Thread by @TheRingsSystem

Let’s talk: Monsters Inside, highly stigmatized mental illness, and how society incarcerates mentally ill people they perceive as violent and dangerous. 🧵
#CancelMonstersInside #dissociatwt #dissociativeidentitydisorder

[CW: Institutionalization & Police Brutality]

Portraying mentally ill people as violent is not a new phenomenon. Systemically, mentally ill & neurodivergent people are characterized as violent, erratic, unpredictable, and as threat to society.

Being portrayed as dangerous leads to the removal of mentally ill people from larger society. Historically, that looked like indefinitely warehousing the mentally ill in state institutions and asylums.

In truth, the narrative of deinstitutionalization (dissolving psychiatric asylums, patients given outpatient or community care) is largely false. The incarceration of patients at state institutions just shifted to incarcerating people in the prison system. academic.oup.com/jsh/article-ab…

Today, the three largest mental health centers are in prisons. google.com/amp/s/www.wlns…

Over 40% of mentally ill folks will be incarcerated in their lifetime. 64% of incarcerated ppl are mentally ill. Characterizing mental illness & disregulated behavior as dangerous means that 50% of people killed by police are disabled (often disabled POC).
americanprogress.org/issues/disabil…

This cannot be said without contextualization. Schizophrenia in particular was reframed from a disease primarily affecting fragile white women, to a violent disease affecting black men - and diagnoses were used as tools to incarcerate Black people.

To this day, Black Americans are diagnosed with psychosis 3-4 times more than white Americans, and are at the highest risk of fatal police violence. There is so much more to be said on this topic - The Protest Psychosis is a great place to start. psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-02…

Schizophrenia and psychosis are at the center of characterizing mental illness as violent, but they are intwined with DID. DID is often confused with and misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, and psychosis is relatively common for folks with DID to experience.

I want to make it clear that media such as Monsters Inside is not the deep cause of characterizing mentally ill people as violent - those roots lie in ableism, racism & the disruption of the civil rights movement.

However, incarceration & police violence is critical context when we are discussing media. The continued production of movies like Monsters Inside portray people with DID as violent and dangerous, justifying to abled people the continued incarceration of mentally ill communities