The large-scale disclosure of materials known as the “Epstein Files” has revealed “disturbing and credible evidence” of what independent human rights experts describe as a possible global criminal enterprise involving systematic sexual abuse, trafficking and exploitation of women and girls.
Blog
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Maternal deaths spike during war and instability, new report warns
Nearly two thirds of all maternal deaths worldwide occur in countries marked by conflict or fragility, according to a report released on Tuesday by the World Health Organization (WHO) and partners. -
Four years of war in Ukraine: Childhood has ‘moved underground’, displacement continues – UN humanitarians
Civilian suffering shows no sign of letting up in Ukraine as the four-year-mark of Russia’s full-scale invasion nears amid attacks on energy infrastructure, blackouts and freezing temperatures, UN humanitarians warned on Tuesday. -
Anti-Corruption Probe Launched Into Romanian Business Registry’s Failed IT System
Romanian anti-corruption prosecutors are investigating a 38 million-euro ($44.6 million) IT project at the National Trade Registry Office (ONRC) after the system caused major service disruptions and exposed personal data, according to reporting by OCCRP member center Public Record.
The platform, launched in summer 2024, blocked more than 130,000 business registrations for weeks, disrupting company formation nationwide and frustrating users.
The registry, overseen by the Ministry of Justice, manages official records for more than 1.7 million people and companies.
Draft audits by the National Court of Auditors and the Justice Ministry found serious problems. Auditors said the system was launched before proper testing, that the agency never received its source code, and that security and functionality checks were incomplete. Investigators estimated losses of more than 12 million lei ($2.7 million) because penalties were not enforced for delays and faulty testing.
Former registry director Valentina Burdescu, who was dismissed in 2024 after the audit but still works at the agency, is also under scrutiny. Her husband holds a senior post there, raising concerns about conflicts of interest. Auditors also said that financial benefits were improperly granted.
The main IT contract went to Vodafone Romania, which subcontracted software development to Total Soft SA, a company owned through firms in Cyprus and Turkey. Auditors said Total Soft was supposed to provide the source code but it is unclear whether the registry ever received it, meaning the agency may be unable to fix or review the system independently.
Public Record spoke with IT manager Vlad Herescu, who said a contractor may withhold source code to keep a client dependent for maintenance, conceal incomplete functionality, or mask poor-quality programming that could pose security risks.
Vodafone Romania said it had “fulfilled all contractual obligations” and that implementation was coordinated by the registry’s management, but did not address questions about the code or alleged vulnerabilities, while Total Soft referred inquiries back to Vodafone.
The failed IT system also triggered a data breach affecting over 3,000 individuals. The Ministry of Justice reported that the platform was unstable and insufficiently tested at the time of launch. ONRC acknowledged initial disruptions but attributed them to an unusually high number of requests.
Auditors concluded that the project was signed off nine months before it was launched, creating legal, financial, and operational risks.The case remains under investigation, and Public Record reported that the Court of Accounts’ audit is ongoing. ONRC did not respond to the Public Record’s requests for comment.
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Boy first in UK to have pioneering leg-lengthening surgery
Alfie Phillips, 9, had the pioneering treatment at Liverpool’s Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. -
The American Media Polycrisis: Cascading Layers of Capture
From the recent gutting of the Washington Post to the rightward lurch of CBS, the sheer proliferation and variation of media failures and attacks on the press during Trump 2.0 are difficult to grasp. Regulatory bodies have become political weapons. Major news organizations have complied and retreated. Media ownership has consolidated in the hands of a few feckless billionaires. Taken together…
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Pluralistic: What’s a “gig work minimum wage” (17 Feb 2026)
Today’s links
- What’s a “gig work minimum wage”: The important rate is what you’re paid when you’re waiting for a job.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- Object permanence: MBA phrenology; Sony’s DRM CEO is out; Midwestern Tahrir; Reverse Centaurs and AI.
- Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
- Recent appearances: Where I’ve been.
- Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.
- Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.
- Colophon: All the rest.
What’s a “gig work minimum wage” (permalink)
“Minimum wage” is one of those odd concepts that seems to have an intuitive definition, but the harder you think about it, the more complicated it gets. For example, if you want to work, but can’t find a job, then the minimum wage you’ll get is zero:
That’s why politicians like Avi Lewis (who is running for leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party) has call for a jobs guarantee: a government guarantee of a good job at a socially inclusive wage for everyone who wants one:
https://lewisforleader.ca/ideas/dignified-work-full-plan
(Disclosure: I have advised the Lewis campaign on technical issues and I have endorsed his candidacy.)
If that sounds Utopian or Communist to you (or both), consider this: it was the American jobs guarantee that delivered the America’s system of national parks, among many other achievements:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps
The idea of a wage for everyone who wants a job is just one interesting question raised by the concept of a “minimum wage.” Even when we’re talking about people who have wages, the idea of a “minimum wage” is anything but straightforward.
Take gig workers: the rise of Uber and its successors created an ever-expanding class of workers who are misclassified as independent contractors by employers, seeking to evade unionization, benefits and liability. It’s a weird kind of “independent contractor” who gets punished for saying no to lowball offers, has to decorate their personal clothes and/or cars in their “client’s” livery, and who has every movement scripted by an app controlled by their “client”:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/02/upward-redistribution/
The pretext that a worker is actually a standalone small business confers another great advantage on their employers: it’s a great boon to any boss who wants to steal their worker’s wages. I’m not talking about stealing tips here (though gig-work platforms do steal tips, like crazy):
I’m talking about how gig-work platforms define their workers’ wages in the first place. This is a very salient definition in public policy debates. Gig platforms facing regulation or investigation routinely claim that their workers are paid sky-high wages. During the debate over California’s Prop 22 (in which Uber and Lyft spent more than $225m to formalize worker misclassification), gig companies agreed to all kinds of reasonable-sounding wage guarantees:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/14/final_ver2/#prop-22
When Toronto was grappling with the brutal effect that gig-work taxis have on the city’s world-beatingly bad traffic, Uber promised to pay its drivers “120% of the minimum wage,” which would come out to $21.12 per hour. However, the real wage Uber was proposing to pay its drivers came out to about $2.50 per hour:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible
How to explain the difference? Well, Uber – and its gig-work competitors – only pay drivers while they have a passenger – or an item – in the car. Drivers are not paid for the time they spend waiting for a job or the time they spend getting to the job. This is the majority of time that a gig driver spends working for the platform, and by excluding the majority of time a driver is on the clock, the company can claim to pay a generous wage while actually paying peanuts.
Now, at this phase, you may be thinking that this is only fair, or at least traditional. Livery cab drivers don’t get paid unless they have a fare in the cab, right?
That’s true, but livery cab drivers have lots of ways to influence that number. They can shrewdly choose a good spot to cruise. They can give their cellphone numbers to riders they’ve established a rapport with in order to win advance bookings. In small towns with just a few drivers – or in cities where drivers are in a co-op – they can spend some of their earnings to advertise the taxi company. Livery drivers can offer discounts to riders going a long way. It’s a tough job, but it’s one in which workers have some agency.
Contrast that with driving for Uber: Uber decides which drivers get to even see a job. Uber decides how to market its services. Uber gets to set fares, on a per-passenger basis, meaning that it might choose to scare some passengers off of a few of their rides with high prices, in a bid to psychologically nudge that passenger into accepting higher fares overall.
At the same time, Uber is reliant on a minimum pool of drivers cruising the streets, on the clock but off the payroll. If riders had to wait 45 minutes to get an Uber, they’d make other arrangements. If it happened too often, they’d delete the app. So Uber can’t survive without those cruising, unpaid drivers, who provide the capacity that make the company commercially viable.
What’s more, livery cab drivers aren’t the only comparators for gig-work platforms. Many gig workers deliver food, meaning that we should compare them to, say, pizza delivery drivers. These drivers aren’t just paid when they have a pizza in the car and they’re driving to a customer’s home. They’re paid from the moment they clock onto their shift to the moment they clock off (plus tips).
Now, obviously, this is more expensive for employers, but the Uber Eats arrangement – in which drivers are only paid when they’ve got a pizza in the car and they’re en route to a customer – doesn’t eliminate that expense. When a gig delivery company takes away the pay that drivers used to get while waiting for a pizza, they’re shifting this expense from employers to workers:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism
The fact that Uber can manipulate the concept of a minimum wage in order to claim to pay $21.12/hour to drivers who are making $2.50 per hour creates all kinds of policy distortions.
Take Seattle: in 2024, the city implemented a program called “PayUp” that sets a “minimum wage” for drivers, but it’s not a real minimum wage. It’s a minimum payment for every ride or delivery.
A new National Bureau of Economic Research paper analyzes the program and concludes that it hasn’t increased drivers’ pay at all:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w34545
To which we might say, “Duh.” Cranking up the sum paid for a small fraction of the work you do for a company will have very little impact on the overall wage you receive from the company.
However, there is an interesting wrinkle in this paper’s conclusions. Drivers aren’t earning less under this system, either. So they’re getting paid more for every delivery, but they’re not adding more deliveries to their day. In other words, they’re doing less work and then clocking off:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/02/minimum-wages-for-gig-work-cant-work.html
A neoclassical economist (someone who has experienced a specific form of neurological injury that makes you incapable of perceiving or reasoning about power) would say that this means that the drivers only desire to earn the sums they were earning before the “minimum wage” and so the program hasn’t made a difference to their lives.
But anyone else can look at this situation and understand that drivers only did this shitty job out of desperation. They had a sum they needed to get every month in order to pay the rent or the grocery bill. They have lots of needs besides those that they would like to fulfill, but not under the shitty gig-work app conditions. The only reason they tolerate a shitty app as their shitty boss at all is that they are desperate, and that desperation gives gig companies power over their workers.
In other words, Seattle’s PayUp “minimum wage” has shifted some of the expense associated with operating a gig platform from workers back onto their bosses. With fewer drivers available on the app, waiting times for customers will necessarily go up. Some of those customers will take the bus, or get a livery cab, or defrost a pizza, or walk to the corner cafe. For the gig platforms to win those customers back, they will have to reduce waiting times, and the most reliable way to do that is to increase the wages paid to their workers.
So PayUp isn’t a wash – it has changed the distributional outcome of the gig-work economy in Seattle. Drivers have clawed back a surplus – time they can spend doing more productive or pleasant things than cruising and waiting for a booking – from their bosses, who now must face lower profits, either from a loss of business from impatient customers, or from a higher wage they must pay to get those wait-times down again.
But if you want to really move the needle on gig workers’ wages, the answer is simple: pay workers for all the hours they put in for their bosses, not just the ones where bosses decide they deserve to get paid for.
(Image: Tobias “ToMar” Maier, CC BY-SA 3.0; Jon Feinstein, CC BY 2.0; modified)
Hey look at this (permalink)
- Privilege is bad grammar https://tadaima.bearblog.dev/privilege-is-bad-grammar/
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Closing the Stablecoin Yield Loophole in the Post-GENIUS Era https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2026/01/23/closing-the-stablecoin-yield-loophole-in-the-post-genius-era/
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The century of the maxxer https://samkriss.substack.com/p/the-century-of-the-maxxer
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Why the “AI God” Narrative is Actually a Corporate Power Grab https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-stop-telling-me
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All Your Base, slight remaster https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/02/all-your-base-slight-remaster/
Object permanence (permalink)
#20yrsago HOWTO resist warrantless searches at Best Buy https://www.die.net/musings/bestbuy/
#20yrsago RIAA using kids’ private info to attack their mother https://web.archive.org/web/20060223111437/http://p2pnet.net/story/7942
#20yrsago Sony BMG demotes CEO for deploying DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060219233817/http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060210/germany_sony_bmg_ceo.html?.v=7
#20yrsago Sistine Chapel recreated through 10-year cross-stitch project https://web.archive.org/web/20060214195146/http://www.austinstitchers.org/Show06/images/sistine2.jpg
#15yrsago Selling cookies like a crack dealer, by dangling a string out your kitchen window https://laughingsquid.com/cookies-sold-by-string-dangling-from-san-francisco-apartment-window/
#15yrsago Midwestern Tahrir: Workers refuse to leave Wisconsin capital over Tea Party labor law https://www.theawl.com/2011/02/wisconsin-demonstrates-against-scott-walkers-war-on-unions/
#10yrsago Back-room revisions to TPP sneakily criminalize fansubbing & other copyright grey zones https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/sneaky-change-tpp-drastically-extends-criminal-penalties
#10yrsago Russian Central Bank shutting down banks that staged fake cyberattacks to rip off depositors https://web.archive.org/web/20160220100817/http://www.scmagazine.com/russian-bank-licences-revoked-for-using-hackers-to-withdraw-funds/article/474477/
#10yrsago Stop paying your student loans and debt collectors can send US Marshals to arrest you https://web.archive.org/web/20201026202024/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/02/us-marshals-forcibly-collecting-student-debt.html?mid=twitter-share-di
#5yrsago Reverse centaurs and the failure of AI https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur
#1yrago Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers’ personalities based on their faces https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
- Salt Lake City: Enshittification at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Tanner Humanities Center), Feb 18
https://tanner.utah.edu/center-events/cory-doctorow/ -
Montreal (remote): Fedimtl, Feb 24
https://fedimtl.ca/ -
Oslo (remote): Seminar og lansering av rapport om «enshittification»
https://www.forbrukerradet.no/siste-nytt/digital/seminar-og-lansering-av-rapport-om-enshittification/ -
Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/ -
Victoria: Enshittification at Russell Books, Mar 4
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-is-coming-to-victoria-tickets-1982091125914 -
Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20
https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/ -
Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
https://conference.bioneers.org/ -
Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow -
Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html -
Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
Recent appearances (permalink)
- Panopticon :3 (Trashfuture)
https://www.patreon.com/posts/panopticon-3-150395435 -
America’s Enshittification is Canada’s Opportunity (Do Not Pass Go)
https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/americas-enshittification-is-canadas -
Everything Wrong With the Internet and How to Fix It, with Tim Wu (Ezra Klein)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-doctorow-wu.html -
How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo -
Enshittification (Jon Favreau/Offline):
https://crooked.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-the-internet-with-cory-doctorow/
Latest books (permalink)
- “Canny Valley”: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
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“Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/ -
“Picks and Shovels”: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
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“The Bezzle”: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
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“The Lost Cause:” a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
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“The Internet Con”: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
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“Red Team Blues”: “A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before.” Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
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“Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin”, on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
Upcoming books (permalink)
- “The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
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“Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
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“The Post-American Internet,” a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
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“Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027
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“The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Colophon (permalink)
Today’s top sources:
Currently writing: “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1148 words today, 30940 total)
- “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
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“The Post-American Internet,” a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
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A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.
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“When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla” -Joey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla
READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (“BOGUS AGREEMENTS”) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
ISSN: 3066-764X
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MD Enshittification
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. As some of you may be aware, I was an Infectious Disease (ID) physician for almost 40 years, retiring 3 years ago. My practice was almost entirely concerned with taking care of patients in several acute care hospitals. So […]
The post MD Enshittification first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.
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Are We Allowed to Criticise Mental Health Professionals?
Editor’s note: this blog is co-published with Mad in America
Are We Allowed to Criticise Mental Health Professionals?
In my book Fragile Minds, I wrote about my recent experiences as a student mental health nurse in England. I wrote about real incidents and real things that staff said and did, which I scrawled down in disbelief while training.
Since its publication, I am beyond grateful for the survivors and staff who have contacted me or written in support of the experiences I needed to make public, though the book has also been called a ‘furious attack’ on psychiatry that doesn’t ‘ring true’. I have been labelled as having a ‘saviour complex’ and as being ‘grandiose’ for asking questions about the treatment I witnessed. It has been claimed that I must be writing these things for my own gain, or that I must be a scientologist, or that I’m not knowledgeable enough to have an opinion on issues that are ‘far too complex’ for people like me to understand.
Publicly criticising psychiatry and our treatment of mental ill health can feel terrifying; it fuels vehement responses which cloud our ability to hear each other and drives us to lash out. It threatens our understanding of ourselves, and our relationship with the world, and highlights our ability to repress and ignore the things in society that are too painful to confront.
So despite having no public profile, I was genuinely frightened of the backlash I would receive. I wondered: if I somehow managed to portray an equal balance of ‘good and bad’ care experiences, would the undesirable truth of the shocking and at times cruel treatment of service users that I witnessed could be digested and believed more readily?
Can we, in fact, continue to champion our free health care system, which I am extremely grateful for, whilst also calling out its abuses both on a systemic and—the really tough one—individual level?
Yet, this desire for a balanced depiction felt fraudulent. The reality was, much to my surprise and disappointment, that I hadn’t witnessed much inspiring or even reassuring care during my two years on mental health wards and in community teams. What I had actually witnessed was overwhelmingly and starkly not good enough.
Stories of good or even excellent care by medical staff, including mental health staff, are of course dominant in our media. The narrative that we are all immensely empathetic, selfless and dedicated despite the challenges feeds into a national pride that I have also felt enveloped by.
I know from both my training as a mental health nurse, and later as a psychotherapist, that we are largely encouraged not to engage with or question other practitioners’ approaches. I’ve been told to ‘ask fewer questions’ about staff, to avoid putting across concerns and instead ‘try and see the best’ in them. The same with therapy training, where we are encouraged to generally assume that if there is a complaint from a client, or that they stop coming to us, or claim it wasn’t helpful or even harmful, we largely see the client’s response as something to do with them and their difficulties or ‘illness’, rather than with ourselves. I think this is a very worrying and even dangerous culture.
So, when are we allowed to critique and potentially criticise mental health staff?
We know that giving humans power often leads to abuse. When journalists do uncover abuses on psychiatric wards, we as a society seem to be willing to accept it as long as it is in the past, or, if it is within institutions that are painted as an ‘exception to the rule’. Likewise, the ‘bad apple’ staff members within a barrel full of virtuous ones.
We also relish books by medical professionals who write about how they are understandably also struggling within the system, mostly due to the long hours, lack of funding and support, or their own mental health. But they are stories about how caring they and all the other staff are, how almost super-human their unending kindness is, despite all the odds.
This is a very understandable narrative, and there are staff like this, I’ve met and worked with some of them. And we as a society want these stories; they fit with the narrative we desperately need when we are at our lowest and seeking support. We also want these stories as staff; it helps us feel better about ourselves while doing a job that is incredibly hard and largely poorly paid and exhausting.
Questioning ourselves as staff or calling out poor care should not be seen as an ‘attack’ on a medical system. It should be an essential part of our love and respect for it, our desire to make it and ourselves better at what we are trying to do.
While on nursing placements and then again while trying to write it all down, I attempted to make sense of why some staff had lost their empathy or dissociated. Why some were even rude or cruel or abusive.
I wanted to dissect the stark divide of patients versus staff, and why nurses huddled in offices and avoided patient contact.
As a student nurse, I know that I occupied a unique position within the psychiatric maze. My time there was finite. I had less paperwork, less pressure and responsibility. I wasn’t seen as the jailer, so I could observe. I had more time to talk, I could listen and absorb, read through years of notes, compare assessments, look for inconsistencies. I was both powerless and powerful.
I know that it’s very different to whistle-blow when you are fully imbedded, when your family depends on your income, or when you’ve been working within a flawed system so long that your brain has moved past fight or flight and into dissociation.
I saw first-hand that when despondency grows, it’s easier for us staff to numb ourselves, to hide amid banality and follow orders, than it is to challenge anything.
Of course, with some staff it was easier to see what had happened to bring this dissociation and hopelessness on, than with others.
Some staff appeared to have been devastated too many times by the poor outcomes of their treatment or the suicides of their patients to keep attempting to care for new patients.
Others seemed to have been drained of empathy by the long days and relentless emotional toll of working with people in distress and not having been trained in how to really help them, or been emotionally supported to do so.
Others still, by the orders to restrain or forcibly medicate over and over, or the doctrine of psychiatry itself which encourages us to ‘other’ the patients experiences from ourselves.
There were also staff who seemed to have shifted their focus to protecting and empathising with other staff who they saw as being under attack from the interminable workforce shortages and unsafe demands, leaving them with little time or consideration for their patients.
Yet more challenging, there were the staff members whose behaviour was difficult to understand. The staff who seemed to enjoy provoking patients into behaviours they were then punished for. Who told me they enjoyed the ‘action’ on wards, describing how it was a ‘rush’ for them to wrestle people to the floor or to inject them. Staff who seemed to hate their job and therefore the patients who embodied it. There were also staff who just flat-out lacked the skills I assumed were vital to working in mental health: patience, thoughtfulness, curiosity.
It’s odd to see how readily we accept and even crave these characters in our films or books, but don’t want to believe that they exist within our real staff. Why is this?
Of course, some of the backlash I’ve received has also come from service users who are protective of a system they feel has helped them. I can understand this. Though I question whether they are the minority, the minority among the many, many others who feel harmed. And it is the grateful service users who shout the loudest, who are given the biggest coverage in the media, whose stories we hear most.
But at what cost do people have their good experiences? At what cost to all those who are silenced? To those who are shouted down as ‘anti-psychiatry’, shamed as conspiracy theorists, or are simply derided and told they are mad?
When I started recording the worrying incidents I was witnessing, I was advised that my complaints would go nowhere and make it difficult for me to pass the course. So, I thought, what can we do when we’re unable to complain? When we can no longer explain?
We can document. We can record as an act of evidence, as the basis for examination. We can attempt to capture the disorder of the whole so we can tease it apart, see its makings, and empower people to act. At least, that is what I’ve tried to do.
I can only hope that Fragile Minds adds to the canon of survivor and activist literature in a way that helps people with similar experiences to speak up and be believed, both the survivors of psychiatric treatment and the staff who resist the pressure to conform.
****
Mad in the UK hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.
The post Are We Allowed to Criticise Mental Health Professionals? appeared first on Mad in the UK.
