When Treatment Isn’t Treatment

Oct 18, 2024 //
2

I wrote something for the BC election, and had it published by a small independent online news outlet. You can read the published copy here:

Involuntary Treatment is a Cruel Betrayal

I’d also like to include the original article. A lot of the vitriol was removed from the piece, and I’d like to share my anger with my sweet Chumps. Cheers!

There appears to be a surreal and growing consensus between the two poles of British Columbian politics. Presumably as a preamble to fully dissolving the party and endorsing the Conservatives, the NDP has embraced a series of regressive policies that leaves one wondering if the party of the radical woke Marxists is truly living up to the moniker. This whiplash shift in the Overton Window began when the NDP caved to political pressure and ended their decriminalization pilot project halfway through its run time, then caved to pressure and abandoned the life-saving harm reduction vending machines providing discreet access to disease-free supplies, then caved to pressure and pledged to withdraw from the carbon tax at the earliest possible convenience, and then finally the latest surrender to conservative pressure has been the promise to, once again, force people who use drugs into treatment. If it is not consensus, it is – at the very least – brazen cowardice.

As mentioned, the latest endeavour of this Craven Coalition is to snatch all the people off the street who use drugs and jail them, allegedly for their own good. It’s “treatment,” after all! Of course, they can’t send anyone to actual drug and alcohol treatment centres because there aren’t even enough beds for the voluntary clients, nor can they place them in dedicated mental health facilities or hospitals because those are all spilling over too! I suppose jails were chosen through a process of elimination. The NDP will retort that it won’t be prison guards or wardens administering these units but licensed medical professionals – as if that somehow changes the facility this all takes place in or the dearth of licensed medical professionals in the hiring pool. It will be a locked unit with many security personnel, and it sure won’t be an ambulance bringing in the new inmates! Following the trend of recriminalization, the NDP is choosing to meet the Public Health Crisis that was declared in 2016 with the full force of the carceral system.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. This is a deadly serious problem, and there is a treatment for it! It’s literally in the name! If we can overcome the logistical impossibilities of this kind of program and force these recalcitrant sticks-in-the-mud to just get a little help, then so many lives will be saved, so many families will be happily reunited, and so many people will continue to vote for the incumbent government. Is that not something noble worth striving for?

I worry that when people hear the word “treatment” when it refers to addiction, they think it works like an antibiotic: you party too hard over the weekend, catch a smidge of an addiction, you take some penicillin as prescribed, and it clears right up! Forcing someone into treatment under those circumstances might make some sense; if someone stubbornly refuses their dialysis, they’re often assessed as incapable, forced into the medical procedure, then sent back into the world until their organs start failing again. The coercive dream seems to be a brief intervention that measurably prolongs a life through medically-sound practices.

This is not, however, what drug and alcohol addiction treatment looks like. I worked for a couple of years in a licensed treatment centre, and continue to work as a social worker with people who use drugs. In my experience with treatment centres, they typically have programs like art therapy, music therapy, trauma-informed yoga, group therapy, one-to-one counselling, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to help establish healthier links between thoughts, feelings, and actions, Dialectical Behavioural Therapy to help regulate overwhelming emotions, and so on. A pattern is beginning to emerge here! Even 12 Step-based programs (like Alcoholics Anonymous and the facilities that embrace it) function along the lines of non-judgemental and accepting communities that provide a caring environment for residents who typically feel isolated and stigmatized out among the rest of society. I believe if John Rustad ever learns how much Social and Emotional Learning goes into addiction treatment, he would abandon the whole project.

Going into a bed-based treatment centre means going into a 90 day therapy session. The reason for this is that addiction arises from trauma. In fact, all the people who use drugs that I’ve worked with use them to cope with that trauma. Drugs are the treatment for trauma. I will say it again: drugs are the treatment that people with addiction use to help them live with their debilitating trauma. These facilities exist as 90 day therapy sessions to provide alternative coping skills to the numbing and euphoric effects of drugs – quite tempting when sobriety is a living hell. The reason these facilities aren’t always effective is because addiction manifests itself over years or potentially decades, accumulating compounding trauma throughout the process, and three months of therapy before returning to the same environment that spawned all that trauma and drug use in the first place is unfortunately not the “cure” that people want it to be. Remember, if they have them, people have to go home when they’re done. If people are being taken off the street, where does the NDP intend to send them once their “treatment” is complete?

If the NDP thinks forcing people who use drugs into therapy is a good idea, I would invite David Eby to tell his wife, “Just calm down!” the next time they’re having an argument and report back on how well it went. There is a reason that 99% of treatment facilities are unlocked: people need to want to be there. The idea is to regain control of your life, and taking away that control at the outset is so obviously counterintuitive to the therapeutic process that it makes me wonder if the NDP actually knows any more about addiction treatment than John Rustad. Abducting people off the street, forcing them into jails, telling them this is for their own good, all of this is going to add to their trauma, not reduce it. Calling this “treatment” in line with the other resources that are available is going to terrify people struggling with addiction away from getting any kind of legitimate help. Rather than force people into addiction recovery, the results from this would have the NDP forcing people away from it.

Who is this for? This anti-therapeutic model was clearly not designed with people who use drugs in mind, so what is the NDP’s goal here? The reason this disaster of a policy was introduced was because a 13 year old girl fled her foster care and overdosed in a homeless encampment. Why not promise improvements to the foster care system? Why not promise additional supports for families so that kids don’t end up in care? Why not promise additional funding to Child and Youth Mental Health services to cut down on wait times? Why resort to this asinine model? Unsurprisingly given the NDP’s sea-change from orange to yellow, we’re following the traditional conservative trope of being Tough On Crime: ignore all the complex reasons that the scary thing is happening and warehouse the scary people so that they’re out of sight and out of mind. If we can stoke people’s fears and promise simplistic solutions to resolve them, we’re sure to win!

This provincial election is an embarrassment. With Kevin Falcon having sabotaged his own party into oblivion, the two surviving contenders appear in lockstep to dehumanize and discard people who use drugs. I’m not so naive to think that the Conservatives will provide any kind of reasonable or humane drug policy, nor any kind of other policy, so as a progressive voter, I will likely swallow the caustic bile festering in the back of my throat and vote NDP – only because the Greens are not viable in my riding. We desperately need to do better. We desperately need to actually look at the evidence when trying to address addiction, and start addressing trauma. If there are any politicians remaining who are capable of feeling shame, I hope they’re crippled by it.

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Categories Politics

Social Work: The Noble Profession

Aug 18, 2024 //
0

I am a social worker in Canada, and with some frequency I am told that I work in a noble profession. And it’s always that word, too: noble. Social workers are paragons of virtue simply by dint of how we make a paycheck. We don’t toil monotonous labour; we don’t exploit those same labourers for surplus value – we transcend the capitalist dichotomy. Doctors, firefighters, and the like may be heroes, but social workers are noble. We’re not glamourously saving lives; we’re in the trenches helping the less fortunate. We sit among both the lepers and the crooks. It’s unclear what we actually do, as I find when talking to even those who work intimately with social workers, but our virtue is assumed – whatever it is we’re doing with those lepers and crooks is irrelevant. Our proximity to pain is enough.

So what do social workers do? Are we really so noble? Am I secretly a monster??

Pictured: a social worker

The Sixties Scoop refers to direct policies of colonial Canada to remove indigenous children from their homes and place them into white foster families or fully adopt them into other, equally white families. It ran from about the 1950s until the 1990s. It represented a shift in approach from the residential school policy which was established to follow the maxim, “Kill the Indian, save the man.” This approach aimed to “save” the indigenous person by “killing” everything that was indigenous about them, and the residential school program aimed to do exactly that by removing children from their families and culture, abusing them if they spoke their native tongue, and presenting them as superficially white with shorn hair and new clothes.

As abducting children from their homes and imprisoning them in abusive facilities became more and more gauche, the Canadian government needed a new methodology to “save” them. In comes the social worker to investigate indigenous homes, and when the indigenous parents are found lacking by white colonial standards, abducting the children from their homes and imprisoning them in abusive white families. This practice continues to this day in what’s called the Millennium Scoop, as the majority of youth in care across the country remain indigenous despite being a small fraction of the Canadian population. Social workers as a profession are responsible for this.

Pictured: another social worker

But surely social workers must do more than whisk babies away in the dead of the night to feed the endlessly hungry maw of settler colonialism! And we do! Socials workers are in schools, healthcare, all over the place. We even do more than just report new moms to child welfare when they’ve given birth while poor! We also connect those without an income to regular, adult person welfare which in British Columbia adds up to… $560 a month.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: that seems like less than table scraps. But there’s more! Social workers can also support low-income people in getting housing that is arguably worse than homelessness: insufficient temperature controls that have residents freezing during the winter and cooking in the summer; illegal practices by landlords including unlawful evictions; restrictions on guests preventing loved ones from ever visiting; health issues arising from mold, bed bugs, vermin, and general lack of upkeep; the list goes on. Those helped by social workers can enjoy their fraction of a scrap living in deplorable squalor.

The resources that social workers can actually provide to the people they’re “helping” are so insufficient it seems somewhat surreal to refer to it as helping at all. This is the parsimonious bounty the system provides, and social workers are the smiling face of the miser doling it out. People don’t typically know what social workers do because even in the best case scenario, the real answer is so close to “nothing” that we would all collectively die of embarrassment if anyone actually looked into it.

Pictured: still another social worker

If our jobs are so trivial, how did we become noble? In this instance, it’s useful to look at the etymology of the term. Noble comes from the Latin nobilis, referring to the high-born families of the time: the nobility, duh! It is a moral framework steeped in hierarchy. Noble people are those who embody the ethic of the aristocracy, and social workers do exactly that.

The idea of the welfare state is to help the less fortunate, but capitalism can’t actually address any of the root causes of poverty and inequality because that would upend capitalism itself. Welfare is the compassion of capitalism whose sole purpose is to never solve anything. Monetary policy requires a percentage of the population to be unemployed; when there is inflation, the central bank raises interest rates in order to produce more poor people. Our system requires poverty, and if any of the methods utilized by that system ever did anything to address it, society would collapse into itself in a Dadaist paradox. Social workers are the systemic representation of that compassionate farce. We are noble because we are the morality of the capitalist elite. When approaching indigenous population, we are the ethic of the white settlers, taking up the white man’s burden to serve our captives’ need. We ease the worries of an otherwise apathetic middle-class, comforted knowing that social workers are there as a bulwark against the cognitive dissonance from class and racial guilt.

Pictured: a final disparaging caricature of social workers

We are not, however, a moral profession. As compassionate and as genuine as social workers tend to be, our “help” is often harm. Indigenous families do not look upon social workers as saviours but as destroyers, tearing up their families in the name of an oppressive fantasy of “doing good.” The impoverished do not see social workers as angels coming down from on high, but merely as a means of drowning less quickly. We try to be good, but good on whose terms? We try to help, but we’re in denial, cogs maintaining the facade of a benevolent state. True solutions would not involve social workers at all, but a restructuring of the world so that the horrifying outcomes of colonial capitalism would not be produced in the first place.

If the ethic of nobility is the delusion social workers use to sleep at night, it is useful to look at the Latin once more to try to break free from that corrupted reverie. We traditionally think of the vulgar as the offensive, the crass, the unclean. In its origin, however, it referred to the low-born, everyone else outside of the nobility. These are the people social workers are supposed to support, yet we remain detached and aloof. How can we bridge that gap? What would an ethic of the vulgar look like? What would social work practice look like if it embraced the vulgar instead of the noble?

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Categories Social Criticism

Superheroes: The Delusion of Power

Jun 30, 2024 //
2

Power is typically seen as the capacity to act – with obviously varying degrees. A prisoner can pace their cell, do push-ups, and so on, but can’t act outside the limits of their cage. The President of the United States might not have the power to verbalize a complete thought, but he can do all the things the prisoner can, and more besides. They both have power, but one of them has far more power than the other.

I think this is a narrow view of power that is lacking one of its key components: need. The variations in power aren’t so much across the capacity to act per se, but the capacity to act without considering the needs of others. The prisoner must accommodate the needs of the warden, the guard, the parole board, and so on. His needs are ranked quite low when contemplating which actions to take. The President of the United States, on the other hand, can skate by without acknowledging the needs of most of the planet. He might have to consider the needs of Benjamin Netanyahu, to a degree, as the Israeli Prime Minister has considerable power in this regard as well, but he certainly does not need to consider the needs of the Palestinians who are, for all intents and purposes, power-less.

How power is depicted goes a long way

Taking this needs-focused perspective of power opens up further understandings of how power works, and how impotent our approach to it actually is. If we consider our human needs (using Maslow’s hierarchy for the sake of simplicity), what we consider powerful can really only help us meet our most basic needs: food, water, safety, shelter. This can also help us define what might be considered ‘power’ as anything that can help us obtain these things without considering the needs of others – money, celebrity, access to opportunity (think Harvey Weinstein), and so on.

In case you need a refresher

There are way more needs than the basic ones, and power is useless in obtaining them. Love is elusive to those whose identity is based solely in their power, and this is highlighted in the common trope of the rich person worrying over whether they are loved as themselves or if those close to them are only after their money. Similarly with esteem: we think we respect power, but we really only respect what one does with it. Elon Musk isn’t respected because of his money, but because of his advocacy for free speech and his pursuit of a better world for humanity through clean energy and space exploration; or, he’s not, because of his advocacy for racism and his massive ego whose projects offset any climate good his cars might produce. His power is irrelevant; he is judged by his actions based on the capacity that he has to act – as anyone would be. Self-actualization goes without saying.

Someone with only their very most basic needs being met – such a thing to strive for…

So why is there this fixation on power? Why do so many people strive for it, often at the cost of their other needs? Why do we delude ourselves that power is somehow going to fulfill our lives when it literally cannot? The answer is obviously capitalism, you goons; it’s always capitalism.

Capitalism as an ideology requires an underclass to use their labour to produce the things needed by the more powerful. This required scarcity forces people into a situation of never having enough power, so our most basic needs can never be met. A housing market that makes shelter out of reach; low wages to make food and security luxuries; a “flexible labour market” (i.e. gig work) to make the underclass even more precarious in their ability to meet their basic needs.

We are then told that in order to get our needs met, we must compete laterally with others in our class. We must gain power by any means necessary, and that’s the only way we’ll be able to afford rent. Do not consider the needs of your neighbour; they are in competition with you! The only way for society to function is if there are winners and losers, and winners don’t need to accommodate anyone. This is the way.

Baby Yoda’s famous catchphrase, “Fuck you. I got mine!”

This isn’t to say that power didn’t exist prior to capitalism. Feudalism obviously had lords going head to head to obtain more power – it’s just that the regular people didn’t give a shit because they had their basic needs met. More people had access to a more diffuse power: land. If you had access to land, you had food, security, family, and so on, and didn’t see the point in striving for anything else. If you didn’t have land, there was still the commons which allowed a degree of needs to be met. There wasn’t as much wealth as we understand it today, but there didn’t really need to be; people had enough. Industrialization created urbanization which increased inequality and poverty which reduced the average person’s power, and the shrinking of the commons increased commodification which reduced normal people’s ability to get their needs met as basic needs became more and more unaffordable. As the West went through this transition, we peasants and proletarians gained political power through the institution of democracy, but lost it economically as the means of production shifted more and more to the ownership class.

This blog is technically more anarchistic than communistic, but Party Marx will always be welcome for discussions around the ownership of the means of production

This manufactured scarcity and proselytized ideology has deluded us into thinking that with power, we’ll finally be able to live the lives we want to have. To a degree this is true: we cannot achieve anything without our basic needs being met, and power is required to obtain them. The delusion arises when we forget that our goal is to get our needs met, and not power in-and-of itself. We want money in seeming ignorance that the entire purpose of money is to buy stuff – do we want the money or do we want the stuff? Do we want the power or do we want to have our needs met?

Also, wasn’t this article supposed to be about superheroes?

It has been this whole; you just had no idea!

Superheroes have superpowers which would include them in this analysis. It’s a little campy, but being more powerful than a locomotive is technically a power. As David Hume said, “Strength is a kind of power; and therefore the desire to excel in strength is to be considered as an inferior species of ambition.” Could Superman achieve his basic needs without taking into consideration the needs of others? Absolutely! That’s how we get Injustice and Homelander. This shit counts, however nerdy an ambition it might be.

Superman, of course, would never do such a thing in the traditional canon. That’s what makes him heroic. He doesn’t use his power for himself, and I’m going to argue that he doesn’t do it for the people of Metropolis either. The people of Metropolis don’t exist – they’re fictional. Superman doesn’t technically exist either, but the story of Superman does. The writers are producing this power, and the power of Superman is used to meet the needs of person reading his story. We feel secure against the threat of Zod. We feel safe from the machinations of Lex Luthor. This is how empathy works.

If our needs don’t supersede the needs of the hero, they become the villain. This is why the villain Homelander is still seen as a hero in an ever-increasing fascistic America – the people who watch The Boys don’t see any issue with what he’s doing, and their needs remain met by his actions. But traditional villains rob banks and try to take over the world, using their superpowers to meet their own needs. Disney’s new “sympathetic” Marvel villains have high ideals, but don’t consider the needs of others in their quest for it – this is how their villainy is displayed despite the validity of their ideology.

The face of accommodating the needs of others

The thing is, this glomming on to the powerful with the assumption that they’ll meet our needs exists outside the world of the superhero as well. In the traditional model, women (who are limited in their power) will seek out powerful men as a means of linking themselves with his power to help them get their own needs met in a world that wouldn’t allow them to be met otherwise. If there is abuse or violence, it is often endured out of a fear that her needs won’t be met without him – his power is all she has to keep herself from becoming powerless.

Under capitalism, there are more powerless people than just trad wives. Many of us live our lives with the bare minimum of power, scraping by as best we can. Wouldn’t it be nice to attach ourselves to some hero who would use their power to uplift our own? This is the allure of the tyrant. Surely I’ll be taken care of if we give more power to this person with whom I identify! Surely my station will be reduced if they are overthrown! We connect to the tyrant as we would to Superman, as some of us bizarrely do with Homelander – they will use their power to keep us safe. Our needs will be considered; the needs of the outsider be damned. But is the solution to our abusive boyfriend to make sure we land a nice one, or to adjust society so that women and men are equitable in their power, limiting the potential for abuse to happen in the first place? Such a world appears to be possible!

People are alive today who have witnessed significant changes in systems of power

The thing is, power is the capacity to act without considering the needs of others. The powerful don’t need to consider us, so why would they? That’s how power maintains itself, so why abandon the working model? We, however, as a collective have more power than any individual. This is why platitudes are made about how the powerful will take care of us, as a manipulation. We are given speeches and scraps to delude us into thinking that we are better off with them having all the power, with us remaining powerless and allowing them to go unchallenged. Superman is a propagandic myth: the boyfriend who tells his girlfriend to never leave him, he’s going to take care of her, trust him.

Power cannot escape what it is; we have to escape power. We have to recognize the value of our neighbour and accommodate them accordingly. We have to recognize the life beyond our basic needs. Both of these perspective require giving up our pursuit of power. Power will never go away, our basic needs will always need to be met, but we can diffuse it. Just as democracy diffused political power, we must identify other aspects of power and diffuse them as well. Power where it exists today must be counterbalanced – this is often the project of the Left as we try to convince governments to allow the otherwise powerless access to their basic needs. It’s a faulty system as power remains relatively undisturbed, and this liberal redistribution does not address the root causes of the concentration of that power, but it’s what the system currently allows. We still have room to dream for more.

To quote a super-villain (notably, one later purchased by Disney), “When everyone is super, no one will be.” And we’d be better off for it.

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Categories Politics, Social Criticism
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