's an expectation to immediately come to a conclusion and they didn't want to also be branded as some kind of phobic for associating with me once I was deemed a "bad" person, no one thought "wow that sounds out of character, let's find out more first" or cared to hear my side once I figured out what he did and told them my abuser was running a smear campaign to destroy my support system.

I'm on the left but it terrifies me about how we waste so much time on purity politics than doing anything actually meaningful.

Yeah this culture means that it's usually the people who are the most skilled at positioning themselves as if they have the moral highground who gets the most power and influence, and unfortunately having these skills does not imply that you're 1) actually right, 2) a good person, and 3) going to use it for good.

#chat with kat#bullying tw#harassment tw#manipulation tw#gaslighting tw#abuse tw#psychological abuse tw
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Anonymous asked:

following your blog has helped me come to terms with and learn coping skills for my occasional hallucinations. and opened my eyes to a lot of things. thank you for what you do and I wish your grandpa a happy birthday.

Interesting, as I've never really hallucinated and thus haven't posted that much about that experience specifically, but I'm happy to hear that following my blog has been helpful to you!

#chat with kat
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Anonymous asked:

Vent about meds/psychiatry:

I'm tapering off a medication right now that i only tried to humour my psychiatrist (I wanted to change my antipsychotic and she wanted me to try changing my antidepressant first? I still don't fully understand her reasoning.) A couple of times when I reported side-effects/not being helped by it, she increased my dose, so now I'm having real spicy discontinuation symptoms and I'm so fucking angry about it :/ I went in with a well-evidenced argument for making the changes I wanted, presenting no depression symptoms other than lethargy (hence wanting to try a different antipsychotic) but she Knew Better and I let her steamroll me 😞 also, love your blog!

Psychiatrists who respond to "this med isn't helping me/is making me worse" by increasing the dosage might become the cause of my villain arch. I'm so fucking angry you were put through this. I'm angry so many of us have been put through this at some point.

#chat with kat#anti psych#psychiatric abuse tw#medical abuse tw#forced treatment tw#medical neglect tw
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spagetdomain asked:

btw very very very sorry if it seems like we're looking to you for a solution ^^; we just need to vent plenty and we have the urge to correct others a lot

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It does not, and I'm sorry if my attempts to respond only escalated your distress! But nothing you've sent my way has been unpleasant or inappropriate, so no need to worry about that.

#chat with kat
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Anonymous asked:

Is there any festival at your country

Yes, but that's not my scene like at all ever. I can't even go to a regular concert without having to leave early due to overstimulation.

#chat with kat
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spagetdomain asked:
Okay, now I obviously don't know why exactly you're in therapy or what exactly you're struggling with, so take my input with a grain of salt, but I want to strongly encourage you to question the idea that you have this inherent moral obligation to stay in therapy indefinitely no matter how expensive, inaccessible, useless and actively unsafe it is. As someone who is and has been making improvements both despite and without psychiatric treatment while being what most people would categorize as severely mentally ill, I take issue with the notion that we are inherently obligated to stay in even completely useless or actively traumatizing "treatments" if we ever want a chance at getting better. Recovery isn't actually limited to being in therapy.

thing with this is, we've tried to recover in the past without getting help and been hopeful at least four times except we keep spiralling and we keep spiralling and we keep spiralling and we keep spiralling and very possibly will get put on medication (despite being unable to swallow pills) or hospitalised. also when somebody else is getting us help purposefully we can't really do much about it since they're bound to force us to go basically

it's essentially a last resort that people would consistently expect to be a first resort since our first visit during a time of severe depression was essentially useless and only got us a vague asd test referral(which we didn't need at the time, we needed help for being suicidal but our parents did not listen to that bit) and maybe a bit of the "i don't think this kid is normal but it doesn't appear urgent so we'll send you on over" treatment

(and also, we're going for a diagnosis of some forms of mood disorder, anxiety disorder and also unrelated issues like gender identity and our plurality which like. don't need therapy for that. we have that figured out. also happen to be not the best physically and we're going to be expected to walk 😵‍💫😵‍💫)

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I'm not trying to tell you what to do as if I know better than you, especially not if the therapy is a lesser evil in a setup of coerced or forced treatment that would only escalate in even more harmful directions if you refused the therapy. But as someone who will never be either abled or neurotypical no matter which mental health treatments they put me through, there is first of all no guarantee that therapy is a solution, and also reaching their definition of "recovered" isn't necessarily the only possible way to ever feel better. In my case, slowly distancing myself from psychiatry has significantly improved my life. That being said, I trust your judgment and you get to be upset about the whole situation even if prioritizing the therapy is in fact the lesser evil right now, or is in some capacity helpful.

#chat with kat#anti psych#coerced treatment tw#forced treatment tw#psych ward tw#suicidal ideation tw
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Anonymous asked:

Doing a weekly dbt group thing and the teachers have literally said that emotional distress is caused by not getting what you want. that in every case, it's not going how YOU want it to, and that That is the issue. In our worrkbook it says, quote "willfulness is ATTACHMENT TO "ME, ME, ME" and "what I want right now!"".

How in the world is this victim blaming crap still passing as "treatment"

#chat with kat#anti psych#psychiatric abuse tw#medical gaslighting tw#victim blaming tw
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Anonymous asked:

I sort of sometimes feel like some of the things I hated most about my hospitalization were petty/childish complaints.

Like… this is honestly one of the memories that sticks with me the most.

I wasn’t allowed to bring my plush doll. Because stuffed animals and similar items were banned items. I guess you could hypothetically hide blades and stuff inside the stuffing? I don’t know. Part of me tried to rationalize it when they told me. But… it felt awful. I remember I rolled one of those socks they give you into a ball. Because if I tried really hard not to think about it, the sock ball was kind of cuddly. And I can pretend it was them. Sort of. Now it’s been years since my hospitalization. And my doll still rides in the pocket of my bag and comes everywhere with me.

It feels stupid. Like, plenty of people had objectively worse experiences in a mental hospital/psych ward. Heck, a lot of my experiences were objectively worse. If I had to pick something to be scared of when I think about going back, I kind of have a lot of options.

But whenever I think about the possibility of someone signing off on sending me back, my first thought is usually “what if they take my doll from me?”

I'm not surprised this experience stuck with you. The humiliation of unexpectedly being denied access to a harmless comfort object is so unnecessary and so cruel. Having to sleep in a foreign hostile place without my comfort objects would fuck me up even today.

#chat with kat#anti psych#psych ward tw#hospitalization tw
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Reblogged zmpl
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resting my hand on the dsm and looking at u with a pained worried expression: promise you'll stop? for me?

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i assure u that the book that treats autogynephilia as a real thing and has a dozen entries for "shitty child we hate who ur now allowed to abuse justifiably disorder" is not the source of comfort and community you're looking for

#anti psych#kat shares stuff
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Reblogged queerautism
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Lots of beautiful and personal and profound stories being added on to my anecdotes of dementia patients, and these are good and important and I love them, and yet... they're not what I wanted the post to be about.

I'm not so much interested in dementia patients as dispensers of profound life advice, nor in the family love and grief surrounding them (though I have every sympathy for it and I know it is immensely hard). I'm interested in dementia patients as a marginalised population. Often medically neglected, often institutionally abused. Frequently dismissed and trampled on at every level. It's ableism, against a population almost definitionally unable to fight it.

Providing care for people who can't understand it and don't want it is complicated and ugly. I don't have big solutions and I'm failing to sketch out even the vaguest shape of the huge problems. But at least I can take one tiny stance for how I interact during the time I have with them: that they are people, deserving of respectful engagement in both being spoken to and being listened to.

People with dementia are worth talking to, even when they won't remember afterwards that you ignored them.

People with dementia are worth talking to, even when they can only follow a couple words at a time. Sometimes they surprise you and you get a funny or touching anecdote out of it, but far more often they do not; the mundane times are still worthwhile.

People with dementia are worth talking to, even when they talk in one unending sentence at 500 words a minute looping around the same three phrases because they don't remember when their sentence began.

People with dementia are worth talking to, even when they never talk at all.

People with dementia are worth talking to, even when they are in pain. Distressed. Angry. Crying. Shouting. Screaming. Violent.

Nobody should be obliged to suffer the violence, but neither should the person be obliged to suffer their own distress alone forever. There's a tension there! There isn't an easy answer! Both things are true and it's exhausting and hard and painful and loud and still we must wrestle with it, we must not write them off. Often they are trying to communicate their pain, though often their pain cannot be solved.

People with dementia are worth talking to. They are the same people as ever they were - they haven't died, they aren't lost or hidden. There is a continuous thread from the past to now.

Sure, they've changed. So have you.

#disability#kat shares stuff
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Anonymous asked:

I hope your grandfather had a very normal and tolerable birthday with all the things he expected and wanted! I know how hard it is to celebrate birthdays both for someone who struggles with the concept and as someone who struggles with the concept.

It hasn't really started yet, but your well wishes are appreciated!

#chat with kat
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Anonymous asked:

I hate how fast you’re expected to form opinions nowadays.

Like as soon as something happens you’re supposed to know whether it was good or bad, whether we should celebrate or condemn it. Doesn’t even matter if you’ve read the whole story yet, you’re supposed to see one person’s opinion and know whether they’re right.

I hate it. I hate how if you take even five minutes to google smth or find out more about it everyone suddenly thinks you’re either a bad person for not immediately intuitively knowing how good/bad it is OR you’re media illiterate or something. Like let me figure out what even happened first cmon.

Also the fact that you’re supposed to have super strong opinions about everything. “Well I don’t know much about that so I don’t really have an opinion yet” immediately means you’re ignorant and deliberately ignoring this really important thing.

Like you realise it’s not sustainable for everyone to have a strong opinion on everything. Our brains are literally not made to hold that many opinions, that much information even.

Like I’m trying to train away the intuitive response to something as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ bcs I want to be able to look into it first, see the nuance and different perspectives, but the current online landscape seems to actively encourage relying completely on that intuitive response.

I hate what the internet has done to us (in this respect, obviously there’s good things about it too but man, this shit sucks)

Facts!!! This notion that you're somehow supposed to intuitively know what the most progressive take on everything is and if you don't that's inherently suspicious is doing so much damage to political debate. There is no shame in taking time to think, asking further questions or doing your own research before forming an opinion. And admitting that you just don't know enough to form a relevant opinion will ALWAYS be more progressive and constructive than uncritically jumping on the latest bandwagon!!!

#chat with kat
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Reblogged defectivegembrain
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Shut up about reading comprehension and media literacy, shut up about picky eaters, shut up about people who only watch cartoons or read fanfiction, shut up about poor hygiene and the frequency at which you should shower/brush your teeth in order to be treated like a person, shut up about people who can't order their own food at a restaurant, shut up about bad social skills, shut up about people who can't "read the room" and aren't able to get jokes/sarcasm that you think should be obvious, shut up about autistic people that literally have actually noticeable traits associated with autism that they don't/can't mask that you might consider annoying and a nuisance. Consider, that you, in fact, may have it better than other autistic people. And I'm also here to remind you that autism is a disability since I'm starting to believe a lot of you forgot or just don't consider it one for some reason

#disability#kat shares stuff
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Yesterday my increasingly senile (alzheimers) and ill grandpa sent me money for my sisters birthday. First I thought this was the alzheimers in action, but a long coherent text followed explaining that he knows this is weird but he just really wanted to do something nice for both of us. Considering that he literally always sends both of us the same amount of money for each of our birthdays and Christmas, this decision and his argument for making it only makes sense in the context of him being aware that the odds that he'll be there enough both physically and mentally to send me money once my next birthday comes around are really low. It's his 83rd birthday today and I love this grumpy but caring old man a whole lot.

#kat gets personal