The Sorting Hat
RFK Jr. claims he wants to help us. What he really wants is to isolate us.
I am a professional at gallows humor, as are most of my neurodivergent friends. There are memes-a-flying about us all being put in Wellness Farm, like this gem…
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All joking aside, it is a scary prospect, and I do believe that RFK Jr. is serious. I do believe he wants to make Wellness Farm a reality. I am also concerned in the immediate term about losing access to my medication. That is a very big problem. But I’m afraid it goes deeper than that.
Follow me on a brief tangent, friends:
You may recall a certain Professional TERF and Aggressively Mid Author had a concept called the “Sorting Hat” in her Wizard Books1.
I didn’t give a shit about this until I started seeing it all over social media, including sometimes intense debates about what “house” everyone was in. At the time, I took a benevolent approach. I looked at it like astrology. Then, people started asking me in person what Hogwarts House I was in. There was no nice way to say “I do not think that hard about books written for literal children”2 so I’d just laugh it off saying I didn’t know, or I would change the subject entirely.
And then, the Buzzfeed quizzes. The Facebook quizzes. Who is on your Zombie Apocalypse Team? Which Sex and the City character are you? What Taylor Swift song are you? We all gave our data3 away so that the internet itself could sort us. And sort us, they did. The algorithms know us better than we know ourselves. 4
The “Sorting Hat”, as it were, has reached the US Government. Space Nazi is purging the federal government, based on “data”, and the first sorting activity was deciding who was a “DEI” hire. I can guarantee he has all the data he needs to find out stuff about each and every one of us, and that should scare us all.
RFK Jr. is sorting us, too.
In order to talk about this, we have to briefly ignore the ridiculous fact that the man in charge of public health found the carcass of a baby bear, put it in his vehicle, and dumped it in Central Park. We also are meant to ignore that his own sister told the world that this man put living baby chickens and mice in a blender to feed to his snakes. We are also meant to ignore that this man is not a doctor, has no formal science training, and is in no way qualified to decide who needs to be on medications and who doesn’t. But since RFK is a recovering addict, apparently, that qualifies him.
Addiction recovery is one of the only areas where the mere fact of having experienced a medical problem means you are now considered an expert in said problem. I know a lot about ADHD, but no one is going to hire me to do medical research on the subject, nor should they. A not-small chunk of the people in charge of addiction recovery programs are former addicts without any other qualifications (AA leaders, for example). RFK Jr. may have quit drugs, but he isn’t an expert. Unfortunately, he is being treated as such. He has decided that his “cure” for drug addiction is to put people in camps, aka, “Wellness Farms”.
One of his models is a farm that was developed in Italy in the 1970s called San Patrignano, in response to worsening heroin use. It was a small family-run farm that eventually began to employ and house recovering drug addicts, and over time became its own small town, complete with a hospital, canteen, and housing. It’s founder - Vincenzo Muccioli - dabbled in Very Scientific Things such as seances, parapsychology, and “natural medicine”.
As it turns out, Muccioli was basically a cult leader. He used inhumane methods to keep people from relapsing, like locking them in dog kennels and chicken coops in the freezing cold. He claimed he “did what was required” to keep people off drugs and keep them safe. Of course, that wasn’t the worst of it, and his methods escalated. In 1989, one of the residents was found dead in Naples, wrapped in a blanket from the farm. He had been killed by his boss on the farm, who used a cattle prod on his victim before strangling him. 5 Muccioli knew about it, and attempted to cover up the murder, which eventually led to him serving time in prison.
Despite all of this, San Patrignano still exists today. It is regarded as one of the more successful drug treatment programs in Europe. It’s Therapeutic Community Model is held up as an example worldwide. It is especially popular with young people in Italy6, and the residency is offered at no-cost. The program is quite restrictive. For example, family members aren’t even allowed to visit until you have been in residence for an entire year. Many addiction models - including 12 Step programs - have time-based rules as well, such as no romantic relationships until you have been sober for an entire year.7
To many, San Patrignano is considered a miracle (they boast a very high success rate, though I am not sure who is fact checking that), but San Patrignano is also viewed as a fancy labor camp8. For example, they have a bunch of addicts make their expensive wines. They claim that the products made there are meant to create a fully self-sustaining community. Many also argue that because it is teaching marketable skills such as textile creation, baking, and winemaking - it is giving the residents a better chance of success when they leave. However, when you have a program where labor is compulsory and the workers are not compensated for it, that becomes at best an ethical grey area. Some argue that San Patrignano is simply a way to segregate addicts and get them out of the general population9, but that it is a better option than Italian prison.
The commonality between San Patrignano and RFK’s planned out Wellness Farms is that neither are based in science, nor are they/will they be run by scientists/medical professionals. The residents of San Patrignano are not offered science based medical treatments, including drugs like methadone and buprenorphine, which have been shown to help recovering opioid addicts. With the rise in popularity of Ozempic, which is now being researched to treat addiction, it is clear that the idea of “willpower” should go the way of the dodo. Like obesity, it’s becoming even more evident that addiction is not a moral failing. In fact, I’d wager that morality has less to do with either of those things than previously thought.
RFK Jr. is not only targeting drug addicts. He is targeting every person who he deems to be “at risk” for addiction, and since he has openly demonized SSRI’s and stimulants, he has made comments to suggest that anyone who is on psychiatric drugs or has a mental illness may “voluntarily”10 join one of his Wellness Farms.
This rhetoric is insidious. It aims to further stigmatize anyone with a mental illness or ADHD/Autism, and to conflate the medical treatment of those illnesses with drug abuse. Taking a stimulant to treat ADHD is not the same thing as a neurotypical person using Adderall to party all night. Taking an antidepressant to treat clinical depression is not the same thing as self medicating by drinking a fifth of Jack Daniels every day. It is well known that untreated mental illness, ASD or ADHD can actually lead to increased rates of substance abuse.
People with mental health conditions and/or ADHD/Autism Spectrum Disorder already face stigma, especially when it comes to medication. Over the past several years, trying to find available medications for ADHD has become a full time job, and with the further disinformation that RFK Jr. and his ilk are forcing down our throats, that situation isn’t getting better anytime soon. Under his purview, the Department of Health and Human Services has been tasked with assessing the “prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs."11 He has falsely claimed that school shootings were caused by SSRIs (in fact, it turns out that most school shooters DID NOT take them).
And yet, he keeps claiming he wants to “Make America Healthy Again”.
If RFK Jr. really wanted a more healthy society, he’d be interested in making residential drug and alcohol treatment more affordable. He would be interested in universal health care. He would be interested in promoting vaccinations against entirely preventable diseases. He would be interested in creating a society where people aren’t so stressed, overworked, and miserable that they begin to abuse drugs and/or alcohol. He would make sure that people with mental health disorders have access to their medications and that mental healthcare would be covered by insurance. He would be against dangerous abortion bans that threaten the lives of anyone who is pregnant. He would make sure every child in this country had access to healthy and nutritious school lunches, and would figure out what to do about Food Deserts12.
He isn’t doing that13. He’s doing exactly what the President and Space Nazi want - sorting the “undesirables” and putting them where they think they belong. He is going along with the fringe ideas that have become the mainstream. He is anti-science, anti-freedom, and antagonistic towards mental health disorders. He continues to lie about the link between vaccines and ASD (there isn’t one), and talks about autism as if it is the worst thing that can happen to someone (it isn’t). As we speak, children are dying of measles in West Texas, with their brainwashed parents insisting that they would STILL turn down a vaccine if they had to do it over.
What if we had leaders who dared to work towards a society where people didn’t turn to drugs or alcohol to relieve the burdens of living in this world? What if we had leaders who understood the difference between heroin and Prozac? What if we had leaders who did not wish to bring segregation back? What if we had leaders who insisted on humane treatment for mental illness, who worked to ban prison labor, who made sure that everyone in this country had enough to eat?
That isn’t what this Administration is doing. They are not seeking to heal. They are seeking to isolate and eliminate those they deem unworthy. We need to stand together against this demonization of science, mental health, neurodiversity, queerness, and bodily autonomy. It is imperative that we show them in every way we can that we do not fit into their reductive categories, and that we don’t buy their bullshit. The more united we are, the more difficult it is to isolate us. We need to find community with each other, rather than let the government choose our communities for us.
Truly, has this woman done ANYTHING positive for society in the past decade or more? Anything?
When people started comparing the Current President to fucking Voldemort (this was more during his first term), I wanted to lose my absolute mind. I have Many Thoughts about the level to which people decided that YA/children’s fiction was the new Moral Code but I digress as usual.
I am certainly not saying that Buzzfeed quizzes led to the end of American democracy, but it certainly gave companies lots of useful data about us that I am certain was used for nefarious purposes. I regret ever participating in any of them, especially when I already know I am a Charlotte/Carrie hybrid.
I will reiterate that this is not based in any kind of science, rather, a model of behavior invented by white Christian men for white Christian men. Holly Whitaker has written about 12 step and the patriarchy and people got Very Mad about it, but I do think it’s worth discussion and scrutiny. That is not saying 12 Step can’t and doesn’t work for people, but their relapse rate is about the same as any other model of recovery.
But where do the rest of the addicts go? Italy has insanely punitive drug laws. An addict convicted of possession can go to jail for as much as TEN years, without intent to sell. Recently, they eased up on marijuana laws, but drugs like heroin are still punished harshly.
Sure Jan dot Gif
We all know the GOP doesn’t care, and they all had a Full Menty B when a Black Woman wanted kids to eat a vegetable.
The only thing I agree with him on is banning food dyes and ingredients that have been banned by the EU for years.
It's absolutely mind-boggling how this guy thinks his name, his family history, and his money make him absolutely certain that he is right about all things at all times.
One experience I know you and I share is how life-changing ADHD meds were for us. Everything you've written about here is one of the (many) things keeping me up at night. Thank you for writing this!