#asylums

Nurse in Hospital Ward, Liverpool Asylum, n.d.

-Carbolic acid sterilization was practiced often by the setting's time, and Seward would definitely be pro-antiseptic measures, so scars from infection aren't a consideration I have. I have seen syringe kits with instructions to sterilize them by boiling, too.

-Needles may have been duller, I'm assuming manufacturing was less precise and I haven't found instructions in kits on sharpening- hypodermic syringes were reused after being sterilized, right?

-I'm not sure how the injections would go. With violent patients I believe it's just wherever you can stick it. Would track marks/scars still appear if it isn't a consistent injection site into a vein? Am I right about how they were injected?

-Considering Seward's liberal use of chemical and physical restraints (for patients and himself lmao) I'm assuming even before Renfield's mania turned violent, he was being sedated relatively often. So this could be long-term and regular, especially with what I understand about attitudes towards chemical restraint in the 1890s (and to some extent now).

Not all asylums were bad, over run, abusive, dirty, neglectful, violent and suffocating. Especially when they were started around the late 1800s. We all know the horror stories and they did happen but to broadly paint every asylum ever, including all modern day mental health facilities, as inherently bad is not only disingenuous fear mongering but factually fucking untrue, even in a general sense, most were not mass experimenting on their fucking patients. This isn't to silence the very real and very upsetting stories told by many here and on other platforms, your experience did happen and you are valid for warning others. However, a good experience being shared is less interesting to the general public than one rife with tragedy so many good experiences are either ignored or drowning in a sea of comments of people questioning their perception or just endlessly repeating the bad ones or trauma dumping which is really weird to do. Your watching too many horror movies, they didn't all have their government required licenced Dr. Lector on staff. Many were good and kind to their patients and it's important to not imagine these things through a modern light. In today's world, we are perfectly capable of knowing that electro-shock therapy does nothing for anyone is just used as torture but people in the fucking 1880s didn't fucking know that. No, the nurses and doctors administrating these painful procedures (including fucking lobotomies) weren't doing these things cause they fucking hated mentally ill people and just wanted to disable them so they'd shut the fuck up and work for the capitalist machine quietly, they did them because they genuinely believed they were helping their patients. Just because it was sometimes used maliciously dosent mean that the procedure's implementation was exclusively malicious. Here's a modern lens; abortion. There is a difference between a woman receiving an abortion consensually because it's harming her and a native Canadian woman being non-consentually sterilized by the government and due to her current pregnancy, they performed an abortion. Both kill a fetus but one is wanted and the other isn't. Medical procedures are, for the most part, neutral. Medical removal of the kidney and getting it stolen both take out a fuckin kidney. These doctors believed that electro-shock therapy was a necessary evil, like cutting off someone's foot cause the toes were necrosing. Painful but nessesary. When you blanketly label all outdated mental health treatments as evil ableist and typicalist violence committed against mentally ill people, you are pushing conspiracy and misinformation. Some people abused it, but most thought they were helping. They weren't coming from a place of ableism. In today's standards we know for a fact it's useless and just torture, both patient and doctor alike almost 200 yrs ago thought they were helping them. Just because you lost faith in the medical field or doctors or even all of humanity dose not give you the right to fucking lie about people who had nothing but love for this community but did not have the information and technology to know for certain. Put the modern lens down.

Secondly, and this is very fucking important, Some mental illness is inherently harmful and the individuals with these symptoms or illnesses can and will forever be a danger to society. Saying we should just destroy the whole system dose not help you or these people.

I get called saneist (I qualify as insane by your standards) and ableist/typicalist (I am both mentally and physically disabled) because I state this fact. It's not a fun fact but it is the literal truth. Chemicals within someone's brain can be so out of wack that no medication will cure them or even really stop them, just slow them, to the point where it never was and never will be safe for them to reenter society at large. They are not and never will be considered "beyond saving" but the body can be that far into disregulation that they are a danger and can not be without strong and constant medical supervision. It's not fun to think about and these cases are fairly rare and very sad for both that individual and for their family but the goal here is safety and quality of life and that's what is being put forth by forced and permanent residency in mental health hospitals for some people. There are many many mental illnesses that cannot be cured and damage the brain to such an extent, the person, their memories, their relationships and their personalities are so lost to this damage or illness, they do not understand why it's bad to stab people and they cannot safely exist in society. That's ok. No, say it, it's ok that some people can't exist unsupervised in society because they are a danger to themselves and others. So much of the conversations around mental health right now are by perfectly sane barely neurotypical people who have no business trying to decide what's best for people other than themselves. These people are no less valuable than you and I but this is the reality of some mental illness and they are the baby you throw out with the anti-psych shut-down-all-mental-hospitals bath water.

In the mental health community, there's a lot of " disneyism", aka blind hopefulness and psoitivity snd feel good mesaaging with zero basis in reality and is often harmful and dangerous. It's very similar to toxic positivity, the idea that any sort factual evidence and especially conversations should be uplifting or else it's toxic, like the idea that every person in chronic pain should constantly be happy and uplifting and hopeful and should not share any feelings of hopelessness or depression because they "bring down the mood" or " encourage defeatist thinking in those new to the community who need to be uplifted", ultimately silencing negative thought and living in ignorant bliss for the sake of hopefulness and maintaining an entirely positive image for those outside the community. It punishes people for having negative emotions which is toxic and dangerous. This disneyism in the mentally disabled community basically looks like the phrases, everyone can get better, even cured, with enough time, meds and therapy and no one is beyond eventual release and anyone could eventually get off their meds and other feel good sediments that are hopeful and nice to think about and although a world like that would be wonderful, its a fucking fantasy made by and peddled by and made for people that it applies to factually and zero others. Not everyone, infact most of us, will ever truly "get better/cured" for most of these illnesses, especially those I mentioned earlier, these are chronic deteriorating conditions and right now in the present is as good as they are ever gonna get. They will get worse with age. They will never go into a true "remission". Not everyone can or should, for their own health and safety and yours, eventually be released. Many of those who can't often need around the clock care and constant supervision. It won't go away just because you like the idea personally. Mental hospitals are some of the only places these people and others who are not in as an extreme position can receive the care they need at the consistency they need it at. In home care is really the only other option but for many, it's simply not possible financially or practically. Most of us will never truly be able to completely get off their meds. They are as nessesary as air for many.

And guess what? All of that, is ok. To say it isn't or can't be is ableism. It's ok if it won't eventually get better, it's ok if it will never be cured and it's ok if it will only get worse. One day at a time. Maybe it will and that's a nice bit of motivation but there is no garentee for any and it's best to focus on your comfort and quality of life before you worry about " getting better". That may not be an option for you and that's ok. It's ok if some people can not or ever should be released for their own and other's health and safety. These individuals are there because it is good for them, many don't remember anything but the hospital or even have the mental capacity to realize they can't leave. Many never really knew that free life because they went from their parent's care straight to the hospital residency. I promise you, people with your level of sanity and consciousness, if you have the ability to read and comprehend this post without checking with hospital staff, are not rotting in those hospitals as permanent patients going stir crazy. They know and are comfortable with that life and they are not in the same places as people on 72 hour or week or months long holds like most of us who visit. Their lives are lives you will likely never see and their parents or guardians often visit and are very involved their care as their emotional and physical irregularities often qualify as mental disability and reduced mental age. There are issues of abuse but they are not nearly as common as every other form of medical malpractice, even remotely. Please do not try to put yourself in their shoes to try to judge their situation because they do not have the same mental capacity as you and that is ok. You do not know better than their guardians, the nurses and care staff who care for them every day and the entire medical field involved in severe mental illness, I promise. You, someone with no degree or even considerable amount of knowledge about this field of science, do not have the secret key to curing them " that every ableist in that field overlooked cause it makes them less money 😡", just say something something big pharma and shit with the rest of the antivaxer anti intellectual maga pizza gate conspiracy theorists and their heart stopping fears of abortion and giant what-causes-autism-today wheel and shut the ever loving fuck up.

No, even if you watched 10 or 20 or 1,000 documentaries and did 20 or 50 or 5,000 hours of article and source reading, you do not know what is best for the mental health community, especially if your answer, off minimal evidence, is scorched earth. Me and my mom disagree on many topics ranging from immigration (she's a first and I'm a second generational American as my grandmother is an immigrant from Canada and her mother was an immigrant from fucking Holland. We are also pan-generational due to nativeness but you get the point.) to vaccines to abortion and although we generally align, there's plenty of things she's gotten wrong. One piece of advice however that she didn't get wrong was the simple sentence of " If it were such an easy problem (in America) to solve, we wouldn't still be talking about it. It would have already been solved." And although this isn't universal advice and some little short sided instant-gratificational brat could scream a few words sentences at me like "Hunger? Feed them! It's only complicated if you're classist! 😡🖕🏼😡" But that don't apply to fuckin policy. It's more complicated than that in actuality.

What I mean is, basically, the answer is simple but the implication is very very fucking complicated however... You gotta get that answer right for it to work and shutting down the entire mental health system overnight (which some anti-psych dumbasses on Tumblr who can't even comprehend that the person writing this drools sometimes if they think too much and they'd happily patronize and infantilize me if they met me irl aka be ableist cause they arent as disabled as I am) would have catastrophic consequences and result in the deaths of millions of disabled people they never even knew or considered existing. The fact is, most of them may qualify as insane but they are not mentally disabled and the people I'm talking about have mental disabilities and yet again, I beg as a mentally disabled person, mentally abled people? Stop fucking trying to make choices for us just because you think your better than us. Let mentally disabled people, like me and many others, who have the disability and also the mental capacity to advocate for ourselves, to do so for those who don't. Those are the most vulnerable of our oppressed group, not yours, and you aren't even in the building so how dare you try to break in and talk about our courtyard.

The most vulnerable woc in the US are native American women as we top every chart, often 2 or 3 times over, any other racial minority in America from dv to homelessness to hate crimes to murder/missing statistics. It's a bad day to be the #1 in most of the places we qualify. Fellow woc, would you let a white woman, who thinks she knows what's best for native women and native women can't make choices for ourselves, make choices for the native woman community? FUCK NO. It's the same issue here. Neurotypical (oppressed, the woman part of the white woman in this analogy) but mentally abled (oppressor, the white part of the white woman in this analogy), have no business addressing the neurodivergent and mentally disabled (the native and woman parts of the native women in this analogy) community like you know what's better for us. I can go a million way with this analogy but it never gets less entitled and bigoted; cisgays trying to make choices for trans gays, Low income but houses trying to make choices for no income homeless, the list goes on and on and on.

Being oppressed like us in one way but not in another related way dosent make you inherently knowledgeable about what's best for both groups, especially the one your not in. Neurodivergence and mental disability are sisters but they are not twins. Related but separate. Being an expert in one dosent mean you know enough about the other to claim expertise in it. Someone who knows everything about reduced mental age won't understand everything, hell sometimes anything but certainly not sufficient amounts, about personality disorders and you do not know everything, hell mostly anything and certainly not sufficient amounts, about mental capacity or reduced mental age or mental disabilities period just because your neurodivergent for any reason. You do not, and should not, talk about issues you have no horse in the race of. Those with mental ability need to stop trying to talk over mentally disabled people. We can advocate for ourselves. We do not need you. Just because I may not be mentally disabled enough to qualify for full time hospital supervision doesn't mean I don't understand their issues. I may not be at the deep end of the pool with them but at least I'm still in the fuckin pool and you aren't even in the pool at all so why don't you worry about you and your friends and the scraped knees and broken arms you all have from constantly and weirdly reaching in to touch us and try to pull us out and yell over us when we explain we're ok and semi-aquatic, ya land mammal.

Thanks for the worry but we got this, can you respect us now or is your ego too big to accept that despite your weird ableist self-assurance, you are not inherently louder, more articulate and smarter than a mentally disabled person?

Is your visage of the drooling retard too innocent and distracted to tell you to stop fucking touching us shattered yet? It should be if ableism is really one of your supposed "top concerns."

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DOAI stimboard

Event: @heartnosekid Halloween Day 3

Themes: VHS, Halloween, stripes, asylums

Note: I chose to do an analog horror instead of a horror movie because I barely watch horror movies

Song: