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Antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy, dissocial personality disorder and sociopathy are constructs used to exclude patients from treatment and services. One of the sickest things about the New York State prison system is that many people who enter it /1
with diagnoses that command robust treatment and services--like schizophrenia or bipolar--are swiftly rediagnosed with these types of personality disorders. These false, clinically unsupported re-diagnoses enable @NYSomh to drop people's "mental health service level" and deny /2
meaningful treatment and services, thereby saving state resources. They also sanction the smearing of people with mental illness as volitionally aggressive "rule breakers" who are essentially beyond treatment. It's no surprise that these tropes neatly map onto the /3
racist and classist tropes that undergird the entire criminal legal system. In essence, a bulk of the work of state prison mental health staff is to label thousands of black and brown people with mental illness as out of control, aggressive animals who are beyond saving. /4
State mental health officials always behave the same way when we call them out on their intentional misdiagnoses of our clients. They respond furiously, defending their honor as trained professionals. But they surely know that their diagnoses are illegitimate. /5
They know that their diagnoses are the product of their loyalty to the prison system, which displaces their loyalty to our clients. They know their diagnoses are driven by the state's need to ration limited mental health resources in its prisons, and the state's own /6
racist stereotyping of our clients. They also know that misdiagnoses deny our clients treatment and discharge planning and often sanction their continued stay in solitary. They know that treatment and services denials have led to innumerable tragedies -- suicides /7
poor outcomes upon discharge, decompensation in solitary, institutionalization, etc. The bottom line is that prison-based mental health treatment is not and will never be real mental health treatment. It's purpose is to whitewash MH needs and to relabel our clients as /8
ireedeemably aggressive, untreatable menaces whose very existence endangers society. The purpose of prison-based mental health treatment is to create and recreate a permanent underclass and provide a "clinical" justification /9
for the existence of the carceral state.
The fraudulence of prison-based mental health treatment perfectly encapsulates the urgency of decarceration and abolition.
cc: @guzmankyle
/end
The fraudulence of prison-based mental health treatment perfectly encapsulates the urgency of decarceration and abolition.
cc: @guzmankyle
/end
