To be frank, I understand that some people maintain that police are appropriate responses to mental health crises. I understand their viewpoint so thoroughly that I read NAMI’s sponsored report maintaining that police are allowed to fear mental illness. The report, admittedly, was not completely horrendous, but what we do as an American society is attribute more humanity to vicous and violent opressors than we do to those who are marginalized and misunderstood.

I’ll begin with a narrative that I am not ashamed of:

July 10, 2023 was the day that flashing police lights and loud sirens from an event going on nearby alerted my unconscious to get the hell up. I was in the middle of a nightmare from some past trauma I was processing, and, well, I wasn’t really aware when I woke up that I was stuck living out my deepest trauma.

My partner (may God have mercy on his soul) was insistent that if he were to do as I asked (leave me alone; give me space), I would feel abandoned, and that was the biggest fear in his mind.

Now, I do accept that I brought that on myself.

Earlier in the year, I fell into a dark depression (would not recommend), and I asked for a lot of space. He did in fact give me a lot of space. My fault was not communicating that even with giving me space, I wanted to know still about him. If that meant we went out for ice cream or dinner and it was just us enjoying company in relative silence, that would have sufficed. Unfortunately, my partner assumed that would be too stressful for my overly depressed brain, and, since that was the primary modality of coping for him (engaging in outside activities), he didn’t think to check with me.

Back to July, though.

So my partner tried really, really hard to do what he thought was right. He wanted me to know, without question, that he wanted me – even in the middle of being woken up during a traumatic memory and freaking out from not knowing what was happening.

This is where things started to get messy.

His primary coping skill for trauma is to smack himself in the face, including sometimes the desire to bang his head against the wall. I flat out have never liked or supported this, and have desperately tried to help him see there are better ways. And he’s been pretty successful at coping in other ways. But this time, he must’ve felt trapped.

So, in the middle of my trauma, he freaks out and starts hitting himself. He bashes his head against the wall, and I was completely concerned for his safety.

I, being in the middle of trauma, had limited crisis management skills. The best I could do was pin him down and hope to God that it would be enough to get my partner to understand that I wasn’t wanting to harm him or even placed any blame on him.

Granted, he freaked out at that.

But he did consider that he shouldn’t be doing that, thankfully.

Yet, he persisted. And I grabbed his wrists to try and stop him from really damaging himself with another TBI (traumatic brain injury). But he is stronger. He desperately flung limbs at me in confusion. But again, how someone reacts to being triggered isn’t something I feel the need to claim is violence. It’s not even something that I felt was relevant to getting him the treatment he didn’t know he deserved.

I was concerned; there was no way I was going to attempt to explain that I would stand firm in that stopping someone’s self-harm was more important than trying to look good before a neighborhood. So my hands and arms flung into him in an indavertent means to protect being hurt in the crossfire (mainly due to being pysically fought on stopping his self-harm) as he was trying desperately to leave, and I was terrified because it looked like someone else had been actively hurting him, and my neighbor had already been using cops to terrify and harass me for months.

She would complain her head off that my partner and I, both in our mid-twenties, were a disgrace for cursing sometimes. (I would like to address at this point that she lived across the complex, and so the whole thing was weird.)

Anyhow, my partner pushed me off and ran out the door, screaming.

I prompty fell asleep. My nightmare had led me to a level of exhaustion I could no longer spend my effort ignoring. As far as I knew, he felt safer in leaving (and ultimately that was the only thing I wanted for us both; physical distance).

A bit later, while I was sound asleep and unaware of what had previously transpired, my partner startles me awake with “The police are here.”

And since he had the remnants of a bloody nose (typical of someone who self-harms from hitting their face), and the police were not going to pester him for why that bloody nose existed, I requested that he first wash his face. He did not.

When trauma is criminal, there’s no hope for us.

The cops were horrific to me.

I had just woken up; I was in pajamas. (Admittedly I had just put those on; rationale as to why is irrelevant.) I hadn’t a clue why they were there.

I remarked, “I have dissociative PTSD. I don’t know what happened.”

Incomptent law enforcement read this as, “I have violent blackout states. I don’t admit my harm to others.” Again, with what clinical expertise?

They directly yelled in my face, “What do you mean? Of course you remember. Come on, you really think we believe you don’t remember?” But again, was I really in a state to assume they wanted to actually determine what happened?

Why this mattered, though?

Roughly two years prior, when I was accused of violence by a partner who reacted to an offhanded remark from my mom, on the phone, that having sickness in the morning was pregnancy, my partner reacted to this through brutal violence, to a point where it was more important to him to create an aura of self-defense than accept responsibility.

I recall laying there, roughly dead, being brutally interrogated the same way.

“What do you mean you don’t know what happened? Of course you remember.”

They were disgrunteled, realizing that I wasn’t going to speak to things I didn’t know the validity of. They angrily walked away, and there was violent screaming from my partner at the time that they didn’t listen to him properly; it was my job to accept blame.

But who could blame him?

He bitched and moaned that I needed to care more about his “mental health condition,” and so I encouraged him to seek out a therapist. Unfortunately, he learned all the legal ways he could shift blame onto me, and was violent enough to attempt those.

And when he didn’t get his way?

Well, it came back on me for not being perfect enough.

What became of the police violence, though?

Push came to shove as I was walking them through how traumatized I was. They stared me down increduously, as if to say, And what? You really think we care?

The officer who calmly asked not more than one question to my partner asserted to me, “Come on, he’s in there all bloodied up and bruised.”

I am not a dumb human.

A bloody nose is so unalarming that I don’t think twice when I see one.

But a bloody nose was what I last saw my partner with before he was gently not harassed for his ailment (unlike me, who was still confused). When the cop claimed my partner was essentially brutally beaten, I assumed the cop was the one who harmed my partner and thus waited to capture evidence to frame me for abuse.

I freaked out.

I had one officer utilizing domestic violence on me by means of psychologial and emotional torture. Hovering over me while incredulously shaking her head and communicating that there was no way in Hell my trauma was real.

When I began to panic, struggling for breath, I tried my hardest to stand up and breathe. I stated that I needed to. She held her hands out in front of her, and shouted, “Don’t move,” at which point I began hyperventalating and saying what I needed to say so they wouldn’t harm me like they had just conveyed doing to my partner.

I’ll spare you all the details, but when it came time to address the charges made against me by a neighbor (who had heard the whole incident) claiming the event was “Guy ran out with bloody nose,” the prosector was a bitch about my mental health. I was informed that having trauma was something it was reasonable to assume I lied about, as this woman (may she burn in Hell) insisted that because my neighbor had been making false allegations for months, that it was reasonable to then assume she had been honest.

When I looked at their supposed “evidence” against me, it was clear beyond reproach that the polcie didn’t care to do their job. Sound bites of “come on, move it along” and zero actual questions to validate a lack of corercion made if clear they don’t want to determine if they should resond. Rather, their goal is to prove that they need more funding because there are more “crimes” – when allowing false reports is what actually bolsters this.

So back to the initial statement.

I understand that some people maintain that police are appropriate interventions to mental health crises.

I am never going to be one of those people.

I stated that I have a diagnosis most competent mental health professionals put in the SMI category rather than GMH/SU. SMI stands for seriously mentally ill, and is used to signify an illness that is chronic and has debilitating symptoms. GMH/SU stands for general mental health and substance use, and applies to clients whose diagnosis is appropriate for mental health interventions but is not chronic, debilitating, or severe. (Combinations thereof do exist, and this is by no means an exhaustive definition.)

Yet, these incompetent police officers operated under the societal assumptions about mental health. Specifically, those around PTSD.

Social assumptions are that you have to have gone to war to ever qualify for that. Some people go as far as to assert that only male veterans can have PTSD.

Dissociative PTSD (DSM-5-TR) is also called C-PTSD (complex PTSD; ICD-11), and is a concept in the mental health world gaining new traction from first being introduced in the 1980s. This distinction is for prolonged/repeated trauma. It was devised to distinguish traumatic events with defined periods of symptoms from invigorated trama resulting in long term, and frequently life-long, effects.

But what does this mean legally?

Surely police aren’t claiming mental health licensure, right?

Well, technically yes, but also, they have done their best to circumvent training.

How have they allowed this in courts?

Reactive “abuse”: What cops get wrong.

If we are being honest here, police don’t like arresting abusers. It bothers them immensely to have to prosecute someone treating vulnerable populations how they do, too. To have to arrest an abuser harms violent oppresors, who become terrified they will eventually be forced to answer for their crimes against humanity.

I know there are some good police in America.

But recently there has been traction in “men’s rights” movements to hold women and minorities to higher standards then they will ever hold themselves to.

That’s where we have removed “self defense” as a reasonable argument and told victims of violence that if they aren’t perfect victims, then they are actually the abusers. The argument holds in court. I don’t know why. Reversing blame and holding vicitms to either comply and be murdered or be called abusers is a horrific double standard.

I have seen dozens of times that men who claim self defense will then allow legal personnel to DARVO (deny the attack; reverse the victim and offender) their victim when they have lost the ability to engage in that themselves.

In a violent relationship, there is a power imbalance.

Alarming communication (as reported by outsiders) isn’t violence. There’s plenty of studies demostrating how couples with higher reported conflicts don’t report lower satistaction in the relationship. Often satisfaction comes down to feeling safe, secure, and heard – all things that conflict is reasearched in enhancing, not depleting.

Most people living with an SMI condition will partner with each other, as it is inherently dangerous to have a mental health condition with someone being fed information on how to demonize and criminalize mental health diagonses.

People who hold a diagnosis themselves aren’t going to brutalize SMI conditions.

But people (police) who want to claim knowledge of mental health and the ability to intervene in crises will brutalize anyone and everyone who doesn’t fit the mold. It is simpler to caim that everything is criminal than to investigate if a crime was made at the reporting stage rather than the police brutality (“interrogation”) stage.

By claiming that violent people are entitled to expect a perfect target, we as a society have admitted that we don’t want to help survivors who not only don’t make us happy though their mental health, but have also been failed by systems that promise to “serve and protect” them but tormented them in the process of seeking justice.

So what can we do?

There’s not much. Short of defunding and abolishing oppressive police, anyway.

Defunding simply allows for funding to be reallocated to community resources. Abolishing means giving properly trained people the ability to respond instead of violent systems designed to scare and harm victims. Both improve outcomes for both police and falsely accused communities.

Let’s help everyone.

XOXO,

Dorothy B.