Rest in peace :( you are missedMOSCOW (AP) — A fire swept quickly through a psychiatric hospital outside Moscow early Friday, killing 38 people, most of them in their beds, officials said.
The one-story brick-and-wood hospital building housed patients with severe mental disorders, Health Ministry officials said. An emergency ministry official said the fire started in a wooden annex and then spread to the main brick building which had wooden beams.
The patients were under sedatives and most of them did not wake up, Yuri Deshevykh of the emergency situations ministry told RIA Novosti.
At least 29 people were burned alive, said Irina Gumennaya, a spokeswoman for the Russian Investigative Committee.
Investigators said 38 people, including 36 patients and two doctors, have died. They said a nurse managed to escape and save one patients, while another patient got out on his own. The emergency services also posted a list of the patients indicating they ranged in age from 20 to 76. Gumennaya told Russian news agencies that most of the people died in their beds.
Moscow region governor Andrei Vorobyev said some of the hospital windows were barred. Gumennaya quoted testimony of the surviving nurse who said that doors inside the hospital were not locked.
Officials from the Russian Investigative Committee said they are looking at poor fire regulations and short circuit as possible causes for the blaze that engulfed the hospital in the Ramenskiy settlement, some 85 kilometers (53 miles) north of Moscow.
Vadim Belovoshin of the emergency ministry said that it took fire fighters an hour to get to the hospital following an emergency call because a ferry across the canal was closed and the fire fighters had to make a detour.
Vorobyev told Russian state-television that the fire alarm seems to have worked but the fire spread too quickly.
RIP :(
Formerly the Northern Michigan Asylum, in Traverse City. You can read more about it: here
I had a calm and poignant experience wandering around this 135 acre campus yesterday.
I spent a long time looking at the oldest trees, knowing that my elders looked out their windows at these same trees, or maybe planted them.
I thought about how it is part of my lived embodied knowledge to see that the white buildings are probably where nurses and administrative people lived. Hospitals love color coding things.
I thought about how there is a part of me which has been socially conditioned to have a certain interpretation of these buildings, specifically to be scared of them, or creeped out. But I thought about how I actually felt incredibly comfortable, I could have stayed there in the snow all day.
I don’t miss being involuntarily confined, but I miss being confined.
These buildings are being renovated into fancy (very expensive) apartments and shops. I am nonetheless grateful that it isn’t being demolished, like many of the hospitals closed in the 1980s during de-institutionalization. I thought about how if I were a zillionaire I would renovate them to be affordable housing for mentally ill people, with hi speed internet for bloggers like me :)
I went home and posted these photos on instagram, and when I clicked through the tags I found some other cool photos, but I noticed that every single person except for me had used very dark filters.
So then I really started to mull this over. Personally, I think that the only people who have claim over making photos of asylums scary and ominous, are Mad people who have been involuntarily confined, psychiatric survivors. Other people and even other Mad people who haven’t been confined to institutions might want to analyze what cultural narratives are perpetuated by a casual & repetitive insistence that old hospitals are inherently scary. For me, that’s hurtful, offensive, and deeply stigmatizing. I think that violent disproportionate power of doctors is haunting and scary, but is that what people are typically implying when they filter their photos to look like halloween?
Thanks for reading this,
love always,
k. adelle
[edit: other ppl who have claim over representing asylums however they want are ppl with other disabilities who have been confined. anyone who has been confined to an asylum basically. i went and ate dinner and was like woops]
By K. Adelle
Artist’s Description:
My name is K. Adelle and I run the blog fuckyeahmadpride.tumblr.com. I am bipolar II, or as I like to call it, bipolar !!.
When I was in high school I was sent to an all girls therapeutic lock-down facility in Arizona and I was there for 15 months.
This is one of the only pieces of visual art I have ever made in a manic state, and it was sometime during the year after I got out. The photograph is from a stolen moment in treatment with a disposable camera someone smuggled in. I don’t remember much about making it, just that it had to be made. I only remember feeling intense shame. I used my grandma’s typewriter and a piece of wax paper stapled onto some poster board or something.
dreams are coming true for me!!!!! thank you so much Art From the Edge :’)
| — | Nelson Mandela (via iamjohnnyrcash) |
Communities, come unity. Who belongs?
Defining right and wrong without binaries.
You can’t decenter something that isn’t centered. You can’t see outside an ego that hasn’t yet entered your mind. You can try, but you might end up with schizophrenia.
There’s a site in my mind that’s a sight in the desert. A storm that I weathered. Stiff as a board, light as a feather. Shit I’m so bored, the days are all tethered together. Now I’m ripped and forlorn, deciding whether or not to recount this stuff.
Once in the basement of my boarding school I was taped to a chair it felt cool against my skin.
Holding your own reality while confined by people who tell you to hold your own reality is pretty absurd.
Brainwashed by words in basements. Adjacent lives tied together.
Tightening the chord, lifting the lever.
Gifts that I scorn versus righteous endeavors. Who’s clever now?
Don’t dismiss feminism as 2-D, it’s got a history,
its rich in fat. Feminism: the cat’s pajamas.
I step in line for “Beauty Night” every friday night for fifteen months. No running.
In the med room one by one Mary hands us plastic boxes. Some contents are toxic, or sharp, some are nail files. We file out.
Now in the cafeteria we sit at tables. “Lately I’ve been feeling much more stable”
“C.” says as she tweezes her brows.
This kind of statement was extremely political, in critical proximity to our note-taking captors.
I wonder about the performativity of recovery.
How can we tell who’s “recovering.”
If “C.” had said “I’m shuddering at every moment” like when we were alone,
her mobility would have been considerably postponed.
My community had four horizontal and vertical divisions. Weird incisions, disciplining us.
“Families” A, B, C, D. “Phases” 1,2,4,3. Unless you ran.
Phase Orange. Neoliberal contortions.
You had to wear slippers after you were caught. They taught us. “If you run,”
they’d say, “you’re far away from water and could die.
Your only other option is to hitch a ride and sell your body.”
This shit was casual, haughty, authoritative.
“T.” files her nails furiously. “L.” paints hers bright pink which she thinks is allowed because she made it to phase 3. She’s wrong though. It’s too neon. She takes it off quickly.
Phase ones can’t pluck their eyebrows because they haven’t earned it. So we called “J.” Frida. She’d turn her head a bit, she’d smile. “I’ll be movin’ up soon, should be just a little while.” She moved up four months later.
I AM THE RECKONING AND THE FORCE; THE RELENTLESS GRINDING OF TEETH. I AM DIALECTICALLY REMORSEFUL. THE ENDLESS FINDING, DELETED.
To prove our sanities we had to become Women. Upper phases were driven to creepy group dates with a boy’s school. Rules about bodies.
To prove our sanities we had to be straight. They didn’t even really hate admitting it.
I sit in a dark room with my therapist. I confess, “My shadow is manipulative and mean. Show me your throat and I’ll show you my teeth.” Hand me my coat and remove the wreath. Know I’ve got photos I owe you some cheese. Show me a boat and I’ll loan you my sneezes Jesus I don’t know. The days just kept going and going and going and going and going.
“G.” sits in the shower and removes the safety guard from her electric razor, pushes it deep into her arm. Human alarms sound. She’s put in solitary.
I saw the room once. There was a drain on the floor to pee into if they left you in there too long.
I was still a gender love spy. I felt so alone. We weren’t allowed to use the phones.
Everything we did was documented. Every hour during sleep. Flashlights in my eyes.
Every Friday we mylinate neural pathways which oppress us…
We learn to be ladies. We learn to be neoliberal.
We yearned to be shady. The personal is the political.
Lockdown helped me to value my life. Lockdown taught me to be a wife.
The desert was my prison. The desert is within me.
Those girls were my companions.
Those girls have Stockholm syndrome and won’t abandon it.
They won’t let up, they worship that school.
My friends were broken. Now they feel fixed… Literally they are the Smith to my Marx.
We’re describing the same things, except they totally loved it whereas I am barfing.
Once in the basement of my boarding school we were taped to chairs and brought to new awareness.
I long for a community imbued with something like “mestiza consciousness”
“…though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm,” (Gloria Anzaldua).
A modest masochism motivates me.
| — |
#madpride #confinement A Poem About 15 Months by k. adelle (fuckyeahmadpride) |
| — | Michel Foucault, from the chapter “The Great Confinement” in the book, Madness and Civilization, p. 46 |
“Deconstructing identity while still trying to address inequality”
this is possible. I know this from my time in hospitals.
| — | k. adelle |
There’s a site in my mind that’s a sight in the desert. A storm that I weathered. Stiff as a board, light as a feather. Shit I’m so bored, the days are all tethered together. Now I’m ripped and forlorn, deciding whether or not to recount this stuff.
Once in the basement of my boarding school I was taped to a chair it felt cool against my skin.
| — | k. adelle |
(the intro to this song goes until 1:55 hahahahahaha)
“Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me”
That somebody loved me
No hope - but no harm
Just another false alarm
Last night I felt
Real arms around me
No hope - no harm
Just another false alarm
So, tell me how long
Before the last one?
And tell me how long
Before the right one?
This story is old - I KNOW
But it goes on
This story is old - I KNOW
But it goes on
Cuz people may find it interesting. We were asked to summarize what we will write about and include 5 references we may use.
My final paper will begin as an analytic literature review of mental health social policies in the United States in modern times, from 1950 forward. I will take a special interest in and focus on recent policies, legislation, and laws that are currently in effect that address the intersection of crime and mental illness, specifically mentally ill criminals and inmates. I will discuss the impact that deinstitutionalization has had on jail and prison populations: what is known as trans-institutionalization. I will discuss the effects of mass incarceration on families, poverty, stability, mental health, and overall well-being. I will analyze key policies, their pros and cons, and suggest improvements or new policy directions based on evidence from the literature. I will also discuss alternatives to incarceration that are cost effective, build communities, reduce recidivism, and have overwhelming positive outcomes for participants. Community and individual responses to mental health concerns and crime will also be addressed as one of the many options in a holistic approach to remedying the issue of the mentally ill not receiving the services and help they need as a result of the system having failed them.
Cooper, J.L., Aratani, Y., Knitzer, J., Douglas-Hall, A., Masi, R., Banghart, P., et al. (2008, November). Unclaimed children revisited: The status of children’s mental health policy in the United States. National Center for Children in Poverty. Retrieved from http://www.nccp.org/publications/pdf/text_853.pdf
Frank, R., & Glied, S.A. (2006). Better but not well: Mental health policy in the United States since 1950. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.
Garfield, R.L. (2009). Mental health policy development in the States: the piecemeal nature of transformational change. Psychiatry Services, 60(10). 1329-1335. Retrieved from http://ps.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleid=100824
Grob, G.N. (1992). Mental health policy in America: Myths and realities. Health Affairs, 11(3), 7-22. Retrieved from http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/11/3/7.full.pdf
Wolff, N., Fabrikant, N., & Belenko, S. (2011). Mental health courts and their selection processes: Modeling variation for consistency. Law & Human Behavior, 35(5), 402-412. doi:10.1007/s10979-010-9250-4
this looks awesome! keep us posted on your findings! :) :)
#Romney and the #torture of youth.
Please help us spread the word:
Make this your FB “Cover” photo and copy/paste info below! Distribute widely!
And more here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-levine/romney-profits-from-baino_b_1700711….
Maia Szalavitz: http://healthland.time.com/2012/07/20/new-abuse-allegations-arise-at-drug-tre…
Romney Torture and Teens: http://reason.com/archives/2007/06/27/romney-torture-and-teens
| — | Marc Lumont Hill at the talk ‘End Mass Incarceration’ - Riverside Church, Harlem New York (via icecreamritual) |
