Ing Says: They Weaponize Language and Our Struggles; We Have Answers!
A living lexicon for survivors of mental health system harm
Language is a tool of power. And a powerful tool.
Mental health institutions have spent decades perfecting the use of language to shame and silence the people they harm. The vocabulary is clinical. It sounds neutral. It is not neutral. It is designed to place responsibility for institutional failure onto the person who was failed — and to do it in a way that is hard to argue with, hard to name, and nearly impossible to appeal.
This article is a counter-lexicon. It borrows from every social justice framework that has done this work before us — women’s empowerment, sexual abuse advocacy, domestic violence survivor movements, disability rights, anti-racism. Every movement that has named what was done to them, refused the language of the institution, and built their own vocabulary of resistance.
We are doing the same thing.
This is a living document. It will grow as our conversations deepen and our collective language strengthens. The goal is simple: to give survivors of mental health system abuse the tools to name what happened, reject the reframe, and stand up to the power that depends on our silence.
They Say / We Say
“Your trauma is making you see this wrong.”
This is one of the most sophisticated tools in the institutional arsenal. It takes the very thing that brought you into care — your trauma history — and weaponizes it against your credibility. It suggests that your perception is contaminated, your account unreliable, your complaint a symptom rather than a report.
We say: Current harm is real regardless of past trauma. Both can be true simultaneously. A person with a trauma history who is harmed in a clinical setting has been harmed in a clinical setting. The history does not cancel the harm. The harm does not require a clean psychiatric record to be real.
“This is only your trauma speaking.”
A variation on the above — and just as dishonest. This phrase attempts to locate the problem entirely inside the survivor. It treats the present as though it were only an echo of the past.
We say: It is inappropriate — ethically and clinically — to invoke past trauma as an explanation when you are causing trauma in the present. Whatever our history, you are responsible for what you are doing right now. Address the present before you reach for the past.
“This is your diagnosis.” / “This is your substance use.” / “You’re unable to accurately represent your own experience.”
This is diagnostic discrediting in its most direct form — the use of a clinical label to preemptively invalidate a person’s account. It is the mental health system’s version of “what was she wearing?” It shifts the frame from institutional misconduct to client pathology. It is designed to end the conversation before accountability can begin.
We say: You have a duty of care to us — not to the version of us that is easiest to manage, but to us as we actually are. If we struggle, that means you are obligated to work harder, not to dismiss us. Our diagnosis does not reduce your responsibility. Our struggles do not excuse your violations of law, ethics, or basic human dignity. The failure is yours. The accountability is yours.
“You’re treatment resistant.”
This phrase deserves particular attention — because it is used so widely, so casually, and with so little awareness of what it actually means when examined honestly.
“Treatment resistant” is a clinical term with a specific technical definition. In common institutional use, it has become something else entirely: a way of blaming the patient for the failure of the treatment. It locates the problem in the person receiving care rather than in the care itself. It closes the door on accountability by suggesting the institution did everything right and the client simply failed to respond.
We say: We are not resistant. Your treatment failed us. When a person does not improve under your care, the appropriate clinical and ethical response is to examine the treatment — not to pathologize the patient. The failure belongs to the treatment. The responsibility belongs to the provider.
“You have poor insight.”
“Poor insight” is clinical language for “you don’t agree with our assessment of you.” It is used to dismiss self-report, override lived experience, and establish clinical authority as the only valid way of knowing.
We say: We see exactly what happened. That is why you are uncomfortable. Our clarity is not a symptom. Our refusal to accept your version of events is not evidence of impaired judgment. It is evidence that we were paying attention — and that we remember what you would prefer we forget.
“For your own safety.”
Safety is one of the most powerful words in the institutional vocabulary — because it is genuinely important, and because that importance makes it easy to misuse. “For your own safety” has been used to justify restraints, involuntary holds, medication over objection, isolation, and the removal of autonomy from people who had not consented to any of it.
We say: Safety was used as a justification to harm us. When safety language is used to override consent, remove autonomy, and silence objection — it is no longer about safety. It is about control. True trauma-informed care does not use safety as a silencing mechanism. It builds safety in collaboration with the people it is supposed to protect.
“You couldn’t take no for an answer.”
This phrase reframes persistence as pathology. It reframes legitimate advocacy as behavioral dysregulation. It uses the fact that a survivor kept asking — kept pushing, kept refusing to accept a non-answer — as evidence that the survivor, not the institution, is the problem.
We say: We kept asking because we deserved a real answer. Persistence in the face of institutional stonewalling is not a symptom. It is an appropriate response to being ignored. When an institution fails to respond to a legitimate complaint, the correct response is to keep asking — louder, and through more channels, until someone answers.
“Given your history…”
This phrase does double work. It invokes a psychiatric or behavioral history as context — and then uses that context to suggest that whatever happened was predictable, manageable, or somehow the survivor’s fault for having a history at all.
We say: Our history does not make what you did acceptable. Your replication of our past trauma is not an inevitability — it is a choice, and it is yours. Whatever we have survived before does not reduce your obligation to treat us with dignity in the present. The past does not excuse the present. It never does.
“This is a clinical judgment.”
Clinical authority is real. Expertise is real. But clinical authority has limits — and one of those limits is that it cannot be used as a shield against accountability.
We say: Clinical authority is not immunity from accountability. If your clinical judgment resulted in harm — if your decisions caused someone to leave your facility more damaged than when they arrived, with new trauma responses, suicidal thoughts, or actions they would not have taken otherwise — then your clinical judgment failed. It failed the person in your care. It failed the ethical standards of your profession. A clinical judgment that causes harm is not protected by the credential of the person who made it.
“We followed proper protocol.”
This is the institutional equivalent of “I was just following orders.” It relocates responsibility from the individual to the system — and suggests that compliance with protocol is the same thing as ethical conduct.
We say: Protocol that causes harm is not proper. Following a policy that results in trauma, injury, or death is not a defense. Institutions are responsible for the protocols they design, implement, and enforce. If a protocol causes harm, the institution is accountable for that harm — and for the choice to maintain a protocol that it knew, or should have known, was harmful.
Why Language Matters — And Why This Is Educational, Not Just Personal
Every phrase above is in active use in mental health facilities across this country right now.
They are being said to people in crisis. To people who have just been harmed. To people who are filing complaints and trying to understand why no one is listening. To people who are fighting to be believed by the very institutions that were supposed to help them.
This is not unique to The Guidance Center in Flagstaff. This is not unique to any single facility or any single state. This is the shared vocabulary of institutional self-protection — and it works, when survivors don’t have language to push back with.
That is what this lexicon is for.
Trauma-informed language is not just a clinical best practice. It is a political act. When survivors name what is being done to them — when they refuse the reframe, reject the diagnostic discrediting, and insist on their own account of their own experience — they are doing something that the institution depends on them not doing.
They are refusing to disappear.
This Document Is Living
This lexicon is not finished. It will grow.
If you have heard a phrase used against you that belongs here — send it. If you have found language that helped you push back — share it. If you have stood in a clinical office and found the words to say no, that is not what happened — you have contributed to this document already, whether you know it or not.
The goal is collective. The language is ours.
If This Mirrors Your Experience
You are not alone. What happened to you was not inevitable. It was a choice made by a provider or a facility — and choices can be documented, reported, and challenged.
File with your state’s licensing board, the Office of Civil Rights, and the Attorney General. File knowing that these bodies rarely impose meaningful consequences — because the record matters regardless.
And then come to us. Between Trust and Trauma documents what happened, names the providers and facilities responsible, and connects survivors who experienced the same pattern of harm.
One incident is enough. One person harmed is enough. We document it because it happened — not because we need a pattern to justify our pain.
“Nothing About Us Without Us.”
