i both firmly believe that self-diagnosing saved my life and i think that the way tiktok and instagram have recently been spreading misinformation about mental illness/neurodivergence is incredibly harmful.
people who are looking for answers are already people who are in a vulnerable situation.
much of the misinformation appears logically sound; and is presented as definitive fact (prefaced with claims such as "research shows"). it's imperative we remember correlation does not prove causation. it is incredibly dangerous to make definitive statements like "if X happened in your childhood, you now Z as an adult." real scientists will almost always use may or other less-definitive terms. similarly, equating one behavior/experience with any single condition is also unsafe. many conditions have overlapping symptoms; and many people "mask" their key symptoms, even to themselves.
we cannot discern from a singular data point any conclusion. in official diagnosis, for a behavior/experience to be considered a symptom, it must significantly influence your life. many people enjoy an organized space. that is a preference. disrupting your daily life even at personal cost in order to prioritize organization is more likely a symptom.
again, a single data point is not an effective diagnostic tool. it is necessary and important work to catalogue and consider all unwanted/distressing behaviors in order to understand a complete picture of the person.
i will see creators in paid partnerships make generalized behavioral/emotional claims that apply to a large portion of a community, and then they will suggest that the "solution" to that behavior is through their paid partner/through their personal support. "follow for more psych tips/facts" is an incredibly evil marketing tactic. i very rarely see unpartnered/unbranded content on how to aid/comfort those behaviors and feelings.
much of the misinformation employs a subtle technique (called confirmation bias) of setting up a conclusion before "proving" the conclusion. "you know you have X when you experience A,B, and C." no person's experience of their conditions/behaviors will look exactly the same as another's. while knowing certain things might be a sign/symptom of a condition, it is irresponsible to consider it definitive.
confirmation bias is unfortunately extremely effective on tiktok specifically. the algorithm will notice that you interacted longer with the video that "proves" (through a singular video) that you "have" a condition. it will continue to feed you related videos that further confirm what you believe.
this is dangerous because we are, unfortunately, not good at knowing ourselves. i did not know it was unusual to vividly nightmare every night; i didn't consider it a symptom. i was similarly dismissive also of any other signs of my PTSD - i incorrectly assigned them to anxiety/adhd. on the small scale, this can mean a longer journey to healing. on the larger scale, it can mean people with extremely difficult situations are unable to get the help they need.
please, if you can, and you're looking to self-diagnose: be careful about what you assume about yourself. try to keep an honest journal of what you're thinking/feeling/doing for a few days.
do not go in with an assumption. try to keep an open mind. i think we all "suspect" we have something - but like i said, i completely missed my own PTSD symptoms, because i suspected the ADHD the most, and only "saw" those symptoms.
do your own research. if the tiktok says "research shows", google that research. figure out who paid for that research. do further research related to that study - has it ever been repeated? is it peer reviewed? do other researchers seem to accept it as conclusive?
if you feel you really resonate with the materials of one person's experience with a condition, find other examples. see if you relate to other creators who identify similarly.
and please - please do not stop once you come to a conclusion. i fully believe that the diagnostic process should be seen as a first step, not a destination. by knowing what you might be struggling with, you gain an incredibly powerful tool on how to gain peace with that condition.
if you feel yourself emotionally respond to a tiktok/etc that suggests something that might be true about yourself, i'm glad you had that experience. but it's also important to not relax into the "easy" answer. interrogate it. start googling what else that could mean; what ways you could work on healing that wound.
healing does not "belong" to any one condition. i want you to begin to look into healing no matter if you have "proven" you have a condition or not. it is never selfish to practice responsible self-care. even if you don't relate to having adhd, you are not harming me by using adhd-inspired study tips. it is not making my condition worse for you to seek peace by asking for more time on tests. even if it was - the fault would be with the system, not in your need of something the system makes inaccessible.
remind yourself that everything you experience is real. and because it is real, it is complicated. while things might be related - even sometimes clearly related - a stranger on the internet cannot make that discernment for you. you as a person deserve the work, attention, and care that goes into the process of unravelling the harm that has been done to you.
it makes me very, very upset to see how popular these videos have become, because they're so irresponsible. and they clearly are targeting a vulnerable group. for example, making generalized claims about children of unloving caretakers is targeting those who have experienced neglect. there is no way to use 30 second videos to correctly analyze what that neglect might have caused in your adult life. i'm sorry, but it's snake oil.
i know it is so powerful soothing to recognize that you aren't broken. that others exist like you out there. i want every person looking for answers to find their answer. i want you to feel seen and heard and understood. i want you to find your community.
i just want it to happen safely.
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Mahiru Shiina: Trial 2 Synthesis Theory
Hello everyone! For the “I Love You” drop, I’m just going to jump straight into a full-length theory because I have a LOT that I want to cover and it’s much more comprehensive than my initial thoughts posts usually are. This is partially because all four other admins helped me out, as well as our 6th roommate who isn’t an admin!
As always, I will be using the very fast translation done by @onigiriico, which is linked here! I’ll also be using @iaobug ‘s wonderful translation of Mahiru’s 16 step guide in This Is How To Be In Love With You, which I’ll put here.
T/W: Suicide, stalking, kidnapping/abduction, toxic relationships, murder, hanging, drowning, malnourishment, force feeding a rat. There WILL be images so please read at your own discretion!
Alright, let’s jump into it!
Mahiru’s murder took place in Aokigahara, AKA the Sea of Trees, AKA the Suicide Forest.
This is based on an initial post by @tomoesan, which has since become unavailable. I’ll post a photo of it here, though:
It compares Mahiru’s murder location on her card from Undercover to a real place in Japan: Aokigahara. From the pictures, it’s very clear that this was an intentional move by the artists to place Mahiru’s murder somewhere actively recognizable through some google searches. I firmly believe that the forest that they move through in the MV is Aokigahara.
That’s not all, though. From this image, you can pretty clearly see that the photo seems to be taken from inside a cave. We’ve determined this specific cave to be Ryugu Cave, or The Dragon Cave.
This article shows the exact same photo in the earlier post, citing it as being from the Ryugu Cave.
The Ryugu Cave also contains the Seno Umi Shrine, within it. You can read a bit about it here, but I firmly believe this to be the shrine mentioned on Day 15 of This Is How To Be In Love With You; more on that later.
Furthermore, the shrine is to Toyotama-hime. In mythology, this references a goddess who falls in love with a prince at a water well. However, he breaks a promise not to spy on her, which results in him seeing her in a monstrous form. Given the lyrical translation of daisuki (which should just mean I love you repeatedly) in the chorus to “monstrously in love,” “monstrous cause I love you,” “monstrous dilemma”... I think that the writers absolutely knew what they were going for, and they were giving a nod to this specific story and the shrine, with Mahiru being the lover turned monster.
Based on all of this, and the fact that I do believe Mahiru’s lover committed suicide, I think that all signs point to Aokigahara, specifically Ryugu Cave, being the location of the murder. I’ll be using this assumption throughout the rest of my theory.
I’ll follow along with the guide, starting at Days 1-8.
I think that Mahiru portrays Days 1-8 approximately correctly.
Days 1-7 are, I think, completely correct. Mahiru meets this guy, assumes it’s fate, and does small things to try to get closer to him and get to know about him. At this point, things probably seem completely normal to him, so there wouldn’t be any reason for him to reject her jogging with him or whatever.
Day 8 is when she waits outside his work, takes him to the park and presumably confesses her love to him. This is where her first inconsistency is.
She says that they talked the night away, but she also says that she “chooses not to believe they talked the night away” and that “it felt like no time passed at all.” She also very notably doesn’t actually say what his response was, though she implied it was positive.
I think that it was actually very short; rather than them talking the night away, he probably swiftly rejected her. This, therefore, ends Mahiru’s attempts to get him into a relationship normally. If he won’t love her the way she wants him to, she’ll find a way to make it happen, no matter what.
Mahiru sets a plan into action, starting Day 9.
This is the first page in her journal where the text switches from normal, pristine rows to slanted text. That’s a sign that something is going wrong.
She mentions that her “boyfriend” is really cute when he’s blackout drunk. I think that it’s possible she drugged him, but even if she didn’t, she used this to get some kind of information. It’s possible she brought him back to his house, getting his address, possibly even stealing keys or something like that.
I’d theorize that, rather than going here together, she followed him to the bar. Once he was pretty drunk, it’d be a lot easier to convince him to go along with her.
Day 10 is her talking to her beautician; I think that’s all correct. The beautician simply heard about the story through Mahiru’s eyes.
Day 11 is, I think, similar to the bar; she probably followed him to the “date” location. She says it “can’t be a coincidence” their tastes are so similar and that she’s become a different person. That indicates that this isn’t actually a shared taste: he went to the location and she followed him there.
On Day 12, Mahiru abducts her lover.
Day 12 is the day when Mahiru goes to his house for the first time, but somehow, she can’t actually seem to remember anything.
While that alone is suspicious, there’s also the mirror. We can see her beautician in the mirror, so the fact that he isn’t in the mirror at all seems to imply that he isn’t within the camera’s view at all. Why is she in his entryway without him there to greet her?
The answer is that she’s uninvited. She enters his home, and she takes him. That’s what I think the shot of her jumping on the couch spreading the flowers in This Is How To Be In Love With You is:
Rather than this being her killing moment, I think that this is her going in and snatching him from his own house. I firmly believe that Mahiru took him to Aokigahara, and I think that this is when she did it.
The scene in the house with the feathers immediately follows Day 12, so it makes sense chronologically. Additionally, for Day 13 onwards, the text switches from just being slanted to being stitched together from smaller boxes; it seems like it’s mimicking a ransom note that’s patched together from magazine or book clippings. This indicates that this is when Mahiru is more actively committing a crime: in this case, kidnapping.
Days 13-15 are Mahiru moving the body.
If we assume that Mahiru’s end destination is Ryugu Cave based on earlier research, Days 13, 14 and 15 can be interpreted as movement.
Day 13 may seem strange, given that it’s Mahiru seemingly attending a wedding. However, if you pay careful attention to her phrasing, she does not say that she actually attended. She says that she was invited, and that soon, her dreams will come true. I think it’s possible that the wedding location was closer to Aokigahara–it’s near Mt. Fuji, so I’d imagine there could be some scenic locations or something–and she’s mentally using the wedding as a justification for heading that direction. Maybe she even did attend, if it was over that way.
Day 14 is an outdoor date under the stars. She practically begged him to come along. This is her taking him into the woods. I’m not sure exactly how compliant he was being and if she literally dragged him or if he was in more of a “resisting seems like a bad idea” kind of headspace, but I believe that Day 14 is them arriving at the forest and entering.
It’s notable that, in the scenes in I Love You, Mahiru seems to be leading her lover into the forest. Here’s a screenshot from around 1:37:
At this point, it doesn’t seem like he’s being forced. However, this ends with him groveling on the ground at 1:55.
Comparing that to the image immediately after, we understand that Mahiru isn’t seeing the situation clearly. Given that he’s in this kneeling position in both shots, I think it’s safe to say that the shots with the golden lighting are the situation through Mahiru’s eyes.
He’s very clearly actually beaten down and miserable, but Mahiru depicts them as a cute and happy couple. In fact, at 1:20, the lyrics support this interpretation:
This too-perfect image of her relationship is captioned with “I actually believed that.” It’s telling us, the audience, that while she actually, genuinely believed that these fantasy segments were reality, we, perhaps, should not do the same. These fantasy segments aren’t real.
Mahiru has already proven her capability of being an unreliable narrator in the past, concealing a lot of information within the text of her 16 Day Guide. I don’t want to completely discount these fantasies, but I’m trusting the side by side comparisons it gives us that they are NOT, in any way shape or form, what she portrays them as. I don’t want to take any of it at face value.
Anyways, Day 15 is the end destination of their journey: the arrival at Ryugu Cave. This is the shrine that she mentions.
As stated earlier, Ryugu Cave contains a shrine. Though the cave isn’t available to tourists, that just increases the chances that Mahiru could get away with imprisoning her captive there without being spotted by the patrols that go through.
For reference, this cave is very deep: 96 m, or approximately 315 ft. It would be pretty hard for him to escape once they’re there, which resounds with her wish: they’ll stay like that until the end of time, and no one will stand in her way.
Day 16 is… a snapping point.
Day 16 is when we see Mahiru prepare her lovely boyfriend a wonderful meal of all his favorites. I think that this is when the 2:13/2:14 fantasy split happens:
While she sees herself giving him cake pleasantly, in reality, she seems to be… force feeding him a rat??
I know some people think that the cake is a metaphor for toxicity, and that because he feeds it to her first in the video, it means that the relationship is mutually toxic. From what I’ve seen, this theory completely disregards both the rat aspect and the fantasy filter over the cake scene. I think it’s far more likely that him feeding her cake was Mahiru idealizing the real events. Maybe she ate the rats, too, and she liked to think he’d feed her, too. It’s them eating together; if the cake can be a rat, him feeding it to her can be a similarly significant misperception.
In any case, given that this is the last day in the guide, I think that this is the end of the line for him. He can’t take being her captive anymore, and sometime when she’s not away, he commits suicide.
I’m not entirely sure how. Obviously, we see him hanging at several points in the video, most prominently at the end:
But we can also see that he appears to be soaked with water at the very beginning.
There are lakes within Ryugu Cave. They’d also likely be cold enough to give him some form of hypothermia, explaining the blue tint to his skin in the second of the two images (he seems to have dried off by the second). Because of this, I’m somewhat inclined to lean towards drowning because it seems like it would have been more accessible to him. In that case, though, I’m not sure how he ends up hanging. I don’t feel like Mahiru would put him there; it feels much more likely to me that she would jump into the lake with him so that they could be together forever or something.
So, I’m not sure whether he hangs himself or drowns himself, but the gist is, he ends up dead. That’s what Mahiru blames herself for.
VOTE: GUILTY
I know that she’s currently leaning innocent and many people feel strongly about it, but please hear me out here.
In Mahiru’s audio drama, she very clearly does not grasp the gravity of what she did. If she really did kidnap him, bring him to the suicide forest and force feed him rats… that is NOT loving someone “normally,” as she’s so insistent that she did.
Her current perception is that when she loves someone normally, it’s wrong. That’s what she’s said about her guilty verdict. However, if we switch gears and vote her innocent, what will that tell her?
I think it would tell her that her love is okay–and, to the delusional Mahiru, that means saying that all of what she did is okay. If she believes this is loving someone normally, then I’d rather tell her not to love anyone like this again. It’s going to be hard for her to accept, and I recognize we might lose her between trials, but I think telling her that this is okay is even worse.
I do meta vote, but I do it in the context of trying to secure as many viable innocent votes for the third trial as possible. I think that, if we vote Mahiru innocent, she’ll go back to her fully delusional self. I think guilty is the only way to make the message stick, and the message has to stick if she has a chance at getting an innocent verdict in the end. I really urge you to consider it, because I think that voting her innocent will be a huge mistake on the fanbase’s part (which is the same exact way I felt about the Kotoko vote in Trial 1).
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I am going to take a break from milgramblr
[important please read]
ok now how do I start. Im going to take a break from tumblr for about a week. Things have been absolutely awful for me here since the very beginning of 2024, even if it may not look that way at times.
to retell the situation it happened with the new years gartic phone game, where someone made a prompt about a ship that made me heavily uncomfortable. To put it loosely it reminded me of an extremely bad experience with a fandom a few years ago when I called out a ship for being creepy and having a huge age gap but I was constantly dogpiled and harassed. It was probably the worst experience I’ve had on the internet and to this day I get really scared of people hating on me and I apologise for everything likely stemming back from the situation.
I tried to persist with the game but I got really upset and left. I expressed on my blog how uncomfortable I felt about the whole situation. Then this one person, who’s a prominent figure in the Milgramblr community, I won’t name them but I think you’ll know who, replied on my post saying that “it’s ok because…” in such an awful tone. It’s hard to explain but basically it felt really bad as they completely dismissed my feelings about the situation just to justify their creepy ship. And even worse, they way they responded was EXACTLY the same way that everyone else responded back in to at old fandom. At the point to I’d much prefer hate and harassment over that false positive attitude.
I freaked out and immediately blocked them and basically went into a panic attack. I was freaking out on my blog and just to make things worse I saw a post praising them and things got so bad. It was the start of the new year and I was on holiday and was supposed to do a bunch of things but because of that situation I was bedridden and couldn’t stop crying. I had so many nightmares about everyone here turning on me and the original incident and I still have them.
the way the person reacted to my situation was absolutely awful. After my breakdown they immediately went to their blog and started posting about how the ships good and you should praise it completely disregarding everything that happened. I’ve always been uncomfortable with them but this pushed me over the edge. And later on I got in contact with someone who was (presumably) trying to help me and we decided to see if that person could make an apology. But they took way to long to even think they gave any attention to the situation and the apology itself didn’t feel that genuine.
This person was still posting about it and didn’t change their pfp and title despite how bad it was to me and they did not do anything at all. Again I’m not naming anyone but I highly recommend you do not support them anymore. I said I’m going to be leaving for a while but if you want clarification on who it is you can just ask, I’ll check my stuff tomorrow morning before I completely shut off for the week.
I don’t know who it was but there was even a throwaway account hating on me and saying awful things. I didn’t care that much as things had already gotten so bad for me that I didn’t care about the opinion of an anon. But like I said, the sickly positive response that person gave was way worse than actual hate.
and that’s only one part of the story. Another thing happened much more recently with the person I mentioned who was trying to help me. They were the first person I followed on Milgramblr and the person who inspired me to join and make all these theories, so with this and them helping me I really looked up to them. It was a few days ago I think but they posted something on their account about that person and wanting attention to them. I expressed my uncomfortable feelings about the situation and they didn’t do anything about it. Instead they decided to KEEP POSTING about it, like constantly and me getting more upset at the situation and how they responded made it clear that they didn’t care at all. I blocked them and we were mutuals for a while.
It’s been a month and I’m still suffering very badly. I’m not constantly crying as I was when it first happened but it still pains me. I’ve been feeling incredibly distressed on this sight knowing that the original person hasn’t done anything about it and they’re still very close. No matter how much I block them or blog tags I still see them in reblogs or bought up. I had to exclude anything relating to the earbuds collab from my milgram archives as it gives me back really bad memories to the pfps involved. I just can’t feel safe in this place anymore and especially that no matter how I feel, nothing has changed since when it happened and no one’s even actually trying to help me or change things.
I’ve just been feeling so bad that I’ve been going days without eating. Just because I can’t be bothered to get out of bed. The only solace for me is sleep but even that’s not good enough as I might have nightmares and I often feel much more tired afterwards. Things are changing for me as I actually have to get up and do something now and it’s surprisingly going kinda well, but that has nothing to do with this situation.
just to note I will be continuing my milgram archives series, I’ve scheduled quite a few posts for this week so they’ll keep going. For me I’ll completely cut off all activity for this week, and may return on Wednesday.
it’s just. I hate how nothings changed. I want something to happen but no one’s helping
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