An Open Letter To The Playwright Who Stole My Blogs

[Content Warning: Mention of child abuse, rape flashback and suicide attempt]

A topic which is seemingly arising more and more frequently within survivor circles is the taking and publishing of our words and experiences without our permission - in academic papers, speeches, books, teaching materials, newspaper articles and other publications. Over the years I have been involved in Mad communities, I’ve been horrified to witness people repeatedly identify themselves and their experiences of trauma and mental illness in someone else’s work. I was disgusted by the theft and publication of women's experiences of sexual violence by a prominent "feminist" psychologist. I have felt frightened and appalled to learn of studies (which somehow managed to gain ethical approval) where individual twitter users were covertly followed online and their posts analysed. In 2024, a paper studying posts from the r/schizophrenia Reddit community was only retracted after a significant outcry from Reddit and MadTwitter communities.

Our hashtags have been gathered up. Our desperate pleas for help categorised. Our communities dissected. We’re not even safe when we’re dead.

Several years ago I discovered that a large number of my blogs had been plagiarised by a playwright, who had taken my words and my deeply distressing and traumatising experiences to create a script. Not only were the ideas and concepts from my writing and life story used - direct quotes were lifted from my work, entirely unchanged, and presented as his. Alongside material from my blog, the script also included plagiarised work from a number of sources, including Recovery in the Bin, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, and the Langley-Price report, Death By A Thousand Cuts. There were other stories and details within the script, some I didn’t recognise, some sounded like things my friends had been through. I suspect some were taken from Twitter and other social media sites.

After reading the script, I turned to friends in the MadTwitter community to ask what to do and what they thought, and was met by so many people describing their own experiences of something like this. I showed them this letter, initially a draft of an email I planned to send directly to the playwright, but after discussions it seemed more sensible to simply send him a short and direct email which requested all my material be removed from the script. I was very fortunate that he agreed to do so. I know many people for whom that was not the case, some who are still fighting lengthy battles with people who hold far more power than they do.

I decided rather than throw away this letter, I would edit it slightly and publish it, to describe how it felt to have my words and experiences taken from me.

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Dear Mr Playwright,

I received the script you sent over last week and have needed some time to process it. It's a struggle to know quite what to say. When you first contacted me in 2021, you explained that you were working with a charity, using creative methods to tell the stories of neurodivergent people. You said that you had read my blog about the "paper-self" and wanted to use my concept of the paper-self within your project, as a means of describing what it is like to move through the mental health system. I stated that I do not have the specific condition mentioned, so could not put my voice to others’ experiences, but said you could use the general concept from my blog. We have communicated very little since then.

Last week you asked if I would like to read your script, describing how you have read a number of books, reports, blogs, and tweets since reading my blog, and tried to capture something about the experiences I describe - the experiences of being erased by services, forced into new shapes, written out of our own lives, the experience of the creation of a whole new person in our medical notes. I said I would like to read it, because it sounded like you had put a lot of care and attention into your project and that having people see survivors and honour our stories was so important.

How wrong I was. There is no honour here. You see nothing. What you have produced is a collection of lazily sewn together pieces of other people's writing, brazenly plagiarised from sources you haven't even bothered to acknowledge or tried to understand. You have taken mine and other people's trauma and grotesquely stacked them one on top of the other to create a patchwork of our suffering and our pain. A pain you are clearly so far removed from, you don't even seem to have registered that what you have done is sickeningly wrong.

You may have read my blogs and my tweets but you know nothing of me. I am a person. An individual. I hope for things, I try, and succeed, and fail at things, I have the most immense love for my friends and family, I am fiercely loyal to my Mad community. I exist. You have helped yourself to the parts of my life which seemed most sensational to you. The rapes. The abuse. The arrests. The betrayal. The assaults. The pain. But it wasn't enough for you, because you went out and reaped more horror from other sources. You took the stories from the people in Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery. You took the stories from the people in the Langley-Price report. You took and took and took and mutilated me by attaching those extra horrors to my life. By doing so you also erased the people whose stories you stole. Did you not think I would notice? Did you not realise I would know the Recovery in the Bin blogs back to front? Did you not think I would have read and absorbed every single word of every single piece of testimony in the Death By A Thousand Cuts report? The report dedicated to my friend who died. This is my community. That you didn't realise I would know this wasn't your work indicates how little you understand of it. In this community we listen to each other. We believe each other. We witness each other's pain. We honour each other's lives. We remember each other's words.

In your email last week you told me the play was “not trying to be exactly [my] story”. Despite this, you felt it acceptable to use a word for word description I wrote of myself in my blog, to paint your main character. By doing so, she is no longer fictional. She is me. And in your twisted world you left me no refuge. No comfort. No place to hide. My life had clearly not been painful or frightening enough for your audience to stay engaged. You decided that I should have been abused by my father, and so you took someone else's violent abusive Dad, and you gave him to me. You tossed aside the person from Judith Herman’s book whose story you stole, and you erased my loving Dad. Cutting him from my life. You didn't realise that one of the other quotes you stole from a mental health report was actually MY quote. MY experience. Who cares who this belongs to, right? We are all faceless, nameless, shapeless blobs of graphic and grisly experiences ripe to be harvested.. To fit your narrative, you once again removed my Dad from this quote. A quote in which I described the time he and I fought for a family member who was being abused by mental health services. A quote in which I described my Dad as a loving, caring, powerful force for good during a desperate situation where he nearly lost someone he loved to suicide. Unfortunately this Dad didn’t fit your idea of a good story. You decided with a flick of your pen that he didn't matter. He wasn't a real person to you. So you excised him from my life and replaced him with an abuser. I could have vomited reading what you had done to him. I shook with despair seeing that you had allowed my actual abuser to escape scrutiny and responsibility. What he had done to me was blamed on my Dad instead. And as if this wasn’t enough, you made my family member’s experience of nearly dying, my experience. I cried realising how little their life meant to you, they were so unimportant, they could simply be blended into me. I cried with the guilt of believing that I had somehow erased people from their stories. I can’t stop thinking about the young woman in Judith Herman’s book. You made me feel that I had stolen her words and her pain. But it wasn’t me. It was you.

How could you have read all of these books and blogs and tweets and reports, claiming to have heard what we were saying - about being erased, about being silenced, about being forgotten, about being powerless, about being ignored, about being dehumanised, about being recreated into entirely new people - and then produce this script, in which you do to us exactly what you profess to find so awful? I wonder if you would have felt it acceptable to so shamelessly plagiarise the words of people without mental illness? I wonder if you even considered that your script is a walking copyright violation? We are just Mad people, right? That anyone even reads our words should be enough for us. Especially if you are “on our side”.

Earlier this year I wrote a deeply personal blog in which I shared a little piece of my soul, describing what it is to experience a rape flashback. I don’t know if you know what it is to be raped. I suspect you do not. I cannot imagine anyone who has experienced rape would do something as abhorrent as take such a searingly painful account without permission, and turn it into a chance to entertain. I am so deeply hurt that you have done this, I don’t even know what to say other than to reiterate once more that I am actually a person. The night I describe really happened.. to me.. when I was a child. Do you know what one of my most common flashbacks involves? The deepest and most desperately despairing feeling that I am going to die. Not just that I’m going to die, but that my violent death is imminent and inevitable. This is what I live with on a daily basis. Because that night, as a child, I truly believed with 100% of my body and mind that I was going to be killed. I shared this experience to help people, to educate people, not to further your career or provide you with the devastating words your audience hunger for, but you could never produce. How dare you take my words from me. How dare you present them as your own.

The disrespect you have shown me; the other survivors you have erased; and the authors and activists of the work you have helped yourself to, is vast. I was revolted to see quote after quote lifted directly from Recovery in the Bin. Not only did you make little to no attempt to conceal your plagiarism, you also displayed a total lack of understanding about what it was you were plagiarising. By removing the context of the words you stole, you also removed their power and their purpose. The documents in question contain a commentary on the very real and devastating consequences of stigma and discrimination in mental health services. Stigma and discrimination which kill people. Those words have meaning, they are not simply filler for you to pad out a scene, or comic relief to “lighten the mood” at the opening and ending of an uncomfortable play. Your misuse of these words makes a mockery of them, and by extension, the people these words describe, and the people these words aim to help.

Your entitlement to our words, our pain, our experiences, and our hard work in creating these resources is staggering. The incredible people who work behind the scenes with Recovery in the Bin do so unpaid and unacknowledged, bringing to light abuses that services refuse to recognise and providing a space for survivor voices to be heard. The authors of the Langley-Price Death By A Thousand Cuts report devoted two years of their time, unpaid, to share the stories of people being harmed by services, and to honour a beloved member of our community who was tormented to death by mental health staff.

You have clearly not grasped the gravity, solemnity, or importance of the material you have so unscrupulously gathered this past year. You have created the biggest piece of literary irony I have ever had the misfortune to read. To supposedly raise awareness of trauma victims and Mad people being erased and trodden on, you have erased and trodden on trauma victims and Mad people. You may call yourself a storyteller, but you do not have the right to tell our stories. Our stories belong to us.

To all professionals reading this. Academics, clinicians, authors, journalists, playwrights, screenwriters… Traumatised, neurodivergent, Mad, and mentally ill people sharing their experiences are not objects to be studied for your projects, papers and publications. The words you take are our words, which have come from places inside us so deep and painful they may never have been spoken aloud. You are not entitled to them. You are not entitled to us. Our lives are not your creative inspiration. Our suffering is not your ticket into a journal. Our traumas are not juicy anecdotes to litter throughout your books, or devices for you to develop your plots, and your careers. Attracted like vultures to a corpse, you gather to pick us clean. But we are more than bodies. See through your screens, we sit on the other side. The pain, anger, torment and desperation we express at a world which refuses to see us is not imagined, and by reading our words but not actually hearing them, you compound our invisibility. We exist! We fucking exist.

Please remember:

Plagiarism is plagiarism whether the person you are stealing from is traumatised/neurodivergent/mentally ill or not. There is no footnote in copyright law which states that the law doesn't apply to people who lack social status and power. If you wouldn’t do it to someone you consider a peer or colleague, why do you think it acceptable to do to us?

Quoting work which you have found “in the public domain” may be legal, but that doesn’t mean it is always ethical. It isn’t hard to ask permission. Try it, and respect the answer you’re given.

Finally, remember to think about what it might have taken for the author of those words to create them; what sharing them may have cost; how much trust and faith we have had to hold to bear our secrets and our shame to the world; what purpose we hoped they would serve. Are you honouring our words or are you using them for your own purposes? Are you the right person to tell this story? How does your position of power differ to that of the author? What might you be taking from them along with their words? I almost exclusively publish my writing on my blog, not because I don’t want to contribute to other publications or websites, but because while it is on my blog, I can remain in control of it. I can take it down if I want, edit it, delete it, change it, censor it. By taking our words you take our control. For some of us, that is synonymous with our safety.

We know how little value our testimony has in this society. "Survivor" is often synonymous with "not believed"; "ignored"; "silenced"; "not trusted"; "not listened to". We see how our experiences of abuse from mental health professionals are reframed, at best as our faulty perception, at worst as malicious fabrications. We feel it in our bodies when our experiences of trauma are titled ‘allegations’ and ‘claims’. We take note when our blogs and articles are removed from the reference section in your academic papers and replaced with a footnote, or nothing at all. We are not believed because we are mentally ill. We are not believed because we are traumatised. We are not believed because we are disabled. We are not believed because we are lesser.

No matter how loud we shout, we do not hold the epistemic authority to truly be heard, because true hearing means being believed and being seen as the authority on our experiences. What this translates to in practice is that I can write about my experiences here on my blog - my experiences of abuse, of police brutality, of harm from mental health services - but what I write holds no authority. If a professional person wrote literally exactly the same words as me but had them printed in a peer reviewed journal, they would be believed. They would suddenly be the truth. Reliable. Trustworthy. I don't have that power. When professionals or people in positions of power steal our writing, they take more than our words. They assume power over those words, and sit as an authority on them. We are subsequently removed from our own experiences.

Stealing our words and work is not empowering. When you take it without permission, you take little pieces of us, replicating the pain and trauma we are attempting to share. Silencing us. Stripping that little bit of power we may have gained by speaking aloud. Ultimately, you are saying to the world that you have absolutely no respect for us. We’re just objects to you.

I have no idea if sharing this letter will make anyone think twice before taking the words or work of a survivor, but I hope so. We are worth more than this.

Wren