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Title: Burn Down the Psych Ward Author: PERA Date: 2019 Language: en Topics: Mental Health, Psychology, Mental health incarceration, prison abolition Source: Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement (NYC branch) Notes: If you want more copies of this zine, a copy of our next one when it comes out, help creating psychological affinity where you are, or have questions please contact us at; PERA-nyc@protonmail.com
The American plantation relies on the mental distress of those it
oppresses. As revolutionaries, we seek the liberation of people in
bondage, both in prisons and psych wards. In order to eliminate
patriarchy, capitalism, gender, and anti-blackness, we must address the
significant psychological damage these forces inflict.
The trauma caused by social isolation, psychological manipulation and
physical oppression is felt by all of those who are locked up, enslaved
and otherwise targeted by the barbaric enforcers of white supremacy. The
rampant psychological distress we are accustomed to is the effect of
living in a depraved world. It is not possible to address “mental
illness” without addressing the overwhelmingly reactionary nature of
American society.
Psychological Emancipation for Revolutionary Abolition seeks to create
ways of dealing with psychological distress which build up the
revolutionary relationships that are needed to help people stay free. We
must not only be supporting our fellow revolutionaries in their time of
psychological need, but developing the patterns and practices of social
cohesion that create strong bonds more capable of withstanding state
repression, dealing with psychological distress, and undertaking
militant action.
The skills, ideas and methods of organization proposed in this call for
a revolutionary abolitionist approach to psychological emancipation will
beuseful to anyone seeking to overcome the psychological barriers to
securing their own liberation, but the ultimate goal of PERA is to
destroy locked psychiatric treatment, prisons, and the state itself.
This means that to truly succeed PERA requires support from and
coordination with a broader abolitionist network, the Revolutionary
Abolitionist Movement.
This call for a revolutionary abolitionist approach to psychological
emancipation is structured around three pillars, each related to a
different aspect of active struggle against psychological distress.
• Psychological Emancipation
- Learn psychological skills which can help us become better
revolutionaries.
• Revolutionary
- Develop psychological affinity groups to support one another, as we
face psychological distress.
• Abolition
- Destroy the current system of mental health care, which holds mentally
ill people against their will in both prisons and psych wards.
Psychological self defense is a necessary part of revolutionary
struggle, and psychological skills are necessary for withstanding the
challenges all revolutionaries face. To bring our unique talents and
individual experiences to the struggle for liberation, we must remove
the psychological roadblocks that hinder our effectiveness.
Living on the American plantation is psychologically damaging, and being
mentally ill here can be physically damaging, or deadly. The carceral
state extends to our ways of treating mental illness; from the mentally
ill in traditional jails and prisons, to those in locked psych wards,
the end of this prison state must include straitjackets as well as
shackles.
In traditional mental health treatment, success is most often measured
by how well people are able to fit into the expectations of society. For
PERA, instead the goal is to provide the psychological tools necessary
for revolutionaries to fight for our own freedom.
To build a world without oppression, we must kill the master within, and
harden our minds against the assaults of the state and capitalism. In
order to grow as a revolutionary movement, we need to support comrades
who are facing the psychological effects of this prison society.
Psychological affinity can form a basis for building up revolutionary
capacity. Not only can we help one another through periods of crisis or
distress, but we can form strong relationships based on shared values
and emancipatory goals. This isn’t just something that will have a
positive effect on our lives in the immediate moment; it is a chance to
build the kinds of connections that can withstand the force of
oppression.
We must start with a recognition of the social and political forces
which cause some of the most unpleasant forms of psychological distress.
The conception of mental illness as rooted in only genetics, or pure
chemical imbalance is unfounded. Depression and anxiety are natural
reactions to the isolating effects of capitalism. For black people, and
others targeted for control and enslavement, this feeling is multiplied
by the trauma of white supremacist terror. The psychological pain that
people feel is alleviated not primarily through medicine or therapy, but
through the creation of a social environment that will allow us to
become better revolutionaries.
Though techniques for dealing with certain emotions or unpleasant
thoughts are important and useful, we need systems of social support to
attain the freedom we’re looking for. We seek to transform the way we
relate to each other and to create groups capable of eliminating our
oppressors.
We are specialists in psychology and novices alike, we have experienced
mental illness personally or peripherally. Our skills and our
backgrounds differ, but our autonomy, and revolutionary goals are the
same.
PERA is focused on developing a model of psychological affinity,
developing a non-hierarchical mode of treatment for psychological
distress, and providing people with resources necessary to seek their
own psychological emancipation. While specialization of knowledge is
useful, authority over the treatment of "patients" is inherently
hierarchical and destroys the very autonomy and control over one’s life
that psychology claims to give.
There is no prescriptive guide or single analysis that can bring
liberation. We don’t presume to have found a final answer for how to
deal with the psychologically distressing experiences that are
inherently part of living in a society we seek to destroy. Instead we
want to propose a set of tools and methods that will not only help us
strike back against the psychological assaults of capitalist society,
but will also address the underlying social factors that are at the root
of mental illnesses.
Both on a social and individual level, we are taught that the “solution”
to a negative emotion or phenomenon is control or avoidance. In our
families histories of mental illness are coded secrets. People are often
unwilling to talk about what they are experiencing psychologically due
to stigma. We are conditioned to think of illness and addiction as
personal weaknesses. Rather than representing an innate flaw, “mental
illness” is a product of the society we live in, and a label used to
imprison those who do not reliably follow orders, or create profit for
the capitalist machine.
Anti-black policing often criminalizes the mentally ill, enslaving
people, rather than providing support. A staggering number of people are
murdered by police during mental health crises, and prisons are
overflowing with people suffering from mental illness, often compounded
by their experience behind prison walls. “In 44 states, a jail or prison
holds more mentally ill individuals than the largest remaining state
psychiatric hospital; in every county in the United States with both a
county jail and a county psychiatric facility, more seriously mentally
ill individuals are incarcerated than hospitalized. A 2004–2005 survey
found there were “more than three times more seriously mentally ill
persons in jails and prisons than in hospitals.”
This slavery is possible because of the societal attitude that mental
illness is a personal failing. After mass shootings rather than
confronting patriarchy and white supremacy, we scapegoat mental illness.
In the case of the Parkland shooting media was more vocal about the need
to imprison the mentally ill than the swastikas engraved on the
shooter’s gun. Those in power will never blame the fundamental
anti-blackness, patriarchy, and alienation that define American society,
because they are the ones who benefit from and uphold these forces.
In Nazi concentration camps a black triangle was used to mark prisoners
as "asocial" or "arbeitsscheu" (work-shy). This applied to people unable
to participate in the production of Nazi wealth, be they disabled, or
mentally ill. This label, work-shy, gets to a fundamental aspect of the
societal attitude towards mental illness. The only difference between
the experience of the mentally ill in traditional prisons and in the
locked psych wards is a slightly greater chance of escape or clemency
(if one is willing to subject oneself to the rules of society and the
necessity of work).
Instead of accepting seclusion and imprisonment we have to become
capable of fighting back against the distress that wracks our minds, and
the society that creates these deep psychic rifts. Reformism only
perpetuates and strengthens the existing mental health system. Instead
we propose a revolutionary approach. We cannot solve this social problem
without addressing the society that created it. There is no way to truly
reform a system so rotted at its foundation. We don’t want to reform
American society; we want to destroy it.
Only through this destruction can we create social and physical
structures of support that build trust and solidarity rather than
obedience and conformity. This social change is the real point of our
revolutionary vision; we have to look at our actions and analysis from
the context of abolition: abolition of locked wards, of the state, and
of hierarchy in all its forms.
The traditional methods for treating mental illness serve to reinforce
false assumptions about what mental illness is and what its causes are.
The societal nature of psychological distress is roundly ignored.
Instead therapy is usually founded in the same reasoning that justifies
many other hierarchies. Participation in society, regardless of its
brutality towards you, is the goal of mental health treatment.
Therapists judge progress based on your ability to live within
capitalism, regardless of your desire to do otherwise. These tendencies
are fundamental parts of the therapies themselves, and are dominant in
society. Even their personal separation, through their professional
status and the inherent hierarchy of therapist-patient relationships
creates an environment where the true trust and support needed by the
person seeking help is compromised from the start.
The ambitious goal of PERA is to create a system for responding to
psychological problems which can replace the oppressive system that
currently exists. This goal is difficult, but it is not impossible. The
inadequacy and oppression of mental health “treatment” leaves a vacuum
for the creation of new approaches. PERA aims to make a revolutionary
change in the way we deal with mental illness.
In pursuit of our three pillars of Psychological Emancipation,
Revolution, and Abolition, we are focusing on securing psychological
emancipation to bring about abolition of the state and the psych ward.
We will meet these goals by:
• Creating psychological affinity groups built to fight back against the
mental health imprisonment system.
• Developing personal and collective skills to improve our psychological
state
• Destroying the prevailing approaches to mental illness, and creating
an abolitionist approach to psychological distress.
The seeds of madness, of dissolution of self, of grief, trauma and
depression, are in all of us. To fully prevent them from growing to
strangle us, we only have one option: destroy the psychological system
that pathologizes and imprisons those who do not fit the norms of a
barbaric society.