Why Anti-Carceral Care Matters to Me as a Psych Survivor

I come to care work from lived experience, through my body, my memories, and my survival. I am a psych survivor. That means I have lived through psychiatric systems that claimed to help while using control, coercion, and punishment as their primary tools. It means I know what it feels like to have your pain interpreted as pathology, your resistance reframed as noncompliance, and your humanity reduced to a chart note.

Anti carceral care matters to me because punishment and control are deeply embedded in how mental health support is often delivered. Even outside of prisons and jails, punishment shows up in hospitals, treatment centers, and so called helping professions. It shows up as forced medication, involuntary holds, surveillance, behavioral contracts, compliance based access to care, and the constant threat of having your autonomy taken away if you are deemed too much.

As a psych survivor, I learned early that the system was less interested in understanding my pain than in managing it. Distress was something to be subdued. Anger was something to be medicated. Grief was something to be expedited. There was little room for context, for trauma, for the ways oppression shapes mental health, or for the wisdom of my own bodymind. Anti carceral care begins by refusing this flattening. It insists that distress makes sense.

What Carceral Care Looks Like in Mental Health Spaces

Carceral care is not just about locked doors and restraints, though those are very real and very present for many of us. It is also about the quieter forms of control that are normalized as best practice. Risk assessments that prioritize liability over relationship. Treatment plans written without any input or consent. Language that labels people as noncompliant, manipulative, or treatment resistant when what they are actually doing is protecting themselves.

For psych survivors, these experiences leave lasting marks. Many of us carry medical trauma, mistrust, and fear that follow us long after discharge. We learn that honesty can be dangerous. We learn to perform wellness to avoid punishment. We learn that survival sometimes means silence.

Anti Carceral Care Is Not the Absence of Care

One of the most persistent myths is that anti carceral approaches mean a lack of accountability or structure. For me, it is the opposite. Anti carceral care is deeply intentional. It is rooted in relationship, consent, and shared power. It asks harder questions.

Instead of asking, How do we control this person, it asks, What is happening here and what support would actually help?

Instead of compliance, it centers collaboration. Instead of punishment, it prioritizes repair. Instead of risk management alone, it values dignity.

As a psych survivor, anti carceral care feels different in my nervous system. It feels like being believed. It feels like having choices, even when options are limited. It feels like someone staying present with discomfort instead of rushing to contain it.

Why This Is Personal

My commitment to anti carceral care is not theoretical. It is shaped by every moment I was not listened to. Every time my no was overridden. Every time care was made conditional on obedience. These experiences did not heal me. They taught me to dissociate, to mask, to hide what I felt, that lying meant freedom.

Healing, for me, began in spaces that honored my autonomy. Spaces where I was allowed to be messy, contradictory, and slow. Spaces that understood that safety does not come from force, but from relationship and consent. Spaces that recognized that surviving psychiatric harm is itself a form of wisdom.

Anti carceral care is how I make meaning of what I survived. It is how I ensure that my work does not replicate the harms that nearly broke me.

Centering Psych Survivors and Mad Wisdom

Psych survivors have been telling the truth about psychiatric violence for generations. Our stories have often been dismissed as anecdotal or biased, precisely because we are labeled as unreliable narrators of our own lives. Anti carceral care insists that our lived experience is not a liability, but a vital source of knowledge.

Mad wisdom, peer support, and survivor led practices challenge the idea that expertise only comes from credentials. They remind us that those who have been most impacted by harm often hold the clearest insight into what needs to change.

Choosing a Different Way Forward

Anti carceral care is not a destination. It is an ongoing practice of unlearning and choosing connection again and again. It requires humility, especially for those of us who hold roles of support or leadership. It requires us to notice when fear, urgency, or liability starts to override compassion.

For me, choosing anti carceral care is an act of devotion. To my younger self. To other psych survivors who are still navigating systems that do not see them. To a future where care is not about coercion or control.

I believe we can build forms of support that do not rely on cages, coercion, or control. I believe we can respond to crisis without stripping people of their rights. I believe that care rooted in consent, relationship, and dignity is not only possible, but necessary.

As a psych survivor, anti carceral care is not optional. It is the only kind of care that feels like life.