Past Imperfect

My therapist almost sent me to a juvenile detention center. The only reason that she didn't was because having six months of therapy was a requirement before I could go to the center, and my mom and I moved away before the six months could be completed. What do you think could've happened to me if I went to a juvenile detention center? Would I have ever had access to a lawyer at any point in the process? 

And this is why Oppositional Defiant Disorder is fake fake fake!! It depends on reports from adults, and adults are eager to portray themselves as entirely reasonable and teenagers as just crazy idiots.

When the ODD label gets slapped on a child, parents have no responsibility apparently for when a child habitually responds badly to authoritarian control. Nor do teachers, or systems; disabilities are suddenly irrelevant or their very existence is doubted.

ODD: fuck that child, in particular, but like clinically.

Okay, if you were in America, your therapist could not have just sent you to a juvenile detention center. There are a couple things that could have been happening here that you misunderstood or that were not explained to you. (People also tend to stop explaining things to kids diagnosed with ODD.)

Your therapist could have been referring to a youth mental health facility. Some of these are locked and do look and feel a lot like juvenile detention centers, and the locked facilities also do a lot of work with kids that are involved with the juvenile justice system.

Your therapist could have been threatening/offering to file something in court that could have ended up with you in detention. This could either be criminal charges (how dare you assault your mother);

Or it could have been an alternative civil type of case that's very common but called many different things in many different states. The civil charge is basically "hello I would like a judge to help me parent my child" and historically involved determinations of "incorrigibility." Now it's usually something involving determining if the child is at risk or in need of services or something.

Youth Mental Health Facility: this would have been undoubtedly the potential worst and also the potential best of the three options, depending utterly on how garbage your mom was going to be and what facility you ended up in. Those mental health facilities are rife with horror and abuse, as you might expect from anywhere containing a whole population of people who are habitually not believed and who have extremely limited legal rights.

Depending entirely on who is staffing the place and how vigilant and focused they are, their leadership, their ability to set goals and keep the kids first, some of those facilities... actually... are pretty good. I actually think architecture might have an influence on this too: if it looks more like a prison, it's going to end up with the staff acting more like it's a prison. I toured one of our higher-security locked youth facilities before, and they were super eager to show me their classrooms, their counseling rooms, and then... a blank hallway painted friendly colors, with a room coming off of it that had padded walls. I was like "wtf is this" and they were like, this is actually the pacing hallway! If kids are having a meltdown, they can come here any time with a staff member and yell and punch the wall and have a talk about it!

Court Filing: If you got a criminal charge, you would have gotten someone like me (ideally; the access to decent lawyers for youth is. spotty at best) and (ideally) a guardian ad litem, an attorney to look out for your best interests. This would be because your parent was the "victim" of the charge and so might not be looking out for your best interests. I actually ask for a GAL to be appointed on any case where I suspect the parents might be doing some Fuckery.

If the case was criminal, you also possibly would have gone to detention very briefly on arrest but whether you stayed there would have depended on the jurisdiction, the judge, and the lawyers. My experience overwhelmingly would say: probably you would not be staying in detention for a push unless your mom refused to have you back at home.

If you got a civil case, you would have gotten an attorney who's not quite like me. As a public defender, I specialize in criminal defense and I have the backing of my office and lots of training. Attorneys for civil cases for kids (which can still end up with them in detention) vary wildly in experience, commitment, general intelligence, and whether I have ever low-key wanted to throttle them.

Either way, you probably would have gotten stuck going back to court pretty regularly for a while to prove that you could shape up and be better (TM). During this process, you would have to behave orders of magnitude better than, just for a random example, the President of the United States, under constant provocation, with no right to privacy or autonomy, and the penalty of detention if you failed.

ok I will say (you know me I gotta add nuance) that sometimes this comes out with adopted kids who were severely abused or neglected in the first couple years of their life. TBI (traumatic brain injury) usually manifests a little differently.

But to focus in on the severe neglect in first two years of life: I have actually seen this a whole lot with children of drug abusing parents who are removed from their parents' custody. They can end up diagnosed with ODD later, usually accompanied by more alphabet soup like ADHD and problems with emotional regulation like Intermittent Explosive Disorder.

The tricky part can be that this can show up when the kid actually gets to a place with a good caretaker. Their difficulty bonding with caretakers at all suddenly becomes a huge problem, and they constantly test the bond by throwing essentially tantrums because they don't believe on a physical level that they're truly in a safe place and they feel the need to keep proving it over and over and over.

When it's problems in that two-year window of opportunity in an infant's life, it can be REALLY hard to help, and the therapeutic need can require some serious specialized intervention. Also: Foster/adoptive parents are human too and it becomes very hard to know how to react to a kid who is clinging to you then breaking all your shit then clinging to you again.

so

Yes it is usually indicative of child abuse (or of a different disability liked ADHD that is being mismanaged) (which tbh depending on severity of mismanagement can also be child abuse)

but

No the child abuse might not be coming from inside the current house (or current school or current daycare or w/e)

Also

More support and training for foster and adoptive families !!

And end the shame and exclusion of the war on drugs because I think that by ITSELF will have a noticeable impact on the kind of child abuse that I'm talking about here

Also I'm not a psychologist, I just see, notice, and read a lot.

Further Paradigm-Shifting Reading:

(via bsky)

In case anyone hasn't heard, the cyclospora outbreak affecting tons of people in the US right now is coming from Taylor Farms produce. Best to stay away from bagged lettuce and prepared salads completely right now, but especially the ones mentioned in the screenshot:

Taylor Farms Earthbound Farms Little Salad Bar (Aldi) Marketside (Walmart) Kroger House Brand Target private label greens Costco salads and greens etc Trader Joe's chopped salad kits and fresh produce Fast food: McDonalds, Taco Bell, (Yum! Brands), Chipotle, Subway, Pizza Hut, KFC, Olive Garden, Top Golf, Red Lobster, Burger King, etc.

This is not the first time I've heard about a Taylor Farms foodborne illness outbreak. I stopped eating their salads after reading a description of the conditions in their facilities. Doesn't sound like they've improved anything.

(tags via @greedydemands) this is another important point bc while folks have rightly pointed out the palpable sense of resentment and contempt the nonblack writers room seems to have for louis and claudia, it's important to think about how this show did have some black writers working on it during s1-s2 and it was an intentional choice to remove all black talent from the writers room and how white creatives often have a chip on their shoulder about their work being popular with a marginalized audience they didn't intend or feeling like their own work and ideas are being outshined by the work of black collaborators. iwtv s1-s2 was loved by black viewers and was praised largely as a black show, with louis and claudia (despite their unpopularity among nonblack viewers and in predominantly nonblack fandom) being celebrated as iconic figures in the small but beloved pantheon of black vampires in pop culture in less than 4 years. omar benson miller and jack o'connell (who knows jacob) cited and recommended iwtv on the sinners press tour and as the original post points out, iwtv s1 was clearly a visual and conceptual reference for ryan coogler when he was making sinners. (and sinners was both a box office and awards success despite the antiblackness of the industry so anyone justifying amc's efforts to distance tvl from iwtv as a purely business/financial decision is being seriously bad faith.) reddit and tumblr, and we know rolin lurks on both, might have been shoulder-deep in antiblack abuse apologia to excuse fan favorite nonblack characters, but iwtv was entering pop culture as a black show, as centering and valuing blackness. and we see now more clearly than ever that none of those aspects of the show- not the compassion and nuance for louis and claudia, not the immersive and lyrical dialogue and narration, not the thoughtful engagement with themes of race, racialized violence and domestic abuse- came from hannah or rolin. they wanted to make a "everyone is evil and nothing matters" vampiric-violence-excuses-all ironic shlockfest where any gesture toward sincerity gets undercut by a self-aware quip and where compassion is only reserved for nonblack people. and the seeds of that are there in the earlier seasons, like hannah always writing episodes that are extremely, disproportionately detailed about the brutalization of black bodies, but there was just enough care, thought and interest in the black leads to make the show seem like it was critiquing the nature of this kind of violence instead of punitively reveling in it. and that part came from the black writers (and likely also some of the nonblack women who worked on s1-s2 but were fired before s3, bc while the show has always been misogynistic, it wasn't cartoonishly misogynistic where every single woman is reduced to a one-note stereotype) and the nonblack writers and producers likely deeply resented them for it.

First thing the sales guy did after I laid down the rules was turn to Sean and go, "What's your number?" And Sean said. "Oh, no, you negotiate with Gayle."

So, strike one for the sales guy. Could not divide and conquer us by implying THE MAN would not surprised at what I laid down.

Sales guy then had to confer with his manager and left us at his desk for several minutes. I have a vague recollection (this was 16 years ago) of Sean and I amusing ourselves doing bits about the other people there to look at cars. I am sure we did not give off the stressed or nervous energy they were hoping for.

Guy comes back. His first offer is fifty dollars a month more than I told him we could pay. I looked at him and said "I gave you our upper limit."

"Well, but what's another 50 bucks a month?"

"Something I can't afford."

He didn't know what to do with my open and unashamed admittal that I had a budget because my money was finite.

He went back to talk to the manager again.

It took two more rounds of "I told you what I can afford" before he finally came back 20 bucks under what I'd stated as my max.

🌱 EXTREMELY ROBUST SCALLIONS 🌱

do NOT scroll past the scallions. these are extremely robust. i did not seek them out, they were placed before me.

the produce misters had just run. the bundles were tight. the whites were WHITE. good fortunes await.

🧅 repost within 24 hours: robust scallions

🧅 repost within 1 hour: robust scallions + minor windfall

🧅 do not repost: limp scallions. flaccid stalk. the celery will look at you and it will know.

a man in Fresno scrolled past. his scallions went to seed the same evening. his dog stopped making eye contact.

a woman reposted immediately. she found $40 in a coat. her scallions have not wilted since March.

The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely.