cool ass shaman

Bullshit.

You need to get your bigotries together, because mental illness IS God making mistakes.

That doesn't happen when people have power and therefore can count on getting away with it or finding a legal way to do it.

That doesn't happen when people are vulnerable and dependent and therefore anyone who wants to hurt them pretty much has a free pass.

That doesn't happen when people are perpetually afraid because they're constantly punished for challenging authority or because they live in a society that normalizes suffering.

Oppressed Person: "You are dangerous. I fear you."

Another time when you see her, you touch her again in a similar way and she finds it creepy.

You may be wondering why this is happening. She liked it at first. So what changed?

The difference is that the first time it happened, you were carefully trying to read her boundaries. You were slowly experimenting to find out what she likes and what she doesn't. You started out using the default setting of how people in general should interact with people in general, and you then slowly increased the physical contact while each time making sure she has a reasonable way out. You were paying attention to what she initiates in order to make sure it's not one sided. Meanwhile, the second time, you were just copying the parts that you liked from the first time. The first time, you were doing everything the correct way. The second time, you went in with expectations.

90% of the volunteers were wealthy retired neurotypical cishet white women. That meant that for basically every call these people received there was a pre-existing power dynamic where the caller was well below the call-handler, and the call was consequently handled totally paternalistically, never with any sense that the volunteer might actually have something to learn from the caller. The similarity to the typical patient-GP/PCP dynamic was really striking.

Most of the callers were prisoners, homeless, or people who had recently stopped taking anti-psychotic meds. I think many of the volunteers enjoyed the feeling of the power dynamic that was obvious in these calls. If you spend most of your social time with people of the same high social class as you, I guess you might find it refreshing to encounter people who remind you that you've actually done well out of life, only from a safe distance and through a phone ofc.

We also got a lot of trans callers. Hearing how the volunteers talked to these callers was a really radicalising experience. "Why do you think you're a woman?" "Why do you think you enjoy wearing women's clothing?" "Is there a sexual component to it? Maybe something that happened in your childhood?" "What do the other girls at school think about you calling yourself a boy?", plus the obvious constant misgendering and pronoun "mix-ups", saying, "Oh sorry, miss, your voice sounds like a man's so it's confusing."

People would say this stuff during training too, and the people training us would say it was correct. It's not like they were letting their bigotry cause them to deviate from policy, bigotry was the policy. I remember there was one senior volunteer who was a retired cis lesbian police officer, and I asked her about handling trans callers and she just repeated back all the same bigoted nonsense everyone else thought (at the time I put that down to her being a cop, not being aware back then that being a cis lesbian is no guarantee at all of an absence of transphobic views.)

It didn't take long for me to start getting reprimanded for having too much empathy for the callers. I was an unusual volunteer in that I had actually been in the same position as a lot of the callers. I was trans (albeit not out yet), I was frequently suicidal, I had been on anti-depressants (incredibly I was the only volunteer out of around 150 with that experience), I had experienced CSA and domestic abuse, I had lived through times when I had a zero bank balance, I had eaten food out of a bin because I had no money, I had been heavily addicted to alcohol and nicotine.

It meant I normally had some commonality with all the callers that I could use to make sure I was talking to them in the way I would've wanted to be talked to, i.e. as an equal. I would actually let the caller direct the conversation rather than directing it myself (which was the policy), I would show genuine interest in their story, I wouldn't tell them to hurry up because there were other callers with "real problems". After a while, I couldn't handle it and I just left, not because of the stress of dealing with the callers, but the stress of dealing with the other volunteers.

I've seen it many times. Even when there's a post clarifying that it's just some of the interest being deleted, which would cost the taxpayers nothing, the comments are full of people still opposing it.

But what actually happens is much worse.