Rehumanization
People with mental health conditions are often made to feel dehumanized by society and institutions. Meta-dehumanization, or the feeling that others see oneself as dehuman, can occur when people feel that they don’t have control over their experiences or they don’t fit in. This disproportionately affects survivors of institutional trauma. Studies suggest that psychiatric survivors, for example, face more discrimination from healthcare workers than other hospital patients, leading to meta-dehumanization (Jenkins et al., 2023).
Meta-dehumanization is often ingrained within IODs. Survivors are treated as patients, prisoners, students, etc. before they are treated as people. Some institutions even assign survivors numbers or codes and refer to them only by their institution identification, stripping them of their names and further dehumanizing them. They are deindividualized and depersonalized, sometimes to the point of causing mental health conditions. Survivors from IODs that wholly manipulate their identities (such as cult abuse survivors) may even meet the criteria for a dissociative disorder, as their institution intentionally attempts to reform their personality to one that benefits the group (Salter 2014).
Meanwhile, self-dehumanization maintains the beliefs of meta-dehumanization through internalization, reinforcing negative self-beliefs. In this way, dehumanization and mental health conditions feed into each other. This creates a cycle that can be hard for survivors to break. That is why Institution Therapy includes the principle of Rehumanization.
Rehumanization emphasizes the importance of physical and medical care, supportive social interactions, emotional self-care, humanizing affirmations, self-compassion, and self-forgiveness. It prioritizes the specific needs of the survivor, which are often ignored in the process of institutional deindividualization. Recovering from institutionalization requires that survivors are allowed to reclaim desires they may have cast aside assuming that they’d never be able to achieve them within the IOD. This may look like encouraging survivors to find hobbies, set (and pursue) achievable goals, and treat themselves with self-care activities that were previously denied to them by the IOD.
It is important to note that there can be value in reclaiming one’s ‘humanity’ by proudly identifying with dehumanization. Institution Therapy’s Rehumanization takes this into account, appreciating that new posthumanistic therapeutic approaches may better meet the needs of survivors. In the conceptualized subfield of object-oriented psychology, it is argued that “what it means to be human has changed over the last sixty years,” and humanistic psychologists should adjust to the role nonhumanity has in our lives (Whitehead, 2017, p. 4). Therefore, Rehumanization cannot be discussed without the consideration of posthumanity and nonhumanity.
In some survivor communities, subcultures such as ‘voidpunk’ allow survivors to reclaim their imposed nonhumanity by aligning their identity with objects like dolls, robots, creatures, and more. While this may seem antithetical, Rehumanization embraces these concepts by affirming survivors’ nonhuman identities as long as they identify as dehuman but not subhuman. Rehumanization is about taking care of oneself even when it feels wrong; for some survivors, identifying as dehuman is a necessary step to being able to do so. If embracing one’s dehumanization becomes more self-destructive than helpful, survivors must consider other methods of Rehumanization.
Example Rehumanization affirmations include:
- I am free to choose my own identity, regardless of the one my institution assigned me.
- I am worthy and deserving of respect.
- I am allowed to express myself and my emotions.
- I deserve to be treated with kindness and compassion.
Example Rehumanization exercises may include Being Your Own Friend (or showing oneself the same forgiveness and compassion as one would a friend), Taking Care of Yourself (or using emotional and physical self-care to cope), and Treating Yourself (or reasonably indulging in hobbies, enjoyable pastimes, and self-gifts).
Disclaimer
The Five R’s of Institution Therapy serve as overarching umbrella categories under which different skills and techniques may fall. Example techniques are provided in each principle section, but this paper is not a complete list of all possible treatment methods that fall under Institution Therapy. Any skills taught in trauma therapy will be helpful in Institution Therapy and can be freely applied with the administer’s discretion.