“If a person can’t get out of bed, something is making them exhausted. If a student isn’t writing papers, there’s some aspect of the assignment that they can’t do without help. If an employee misses deadlines constantly, something is making organization and deadline-meeting difficult. Even if a person is actively choosing to self-sabotage, there’s a reason for it — some fear they’re working through, some need not being met, a lack of self-esteem being expressed. People do not choose to fail or disappoint. No one wants to feel incapable, apathetic, or ineffective. If you look at a person’s action (or inaction) and see only laziness, you are missing key details. There is always an explanation. There are always barriers. Just because you can’t see them, or don’t view them as legitimate, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Look harder. Maybe you weren’t always able to look at human behavior this way. That’s okay. Now you are. Give it a try.”
(And a footnote I didn’t see explicitly covered in the article: laziness still doesn’t exist when it is you yourself making no progress and not knowing why. You deserve that respect and consideration, too, even from yourself.)
Also when he was being treated in a hospital he wrote a letter to his brother, and in it he says how he was actually feeling better than he had in a really long time and how he was doing his best art ever. If he had had access to more effective modern treatment, who knows how much more art he would have made and how amazing it would have been
I never understood why people list their mental health on here anyway unless it’s something like DID/OSDD then you don’t need to list that shit
You know what, not even! Listing your mental health is out, minding your own business is in
I honestly hope this spreads because the thought that someone is automatically nt until they tell a complete internet stranger EVERYTHING is both exhausting and annoying.
You wouldn’t go up to someone irl and be like hmm you must be neurotypical because you aren’t stating clearly to me that youre –. It’s private info.
For me, it helped me see that there are a lot of other people out there who are like me (cuz let’s be honest, stats aren’t as effective as actually seeing lots of people out in the world who are like you). I also talk about my illnesses on my blog, and I like being able to be open about it where no one knows me irl. I’m tired of the “we don’t talk about that” attitude tbh. Like if you want to keep that info to yourself you should be able to, and the assumption that people are nt unless specified is definitely shitty. But there’s still a culture of silence and judgement around mental illness that needs to stop. And as someone who IS more comfortable talking about their own illnesses, I want to make it visible for others who may be going through the same thing
Okay so apparently one of the things that the whole March For Lives things wants to do is let cops have access to mental health records right away no questions asked and like uh no fuck off fuck you and fuck anyone that supports that
nothing could possibly go wrong
is the march for life the thing for ‘ending gun violence(except the state yknow)’?
all crazies must take their pills, go to therapy, and drink water, sweaty. we care™ about your well being.
the database is there for YOUR protection
More school cops too! Gee, these kids are nailing it on all fronts.
This is ridiclous because one of the biggest demographics harmed by police brutality are disabled people, many times the police are fully aware of their mental or neurological disability and continue to abuse them anyway because they can! Like holy shit this is a terrible idea
It’s moments like this that I’m reminded that these are children who lack nuance who are being guided by adults who also lack nuance and/or purposefully want to shoehorn dangerous shit like this into the “progress” being made.
This narrative that the mentally ill are violent and dangerous is pervasive. It invades ideology to the point that people don’t even realise the assumption is there. That’s what’s happening here. These are kids. They are absolutely right that change needs to happen, but they have not learnt nuance when it comes to deconstructing the assumptions underlying their theoretical premise. So we get this.
They are of course right that we need new gun laws, but frankly this attitude scares the shit out of me. Because they do not see the danger this poses to the visibly mentally ill. It stigmatises us further and puts us in massive amounts of danger. Doing everything we can to stop the school shootings is good, but this is not going to help.
Because the worst people I’ve ever met for nuance is the police force. Always. If this legislation is passed, forced hospitalization will go up. Police brutality towards the disabled will go up, and to people of colour, because it’s acceptable to hurt the disabled now because we’re dangerous, which compounds the idea that disabled people of colour are super dangerous.
Legislation like this, aside from being invasive, threatening, and violent by nature, will lead to police thinking that attacking the disabled will be something they can get away with more easily than before. It will make the public more frightened of us. It will lead to anonymous tip offs and to violence and death.
Legislation like this fundamentally fails to recognise the disabled as equally human. It’s dehumanising and terrifying. And it will not be used to prevent violent people from accessing guns. It will be used to allow the scapegoating of the mentally ill for EVERYTHING. It’s making being mentally ill criminal in and of itself.
What confuses me is that this does NOT sound like what the kids wanted at the march. Some of the kids were openly saying they felt like criminals in their schools because of heightened police in their areas.
And it really doesn’t ring true to what I’ve seen of them. Which begs the question – who’s actually pushing for this by piggybacking off these kids to do it?
As far as I can tell, these “demands” for expanding police presence and criminalizing mental health do not stem from the actual official March for Our Lives movement.
These proposals come from an article from The Guardian which allowed 10 students from the MSD high school newspaper, Eagle Eye, to write an article for the website. (article can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2018/mar/23/parkland-students-manifesto-americas-gun-laws) These students are not the ones who have been leading the march or the ones who have been seen speaking out to the media recently.
The March for Our Lives petition/website does not include these suggestions.
The actual March for Our Lives petition demands only include an assault weapons ban, prohibiting high capacity magazines and closing the loophole in background checks. The official petition can be found here: https://marchforourlivespetition.com/ The March for Our Lives website includes funding for gun violence research and intervention and eliminating restrictions on the ATF (which includes things like digitizing gun sales records and instituting safety requirements, did you know guns shown to have manufacturing defects are not required to issue a recall, even if people are killed because of it?) Information found here: https://marchforourlives.com/how-we-save-lives/
this might be a bit of a reach but in the wake of so-called “progressives” advocating for creating a list of mentally ill people and handing it over to the cops, on top of things like forced institutionalization and universities expelling students who they deem too crazy to function, I do not want to hear ANY of you people whining about why we don’t just see a doctor and Start Recovering.
Just either admit you have no fucking clue how dangerous it can be to live at the mercy of incompetent bureaucracies that convinced themselves they can do no harm, or that you’re just annoyed that mentally ill people write things where you can see them. Fuck off
For real. Also since this is largely a response to mass shootings, to say that the mass shooting tragedies have been primarily caused by mental illness in the first place, is blatantly ignoring the fact that despite mental illness existing across all demographic lines, it’s overwhelmingly been white guys who felt justified in killing other people, and apparently lacked the understanding that other people are allowed to reject you without violent repercussions and that individuals are responsible for their own behavior and reactions. If it were really just about mental illness, you’d see many more people of other races, genders, etc doing the same thing.
I DO think that improved access to effective mental health treatment is really important, but furthering stigmas, punishing people for being mentally ill, making it less safe for mentally ill people, and creating a hostile environment literally just makes everything worse??? Also, depending on insurance and availability of treatment, it can take a LONG time to actually find a therapist/psychiatrist at all, let alone someone who helps treat you effectively. My S/O is on Medicaid and it’s been over a year of constant waitlisting, searching, and being rejected by potential therapists due to policy changes and/or not taking new patients. He was seeing one for awhile tho she wasn’t effective, but after she cancelled one appointment, we never heard from her again, despite leaving numerous messages on her personal answering machine and with the front desk. That specific treatment center was the closest one to where we live, and it was 30 minutes away by car, and about an hour by bus and walking. This was after the city decided to close a lot of mental health clinics (more than one of which were around our area, which is predominantly black and latine, big surprise there). We live in Chicago, which has more resources than a lot of small towns where there might not even be a mental health clinic at all.
So to people saying “just get treatment”, it’s NOT that fucking easy.
“Are you saying that murderers are right in the head??”
No there’s definitely something wrong with someone’s way of thinking if they can justify killing innocent people, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they have a mental illness.
Extremist beliefs isn’t a mental illness.
Bigotry isn’t a mental illness.
Entitlement isn’t a mental illness.
Hate isn’t a mental illness.
Having a dysfunctional moral compass isn’t a mental illness.
We need to stop categorizing all these things as some undefinable “mental illness” and start looking at what we do as a society to develop and justify these things to a degree where people use them to justify killing.
Also notice how despite the fact that mentally ill people exist in every demographic, the one demographic that continues to commit mass shootings, and in particular, school shootings, is white cis boys/men. So even if it were just an issue of mental illness, they’d have to explain that away somehow
I agree with this mostly. But also some people don’t admit/realize they’re mentally ill because of their mental illness. Especially people who have delusions or other symptoms that impact rational thought/cognitive reasoning.
Another common factor in America is cultural influence. In most cultures, mental illness already has stigmas attached. But especially within minority communities (poc, poor, immigrant, etc), it becomes especially hard to admit or recognize that you or family members may be mentally ill. This is partly due to a continuing historical lack of resources (and thus improvised coping mechanisms that cover up symptoms or result in other behaviors that were seen as a separate problem from mental health), the minor and major traumas that minority groups tend to face more of (that often create a more desensitized support system – many people hear “well I’ve had many worse things happen so you should be able to deal with this” from less mentally ill people, even in majority groups who don’t typically face as much traumatic events), and the historical pattern of minority mentally ill people either needing to push through with bad coping mechanisms to do what was necessary or else die/be put in jail/etc. Mental health centers/institutions, while definitely often horrible and toxic, were often not an option for poc or poor white people and so rather than being seen as sick people needing help, underprivileged communities often saw (and still see) mentally ill people as lazy, delinquent, etc. That if you ask for help, it’s because you’re weak and lazy and incompetent. Which makes it much harder for people who grew up in these communities to admit they need help or are ill, even after they leave the community if they do. And these issues still very much affect people in these communities now.
For the most part, I’m not talking about underprivileged communities facing mental illness. The majority of toxicity I’ve observed in people who use their mental illness as an excuse are from people from privileged groups. People who HAVE been receiving help, who aren’t stigmatise. It’s not about not being able to ask for help, thats an entirely separate issue. It’s about knowing you have a problem and flaunting it as your get out of jail free card.
That’s absolutely fair. I’ve seen people do it too. I just didn’t want someone who it didn’t apply to getting the wrong idea. And I didn’t want anyone to miss the point and try to use it against certain mentally ill people who struggle with it. Sorry if it felt like I hijacked your post 😓
I agree with this mostly. But also some people don’t admit/realize they’re mentally ill because of their mental illness. Especially people who have delusions or other symptoms that impact rational thought/cognitive reasoning.
Another common factor in America is cultural influence. In most cultures, mental illness already has stigmas attached. But especially within minority communities (poc, poor, immigrant, etc), it becomes especially hard to admit or recognize that you or family members may be mentally ill. This is partly due to a continuing historical lack of resources (and thus improvised coping mechanisms that cover up symptoms or result in other behaviors that were seen as a separate problem from mental health), the minor and major traumas that minority groups tend to face more of (that often create a more desensitized support system – many people hear “well I’ve had many worse things happen so you should be able to deal with this” from less mentally ill people, even in majority groups who don’t typically face as much traumatic events), and the historical pattern of minority mentally ill people either needing to push through with bad coping mechanisms to do what was necessary or else die/be put in jail/etc. Mental health centers/institutions, while definitely often horrible and toxic, were often not an option for poc or poor white people and so rather than being seen as sick people needing help, underprivileged communities often saw (and still see) mentally ill people as lazy, delinquent, etc. That if you ask for help, it’s because you’re weak and lazy and incompetent. Which makes it much harder for people who grew up in these communities to admit they need help or are ill, even after they leave the community if they do. And these issues still very much affect people in these communities now.
i’m now seeing posts that are basically accusing therapists of being the same as ““““neurotypicals”””” who tell you that doing yoga will cure your depression
and it’s fucking killing me because ??? the idea of being annoyed by people telling you that stuff is because those people honestly think that doing yoga and “looking on the bright side” will magically cure your depression, because they can’t imagine happiness not coming as easily to someone else as it does to them. the idea isn’t that getting exercise and practicing positive thinking are useless ways to treat depression. but that’s what i’m seeing a lot of now and i just want to say…. i got some fucking bad news, cause that is the treatment for depression.
therapists telling you to get good nutrition and exercise are not the same as your yoga-instructor aunt on facebook posting pictures of the sunrise and wondering how anyone can be depressed when the world is so wonderful!!! thats not just an anti-recovery attitude, it’s an anti-treatment attitude, and it’s unbelievably ignorant.
there’s sort of this interesting circular form to dealing with mental illness, where you start in a place of “i just need to think positively and push myself out of this ditch” and then you move to step 2, which is “depression is a real and very serious illness and it’s not my fault that i’m tired all the time, stop telling me to just “think positive” all the time.”
But then there’s step three, which is where you size up your situation and say “look, i understand how serious my illness is, and i’m no longer blaming myself for it. And it sucks, and I don’t “deserve” this, and I didn’t bring it on myself. But regardless of how unfair it is, the truth is that I’m the only one who can actually do anything about it.” And so in a lot of ways, you end up with parallel ways of thinking as before, but this time you’re coming from a completely different source of understanding. People who don’t know anything about mental illness say “depression is a choice.” People who are fed up with being depressed and realize that wallowing in the comforting embrace of self-pity is useful to erase guilt, but ultimately won’t help them lead a better life say, “recovery is a choice.”
The first group means that if you’re depressed, you can just magically decide not to be depressed. The second group means that depression is a crushing weight on your back determined to make your life as miserable (and as short) as possible, and that you didn’t do anything to cause it, but that ultimately you have the choice of giving up and accepting being depressed for the rest of your life, or you have the option of making an effort to improve your quality of life. Similar statements, totally different meanings.
But I think a lot of people are sort of seduced by the comfort of giving up, and with the good intention of creating communities of understanding and non-judgement between mentally ill people, social media has unwittingly created communities of mentally ill people encouraging each other to give up. To just accept that this is the way their lives are, and there’s no possibility of getting better. And that’s how it’s gotten to the point of people dismissing actual mental health professionals as being no different than some ignorant person who doesn’t know the first thing about psychology and thinks an avocado smoothie will solve all your problems.
Avocado smoothie people are coming from the first perspective, that being depressed is a free choice that you can easily opt out of. Therapists are coming from the second perspective, where mental illness is a horrible reality, but given that you’re seeing them, a provider of mental health treatment, of fucking course they’re going to give you advice on how to treat your mental illness! Your therapist isn’t going to sit around and say “yeah man that sucks, haha look at this funny meme about how much you want to kill yourself.” Your therapist is going to give you recommendations of activities and habits that will help you recover. And they understand that these activities are not easy!!! They get that!!! The reason they’re there is to help you introduce these activities and ways of thinking into your life!!! Otherwise they’d just hand you a pamphlet and walk out!!!
But you can’t access that kind of help – the kind where you say “getting out of the house is a real problem for me, I never have the energy to get out of bed” and your therapist says “okay let’s figure out how to break this down into small steps, we’ll set a small goal for this week, and next time we meet you can tell me if it worked out, and if it did then we can figure out what the next goal will be, and if not then we can figure out why it didn’t work and try a different approach” – if you immediately dismiss any mention of recovery as “neurotypical bullshit.”
Anyways please please please take your healthcare seriously, get treatment, and realize that giving up and normalizing your depression/anxiety/etc as something that will never ever get better (yes, even if it’s a chronic condition that you’ll never fully cure, you still need to treat it) is not okay. Try to get good nutrition. Try to get sunshine and exercise. Try to be social. Making an effort to do things that will help you is not the same as thinking mental illness is a switch you can easily flip. Getting treatment is not the same thing as pretending your mental illness doesn’t exist or isn’t serious. On the contrary, getting treatment is taking your mental illness seriously. I’m not saying you should never make a joke or reblog a fucking meme or anything, I’m saying don’t use social media as your mental health care provider. Social media can be a way to vent, but venting is not the same thing as recovering.
Honestly it can take a very long time to get to that “step 3″ perspective but it’s a vital step.
THIS.
I’ve got my boyfriend calling me at 8am every weekday morning to get me out of bed so that I *get out of bed*. I then tell him when I’ve gotten to the gym.
We have worked this out between us, consensually, because I can’t fucking make myself do it. Because depression. But when I get up and go to the gym, suddenly my days get way, way more functional. I eat real food, I run errands, I cook- instead of laying on the couch feeling like my diaphragm got nailed to the floor. (They don’t all necessarily happen every day, but they become at least theoretically feasible.) This isn’t part 1, it’s part 3. Because dammit, I am fucking sick of this shit. I don’t deserve it and it’s a real issue- and for me, having someone to basically hotwire me because my starter is broken is how we’re gonna get a routine that takes minimal spoons to run.
Sometimes depression is cureable. Sometimes it’s just treatable. But dissing treatment because “gah neurotypicals” is shooting yourself in the foot.
Sometimes self-care is baths and Netflix and junk food and Tumblr. And sometimes self-care is an arranged phone call at 8am.
This is important. I doubt I’ll ever be rid of my depression entirely. But I’ve definitely had worse days than im having currently, and things are feasible that weren’t for a long time. And therapy is what’s helped me with that. My bf has more severe depression than me, and when it’s nice out I literally force him to go outside for a bit. And he hates me for a second. And then he gets outside and he always feels a teensy bit better.
Disheveled Mess 