Psychiatric survivors, labels and me

If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick. William James

Ω

The deleterious effect of evil, pernicious, stigmatizing labels is at the core of psychiatric survivor discourse™, so of course it makes me wonder why I don’t care about mine so much, like — what am I missing here, am I insufficiently outraged about a civil rights injustice?!
Borderline, Bi-polar, Schizophrenia, these official stamps of psychiatry will lead to life of ruin, they say, while saying not so much about the label that actually got them committed. Puzzling, but later for all that. The thread on BPD at the only blog that matters has me head in a spin.

I identify with borderlines, my life’s been filled with them, I have it in me, it’s a hellish disorder. I’ve only seen doctors in offices. In the room, every diagnosis came at a snail’s pace by reluctant treaters who always provided the caveat that what they do are “diagnostic IMPRESSIONS” — their best opinion, that others might not agree with, including me. Fair enough. Over many years 3 different diagnosticians gave me a Cluster B (Dramatic) Personality Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, all of them working independently without reading each others notes, and all of them placing an AXIS I diagnoses as the primary concern, whether major depression, bi-polar, PTSD, hysteria (conversion disorder) or some kind of schizophrenia. The docs I saw regularly who presumably knew me best were adamant that I do not have BPD, and I wanted that diagnosis, to feel closer to the people I love, and the musicians I relate to, all the luminous, sullen and delicate cutters.

I just last week sat down for the first time to read the opinion of the psychiatrist who evaluated me for the Social Security Administration. It’s been sitting here seven years and I’m aware that I have feelings about it before even reading it, the language is very sobering. I saw this SSA psychiatrist for 90 minutes and turns out he settled on “a long-standing and well-documented history of borderline personality disorder” with the following attached:

Dr. Aitcheson’s testimony is well-supported by the objective medical evidence, which establishes a deeply ingrained and maladaptive pattern of behavior associated with oddities of thought, perception, speech and behavior, … extreme difficulty getting along with others…panic attacks, psychotic features, vegetative states, hypersomnia… emotional lability as well as intense and unstable interpersonal relationships and impulsive and damaging behavior. This symptomatology has resulted in marked difficulties in maintaining social functioning, marked difficulties in maintaining concentration, persistence, pace, and repeated episodes of decompensation, each of extended duration.

I’m supposed to be offended by that? It’s the truth. I guess I could be offended, but appears I have a rather full plate to be upset by something so removed. I mean, it seems removed; I have my life and I have these labels. Now I finally have one that makes me chestpuff, I’m in with the out crowd.

I don’t care. That’s the problem, I am perceived as falling short in the victim identity. But listen, schizoaffective disorder was real tough on me, due to all the research it requires, but okay fuckit, overall I have no personal issues with labeling, I’m not outraged by the iffy nosology in psychiatry because the iffiness has been established for me by psychiatrists throughout my treatment course. Now I’m getting shit at Furious Seasons because what happened to me just don’t sound right. It’s a competition, this shit right here.

I feel protective and territorial about my newfound BPD label and don’t like how things are going over there. I am nobody’s victim and am sorry to say have always felt supported by my treaters, but do hang on to anger for the lobotomy and expect I always will. My gramma was the only one in that house who loved me, I saw what it did to her. Saw what psychiatrists did to my whole family, who, hang on a sec, unlike me were all involuntary patients. I guess today they’d be psychiatric survivors, since they were forced into asylums and treated against their will.

The difference between voluntary and involuntary patients is something. Seriously, cartoon king Szasz got one thing right.

Still, I am against the BPD dx for all the right reasons. People are negatively effected by that specific label in all kinds of specific ways and they don’t like it, and that should be reason enough to say it’s got to go. Period. But none of these DSM labels, invoked like mantras are what I look for when psychiatric survivors say they are sharing their feelings about what society thinks about them. The label they avoid is the one I’m most interested in hearing about  and what they do with it.

Yeah. What’s it like to be considered dangerous by the powers that be, and is it too late for me to get some of that juju?

The sole justification for involuntary commitment. You must be found to be a danger to self and or others. You might think that would make some impact on a person, an activist, a truthteller, but damned if I’m onto that discourse, in fact I’m seeing more like a taboo around meaningful discussion in the psychiatric survivors, but hey I’m borderline now, I get to stir shit up.

I realized something the other day, how the same thing happens when visiting a General Practitioner for the first time. The Physicians Assistant does the standard intake on medical history; surgeries, cancers, allergies, heart disease, mental health issues? “Yes,” I reply breezily, I’ve been treated for psychiatric conditions. “Any hospitalizations?” Why do they always look up and ask that? They do it every time, ask and look up, make eye contact and hold it.

Any hospitalizations for mental illness?

They are trying to gauge how much they need to be on guard in my presence. I guess we’re all doing that to some extent, but this makes it rather stark. I’ll remember next time to say “Nope, you’re safe!”

As am I, so far at least. I imagine that things could be different for me.

The giving, offering, and forcing of selves

Not another post about nuance! Yes and it all started when I heard benevolent superstar Jon Swift is offering exposure to his blogroll writers with another year-end round up of Best Posts Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves. Last year was a great success, providing hours of enjoyable reading and oodles of new visitors to the entrants’ blogs. This is not a contest, but an invitation for writers of all kinds who want a little more attention. I’m posting about it in the enduring hope of seeing psychiatric bloggers do more crossing-over into the wider progressive blogosphere. Of course you have to be on his blogroll, but since his blogroll is famous for being open to anyone I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t be on it.

I had little trouble choosing my own favorite post from this year’s slim pickens because I’m still pissed about that blogger from last year’s round-up who decided the most important post she wrote in 2007 was an injunction to readers to take their psychiatric meds. I don’t easily let go that sort of bullshit and it’s not because I’m against people taking psychotropic drugs. It was the compulsion to thrust her garbage onto the faceless reader as if the reader was any of her damn business, it’s that sort of foolishness gets stuck in my craw.

It looks like we’ve come full circle in one year’s time. These days the big drag in the psychosphere is seen in the browbeating of bloggers who actually do take their medication, to the consternation of antipsychiatry bullies who know for a fact that using meds does nothing but support corrupt big phRma. The DSM’s a bastard, mental illness a social construct, everybody hurts, but if you need a crutch there’s always B-Vitamins and Omega 3 fatty acid, looser! You may think this a caricature and sadly, so do I. But it’s for our own good, the twisted stigmatizing by double-talking activists who seem to think unvarnished contempt of their own (imagined) constituency is lost on anyone who believes other people’s choices are deserving of respect.

What are we to make of it? Unsolicited warnings about disabling side effects, but ZOMFG stopping drugs cold turkey without “tapering” will make you a school shooter, calling out fellow bloggers in a keyboard-pounding frenzy to justify their failure to denounce the modern tools of psychiatry, and without a single self-deprecating nod to their own fixation over this grave and pressing life and death matter.

One popular no-med blogger did just that to your shy and retiring flawedplan this year and thankfully I was able to maintain sufficient wit to persuade her to swiftly remove the nonsensical post but these displays of nerve can leave a chilling effect. And they’re accumulating, some phase, the pendulum swinging, whatever the reason, antipsychiatry abounds. Yes I know, google antipsychiatry and you’ll end up here, isn’t that ironic. Something’s gotta give.

Just this October while cleaning out my medicine cabinet I found a two year old bottle of un-opened Effexor and decided I’d take one a day to see what it did to my mind. First time I try psych drugs in over three years but can’t bring myself to share this experiment on my own damn blog because who wants to fight with competitive antipsychiatry ass berets? That’s fucked up . And more fool me, being so wilting lily sensitive but
when
I
can
I
will
so let the record show, Effexor kicked ass in the third week, got me talking to people, telling jokes, on the phone and off my computer, playing with kids, looking up at the sky above, cornbread moon and twinkly stars, take that, assholes! all very banal and run-of-the-mill, a mood elevator doing what it was designed to do, someone better call Ripley. But I dreaded the outcry — Placebo effect!— Uh huh, and it only took 32 trials with prior “placebos” til Effexor hit the sweet spot, what a mystery these dadgum sugar pills, 31 fakes til the real placebo kicks in.

Now, wait just a dadblasted minute. Did I not just say I’ve been off psych meds for three full years and now I’m going on about undergoing 32 drug trials? Which is it, what gives? I get these triumphant gotcha emails and don’t know what to make of them that seem to be saying “Come Clean!”

Because nothing says you’re filling a necessary void like an excruciatingly detailed exposition of your journey with psychotropic medications, therefore a blogger is beholden to describe her course in its entirety, stops and starts, gains and losses, why I changed my mind, then changed my mind again, til I came upon the final wisdom, whether from compliance to non-compliance or non-compliance to compliance and the road back to where I was before the meds destroyed my fill-in-the-blank, the fact of the matter is every veil that falls from my eyes will be validated by matching veils falling from your own. Or else.

Else what?

You can face the pathetic need to have complete strangers put their stamp on your own life choices or you can assume the identity of a pharmaceutical fetishist, choose to troll blogs, shut down discussion, expect everyone to be similarly obsessed with pharmaceuticals in a vain attempt to normalize batshit insanity by projecting your issues into the environment, which no one in the history of the world has ever tried before.

They’re out there. Trolls are meant to be smacked down, though I wouldn’t call them concern trolls, because they’re incapable of misrepresenting the concern part of the concern troll protocol. It seems more like a minority of angry antipsychiatry usurpers have united in an effort to seize the mental health discourse, make discussion ugly for any mental health blogger inclined to post about a casual relationship with said drugs and prescriber, who gives the topic due proportion, as an aside, one detail in a multi-faceted narrative. Not to mention any blogger who feels conflicted about using pharmaceuticals, you will watch your mouth or rue the day you turned off comment moderation.

Antidepressants aren’t that interesting, they are just the device in a battle of wills. It’s about control, over-powering the blight of personal sovereignty by those who feel personal sovereignty was stolen from them, and by the looks of things it was. But there has to be a way of reclaiming what’s yours without destroying the self-esteem of psychiatry’s willing guinea pigs as if their peace of mind is what’s wrong with this picture.

Perhaps I’ve gone far afield of the original subject, but it seemed some preamble was in order. I’ve come to realize that anticipating a jump to conclusions has become necessary in blogging and guess there’s nothing to be done for that but learn to address it in fewer words. I’ll aim high, meanwhile my favorite 2008 post at Writhe Safely remains this one, but I won’t submit that since it’s pure link love, I didn’t write anything. My own best typing in 2008 combines social criticism with personal confession (and if you think I exaggerate the violence of online antipsychiatry read that thread) but will submit this instead with a thought for public service. If you come away from that convinced of what I stand for you are privy to a truth that is not even in my own possession. Why would you want that responsibility? Just think about the post, not a bunch of interesting ideas about the person who wrote it.

Right now I am thinking of various mental health bloggers who deserve a wider audience. Here’s hoping half my blogroll makes an appearance in Jon Swift’s self-selected personal bests for Election Year 2008! I’ll be clicking along with my Christmas toddy, in solidarity, basking in the plenitude of complimentary hits.

Diversity at Netroots Nation

Ah well they rejected my panel so fuck ’em I said, prepared to be all pissy and dismissive of the convention on its way to Austin town, but that’s just not me. Three thousand progressive bloggers flying into the state responsible for the neocon stronghold on this country is a marvelous event that didn’t happen by accident. Bu$hco absolutely rules Texas on every level of government, what better place than Austin to say goodbye to all that?

I plan to volunteer and serve the psychobigots in some capacity but will first clear the bitterness away. Maybe I’m not seeing it, but looking over the agenda it appears once again as a “Sea of Middle-Aged White Males” with no disability caucus or mental health activism included anywhere.

As usual civil rights are well-represented by GLBT bloggers who I certainly do recognize as mentors, but that’s not the only civil rights game in town, y’all, isn’t it time to embrace liberal diversity and engage the unwanted stepchildren/lifelong organizers under the big tent? I wonder if any other disability rights bloggers submitted a proposal to NN, and am anxious to read their layout and hear what they have to say about being excluded during this momentous era of Change.™ Party unity my ass, there is something very missing here, and yes, you’re lookin at it.

This proposal, penned by the illustrious Candid Psychiatrist, is as stand-up as anything going on this week, and it received a standard polite brush-off by the NN gatekeeper. Hmph. Methinks the elite liberal establishment resists education, and I think we would have killed.

CHALLENGING THE CORRUPTION OF PSYCHIATRY
A Proposed Presentation for Netroots Nation 2008

ABSTRACT

The institutions and practice of contemporary psychiatry are corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry, managed care, and other commercial interests. The prevailing treatment model today is biological psychiatry, a worldview that systematically dehumanizes patients by reducing their life stories, individual concerns, and emotional needs to a bunch of dumb molecules. This clinical model is driven by fiscal priorities, professional insecurities, and an elitist/authoritarian mindset—and is propped up by a vast research infrastructure that is drunk on drug company money, generating sham science in support of diagnoses and theories that have no firm basis in fact.

The above paragraph may seem hyperbolic, but it is more supportable than much of what passes for conventional wisdom in psychiatry today. Many progressives resist education on these issues because they are accustomed to defending psychiatry from perceived enemies of science. Others generalize from their own positive experience of psychiatric treatment, and/or question the credibility of psychiatry’s opponents. Nonetheless, recent news stories about the selective publication of antidepressant studies, the systematic diagnosing and drugging of children, and other outrages hint at the widespread dysfunction in our mental health system. Many in the progressive community are being seduced by pseudoscience and unwittingly enabling corporatism. We would like to correct this misjudgment.

The movement for psychiatric reform is evolving and broadening as awareness of this institutional corruption increasingly comes to light. The internet has opened doors for free communication between consumers and providers, and its anonymity has allowed psychiatrists and other providers to speak freely without fear. As parties that used to oppose each other find common cause and coalesce, we see ourselves on the threshold of a new front in netroots activism.

PANELISTS

Dr. Paul Minot is a psychiatrist with a medication management practice in Central Maine. He is part of the burgeoning critical psychiatry movement, attacking the institutional corruption and sham science that taints its contemporary practice and dehumanizes patients. He cites his experience playing in punk bands in the 1980s as significantly influencing his worldview. He now promotes psychiatric reform through his website, Candid Psychiatrist (www.candidpsychiatrist.com), and also posts frequently at Daily Kos. Perhaps his greatest notoriety to date comes from a diary there entitled Bush’s ‘Delusions’: A Psychiatrist’s Perspective which was linked throughout the blogosphere and subsequently became a viral email. Dr. Minot will be examining the scientific underpinnings of biological psychiatry.

Robin Plan is a consumer advocate addressing psychiatric issues on her website, Writhe Safely (https://writhesafely.wordpress.com). Her background is in alternative-rock broadcast media, and she now works tracking Texas state legislation. She is an award-winning SLAM poet, pioneer in the DIY poetry zine scene of the 1980s, and her work has been taught at Miami University Women’s Studies and Stanford University Introductory to Writing courses. Robin describes herself as a radical humanist, for whom advocacy has been the enduring presence in her life. She has shelter experience counseling victims and perpetrators of domestic violence, child abuse, Alzheimer’s victims, and works on campaigns addressing hunger, patient rights, the democratization of the arts, and the mental health consumer liberation movement.
Ms. Plan will discuss the impact of biological psychiatry from the patient’s perspective.

John Breeding, Ph.D. is a counseling psychologist in Austin, Texas. He is the director of Texans for Safe Education, a citizens group dedicated to challenging the ever-increasing role of psychiatry and psychiatric medications in the schools. He combats psychiatric oppression in other arenas as well, and is a steering committee member of the Coalition for the Abolition of Electroshock in Texas (www.endofshock.com). His personal website, Wildest Colts Resources (www.wildestcolts.com), is an exhaustive resource for information on parenting, psychology, and psychiatry. Dr. Breeding is the author of four books, including The Wildest Colts Make the Best Horses and The Necessity of Madness and Unproductivity: Psychiatric Oppression or Human Transformation. He has 37 video clips posted at http://www.youtube.com, with tens of thousands of cumulative views logged there. Dr. Breeding will explore the ethical and spiritual impact of biological psychiatry.

The presentation will be live-blogged by Philip Dawdy, an award-winning investigative journalist and patient advocate who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Mr. Dawdy has reported extensively on mental health issues on the local and national level, and worked as a staff writer at Seattle Weekly until November 2006. Since then Philip has been running the popular consumer blog, Furious Seasons (www.furiousseasons.com) and is a frequent diarist at Daily Kos.

GOALS

We hope that this presentation will increase the audience’s understanding of the extensive corruption of science that is used to justify the biological model of psychiatry, and the many ways in which the application of this clinical model degrades patient care. We would like to overcome the perception that critics of psychiatry are enemies of science, and thus attract wider support among progressives in opposing rampant corporatism in psychiatry. Finally, we would like to demonstrate how the internet is enabling activists with diverse perspectives to communicate with each other and come together in common cause.

Faith healers

Over the last 4 years I’ve heard the term Evidence-Based Medicine™ invoked 20 times a day at the Capitol and named it gobbledygook from day one. Evidence-Based Medicine™ refers to interventions based on established criteria in the medical literature, involving steaming piles of horseshit from the academic domain that just happen to call for the most expensive procedures. But not til 2 weeks ago did I hear the first professional talk it down, in a committee on domestic violence, where “stop the bleeding” has become “drug the victim” since we live in an era that has medicalized what any reasonably empathic person should recognize as predictable aftermath. Meetings where victimization is the theme — battery, rape, child sodomy — this is domestic violence, while invited testimony is dominated by medical professionals. Fucking obscene.

After some six hours listening to her peers wank glowingly of Evidence-Based Medicine™ the representative from Texas Network of Abuse Prevention Services warned the senate to be wary of EBM terminology, said it is not a black and white seal of approval, that evidence-based appraisals are contested in the academy, due largely to bias in research, conflict of interest and the inherent difficulty of quantitative data-collection in human service research experiments. Evidence based services cost more, she said, agencies that make these investments need to know what an evidence based product is and how it is so denoted, and make sure that it is evidence based in substance and not in name only.

Speaking truth to power is always unexpected from that quarter, I’d say it’s a fluke but for what hit my inbox this week:

Why Evidence-Based Medicine Cannot Be Applied to Psychiatry

Co-written by Robert Levine, MD, associate professor of clinical psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine and Max Fink, MD, professor emeritus of psychiatry and neurology at Stony Brook NY, founding editor of The Journal of ECT and author of Electroshock: Restoring the Mind. Worthy opinion by the likes of dirty rotten scoundrels bears some looking into, and it goes without saying they’re going to get smacked down by their colleagues for publishing this in Psychiatric Times. Oh yes, it’s hard going, but anyone interested in EBM, this is the shit. (Sorry no linky, subscription only):

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is rapidly becoming the norm. It is taught in medical schools and is encouraged by both government agencies and insurance plan providers. Yet, there is little proof that this model can be adapted to fit psychiatry.

EBM supposedly allows the clinician to offer the most effective treatment for each patient.^1,2 This goal is laudable, but the model is not appropriate for psychiatry because precise and stable diagnostic criteria are lacking in our specialty. Treatment outcomes in psychiatry are not defined by remission or cure. Instead, fractional reductions in the number and severity of symptoms are accepted, as measured by rating scale scores. Evidence-based psychiatry (EBP) is an untested hypothesis; for this theory to be either useful or valid, 3 basic assumptions must be examined.

• Is the diagnostic system valid?
• Are the data from clinical trials assessing efficacy and safety sound?
• Are the conclusions in a form that can be applied in clinical practice?

NIMH message to consumers

So the public’s been invited to get off its sorry ass and send personal recommendations to the moon in the sky regarding the national strategic mental health plan, which will “serve as a guide to the Institute for advancing mental health science over the next 3-5 years.”

The friendly solicitation of public comment strikes me as a cynical ploy, as if they have no idea what consumers want, as if we have no blogs, youtubes, pundits, journals or any sort of critical presence spreading like wildfire across the Internets, unless that’s the Tom Waits I’m listening to while toiling over my own heartfelt NIMH tidings all day:

What did that old blonde
Gal say?
That is the part…
You throw away
…

Will you lose the flowers
Hold on to the vase
Will you wipe all those teardrops
Away from your face
I can’t help thinking
As I close the door
I have done all of this
Many times before

Mindfreedom has a copy of the 26 page draft and reports the following predictable horseshit:

* 98 – number of times NIMH draft uses the words “drug, medication, biological, illness, disease, genetics”
* 38 – number of times NIMH draft uses word “brain”
* 16 – number of times NIMH draft uses word “recovery”
* 2 – number of times NIMH draft refers to the “mind”
* 0 [zero] – number of times NIMH draft uses any of the words “counseling, consumers, survivors, peer, mutual support, empowerment, rights, self-determination, employment, jobs, housing, psychosocial, wholistic, holistic, psychotherapy.”

We have til December 21st to email them at: strategicplanning2@mail.nih.gov

Why bother? asks Mindfreedom, and nearly kills my motivation by reasoning that at least NIMH won’t be able to deny that we gave them our input. So I thought about that, the going around in circles of it, yes they’re going to ignore us, but we’re gonna do it anyway just so we can tell them they ignored us, and this time, yes, this time they’ll um, oh, right.

Fuck the Man, what they do with my input I could care less, this is about me, between the
sayin’
and the
throwing awayin’
it’s
the sayin’
what matters most.

Or, as Jim Hightower put it “Even a little dog can piss on a big building.”

—

(Henry Arthur Miller tombstone quote.)

One of these psychiatrists is not like the other

These two posts caught my eye today, different starting points but seem related somehow:

Philip at Furious Seasons responds to a reader who asks if bipolar is a dangerous gift, and the breadth and scope of his response deserves a standing ovation. Not only does he describe the Icarus Project clearly and with enviable economy, he explores the possibility that what we sometimes call mental illness has more to do with personality and character issues, the medicalization of which enriches no one but the medical establishment. No, don’t expect recovery (especially since we’re avoiding the real issues), or as his pshrink tells Philip after successfully going off meds and being subclinical for years, Once diagnosed, Never undiagnosed, i.e. you’ll never make it without me.

If anyone but a psychiatrist said that it would be considered abuse. It’s abusive to nourish dependency and hopelessness, and no less so when a professional does it from a place of fear and prejudice, from their *training* in the scientific method. As if. All abusers create dependency to feed the ego-gratification of their own indispensability, the difference when a psychiatrist does it is in the additional perks of social superiority in relation to a defective human, the expectation of gratitude, and of course the most relevant and un-ending paycheck.
Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
Yes, and on the other hand baby, here’s a treat at Daily Kos from our punk rock Candid Psychiatrist; Stop calling EVIL a mental illness. Predictably, his rendition of conscious evil to describe ah, conscious evil, comes under fire as imprecise and inflammatory from the usual science-addled liberal quarter, to which the CP replies

I’m not concerned about being inflammatory–I’m already inflamed!!!

Let me know if I’m reaching in seeing these two posts as somehow related. The underlying question seems to be, “who is in the driver’s seat, your disease or your volition?” So much is at stake in the answer to that. Who profits and who loses? Power, money, control, the mantle of science, the comfort of certainty, intellectual escapism, all in all, including the comments, much thought provoking, this here radical psych-O-sphere.

Try To Praise The Mutilated World

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the grey feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

Adam Zagajewski
Translated by Renata Gorczynski

Effed up on how many levels?

Sure, ok. Count ’em off, I got to eleventyzabillion before the calculator exploded:

Valdosta State University (VSU) has expelled student T. Hayden Barnes for publicly protesting the school’s decision to construct two new parking decks on campus. After VSU President Ronald M. Zaccari labeled Barnes a “clear and present danger” and mandated that Barnes submit certifications of his mental health and on-going therapy as conditions of his readmission to VSU, Barnes contacted the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.

“A kind of madness seems to be gripping our colleges, one in which merely claiming a student poses a ‘threat’—no matter how absurd or attenuated the allegation may be—is enough to punish even the most clearly protected speech,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. “This case represents the extreme of this troubling trend. Hayden Barnes did nothing wrong; the claim that his speech was threatening is specious, and the university’s decision to expel him is truly chilling.”