On 2004-11-27 03:34:00, Anonymous wrote:
"okay so i wasn't going to come back but i received an email about one of my posts. i'm not an employee and i'm not "he." i'm female. i sure as hell didn't want to be committed to a wilderness or boarding school. i fought it. but i wouldn't have come around myself. after two years of intense therapy i still have trouble and i left early. so maybe the numbers aren't high. fuck that. numbers don't take every aspect of life into consideration. it helped me. believe it or not teenagers don't always know what is best for them. i grew up in the rich suburbs of chicago. heroin got big with certain groups of kids in my town because pot shrooms and e were everyday, crystal meth was too hard to get and a couple kids started pushing it. i forget now what else i wanted to say. you can go ahead and be condescending to me. i know what i've been through and maybe i'm not perfect like you. plenty of my old friends went to outpatient or short rehabs and they didn't do anything but meet other drug users and dealers. they went to na because they were forced to and didn't get anything out of it. addicts are self-centered and feel omnipotent. if you go to meetings with that kind of mind set it's hard to take anything in or even start the first step. there's always people there who just get their card signed and leave. if they have to sit through any of it they look half-asleep. fuck it this is pissing me off. and yes i have been to bad therapists, psychiatrists, mental health clinics, so i can tell the difference. i don't claim to be 100% right. so come on, pick away, you bitches. actually i appreciate people who try to give different perspectives and who do correct me as with the numbers. but also follow the law not the letter of the law, as in please listen to my meaning too... and it's just annoying how some of you seem as if you think you're always right. okay this is choppy and rambling and probably full of fallacies but maybe when it's not the middle of the night i'll write a decent argument for your consideration. anyway if somebody from on track who was a student or staffed around october 2002, email me if you want to. it's [email protected] (yes i know it's not spelled correctly it was given to me as a nickname, so don't start)."
Look, chick***, if you are a heroin addict and were actively using, that is one of the situations that I personally consider "imminent danger" of harm to self or others and believe justifies involuntary commitment---in children or adults.
I believe everyone with a mental illness should get quality care, in the least restrictive, effective setting.
Addiction to certain drugs that are extremely, immediately dangerous (like heroin) is a no-brainer, to me, as grounds for involuntary commitment.
I'm not an expert on heroin addiction, so I can't make informed judgments between methadone and other treatment protocols--at the same time, I'm not going to form an opinion on that based on others' judgments either, because there's a lot of crap out there on issues of addiction. So for right now, the exact methods of treatment for that, are, for me, in my "I don't know" box.
But what I do know is that the risk for fatal overdose for a using heroin addict is high, and imminent--which puts it in the "involuntary commitment okay" category for me.
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
If you're a recovering heroin addict, I'm not surprised that you sing the praises off whatever got you to stop using heroin. You'd be weird if you *weren't* singing its praises.
And yes, I "get" that you want oversight and quality care, too.
You're on the same page as most of the rest of us, you're just looking at the problem from a different angle.
*My* angle is that I have a hereditary mental illness, and various combinations of those genes affect most of my family to various degrees, and I really want the care out there to be quality care because there's a much higher likelihood for my loved ones ending up voluntarily using it or stuck with it than there is for most people.
The angle of most other people on Fornits is they got stuck in involuntary lockdown facilities when they didn't need to be there---either didn't have anything that needed treatment or outpatient would have done---and got permanently harmed by bad, incompetent, unscrupulous providers. Providers who might better be described as perpetrators.
And yet almost all of them will still come out and say, just like you say that treatment has to be safeguarded and high quality for those who need it, they say that safeguarded and high quality treatment needs to be available for people who really do need to be committed. And they readily allow that anyone who is in imminent danger of harming themselves or others--real danger, not just made up danger---needs to be and should be involuntarily committed.
Ginger's uncensored "town square" philosophy is good because it makes sure every opinion gets its advocates on here taking our best shots at communicating our thoughts. Its drawback is that it means there are trolls.
The rest of us try to ignore the trolls (like the one who said you aren't a real person). You'll be happier if you choose to ignore them, too, but that's up to you.
Deborah pointed out, rightly, that any facility dealing with heroine addicts needs to be able to handle withdrawal symptoms safely. She never said heroin addicts don't need immediate, high-quality treatment, even if that treatment is involuntary.
I think the best way to look at this is that you, and me, and the other non-trolling people on Fornits, all want pretty much the same thing. We all want the people who need involuntary commitment involuntarily committed, the people who can benefit from voluntary commitment allowed to choose for themselves, and the care the facilities provide to be high-quality and ethical and properly overseen by the authorities.
Your emphasis is on getting the people who need involuntary commitment into it. My emphasis is on making sure the bad providers are taken out of the provider pool. Their emphasis is making sure that people who don't need to be involuntarily committed never, ever are.
But from our different backgrounds and the different aspects of the solutions we emphasize, you and me and the others on Fornits all want pretty much the same thing.
Are they biased? Yes, of course. They're biased towards preventing people who don't need care from being harmed by involuntary "care." They're trying to prevent bad stuff that happened to them from happening to others.
Am I biased? Yes, of course. I'm biased towards seeing the beds in the facilities are kept available for people who really may need them---like those of us with serious mental illnesses. I'm biased towards making sure that instead of providing fake care to people who don't need it and dragging people who need real care into the fake care, disastrously for them, with their deceptive little marketing nets---making sure that the facilities advertising to parents of kids with serious mental illnesses are providing the right care, quality care, to our kids when and if they need that care.
Are you biased? Yes, of course. You're biased towards seeing that care is available and high quality for people like yourself who get addicted to seriously, immediately dangerous drugs and really need involuntary care to get them off those drugs before the drugs (like heroin) kill them.
We're all vulnerable to, when we're not paying close attention, talking as if our particular interest was a bigger part of the whole teen facility situation than it is.
Particularly when we get excited.
You are. I am. The survivors of bad care who are on Fornits---the ones who didn't need to be committed at all---are also.
None of us can help that.
What we can try to do--not always successfully---is keep our tempers and recognize that we all really want the same thing, we're just coming at the problem from different perspectives.
I'm saying don't get bent out of shape, if you can help it, by what you see as other people's biases, and don't make the mistake of thinking they're out to deprive people like you of care. They're not.
Just recognize that like all of us, you have biases yourself and the rest of us are as likely, if we're in a hurry, to read too much into your biases as you are to read too much into ours.
And don't take this as me being higher-than-thou Moses on the Mountain like I'm perfect---because I know I'm not. I lose my temper on here sometimes, and I sometimes read too much into the words of other people coming from other directions on this issue. You didn't lose your temper, but I think you are, inadvertently, reading too much in.
Timoclea
***chick--please don't get offended that I called you chick. I call all unnamed females chick and all unnamed males dude. It's not meant to diminish or disrespect you. If you find it annoying, please just give me something else to call you---it need not be your real name, just something to call you that doesn't offend you. Thanks.
