On Calls to "Reopen the Asylums" w/ Liat Ben-Moshe, Leah Harris and Vesper Moore (10/11/23)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Liat Ben-Moshe, Leah Harris and Vesper Moore about increasing calls to "reopen the asylums" and why the dark history and enduring legacy of psychiatric incarceration mean we should never go back. We look at recent statements by politicians Eric Adams, Donald Trump, Matt Gaetz, and Vivek Ramaswamy and discuss how carceral sanism is not exclusively the domain of the right.
Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)
[audio clip] Donald Trump 0:00
Part of the problem is we used to have mental institutions where you take a sicko like this guy, he was a sick guy, and you bring them to a mental health institution. Those institutions are largely closed, so we're going to be talking seriously about opening mental health institutions again.
[audio clip] Vivek Ramaswamy 0:17
Just over the same period that we have closed mental health institutions, we have seen a spike in violent crime. Do we have the spine to bring them back? I think we should. As President, I will.
[audio clip] Matt Gaetz 0:26
It's Democrat, the Democratic Party and Big Pharma that are unleashing the crazies on you and nobody seems to have a solution for it. So here's one: we need to reopen the asylums. There are severely mentally ill people who do not have a right to wander our streets.
[ Intro music ]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:08
Welcome to the Death Panel. Patrons, thank you so much for supporting the show. We couldn't do any of this without you. To support the show, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. You'll get access to the second weekly bonus episode that comes out every Monday and our entire back catalogue of bonus episodes. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up a copy of Health Communism at your local bookstore, or request it at your local library, pre-order Jules' new book coming January called A Short History of Trans Misogyny, and follow us @deathpanel_. So today I am truly honored to be in conversation with not one, not two, but three really fucking fantastic guests who are here today so that we can talk all about demands coming from across the political spectrum to reopen asylums, which is part of this broader political movement to retrench the few so-called rights that people with mental illness labels have, while also rewriting history in such a way as to retcon the largest decarceration movement in the United States as a total and complete failure that has led to a catastrophe, an epidemic of mental illness and housing crisis, etc. Erasing nearly a century of struggle for psychiatric liberation in the United States as not only this failure, but again, the so-called cause of a multi-intersectional crisis. So let me introduce our guests. First, returning to the show is Liat Ben-Moshe. Liat is associate professor of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of the book Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition. Liat is also the co-editor of the book, Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada, and was also recently in the podcast feed in our Carceral Sanism session live recording from the Socialism Conference that we just recently put out in the main feed. Liat, welcome back to the Death Panel. Always so wonderful to talk to you.
Liat Ben-Moshe 3:13
Thank you. Thanks for having me back.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 3:15
And next is Leah Harris, who many of you may also remember from the session on Carceral Sanism in the Socialism Conference series, Leah is a mad and disabled writer, facilitator, educator and advocate whose work has appeared in the Progressive, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Disability Visibility Project and Mad in America, among many others. Leah writes the Substack, Writing Through, and is also working on their first book called Noncompliant. Leah, welcome to the Death Panel. It's so great to be in conversation with you again.
Leah Harris 3:44
Thank you. Happy to be here.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 3:46
And finally, I am so excited to have Vesper Moore joining us. Vesper is an indigenous political activist, leader, organizer, public speaker and educator in the psychiatric survivor and disability rights movement. Vesper is also the lead editor at Madness Network News, host of the Get Mad podcast, and COO of the Kiva Centers, which is a peer run and trauma informed organization that does peer support training and advocacy across Massachusetts. We also wished that Vesper could have joined us in Chicago, so it's really extra awesome to finally all be in conversation together. Welcome to the Death Panel, Vesper. And thank you so much for coming on the show.
Vesper Moore 4:22
It's wonderful to be here, y'all. Thanks for having me.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 4:25
So as we talked about in our discussion of carceral sanism in the Socialism Conference live recording, what we're going to cover today is part of a recent resurgence of calls to invest in and expand forms of carcerality that contribute to the targeted oppression and removal of mad or mentally ill populations under the guise of providing specially targeted treatment or care. The calls to return to the era of the asylum system are complicated and covered in layers and layers of pseudoscience and common sense narratives that reproduce ridiculous and dangerous ideas about treatment, care, cure, what mental illness or madness is, or the idea that people with mental illness labels are dangerous to society in general. But there is more going on here than the direct relationship of the state to mad people and people living on the streets. The call to reopen asylums also offers this inaccurate and warped view of the history of deinstitutionalization. It rewrites decades of austerity and extractive abandonment as the mere faults of individual pathology or the result of choices that individual people made about their own health, or as we'll get into, you know, often the idea that we see reproduced here is that people can't make the choices, so the choice needs to be made for them. So today, we're going to talk through these calls together, from politicians grandstanding and using the call to reopen asylums as a catch all fix for all sorts of social and political and economic crises. We'll talk through the way this is editorialized and do a close read of a particularly egregious article from The Wall Street Journal called, It's Time to Bring Back Asylums. But I want to just start us off by taking a moment to give Leah, Liat, and Vesper each a chance to just name what we're talking about today in their own words, because what we're doing is talking about actually a few intersecting dynamics and ideas that actually coalesce into one larger picture. So Vesper, since folks have not heard from you yet, would you like to start us off?
Vesper Moore 6:23
Absolutely. I want to say for myself, as someone who's an indigenous political activist, that my experience, my life experience is grounded in something that I often feel is very different than a lot of white led or white dominant movements. And I think something that's really important there is there is a continuous connection between the many legacies of institutions in the United States, so for myself, as a Taíno person, someone who's indigenous of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, there were 60 Puerto Rican, Taíno young adults taken out of Puerto Rico and brought into institutions like the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania. And we see these legacies of many different institutions targeting different communities. I'd say specifically when we talk about psychiatric institutions, you have the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians that labeled indigenous natives with diagnoses such as horse stealing mania, which we understand that stealing horses or being labeled for stealing horses as a diagnosis is clearly, clearly not factual or grounded in anything viable in that way. But when we look at what's happening today, I really think of it as a prevailing legacy of what we talk about as carceral sanism. And when we look at carceral sanism, I think it's grounded in histories of things like ugly laws, where people are deemed unsightly, or particularly disabled and poor folks being deemed unsightly and unacceptable in the public view. And what we see is an intentional targeting of those who are mad and disabled in the public. And we also see the very, very public killing of mad and disabled people in the public. So I do think that there's a lot in terms of legacies when we look at institutions. We hear this narrative of deinstitutionalization, which never fully happened, and really a falsehood in the public, and people looking at mental health treatment as the solution to the prison system, or getting people out of the prison system and into treatment, when in fact, it is moving people from one carceral institution to another carceral institution. I think, really, when we look at this issue, it's so confounding, the ways in which it is used and the ways in which particularly mad disabled folk are portrayed in the media and in the public.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 9:18
Vesper, I really appreciate the way that you also connected this to, again, the kind of other "institutional legacy," which is that oftentimes people talk about like residential schools, or the facilities that are specifically targeting indigenous populations as a kind of separate logic or program from, for example, like the system of state asylums, but there really actually isn't a kind of separation between these two things. Like often I think this can be something that you'll see a lot of great folks in Canada sort of developing work on trying to connect these two things, but a lot of times in the US, we don't necessarily see those narratives brought together in this conversation as much as it is absolutely should be. So I really appreciate you sort of centering that right from the beginning. Leah, I wanted to throw it to you next.
Leah Harris 10:06
Yeah, just echoing, you know, that this call to reopen asylums just represents such a diffuse network, both historically and currently. So, I think when people think about asylums, they tend to think of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is such a fraction of what actually has happened in our history. But yeah, I think we look at, there's this sort of web, this network of coercion that ranges from outpatient commitment, so kind of taking the asylum walls and bringing them into the community, and we can talk a lot more about what that looks like, all the way to, right, your traditional locked congregate facility, what is referred to often in policy speak as beds, right. And people accuse activists, folks like us, of being hyperbolic when we say that this whole thing of -- you know, we can also talk about this trend of expanding the criteria for involuntary psychiatric intervention, making it easier to force people into outpatient and/or inpatient commitment. But you know, when we have said that this sort of encroachment would lead to the literal rebuilding of asylums, like we're not talking metaphorically here. In California, we can see right now how this progression can happen, and is happening, and how it might happen in other states, particularly those with large populations of unhoused people. And just to really point out that both liberals and conservatives favor these kinds of policies to reopen the asylums, even if they talk about them in slightly different ways. And looking at California, there was first the enactment of CARE Court, right, which is about forcing counties in California to create this regime of courts to coerce primarily unhoused people with "serious mental illness" diagnoses like schizophrenia, or schizoaffective disorder, compelling them to accept treatment -- "treatment," which is usually little more than forced heavy duty neuroleptic, or anti-psychotic medications, under the threat of a guardianship, right, if they don't comply with their "care" plan. So you know, it starts there with these kind of outpatient or, you know, involuntary outpatient schemes that lead to ever more coercive and restrictive schemes. And also there's this rhetoric that CARE Courts are going to address the housing crisis, right. So these things get a ton of popular support. But state officials are already trying to sort of tamp down expectations from the public around that, saying that it's really not even going to dramatically change houselessness, right. And even if it was, I don't agree with -- of course, with doing it under these coercive means, right. And so then after that, we get these efforts in California to "modernize" the state's mental health services, right. And it's really frightening. And I think we could spend time talking about how the rhetoric of modernization is being used to justify policies that are truly regressive, and are truly taking us back 50 plus years. So just to kind of share one other piece on this, there was just a $6B+ bond measure which just passed in the California legislature. And of the $6B, the lion's share is not devoted to housing, but to "behavioral health beds," which really, we're talking about locked facilities. And folks were really scared that this was going to be the case. And originally, it had said that these were going to be unlocked, voluntary facilities that were going to be built with this multibillion dollar bond measure. But just days before the legislative vote, the bill's language was amended literally at the last minute. And it removed the words voluntary and unlocked and replaced it with acute facilities, which is basically code for locked facility. So this is a potential true rebuilding of the asylums and this bond will go before voters on the March primary election ballot. So I just kind of wanted to talk about how this is literally happening at least in California, and other states may take notice and try to enact similar policies.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 14:49
Absolutely. And I really appreciate the way that what you brought in there speaks to the fact that not only is this a call to reopen asylums that we're seeing thing as an explicit thing from people saying we need to rebuild these large total institutions, like there are also policies being put into place that are basically going to be demanding that capacity of the state be built up in response to various changes in the law, whether that's in California, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts, this is like happening all over the United States. And you know, as both you and Vesper have pointed out, part of what's also going on here is like a -- there's a very powerful sort of dominant narrative that doesn't have a lot of like support behind it, and might be at face ridiculous, like in the case of pathologizing stealing horses, or those kinds of things that seem on their face to be obvious examples of overreach or misapplication or whatever. But it's actually a much more sort of broad, diffuse, informal and casual relationship that I think, Leah, you called this, the asylum has been extended into the community through "tentacles of coercion." And it just -- I think what we're sort of speaking to here is just the way that this is not just like all falling within sort of one traditional silo, right? We tend to think of healthcare, or mental healthcare as separate from all these different pieces, right? And what's going on here is that actually, in this call to reopen asylums, you see the fact that, no, housing and the political economy in general, have much more to do with shaping the landscape of pathology than anyone's inherent personal traits or characteristics. That ultimately we have these sort of two systems that work together in order to accomplish tremendous things in terms of power, control, and all of this is done in the name of care, right. And at the end of the day, it's not really -- the issue that a lot of these people who are calling to reopen asylums are actually concerned with is not actually the care that people are getting, but it's the preferences of sort of what the dominant population is seen as. And Liat, I'm going to turn to you now.
Liat Ben-Moshe 17:15
Yeah, thank you. So this is a great point I wanted to connect to, so thanks for bringing us here, Beatrice. And it's the point of the intersection. So Leah was brilliantly talking about the CARE Courts, which is something we've all also been kind of in coalition with a lot of other orgs, been pushing against. But the intersection of these courts, law, the infrastructure that we might not kind of think of as you just suggested, Beatrice, as part of the kind of rebuilding of health and mental health is exactly that. That's the kind of intersection or of the criminalization and medicalization or you can also talk about it as the prison industrial complex, courts, criminal justice pathways, and the medical industrial complex, or just even pathologization. And this all is, of course, also related to the points Vesper was making, and I want to make that very clear, that we cannot talk about criminalization or medicalization or pathologization, without understanding that this all comes from colonialism and racism. And in the US, of course, particularly anti-Black racism. And also that is related to -- by that, I mean, pathologization, and criminalization, are of course related to gender and sexuality, which are also built on racism and colonialism. And so as a construct, and as, you know, who we pathologize, who we criminalize. And so I think it's really important to understand all this as the nexus, right? This is like the baseline of things. So when we talk about bringing back something, this is what we mean, like this is kind of the nexus that we're talking about. And so when we're talking about, for example, modernizing mental health asylums, as Leah was just mentioning, and I know we'll get back to it a little bit later on, but just to say that this kind of like narrative of progress, right, to like modernize is exactly the reform that brought us asylums, you know? This is why asylums were built, psychiatric institutions. This is why prisons were built. These -- they were built by reformers, right, in the US, by people who meant well, by benevolence. And this idea of modernizing, or reform is something that we need to pay attention to, not just as, you know, us as abolitionists, but as people who really care. I mean, I mean that word literally, because what happens without that is that we don't understand how pathologization, and criminalization all come from this nexus I just described, and are all connected to what we might call corrections, and corrections meaning the correctional industry, but also really the eugenic meaning of correcting people. And if we don't understand how this works, then I think we say two things, and both of them are problematic, and I hope our listeners at the end of the day will learn why. And the first one is that the more things are evolved, the more they stay the same. This is the first thing people say, right? So when I say asylum came from a reform and that we're now trying to modernize the reform and people are like, yes, we have come full circle, and we have not. So I want to put that out there, that there's a lot of resistance to these things, we have not come full circle, the more things stay [the same], but it's not the same. And so today, we're going to talk about also what's different. And then the second thing people say is that, you know, that one has nothing to do with the other, you know, this is not eugenicist, it doesn't come from colonialism, this is not, you know, whatever. So I want us to not fall into any of these fallacies when we talk about these things.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 21:15
I really appreciate you bringing up those two fallacies, Liat, because the next thing that we're going to do is go through these four clips I pulled, and listeners, you will hear these fallacies on flagrant display across the people who are talking. And, Leah, as you pointed out, sometimes, you know, the work around psychiatric abolition, it can be really easily reducible to a kind of meme that, you know, everything that folks like us are saying, all the work that is done in this area, that this is like all exaggeration. I mean, oftentimes, and I think you'll even maybe hear this in the Wall Street Journal piece, if I recall correctly, there are too many primary sources too full of bullshit for me to exactly remember off the top of my head right now without looking at my notes which one this is in, but what you will see or hear, rather, is that, you know, oftentimes when the kind of exposés or things like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest are talked about, these kind of cultural touchstones that most people use to understand what the total institution was, what an asylum is, etc. You know, the other cultural piece is again, like Halloween tours through asylums, that's another way that a lot of people come to understand sort of what these places are and were. And the claim is always that, you know, oh, this was just like some bad asylums here and there, just some bad doctors. It's a Nurse Ratchet, you know, it's bad actors. It's exaggeration. But that is quite far from the truth. So to sort of just illustrate what some of these calls are like to reopen asylums, I'm going to play four short clips. And after each clip, we'll take a second and the four of us will discuss, you know, some of the tropes of each of these various calls to reopen asylums, and part of what we're doing here is just to sort of, one, push back against that claim that, you know, we're all coming from a hyperbolic position, but to also get folks who may not be so dialed into this as we are, just aware of the specific architecture of the way that this is talked about. So we're gonna hear from four politicians in the US. Each will attempt to explain their takes on why the answer to what many of them frame as an intersecting crisis of mental health and homelessness, that is located, of course, in individual dysfunction and disconnected from the political economic context that we all live in. And they're going to sort of explain like why the asylum is the answer to this crisis that they locate, you know, within people's behavior. So first, we have Donald Trump from 2018. And this is probably one of the better known calls to reopen the asylum. So I'm gonna play that clip.
[audio clip] Donald Trump 24:00
Part of the problem is we used to have mental institutions, and I said this yesterday, we had a mental institution where you take a sicko like this guy, he was a sick guy, so many signs. And you'd bring them to a mental health institution. Those institutions are largely closed, because communities didn't want them. Communities didn't want to spend the money for them. So you don't have any intermediate ground. You can't put them in jail because he hadn't done anything yet but you know he's going to do something. So we're going to be talking seriously about opening mental health institutions again, in some cases reopening. I can tell you in New York, the governors in New York did a very, very bad thing when they closed our mental institutions, so many of them. You had these people living on the streets. And I can say that in many cases throughout the country, they're very dangerous, they shouldn't be there. So we're going to be talking about mental institutions and when you have some person like this, you can bring them into a mental institution, and they can see what they can do, but we got to get them out of our communities.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 25:10
Okay, so who wants to jump in on this whopper first and point out some of the tropes that we often see, that Trump ran through there?
Vesper Moore 25:19
Well, first throwing it back on the community, and saying, like, oh, communities didn't want this. And also, he's referencing like, oh, you know, communities didn't want certain institutions in New York. And it's like clearly not understanding or very much knowing of institutions like the Willowbrook State School, and the horrible conditions in which disabled people were basically tortured in. This is another piece of, I find, from a political perspective, taking advantage of generations not actually knowing the horrors of these asylums and these institutions. And I think, to Leah's point and Liat's point earlier, that's the dangerousness really of this modernization, if you will, of the asylum.
Liat Ben-Moshe 26:14
So, you know, not to make light of the situation. But I do think this is so, so, so repetitive and predictable that it is, you know, slightly comical at least, but equally dangerous. So one of the things we should think through together collectively is what do we call dangerous. So that word I'm sure will repeat in many of the -- either the clips or the things people read about the issue of kind of bringing back the asylum. And it really comes back to the construction of what danger is. So I'm just gonna go back to what I said earlier. I mean, danger is racialized, it's gendered, and it's very related to sanism, it's very related to carceral sanism, you know, meaning the way that we basically operationalize who we think is, "mentally ill" or not sane or not rational, and what do we do about it. So the use of pathologization to justify carceral expansion basically. And so dangerousness underpins a lot of that, and we can't just take that word, and kind of leave it hanging, right. And then the -- what Trump does with that, and quite frankly, Obama did with that as well, is to create an infrastructure of preventive detention. So of course, Obama did that in regards to Guantanamo and other places that we don't like to connect with the kind of struggles for liberation, that certain kinds of rights movements kind of try to shy away. But I want to say that those are connected struggles and the whole idea of preventive detention, again, comes from eugenics, right? It's the idea that people are born criminals, as Nicole Rafter, the late Nicole Rafter, her book is called Born Criminals. And so it's, again, a discourse that comes from eugenics and is connected to race and colonialism and also Islamophobia, antisemitism. The last thing I would say, and I'm not gonna go into it, this idea of living on the streets, right, like that institutions closed, they left people to be living on the streets. So in addition to being dangerous, now they're also unhoused, so we have to open the asylums, because that is where people should go, as if an asylum is somebody's home.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 28:34
Such good points. And we'll revisit a couple of those tropes in future clips and also the asylum as home and as a place of refuge features really heavily in the framing of the Wall Street Journal piece. Leah, I want to leave it open for you next.
Leah Harris 28:50
Yeah, you know, Trump has a real romance/love affair with institutions. I remember some other remarks that he gave, maybe they were also the same remarks. But, you know, he talks about -- he waxes nostalgic for growing up in Queens and all of the mental institutions that he would see in his childhood [laughing]. And then he says, all of a sudden, you go and you don't see them anymore. What happened to all of those beds, right? And it's also, right, there's this nostalgia for the institution and also the context that -- there's so many reasons why politicians will call for rebuilding the asylum, but it does get back to these kinds of tropes either around dangerousness or helplessness, right. And it's, again, like Liat was saying, this idea of almost like a preventative, Minority Report kind of thing. Like if we had these institutions, you know, these mass shootings wouldn't happen. People wouldn't be on the streets, right? That it's kind of like this catch all for literally every problem in our society. Yeah. And he always kind of talks about different reasons why the asylums were closed, you know, he'll say in one case, the communities didn't want them. In the other case, he'll say it was budgetary reasons and pretty much talk about every potential reason except for what Vesper mentioned, right? That, you know, these places are horrific sites of violence, abuse, torture and neglect. And that's the piece that I think rarely gets air play from any of these politicians, from the left to the right.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 30:31
Absolutely. All such great points. I mean, Vesper, I really appreciate you bringing in Willowbrook. The fourth and final clip we'll go through will specifically address Willowbrook. And I know folks who are big Death Panel listeners may have recently heard our episode with Dr. Bill Bronston, who is one of the doctors who helped organize the movement that resulted in the closure of Willowbrook and he briefly at the beginning of our conversation, you know, gets into some of his experiences there. So, you know, for folks who are like, is that name familiar? Like yes, absolutely. You heard about it recently, and it's horrific. But again, like these kinds of things are treated as like individual moments, or Vesper, as you pointed out, you know, Trump is saying here, like, well, the closures happened because people didn't want them, right, this is all about like this population not being desirable, and what the desires of that dominant group are and how we meet those desires, right, and not about care, right, like care here as a kind of ideology or idea was being given to the audience, which was being assumed to be other "sane" people who also, you know, "reasonably" want the removal of all these "crazy" people from their community that they don't want them locked up, but they don't want them on the streets. So Trump sort of presents this as like the less bad of two options, right? As if we made a mistake, we've learned from it, and now we can return to that humane practice. And Liat, I really appreciated also the way that you connected this to the war on terror, the idea of sort of pre-emptive sorting, eugenics, and things like that. And Leah, as you're saying, you know, this is also being proposed as a solution to mass shootings as an alternative to having a discussion about anything else related to guns, right. It's locates the problem of mass shootings, again, in "mentally ill" individuals making individual choices in a vacuum, right. And that could be a very kind of compelling, and I think is often repeated kind of without a lot of questioning. This frame is something we see quite often. So the next is a quite recent one. We have tech entrepreneur, Vivek Ramaswamy, who is a Republican presidential candidate, and this is from the first Republican presidential debate earlier this summer that happened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
[audio clip] Vivek Ramaswamy 31:24
And we also have a mental health epidemic in this country. Just over the same period that we have closed mental health institutions, we have seen a spike in violent crime. Do we have the spine to bring them back? I think we should. As President, I will.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 33:20
Okay, so that one's short and sweet. 13 seconds of pure fucking nonsense. Liat, since your book really deals with this particular trope, I wondered if you wanted to jump in on this one first.
Liat Ben-Moshe 33:33
Which trope though [laughing]. There's so much.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 33:36
Well, I know, I was gonna say there's so much in 13 seconds, right. I was thinking specifically of the framing that this was a simultaneous sort of switch, right, that we closed institutions, and that proportionally, directly correlated to an exploding crisis of criminality.
Liat Ben-Moshe 33:55
Yeah. Yeah, thanks for narrowing it down, because it is a lot --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 33:59
I know, sorry.
Liat Ben-Moshe 34:00
In 13 seconds, to like -- no, no, no, don't apologize. It's not, you know, you didn't say those things. But, you know, just to briefly, briefly touch on that. One thing to really remember is that the deinstitutionalization movement, first of all, that there was two of them, because I know you're gonna give a clip about Willowbrook. So there was the closure of psychiatric institutions, which I think is what most of us think about when we think about deinstitutionalization. And that historically has happened, you know, the largest population in psychiatric institutions was in 1955. So pretty much every day afterwards, was less. And particularly in terms of policy, we're talking about the 60s, beginning of 70s as the kind of heyday of deinstitutionalization in mental health. Now, there was also deinstitutionalization in intellectual and developmental disabilities. And so that's really important to note, because that was in a different time period. So that didn't really begin nationally -- of course, there's variations -- in the maybe mid 70s, and 80s, where we kind of see the heyday of that. So I think that is really important. The reason why it's important is because when do we start to see like homelessness en masse, like happening in the US? That is not in the 60s, it's not in the 70s. It's, in fact, more in the 80s. It's the beginning of neoliberalism as a policy that was imported by Reagan from Thatcher. And we see at the same time, austerity measures in regards to mental health that resulted in things like the closure of psychiatric hospitals, although that's not the only reason why these institutions closed. They closed also because of the resistance of movements, including people who were institutionalized within them, and their allies and their family members, and so on, and activist lawyers. But also because of these austerity measures, in which, you know, Reagan famously said that he's going to close down all the psychiatric institutions in California. And at the end of the day, he didn't close all of them, but he came like really close. This is what -- when he was governor. When he became a president, he did that on kind of like a more national scale. And the money, of course, never went to community mental health, which, you know, the thing that Vesper was just talking about, what the community wants or what the community gets. And at the same time, that every public kind of welfare institution was either abolished or diminished, including education and housing. By housing, I mean, affordable, accessible, but also general housing assistance that existed since you know, the 40s, since the New Deal. That vanished or diminished during the neoliberal era up until today, and at the same time, we see a boom in corrections. The money goes to -- it doesn't go away, it goes to the build up of policing, and the infrastructure for incarceration, what we today call the prison industrial complex. And so we see those things happening at the same time. And just because, you know, we say, in social science, correlation is not causation. Just because two things happen at the same time doesn't mean that one led to the other. Meaning, yes, the closure of psychiatric institutions happened at the same time as the rise in incarceration. But it happened because of a third factor, which is neoliberalism and racism, which are, of course, completely related. And so I think that's really the point that we should think through.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 37:42
Absolutely. Thank you, Liat. I mean, and also if listeners wants to learn more about that history, Liat's book is fantastic. And we've also done two interviews just about the book in the last three years. One when it came out in 2020, and then one in the fall around when Health Communism came out, because obviously, you know, Liat, your work has been deeply inspiring to Artie and I, so we wanted to make sure to sort of revisit it. But I want to leave it open for Leah and Vesper, if either of you want to jump in next. As we were joking, obviously, in this 13 second clip, there is so fucking much, so I can also replay the clip if that would be helpful, because it was so short.
Leah Harris 38:24
Sure. Yeah, I'd love to hear it again.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 38:26
Alright, let's do it again.
Leah Harris 38:27
I mean, I wouldn't love to hear it again, but [laughing] --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 38:29
We'll never get these 13 seconds back. But as long as we get one laugh out of it, then it'll be worth it. All right, here we go.
[audio clip] Vivek Ramaswamy 38:37
And we also have a mental health epidemic in this country. Just over the same period that we have closed mental health institutions,we have seen a spike in violent crime. Do we have the spine to bring them back? I think we should. As President, I will.
Vesper Moore 38:49
I think what's most striking when I hear this first is like, do we have the spine to bring them back? That -- that emphasis. If that doesn't scream carcerality to you, I don't know what will. But aside from that, what I want to focus on is really, and I think this is the emphasis of a lot of Liat's work and a lot of the writings, because this is the intersection of being viewed and treated as dangerous and disposable simultaneously in society and a misinformation campaign of dangerousness and disposability to be able to exert political control over populations of people. And what I mean about that is is that when we talk about the asylum, we see, you know, Angela Davis refers to this wonderfully with prisons, we see an effort to disappear people, historically, currently, what is being focused on here? And when I hear, when it's like, are we ready to bring them back, to kind of solve this problem, right? I think people have such a disconnection because of carceral sanism, that there is this piece of like, oh, okay, we're not viewing them as people, we're viewing them as a problem. And there's such an impact when we look at public and private policy that relates to this, in the way of, oh, okay, we are always viewing these people as a liability, we are always viewing them as disposable, and as people who shouldn't be seen or perceived in the public, and a lot of that also comes from a fear of, I don't want this to happen to myself, I don't want this to happen to my family. But again, it is political strategy. It is fear mongering. It is a lot of things. And we look at CARE Court, which doesn't actually mean the word care. It is Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment and CARE Court doesn't mean any of that, honestly, if you were to ask me. We see this connection of basically getting unhoused, mad, disabled people off of the streets, removing them en masse, trying to bring them into these institutions, labeling them as gravely disabled, and that gravely disabled meaning if you're actively using or or whatever, again, that criminality, that disposability, and then once you are deemed gravely disabled, making it easier to put you into a conservatorship. So when we look at all of those pieces, right, again, it is a continuing prevailing surveillance capitalism and a carcerality in our society that I don't think we fully recognize or that the public is fully ready to recognize.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 41:53
I think it also, you know, the kind of framing of like, I'm brave enough to be the one that calls for this, is often the flip side of the compassion coin. You have some people saying this is a moral mandate that we have to scoop people up off the streets and give them treatment, whether they want it or not, whether they know they need it or not. You also see that sort of flipside of like, I'm the only one who's got the balls to be not politically correct and talk about the fact that like, we need to be brave and call for this thing again. And it's kind of like, I think, really, you know, a sort of softer, lighter version of that attitude is quite common, and very common on the left, you often see people say like, oh, ADHD, mental health diagnoses, depression, bipolar disorder, BPD, all these like people putting labels in their bio, like mental illness is so trendy, maybe we've destigmatized mental illness too much. And now we're just surrounded by all these people who have made their pathology their personality. And you know, there's a kind of like grift from psychiatrists who make that their brand, the kind of over treatment folks who focus on sort of demonizing people seeking treatment as the problem. But then there's also the more casual, cultural idea that just like it is brave to say bad things about mad people because, you know, there's this kind of framing that I think often is the same misunderstanding about disability and culture, which is like that having this identity, having these labels, gets you a kind of what disability theorist Ellen Samuels calls like a currency in kind, the idea that benefits, whether it's SSDI, or SSI, or Medicaid, even though these come with forced poverty and tremendous suffering and surveillance and all of these administrative burdens, that that is an advantage, that people are being given the equivalent of currency, the equivalent of an advantage over "normal" people. And so part of this is also that all of these ideas, like, you know, Vespers, you're saying, this ties up into like a broader austerity mindset about kind of like who society is even fucking for.
Leah Harris 44:09
Yeah. Like I kind of view comments like Ramaswamy's as like this, yeah, just to echo what other folks are saying, like this carceral compassion or this like compassion cop kind of mentality. And it's often juxtaposed, as y'all were saying, to us as the "civil libertarians" or, you know, rights-based people who don't give a damn if people are languishing in jail or unhoused and suffering, like we think that's part of a "alternative lifestyle," which we will, I think, get back to, but yeah, it's just like there's this basically almost like a projection that, you know, we are the people, like mad, disabled activists or disability rights activists are the people who don't care and don't have the courage, the moral courage to do what must be done, right. So it's like this way to really discredit and silence people who are continuing to say can we please, you know, have these few and very tenuous rights that we achieved, you know, 50 years ago? Can we please like hang on to these and not erode these? Yeah. And it's -- the other thing about the sort of mental illness equals violence equals dangerous equation is that, you know, this has been reinforced in the public imagination for half a decade, probably much, much longer. But, you know, in more recent decades, it's been reinforced and reinforced and reinforced. And so when people say, hey, you know, people with these diagnoses are actually far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators, it's kind of like crickets, right? The persistence of this drumbeat, again, of mental illness equals violence equals dangerous, we have to get them off the streets. It's really working. I remember there was a study in Health Affairs maybe five years ago saying that the American public has increasingly come to associate specifically the diagnosis of schizophrenia, with dangerousness. And that's what so many of these laws are really targeting, is people with these diagnoses. And that this leads to, you know, public opinion that's in favor of expanding forced treatment laws. So the kind of compassion cop mentality is really, really taking root in the public, beyond just the politicians' rhetoric.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 46:33
Absolutely. And I think when you contrast that actually with the kind of things that you see, like the very neoliberal, like public health, mental health awareness campaigns and things like calls to destigmatize mental illness as itself like a solution, right, to just talk about the stigma, it makes it go away, often, I think portrays this kind of spectrum of mental illness, right, where it's up to the individual person basically, we're like deputizing people to turn themselves into mental health cops, right? Where we're really saying to people, you can see, you can evaluate, you know, like, I know, you know, these politicians are saying, not me, is saying. God, these people are so horrible. I hate reading this stuff out loud and stuff like that. And I'm like, what if someone quotes me out of context, and I'm reading one of these assholes, but it's like, when they say, like, you know, oh, you know, you citizen, you can tell when someone's mentally ill like I am. It's also deputizing people, and literally sort of wrapping up membership in the body politic with the idea that it is like, you know, your responsibility as a citizen to seek out, identify, and notify the state for the purposes of removal, the people who you think are not supposed to be part of your community. And I appreciate the way, Leah, you brought in the sort of specificity also of schizophrenia, you know, as we've been talking about, also, this is like hugely tied up into the very sort of root of psychiatry and of the determination between sane and not sane, sound and unsound. These kinds of frameworks have explicit, explicit roots and their sort of original context is in the Transatlantic slave trade, in the kinds of anti-Black determinations that render people property based on eugenic ideology, where you have sort of this history of naturalizing class position as earned or biological truth, right, tthat gets played out, again, in the ways that also this is talked about, right? Like the idea that it is just like the kind of destiny of society to be made available only for the sane, right? The commandment that we must be sane is also sort of implied in this, right? Like all of these statements that we've been going through not only say something about what we should do to people with these labels, but they say something to the people with these labels, which is more indirect, which is that, you know, you're not welcome here, society's not for you. And they, you know, in the same ways that administrative burdens make people feel like fucking shit, these kinds of frameworks, like they aren't just like rhetorically bad. They have emotional weight, they do damage and they do harm in so many different ways. And this next one's interesting. I read part of this actually in our Carceral Sanism panel in Chicago, but I have the full clip here. This is Republican congressman from Florida, Matt Gaetz, from April of this year. Listeners will notice immediately that there are some differences in his framings, but it's still the same genre, flavor, or vibe, so to speak. But what we see here also is the kind of expansion and application of like just general political thought to this and sort of who qualifies as crazy for all sorts of reasons.
[audio clip] Matt Gaetz 50:07
It's Democrat, the Democratic Party and Big Pharma that are unleashing the crazies on you, and nobody seems to have a solution for it. So here's one: we need to reopen the asylums. There are severely mentally ill people who do not have a right to wander our streets, seeking and selecting who they are going to terrorize. Whether there is criminal culpability or not, there is a permanent element of society that is dangerous. And it does not make us more just or more compassionate to have them walking amongst the rest of us. Because then you see the type of loss of life that we've seen too frequently from these acts of violence. Now subject to due process, of course, in our Constitution, we have to put some people away. And that might not be politically correct to say, but it is the truth that we encounter, especially in a world in which we're getting so many people chemically addicted. Good people have a right to exist in the country without wondering if some crazy leftist or mentally ill individual lurking around the corner is about to post up and kill you.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 51:17
I'm sorry, I can't help but laugh at the way he ends that one. It's a truly horrific --
Liat Ben-Moshe 51:23
Leftist or mentally ill. Either/or.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 51:24
Yeah, truly horrific example of this argument.
Vesper Moore 51:29
Well, I think I first want to say that there is, and you can hear it very clearly here, this -- when you speak out, you're labeled as non-compliant, or you can be labeled as non-compliant. When you speak to injustices, you can be viewed as unreasonable. And I think -- I think when you hear him say, particularly, like we need to basically put some people away, who is that some, you know? There's this dangerous generalization that a lot of these politicians often get into, and they're like oh, yeah, you know, some people need it. And you'll find disproportionately, at a very, very alarming rate, it's usually Black, brown, indigenous people of color. It is usually people who are deemed poor, or otherwise. It is usually people who are trans. And there's this criminality, again, with identity, how you associate, whether or not if you speak out, right? And the use of it as a tool for control and again, disappearing people. But I think, here, you can see a little bit more, when talking about leftists and other folks, that it is this -- it is this like, how can we just let them live among us, it's not actually dignified to let them live among us. And I'm like, get out of here.
Leah Harris 53:07
Just like a couple pieces that I just kind of want to pick at here. First, even just like let's talk about this designation of severely mentally ill. Like this is the sorting. This is the eugenics that we're talking about, right? It's not -- it's a legal designation. It's not, it's -- yeah. And anyway, even if it wasn't a legal designation, but it is, it's sort of choosing this, right, that's synonymous with this permanent element of society that is dangerous, right? So again, coming back to people with these certain diagnoses, which is now being expanded to drug users, right? Like there's this almost synonymous here in the way that he's talking about it. And it's a nod to due process, but ultimately, ultimately, really, we need to put people away. There's very much of this us-versus-them language that's embedded in his rhetoric. And then he uses this term, good people, right? And so, of course, the flip side of that is these bad people that are running around killing people, you know, like Vesper said, you know, that conflates people, again, with this severe mental illness diagnosis with activism, right, with activists on the left, right. And it also makes me think about, you know, there's a book called The Protest Psychosis by Jonathan Metzl, which talks about this history of psychiatrizing and psychiatrically incarcerating Black Power activists in particular, whose activism was seen as pathological. So, you know, I think again, yeah, there's just these echoes that keep coming back around in different ways over and over and over, but ultimately, yes, it comes down to eugenics at its core,
Liat Ben-Moshe 54:58
Just quickly to say, and I really want Leah to get into the due process stuff, maybe later, because I have a lot to say about that. But just to say, you know, very quickly that, first of all, this conversation is really helpful even for me, because even though these clips are not necessarily shared as clips, but there's something about media literacy and political media literacy, or any kind of media, let us say social media, that we see, in which it's really important to kind of break down these like little sound bites. But I also want to say that it's really important to break them down from -- like I think it's easy to do with like Trump and the -- all the three clips actually, but it's a little bit harder to do on some people on the left. So I really appreciate what Leah and Vesper already said about that. Because we hear some of these as axioms, meaning kind of like taken for granted things, not just from people on the right and not just the far right, and not even just the middle, but really left and sometimes our people, people that we are in community with. We, I mean, those of us now on the panel, but maybe listeners as well. And I'm reminded of when you were talking, Beatrice, earlier, trying to kind of connect the clips, you were mentioning these anti-stigma campaigns against the "stigma" of mental illness. And I'm reminded of the late Judy Chamberlain, and I don't know, Leah and Vesper, if you were as well, but you know, she would always say things like, leave me alone with these like anti-stigma campaigns. The power that oppresses me is not stigma, it's psychiatry. And it's so important to hold that also as a mirror to people who think that they're the benevolent cop, all the things you were saying earlier, right, the carceral sanism that kind of comes from within, I'm kind of as interested in that as I am in the other stuff.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 57:03
Such a great point, Liat. And actually, I feel like now is perhaps not necessarily the worst time to spend a second talking about this due process idea, right? Because this, this is really like an important rhetorical point in Gaetz's framing here, where he says, oh, yeah, we've got to do this thing, right? But of course, of course, of course, we'll make sure due process is there. And so often, you know, when we're talking about reforms, Leah, as you were talking about in our conversation on the Socialism Conference panel was like, you know, we are seeing actually like specific erosions in due process as part of the current sort of dynamic that we've been talking about, which is like, it's not just the call to reopen asylums, it's also these other policies, whether it's a CARE Court in California, whether it's things going on in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Ohio, I think Colorado also, and in New York, you have these policies that are slightly shifting due process, slightly shifting what some of the guardrails are, what some of the requirements are, what some of the criteria are here and there, these little tweaks that as we're saying, are going to actually produce a structural demand to rebuild the total institution, to return to the large warehousing model, because of the kinds of dynamics that they're trying to put into motion, the kinds of expansions. Again, these sort of like coercive and carceral tentacles that are not just about, you know, is a person being sent to an asylum, a residential facility or not, it's about are you being put on something that is part of that pathway, right? Because this is the kind of thing that I think is also often represented in the way this is talked about with a kind of sterility or a siloing, right, as if like the "severely mentally ill" can be somehow separated from the rest of the mentally ill, the working well population, and that this isn't actually like a dynamic that affects the entire landscape of this kind of cohesive framework that people who push for these things have put together, where there's like a line in the sand of when you're exploitively mentally ill and you're allowed to be in society so that your surplus labor value can be extracted and, you know, the mentally ill who are marked for extractive abandonment, who are, you know, made of use to the economic order by other means, as Marta Russell would have said, you know, speaking about the idea of the money model of disablement and the ways that people who are either certified not able to work, or who are not able to work, or who do not work, how their bodies become part of the material that the economy uses as a kind of raw material to reproduce itself.
Leah Harris 1:00:03
Yeah, no, I mean, there's just -- my mind is just kind of going in 100 different directions. But yeah, I think just kind of echoing what you're saying, Beatrice, it's like, we really need to look at recent history, right, and how that has worked. That this is -- you know, I think people assume that people could be locked away for life, you know, maybe that was in the 1800s, or, right, that this is in our very distant history, right, based on a psychiatric diagnosis. But you know, even as little as 50 years ago, people could be committed to asylums for -- potentially for life, solely based on the testimony of a few psychiatrists, right. And this is based on a legal doctrine called parens patriae, which assumes, again, the state to be a benevolent force that's intervening for the best interests of people seen as unable to care for themselves, right. And that's what we're sort of hearing in a lot of these politicians' rhetoric is like, we need to be that benevolent force once again, right. And so what we saw coming very aligned with the institutionalization and aligned with civil rights, and all of these awarenesses about the horrific nature of these institutions is when you kind of -- it's the beginning of this due -- what's called the due process revolution, when we look at mental health law and policy. And I think this is so important to really think about because it put psychiatric incarceration on the same footing as incarceration in jails and prisons, right. So they really made that link that I think has been lost today, where psychiatric incarceration is seen as a public good and/or violence prevention, right. But it -- and of course, I'm against all forms of incarceration as an abolitionist, but the thought behind these, right, is that both forms of incarceration should require due process protections, and that it should not be as easy as two psychiatrists, you know, saying someone needs to be put away for life. So that's where we get to, and you can argue whether or not this was a good idea, but we get to this idea that in order for someone to lose their liberty for a "mental health" related reason, that the state would have to prove that they were an imminent danger to themselves or others, right. And that -- or gravely disabled in the sense of unable to provide for their needs. And that's really what is under attack right now is that standard. And the purest forms of that standard that was enacted in the late 1960s, early 70s, things like the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act in California, which is literally under attack at this point in time. Another example is the Lessard decision in Wisconsin, which was taken up by many, many other states, but they establish a pretty high bar for taking away someone's liberty. But that has been eroded for years. I mean, it's not new that they're trying to erode these standards. But I think that's just the part that I think is so critical for us to really, really understand, you know, that this due process is under attack, and they want to return us to this point where, you know, with CARE Court, right, anyone over the age of 18 can say, hey, I think this person is eligible for CARE Court, you know, and there are certain procedures etc. But yeah, I think we're really looking at an effort to make it easier and easier and to expand and expand and expand the categories of people who are the categories of people who can be funneled into inpatient and/or outpatient forms of commitment, various forms of courts, assisted outpatient treatment, you know, which we can talk a little bit more about. But yeah, it's a concerted attack on these very, very limited rights that we gained about 50 years ago.
Vesper Moore 1:04:10
I think, going back to what Liat was talking about earlier, when we talk about places like Guantanamo Bay, prisons, or when I was talking about the Indian boarding schools, particularly targeting native populations, or when we were talking about the protest psychosis and targeting civil rights activists, particularly Black civil rights activists, and their notes reading that they had schizophrenia on the basis of their association with the civil rights movement. You know, again, it is a reminder that we cannot think about these things as separate issues. And when you are against the implementation and expansion of prisons because the United States is the most incarcerated people in the world, when you're against a lot of these other institutions, and you don't take a stance against psychiatric institutions and the expansion of psychiatric institutions, because you believe it only helps people that don't know better, I would invite you to examine that thinking very critically.
Liat Ben-Moshe 1:05:27
I want to just jump on what Vesper is saying, to say that, you know, I think it's sometimes people kind of -- I'm thinking about, you know, students that I teach, and people in workshops that are like, yes, the protest psychosis and drapetomania and stealing horses syndrome, I mean, all of those are obviously like fake and racist and colonialist diagnosis, but I think we can go further, like Vesper is urging us to do and to kind of critique the whole, not just a particular thing that to us are like egregious, right. So, it's important to remember that Jonathan Metzl is a psychiatrist who wrote The Protest Psychosis. And I know Jonathan well, but you know, it's really important, and he's not an anti-psychiatry psychiatrist, just to make sure. And so it's really important to kind of think through like a broader critique of psychiatry that I think the entryway to could be these kind of egregious, or what people see, I should say -- I don't think either Vesper or Leah or I are saying that these are particularly egregious, we're saying that this is part and parcel of the psychiatric system that is like a coercive, medicalizing, pathologizing system that's rooted in eugenics and other systems of oppression. And so it's really important to kind of take that wholesale. So I just want to emphasize the importance of what Vesper is just bringing up.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:06:59
Absolutely. I think, oftentimes, I call this like, in my own notes, like an
à la carte critique of pathology where you have, you know, it's like the critique of pathology can sometimes be taken up piecemeal by people where they say, well, this pathology is bullshit, and that pathology is bullshit, but like schizophrenia is real and dangerous, and I don't want to share space with that person. And it can be, I think, also easily appropriated, as we saw Gaetz say, you know, he brought in this critique of pharma that can -- you can hear quite often, right, which is this kind of conspiratorial, like pharma is hooking people directly, you know, in a kind of intentional process to extract profit by tricking people, right, which is, yeah, I mean, there's like truth to that, right? But the truth to that pales in comparison to the actual truth, which is like that pharma is part of hegemonic capitalism, and that capitalism extracts and alienates and the point of pharmaceutical development is often very different from what we talk about the point of pharmaceuticals as and the idea of cure is heavily loaded, and has this really complicated history that most people have no exposure to, or no sort of baseline on. But it is really interesting how sometimes in this conversation, like, you know, this is not something that's going on between us, but like when these conversations leave circles of folks like us who work on these things and who think on these things, it can sometimes like be taken up only in part, right. And there's often the case made that, yes, this is all true, but there is still like some edge case that requires us to have coercive treatment, right, that there are some moments where it is acceptable, right? And I wonder if we could actually sort of talk against that sort of framing for a second before we move on to the next one.
Leah Harris 1:09:00
Yeah, I was wondering if I could jump in about so called anosognosia.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:09:04
Yeah, that'd be great.
Leah Harris 1:09:05
You know, when Liat was talking about how there's, yeah, these -- we can look at certain diagnoses of the past, you know, the ones that both Liat and Vesper referenced and say, oh, that's absolutely ridiculous. Like that is clearly social control and white supremacy, right, in action. But you know, what is often bantered about in some of the justification for why we need to expand the criteria for forced treatment is because people -- again, this certain, you know, category of people with severe mental illness are afflicted with something called anosognosia, which it's an appropriation of a term that was coined in the early 20th century to describe people who'd experienced brain injury, like traumatic brain injury and didn't realize that they'd had a brain injury. And it's just been appropriated and sort of superimposed onto this group of targeted people, to say that they're unaware of their need for -- they don't know that they need help, essentially. And you can sort of hear that rhetoric sprinkled in throughout the left and the right. And I think it's really -- it's again, it is pseudoscience that's justifying coercion. And it's been around, you know, really used in the policy sphere pretty much since the late 90s. But I think what's one of the defining characteristics of anosognosia, this is like what is such a mindfuck with it, is that it's disagreeing with medical opinion is one of the characteristics. Just one definition I'll read, it's "A lack of ability to perceive the realities of one's own condition. It's a person's inability to accept that they have a condition that matches up with their symptoms or formal diagnosis. This occurs despite significant evidence of a diagnosis, and despite second and even third medical opinions confirming the validity of a diagnosis." So yeah, it's really gaslighting people for resisting the pathologizing of their lived experience, right. And you you may not hear this specific term always used, but you'll see it referred to. When we think about Eric Adams in the rollout of his involuntary removals plan in New York City, he said that, "We'll continue to do all we can to persuade those in need of help to accept services voluntarily, but we will not abandon them if those efforts cannot overcome the person's unawareness of their own illness," right. So it's just the idea that they don't know they're sick. And we have to sweep in as these, you know, saviors to force them into the help that they so desperately need. And it's always the -- it's always, always, always the pushback that folks get when we say, you know, people should be allowed to voluntarily choose services that they want to access, right? And the argument is like, well, people won't, they won't do it, they won't go voluntarily. And it's a very, very hard thing to counter. And you'll hear it over and over and over again.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:12:32
Mmhmm. Absolutely.
Vesper Moore 1:12:33
Actually, if I could also add to that as well, there was a recent involuntary commitment hearing in Massachusetts. And it was it actually, it was a follow-up to one that was interrupted by an electrical fire.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:12:47
Oh my gosh.
Vesper Moore 1:12:48
But the original one, there was a psychiatrist from Bridgewater State Hospital, which is a Department of Corrections run psychiatric institution in Massachusetts, that used anosognosia as a reason for the need for this bill. And we see this in a lot of different places. And I do, I do think it alludes to the wider picture, which I want other folks from different civil rights movements to really take away when listening to this is, is the fact that when we talk about surveillance capitalism, or types of capitalism, it doesn't just apply to tech, it applies to using these diagnoses, these forms of pathologizing people, again, as new ways of social control that are more subtle. And then institutions as a way of social control that are more subtle, or often perceived as subtle, but the experience and the pain of it is not subtle at all. I think something that's so important with that is that when we view these ideas of capitalism, we're taking things that are outside of the market, and we're bringing them in. We're pathologizing behavior. We're doing this, we're doing this. We see this with ODD, we see this with borderline personality disorder, we see this with labels of non-compliance and serious mental illness, you know. So I think it is so, so, so important to understand and unpack these as tools for silencing and again, controlling populations.
Liat Ben-Moshe 1:12:51
Next, next.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:14:21
Alright, our next one. Okay, we've got -- finally we've got Democratic New York Mayor Eric Adams. This is from September of 2021. He's speaking with the host of MSNBC's Morning Joe, but also Al Sharpton is there and he speaks in the middle of this clip, but it's kind of this interjection. He goes off on a tangent being like latte liberals just don't understand the position that Eric and I are coming from being raised by like single mothers, we just, you know, some people just need good cops in their neighborhood, not no cops. And so we've actually like -- I've trimmed out Al Sharpton 's interjection in this clip because it's like about a minute long and I want to just be able to juxtapose the question from the Morning Joe Host that Adams is actually responding to, in Adams' response. So again, this is from September of 2021. If I recall correctly, this is actually like an appearance kind of discussing the primary results. So it's before he's actually mayor.
[audio clip] [Morning Joe Host] 1:15:28
But you know, how maddening is it for some reason, there are some people who think allowing homeless populations to grow in the street is somehow more humane. There's nothing humane about somebody with a mental health problem sleeping on a grate when it's 15 degrees outside. That's insanity. It's bad for quality of life of the city, but it's even worse for those suffering outside.
[audio clip] Eric Adams 1:15:55
Without a doubt. And you see, we made a big mistake when Willowbrook -- a few employees harmed those who were patients in Willowbrook on Staten Island. There was a reaction from the advocates to close down Willowbrook, deinstitutionalize those who need around the clock services. But we didn't balance that with real programs to give it -- give it to them. There's a great institution called Fountain House. They have an 85% stability rate of taking people out of street homelessness, building trust and putting them into permanent housing. That's where we need to invest our dollars.
[audio clip] [Morning Joe Host] 1:16:31
Yes, we do. We could talk to you forever, Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York.
[audio clip] [Morning Joe Host] 1:16:36
Come back! Thank you so much for being here.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:16:39
So this is the infamous Willowbrook was a mistake. Closing Willowbrook was a mistake, comment from Eric Adams. And this one's a little bit more complicated because in some ways, like Eric Adams is a cartoonish Democrat that many people on the left have no love for. But on the other side of this, right, what he's saying, after he says, you know, we closed Willowbrook and it was a mistake, is technically true, right, which is that we closed a lot of institutions. And as we talked about at the beginning, that that funding did not go to the things it was supposed to go to and there's a whole other conversation about, you know, whether those were adequate and sort of that there. But one thing that I want us to sort of focus on in this clip specifically is how the idea is really about sort of that all other things are already foregone conclusions, that this is off the table. And that really sort of what makes sense and also what comforts the hosts, that this is from like a larger 12 or 13 minute segment there that's very concerned with the aesthetics of having unhoused people around New York and what that does to like the New York quality of life. And so it's really telling, I think, that his statement here, as you can hear at the end of the clip, like really comforts especially the white woman who's one of the hosts on Morning Joe, like who's there sort of like, oh, finally a good answer, you're just gonna sweep 'em off the street, and I don't have to look at them anymore.
Vesper Moore 1:18:16
And also, like the packaging of we will help them, you know what I mean? Because that's the overall -- like, if you listen to it again, you know, it's just like, it's this idea of like, oh, yeah, we will help them by doing this. And it's in their best interest and who knows why those activists wanted deinstitutionalization. It's that way of framing it. Or also saying that we don't have enough in the community, or that it's not done well enough. But what is not mentioned is how Mayor Eric Adams and the state of New York defunded, I believe it was four out of eight of the respites in the state, the very community supports that they're saying that there isn't enough of or that they're not done well. So hmm, you defunded them, and then you blamed us, and then you just kind of continued on with your day. And it's just -- it's really malicious.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:19:18
Absolutely.
Liat Ben-Moshe 1:19:19
And the us versus them, you know, I think rears up here, like we were talking about earlier, which is always kind of the question. You know, this -- I always call him Trader Joe, Morning, Joe, whatever. He's always a Joe, right, some Joe that's asking the question, and the question of the Joe is always something like, what do we do with the homeless mentally ill, right, as if it's like a monolithic population that A, actually exists, right? Like there's an inherent thing called mental illness and it attaches itself to people who are unhoused. And, you know, then it's like, what do we do, because we're obviously not that, so what do we do with them? Which I think is just a reiteration of this, I don't even know what to call it, because it's not NIMBY, right? It's not like not in my backyard. But it is also something that springs up in these -- in a lot of gentrification discourses, in New York and elsewhere, of what do we do with this, and we being the people who weren't here, and of course, the people who were here first were the dispossessed people, meaning native, indigenous, and so on. And then people who were long-time residents of places like New York and Chicago and San Francisco, you know, and so on. And then, you know, what do we do now with the "homeless mentally ill," it's like unsightly and blah, blah, blah. And so I think it's a continuation of these discourses, they're very connected to capitalism, and are very connected to the fact that, you know, this us and them eugenic discourse, and I hate to tell it to people, and maybe people will be afraid if I say that, but we -- like disabled and mad people, we're like everywhere. So this idea of the us and them, you know, we're -- we're everywhere. So it's a rhetorical device, but it's also like a very dangerous tool that's used in the creation of these carceral policies.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:21:33
Absolutely.
Leah Harris 1:21:34
Yeah. And I would just add to it, again, you hear this echo of like, those uncompassionate people who are all about civil rights are just totally cool with folks being unhoused in 15 degree below weather, like, you know what I mean, it's just this -- again, this juxtaposition of us as the moral arbiters versus those rights based people. And then yeah, there's also this kind of a few bad apples rhetoric that we hear, you know, referring to Willowbrook. Like, oh, oops, like just a couple of employees, to just totally elide the fact that like, yeah, there was systemic abuses in institutions. It wasn't just like a few here and there, you know, past and present. You know, I live in the colony of Virginia. And just this year, there was a murder at a facility in Dinwiddie, Virginia. Irvo Otieno was placed on a emergency custody order. And you can really see how the prison and the asylum are intertwined in a tragedy like this. Like right now, there's like seven sheriff's deputies and three hospital employees were indicted on second degree murder charges, and CMS is calling for an investigation into the facility. So there's just this, like, real denial about the fact that these institutions are sites of harm. And, you know, that's the piece that I think is so, so important to keep, keep highlighting that this is not in the past. And it is continuing to echo in really tragic and horrific ways.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:23:16
Absolutely. And I think the thing too, that can be really frustrating is that, you know, oftentimes you'll see people like Adams, you know, sort of building the rhetoric that becomes things like his policy for expanding involuntary removal to basically be not just a clinical encounter sort of situation, but also something that's like, a judgment based on sight, right, the idea that, oh, well, we're gonna sort of look for people who are visibly not taking care of themselves to push past the former line in the sand, which was like, "danger to themselves or others," so. And the thing too is that, you know, New York has had a long history of sort of being connected to, in a policy sense, to a very specific intellectual figure, who has had a huge influence on this discourse, named E. Fuller Torrey, and he's a guy who, you know, his project is called the Treatment Advocacy Center. This past year, there was a really, you know, gross puff piece on him that the New York Times did, you know, talking -- it opened with like, you know, Dr. Torrey is old and infirm with Parkinson's disease and his hand is shaking and he's so disabled, and yet he's pulling out his records to read me, the reporter, terrifying stories from the 1970s and the 1980s and the 90s and the 2000s that he has collected over decades, that he uses these anecdotal stories, right, that are sensationalized, just as much as like those accusations are levied at us, to prove to the reporter that people with schizophrenia are really dangerous, right? And it's this romanticized, fucking disgusting profile of him that came out this year. And it casually just makes light of what the New York Times calls, "Dr. Torrey's influence on New York City is profound." And they sort of say that as if it's a good thing, right. And part of what they're talking about is that Mayor Adams' advisor on his involuntary outpatient policy changes is this guy named Brian Stettin, who first worked on like mental health law in the late 90s. In 1999, when he was working in Eliot Spitzer's Attorney General Office, drafting what's called Kendra's Law, which is like a very important sort of shift in mental health policy in New York City that happened as a result of a like, very widely publicized murder in the subway. And so you have this sort of severe mental illness framing, the idea of like, well, this is just common sense. This is just what people want. And underneath that, right, is actually like a very small pool of people doing the intellectual labor, doing the kind of work, doing the policy advocacy, designing the policy, reproducing these ideas, not some sort of broad consensus of like, you know, this is like every single person who works on mental health policy thinks these are a good thing. And yet this small group of people have had such a profound influence, right. And part of that reflects the way that carceral sanism is not just about, you know, the interpersonal things, the actions of one person coming from that perspective within our system, but that's literally materially, the way the system itself has been made and constructed. It is the material of the system of healthcare, of pathology, of diagnosis, and of psychiatry in the United States, and not just in the US, but all over the place.
Vesper Moore 1:27:11
Absolutely. I think another piece too is like -- and I know we've talked about this kind of throughout, this idea of moral failure, right? That we are -- oh, this moral failing. And E. Fuller Torrey is talking about just that, this idea that people who have these diagnoses or who are experiencing emotional distress or in these spaces, will tarnish the morality of our society. And we've seen again, you know, how this has impacted and targeted many different communities. And when we were talking earlier about, you know, capitalism, and this idea of replication, once again, if you look back hundreds of years ago, you would always say, like, oh, well, that person is occupied by bad spirits. This is what they're going through, like, clearly they need this or that. Well, now we're looking at, you know, people who who are experiencing or diagnosed with schizophrenia, or experiencing psychosis, that these folks are in some way of a moral failing, because they are a danger to society. These blanket statements, right, and again, using horrifying cases and instances, often pushed by these same institutions to justify it.
Leah Harris 1:28:32
Yeah, I mean, I think it's so important, you know, just to underscore what you were saying, Beatrice, about how such a small group of people have had such outsized influence, and right, and how carceral sanism has really paved the way for that. And I think, you know, looking at, you know, the -- I knew as soon as I saw Eric Adams' plan, I was like somebody with Treatment Advocacy has to have been involved in this. And it's just this wild dystopian, you know, sort of the same players reemerging, and with great success, right, to kind of frame "untreated severe mental illness" as this public safety issue. And every time there's been a policy push towards this, it's been after some kind of extremely rare, of course, tragic incident. Whether it's a mass shooting, whether it's a subway pushing, again, highly, highly rare, rare incidents to move these policies forward. And yeah, in the 24 years since TAC was founded by E. Fuller Torrey, I think we now have AOT laws in 47 states and the District of Columbia. They're actively trying to get it going again in Massachusetts, they've been trying for years and years and years, and Vesper, y'all have been pushing back there so hard. And I think, you know, the other thing to really point out is that, again, like all of these policies are -- just have these glaring racial disparities, right, in terms of their implementation, so that they find that like Black and brown people are at least five times more likely to be subjected to these kinds of regimes of "assisted outpatient treatment" than white counterparts. And yeah, and that, you know, there's been all of this research that's shown, you know, even in the face of that, that compulsory treatment has no difference in terms of outcomes for people. And of course, we know that it causes trauma and harm. But in spite of all of those things, right, they continue to push these policies and they continue to gain traction.
Liat Ben-Moshe 1:30:55
Just to say, I mean, anecdotally, I don't know why I want to bring this into this conversation, but it so happens. But I think that the original way that we met, I think the first time Leah and Vesper and I met, we almost immediately found out our commonality is in our arch nemesis, which is, you know, the Treatment Advocacy Center, amongst others. And the reason why I say that is because I think people assume that these things like the Treatment Advocacy Center are these nodes with like billions of dollars and like hundreds of people, and this is like, five guys or something, you know, like, headed by this one guy. And I think that it's kind of like taking the curtain off, you know, like the Wizard of Oz. And really showing that this is defeatable, right? These are just a few people who are spinning this awful narrative. And yes, it is completely - has its tentacles in very real, material practices. But this is also what I mean by not to fall into this, the more things are the whatever, the more they stay the same, and we come full circle and all that, because we now have like decades of knowing what to do with this, because it's the same thing. And they've built an infrastructure, and we've built an infrastructure, you know, of resistance to it. So I think that's important to note.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:32:37
Absolutely. And I mean, I want to sort of underscore, like the fact that we're not just the only one saying like, you know, that the guy doing this policy for Mayor Adams is like a full on true believer, acolyte of E. Fuller Torrey, who again, has been the central figure for decades pushing for, you know, expanding what's called assisted outpatient treatment, which is AOT that Leah referenced, which is something that we talked about in the Carceral Sanism panel at Socialism Conference as a kind of rebrand, right? The AOT label takes coercive treatment and tries to make it sound more gentle and more nice. And this is really kind of like one of his main issues that he has spent his life pushing for it. And again, it's not us saying that. Brian Stettin, who is Adams' policy guy, his like mental health policy guy, that he's, you know, an acolyte. It's the New York Times, again, positively saying that he had this interaction as a young policymaker with Torrey and that Torrey turned him into -- he "became a true believer." And we're seeing, you know, what is essentially a crusade that we're seeing increasing calls to take up and join up with this kind of framework. But the thing that gets difficult, right, is that [sighs] -- and here's maybe where we can talk a little bit about how to deal with when our comrades, when folks, you know, maybe that we're in collaboration with, other aligned movements, folks even sometimes in the abolition movement, you know, sometimes you even see the work of stuff like the Treatment Advocacy Center cited by people who are ostensibly on our side. I'm gonna give an example from 2014. I'm not trying to come for James Kilgore here, but I'm just trying to demonstrate what I mean. This is from something he wrote called Repackaging Mass Incarceration: The Rise of Carceral Humanism and Non-alternative Alternatives, and it's from June 9th, 2014. So he's talking about and defining carceral humanism. He says "Currently this repackaging [of carcerality] assumes several forms. One of the most important is carceral humanism or what some people refer to as incarceration lite. Carceral humanism recasts the jailers as caring social service providers. The cutting edge of carceral humanism is in the field of mental health. According to a recent report by the Treatment Advocacy Center in 2012, the US had over 350,000 people with serious mental health issues in prisons and jails, as compared to just 35,000 in the remaining state mental health facilities. Prisons and jails have become the new asylums and the jailers are waking up to the fact that mental health facilities also represent a new cash cow." And so, here's an example of someone making an argument against, you know, these sort of non-alternative alternatives, non-reformist reforms, speaking critically of the prison industrial complex, of the expansion of carcerality, and yet citing the knowledge production of a group like Treatment Advocacy Center, in order to make that point, which is kind of frustrating and terrifying in equal parts, frankly, whenever I come across an example like this. So I wonder if this is maybe a way for us to pause for a moment to sort of talk about the non-monopoly on this, specifically, also coming from the left and how sometimes this is one of the sort of points of the most friction that I encounter also personally, just with other leftists and other people doing similar work.
Vesper Moore 1:36:27
I want to name that I've encountered this a lot too, working with folks who identify as so-called prison abolitionists. And I think I do want to start with the fact that it's not prison or police abolition, if there isn't psychiatric abolition as well. And when we talk about what psychiatric abolition is, I think a lot of people also don't always understand that what we're referring to is models of community care that can sustain and support people in their right to live in community interdependently without the oversight of a surveilling institution, a carceral institution. And I think -- I think there are such internalized ideas that are, again, you know, mass marketed, mass shared, kind of across the board, that really lead to carceral sanism in our society, in that idea that we are, once again, you know, perceived as not only like unable or disposable, but also dangerous. And I think that that's one of the piece. People can talk about, oh, you can abolish every prison, but for some reason, these psychiatric institutions, the prisons for mad people, they have to stay around, you know? And it is so important for us to really, really, again, examine that line of thinking and where it comes from. There is a multi -- there are multiple multibillion dollar industries being put into all of this. Suicide prevention being a multibillion dollar industry. The treatment Advocacy Center, and their campaigns, who they're backed by, right, pharmaceutical companies with philanthropic arms pretending to be on our side, and a lot of these other pieces. So if you are a prison abolitionist in the community, and you are saying abolish prisons, but then you're taking a stance against mad, disabled people and saying, like, well, we need these institutions around to realize these ideas, you're playing right into their hands.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:36:34
So well said.
Leah Harris 1:36:49
Yeah. Yeah. And I would just add to that, you know, it really goes to prove the success of the jails are the new prisons -- or jails are the new mental institutions/asylums rhetoric, right, that has been really sort of run with, this trope that's been, you know, mass marketed like Vesper said, and yeah, just thinking about how, you know, my friends and I would get so irate whenever like E. Fuller Torrey would appear on Democracy Now.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:39:34
Oh my god, yeah.
Leah Harris 1:39:35
For example, like pushing this rhetoric --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:39:37
That's why I stopped watching Democracy Now, no lie. Please continue.
Leah Harris 1:39:41
Oh, yeah. This was like even as recent as 2019, you know, they were kind of beating this drum on Democracy Now. And yeah, so I just -- I think I would just echo that, you know, if you consider yourself to be a leftist or abolitionist, and hear this rhetoric, right, that jails are the new mental institutions, to like really question that and question who benefits from that, and push back on that. And yeah, and actually listen to what mad and disabled people themselves are saying. And I'll say, like anyone who is encouraging, you know, mental institutions, like I've always said, like, why don't you go stay in one? I mean, I'm against all -- I'm an abolitionist, but it's like, for those of us who have been in those places, right, and, of course, there's differential treatment based on race and class, but like, overall, they're just horrific experiences most of the time, and I think it's just so easy for people who have not been psychiatrically incarcerated to say, this is care and this is help, when they've never experienced the full carceral force of these institutions.
Liat Ben-Moshe 1:40:49
And I also want to point out that sometimes in, you know, disabled and mad community, especially amongst people who are maybe less politicized, or people who are also working with family members, and so on, there's a notion of -- there is also the notion of bring back the asylum. So, you know, I really want to say that even within our own communities, I mean, all three of us like work within disabled and mad movements, we can't ignore the fact that this is kind of somewhat happening, again, within -- within that sphere as well. Although, like I said, it's more from people who are either less politicized or, you know, or family members of, which is its own kind of issue. You know, I think that people who have been in the self advocacy movements, for example, have said for pretty much since the 70s, that they want to close down all institutions for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, right. So there are some things that have been very clear from the get go. And yet, there are also, you know, some organizations or cries to end everything except, you know, this kind of like à la carte approach that you were mentioning earlier. So I just think that's really important to kind of pay attention to as well.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:42:19
Absolutely. And honestly, I feel like it's -- it can be difficult, right, because it's not like we're trying to like, say, oh, we are privy to this take and like you who do not have this take, like are fucking up. Like yes, that's true, but it's also that this stuff is kind of like hidden even within disability communities as you're saying, Liat, like for a very long time, movements for various types of disability liberation would often like frame their goals in explicit opposition to other people who fall under that same umbrella, right, whether it's talking about severity of disability justifying entry into the community, and a lot of times, it's like, you know, framed as if this is some sort of necessary rhetorical compromise, which is absolutely not the case. And I think it sort of reproduces tremendous harm in terms of how this shifts social reproduction, because as we're seeing, like the idea of carceral humanism applies to all of what we're talking about, right? And yet, that knowledge production that is rooted in a widespread campaign to expand, you know, carceral practices and justify the removal of disabled and mad people from society is also being used, right, to support things that we do care about and we do share goals on, and so it's -- it can be like a moment where also I think a lot of like disabled and mad people can can look at the left and say, oh, well, I'm not a part of that. That's not for me, right? Because you know, I'm not seeing sort of these hard lines in the sand that are really hard lines for me maybe, reproduced in say, like the abolitionist movement, which is -- which is why it's important to stop and have these conversations and sift through the bullshit with the kind of fine sieve that we have been, because it's not like this stuff is obvious. Like we have spent an hour and a half now talking about four clips, and we haven't even gotten to the Wall Street Journal editorial that like started this whole recording as the plan, because it's actually that kind of layered and complex and not accessible, that it requires unpacking it at this kind of extreme level.
Liat Ben-Moshe 1:42:20
And yet, it's also repetitive, right? So I mean, the four clips you showed are some of the main arguments in the Wall Street Journal piece, because it's also written by the same people and kind of said by people who work with the same people and so on. So it's a repetitive piece that's, you know, been successfully repeated so much, like you said, that even people on the left kind of absorb it. It's kind of a truism, which is also part of the problem, as you mentioned.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:45:14
Absolutely.
Vesper Moore 1:45:15
Absolutely. And I think if we look at the Wall Street Journal piece, particularly in that piece, they mention the Worcester Recovery Center and Hospital, and that's based in Massachusetts. And I never call it the Worcester Recovery Center and Hospital. I call it Worcester State Hospital. I spent some time in Worcester State Hospital as a patient, before it became the Worcester Recovery Center and Hospital. And I did some work in there as a peer bridger, as someone who had helped people get out of that institution, and back into the community. And I can tell you that from being in that space, it is very much a panopticon where people are being watched constantly, or if they're not being watched in any moment, which is doubtful, that they would still have that sense of being watched. You have censored materials, and you have an enclosed courtyard, you have a lot of different pieces there. So you see, again, this use of a key example of a modernized institution as a call back to bring back the asylums. And there's a serious danger in that because again, it is this subtlety of we will control and censor people and keep them out of the public view, and we will do the exact same harms we've done in the past.
Leah Harris 1:46:38
I mean, I don't know that I have much to add to that. I mean, it really -- like y'all both have really summed it up for now. But yeah, it is. You know, my friend, Bruce Owens Grimm, talks about how a haunting is a repetition, right. And I think we're so haunted by the asylum. And it just continues to echo and not to say, again, that things are exactly the same. But it's like this remaking and re-haunting of our society that lands in very real ways, on people who are most harmed by the society.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:47:14
Absolutely. Now I have sort of the task -- maybe, you know, what, maybe we just be really honest. So we had this plan to go through these four clips, which turned into this beautiful and nebulous break down that I think has been so rewarding to participate in. And this is getting to be quite a meaty episode at this point. So we just, you know, we're discussing the possibility of doing a second part to this episode, which may, of course, you know, become an ongoing conversation at this point. It's not like there's a shortage of things to talk about in this arena right now, unfortunately. But I think we're gonna run out of time to do the close read of the Wall Street Journal piece called, It's Time to Bring Back Asylums, but we will revisit it, we will reconvene, we will record a part two, and we will go hard on that one. We'll get a chance to talk about things like, you know, the role that the narrative about psychiatric drug innovation plays in this, we'll talk about Thorazine, we'll talk about the solutionism of it all. And the ways that also in this Wall Street Journal piece, in particular, it's very interesting, it kind of gets into this, the aesthetics also of the asylum, and kind of makes the claim that, you know, this might not be the look we want, but this is the solution we need, that I think is a really sort of powerful and important frame to also give plenty of room to push back on. So I just want to sort of, one, reiterate like how fucking grateful I am for you three, and for this time that we've had to talk today. And we've gone through so much, but as a final takeaway, we will reconvene, but for now, I want to take a second to sort of dwell on final thoughts here to wrap things up. And really, I just think that what we've been able to do today in this conversation, is really talk about like, what does it mean to call to reopen asylums? And what are those calls actually naming in that demand, right? And I really so appreciate all of the work that's been done here to articulate that and make that obvious and sort of peel the layers back, to actually show, you know, the real structural undergirding of what exactly people are talking about when they make this claim that this is the only "solution" to the "intersecting crisis of housing and mental health," right, which is the kind of euphemism that actually we ended up really ripping to shreds quite effectively today, if I do say so myself.
Liat Ben-Moshe 1:50:00
I second that [laughing].
Leah Harris 1:50:04
Yeah, I would just say, you know, like, we're getting close to Halloween season and just kind of rethinking about, you know, just to follow up on my comment about haunting. Like, we're, you know, there's gonna be all of these haunted asylum exhibits, year after year we see them, but to me just what's truly terrifying, is this encroaching carceral sanism, but what does give me like a sense of possibility is the resistance to it. And I hope we can also talk a lot more about that at a future date. But yeah, like, there's a growing resistance, and there's an ongoing resistance. And that's what keeps me going through all of this bullshit. But yeah, really, really happy to be here and to be in conversation with you all.
Vesper Moore 1:50:56
Absolutely, I think first off, I want to say thank you, as always, for such a wonderful conversation, and to be in this space. And I look forward to continuing to have this conversation. And I would say that I echo a lot of what we were saying, where I do see a resistance forming as more and more people realize for themselves that like, oh, wow, you know, they might just start identifying as neurodivergent or mad or disabled, and they might be reclaiming that for themselves. And they might be revisiting or coming to understand some of their experiences as like, oh, coercive, and carceral. And do other people notice this? And then like, are starting to speak out. So I see that. I see that inspiration, and I see that momentum, and I hope we can continue to move it forward.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:51:48
Hell yeah. I think this is the perfect and beautiful place to leave it for today. I'm so grateful to the three of you for joining me. Again, listeners, our guests are Vesper Moore, Leah Harris, and Liat Ben-Moshe. As always, patrons, thank you so much for supporting the show. We couldn't do any of this without you. To support the show, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. You'll get access to the second weekly bonus episode that comes out every Monday and our entire back catalogue of bonus episodes. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up a copy of Health Communism at your local bookstore, or request it at your local library, and pre-order Jules' new book coming in January, called A Short History of Trans Misogyny, and follow us @deathpanel_. As always, Medicare for All now, solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.
[Outro music]
Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)