The tests the doctors were putting you through were boring, and they lasted almost all day. They made you do math and read books out loud to them. They showed you all types of things and asked if you knew what they were. You didn't like all these questions, or all these people pushing you to do more stuff.
"Y/N, we need you to try and read this." The doctor, what's his name insists, sliding the small book in your direction. You grab it, throwing it across the room with a grunt.
"I don't want to! I want my Papa and I want to go home!" You shriek as you slink underneath the table, fighting back tears. You knew you shouldn't cry when people were around. Papa didn't like it when you cried. You hear the doctor trying to coax you out from under the table, but you cover your ears.
You don't have to listen to him. He isn't your Papa! Your Papa was gone, leaving you alone again until he remembered to check on you.
"Little one..." You jolt a little when you hear Simon's voice, looking up at him and tugging at the ends of your hair. Did they send him because you were in trouble? "What are you doing under there?"
"I don't want the stupid book! I don't want the tests!" You kick the chair in front of you, satisfied when it tips over with a loud bang. "This is stupid!"
"It is really stupid." Simon chuckles as he sits down on the floor with you. He sits the chair back upright, holding the back of it when you kick it again. "Just because it's stupid doesn't mean you can throw things or kick. You can use your words to tell us what's wrong, Y/N." You stare at him in surprise, tears filling your eyes at his stern tone.
He wasn't even yelling at you. You were used to being yelled at, so why was this making you cry? You hiccup and nod along to his words, squeezing your knees against your chest.
"What's wrong, kiddo? Hmm? Why are you crying now?" He prompts, making you huff and whine in annoyance. Simon just sits with you while you throw your fit. It only takes a few minutes for you to scoot out from under the table and curl up to Simon's side.
"I don't know what's wrong." You mumble as you wipe your tears away. "Is this my papa's fault?" You ask as you look up at Simon, chewing on your bottom lip. You always knew Papa didn't really love you. He took care of you or made sure someone else did, but he never truly cared about you. Simon rubs your back softly, nodding he head slowly.
"Yeah... Yeah, it is his fault. He's not a very good person. But we're going to take care of you, okay?" Simon assures softly, relieved when you don't start crying again.
"Can I watch TV with Kyle now?" You look up at Simon hopefully, cracking a smile when he nods his head. You lean into his side one more time before standing up and running off to find Kyle. Simon plucks the book off the floor and takes it to your room.
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‘Weird’ and ‘gross’ traits of autism I have as a level 2 autistic
I have to use alternative forms of communication around 40% of the time. My verbal speech takes a lot of energy, and often isn’t understandable, or doesn’t reflect what I actually want to say.
I shower on average maybe twice a month. I know it’s gross. I find the water sounds overstimulating, and the whole process super energy draining. I do sponge baths in between.
I will never be able to live completely independently. I will either live in a group home or something similar, or live an a house with a support worker.
I struggle with cavities because brushing my teeth is a horrific sensory experience for me.
I need prompting to do most basic activities of daily living, and can’t do most instrumental activities of daily living.
My meltdowns aren’t pretty. I scream, and cry, and hit myself and other things. Often I make sounds for so long I start to drool, or I cry and have snot drip everywhere.
I rely on “childish” visual aids to be able to semi-independently do tasks like getting dressed, brushing my teeth and showering.
I’ve never successfully initiated a friendship. Ever. Either the person asks me to be their friend, and I say yes, or the whole thing was organized by one of my parents.
Autism isn’t “cute” or “quirky” It’s a flipping disability. Please stop watering down what developmental disorders are.
I wonder if sometimes narcissism is more like that one kid that you played pretend with who takes it too far and can't let it go.
Like maybe his home life isn't hard, but just kind of empty, and his parents didn't ever recognize him enough to return his baby grins and help him associate his upwelling happiness with the smile on his mother's face. They didn't teach him how to connect, which you have to do if you are going to see the other as a person and not an event. They buy him toys, they let him do what he wants, but he's just a chore to them and he knows it. They don't reflect him - when he looks for his image in their eyes he just sees nothing.
So when he's playing with the the other kids, he has to be important. He has to lead the games. When they pretend, he has to be the hero. His friends are sidekicks. They can be involved, sure, but they know not to steal the spotlight. Not after that one time when the new kid didn't play along and went home bleeding. It wasn't really bad, but kind of scary, and now it's just easier to let him do what he wants.
They all feel sorry for him and hate him a little bit. But he thinks of them as his loyal followers. He never really understands how they all lost touch. Which is a shame. Because he really needs someone to be honest with him, but he'd savage anyone that would try. And there are some things you can't explain.
Anyways. I'm not sure where that came from, but it's a really vivid picture in my head. I'm sure there are lots of different ways people manifest narcissistic traits, and I don't know if this resembles any of them. There is something about it I want to hold onto though.
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Both historically and in current days, the places for the mentally ill have often more than not been houses of torment and torture, compared to the help they were initially made for.
Don't get me wrong, places like asylums and mental institutions can be a great help. These facilities keep those in mental breaks from roaming the street, potentially hurting themselves or others. They provide temporary care and shelter for those who struggle to take care of themselves, and also can take the burden of human care off of family members.
But just like old folks homes, very often times the humanity and medical care is second priority, compared to control, torture, and/or imprisonment.
Getting In vs. Getting Out
Infamously, it's always easier to get oneself registered into a psychiatric hospital than out, and has been that way for genuine centuries. It's real easy to be labeled crazy, but more than difficult to be cleared as sane.
For instance a 1973 study was released from Stanford University, in the journal Science, called On Being Sane In Insane Places. Ran by psychologist David Rosenhan he proved very quickly his criticisms of mental institutions and their need for a reform. His biggest criticism being that patients are not properly vetted for being sane and they are not released in timely manner after supposed recovery.
He proved so by arranging a team of eight field participants, including himself, who would sneak themselves into asylums and see how long it took before they were given leave. All of him, and his patients were mentally sound, but discovered not only was it a near impossible tasks, that also they were all treated horribly.
Even funnier, or sadder, depending on your outlook, Rosenhan ran another experiment later on where he told asylums that he snuck imposters in again. 41 suspects were found to be these imposters, when in fact Rosenhan hadn't actually sent any at all.
He was very passionate about how diagnostic material can be very unreliable in the right circumstances, and that its not uncommon for authority figures in these facilities to fake witnessing signs of insanity to avoid admitting mistakes.
Often times too, in order to leave such facilities, there's rigid requirements, such as forced medicine ingestion or meeting impossible "normal" standards.
Funding & Family Names
Many major institutions were private, and therefor funded by wealthy families, donations, and organizations (mostly often religious ones). It wouldn't be crazy for a wealthy family to even own the said institute.
Meanwhile public institutions relied on national/state funding, and donations. These places were often the first to receive less in economic crisis, and other such events that stress the economy, like war.
Religious organizations are usually hand in hand with these kinds of things, so expect them to be pulling a lot of the strings. In fact many of the reasons I never got psychiatric help IRL is because all of the nearest inpatient facilities were religion ran with deplorable reviews that you would typically expect.
Moral Treatment Facilities
There are of course instances of moral facilities, that actually care about the patients. While a lot of these places are gray in terms of alignment, containing things, some good, some bad, even in terms of the old asylums these places did exist.
Rarely, is everything going to bad at these facilities without raising some sort of alarm or being part of a grander scheme. Horror stories do manage to pour of these places, either by caring family members, bystanders, and perhaps even escaped patients.
Laws and regulations are meant to keep psychiatric hospitals clean, humane, and effective at their job. Depending on the environment and government at play, such worries could be more maintained compared to, let's say, 1950s America.
I also like to think of the kind of characters who would fall into this line of work with good intentions. Why did they choose this path? Why do they stay? What does their day to day look like?
Who might look at such a depressing environment and see the potential for recovery and health?
Ward Divisions & Structure
If the facility is large, like an expansive complex, there is likely to be various kinds of wards you'd find the hospital broken into. These can range from types of patients, kinds of temperament, severity, needs of treatment, or level of doctor/nurse.
These complexes can span out like schools, with various buildings, several floors, and rooms of all kind. They have to be able to feed patients, or have some sort of past time location (like a park or living room). If these accommodations don't exist as places, they have to be provided directly to the patients in their separate confines.
That typically means a schedule and more workers...
Religion
Yeah, I'm going to talk about religion again. Historically religion/spirituality and medicine went hand in hand in a variety of cultures. Also religion and spirituality has been used to demonize the mentally ill, and attempt to exorcize problems that were barely understood.
Knowing the role religion played in these things makes the cruelty make more sense, as these same religions also ran boarding schools, orphanages, and old folk homes where atrocities were also being committed under the guise of godliness.
Many turn to religion to find answers or cope when it comes to the pains and mysteries of life. People of course would depend on religious psychiatric facilities to help their family members, but often times this has lead to greater excuses on ill treatment towards patients.
They weren't torturing that woman who has schizophrenia, they were ridding her of her demons... etc.
Political Imprisonment & Discrimination
Who needs prisons, camps, or gulags when you can just label your enemies as mentally ill. That's one of the various ways the USSR disappeared people, and often was a way that famous families have hidden away their less popular relatives.
I could make an entire post alone getting into the ableism in the history of psychiatric hospitals, but I want to dedicate this part talking more about the other kinds of discrimination that followed the decision to put one's family member away in a giant brick building labeled "asylum".
The three biggest kinds of bigotry outside of ableism were homophobia/transphobia, sexism, and religious discrimination. For awhile society worked in a way that if a family wished it so they could rid themselves of their social norms breaker by proclaiming that person insane and sending them away.
Whether that person was a woman who preferred to wear pants instead of skirts, a boy who enjoyed "feminine" hobbies, or a teenager refusing to go to church; you could label them insane and hope that the torture would sort them out.
There's a fine line between whether or not people truly believe such factors make their children insane, versus knowing its a fruitless effort but taking the malicious approach anyway.
I mean just look at the Kennedys, or the dark stories surrounding England's royal family.
From Asylum to Institute
Big word: deinstitutionalization.
Doctors who were in their right mind couldn't stand the injustice occurring in the traditional asylums, and there was a movement pushed by scientists and human rights activists that worked to take down these large residential institutes for the mentally ill and developmentally disabled, and replace them with something more community built.
It was a very simple effort, metal hospitals were cruel and inhumane, and antipsychotic medicines offered new insight on curing mental illness. Money could even be saved, by keeping people free and cared for through medicine.
It wasn't perfect, we have a better understanding of psychiatric medicine compared to its start in popularity during the 1950s.
The mental institutes we have today are much smaller, and more community driven, which has its major pros and cons. Mental institutes still pose a lot of the problems that the originals did, but affect people on a much smaller scale.
There is also places around the world that still work on the asylum-based system.
We're witnessing change still in the psychiatric community, from shifting away from paper scrubs, to more comprehensive understandings of the disorders at hand, and people being more forward about how/when they're mistreated by the medical community.
Final Thoughts
Doctors and people of the psychology community are actively working to better the care for mental illness and developmental disorders. Studies made within the last few years are investigating malpractice and human rights violations in inpatient care, and medicine is constantly being improved and monitored.
It's a very gray situation in all honesty
I did really like this study going into the modern issues with inpatient psychiatric care, so if anyone is interested I'll leave it right.... here.
Inpatient psychiatric hospitalization is often negatively experienced, with previous studies indicating a high frequency of traumatic occurr
the fact that adhd (et. al) makes certain tasks innately harder just adds another layer of complexity when it comes to building skills. like am i bad at [ thing ] because it requires a skill that's impacted by my literal actual disability, or am i just regular-flavor Bad At This because im out of practice?
is it worth putting time and effort into [ skill ] knowing that said effort might not be worth as much here (read: not make as much of a difference) as it might be somewhere else?
This is probably applicable to a lot of things like learning disabilities or other brain-related developmental things (and probably the not-neurodevelopmental ones too but i dont have any of them so i cant confirm). I expect that most if not all of them have at least some skills that are "only partially" impacted.
Bit of a rant, but I am so pissed at the Trump Administration rn and honestly just kinds need to vent. I was doing research for a school project and so I was reading through the White House's statements on autism, and like??? I don't even have it in me to be angry. It's not even close to the worst thing they're doing, but it just makes me so mad. Like, I'm autistic, I've been diagnosed officially for a little over a year, but I was pretty sure I was autistic before that. Some of the things they say are just disgusting. I hate the feeling of listening to somebody else talk about me, my family, my friends, my community, like we can't think for ourselves, or need to be fixed, or are part of some non-existent "epidemic."
Honestly, after reading that, I can understand why people have some misconceptions about autism now. So I'm going to clear some things up and talk a little about myself and my experience with autism.
Thing one, VERY IMPORTANT. Most autistic people do not want to be cured. This is because autism isn't like a disease- it is a developmental disorder, which means you are born with it. Autism is a fundamental part of who I am as a person. The idea of someone trying to "cure" me is terrifying- because me without the autism isn't me. That'd just be an entirely different person. The government trying to do that is just straight-up nightmarish.
Thing two, I am not a burden on my family nor am I incapable of taking care of myself. Note, this is that second one is not true for every autistic person, this is just my experience. But even if it is true, WHO CARES? Autistic people should be valued as people, not just a measure of how well they fit somebody's definition of "useful." And if an autistic person's family describes them as a burden, that's just horrible on the families' part. Admittedly, I still live with my parents, but that's a bit more related to the fact that I'm a high schooler.
Three, please never use "autistic" as an insult. I don't think I should have to explain this one.
Four, I am not a small child. Please treat me like you would treat any other person my age unless I ask you to accommodate for me in some way.
And five. Autism is a disability, and a neurodivergence. I am disabled. However, I must give some credit to my successes to the way my brain works. Having a special interest is SO fun. I plan to graduate by high school very early, and I already know what I want to do with my life for the next twenty or so years. I plan to end up working at NASA.
Anyways, I probably missed some things, and I'd like to reiterate, this is ONE autistic person's perspective. I am not representative of our entire, incredibly diverse community.
