It's a jail—a place where you lock up undesirable people where they can't impose costs on anyone who isn't being paid to deal with them. And precisely _because_ I was modeling it as a jail, my social performance was a lot better this time around than in 2013.
-
[TODO psych ward scenes—
A nice thing about being a free citizen that you don't notice until you've lost it by being kidnapped and thrown in jail, is having a sense of where you are in the world. When visiting an unfamiliar place, I at least know _how_ I got there, how this place _connects_ to everything else in my model of the world: I may not be familiar with this building or these streets, but I know the train or highway that I took to get here from places that I do know—at worst, if I brought my phone, I can pull up Google Maps to see where I am.
...
- * wanted to avoid taking medication, put on a magician-like "show" to nurse to try to trick her, it didn't work
- * in retrospect, the medication was a good idea
- * I ended up with a booklet that claims I have the right to refuse medication, but this isn't actually true in practice
- * paper claims that I "self presented due to your suicidal thoughts"; this isn't true; getting stopped by the cops while trying to
+After I was released and got my belongings back, I couldn't find my Driver License. For a few days, I assumed that one of the psych ward employees had stolen it out of my wallet. I was wrong: actually, there was a separate license-holder compartment inside the wallet. I had forgotten.
+
+...
+
+This was a theme in my thoughts at the time: I was scared that the world was a much less orderly place than I knew. I used to believe the world was "made out of words": that the things people said were mostly true, that the world protrayed in books and maps mostly _was_ the real world. Suddenly, I had been granted a different view of reality, a world of animals in which _words don't matter_.
+
+In retrospect, my psychotic vision of a languageless world turned out to be false. Most people really _do_ know how to read.
+
+I fear that some readers will take this as an admission that the authorities were right, that conventional social reality is right—that I was _just_ crazy, and everything I thought while I was crazy can be costlessly discarded.
+
+I don't think that's right. I _was_ crazy, but _that doesn't mean ordinary social reality is sane_—and it doesn't mean that some of the things I thought I saw from my altered perspective weren't _directionally_ correct, as I can evaluate them from a more standard frame of mind now.
+
+Sometimes, the words written down in official documents really are just lies. I have in my possession an "Involuntary Patient Advisement" form, which claims that I "self presented due to [my] suicidal thoughts". This isn't true. Getting accosted by cops while trying to go into the train station to get back to my apartment is not the same thing as "self presenting"!
+
+I ended up with a "Rights for Individuals in Mental Health Facilities" handbook, which claims that:
+
+> You have the right to refuse medical treatment or treatment with medications (except in an emergency) unless a capacity hearing is held and a hearing officer or a judge finds that you do not have the capacity to consent to or refuse treatment. The advocate or public defender can assist you with this matter.
+
+Naïvely, one might expect that having the right to refuse medication means that when someone tries to give you medication, you can just say that you don't want to take it, and they'll respect that. This did not seem to be true: I was reluctant to take medication, but the behavior of the staff made it clear that they weren't going to take no for an answer, and I folded, _because they were holding me prisoner_.
+
+I remember trying to deceive a staff member, putting on a "show" with magician-like hand flourishes (to which she dutifully pretended to be impressed, as one would to a toddler) before taking the pill—hoping to palm it before swallowing it without her noticing. It didn't work. I swallowed.
+
+Maybe if I had had the presence of mind at the time to read the rights handbook, and point to the specific line where it says, "You have the right to refuse [...] treatment with medications", they would have accepted that? But it seems likely that that would have been punished by a longer stay. A "right" that you get punished for exercising is ... not much of a right?
+
+As it happens, I _now_ think that taking the medication was a good idea. The reason I think this is because when I sought psychiatric help for insomnia in early 2021—intending very dearly not to go insane from sleep deprivation again, very much not wanting to be institutionalized again—the doctor told me that my records from my 2017 institutionalization said they had me on Zyprexa 5mg and Trazadone 50mg. Trazadone!—that was on [Scott Alexander's insomnia page](https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/02/insomnia/).
+
+I worry, again, that some readers will take this as vindication that the authorities were right: they forced me to take drugs, and now that I'm sane and have a little more information, I agree that the drugs were a good idea. Why, the contemptuous normie reader asks, does this not demonstrate that they were right to force me, when I was crazy and therefore couldn't make decisions for myself?
+
+Because submission to authority isn't the same thing as sanity. In the psych ward in February 2017, I _knew_ that I needed sleep. If someone I trusted to have my best interests at heart had _told me_, "This is 50mg Trazadone; I strongly recommend you take it, because it will help you sleep; I also have this Trazadone fact sheet you can read if you want more information," I probably would have taken it.
+
+A system that actually had my best interests at heart would not have _kidnapped me and locked me in a building with strangers_, which is _not a good environment for getting rest_.
+
+Serious antipsychotic medication is scary stuff. When I was institutionalized in 2013, I had tardive dyskensia—an involuntary lip-smacking compulsion—from the Haldol that they gave me. Tardive dyskensia can be permanent in some cases.
+
+I do not think I had good reason to trust the system given the information I had at the time.
+
+...
+
+Scott Alexander's post on navigating the inpatient mental health system says that doctors will sometimes threaten to have a patient committed involuntarily, if they don't agree to sign a form committing themselves "voluntarily".
+
+"This sounds super Orwellian, but it really is done with the patient's best interest at heart," Alexander says. As a local response within the system, I'm sure it is—at least, I'm sure Alexander believes what he wrote. But I would argue that timelessly and in the long run, _destroying the concept_ of "voluntary" is not actually in the interests of the victims of coercion.
+
+ * Another "gem" from _Slate Star_ on the inpatient system: "don't contradict evidence against you, don't accuse other people of lying, just downplay whatever you can downplay, admit to what the doctors already believe, and make it sound like things have gotten better" !!!—similarly, "take the damn drugs"
...
* First facility—separate rooms with beds for men and women; me tapping at the walls trying to teach; pacing, thinking I was one of the most important people in the world
+
* Taken to a separate facility; _very_ lucky to get my own room
...
- * "Now memories are blurred, and their faces are obscured"
+ * ("Now memories are blurred, and their faces are obscured")
* racist/sexist intuitions: avoid the gaze of males; males physically smaller than me are OK
* a moment of solidarity with a black male smaller than me?
* beliefs about evolutionary psychology (make friends, avoid enemies) very salient
...
* asking Anna on the phone whether I was a political prisoner "Really?" "Really really?" followups (if I were a political prisoner; she might not be able to say so)
+
+...
+
* mother visited, mother was cranky, Michael Vassar visited; Michael said that rape doesn't really happen in this kind of facility, and I believed him; I handed him papers (which I thought was necessary to escape the powers that be)
+ * my reports were not reliable; I thought Vassar pretended to be a doctor; I thought one of the other inmates had a security code
* vision of needing to pull the fire alarm?
+
+...
+
* other males pacing the way I pace
- * my reports were not reliable; I thought Vassar pretended to be a doctor; I thought one of the other inmates had a security code
- * trope-awareness of being a psych patient; distrustful of other psych patient; thought I could subtly leave clues that I was a Jesus-analogue (as a Jewish male with long hair) to discourage people from murdering me (because the Christianity meme says you're not supposed to do that); I told people that my father was coming to pick me up at the end of my 72-hour (== 3 days) evaluation period, but that it wasn't fair that I couldn't rescue everyone. (I'm proud of this one.)
- * my father actually did pick me up three days later!
+
+...
+
+I was a very genre-savvy psych prisoner. I was distrustful of the other inmates, and distrustful of the authorities, but in different ways; the optimal strategy to protect myself against each was different.
+
+I feared violence from the other inmates. I thought I could subtly leave clues that (as a Jewish male with long hair), I was an incarnation of Jesus, which would discourage them from attacking me (because many of them would have already been programmed by Christianity meme to believe that killing Jesus was the worst sin). I told people that my father was coming to pick me up at the end of my three-day evaluation period, but that it wasn't fair that I couldn't rescue everyone. (I'm proud of this one, even though I no longer agree with the threat model.) My father actually did pick me up in three days.
]
12 March—
> You can tell that recent life events have made me more worried than I used to be about unFriendly/unaligned possibly-AI-assisted institutions being a threat to humane values long before an actual AI takeoff in however many decades
+
+-------
+
+On 12 March 2017, I made a Facebook post trying to explain my new outlook:
+
+> The core of the update is that it turns out to be surprisingly useful to model the world as being made out of three things: people (who can be friends, enemies, or strangers), evolved social-control mechanisms (which use people as components as well as trains, pieces of paper, credit cards, web forms, &c.), and rocks. Instead of taking the things that people say about the evolved social-control mechanisms literally with respect to what _you_ think the words mean, you should constantly be making predictions (preferably predictions that you can get feedback about on the timescale of seconds or minutes) about what will happen if you interact with the social-control mechanisms in a particular way, and then noticing if the predictions come true or not. It turns out that non-nerds—you know, those people we disdain for being stupid or sexist or voting for Donald Trump or whatever your favorite excuse is—already knew this; they just didn't tell you because they were—correctly—modeling you as a component in the evolved social-control mechanisms rather than as a person.
+
+-----
+
+
I met Jessica in March
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff