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work-of-waking-up · 3 years

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In Defense of the Psychopath

Alright, wanna venture into my crazy ass brain? I’m going to start by saying one thing that will set the tone for everything else that follows: Villanelle is not a psychopath in the way that we currently understand them. Why am I even bothering to write about a fictional character, you ask? Because representation is important. Media portrayal of various mental and behavioral health topics (including ones that people might not think need to be discussed) is important and this show has a big audience. I also just want to contribute to the conversations that are taking place because I am seeing A LOT of them and the reason for that I believe boils down to the fact that Jodie makes Villanelle so relatable and people want to know what that means and looks like for them. Even those who felt they could relate to Sandra’s Eve, or the relationship between the two, maybe questioned what that meant the further they went down the path with them. “It’s probably a bad thing I relate to a psychopath, right? But she can’t be a psychopath because she cries and she feels things! Psychopaths don’t cry, which means she isn’t realistic so therefore it’s okay that I relate to her! Right? Or are my assumptions about psychopaths and people with antisocial personality disorder wrong? I relate to Eve but look what she is underneath it all...so does that mean I relate to that part of her too?” Not only is villanelles character relatable, but people see the freedom inherent within her, the freedom that Eve sees, and they realize that, at least on some level, they want it too. The show has (unintentionally I think) created a massive dialogue which is super cool and you can tell everyone involved on the show is aware of that now, I mean they have a consulting psychiatrist so I think that speaks for itself. This is less of a commentary on the character herself and whether or not she is a genuine psychopath, and more so a commentary on the conversations she has inspired and why... For the record, this is literally just my opinion sprinkled with a few facts, nothing else.

So, the term psychopath gets thrown around in the show, more so in the beginning, MI6 explicitly labels Villanelle this way, even going so far as to use her in a presentation about psychopaths, although I think that was more so to gauge Eve’s response than anything else. The reality of Villanelle, which we come to learn, is that nobody has been able to get close enough to really know the truth. Anna and Konstantin both got close but we never hear either of them use that word (Konstantin says it once but he clearly doesn’t mean it, it was more of an attempted manipulation tactic). They make it clear that she has, and can, and WILL cause damage, but that’s as far as they go. Eve is getting close and she tells Villanelle when they first meet that she knows Villanelle is a psychopath but it’s obvious from Eve's behavior and things she says later on that she truly doesn’t believe Villanelle is what everyone says she is. It’s easier to label her as a psychopath because that alienates and isolates her and her behavior completely. She is an outlier with behavioral anomalies and therefore it isn’t necessary to look any closer. For MI6 and others (not talking about the shows creators) to label Villanelle as a psychopath is easy, it’s lazy, it’s reductive, it serves a single purpose... a means to an end. They (anyone other than Eve basically) simply do not care about Villanelle’s truth. But as an audience we are lucky enough to see more of her with each episode. The psychopath label begins to fade and Oksana is what’s left. We know based on what she has said that she is aware that people think she is a psychopath, a monster, a person built to kill. It’s not always easy to decide that who you are is different from who you’ve always been told you are, especially given her history. Villanelle hasn’t told us yet if she thinks (or knows) that she is a psychopath, but it’s clear towards the end of last season that she no longer wants to be the person that they (meaning the twelve, Dasha, Konstantin, etc.) created. We see moments where she clearly has no remorse and clearly enjoys what she does, but then we have little moments sprinkled in between where she very obviously struggles, even if its short lived. And those moments are important. We have the moment where she struggles with the choice to shoot Konstantin, saying he is a good person, she thinks. This comes shortly after a conversation she had where Irina tells Villanelle she thinks she is a good person because she is sad, so we know she is thinking about it, we know the awareness is there, and it becomes more and more there as times goes on. I like to think of it in terms of having moments that are pure Villanelle (ie the way she killed Inga in the Russian prison), and then we have moments that are Oksana, vulnerable and emotional. Villanelle is a creation and a mask whereas oksana is the truth. Those moments are starting to really mean something. I'm not even going to start with her trip to find her family, that’s its own thing, but it's a Really Big Thing.

So. Villanelle is not a psychopath in the way that we currently understand and perceive them. Yes, she displays psychopathic traits, and yes, she absolutely has antisocial personality disorder. I read an article where the psychiatric consultant for the show (makes it pretty obvious how hard they worked to make Villanelle as realistic as possible) said that the Villanelle in Luke Jenning’s books scored a 32 on Hare’s psychiatric checklist, but I like to think (and I think a lot of people would agree) that number is a bit high, at least for Jodie’s Villanelle, maybe not even hitting 30 at all (close though, let’s be real lol). The max score is 40 which would be a fully blown primary psychopath. For reference, Ted Bundy scored 39. This checklist is flawed though, mostly created and based off the prison population. Which is why it isn’t used as a proper diagnostic tool. 32 is apparently extraordinarily high for a female (think Aileen Wuornos), which brings me to my next point which is that because it’s hard to measure a lot of the classic traits objectively, there is not a ton of solid data surrounding psychopathy, and even less of it is on female psychopaths. Like most things in life, psychopathy exists on a spectrum, there are levels and layers. It’s not black and white, there’s no definitive test (psychopathy isn’t even in the DSM-5 because as I said earlier it’s extremely hard to measure objectively) and it's important to distinguish between someone who exhibits psychopathic traits and someone who is actually an identifiable psychopath. Chances are high that someone you know displays at least one characteristic shared with psychopaths and this doesn’t make them one.

I think what’s important about this is that mental disorders (mental illness/personality disorders/etc.) of any kind are much more nuanced than a lot of people tend to think they are. That they exist less in black and white and more in shades of grey. Jodie Comer is absolutely remarkable for showcasing that through portraying the different layers of Villanelle. Her performance is a literal gift. We cannot keep thinking and acting like we know everything about how a person thinks, feels, and behaves based strictly and entirely on one label. The thing that has stuck out to me the most, the reason I decided to even write this bullshit babble, is that one of the most searched topics about the show is whether or not it’s realistic that Villanelle cries, and honestly how sad is that? That makes me sad for V. Is it more realistic for her to develop connections and cognitive empathy if she was made into a psychopath vs if she was born that way? Is there a legitimate difference between the two? And how do we even decide which one is applicable for someone? It’s important to add that antisocial personality disorder is not the same thing as psychopathy or sociopathy. You can have aspd and not be a psychopath. Research has shown that about only a third of those diagnosed with aspd would meet criteria to be considered a psychopath. Society is not doing a great job at getting people to understand this. But to be fair, understanding personality disorders specifically has been somewhat problematic, a lot of diagnostic confusion and overlap between disorders. A LOT of work needs to be done. But as far as portrayals go, society has strictly chosen to go the route of giving us psychopathic characters and having them be inherently violent, incapable of remorse, feelings, or change. Poverty of all emotions. Subhuman. They are made out to be so abnormal and unrelatable to the point where the character of Villanelle has sparked so much debate and fascination simply because she exists in a way that actually IS relatable...and layered and beautiful and thrilling. We thought she would be the bad guy and yet we root for her at every turn, we cry for her, we want good things for her! We see her darkness and without question or hesitation we forgive it. She makes us question what we’ve previously been shown. Questioning whether or not it’s realistic that she acts the way she does is less important than questioning our own personal assumptions and beliefs and where those come from. I think that’s awesome. Villanelle is truly a gift. She is hands down one of the most well written fictional characters, which is saying a lot considering when you put something, or someone, in a box it doesn’t leave tons of room for expansion. and I honestly don’t even really need to say this, but.. Jodie Comer.

#killing eve #villanelle #jodie comer #eve polastri #sandra oh #villaneve #feel free to rb #if you want #oksana astankova

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eaglehealthworks · 3 years

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Lots of words, lots of meanings Pt. I

This entry is intended to bring a little educational understanding to those who are unsure of what all the different terms mean in the world of people with drug/alcohol/behavioral issues. For the sake of discussing the individual, he/she/they are known as such and will be in active use, active recovery, or active wellness (complete remission, perhaps). There are those that will state that one cannot be cured and there is only a state of recovery because the individual is never not addicted to whatever caused problems. I contend that an individual can achieve active wellness which would include complete abstinence and a life without psychoactive substances and/or other excessive repetitive patterns know as behavioral addictions (e.g., gambling, sex, shopping &c.) in healthy, sustainable, and satisfying ways.

Yes, if someone who has been in the throes of chemical dependency or behavioral disorder return to the substance and/or behavior, the cycle begins where it left off for many biological reasons. The point is it is absolutely possible and very much achievable to never return to that way of existing. If you follow medical orders after realizing a high blood pressure diagnosis, the problem becomes completely manageable. If you get your blood pressure down then revert back to a lifestyle which caused it to increase then guess what, it will return with a vengeance. Same exact thing.

I’ll step off of my “You can live well” pulpit and get into the terminology because the layers to wellness are many, deep, and worthy of their very own post(s) .

What is drug addiction, and should we use the term or its derivatives?

According to the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA, 2019), it is “a chronic disease characterized by compulsive, or uncontrollable, drug seeking and use despite harmful consequences and changes in the brain, which can be long-lasting”. Note how it is considered a medical disease by the established medical community. This gets some people in a tizzy and those are often heard exclaiming, “You did this to yourself!, It’s not a disease!, Cancer is a disease!”, &c. The number one cause of death in these United States is heart disease caused largely by; you guessed it, the sufferer (Weatherspoon, 2019). Smoking, diet, overweight, sedentary, all contribute significantly to this problem. Those previously mentioned anger mongers will often retort “Yeah, well it is also genetic!”, and so is chemical dependency (Johns Hopkins, 2021).

Whether or not the term is used or not is always up for debate, and only time will determine its existence. Addiction as a term is fairly straightforward and accurate; however, the term addict is filled with negative connotation, stereotype, and stigma. I can assure you that easily half of everyone I have ever treated looks and behaves just like every other citizen walking around in any neighborhood anywhere. Rich, poor, elderly, young, and all points in between describe people with substance use disorders and behavioral addictions, many of whom you would never guess. I have also known many straight edge folks who the average American might easily mistake for someone who abuses drugs based on appearance alone.

How does someone get diagnosed?

Well, it must be done by a licensed and qualified medical professional who has spent many years in study and has the student debt to prove it. Or you can generally ask someone who is suspected of having a problem with drugs, alcohol, or circumstance and they will know if it can be controlled or if help is needed. This does not take into account those in denial or fear of losing something by the very nature of the question (like safety, shelter, liberty, &c). In the case of the former, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fifth Edition (DSM-V) by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) uses the following criteria to determine whether a problem exists and/or the degree of severity if present (APA, 2013):

A. A problematic pattern of [insert substance or circumstance] use leading to clinically significant impairment or distress, as manifested by at least two of the following, occurring within a 12-month period:

1. [insert substance or circumstance, e.g., alcohol, opioids, gambling, &c.] are often taken in larger amounts or over a longer period than was intended.

2. There is a persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control [insert substance or circumstance] use.

3. A great deal of time is spent in activities necessary to obtain the [insert substance or circumstance], use the [insert substance or circumstance], or recover from its effects.

4. Craving, or a strong desire or urge to use [insert substance or circumstance].

5. Recurrent [insert substance or circumstance] use resulting in a failure to fulfill major role obligations at work, school, or home.

6. Continued [insert substance or circumstance] use despite having persistent or recurrent social or interpersonal problems caused or exacerbated by the effects of [insert substance or circumstance].

7. Important social, occupational, or recreational activities are given up or reduced because of [insert substance or circumstance] use.

8. Recurrent [insert substance or circumstance] use in situations in which it is physically hazardous.

9. Continued [insert substance or circumstance] use despite knowledge of having a persistent or recurrent physical or psychological problem that is likely to have been caused or exacerbated by the substance.

10. Tolerance, as defined by either of the following:

a. A need for markedly increased amounts of [insert substance or circumstance] to achieve intoxication or desired effect.

b. A markedly diminished effect with continued use of the same amount of an [insert substance or circumstance]. (Note: This criterion is not considered to be met for those taking [insert substance or circumstance] solely under appropriate medical supervision.)

11. Withdrawal, as manifested by either of the following:

a. The characteristic [insert substance or circumstance] withdrawal syndrome (refer to Criteria A and B of the criteria set for [insert substance or circumstance] withdrawal).

b. [insert substance or circumstance] (or a closely related substance) are taken to relieve or avoid withdrawal symptoms. (Note: This criterion is not considered to be met for those individuals taking [insert substance or circumstance] solely under appropriate medical supervision.)

NONE – Presence of 0-1 symptoms

MILD – Presence of 2-3 symptoms

MODERATE – Presence of 4-5 symptoms

SEVERE – Presence of 6 or more symptoms

Questions? Anyone? Let’s keep moving. Now with this information held firmly in your mind, you still need to be properly credentialed in order to affix a legitimate diagnosis to anyone, so this is for informational purposes only. Here are a few more terms to add to your lexicon though:

1. Drug Intoxication. This is elusive because many people with a substance use disorder(s) have been using for so long that their strange and erratic behavior has become accepted traits. Often the presence of intoxication is a sudden change in demeanor, i.e., one moment a person is restless and anxious, they go to the bathroom and after emerging proceed to pass-out after sitting down anywhere (opioids). Or an individual is nervous and even a little shaky but after a few moments alone returns happy, smooth in gait, and chatty (alcohol). Perhaps a loved one is lethargic and grumpy, but after returning from the bathroom is full of energy and talking a mile a minute (cocaine, methamphetamine). Of course, there are many indicators, but you get the point.

2. Drug Abuse. The continued use of a psychoactive drug or behavioral patterns despite the knowledge that it is causing social, occupational, psychological, or physical problems (APA, 2013). Put simply, doing something to excess where the consequences outweigh the benefits; An ice cream cone is great, a half-gallon makes you vomit (in most cases).

3. Drug Dependence. Maladaptive pattern of use resulting in significant impairment or distress, as shown by compulsive use, increased tolerance, withdrawal, and obsessive thoughts about it (APA, 2013).

You know, the word withdrawal has been presented several times in this post and it deserves its own little section because it is this experience alone that keeps more people in active use than any other single precipitating factor. The human mind is in a constant state of seeking homeostasis or normal acceptable functioning. All people, not just those with drug/alcohol issues seek the avoidance of pain. Ok, somewhere there is a body builder claiming no pain no gain but let that pain be a sciatic or tooth nerve and he/she is reduced to a tower of gelatin seeking immediate relief.

This next sentence is a value statement directly from the horse; withdrawal is an exquisitely harrowing experience engulfing the entirety of the human experience and reducing it to the most detestable overall sensation of prolonged living death. The only relief which is desperately sought and despised simultaneously is more of the substance that caused it. I really don’t know a better way to explain it. I know of septuagenarian Rockwellesque grandmothers who have sold themselves for heroin because their medical provider overprescribed opioids for years and due to pressure from governing authorities cut them off, just to avoid withdrawal. People question this but its sadly true, and not even the worst of the stories.

If you ever want to chat with me about this or anything else related to relief from substance and/or circumstance please contact me here or at the clinic. Feel free to click on any of the links provided for more reading. Thanks for taking the time, enjoy.

- Edesepam

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596

Johns Hopkins. (2021). Substance Abuse / Chemical Dependency. Retrieved from https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/substance-abuse-chemical-dependency on 2021, June 30.

NIDA. (2019, January 17). Treatment Approaches for Drug Addiction DrugFacts. Retrieved from https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/treatment-approaches-drug-addiction on 2021, June 30

Weatherspoon, D. (2019, March 29). What Are the 12 Leading Causes of Death in the United States? Retrieved from https://www.healthline.com/health/leading-causes-of-death on 2021, June 30.

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izzyizumi · 3 years

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Digimon Adventures + Digimon Adventure tri. ~ (AUTISTIC HEADCANON!) KOUSHIRO IZUMI Character Analysis (Japanese version) {see Part 2 of Autistic!/Neurodivergent!Koushiro canonical traits here}

+ INFODUMPING in various ways - about Interests, be they possible Special Interests and things he HIGHLY ENJOYS & infodumps about in an extremely INTENSE way {such as the Oolong Tea, and even Science & Knowledge in general} - about information / Team Analyzing & Strategy / Special Interest in KNOWLEDGE in general -- + Infodumping in both GOOD WAYS and BAD WAYS ... (also depending on the certain framings of both these scenes)

{ the following post will have tri references from Soushitsu [Movie 4] } { and also Kokuhaku [Movie 3] }

READ FURTHER: What is a Special Interest?

Special interests are (not named) literally a part of the diagnostic criteria for Autism. From the DSM-V directly: Highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus Note: abnormal in intensity or focus that means that if “everyone” has special interests, they aren’t ‘abnormal’ in intensity or focus, because that’s everyone. In the examples, directly from the DSM-V, specifically referring to interests: excessively circumscribed or perseverative interests (circumscribed=restricted perseverative=repeat insistently/redundantly)

also from that post:

INFO DUMPING

Yes, people like to know things about interests. But autistics often can’t stop. We repeat ourselves about them, and because of the social aspects mentioned above,

we know people think we’re annoying.

But we can’t stop.

We store the information and when it comes up its like they’re kicking over the file cabinet.

DOES KOUSHIRO GENUINELY ENJOY HIS {SPECIAL?} INTERESTS?:

“WHEN YOU’RE DOING RESEARCH,

OR LEARNING SOMETHING NEW,

YOU TRULY LOOK HAPPY

LIKE YOU’RE ENJOYING IT.”

- Tentomon in Kokuhaku {Confession}, Movie 3 with FULL memories of Koushiro

“I UNDERSTAND HOW MUCH YOU LOVE THIS.”

- Motimon in Soushitsu {Loss}, Movie 4 post-Reboot, at the time, SEEMINGLY NOT remembering Koushiro

And yet, the above scenes all together provide a DIFFERENT picture.

[And maybe a slightly smaller Relevant comparison moment BUT.....]

{“HOW WAS I?”} - Adventure episode 28, the episode with the Gate to the Real World Motimon asking about his overall performance.

{“I’M SORRY, AM I HEAVY?”}

... Motimon asking about his overall performance. + “am I inconveniencing you?” {basically}

“...” Koushiro has a significant pause as he’s realizing.

“Koushiro-han?”

“...so WE STILL had A {BOND}...”

- the point of this comparison being

EVEN WHEN MOTIMON SEEMINGLY DOESN’T HAVE ALL MEMORIES, MOTIMON REMEMBERS THINGS ABOUT KOUSHIRO IZUMI, INCLUDING IMPORTANT, CONSTANTLY CEMENTED-IN-CANON TRAITS OF KOUSHIRO’S WIDER PERSONALITY

such as that

“WHEN YOU’RE DOING RESEARCH,

OR LEARNING SOMETHING NEW,

YOU TRULY LOOK HAPPY

LIKE YOU’RE ENJOYING IT.”

and by the way,

regardless of some small differences between versions so far,

this same side of his personality is KEPT so far in Adventure 2020:

“YOUR BRAIN!

YOUR {KNOWLEDGE}!!”

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE BAD SIDE YOU SHOWED EARLIER?? when they TALKED OVER HIM THEY’RE BEING SO OOC AREN’T THEY??? Um... not wholly / it’s COMPLICATED.

[ note everyone’s expressions in the moment above. most {all} are looking at him rather dismayed. he’s clearly been at this for a while to the point even Tailmon was snoozing and had to ASK HIM DIRECTLY “KOUSHIRO. What are you doing” she even asks this in a straight deadpan ]

{Taichi didn’t exactly have the best patience here either.}

Reading the emails, missing the atmosphere / not reading the room {essentially, missing Taichi’s social cues}

{this scene was also related in the previous posts regarding Koushiro constantly missing social cues [EVEN/SOMETIMES WITH TAICHI] and yet the others {INCLUDING/ESPECIALLY TAICHI} ... eventually recognize Koushiro DOES NOT MEAN THIS. GENUINELY Tri!Taichi even defends Koushiro in the later scene in the 3rd movie:}

please relate back to the above contexts:

... and because of the social aspects mentioned above, we know people think we’re annoying. But we can’t stop. We store the information and when it comes up its like they’re kicking over the file cabinet.

WE CAN’T STOP

and neither can Koushiro when he’s infodumping or specifically infodumping on his Interests POORLY.

The Chosen Children know this. {Eventually} [because out of all of them, Taichi knows Koushiro best]

TAICHI YAGAMI KNOWS this. {a bit earlier on compared to the rest} BUT IT TAKES TAICHI A ... Bit TO Learn about Koushiro Izumi, TOO.

{ Koushiro is *sighing* here }

“AT TIMES LIKE THIS, YOU JUST HAVE TO HIT IT!”

{ a part of Taichi and Koushiro’s relationship is learning patience with each others’ issues, if slowly at times/briefly }

{notice how here...}

this scene with the Oolong happens much later on in tri, and everyone just... casually doesn’t mind that he’s obviously infodumping with everyone in a much more pleasant mood & SITUATION {kind of} than they were in the Movie 1 scene. the contexts of the scenes are different they have their Digimon back regardless and are attempting to RELAX and re-bond with them. { including Koushiro + Motimon }

They are all {including Koushiro} clearly very COMFORTABLE here.

And, would I, as an Autistic fan who has info dumped often about my Special Interests myself, have preferred they handled the scene from Saikai better? MAYBE.

Do I also think they improved with later scenes by highlighting that infodumping comes naturally to Koushiro, to the point TENTOMON even points it out? showing the Chosen sitting all together happily despite his infodumping?

considering literally all the contexts I’ve mentioned above about why Tri!Koushiro’s scenes in general are STILL important to his OVERALL personality, AND this wider headcanon,

YES.

And here’s another thing...

When people LET US ramble on about our Special Interests without interrupting us, even if we’re being slightly (or VERY) missing-reading-the-room about it,

IT CAN ACTUALLY EVEN BE A SIGN OF RESPECT especially if it’s to a point you’re COMFORTABLE AROUND US

Autistic people love it when we’re allowed to ramble on without interruption.

We don’t necessarily EXPECT people to absorb or even understand EVERY single word we say. We’re just happy and pleased they’re letting us ramble, without making it out {directly to us, as in DELIBERATELY interrupting us or directly insulting us & our interests, is the literal WORST way} to seem like it’s a huge problem in the moment.

for example, if Tri!Taichi or co had deliberately interrupted Koushiro’s rambling in the 1st movie scene, i.e. if to YELL at him to “stop and pay attention, you’re being so ANNOYING!” for example, that would have been SO MUCH WORSE.

Koushiro’s friends are, in the wider plot of the series,

GOOD friends to him.

A bit later on in Movie 4:

{TAICHI NOTICING KOUSHIRO’S EYES ARE CLEARLY GLASSY / FIRM / WATERY / MAYBE A BIT TEARY FROM ALL THE FRUSTRATION & STRESS. And that Koushiro is clearly holding it all in for Taichi & the team’s comfort.}

Despite some bumps along the way they really do care.

{‘SEE HOW MUCH WE CARE ABOUT EACH OTHER AS A TEAM?’} {‘SEE HOW MUCH YOU AND TAICHI CARED ABOUT EACH OTHER, AGUMON?’ - Koushiro Izumi, probably, as he shows them to Agumon - Koushiro even takes the ‘stealth’ photos HIMSELF as a hobby!!!}

...And in the 2nd scene from tri with Motimon (Movie 4), Mimi does GENTLY interrupt at the end... but note the reasoning: Koushiro has rambled on too long to the point he hasn’t eaten his food.

If he doesn’t eat his food, Koushiro isn’t practicing proper SELF CARE, and the Chosen {and later on, even Tri!Mimi!} know this.

They’re also looking out for him at various such times, in such moments.

Because they CARE.

I’d just, UM, also like to point something out here...

I’M. literally infodumping to you all by making this post & analysis. I understand and expect not every single word will be completely understood, either by more casual fans of the series or by people who aren’t Autistic / Neuro-divergent.

I’m fine with that. Mostly, I’ll be happy if you can at the very least please try to seriously consider what I’m saying about everything here, and how I personally analyze canon!Koushiro’s infodumping and the Chosens’ various responses.

[ NOTES: THIS IS A FAN META POST. This is also my particular headcanon / analysis of Koushiro Please keep this in mind before you comment This post was made with the intention of pointing out CANONICAL character traits of Koushiro in the various media, regardless of wider headcanons. There is a bit further commentary in the tags of the original post in regards to headcanons. If you choose to read this post / commentary, please be respectful. Please be aware I am making this post and speaking as someone who is Neuro divergent MYSELF. ]

{While I am grateful this series is now gaining some positive reception, I respectfully ask that you do not comment on the post or tags with canon hate or use these headcanons as reasons for further bashing canon.} {PLEASE read everything carefully before commenting. Thank you}

( FINAL NOTE: This and this are also very good posts. }

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#digimon adventure #digimon adventures #koushiro izumi #koushirou izumi #izzy izumi #autistic koushiro #autistic koushirou #autistic koushiro izumi #autistic koushirou izumi #autistic koushiro series #taichi and koushiro #autistic digimon headcanons #infodumping koushiro #taishiro analysis #taishiro refs #koushiro refs #(uM ok so at the start I was just going to point out his infodumping in the Tri scenes and Motimon there validating him and such but)#(IT.... EXPANDED A BIT)#(I'M SORRY THE THING IS I ACTUALLY GENUINELY LOVE INFODUMPING ABOUT KOUSHIRO IZUMI BUT ALSO)#(I'M NOT THE BEST AT EXPLAINING THINGS MYSELF But seriously I'M TRYING)#(the point being it's important to consider ALL THE WIDER CONTEXTS of not only these various scenes referenced)#(BUT ALSO KOUSHIRO'S ENTIRE STORYLINE AS A WHOLE)#(i've noticed a lot of fans seem to completely miss the point of how comfortable the Chosen are around him later on so i am . Pointing Out)#(KOUSHIRO'S FRIENDS GENUINELY CARE ABOUT HIM I PROMISE)#(i'll probably come back around and touch on a lot of these points again in the future if i continue this BUT ESPECIALLY the part about)#(Tri!Koushiro And His Complete And Total Lack Of SELF Care because WHOOOOO THAT ONE'S GONNA TAKE A LOOOOT TO EXPLAIN)#(and um i kind of have to be in the right mental headspace for writing that up myself so We'll See if i ever get to that part)#(Friendly Reminder please read ALL info and ALL banners AND my FAQ before interacting and agree to them PLEASE)#(I don't mind support and reblogs if this is helping you see things in a different light when it comes to this headcanon but I DO MIND Yeah)#(but like yeah um seriously please... don't... use this post or series to spread yet more tri hate that is NOT the point of my headcanons)

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violentviolette · 4 years

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So I was on your fandom blog and I saw that you believe Bakugou (at least in assuming) to have ASPD. Is wondering if you could expand on that? I personally see him as NPD but I'd love to hear your side of things

first off anon bless u for being on my fandom blog that takes courage cause it’s a wicked hot mess over there lol and secondly to everyone else yes im about to spend an embarrassing amount of effort overanalyzing an anime man, no u shouldn’t apply this logic to diagnosing real people u don’t know or urself, no its not that deep but yes u can fuck right off if u wanna cry about me headcanoning ur favs with “shitty” illnesses. eat my dick.

But now down to the good shit! So I actually think bakugou has comorbid aspd/npd. But for this since u said u already see him as having npd I’ll just focus on the aspd criteria but im totally down to talk more about npd as well if u wanna. (the rest is under a cut because frankly mobile users would have drawn and quartered me otherwise)

So first im gonna go thru the dsm v criteria that are required for diagnosis that bakugou fits/exhibits (leaving out the few things that don’t pertain to him just for length and also because not every person has to fit every single criteria to qualify)

1. Significant impairments in personality as manifested by

a. identity (self esteem derived from power, pleasure, or personal gain), self direction (goal setting based on personal gratification, absence of prosocial standards and culturally normal ethical behavior)

katsukis entire sense of self is built upon his ability to “win” and to always be number one and come out on top. He absolutely cant stand to be viewed as less than that because if so, his entire sense of self begins to crumble. Part of the reason he’s so antagonistic towards Izuku in the early chapters is the fact that Izuku challenges that identity. He (unintentionally and intentionally) challenges katsuki and wont give way to him (which is the right thing to do, but we see how “well” katsuki handles that). He also doesn’t have a good sense of “prosocial standards.” katsuki has created his own internal sense of morals and values, he’s decided whats worth his time and effort based on his own opinions and not on what society deems worthwhile behavior. He’s constantly getting admonished that his attitude “isn’t that of a hero” because his values are different than the ones of the society around him. But he doesn’t care, as long as he “wins” then everythings good. And its not until he stops “winning” and his behavior begins to get in the way of his goals does he begin to realize that he has a problem.

b. impairments in interpersonal functioning as manifested by lack of empathy (lack of concern for feelings, needs, or suffering of others) and lack of intimacy (incapacity for mutually intimate relationships, use of dominance or intimidation to control others)

I could frankly write a whole essay about just this bit alone but I’ll try to condense my thoughts. So. Lets talk about katsukis lack of empathy. This boy wouldn’t know another person’s emotions if they walked up and punched him in the face. Which they do. On multiple occasions. But I digress. Katsuki is known for his shitty bedside manner, his lack of concern for the feelings of others is literally what cost him his provisional license, but aside from with Izuku (who we’ve established is a source of Baggage for katsuki and shouldn’t be counted among his normal behavior because at the start of the series they BOTH bring out the worst in one another and overcoming that is part of both of their character arcs and growth and a main theme of the damn story. Win and save. Save and win. Ahem. But again I digress) katsuki isn’t vindictive or cruel in an unnecessary way about other peoples emotions. He doesn’t use them against people, it just doesn’t occur to him that they exist. But as we see katsuki grow and begin to try and change his unhealthy behavior, we see that he’s not oblivious of others emotions in the same way todoroki is (who I headcanon as autistic along with izuku (who also has adhd), but that’s a whole nother post lol), he just doesn’t know what to do with them. He can handle things like kirishima feeling insecure, because he can logically talk to him about how strong he is to encourage and support him, but really struggles with more intimate and open forms of emotional support, like with Izuku.

He also struggles with forming prosocial bonds and friends. At the start of the series katsuki doesn’t have friends, he has lackeys he controls with intimidation and fear because he doesn’t know any other way to be. He has trust and intimacy issues and doesn’t like people getting too close to him because he feels displays of vulnerability are what makes someone weak (see those asocial morals and values we talked about earlier). After his time at UA, a few large helpings of some humble pie, and the diligent and hard work of a small group of fearless idiots (aka kaminari whose literally too prosocial for his own good and has zero self preservation instincts, and kirishima who has an endless supply of patience and understands empathy and other peoples emotions to a degree that’s baffling to me) he is able to start deconstructing that idea and realizing that u can be vulnerable and let people close to u and still be strong. That the mortifying ordeal of being known isn’t actually the worst things ever. Also that when confronted with people who aren’t actually afraid of him, he doesn’t know how else to deter them from getting close to him. The fact that none of the other kids in 1-A take katsukis shit and even go so far as to pick on him and mock him and call him out on his bullshit is a MAJOR turning point for his socialization skills.

2. pathological personality traits in the following catagories

a. antagonism, characterized by hostility (persistent and frequent angry feelings, anger or irritability in response to minor slights or insults, nasty mean vengeful behavior), callousness (lack of concern for the feelings and problems of others)

I mean. Do I even have to expand on this point? I feel like no

b. disinhibition, characterized by impulsivity (acting on the spur of the moment in response to immediate stimuli, acting without a plan or consideration for outcomes, difficulty establishing and following plans), risk taking (lack of concern for ones limitations and denial of the reality of personal danger, engaging in potentially risky and self-damaging activities without regard for consequences)

this is a criteria where u have to adjust for the world these characters are living in. but even then, by hero standards, katsuki is still impulsive. His teachers are constantly admonishing him in the early series for charging headfirst into a situation, loosing himself to his emotions and anger, and letting things get the better of him because hes not taking the time to properly assess the situation, this also bleeds into katsukis inability to work with others or ask for help. He charges headfirst into a situation by himself, blows up anything in his way, and then asks questions later. His teammates are often left totally in the dark to his plans, motives, or other moves and have to just play catch up to him the entire time. In the deku vs. kacchan 1 fight we see this behavior come out in full force. He has no plan, he blows up half the building with zero regard for their goals, and leaves iida completely in the dark. Momo pointing this all out and dragging him for filth during the recap is another wakeup moment for him, having to confront the realities of his impulsive and negative behavior whereas before he was only praised for it.

so if we take a look at even just that, which is still about ¾ of the diagnostic criteria, I think u can see where this really starts to explain his personality. Katsuki is hot headed, angry, impulsive, stubborn, selfish, he gets in his own way more often than not, he struggles with prosocial behavior, making friends, and relating emotionally to others. He has a hard time comforting people and usually does so in a blunt and logical way, he isn’t great at sympathy and being soft, kind, or gentle with other people. It takes a considerable amount of effort for him to realize where his world view and his morals and goals are warped and doing him more harm than good, and he absolutely cant stand to be vulnerable or honest about his feelings with others.

All those things, imo, as someone with aspd & npd, are what make me feel like hes a good character representation of what the complexities of living with these disorders is like. Katsuki isn’t inherently a bad person, and as we see him grow and change, we see the ways in which hes becoming better, but its still hard for him. And despite what a lot of fandom thinks, if u look at the canon, the main person katsuki hurts with his behavior is himself. And I think that’s really important because people with aspd & npd are so often catagorized as abusive villians whose only goal in life is to hurt others. Whereas with katsuki we see where these things and this kind of thinking gets in the way of his goals and ultimately hurts him. and thats what I think makes him the most relatable and makes his growth all the much more satisfying. Katsuki is both fundamentally the same and an entirely different person from when we first meet him. his personality didn’t magically completely change, hes not just a tsundere whose suddenly all mushy feely and hyper empathetic, he’s just learning how to deal with his emotions and the world and getting better at being a healthy person.

So yea, those are my thoughts! There was apparently a whole 1600 words of them so my apologies for writing u a literal dissertation on this lol I just really love this fucking character

#bakugou katsuki #katsuki bakugou #bakugou headcanons #bakugou katsuki headcanons #bnha headcanons #jack.speaks #anon #god i really did write a novel #im almost ashamed #almost

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azurowle · 4 years

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y’know i thought r/GenderCritical users DIDN’T indoctrinate their children .

Ways to talk about trans people with kids:

Be compassionate and caring;

listen to and answer questions they have, ask them why they think what they think;

stress that calling a trans person by the name and pronouns they tell you to isn’t just nice, it’s basic respect;

teach them that gender roles and stereotypes are bullshit and that they can be whoever and whatever they want to be.

Be knowledgeable and factual in what you tell them; take ten fucking minutes to research what people who have studied this for years have to say

Treat your child like a person instead of forcing them to be a miniature version of themselves.

How TERFs apparently talk to their children about trans people: whatever the fuck the following is, i guess.

Oh boy.

Y’know, school also teaches about a lot of these things...y’know...just saying.

(This isn’t terrible. Yet. My parents DIDN’T teach me and my brothers a lot of things. They didn’t ever show themselves as open to even considering it. I had to learn a lot of what I learned from school, friends, and questionable online sources. It kept me from being comfortable about my sexuality and unaware that I was trans for years.)

Welp, okay the , guess everything above was a fuckin’ lie, then.

Let’s go over a few points in this smorgasbord of failure, then:

“Reality and delusions” - Nowhere in the DSM-V is being transgender mentioned as a delusion. Gender dysphoria is, but “delusion” is not one of the diagnostic criteria.

“History of what a trans person was 39 years ago” Ah, yes, because cis people are known to be excellent and respectful about trans people and our very rich, colorful history.

“Trans trend” - Same thing was said about being gay/lesbian/bisexual/queer/anything beyond AGGRESSIVELY HETEROSEXUAL into the early 2000’s. Gay people gained the right to marry not even five years ago. Yet somehow that’s...not even mentioned. Okay then.

“lack of medical gatekeeping” - in the UK there is a waiting list to even get an appointment to see if you are transgender. Even here in the States, access to care that empowers and allows trans people to make their own decisions about their own bodies depends on local access and state laws. Trust me, medical gate keeping is still an issue in the US. And even then, there are other limitations - surgery costs, hormone costs, therapy costs.

“[lots of BS about sex reassignment surgery”...y’know what, I’m curious as to what she said about why people get SRS. I’m sure it wa unbiased, respectful, and totally not a misrepresentation from the perspective of a cis person who can’t even begin to understand what we struggle with. /s

So, just curious:

How hard do you guys think this happened? Hard enough to mention it on r/thathappened? I mean my little brothers TOTALLY TALKED LIKE THAT WHEN THEY WERE TWELVE.

look I’m a trans dude i am not shy about having a vajoojoo and tits. No lie, for the first time since my...early 20’s I think, I went to a gynecologist last year because I give a fuck about my plumbing for once in my goddamn life. i’m not a woman though.

I don’t behave differently now from when I was pre-transition, aside from being emotionally stable, no longer hurting myself, having healthier coping methods and just...basically living a better life. Not without struggle, but there’s very little that is.

(Also fellow trans cultists who’s turn is it to wait behind corners for sixth graders so we can ambush them and brainwash them into joining the Trans Hivemind? I lost my schedule.)

“My child is now just as hateful, afraid, and as bigoted as I am towards people who are different, particularly trans feminine people! Parenthood: NAILED IT.”

...this is getting its own post over on @terfs-hate-trans-men because it’s just so fucking vile the way TERFs treat their trans AFAB kids.

She treats her son with more respect than her own fucking AFAB trans kid.

So much for prioritizing (those they perceive to be) women, I guess.

#transphobia tw #child indoctrination #anti terf #terfs #anti gender critical

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inanawesomewave · 5 years

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PUT AN END TO TOXIC EMPATH CULTURE

I am in a few groups on facebook for cluster b personality disorders. Some of them are exclusively for paths (socio-, psycho-), some of them are for people of all cluster b, and one of them is for people who have these disorders, and it’s also a place where people can go for advice on the people in their lives with these disorders. More often than not people will come into this group and immediately rant about their “narcopath” husband (tip: psychopathy encompasses narcissistic personality disorder just as well as it does antisocial, read a book and stop inventing monster words). They’ll start out innocent: “I accidentally looked at my husband’s phone and saw he’s been texting other girls”, or “I just had to go into my husband’s pocket for a breath mint and accidentally found a receipt for a restaurant I didn’t go to with him”. First red flag for me: they immediately tell a lie. They come to a cluster b group to talk about how they’ve been damaged by a disordered personality, and they begin with a lie. We know that, idiots. We lie all the time, and we cheat, and we steal. And we confront them. And you know what they do? They say, “you’re just a filthy fucking narc, aren’t you”. And weirdly, that specific phrase comes up a lot, “filthy fucking narc”, almost like it’s a sobriquet that’s been encouraged somewhere, in some kind of large online community, something it’s acceptable to say to survivors of abuse and trauma that don’t behave in exactly the way you would like them to, despite your best efforts to spy on them and keep them down at heel. But that’s a different thing for a different rant for a different time. We sometimes get mothers coming into the group to talk about how they’re at their wits end with their antisocial personality disordered children, how the antisocial child has cut contact with them and the exasperated parent doesn’t understand why. One of us will suggest that ASPD rarely crops up without being coaxed out by abuse and trauma, and suddenly this hand-wringing, worried parent will start shouting and kicking off. They’ll call us “filthy fucking narcs”. Another thing we get is people with borderline personality disorder (and if you think I have a needless axe to grind, please continue reading before losing your goddamn mind about this) coming in to talk about the fact they are inexplicably drawn to “narcs” and “paths”, and that this is the fault of narcs and paths, that we are drawing them in and hurting them. They tell us that they’ve suffered abuse and we wouldn’t understand, they tell us that they are hurting and we wouldn’t understand. Then we tell them that the rate of childhood abuse and trauma is just as high amongst antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders as it is with borderline. And then they’ll react by telling us they feel triggered and attacked. Ostensibly, they’ll call us “filthy fucking narcs”. More often than not, they’ll refer to themselves as an EMPATH. Just like the estranged mother is an empath, just like the obsessive wife is an empath. Because borderlines are empaths, right? That’s where we’ve gone wrong. Borderlines have reduced empathy. You don’t like that, but it’s true. Let’s talk about why you don’t like that. If you have BPD and you’re reading this and you don’t like that, ask yourself why. Because I know why. The reason you don’t like hearing that one of your diagnostic criteria is a lack of empathy, something your therapist knows about you, something your psychiatrist knows about you, something all your family and friends know about you, is because you hear “empath” and you hear “good person”. You hear “narcissist/sociopath/psychopath” and you think “bad person”. You believe the only difference between good and evil is empathy, and therefore you believe that anything you do can be easily absolved by you insisting that you have empathy, a surfeit of it, in fact. You can do whatever to whomever and whyever you want, but if you can put your hand on your heart and the end of the day and stare that person you hurt in the eye and feel their pain as they feel it, as you inflicted it, then all’s well that ends well. And I have never heard so much fucking bullshit in my entire life. And the reason I’m writing this is because today in the aforementioned group, a woman with borderline personality disorder told a lie to the group that her ex husband had paid several men to harass and stalk her. After some questioning she admitted that this probably wasn’t true, but that she’d felt like it was probably true, and because she has BPD, she feels things before she can cognitively conceive of them, so she’s prone to whipping herself up into a frenzy. But it’s fine, she said, because she has BPD, and has been abused, and has been raped, and she has empathy. It’s fine she can implicate a serious crime that never happened, because she’s sorry she did that. She’s sorry she felt that way but it wasn’t her fault. You know what else she said? She said, to someone who had called her out on her shit (non aggressively), “I’ve been raped, but a narcopath like you wouldn’t be affected by something like that”. Can we just sit on that for a second, please? We are rape survivors and survivors of prolonged abuse and trauma. But you think it’s fine and empathic of you to tell us that we didn’t care about it? That it didn’t hurt us? Think again, empath. Toxic empath culture is using your naturally occurring empathy to oppress and abuse other people. Yes, I know you have empathy but guess what! You can also be abusive. The thing about toxic empathy culture is believing whole heartedly that your empathy is what separates you from the herd, that your empathy is so unbelievably special, that you have a gift. And an interesting thing happens when you think that your empathy is a magical gift - you see what you perceive to be a lack of it EVERYWHERE. You have become so subsumed and enamoured by your own empathy that you believe nobody must have empathy the way that you do, and therefore, what do we call people with a lack of empathy? We call then narcs and paths. We call them filthy little fucking narcs. And we can do whatever the fuck we want to them, right? Because they have no empathy. Not like you though. You’re special. And sometimes I get heat on this blog for singling out BPD but you know what? It’s pertinent. How many times have I see articles explaining BPD as some damaged, fragile gift of broken empathy that is given to victims of abuse? That it’s not rage or hostility or abuse, it’s a storm? It’s gorgeous fragility? It’s complicated, she’s mixed up. We never get to hear that they have a lack of empathy though, that’s the big secret. Because borderlines have a lack of cognitive empathy, they can feel it, but they can’t understand it. Antisocials et all are the other way around. What does this mean? It means someone with BPD will feel your negative emotion but won’t understand how to talk to you about it, or ask you how you are, or interpret it. But they’ll feel it. So maybe if you’re in a bad place they’ll get into a bad place too, but their lack of cognition will prevent them from thinking to ask you what’s wrong, or how they can help you. You’ll have to help them instead. And that’s not their fault, there’s a reason their empathy broke down and they have a genuine lack here, it’s nothing they can help. So why can’t we see antisocials and narcissists with this level of clarity, and sympathy? Because if an antisocial sees someone they care about suffering, they won’t feel it, they won’t adopt it, but they can cognitively understand that your mood has changed and you need something fixing. You know, for all the evil that apparently exists in narcissists and sociopaths, I know what I’d prefer. And it’s so funny really, because in these “survivor communities”, everything has to be forced into the boxes of psychopathy and narcissism. Any bad behaviour gets pigeon-holed into these two categories. Even if someone says “my husband has a diagnosis of BPD” or “my wife has a diagnosis of OCD”, everyone will say “google NPD hun they might have VULNERABLE NARCISSISM”, “they might be a COVERT PSYCHOPATH”. Because if they can’t find the answers they need in the DSM-V, they’ll invent categories. Do anything it takes to excuse any and all bad behaviour as being part of these two schools of evil, because they cannot begin to accept that anyone else can do anything bad, because if they accepted that, they’d have to accept that they too are sometimes bad. And there’s a reason this gets me so angry. It’s not just that some people need the monopoly on pain and distress, teaching people that victimhood can only ever be messy, bloody, stormy, emotional, anxious, dramatic and LOUD, and that because of this, everyone ignores the fact that some victims of abuse end up with different personality disorders and become withdrawn, cold, remorseless, angry and manipulative because they don’t know how to function in a world that they’ve only ever known as cold and hard and something you need to survive through by any means necessary. It’s not even that things like suicidality is now only ever taken seriously if someone is yelling I AM GOING TO KILL MYSELF all the time, despite the fact that most people who end their lives leave no clue whatsoever, don’t tell anyone and even seem happier before they do it, and it’s not even that because of this skewed vision of what suffering looks like, millions of people go ahead killing themselves unnoticed because they weren’t screaming their intent and therefore we are trained to believe they’re not victims. What really fucking ticks me off is the dehumanisation. You’re an empath until you meet a narcissist or a sociopath or a psychopath aren’t you? But the second you meet one, or think you’ve met one, you get to do that thing that everyone wants to do - you get to become a psychopath, because you know deep down in your heart of hearts that nArCoPaThS are trying to hurt you and harm you constantly, that they can whiff you out in a crowded room and spend their lives trying to harm you, because you’re such delicious and precious bait. So what you do, before they can come at you and hurt you (even if it never happened! Even if you just think it happened which is the same, right? It’s okay to think that, right? You’ve been hurt, after all, and now you’ve got all this empathy just lying around and that’s hard for you), you hurt them first, but that’s not your fault, right? It’s a protective shield, yeah? It’s something you had to create to protect yourself from further harm isn’t it? Aw. Yeah. We don’t know what that’s like. We don’t know what it feels like to spend our lives accidentally creating maladaptive coping mechanisms that involve keeping others away from us. That’s you. You’re special. And when you do that, and you identify what you are because you read a Thought Catalog article about empaths and you really felt seen by the bit where it said that empaths are beautiful, strong, courageous, maybe psychic, and healers, and you thought that was probably you because you’re definitely not a narcissist, then it doesn’t matter about everyone else, does it? Because you’re an empath. Hell. You’re a God. And NOT a narcissist, they just THINK they’re special but you really are, aren’t you! And so, with your great gift of empathy your first move is to push the baddies away. Because you know deep down, don’t you, that narcopaths got that way because we wanted to be. You know that even though we also kill ourselves at very high rates, we were only doing that to fuck with you, and the trauma of losing us is actually your greater trauma and that’s how we get to fuck you over one last time. You know that when we tell you we were raped and assaulted and abused and beaten repeatedly, that we’re just saying it to hurt specifically you, because you need to keep your guard up, because you’re special. And if we are telling the truth, which would make sense when you look at the statistics which you haven’t because science is for losers and you’ve just got a hunch which means so much more than empirical research, you know that the truth to them is a labyrinthine maze of potential manipulation. You read in Psychology Today that we can only ever lie and we don’t know how to feel things. I mean there’s no evidence to support that, just like there’s no evidence whatsoever that we have a cold dead stare or that we jerk off to snuff films, but you had that hunch, didn’t you. And this dehumanisation is part of empath culture. Empath culture exists to dehumanise and demean and retraumatise narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths, and it needs to stop. Because I’m not out here pretending to have empathy, but you are. So when I sit here and earnestly hope that you get everything that’s coming to you and maybe I’d like to be a part of that, I’m not lying. When you sit here and tell me that your empathy is a rare gift and that all the men you’ve dated were all narcissists and that your best friend is probably a psychopath and that you’ve never hurt anyone in your life because you’re an earth goddess, you’re lying. But you don’t even know you’re lying, because the lie has now got so big that everyone’s getting themselves involved. And this is why toxic empath culture needs to come to a close. It’s making narcissists out of everyone, and apparently, that’s the worst thing in the world. Empaths go fuck yourselves.

#empathy #empaths #abuse #healing #trauma #sociopathy #psychopath #psychopathy #narcissistic personality disorder #narcissism #antisocial personality disorder #borderline personality disorder

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fuckyeahasexual · 5 years

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A complete guide to how the asexual community is NOT lying about the pathologization of asexuality and how many aces(even young ones)have had their asexuality tried to be“fixed” and “converted back to normalcy”

Trigger warning : Conversion therapy,abuse

As if the so called ace “”discourse””( which has till now involved aphobes and exclusionists comparing ace people to nazis,pedophiles,white supremacists,slave owners,homophobes, ,talking over ace WOC by white people, telling ace people AND kids to kill themselves,victim blamig and gaslighting ace victims of rape, putting extremely graphic sexual content into asexual tags and sending sexual content to ace minors and adults who are are suffering from sexual trauma even after they told them to STOP ) could not get any worse, we now have these pathetic excuses of human beings accusing ace people of lying about their trauma and abuse just so that they can justify their harassing of ace people.

Im TIRED of seeing these “”highly intellectual people”” keeps repeating bullshit arguments so im gonna make this post addled with appropriate resources and links to handle these two topics:

How asexuality is pathologized

Can the abuse and trauma ace people go through when people try to “convert ace people back to normalcy” and “fix” their asexuality really be called “conversion therapy”?

This is gonna be long,but i hope you will stick with me though this because im going to try as much as possible to make this as source-fuilled and educational for yall. So here we go:

1. Has asexuality really been pathologized?

Short answer,Yes. Many mental health professionals had consideredasexuality an illness throughout history.There are many articles talking about it.Up till 2013, indicators of asexuality like lack of sexual attraction,sexual fantasies towards other people, lack of interest in sex etc were basically classified as Hypoactive sexual desire disorder in the DSM which was revised just to include that all those indicators WOULD be considered as a “symptom” of HSDD unless a person self identified as “asexual” which wasnt much useful since not everyone(especially young people) might know that they are ace and can be pressured by their peers into going through the “treatment” for HSDD .They did the same thing before they removed homosexuality from the DSM.

Heres the long answer :

Throughout history , asexuality has brought out bigots to talk about how “unnatural” it is and how it obviously is a “mental illness/disorder” bc experiencing sexual attraction is always considered an inherent experience to almost all living beings.There are many medical and psychological articles either directly referring to asexuality as a disorder or referring its main indicators like “lack of sexual attraction,sexual feelings towards other people”etc as a mental disorder.

But the most well known instance of pathologization of asexuality is the HSDD (Hypoactive sexual desire disorder).It has been in both The International Classification of Diseases and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders both which are used by mental health professionals and psychologists to diagnose people.

There was a huge pushback against HSDD by asexual activists bc it categorized all indicators of asexuality like lack of sexual attraction,sexual fantasies towards other people and lack of sexual desire etc as a disorder.As a result, asexuality was officially given an exception in the DSM-V by stating that if a person experiencing all the symptoms of HSDD self ID’d as asexual then they wont be diagnosed with it.This seemed a good enough thing to do and acephobes keep bringing it up to show how “different HSDD is from asexuality” and how “The medical world has “”accommodated”” itself for the comfort of ace people” but this act and the whole concept of a “Hypoactive sexual desire disorder” are considered problematic and have been put through questions not only by ace people, but feminists and activists too . Heres why :

1. The person STILL has to identify as asexual to be not diagnosed.Asexuality still isnt as visible and well known of an orientation so if a person doesn’t know that they’re asexual, the DSM does no work to sufficiently differentiate between these “sexual disorders” and a sexual identity. so it could very well happen that someone who doesn’t know that they’re asexual is convinced by a therapist that they have a sexual abnormality that needs to be corrected(x) .Taking into consideration the fact that a lack of sexual attraction is still seen as a sign of “brokenness” etc , the aphobia ace people face from their peers,how sex is seen an inherent part of one’s relationship and the immense number of ace people who experience internalized aphobia, theres a higher chance of ace people being pressurized into lying about not being ace and being made to go through treatment of HSDD .

2. The asexuality exception is not included in the diagnostic criteria, but a different part of the text. The desk reference version, which is the smaller version most psychiatrists will use because the actual DSM is a monster of a book, only contains the diagnostic criteria. So, unless a doctor is very familiar with the update DSM, you could still be diagnosed despite identifying as asexual. (X)

3.The DSM is put out by the APA, an American organization and is not used internationally in ALL countries.The international appx. equivalent to the DSM is the ICD (International Classification of Diseases) where an exception of asexuality is NOT made like they did in DSM-V. So many countries where DSM-V is not followed are free to diagnose ace people with almost no repercussions.

4.There is till NO distinction made between HSDD and asexuality and all indicators of asexuality are still considered “symptoms” of HSDD. the DSM does no work to sufficiently differentiate between these “sexual disorders” and a sexual identity. so it could very well happen that someone who doesn’t know that they’re asexual is convinced by a therapist that they have a sexual abnormality that needs to be corrected(x) Just putting “All these signs are of HSDD unless a person identifies as asexual” is literally the same as saying “Being attracted to the same gender and/or being attracted to more than two genders is a disorder unless a person identifies as gay/bi”.In fact a very very similar thing was done to homosexuality in the DSM before homosexuality was deleted off entirely as a disorder.

5.Im not even gonna get into the fact that alot of people have pointed out how the big push to keep HSDD in the DSM came from the pharmaceutical companies who need this diagnosis to exist so thatthey can market a drug called Flibanserin and both of these thingshave been called out by both ace as well as non ace feminists bc studies showed it improved very little in terms of sexual satisfaction in its participants and has potentially big risks(x) and MANY women disinterested in sex(weather ace or not) were pressurized to undergo treatment of HSDD and use flibanserin bc of the misogynist belief that women need to put out more than care about their safety white taking it bc thats not the point of this post.

But just for yalls consideration : Just bc there is a disorder in the DSM doesnt mean that its legit.Female hysteria,homosexuality were considered disorders.As an amazing post here said : “until psychology stops operating in terms of “inappropriate behavior” and starts looking at patients’ experiences of symptoms as stressful and unpleasant, it will be an enforcement of ableism first and an aid to the mentally ill last.” . Unless someone goes through some trauma which make them LOSE their capability to feel sexual attraction and desire,i’ll consider any “disorder” which automatically assumes lack of sexual attraction and desire “unnatural”, as doubtful .

So yeah , asexuality still technically remains pathologized and ace people still are at a risk of being diagnosed and being forced/pressurized to undergo treatments which arent usually even that effective and have health risks associated with them.On to the next topic :

2.Can ace people call the trauma and abuse they went through when people tried to “convert ace people back to normalcy” and “fix” their asexuality “conversion therapy”?

First off, Read THIS And THIS. Now,

Short answer,Yes. Maybe they might not be under the threat of going through the EXACT conversion therapy which involves basically torture and is legal in like 36/41 states IN AMERICA but then again, so arent those gay people who didnt/dont/wont be living/going to those 36/41 states IN AMERICA but have/are/will be tried to be “converted back to” straightness by their peers.Any way in which non straight people are forced/pressurized to be converted into straight by so called “professionals” and “medical experts” counts as conversion therapy to me bc at the end of the day it doesnt really matter WHAT word you define it as when those trying to “fix” non straight people’s non straightness view those non straight people as someone who needs “fixing”.

Also, saying that ace people’s experience when their peers were trying to “fix” their asexuality isnt AS bad as what gay people go through when their gayness is tried to be “fixed” is…not a good thing to say.Trauma isnt a competition.Telling a person with a sprained leg that another person has a fractured leg doesnt make the first person’s sprained leg hurt any less

Heres the long answer :

Here is the thing.The most “well known” conversion therapy(and in aphobes’ case,the conversion therapy they keep bringing up to discourage ace people from calling their trauma involving attempts to fix them “conversion therapy” ) is the one which is legal in 36 or 41(The data keeps differing from diff sources) states in AMERICA ONLY and basically involves showing homoerotic images and videos to gay/bi people and inflicting some sort of violence/harm on them when them and/or their mind and/or their body shows any sort of interest on such images till they form an aversion to same gender attraction and other forms of torture.I described it as PG rated as possible but if anyone is interested and is NOT at the risk of being triggered they can read the whole process here(x).

Aphobes keep arguing that since no clinic advertises that they will “convert ace people back to normalcy” ,and even IF some ace person IS forced to undergo treatment of HSDD ,their experience doesnt matches the EXACT amount of abuse and trauma gay people go through during conversion therapy, aces arent “allowed” to call their experiences “conversion therapy”.Now , anyone with common sense and general morality will realize how bullshit this is bc aphobes are just putting their american centric rhetorics over ALL aces in THIS WORLD(bc they are ALWAYS considering the american conversion therapy)but i’ll still just prove how WRONG this argument is :

1.This argument is only AMERICA CENTRIC.Aphobes keep saying that since ace people dont go through the exact conversion therapy which is legal in 36/41 states in america,they cant call it “conversion therapy”.Now america is only one country.There are 193 countries in this world.The “valid”Conversion therapy is only there in america.But HOMOPHOBIA is there in ALL countries of this world.Now, If we consider aphobes’ argument as legit, then it would imply that any gay person who suffered through the trauma and abuse of having their identity turned into “straight” by their peers in any country OTHER THAN AMERICA CANNOT call their experiences “Conversion therapy”.That means all the gay people who faced torture in russia (especially in Chechnya)to be “fixed” cannot call their experiences “conversion therapy”.Gay people in Brazil and Jamaica who are tried to be “fixed” cannot call their experiences conversion therapy.I live in south asia,we dont even HAVE any special places dedicated to “convert” gay people.But there are many instances where gay people are hauled to the nearest “religious medical practitioners” who abuse and torture them for WEEKS to “cure” them.I guess those gay people cant even call their experiences “conversion therapy”.THIS IS HOW RIDICULOUS APHOBES SOUND.

2.Not every ace conversion therapy is caused by going through the treatment of HSDD : There are many ace people who have been told that it was their asexuality ITSELF that was a disorder and went through abusive therapies to “cure” it which led to some people ending up self-isolating until they ended up in a psych hospital and some people felt broken and alone after that(x).Many health professionals simply pass off asexuality as some symptomatic of deeper mental health problem and thus not every ace who might have been tried to be “converted back to normalcy” might have been gone through quite a rough treatment too.

3.Telling people that their trauma isnt “”really that bad”” isnt a good thing.Telling them that their trauma dosent really “”qualify”” enough to be considered “”real”” conversion therapy isnt good.Oppression and traumas arent a competition.The abuse and torture gay people go through during conversion therapy isnt gonna make the trauma ace people go through “better” or less severe.Telling women that “at least they arent being human trafficked and beaten by their husbands everyday like in middle east” isnt gonna make them feel better when they are catcalled or sexually harassed at work.If ace people are tried to be “”fixed”” by being forced/pressurized undergo “” treatments”” by so called “professionals” and “medical experts” , it counts as conversion therapy to me bc at the end of the day, ace people’s orientation is still being seen as “something to be fixed into straightness”.

So yeah, ace people CAN call all the abuse they go through to be “fixed” of their asexuality “conversion therapy”.Now that we are done, here are a few examples of ace people talking about their fears and/or experiences about conversion therapy which i havent provided already

If you really want to respect lgbtqa people who have gone through conversion therapy,try to make this world a better place for lgbtqa people so that their identity isnt seen as something to be fixed.Telling group of people you are bigoted against that they cant call their experiences of tried to be fixed “conversion therapy” isnt gonna do SHIT to help the community you think you are trying to protect.Saying that No ace person has EVER went to conversion therapy bc there are “valid proofs” is disgusting.

Asexuality IS a highly marginalized orientation and all your refutes against it WILL be debunked and shot down bc we have sources and real people’s accounts on our sides which is supported by many prominent lgbtqa organizations across the world.All aphobes have is bigotry and a bunch of followers who eat up whatever they say without applying any critical thinking skills to it.

#aphobia #tw conversion therapy #mod roma #ref #tw abuse #if you want this tagged with more triggers please tell me i will #i dont have time rn coz i gotta do something #imp

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agendercas · 6 years

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Do you think murdoc has narcissistic personality disorder?

When I saw this in my inbox I kinda got “excited” because the other day my close friend and I were talking about Murdoc having Narcissistic Personality Disorder. So before I go any further, yes I do think Murdoc has Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Why? Well, that’s what I’m about to discuss.

Although I vaguely remembered what Narcissistic Personality Disorder entailed from my abnormal psych class, I pulled out my DSM-V and looked at the diagnostic criteria before answering this question. Let me tell you it was like looking at Murdoc’s life in a few sentences.

Diagnostic Criteria (this is taken directly from the manual)

A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of context, as indicated by five or more of the following:

Has a grandiose sense of self importance (e.g. exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior with commensurate achievements).

Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can be only understood by or should associate with other special or high-status people (or institutions)

Requires excessive admiration

Has a sense of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations).

Is interpersonally exploitative (i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends).

Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.

Is often envious of others or believes that other are envious of him or her

Shows arrogant, haughty, behaviors or attitudes

Now let’s give examples of Murdoc exhibiting each of these:

Has a grandiose sense of self importance (e.g. exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior with commensurate achievements).

This is just Murdoc’s character in a nutshell. Most of what he says and does falls into this criteria. Here are some examples of Murdoc exhibiting a grandiose sense of his importance:

Self importance

“My first manager told me the golden rule of showbiz is to be nice to people on the way up ’cause you’ll meet them again on the way down. I punched him for saying that. Then fired him. There’s no way I’ll see him again on the way down, because a) Murdoc Niccals is a living fucking legend that will never go down...”

“Snobs look down on people, and I look down on everyone. Not in a snooty, classist way—I mean because I’m better than everyone.”

“If there’s a dream in your heart, never let anyone tell you you’ve got no talent. Get out there, embarrass yourself, and prove to the world you’ve got no talent. And then give up. ’Cause not everyone can be a genius like me.”

quotes found here

Exaggerates “achievements”

Interviewer: You need to fight Big Balls McGuinness to break out of prison. What’s going to be your battle plan?

Murdoc: We’ve already rumbled, mate. Prison lore rule one – wallop the hardest con to show the rest of the animals who’s at the top of the food chain. It wasn’t easy, mind – besides Big Balls’ oversized nuts, he’s got fists like seaside caravans. But he didn’t stand a chance against my finishing move, my version of the spinning bird kick from Streetfighter 2. What I do is, jump in the air, flip upside-down, do the splits, and then windmill kick his face into submission. Game over. (For him).

quote found here

As shown here, Murdoc lost the fight (if you can even call it that...) and he over exaggerates his failed jump kick.

Exaggerates “achievements” cont.

“First gig, I was 6 years old. Smashed out "The Wheels on the Bus". One of the most seminal gigs in pop history.”

Interviewer: Tell me about Gorillaz' first ever show.

Murdoc: Camden Brownhouse, 1998. How did it go? Like any paradigm-shifting event, it overloaded people's synapses. They were so shell-shocked a massive riot broke out (which I predicted). The place got trashed, there were multiple casualties, and I picked up a range of STDs. Top night.

quotes found here

Superiority

“The Warden’s well happy to have me, of course – there’s already been a massive spike in crooks and murderers wanting a transfer here. I’m like the Dalai Lama in this place, every day there’s a line of faithful outside my cell waiting for a few seconds with me.”

“Murdoc Niccals doesn’t bunk up with anyone. I pretty much have my own wing. I’m like Pablo Escobar when he got banged up in his very own Playboy Mansion. I’ve got a pool table, plasma tv, chocolate fountain. I’ve even got a hot tub, although that requires a little vigilance...”

“Interviewer: How’s the food?

Murdoc: Absolute filth – for the other mugs in here. But when you’re high-profile like me, you get all the privileges. Steak, caviar, Coco Pops. And what I can’t get I have droned in over the walls...”

quotes found here

Contrary to what he says, Murdoc is an ordinary prisoner. He has a standard sized cell and he eats normal food, like ramen, as shown here:

Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

Murdoc is constantly under the impression that the entire world is in love with him and anything he does will give him success. He also believes he has undying devotion and loyalty from ALL fans of Gorillaz as shown here in this interview:

“Cheers. But yeah, it’s no surprise to me that millions of people have—”

“It’s not millions,” I interrupt.

“—billions of people have come together to fight this terrible injustice!” booms Murdoc. “The masses have spoken, Murdoc shall returneth, like a glorious rocket from the heavens, a great and terrifying phallus crashing to Earth to save all humanity, and make Gorillaz great again! Plus hoover up those mini burger things at the welcome home party.”

Or in his plan to get out of prison

He genuinely thinks that millions of people will be outside the prison following his release and that he’ll have a giant welcome home party (when the band is pretty “content” with him not being in their lives at this point).

Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can be only understood by or should associate with other special or high-status people (or institutions).

Murdoc believes he’s the greatest living person and he constantly compares himself to high profile celebrities or people in history. Or he’ll outright say he’s better than them. This is shown above the quotes from the first point and here:

and in this quote:

Interviewer: Do you ever worry that having so many high-profile guest features will take the spotlight off of you?

Murdoc: Of course not. Who’s higher profile than me? That would be like asking Emperor Nero if he felt threatened by the chumps that feed him grapes and polish his balls.

found here

Although Murdoc will associate with people who aren’t of a high status, he makes sure to let whoever it is he is talking to (usually an interviewer) that he’s better than them.

Requires excessive admiration.

In the video advertising the updated Gorillaz website for Plastic Beach, Murdoc makes sure to flaunt his many awards and to keep a portion of the video on him. Some of which are made by him and some of them aren’t even his.

In order to receive constant admiration, Murdoc will always keep the topic on him and will get upset when someone else is being praised or admired:

Interviewer: Have you heard The Now Now? What do you think of it?

Murdoc: Oh that’s convenient, changing the subject. You’re on the list, pal.

Interviewer: Where would you place it in a ranking of the top Gorillaz albums?

Murdoc: Up your arse, mate. You know what, this interview started well, but I’m beginning to dislike you. I thought this was gonna be a friendly tete-a-tete, a chance for you to get the real story, and maybe even a signed Wormwood Scrubs brochure. But you’re trying to rattle my cage. The only one who gets to rattle my cage around here is the Warden, to get my attention when he personally delivers my bi-hourly Martini. So let’s keep those questions focused on ME, shall we?

found here

Has a sense of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations).

Look at the quotes and the interview linked under the first point (Specifically under • Superiority). As shown in that interview, Murdoc believes he’s entitled better treatment in prison (and claims that he’s receiving it).

Is interpersonally exploitative (i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends).

If Murdoc’s good at anything it’s definitely exploiting others. Murdoc kidnapped half of the band. Nearly got a young Noodle killed while trying to get rid of an enemy of the band. Kidnapped pretty much all of the artists on the Plastic Beach album (including 2D).

"Some people I had to physically smuggle to Plastic Beach," says the Gorilla known as Murdoc. "I had them drugged and FedExed over. Then there were people like Snoop and his entourage who cruised up dripping in gold on a private yacht, amid a cloud of pimp fur and weed smoke …"

found here

Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.

I’m just going to leave these here

Murdoc: So... I crashed the car through the window and it landed straight in 2-D's head. Amazing! Direct hit. Knocked one of his eyes straight out. Put him in a coma immediately. I got arrested for that, uh, and ah, my community service, my SENTENCE, was to look after this silly sod.

found here

“Murdoc’s silver tongue, complete lack of empathy, and fear of further imprisonment was enough for him coerce his fellow bandmates into getting back together and recruiting their biggest host of collaborators to date.”

Interviewer: If you say so. Do you have any remorse for the terrible things you’ve done in the past?

Murdoc: Fucking hell, not this again. Look, if you’re talking about the rumour that I put a hit out on Noodle, then replaced her with a cyborg, and then the cyborg tried to kill me; I mean yes, it’s totally true. But I’d hardly call that a terrible thing. A creative disagreement, just part of the process. We’re all friends again now.

found here

Is often envious of others or believes that other are envious of him or her

Of course Murdoc would never admit it, but he’s jealous of others. One person you could say he’s jealous of is 2D. Murdoc has had several bands before Gorillaz. He was the lead singer of them and ultimately they failed for one reason or another (probably due to their awful names). When Murdoc formed Gorillaz and made 2D the lead singer, the band was successful. Although Gorillaz success was not solely because of 2D’s voice, it did play a large role. Here are a few moments that hint at Murdoc’s jealousy towards 2D:

Murdoc: Anyway, any one of [his bands] could've been as big as Gorillaz. But you know eventually, I thought it might be time to try a different vocalist. Other than me.

2-D: Yeah uh, someone who could actually sing, maybe?

Murdoc: Shut it twerp! See, eh, technically, uh, my voice, obviously, is still much, much better than 2-D's. But, yeah, I just thought it was time for a change. Change of texture.

found here

Richard the Popworld Horse: Anyway back to you guys. 2-D, what's it like being a sex symbol?

Murdoc: Err, no he ain't no sex symbol. He's too busy changing his ringtones.

2-D: You're just jealous.

Murdoc: No, I'm not.

2-D: Yes, you are.

Murdoc: No, I'm not.

2-D: Yes, you are.

Murdoc: Nooooo, I'm not.

2-D:....Yes, you are.

Murdoc: SHUT UP!!!!

found here

From a quote I mentioned earlier, we can see that Murdoc doesn’t like to talk about The Now Now and will shut down the conversation and get angry. Murdoc envies the idea that “his” band prospering without him. He’s jealous that his band was able to put out a successful album with 2D fully fronting the band now. He’s envious of the success the band is getting that he has nothing to do with.

In addition to being jealous of others, he thinks most people envy him (which is most likely a byproduct of him thinking he is better than everyone). Although this quote is probably not entirely serious, it’s still interesting to consider:

Radio host: Do all you animated guys know each other?

Murdoc: Most of us, Yeah. Some of them, they won't talk to me. Y'know, I think it's jealousy a lot of them. That's it, they don't want to see me. They wanna see somebody shoot me down, because I'm up there.

found here

Shows arrogant, haughty, behaviors or attitudes.

Watch this video. Also, if you read most of the interviews and transcripts I’ve linked, you can see how Murdoc oozes arrogance and disdain towards anyone who isn’t himself.

Well, there you have it. I most definitely think that Murdoc has Narcissistic Personality Disorder and that it’s a major factor in how he acts and what he says 90% of the time.

#i went overboard...again #sorry this took so long #murdoc niccals #murdoc #gorillaz #when you do things like this you find some gems tbh #you also realize how dated and untraceable gorillaz stuff is #like things from 2010 and earlier are completely gone unless someone transcribed it or pasted it onto the gorillaz wiki #as time consuming this is i really love doing this tbh #i learn new things #anon #answered #the author speaks #author's note

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words-writ-in-starlight · 6 years

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hi, it's the adhd anon again. according to the dsm-v, i think i have it, which is weird bc i've never seen myself as having more trouble than others. (my grades are better than almost anyone else in my grade.) (although that might just be bc i'm interested in what's being taught - when something's not interesting or too hard, i have a pretty hard time doing it.) anyway, if it's not too much trouble, what does feel like to stim/hyperfixtate for you? (i'm so sorry to bother you in advance)

Hey, dude, welcome back! So, okay, first things first: the stereotype of someone with ADHD automatically doing terribly in school is based heavily on the original diagnostic criteria, which categorized ADHD strictly in terms of “young hyperactive white boy who has violent outbursts and/or disciplinary problems and Just Doesn’t Do Well in academics.” And there are people who manifest ADHD like that, it’s a stereotype with roots in reality--a lot of people with ADHD either consistently struggle with academics or eventually reach a point where their previous focusing techniques fail them.

However.

I left high school for college two years early, and if I hadn’t, I would probably been valedictorian of the graduating class, because I had a GPA well above 4.0 due to my general habit of doing extra credit whenever it was offered. In college, I had a reputation for turning in beautifully complete lab reports and essays five pages over the minimum requirement. I got high honors on my thesis, graduated magna cum laude, and finished a pre-medical major in half the recommended time period. When I was a kid, the phrase “savant syndrome” got thrown around a lot, to give you some context.

On the other hand, I manifest a lot of those stereotypical ADHD symptoms: I’m loud, I interrupt people a lot, I have erratic and overwhelming mood swings that I struggle to control, I fidget incessantly and can’t stand silence, I have a tendency to get destructive when I’m angry, I have managed to seriously injure myself because I couldn’t resist a stupid impulse more than once, and if we’re all being honest, I would never have graduated high school at all, because I was on the brink of expulsion for getting into fights during class periods.

It’s easy to feel like “I never really struggled academically” is somehow a counterargument to any and all symptoms of ADHD that you might manifest, but it’s really not. (Heck, sometimes ADHD is even helpful--I finished my thesis a full week before anyone else and had time to fix my citations, mostly because my ADHD responds well to pressure and that crunch time hyperfocus Had My Back.) It might take time for you to come to terms with this idea, and that’s okay! But try to at least consider it.

All that being said, I am actually gonna answer your question, I just got distracted because the amount of time I spent making the statement “I’m faking having ADHD because I did well in school” is mindblowing and I have a Thing about it. Forgive my ramble.

Stimming: I’m going to answer this first because the answer is going to be the most useless. The ways I stim tend to be vocal/auditory stuff (I talk a lot when I’m alone, I sing and play music when I’m doing menial tasks, if I’m really anxious I’ll hum a single note until I calm down) or tactile stuff (sometimes destructive things like scratching my arms, sometimes neutral stuff like tapping my fingers in specific patterns or rubbing my palms over my jeans or the leather of a jacket or something). It’s mostly things that ‘pass’ for neurotypical with very few exceptions, because I trained myself out of a lot of my ‘non-passing’ stims (rocking back and forth, knocking into walls, hand-flapping, that sort of thing) really young. As for what it feels like to stim, it’s just...good. It’s sort of like the brain equivalent of running your hand the right way along velvet, and discovering that you’ve been rubbing it backwards all along. Or like the equivalent of stepping into a cool shower on a really hot day--it’s not that it’s miserable outside the shower, it’s just that the shower is extremely good. I have a playlist of music that, for whatever reason, hits the right combination of voice and rhythm and notes and words to make my brain suddenly get calm, and it’s not necessarily my favorite music or a cohesive collection of tunes or anything (featuring Six Shooter by Coyote Kisses and also Human by Rag’n’Bone Man, which have nothing in common), but it’s Good.

Hyperfocus: You didn’t actually mention this, but I think it’s worth mentioning because it’s one of the hallmarks of ADHD. It bears more than a passing resemblance to the concept of “flow”, but turned up to 11. Hyperfocus is the state of being so overwhelmingly tuned in to the thing you’re currently doing that everything else falls away--which is fine, unless you’re one of us folks who can hyperfocus ourselves right through meal times. It’s inexorable, it’s all-consuming, and it can feel pretty fucking great, which is why it’s important to be careful and find a way to hydrate yourself. The primary difference between hyperfocus and flow is that hyperfocus is generally involuntary and does not necessarily tune you into something you planned or wanted to pay attention to. If you ever see me publish a fic that includes a note about “I didn’t mean to write this but it’s 2 AM so here”, that’s code for “please validate me, I’ve been hyperfocused on this for two or three hours and I failed to do a lot of important things as a result.” The other thing about hyperfocus is that afterwards, the drop coming off it is a real bitch. It leaves me feeling hollowed out, exhausted, and kind of pettily disinterested in anything that would usually hold my attention. Being hyperfocused is like being a machine designed to do one thing and one thing only and doing that thing feels incredible; coming off hyperfocus is like being an overtired toddler.

Hyperfixation: Hyperfixations are the ADHD equivalent of a special interest, aka: that thing you’ve been struggling not to pester every single person you know about, every single second of every single day of the past two and a half weeks. Were you around, dear anon, when this blog was Only Animorphs, All The Time, and if you didn’t give a shit about morphin’ teens you just had to sit down, shut up, and learn some stuff, or else unfollow me? That’s what hyperfixating looks like. Sometimes it’s useful stuff--do you know how unbelievably useful having a hyperfixation on triage techniques is to me? I crushed my triage training, I owned that shit, I wrote a whole chapter of my thesis on it. Other times, it’s...well, Animorphs. Or the American Revolution. Or X-Men. Or dinosaurs. Some random shit like that. Learning about hyperfixations, talking about them, is generally pure unadulterated joy. On the other hand--oh, God, listen, I know how annoying I am, but I cannot stop myself. I know I haven’t talked about anything but Animorphs in three weeks, I know I’ve made forty-five TAZ posts today, whatever you’re about to complain about, I already know, okay, I am aware, and there is nothing more painful than to have a fucking out-of-body experience watching yourself rattle on about a hyperfixation while the other person obviously gets bored in front of you. And then you try to keep your mouth shut and it physically hurts not to talk about the thing. It’s hard to describe what it ‘feels’ like except that ADHD brains are magpies at their core and hyperfixations are the shiny, shiny objects your brain wants to take home.

Anyway, I’m not sure how useful ANY of this has been, but like. After a certain point, you kind of have to trust yourself enough to decide, once and for all, whether you really, truly believe you’re faking a neurological disorder for the attention. If the answer is no, then great! You have sussed out your symptoms and can start managing them accordingly, whether that’s some helpful apps on your phone or medication or something in between. If the answer is yes, then you probably need some therapy, and your therapist will be able to help you get to a point where you feel able to trust yourself.

Go with the neurodivergent gods, my dude.

#adventures in adhd #actually adhd #stimming #hyperfocus #hyperfixation #advice from starlight #HELLO FRIENDS THIS IS UNDER A CUT BECAUSE I RAMBLE #LIKE #CONSTITUTIONALLY UNABLE TO NOT RAMBLE #anyway ch'boy wrote some stuff today #and now i'm answering some asks #so really what i want is a pat on the damn back for getting shit done THANKS #idiot teenagers with a queue #anonymous #asked and answered

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social-justice-headache · 5 years

Text

Do Aesthetic Genders and Transtrenders Harm Youth?

Time for a new post, folks. This is one I’ve been mulling over in my mind for a while, but the time has come.

The short answer is on the whole: yes. However, if it were that simple, I wouldn’t need a whole post for it. First, let’s look at the arguments against me.

People will claim that aesthetic genders and people who claim to be trans without dysphoria are simply keeping options for identity open to youth who are trying to discover themselves (youth being mainly teens but also some young adults in this case). In the same way that having 10k different labels for sexual orientation is “keeping options open”. Is there anything wrong with youth having a choice to discover themselves, not inherently no.

Other people will come from a more tucute vs transmed discourse and say that health organizations the DSM-V, WHO, APA, etc. don’t see dysphoria and transness as one in the same... therefore, you don’t need dysphoria to be trans. These are the two arguments I will centre on for times sake.

Keeping options open: Let’s start this one with a story. Mary is an AFAB, she is 14 years old and her parents are very open minded and supportive. Mary enters high school and feels that she likes more “guy” things. She plays rough sports, her friends are all guys, she prefers to shop in the mens section. She has never had an issue with her female body, she just feels more masculine. Mary starts to wonder if she is trans. Mary logs into her tumblr account - “You don’t need dysphoria to be trans!” “Some men have vagina’s” “Gender is a social construct” She takes these messages to heart. Mary uses he/him pronouns, HE goes by Martin now. Martin comes out to his parents, they support him. Martin accepts himself as trans, decides to become more trans, embraces being male. Martin starts T, his voice deepens, his hair thickens, his fat redistributes. Martin isn’t sure how to feel. His family funds surgery for him - he gets top surgery despite never having a real issue with his chest, but “men don’t really have boobs”. Now martin starts to experience some really negative thoughts, he doesn’t like who he sees in the mirror, it’s not him, it’s not who martin is. Martin goes through an old photo album, sees Mary, smiling with friends, playing rugby and laughing with her team. Martin misses the girl in the picture, Martin has gender dysphoria now. What does he do?

Most youth have a period where they question gender, sexuality, or both. But this unconditional acceptance some spread and the backlash to gatekeeping and policing, can lead to impressionable youth taking steps that they never should have. Then they either live unhappily or detransition. Detransitioning hurts the trans community. It shows that transitioning is no big deal, that being trans is a phase. It gives transphobes a basis for their incorrect opinions. Harmful to Mary/Martin? Yes. They now have to come out again, they may lose friends, support, they have to rebuild their identity. They have regrets, they wish they never started this in the first place. They have to go through more surgery and even then some changes are irreversible.

What about Trenders who don’t try to pass - they set the precedent that being trans is all a matter of opinion, that they can be female and should be treated as female even if they appear male. Lauren was AMAB - ey uses ey/em pronouns. Ey has short hair, doesn’t wear makeup, and doesn’t dress in typically feminine clothing. Ey sees no reason why ey should have to pass as female to identify as female. What does tumblr see? Validity. Ey can do whatever Ey wants and shouldn’t feel bad, people should accept Em. What does a transphobe see? This is a guy who is just trying to creep on girls #keepwashroomssafe. - Harmful to real trans folks? I think yes.

Disclaimer: This is not about trans folks who can’t pass because of safety or family or fear of being outed etc.

DSM-V/APA: Here’s the thing about the DSM, it is not guided by theory (though it does have a clinical bias due to what it is). It exists simply as a tool that lists out clear common criteria by grouping together sets of symptoms commonly seen together in people with particular psychological conditions. It doesn’t go into causes or treatment because that’s theory. You don’t go to the section on schizophrenia and see it saying: “Hallucinations are seen in schizophrenics because of living in high EE environments, and thus they should engage in family therapy”. So why would it say: “Gender dysphoria is commonly seen in individuals who identify as transgendered and can usually be corrected with HRT and surgery”

What is DOES say is what gender dysphoria, as a psychological condition is: “Gender dysphoria as a general descriptive term refers to an individual's affective/ cognitive discontent with the assigned gender but is more specifically defined when used as a diagnostic category.” - in laymen’s terms - Gender dysphoria is when your sex characteristics cause you distress because they do not align with your felt and expressed gender.

What Transgender is defined as: The broad spectrum of individuals who persistently identify with a gender different from their natal gender. - AKA people who identify as a gender that isn’t their agab.

Which leaves the question: If you identify as a gender different from your agab, wouldn’t your biological sex characteristics cause distress because they don’t match your gender? If not, are you REALLY that gender?

WHO: as for WHO, they don’t have a stance on dysphoria, they just recently (june 2018) stop classifying transgender as a mental illness (akin to declassifying homosexuality as a mental illness)

"It was taken out from the mental health disorders because we had a better understanding that this wasn't actually a mental health condition and leaving it there was causing stigma," said Dr. Lale Say,

#That's all for now #may edit #long post #trans #transgendered #trans discourse #gender dysphoria

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tarysande · 6 years

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I was curious do you think Cain was a sociopath I read an article about how a sociopath 'loves' and it reminded me of him do you think this is what the writers were going for or am I way off?

I think there’s a lot of evidence to support that read on his character and I feel with at least some small amount of confidence that his character description probably included the word. In fact, I think Pierce may even have been a psychopath. (Pysch researchers tend to think psychopaths are born, while sociopathy results from childhood trauma. More on this later!)

Sociopaths and psychopaths fall under the shared umbrella of antisocial personality disorder.

According to the DSM V (psychiatry’s diagnostic bible), the following criteria is listed for antisocial personality disorder:

Persistent patterns of disregard and violation of the rights of others, present since the age of 15 and consisting of at least three of the following resulting in hurting, mistreating, and/or stealing from someone:

Disrespect and failure to conform to lawful behavior resulting in repeated arrests.

Persistent deceitfulness, using aliases, and lying to con others for personal gain.

Impulsive and unable to plan.

Easily irritated, aggressive and prone to repeated physical altercations and assaults.

Reckless, disregarding the safety of others and one’s self.

Persistently irresponsible, inability to maintain consistent work behavior and/or honor financial obligations.

Indifferent rationalization without remorse.

I don’t know about you, but I see a lot of Cain/Pierce/Sinnerman there, no?

So, let’s try to parse Cain a little given what we know because we were told and what we can infer by observation or reading between the lines.

Biblically, we know Cain killed his brother Abel because he was angry that God liked Abel’s sacrifice better. Cain then lied about it (to God; ballsy, but ultimately a bad choice). I want to talk about something, though, that people who didn’t once win Sunday School Jeopardy! (it’s true) might not know: Cain wasn’t marked and punished because he killed his brother. Because Cain was a farmer (and proud of it), God punished him by cursing him so the soil would no longer give him strength. He could no longer do what made him happiest and brought him the most satisfaction. Dying is easy; living without being able to fulfill your purpose is harsh. To this, Cain replied, “Well then, I’ll just hide from your presence and wander until someone kills me; life’s not worth living without farming,” and God said, “Y’think it’s that easy, do you? Have this mark so everyone’ll know that, in killing you, they bring My vengeance upon them sevenfold.”

Murder is bad. Trying to wriggle out of what God deems to be appropriate punishment for it is far worse. Defying God’s judgment is the crime for which Cain is punished with the mark.

(Where have we seen that before? But that’s the subject for a different essay.)

So, if we assume that Lucifer’s writers were pulling from Biblical ‘canon,’ we’ve already got a little sociopathy happening. Cain kills his brother because Abel got a better report card from God and he can’t stand that (he’s the elder brother, after all). He feels no remorse, no guilt (and Pierce says as much to Lucifer; it’s a driving part of his personality from the beginning), and no empathy. He lies to protect himself. His response to being punished is not “I’m sorry for what I did,” it’s “How dare you take my things away from me.” It’s selfish and self-centered.

Also from the DSM V:

Persistent pathological personality traits:

Antagonism

Manipulative - frequent use of deceit, subterfuge, charm, seduction, and ingratiation to achieve personal goals.

Deceit - lies and fraudulent representation of self, embellishment and lying when relating events.

Callous - cold, uncaring, and indifferent to the feelings of others, lack of remorse for the hurt they cause to others, aggressive and sadistic.

Hostile - aggressive and angry at perceived slights and insults, vengeful and mean.

Disinhibition

Irresponsible - failure to honor obligations, lack of respect for promises made and agreements.

Impulsive - acts on momentary stimulus, no planning, inability to plan.

Risk Behavior - denies personal danger, engages in dangerous activity to one’s self and others, engages in risk behaviors to stave off boredom.

Now, here’s where Pierce appears psychopathic: psychopaths plan. They engage in criminal behavior in a way that minimizes personal risk. They have plans and contingency plans to ensure they are not caught. (SINNERMAN.) A psychopath is better able to dissociate from their actions (”It was an accident. He deserved it. He was an asshat.”) ((Sidebar: that Abel’s in Hell proves Abel felt guilt and remorse, unlike his brother. It’s not that Abel ‘deserved it’–he just had deeper feelings than Cain.)

I don’t think it takes much to see these actions and responses paralleled in Pierce’s behavior, right from the beginning of the season when he doesn’t care about anyone in the precinct; he only knows about them in the context of what they can do for him. He lies constantly and always to protect himself. He throws Chloe (multiple times) into danger to test his theories. He shows no empathy for anyone at at any point (remember, if any of the post-Abel grief was real, it was because he still thought Abel was going to help him get what he wanted; it wasn’t about loving his brother). He rejects Chloe until he witnesses the moment between Chloe and Lucifer at Lux. Pierce had several opportunities to start a relationship with Chloe earlier but he didn’t take them because a relationship wasn’t necessary for his plans.

Cain is utterly and entirely focused on himself. When he does enter into a relationship with Chloe, it’s for selfish reasons; he says as much to the waitress. To a sociopath, true love is focused on the self, power (seen in the Sinnerman), and playing/winning his game of life. When Pierce decided to “woo” Chloe, he relied on every cliche in the book: romantic dinner, roses, declarations of love. It was like he looked up “romance” in the dictionary and awkwardly followed the steps laid out. Or, in this case, asked Ella and she told him what Chloe liked, what Chloe wanted, and what Chloe felt was missing from her life (especially vis a vis the heartbreak with Lucifer). And Chloe, because of said heartbreak and because she has some serious love-related self-esteem issues (different essay!!) fell for it. Because she wanted to feel loved, wanted to feel lovable.

Several of Pierce’s behaviors in “love” often occur with sociopaths and one of them is moving quickly: declaring “love,” wanting to get married very fast. Another is resenting time spent with family and friends (or, I suppose, wearing a bullet necklace); sociopaths are often possessive and demanding. Did he ever love Chloe? I don’t think so, personally. I saw no indication he was capable of real love, sacrificial love, love that puts someone else first sometimes. I think he loved feeling like he’d “won” the game of stealing Chloe from Lucifer (Cain is often shown emulating Lucifer, such as with providing favors, but I don’t think he ever cares about what he’s giving to the other person: he’s entirely focused on how beholden the person will have to feel to him. It’s about power. Chloe is about power. Being a Lieutenant with friends in high places is about power. Being the Sinnerman is about power). Perhaps, yes, that moment he lost his mark was the first time in thousands of years he felt bad, a pang of momentary guilt. It did not, however, take him long to return to manipulating Chloe and improvising a plan so he could “win” again.

Finally: look guys, that rock collection was serial killer creepy AF. Okay? The rock he killed his brother with was definitely there. Those were trophies. He took them with him to his creepy sewer/warehouse hidey-hole.

So, before I leave you, here’s something interesting for people to think about: the Lucifer we meet in Season 1? Go look at that list of pathological personality traits again. Lucifer’s a walking checklist for sociopathy/APD (the Cain & Lucifer parallels are definitely material for more thought!). As the show goes on, we start to realize that a lot of Lucifer’s issues are rooted in early (and extremely extended) trauma (which is what psych researchers believe is the root of sociopathy; Lucifer wasn’t born that way, while it’s implied Cain was). Only, Lucifer changes. He learns. It’s slow and he takes steps backward as often as he steps forward. Only his active choices and steps toward change, only the fact that he slowly begins to see things from a little outside himself, only the fact that he is willing to admit he makes mistakes or doesn’t actually know everything and work with an actual therapist, and that he is doggedly devoted to not lying is what sets him apart and allows him to be someone sympathetic and capable of change—it’s why Chloe, and the audience, can love him and hope the best for him. Though they may seem small, that Lucifer is making changes at all is monumental. Psychologically speaking, the deck is really stacked against him.

What I’m saying here is that Dr. Linda Martin is going to write the most epic case study in the history of psychology at some point. She’s gonna make millions. And she deserves it!

(Speaking of different essays, someone remind me to talk about the parallels between Amenadiel & Lucifer and Cain & Abel at some point because they’re fascinating… and also they illuminate why Amenadiel can be redeemed but Cain couldn’t.)

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autism-asks · 6 years

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When I was younger I never did any autistic behaviors, but now, at 15/16/17, I’m doing them on purpose. I hand flap when I’m upset, or if there’s a bad noise I cover my ears. It feels natural and it helps, but I never did it as a kid. Could I still be autistic?

Part of the diagnostic criteria for autism is that symptoms have to have been present in early childhood. However, that doesn’t mean you need to have had the SAME symptoms then as you do now. The DSM-V phrases it as: “Symptoms must be present in the early developmental period (but may not become fully manifest until social demands exceed limited capacities, or may be masked by learned strategies in later life).”

For example, at 28 years old I sometimes flap my hands when I’m anxious. I don’t remember having done this as a child. I *do* remember that as a child I sucked my thumb longer than was normal, which led to me needing braces in middle school, and when the braces came off I would use my tongue to move my retainer around at night (which bugged the hell out of my sister who shared a room with me). These were oral stims, even though I didn’t know that term at the time. You might also have had different stims as a child than you do now.

Looking back on your childhood, you may also be able to identify social difficulties, meltdowns that got misinterpreted as tantrums, special interests, or samefood type things.

So, yes, you could still be autistic. It’s worth looking back on your childhood to see if you can find symptoms you maybe haven’t looked for yet.

-Liz

#stimming #early childhood symptoms #diagnostic criteria #mod liz

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autismus-obscurus · 7 years

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On self-dx

A while ago, someone asked me privately to tell them why I was clearly pro self-dx. It's a question I have seen a lot. It's a complex topic and there's a lot of misconceptions about what self-dx even is. Here's a slightly adapted version of my answer (under a cut so I don’t clog your dash). If anyone else has something to add, please do.

Also, TW: swearing. Sorry not sorry, It's just how I talk.

First off, we have to define what self-dx even is. Self dx is NOT googling "autism symptoms", reading one list, and the deciding "oh I'm autistic, lets go beg for pity". I can't speak for all autistics, but I don't fucking want pity. That's not the point of saying you're autistic. I just want to live without constant overload, okay? Lets go a bit more into detail: I’m very clearly pro self-dx, but I will not take someone seriously who takes one test and reads one blog post and then decides “I’m autistic.” That’s not how this works. Self-dx means hours upon hours of reading blogs, of reading articles, of checking the criteria again and again (cynically said, you're checking off a list, we'll get to that again later on), of asking autistics about every tiny trait you suspect could point towards or against it, of self doubt, of hope, of finding autistics spreading positivity or Autism Speaks / Autism Moms(TM) telling you you’re a monster. It’s emotionally draining as fuck. Self-dx is a search for identity. It’s trying to find out why your life is the way it is, why you are a certain way and how to cope with problems in a way that doesn’t do any more damage.

This line of thought goes in hand with another tumblr thing: Many people shit on self-dx because there's this nearly immortal assumption that people self-dx because it’s “cool” to be mentally ill. It’s not. Admittedly, teenagers are fucking weird and maybe some genuinely think they are ill when they are not, but I'm convinced that is the minority at best. Also, when we get to the point of preteneding to be sick that’s a legitimate disorder in itself. (Münchhausen or imposter’s syndrome. I've heard it called pathological lying, but that's quite a bit different and also a disorder that people cannot control and need help for.)

Let's look at a few statistics. In Europe 30% of people are officially diagnosed with a disorder under the ICD-10 / DSM-V. 75% of mental disorders start in adolescence (according to a German survey, BGS 98; here's also a link to the offical WHO page with statistics: HERE). The survey does not include those who are too ashamed to get help, who have no access to help, who are just not taken serious or have to fear abuse if it becomes known. Autism is not a mental disorder, obviously, but the staggering majority of autistics in the past was diagnosed as a child and face many of the same problems. (I’ll get to why the diagnosis age is a problem for autistic people in general in a second.) Now imagine finding a community of people who understand you, who can give you actually helpful tips, and you don’t have to reveal your identity. Anything classified as abnormal is still a taboo. People don’t believe you or make jokes about you. Example: I had to fight for an autism diagnosis because my dad, and I quote, says “there is nothing wrong with you”. No, there’s not, but I’m still autistic. That’s the mindset people apply to any neurodivergence. As to the matter of why so many people on the internet claim to be neurodivergent / mentally ill, I have a theory of my own. I can’t prove it, but it makes sense for me. Many neurodivergencies make it hard to go out. I’m introverted as hell, and often don't have the spoons to go out. So what do I do? I spend my life at home, browsing the internet. It takes me so much less effort to keep contact with people than if I had to go out and meet them. No sensory overload, nothing unexpected will happen. Meanwhile, the healthy people and extroverts are out and about having fun their own way. And, coming back to the community, on here it’s a lot easier to express your thoughts, especially on taboo topics.

Example: I think reading this text we can agree that my English (my second language) is reasonably good and that I’m a logical, intelligent person that can express arguments in an ordered manner. Right? Well, if you would be talking to me face to face, I would probably not make a whole lot of sense. I stutter, I lose trains of thoughts, I fall over my vocabulary, my pronunciation is often wobbly and then I will inevitably panic and make even less sense (this goes for talking in my L1 as well, in case anyone wonders). I’m not dumb, but face to face communication is hard.

Next up, the issue with psychologists and getting diagnosed. There is this pervasive notion that pschologists are The Authority (TM) who know everything and nobody else can be as good as them. Here's the thing: Psychologists are human. They’re not omniscient. And sometimes those psychologists are just shit. They can be sexist, and racist, and narcissistic. They can be condescending, and unable to admit they doN't know enough about a topic, and flat out ignore new evidence because it doesn’t fit their worldview. Go in the actuallyautistic tag. The amount of people who are dismissed by their therapists because this so called professional “has a feeling” they’re not autistic is ridiculous. Feelings don’t matter. Only the diagnostic interview matters, but the patients are denied that because a psychologist trusts his gut more than science. Without a decent self-dx it will be pretty hard to get diagnosed as a teenager or adult. On top of that, once you have learned to pass, autistic traits get lost or suppressed for fear of punishment. Often you have to convince them to test you with a detailed list that describes how you fit the DSM criteria. Which is by definition already a self-dx. "Oh, but psychologist are trained for that, surely they know!!!!!11!" I’m a psychology student. I just got an A in my clinical psychology class. I'll write my thesis in clinical psychology probably. The amount of diagnoses you have to learn does not allow to go in depth of anything. What a psychologist does is listen to you and check boxes on a list. (Sound familiar? I said we'd get there again.) We didn't even talk about autism. I did a presentation on it, found out my course teacher doesn't even know ABA is harmful (his point was "well the literature says it's effective"; Are You Kidding?). Our paedagogy prof spewed some ableist phrases pitying her friend that has an autistic kid. The perks of being an undercover autistic person :))) (That's sarcasm.)

To get back to the point: An ableist at worst, at best uneducated psychologist decides if you’re autistic, solely on what they have been told. The amount of posts that goes "I was denied diagnosis because I have good grades / are a girl / have friends / can talk" is ridiculous.

Example: I was in therapy three times until I was fifteen and NONE of them got the idea I might be autistic, despite me showing pretty severe symptoms. I had to self-dx and then convince my therapist to test me. I only even got that idea because we watched Rain Man in school. Seriously? Who knows you better: You or a psychologist you know for an hour?

Okay, before I get carried off, all of that assumes you actually get as far as being tested. To get there, it requires parents to listen to their kid. Parents typically don’t want anything to be wrong with their kid. (There’s nothing wrong with being autistic, but too many people still think that.)

Example: My dad still doesn’t believe I’m autistic. My diagnosis was four years ago. Because, I quote, “There’s nothing wrong with you.” No there’s not, but that doesn’t make me allistic.

The amount of stereotypes and ableist myths is staggering. Autism is one of the most misunderstood conditions I’ve ever researched. The DSM criteria are shit. They are, since decades, based on boys. They’re very limited, and while not wrong, describe things in a way that makes it hard for people to find "atypical" examples (stereotypical interests = trains). What about girls obsessed with horses? Nobody thinks that’s abnormal, yet it’s very possible. There are still a ton of people who think girls cannot be autistic, or if they are, to use the ableist principles this idea is founded on, they have to be “low-functioning”. The truth is, even the diagnostic interviews can’t pick up on autistic girls very well, that is a known fact. (Look at this link for example: HERE) I have most of those posts tagged either as info or ableism, but I don't have the spoons to check right now and my internet is shit.) To paraphrase the article and the other sources I know: Most autistic females just fly under the radar because they’re better at adapting and hiding it. That doesn’t have to be a conscious effort, but it’s exhausting, and then you sit there as a teenager and wonder why you’re feeling like shit because you never learned healthy autistic coping machanisms (or got punished for them).

Example: I didn’t learn of stimming, of dyspraxia, of sensory processing issue and literally everything that had defined my daily life until I found the autsitic community. I don’t think my therapist ever heard of that and I was labeled too “high-functioning” to actually get help. I managed, and back then I was fine, or thought I was after the depression wore off. I’m paying the price for that now.

People of color and women are severely mis- and underdiagnosed in literally everything medical. Teenagers are very rarely taken seriously, especially girls. Some people don’t believe autism exists at all. Now, assume somebody has understanding parents or teachers or is an adult, and could, thoretically go to a doctor to get diagnosed. Because (paraphrasing the original ask here) by validating self-dx we only push the notiion that you don't need a doctor to be diagnosed (which is again the Autority Lane (TM)). Well, yes, it would be preferable to get an official diagnosis, for the accomodations alone, but there is a shitton of reasons not to.

Example: I am currently undiagnosed. How so? My therapist made a deal with my parents that we would not write down the diagnosis, to prevent it from bringing me trouble. At first I was like “that’s ableist bullshit”. It’s not. Well, it still involves a lot of ableism, but there are a lot of reasons why I have to weigh if getting a diagnosis is worth it, even though I clearly need the help right now.

Here is a list of good reasons why someone could choose not to get professionally diagnosed:

money (in Germany healthcare is mostly free, but in the US getting a diagnosis can cost several thousand dollar)

autistic people are at a much higher risk of abuse, and don’t get taken as seriously (see ABA therapy and Autism Moms)

With an autism diagnosis you can be instituationalized far easier against your will (that works with almost all mental diagnoses)

In Germany you will have a harder time getting an insurance, they will make you pay more and don’t provide certain services e.g. You want an insurance for when you become unable to work, you know, like almost everyone has? Yeah, forget about it, autistic people don’t get that.

It can be used against you when you get in a fight about your kids’ custody

Medical ableism is a thing. You can have everything from a cold to cancer, from depression to borderline, it’s all The Autism. Autistic people are often seen as not having enough insight into their own body and mind to judge their own body (just like women, so as an autistic woman you're fucked twice as much :))) )

Getting a job outside of “supportive” businesses (read: they want Rain Man. They’re IT businesses who want autistic programmers and engineers, everyone else is pretty much fucked.) will be almost impossible. Autism is a disability and nobody wants disabled people past what the necessary quota is.

In the psych field there are no officially diagnosed people I know of, one researcher’s work was discredited when it came out she was autistic. I was already warned several times that I should hide my autism if I wanted to get a job at all.

basically, people are shit and can and will use your diagnosis against you

Lastly, I don’t really understand why people are so hateful towards the self-dx crowd. I can’t prove that there’s no black sheep, but most of them are people who look to improve their lives and better their mental health. Let’s put it like this:

The anti-self dx crowd: Only psychologists can tell if you’re autistic. Self-dx: I think I’m autistic. Antis: How dare you! I can clearly tell you’re not autistic. Fuck off, faker.

Call me cynic, but that is the core of reason most anti-self-dxers apply. Who the hell gave them the authority to judge other people? How do you know what a person is going through from reading two posts on tumblr? This isn’t some elite club. That kind of thinking ostracizes us even more when we alread have to fight so hard to be allwoed to live. Who are the self-dxers hurting? The ableists treat us like shit anyway. And honestly? I’d rather let in five fakers than have an autistic person suffer alone because of they can’t “prove” they’re autistic.

Dev out.

#actually autistic #self-dx #ableism #discourse #autism #aspergers

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prairiechzhead · 7 years

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Gaslighting and S3E9 Plus Some Really Personal Stuff

On the latest episode of @poldarkpodcast, a claim was made that Elizabeth was gas lighting George.

I disagree. This is my rebuttal. It’s too long to put as an ask, so I made a separate post. And then I get into some of my own personal experiences. More after the jump.

Elizabeth was not gas lighting George. Gas lighting is manipulation, but in order for it to work, it has to be subtle, persistent and gradual manipulation (emphasis mine). The goal of gas lighting is to gain control over someone by isolating them and making them doubt themselves constantly to the point where the victim begins to question their own sanity. Another term for “gas lighting” is brainwashing.

What Elizabeth did to George was manipulation. However, she was guilt-baiting George. Guilt-baiting is a manipulation tactic where the manipulator specifically targets your emotional weak spots in order to get what they want. Elizabeth specifically went after George’s insecurities on certain issues, such as Valentine’s parentage, his desire to rise even higher on the social ladder and not be looked down upon as noveau riche, and Ross Poldark. George does love Elizabeth, but he is afraid of losing her and he is also afraid of not having an heir. He is still very insecure where Ross is concerned. He wants so badly to be accepted by high society. Elizabeth knows this. Those are the things she exploited in order to get what she wanted: for George to pay attention to her and to stop digging into things that might threaten the life she has become accustomed to.

George is not being gas lit because he doesn’t meet the criteria for that form of abuse. He might question his thoughts on the one issue of Valentine’s parentage, but he doesn’t question his other thoughts and perceptions. Gas lighting affects the entire scope of one’s own reality. (Emphasis mine) I didn’t see Elizabeth trivializing George’s needs, which is one tactic someone who gaslights uses. In fact, she thought his need of her was important enough to exploit for her own gain. Elizabeth is direct and she confronts George with examples of his own behavior. A person who is gas lighting is not direct and to the point. Again, gas lighting is subtle and persistent.

George is also not isolated, which is another trait of someone who is being gaslit. It’s a key part because in order to get someone to effectively question their own sanity, the person doing the gaslighting has to remove anything that may counter what the gaslighter tells the victim.

In the book The Angry Tide, the issue of Valentine’s parentage does not come up until later in the book and Mr. and Mrs. Warleggen are happy and Elizabeth gets pregnant again. The happiness lasts until Geoffrey Charles makes a chance remark in front of George that Valentine, who happened to be sitting on a rocking horse at that moment, “looks like Uncle Ross”. (Since they have not yet begun shooting Season 4, I have no idea how the show is going to handle this scene and I’m not even going to speculate.) That remark triggers George’s doubt to return and Elizabeth does something even more desperate after that. (No spoilers. You’ll have to read the novel.)

To the claim that Elizabeth was being abusive to George: while she was manipulating him, she wasn’t doing anything that George hadn’t already done to her. Season 2 is filled with examples of George manipulating Elizabeth in order to get her to marry him. The double standards argument used in the podcast doesn’t apply here. They both do the same thing to achieve their own ends. Both characters have been criticized for being manipulative.

When I submitted my comment to the podcast, I’d only watched the episode once and was still filled with the giddiness from one of my favorite books scenes being portrayed so well by both Jack Farthing and Heida Reed. Elizabeth was standing up to George, (and it was nice to see someone actually standing up to him for once) but yes, she was also manipulating him to ensure she got her way. The two are not mutually exclusive.

No person is immune from being manipulated. Manipulation is not limited to scheming characters in books, movies, and TV shows. We are manipulated every day. Here are two examples:

Every form of advertising uses manipulation. It succeeds when we buy their product. It succeeds more when we realize we suddenly have an unmet need we didn’t know we had, which prompts us to buy a product.

When we accept a claim made by someone else as being true or accurate, but without verifying that it is, because the claim fits within what we already believe. The manipulator is playing on confirmation bias, which we all have to some degree or another. Politicians and purveyors of pseudoscience are especially good at this.

If you want to see an excellent example of gas lighting, you need look no further than the current President of the United States: Donald Trump. However, his attempts to gas light all of us are not as effective because the entire population of the US is too big for any one person to try and gaslight. However, because he’s a such a malignant narcissist, that won’t stop him from trying. When you see him going on those unhinged Twitter rants, that’s how he reacts when people don’t fall for his manipulation and question what he says and does.

And finally, I am married to someone who lived with a narcissistic, psychologically abusive mother who was really good at gas lighting her own child. She made him completely dependent upon her and when he decided it was time to live his own life and be with me, she made it her mission to try and suck him back in. I’ve seen a person, who is smart, charming, and wise be reduced to tears while he questions his own sanity because he doesn’t know what to believe. I’ve seen the lengths she went through to try and break up my marriage. My husband still struggles with self-esteem issues to this day because of what was done to him.

It’s tempting for people who aren’t in the field to throw psychological terms around without truly understanding what that means. I’ve seen it happen recently when someone wrote an article saying that Donald Trump had narcissistic personality disorder. When the public got hold of that, the armchair psychologists came out and started diagnosing him with NPD.

There are a few things wrong with this.

First, unless you are licensed and qualified to diagnose mental disorders, you cannot say that he has NPD.

Second, unless you’ve personally evaluated Donald Trump, you cannot say that he has NPD. It is highly unethical.

Even I, with a background in psychology, specializing in mental health, cannot say that Donald Trump has NPD, even though with my knowledge I see enough DSM-V defined symptoms that meet diagnostic criteria for NPD. I can only say that he shows signs of possible NPD.

The other issue with throwing terms around without clearly understanding their meaning has to do with stigma. It really bothers me when someone is doing it because they have an agenda they wish to push forward-such as victimization of a particular group of people. It makes my eye twitch when that agenda-pushing comes in the form of trying to be an ally. What happens is that the term gets attached to something its not and this pushes people who want help into the role of victim, which actually hinders their recovery from their emotional trauma. Next, people who are opposed to those with the agenda minimize the experiences of all people who have experienced gas lighting. When this happens, those who do need help can’t get it because, once again, their situation and their thoughts are being minimized (which is a tactic used in gas lighting) and they’re thrust back into the role of victim, which is the role they are trying to escape from.

In my own recovery from anxiety and major depression, I’ve run across people who try to put me back into the victim role. I grew up in an abusive household, too. I’ve also met people who tried to push me back into the role of victim, mainly because my being a victim gives them a purpose. As long as I’m helpless, they have a purpose in life, which is advocating on my behalf (when I never asked them to). They were also putting me in my place. This is worse than the authoritarian brand of putting me in my place, because at least with a bigot and a sexist asshole, they are clear about what they believe. The people who do this under the guise of helping me are not, and in that regard, they are worse. At least I know where I stand with the chauvinist pig.

This is why I have a huge issue with people using the term “ableism”. When you accuse others of being ableist towards someone like me, you’re essentially saying that I (the person who has the condition) am a victim, I cannot help myself, and that I should be pitied. When you use that term to defend me, you’re not defending me. You’re putting me in my place by accusing someone of doing something I, quite frankly, did not notice or may have noticed but decided for myself that it was not a battle worth my time and energy. My time and energy is precious, especially in dealing with depression, and only I get to choose where and on what I spend that precious energy. You’re telling the world that I am different and I should be treated differently because I have a particular condition that adversely affects my life. You’re defining me as my condition, not as a human being. I want the world to see me as a human being, not a mental illness.

I have accepted that I will live with my conditions for the rest of my life. That is how you deal with something that is as chronic and at times, as debilitating as my own anxiety and depression can get. I play the hand I have been dealt. I have no choice but to do this if I want to have a full and happy life. Some so-called advocates call acceptance “ableism”. I call bullshit. Again, they’re trying to put me into the victim role I do not want to be in.

Yes, while this last part has gotten long AND personal and has nothing to do with Poldark, this is the stigma I live with every single day caused by people casually throw around psychological terms without truly understanding what they mean. I’m all for lessening stigma. But listen to those of us who live with it on how to help get rid of it.

Two excellent resources on gaslighting

The National Domestic Violence Hotline http://www.thehotline.org/what-is-gaslighting/

6 Common Traits of Narcissists and Gaslighters https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/communication-success/201707/6-common-traits-narcissists-and-gaslighters

#poldark podcast #gaslighting #psychological abuse #rebuttal #future therapist #poldark book spoilers

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actuallyadhd · 7 years

Text

May-be .... ADD

Hi!

So, I think I have ADD. I don’t really know for sure.

I know that I have OCD. But many symptoms that I have became aware of more acutely actually match more to ADD.

We’ve put in a cut because this is a long post. There is an answer at the end, from the marvelous Becca! -J

For me, it takes a LONG time to study. I wake at 7a and finish at least by 12a, almost my entire day is occupied with school, doing homework, going to class. When reading a biology or chemistry or any other textbook, it takes me really long time to read. One page might take me an hour. I keep reading and rereading, feeling as if I don’t get what a sentence means. I try to go ahead, and yet my thoughts and worries pull me back. I also have challenges comprehending certain concepts. Something like energy or electrons can seem VERY VERY abstract for me, and I have to keep going to the dictionary every now and then just to define what a word really means if I don’t really get it (sometimes just common words). I also get a plethora of curious but intrusive questions about what I am reading as I go through it; then I have to pause a bit, think about the question, try to answer it, feel very depressed as if I don’t understand the material when I don’t answer it, and have trouble continuing on afterwards. That almost always happens with science. As a person, I grew up not having a solid science background, so all of these scientific processes and knowledges are just so foreign to me, yet I am exerting the best of influence to learn. Nevertheless, it is crushing: I always have the feeling that I haven’t really swallowed what chemistry is all about. I still have somewhat a disbelief of many tenets in chemistry and biology, b/c they are just so weird and hard to understand. Yet I try to put these thoughts away: they are only disturbances, and I might as well think about them for my entire life without doing anything beneficial. If other people don’t think that way, I don’t need to either :)

I also have problems with concentration and focus. I fidget and move around a lot. It helps me, sure, but I still do it; I can’t stand still for, like, 5 minutes. I always eat my nails, the skin around them, keep folding my hands, look at the clock to make sure I’m not late for class.

And, I can never go to lecture without reading beforehand. Like, if the professor is talking about what I have read, then I totally understand it, and the information reinforces my knowledge. But then, if he/she speaks about something new, I have hard time processing what I am learning. This problem is more subtle when I am watching movies or videos; sometimes, I can’t really understand what people are saying to me unless I turn on subtitles. In the lab, my mind is just boggled: so much to do, not knowing what to write, having trouble following procedures, nodding yes to my instructor while knowing within that I have understood nothing of his answer to my questions, etc.

Especially when doing homework and in exams, I make stupid careless mistakes. Sometimes I just tell myself not to keep checking things over and over again b/c that’s just obsessive-compulsive. And yet, when I don’t, I am more susceptible (naturally) to errors. I feel like I’m rushing through things, and then I get them wrong, and I feel really bad, telling myself that I don’t know what I have learnt despite spending like all my day learning it. One day, I had a chemistry exam, and I mistaken rows for columns: that cost me a point. I am improving in this sphere by use of highlighters, and yet b/c I don’t have much time (b/c most time for me is taken up by reading), I tend to rush: not b/c I am careless, but rather b/c I don’t have enough time.

Sound is a big enemy. I remember years before during high school, I’d sit at the kitchen table, listening to the news while doing my math homework. And yet, now the slightest sound disturbs me, takes me out of the world of academia into anxiety. Whenever I am at the library, I keep moving from one seat to another, one floor to another so I don’t have to keep sitting where there is a person speaking or laughing or on the phone or putting on music, even if slightly. At home, with my family it’s practically impossible to study. I have to keep yelling at my brothers, put my hands over my ears (which is just as annoying and disturbing), go down and constantly eat and do chores and talk with my family (since I meet them on the weekends), and have some fun time for myself — I can’t be and will never study the whole day, no matter what (although I often break this rule :)

Now, I said that back in high school I was better than now, but I also question that. If anything, I had to study long hours as well. I remember questioning myself why I take so long to do homework, to finish math problems, when others do them so fast (a girl did it right in her class!). I always thought that I was complicated, that I was only a studious person (nothing wrong with that, of course, but the typical stereotype). But now I realize that I went hard on myself: I definitely have a mental illness, I just don’t know what it is.

This is just a minutiae glimpse into my mind. I hope you can type a more elongated response than the ones I see here: I know you are a busy person, yet I am typing this right around 1:30a and waking up at 7a the same day to start another cycle of my rather…rather interesting life.

Zhanks!

Soon (Anon)

From what you’ve written, I can tell you’re really struggling with a lot of things which are often part of ADHD (or ADD. The difference between the two can be found here). Before I say any more though, I have to say this: we are not mental health professionals and we cannot replace a thorough evaluation by a psychologist or psychiatrist. The best we can do is give advice based on our own experiences with ADHD and the information we find about it. If you want an official diagnosis then you need to see a professional.

You’re describing things to do with poor concentration, lack of attention, some difficulty processing information, fidgeting, as well as sensitivity to sensory stimuli. These are things pretty commonly associated with ADHD. Getting a diagnosis requires certain criteria to be fulfilled; the criteria as they are in DSM-V (the diagnostic manual used by most mental health professionals) can be found in this post. In addition to that it might be helpful for you to check out our self-diagnosis post and see which parts you identify with. If you want to get an official diagnosis these posts can help you plan what you want to talk about in the evaluation.

It is also possible not all of these things are because of ADHD. You said that you have OCD, so some of these symptoms might overlap. It is quite common to have two or more comorbid disorders, and some of the things you bring up are also associated with learning disorders (like the amount of time it takes for you to read). A professional would be able to help you figure out your symptoms and what might be causing them.

To be honest, there isn’t much more I can say based only on what you wrote. It’s obvious you’re having a hard time with a lot of things and that it’s affecting your life. I would definitely recommend having an evaluation done because no matter what the cause is, figuring it out will probably be a huge help.

-Becca

#submission #actually adhd #adhd #anonymous #questioning if ADHD

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