What is "anti-survivor sanism"?

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Content warnings for abuse, sanism, abuse apologism, victim-blaming, self-harm, suicide, suicidism, psychiatric incarceration and abuse.

Defining “anti-survivor sanism”.

Liat Ben Moshe defines sanism as "the imperative to be sane, to be rational, to be not crazy and mentally ill and psychiatrically disabled."

In An Introduction to Anti-Black Sanism, Sonia Meerai, Idil Abdillahi and Jennifer Poole describe as “an oppression. It makes normal the practice of discrimination, rejection, silencing, exclusion, low expectations, incarceration, and other forms of violence against people who are othered through mental 'illness' diagnosis, history, or even suspicion."

Anti-survivor sanism is a framework coined by Candice Alaska for recognising and naming a form of oppression that enables all forms of abuse, as well as the trauma, injustices, silencing, and revictimisation that victims/survivors endure. Anti-survivor sanism identifies how so much of abuse is justified through victims' mental, emotional, neurological, cognitive or psychiatric (real or perceived) state or diagnosis.

It names how our carceral responses to mental health issues and neurodivergence help to enable abuse in all forms.

Anti-survivor sanism often exacerbates existing trauma and can be traumatising in itself. It is also heavily tied to epistemic injustice. It strongly influences how "credible" survivors are perceived. It frequently forms the basis of the justifications used to strip survivors of their freedom, autonomy and voice, and can be deadly in a myriad of ways.

Anti-survivor sanism names and hopes to make visible the fact that victims/survivors are an oppressed class, as well as how central attitudes about disability are to survivors' oppression.

It identifies how so much of the oppression, injustice, silencing, incarceration, and harm that survivors experience relies on a specific form of ableism known as sanism.

Anti-survivor sanism affects each survivor differently, depending on their social location, which includes their race, gender, age, birthplace, education level, etc. As Meerai, Abdillahi and Poole note, "Sanism exists on a continuum depending on privilege, and it is always and especially compounded when it is visited on racialized bodies."

Anti-survivor sanism can be perpetuated on an interpersonal level, including by professionals, such as therapists, as well as on an institutional level, such as schools and universities and the police, as well as on a societal and cultural level.

Anti-survivor sanism names how victims/survivors experience sanism specifically for their role as victims/survivors (eg: discrediting a survivor on the basis of being "unstable," "self-destructive" or "aggressive"), and/or how this sanism specifically impacts them as a victim/survivor (eg: psychiatric diagnoses making it harder to recognise yourself as a victim, rendering you more vulnerable to victimisation, or punishment for coping mechanisms, like self-harm, further depriving survivors of their autonomy).

It is influenced by concepts like compulsory able-bodied/mindedness for its pressure to be "healed" and the violence that comes with this.

By naming anti-survivor sanism, we're resisting the idea that acts of violence and discrimination that qualify as anti-survivor sanism are harmless, and we're acknowledging them instead as a form of oppression that plays an important role in enabling all forms of abuse.

Anti-survivor sanism is all around us.

What can be considered anti-survivor sanism?

* Institutionalising and punishing survivors for pathologised behaviours and coping mechanisms, such as self-injury and substance use.

This punishes and stigmatises people for the ways that they have survived abuse, exonerates their abusers for their role in these coping mechanisms in the first place, and makes survivors even more vulnerable to abuse by disempowering them in a number of ways.

* Pathologising survivors' responses to abuse as "disordered" and "irrational".

* Framing survivors' distress, crisis and responses to abuse as dangerous. This makes society perceive survivors as even more dangerous than their abusers and more likely to be considered the real abusers.

* The pressure to appear "normal" or to perform being "fine," no matter how much you're suffering, for the sake of safety and social acceptance.

* Inconsistencies with memories surrounding the abuse or difficulty remembering the abuse in a linear fashion treated as evidence of lying about the abuse.

* Labelling abusers with psychiatric diagnoses to explain their abusive behaviours. This dehumanises survivors with these diagnoses, which makes it easier for any form of treatment towards them to be justified. It also makes it harder for all survivors to understand the actual root causes of abuse, which can also make them more vulnerable to being abused.

* Carceral responses to suicidality.

* Discrediting survivors' experiences of harm on the basis of their psychiatric diagnosis, mental illness or neurodivergence.

* Pathologising survivors' emotions by labelling them "dramatic," "too sensitive" or "dysregulated".

* The "perfect victim" myth: insisting that there is a "correct" way to be traumatised that deserves credibility, sympathy, resources and support.

* Using the term "triggered" as an insult to minimise someone's experiences of harm.

* Vilifying and pathologising survivors' anger and rage (especially towards those who have abused them).

* The pressure to be healed: pressuring survivors to "heal" and abandoning them when they don't on our timeline. Many survivors end up isolated because of this.

* Unilaterally imposing our own definition of "healing" onto survivors.

* Weaponising "unhealed" or "you need therapy" as insults.

* Treating survivors as "too sensitive" or "too needy" for their access and care needs, such as needing trigger warnings or tone indicators, to justify neglecting their needs. This can lead to (further) isolation, trauma and disablement for survivors.

* Epistemic injustice: deferring to psychiatrists and therapists to make sense of survivors' struggles and experiences, and how we should support them, over survivors themselves.

* Giving people who self-harm ultimatums and forcing clients to sign "safety" contracts to stop self-harming.

Anti-survivor sanism connects us where psychiatry fragments us. We are taught that people diagnosed with BPD can't possibly understand what people diagnosed with bipolar disorder or people diagnosed with schizophrenia experience.

But there are important shared experiences here of having your diagnosis used to discredit you and to justify the initial (and often further) abuse.

And of that diagnosis frequently being the impacts of the abuse converted into a medical condition to disappear any trace of the abuse in the first place.

Anti-survivor sanism as a concept also creates solidarity amongst survivors who have no diagnosis, who have been discredited on the basis of being "unstable," "self-destructive," "impulsive," suicidal, etc.

It connects us, a potential mechanism of Cross-Movement Solidarity, to help strengthen our communities and our work towards ending abuse.

It also identifies how, by participating in the dehumanisation of mad and mentally ill people, we are invariably participating in the oppression of survivors and the perpetuation of the power imbalances that make abuse possible.

How anyone working towards ending abuse and empowering survivors, while advocating for carceral responses to suicide, madness, mental illness and neurodivergence, is working against themselves.

By tying sanism to anti-survivor oppression, it becomes harder to minimise the consequences of participating in the oppression of mad, mentally ill, neurodivergent and psychiatrised peoples.

And, importantly, I hope that it offers validation to victims/survivors that experiences of being punished for being suicidal, of being stigmatised for self-harming, of having the abuse you endured be discredited because of your emotional responses to the abuse, such as your rage, are not just individual problems, but parts of a larger systemic issue, where the oppression of survivors is and has historically been legitimised through sanism.

This is a working definition that will evolve over time. I'm really looking forward to developing this framework further and to seeing how folks use it in and build upon it in their own lives and work.

You can find a much longer and more in-depth explanation of anti-survivor sanism on my Patreon at Patreon.com/RadicalSurvivorSpace.