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Others' words.
Jan. 22nd, 2011 12:13 amLow on spoons and tired and sick right now so just posting links that contain much of what we would have said anyway.
Don't Blame The Shooting In Tucson On The Psychiatrically Labeled
On The Questionable Wisdom Of Pathologizing Criminality
What creative responses can prevent future tragedies like the Tucson, Arizona shooting?
BTW we might open this entry up to comments later, but for now we're disabling comments because we don't have the physical or mental energy to deal with debates over this and especially if those debates are trying to provoke us into looking like the bad guy over issues where anyone who's read our page and writings should already know (i.e. the fact that we believe anyone has the right to take whatever drugs they want, as long as they're genuinely informed and it's genuinely a free choice. The idea that we as ex-patients, and worse yet, ex-patients who disagreed with most of our therapists' ideas about us, would even remotely have anywhere near the kind of power to take that right away from anyone even if we wanted to is ridiculous.) You don't have to agree with every single thing said or endorsed in the posts or blogs we linked to. Just that the gist of the particular statements we linked is very close to what we would have said ourselves if we could have.
Also potential hazards we don't want to deal with: people using this post to try to politicize our cognition or verbal processing styles and not actually understanding what we're saying at all because it apparently looks to them, at whatever level they're reading it on, like the same thing as their own personal crusades against whoever they've decided is The Evil Enemy in their particular favourite ideologies, even though it's not (and ideologies do not just refer to things you disagree with; people we often agree with very much can hold them). Or glamour-fuckery of the "there is no right and wrong, only what is, murder and torture can be wonderful too!" variety. (Where the types of things being referred to are things that the vast majority of people in the world agree are murder, and are ethically wrong, not having anything to do with issues like when should a fetus be considered separate from the mother or whatever.) Or people launching into big spiels based on assumptions they make about our and our family's history with mental illness labels and the type of behaviour that tends to be regarded as mentally ill and which ones we have and have not had experience with. (I'll just say, not out of malice but because I don't have the spoons to frame this in any but the most direct way right now, that if you try to guess, you probably will get it wrong. There are many things we don't talk about regarding those aspects of our past and family.)
Anyway didn't want to let this incident go by without forming some sort of response to it. And hoping the bluntness here doesn't rub anyone the wrong way, it isn't meant to wound but just to be honest; we aren't remotely near any level right now where we could slip hidden messages and subtexts into our writing, so what we say is exactly what we mean.
-Julian, mostly
Don't Blame The Shooting In Tucson On The Psychiatrically Labeled
On The Questionable Wisdom Of Pathologizing Criminality
What creative responses can prevent future tragedies like the Tucson, Arizona shooting?
BTW we might open this entry up to comments later, but for now we're disabling comments because we don't have the physical or mental energy to deal with debates over this and especially if those debates are trying to provoke us into looking like the bad guy over issues where anyone who's read our page and writings should already know (i.e. the fact that we believe anyone has the right to take whatever drugs they want, as long as they're genuinely informed and it's genuinely a free choice. The idea that we as ex-patients, and worse yet, ex-patients who disagreed with most of our therapists' ideas about us, would even remotely have anywhere near the kind of power to take that right away from anyone even if we wanted to is ridiculous.) You don't have to agree with every single thing said or endorsed in the posts or blogs we linked to. Just that the gist of the particular statements we linked is very close to what we would have said ourselves if we could have.
Also potential hazards we don't want to deal with: people using this post to try to politicize our cognition or verbal processing styles and not actually understanding what we're saying at all because it apparently looks to them, at whatever level they're reading it on, like the same thing as their own personal crusades against whoever they've decided is The Evil Enemy in their particular favourite ideologies, even though it's not (and ideologies do not just refer to things you disagree with; people we often agree with very much can hold them). Or glamour-fuckery of the "there is no right and wrong, only what is, murder and torture can be wonderful too!" variety. (Where the types of things being referred to are things that the vast majority of people in the world agree are murder, and are ethically wrong, not having anything to do with issues like when should a fetus be considered separate from the mother or whatever.) Or people launching into big spiels based on assumptions they make about our and our family's history with mental illness labels and the type of behaviour that tends to be regarded as mentally ill and which ones we have and have not had experience with. (I'll just say, not out of malice but because I don't have the spoons to frame this in any but the most direct way right now, that if you try to guess, you probably will get it wrong. There are many things we don't talk about regarding those aspects of our past and family.)
Anyway didn't want to let this incident go by without forming some sort of response to it. And hoping the bluntness here doesn't rub anyone the wrong way, it isn't meant to wound but just to be honest; we aren't remotely near any level right now where we could slip hidden messages and subtexts into our writing, so what we say is exactly what we mean.
-Julian, mostly