Pathological Warfare: Survivor Manifesto

Wrote this in 4 hours yesterday... Hopefully people will understand...

I view myself through a Neurodivergent (1998, Singer) lens over the pathological lens, and I find clinically victimizing myself to its insanely violent nature is not the way I plan to, nor do I want to go down in this lifetime.

I choose this lens because it is a lens of liberation, not limitation. The pathological lens asks, 'What is wrong with you?' and seeks to eliminate the 'wrong.' The Neurodivergent lens asks, 'How does your brain work?' and seeks to build a life that accommodates it. One is a war of eradication. The other is a strategy of integration. I chose the side that allows me to survive and remain myself—after all, why would I choose the path of self-detrimental sacrifice for other people?

I can agree to a certain extent that pathologizing yourself may (or may not) be helpful; people all have different outlooks and opinions on life, so how we treat and call ourselves is up to us; nobody can take that away from us as individuals; absolutely nobody.

While on the topic of the pathology model, I've found that studying the clinical checklist of a 'disorder' is a crucial act of self-defense. Why? Because when you know their diagnostic playbook better than they do, you disarm them.

You learn to see the 'symptoms' not as proof of your brokenness, but as a predictable set of responses to trauma, being overwhelmed, or spiritual emergence.

This knowledge transforms the experience from one of being pathologized to one of observing a pathology in action upon you.

It is the difference between feeling like a patient on the table and a strategist reading the enemy's plans.

This is how you handle yourself under pressure: not by blindly accepting their frame, but by understanding it so thoroughly you can dismantle it from the inside.

The responses and reactions to trauma are not wrong; we lash out when we're in pain or our needs are not met at all—then we get treated terribly in return for being human?

Make it make sense.

With what is clinically known as "Psychosis", can very easily be known as "shamanic awakening"; these works are up for debate currently (Grof, 2017, Jung) and they're seen as "fringe" psychiatrists, but there's a little something that's not seen by the medical community under 'pathological warfare' that the Neurodivergent community has picked up over the years.

Psychosis and Shamanic Awakening "symptoms" are blurred so far beyond the lines that the only "difference" between one or the other is "rooted in reality" or "unreality".

That definition of a spiritual awakening to psychosis is so far blurry that you may as well give up and realize what you're doing to people's base state of minds is wrong.

But also, who can even define what is real?

"Real" has no true basis except in consensus reality; it is all the last grappling hands of the old world have before they realize they are no longer relevant in the new world.

What I term 'pathological warfare' is the systemic practice of using diagnostic language and coercive power to pathologize human difference, a process that inflicts violence.

This 'pathological warfare' operates through three main mechanisms:
· 1. Linguistic Violence: The use of words like "disorder," "delusion," and "deficit" to define human beings.
· 2. Systemic Coercion: The use of force (like involuntary commitment) and threat (of losing rights) to ensure compliance.
· 3. Cultural Stigma: The propagation of "tragedy narratives" that frame difference as a burden to be eradicated.

I have been within the Neurodivergent community for 16 years; starting with Neurodivergent Rebel (Lyric Rivera, 2012) on Facebook and gradually moving towards intense multiple self-educational focal points that would occasionally lead to a multitude of sleepless nights that push me to the brink of insanity.

I've been all over social media trying to push the Neurodivergent model over the pathological model for the last however many years it's been now.

People seem to prefer flowered-up words over the truth; as my words are wired to be blunt,
and, even though I mean no harm half the time—my words sometimes get me into deep trouble with other people.

I refuse to flower my words because pretty language has been a primary weapon in this war.

Words like 'wellness' and 'compliance' are used to mask coercion. Words like 'delusion' are used to gaslight us out of our own reality.

My bluntness is a refusal to participate in that deception. It is a demand for a truth too long unspoken, even if it makes people uncomfortable. Real change has never been born from comfort.

I simply wouldn't change myself, or how I am wired; as asking to change myself is akin to begging for death—just a much more lenient version, where the Grim Reaper would be staring at me funny and we both drop some mixtapes on why dying is bad.

I use this dark humor to illustrate a deadly serious point: being forced to mask your core self is a form of spiritual death.

It's a slow, bureaucratic erasure of the soul. The Grim Reaper isn't just a metaphor for physical death, but for the death of the self that the system demands.

To resist that is to choose to live, fully and authentically, on your own terms.

However funny that last line may be, the truth still stands: the pathology model is simply ineffective for human rights and our right to advocacy on top of autonomy.

A first world example of pathologizing a person is calling their diagnostics and brain a "burden to the economy" or "now you'll never live a true life as a "normal" person!!!"; the singular tragedy narrative on Autism brings out the worst in people, especially during initial diagnosis with certain parents where they'll give their Autistic children bleach to "cure them of their Autism". (2018, USC)

I don't think I know any particular area where there's parents bleaching their child's ADHD or Schizophrenic brain; but no—the Autistic brain somehow gets the blunt force of "panic" in trying to cure the child from a neurotype that has been used in WAY too many hardcore stereotypical stigmas for well, since its own coinage; from when it first started being documented.

However that's been covered, let's step onto me.

'Pathological warfare' has been used on me multiple times; I am a survivor of 8× psych wards. Some of us, aren't so lucky, have no voice, and are kept "hidden and locked away for safety" under absurd rules and restrictions.

I have been involuntarily committed five times, civilly committed twice; almost got beat up at my seventh psych ward but don't let them know I told you that.

The fifth time I got placed in a psych ward they put me on the highest dose of Olanzapine and civilly committed me.

I came out of that mess a zombie, feeling like I'm the one in the wrong who existed in an altered state of mind; embarrassed of my existence and that I felt at the time I would have been better off dead because my rights and who I was as a person at the time was heavily violated—this is the ultimate goal of 'pathological warfare': not to heal, but to create a hollowed-out, compliant subject that is far too numb to resist or remember who they were.

Three years later I tried getting off my antipsychotics, only to end right back in three more psych wards by the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025.

Something tells me that whatever latched onto me from being homeless in South Carolina for three months, never went away— (i.e, CPTSD) the trauma of being homeless never truly leaves you, and we're leaving people like me, the people who are struggling, different and unique—we are leaving people like me and everyone else who are different in life to struggle and die before they even had a fighting chance at life.

I have more experiences, but that is all I have for this writing piece.

That stops today.

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So this is an essay—a manifesto—for those who have no voice in psych wards, who feel like they're never being listened to, and that they don't matter.

You do matter, I love you, and I'm fighting for a better life for us all.

P.S: If people make this go viral and or want to make me a speaker for the Neurodivergent community.... I'd be happy to speak, but I REFUSE to be worshipped or become a monolithic entity.

Simply put, I am trying to help people understand...

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https://neurodiversity.caltech.edu/resources/neurodiversity-a-brief-history (A Brief History on Neurodiversity, 2025)

https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1524&context=ijts-tr... (Grof, 2017)

https://chan.usc.edu/news/latest/parents-warned-about-bleach-therapy-for-treatin... (2018, USC)