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katzenschlafs · 5 months

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I Am Done Fighting My Depression

And I know that sounds like a declaration of giving in, that I'm going to just lie in bed til it all blows over, or maybe kill myself.

But that's not at all what I mean.

I mean: I'm done with the metaphor of "fighting." I'm done with the false binary that I'm either fighting or giving in. I'm done taking up arms against my own mind and body. I'm done trying to use violence and force to bring myself into alignment with what "should" be.

Last Thursday, my therapist and I talked about my diagnoses explicitly, something I have almost never gotten to do in therapy. I am still meeting criteria for Major Depressive Disorder. Almost every criterion, in fact. This was, somehow, a surprise to me. So surprising I started dissociating, and then cried the rest of the therapy session and a while after.

This morning, I struggled to get out of bed. It took me two and a half hours to convince myself, and it was bladder pressure more than mental pressure that finally convinced me. I fought my way out of bed. I fought my way into making breakfast. I fought my way into going for a walk in the last of the fading sunlight. I tried to fight my way into doing something with a friend, and by that point, the fight was too much, and the depression won, and I'm sitting here typing instead of seeing a movie with someone I care about.

But something interesting has been happening in the background all day.

The realization that fighting is exhausting. That at this point, the fight against the depression accounts for more of my exhaustion than the depression itself.

A few lines of Andrea Gibson poetry have been echoing in my head for hours:

Truce is a word made of velvet. Truce is a word made of velvet. Wear it everywhere you go.

It's the very end of a poem about chronic illness, called "How to Be Sick." And regardless of whether a given illness is usually classified as physical or mental, our culture treats all illness as an enemy to be fought and conquered. But the illness lives in our bodies and minds. When we fight an illness, so often we find that we are fighting only ourselves.

My depression is not a foreign entity slamming a battering ram into the fortress of my soul. My depression is my neurons, my hormones, my brain chemicals, my internal systems trying to find a way to survive a world that isn't built for me. My depression is made up of pieces that also make up who I am. To fight it is to fight myself.

I'm so tired of fighting myself.

My depression and the rest of me want the same thing: to survive and thrive. To protect me from harm. To enjoy my life. To carve out a little corner of the world where it's a little easier to be a human being.

It's just that my depression is running that program on software that doesn't match the world I live in. That mismatch is what makes it an illness.

I can try to fight it. I can try to hijack or hack it. I can try to live with it. I can try to let it run the show.

Or I can start to take care of it. Like it's just another member of my inner family system, another inner child or inner young adult who is doing their best with the tools they have.

This isn't my idea, really. It comes from a Thich Nhat Hanh essay about anger. He says he smiles to his anger and says "I will take good care of you."

I'm still figuring out how to take care of my emotions and my inner selves. I'm learning.

And I think taking care of my depression involves a lot of the same actions that I was already doing, just with a very different mindset. I used to go for a walk to fight my depression. I used to make breakfast to fight my depression. I used to spend time with friends to fight my depression (and because I genuinely want to see my friends, and "fuck you depression for making me feel like staying home").

I think I can still go for a walk and make breakfast and see friends. But I can't do those things with a sword in my hand anymore. I'm going to go for a walk to take care of my depression. If my depression says the world is stacked against me, I can say "sure, but the world can't stop me from taking care of us with a little exercise." If my depression says there's no point to doing the dishes, I can say "yes, there will be more dishes tomorrow, but we'll both feel a little better if we clean up a bit today."

I guess it's just compassionate reparenting. Apparently that's what I keep coming back around to.

It's hard to compassionately reparent an inner self you refuse to acknowledge or treat as real. It's hard to compassionately reparent an inner self that you are constantly "fighting" and trying to "overcome."

Compassionate reparenting is hard enough as it is. I don't want to make it even harder on myself.

My depression is not my enemy. It's a part of me that deserves love and care and compassion. The goal is not to make it go away. The goal is to transform it into something new. By loving it as it is. And by not having expectations about what it might become once it's been loved long enough and well enough to become whatever it was originally meant to be.

#cw suicide mention #depression #inner family systems #essay #reparenting #metaphor #illness #if i ever write a beauty and the beast retelling it's gonna be about this

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strawberrybabydog · 2 years

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i feel sad that psychiatrists don’t tend to consider in these patients whether or not there’s a way for them to live with their CL. like the woman who believed she was a snake. i feel like they just kept putting her on medications and never let her try acceptance. obviously i’m not a psychiatrist or psychologist but the idea that everything has to be treated with sometimes invasive methods makes me scared to tell my psychiatrist much more about my psychosis. there are some aspects of it that are comforting, even in the short term. i’m already quite introverted so i don’t really care about appearing eccentric or whatever. but i suspect my psychiatrist would dismiss my own feelings on myself. sorry i’m rambling you can ignore that last bit of you want!! /gen - 🐑 anon (the bedtime stories tagged >:D

to be fair, typically when people are seeking psychiatrists they themselves are seeking medication/clinical treatment (at least in canada, psychiatrists' jobs are to diagnose and offer medication and basically nothing else.) also to be fair, accepting delusions (as a delusional person) is often very dangerous & i view as being a last resort in coping. even if the delusion itself isn't harmful, it can make treatment down the line extremely difficult if not impossible (if they change their mind,) and can also make a person more susceptible to developing more/different delusions. if a person living with delusional disorder accepts their delusions, that can also turn into schizophrenia or another "more serious" psychotic disorder

but you're also totally right - i just wanted to maybe give some context above. delusional people know themselves better than anyone else, and there should be more treatment options - which include acceptance - for us. just like everyone else, we have a right to bodily and mental autonomy. we shouldn't be shamed into silence or into treatment we don't truly want, or we know deep down isn't going to help us

basically, the acceptance of delusions (as a delusional person AND the acceptance of delusional people into society) is a super nuanced topic! every psychotic person's delusions behave very differently - i have nothing in common with any of my psychotic friends, but i have a LOT in common with my other autistic/depressed/OCD/BPD friends. delusional people are VERY MUCH individuals & so treating every delusional person as if we should all seek help OR we should all just accept our delusions isn't really beneficial (i know ur not saying this im not trying to strawman u /gen)

really... we shouldn't be pressured into treatment, like i said you are wholly correct. we should be given the time, space, and resources to make informed decisions about our mental health FOR and BY ourselves. seeking treatment or accepting delusions are both morally neutral, and ultimately will affect us the most

supporting psychotics means supporting those of us who are seeking/in treatment/want to be rid of psychosis, and those who dont - it's all of us or none of us

#like the reasons i accept my delusions is bc they harm me more to reject them #+ treatment is hard to find + its VERY expensive + i grew up with delusions which means mine dont operate the same #as a person who developed psychosis in adulthood #childhood delusions LITERALLY exist so that children can attempt to cope with a world they cannot understand and is too rough for them #like i am delusional BECAUSE i cannot cope without them. literally.#also because of the whole brain damage thing... that too LMAO #dogcourse #🐑 anon #asks #not dog #delusions

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ganymedesclock · 3 years

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These are questions I've had for some while and it's hard to find someone who'll answer with grace. This mostly relates to disabilities (mental or physical) in fiction.

1) What makes a portrayal of a disability that's harming the character in question ableist?

2) Is there a way to write a disabled villain in a way that isn't ableist?

In the circles I've been in, the common conceptions are you can't use a character's disability as a plot point or showcase it being a hindrance in some manner. heaven forbid you make your villain disabled in some capacity, that's a freaking death sentence to a creative's image. I understand historically villains were the only characters given disabilities, but (and this is my personal experience) I've not seen as many disabled villains nowadays, heck, I see more disabled heroes in media nowadays.

Sorry if this comes off as abrasive, I'd really like to be informed for future media consumption and my own creative endeavors.

Okay so the first thing I'm going to say is that while it IS a good idea to talk to disabled people and get their feedback, disabled people are not a monolith and they aren't going to all have the same take on how this goes.

My personal take is biased in favor that I'm a neurodivergent person (ADHD and autism) who has no real experience with physical disabilities, so I won't speak for physically disabled people- heck, I won't even speak for every neurotype. Like I say, people aren't a monolith.

For myself and my own writing of disabled characters, here's a couple of concepts I stick by:

Research is your friend

Think about broad conventions of ableism

Be mindful of cast composition

1. Research is your friend

Yeah this is the thing everybody says, so here's the main bases I try to cover:

What's the story on this character's disability?

Less in terms of 'tragic angst' and more, what kind of condition this is- because a congenital amputee (that is to say, someone who was born without a limb) will have a different relationship to said limb absence than someone who lost their limb years ago to someone who lost their limb yesterday. How did people in their life respond to it, and how did they respond to it? These responses are not "natural" and will not be the same to every person with every worldview. This can also be a great environment to do worldbuilding in! Think about the movie (and the tv series) How To Train Your Dragon. The vikings in that setting don't have access to modern medicine, and they're, well, literally fighting dragons and other vikings. The instance of disability is high, and the medical terminology to talk about said disabilities is fairly lackluster- but in a context where you need every man you possibly can to avoid the winter, the mindset is going to be not necessarily very correct, but egalitarian. You live in a village of twenty people and know a guy who took a nasty blow to the head and hasn't quite been the same ever since? "Traumatic Brain Injury" is probably not going to be on your lips, but you're also probably going to just make whatever peace you need to and figure out how to accommodate Old Byron for his occasional inability to find the right word, stammers and trembles. In this example, there are several relevant pieces of information- what the character's disability is (aphasia), how they got it (brain injury), and the culture and climate around it (every man has to work, and we can't make more men or throw them away very easily, so, how can we make sure this person can work even if we don't know what's wrong with them)

And that dovetails into:

What's the real history, and modern understandings, of this?

This is where "knowing the story" helps a lot. To keep positing our hypothetical viking with a brain injury, I can look into brain injuries, what affects their extent and prognosis, and maybe even beliefs about this from the time period and setting I'm thinking of (because people have had brains, and brain injuries, the entire time!) Sure, if the setting is fantastical, I have wiggle room, but looking at inspirations might give me a guide post.

Having a name for your disorder also lets you look for posts made by specific people who live with the condition talking about their lives. This is super, super important for conditions stereotyped as really scary, like schizophrenia or narcissistic personality disorder. Even if you already know "schizophrenic people are real and normal" it's still a good thing to wake yourself up and connect with others.

2. Think about broad conventions of ableism

It CAN seem very daunting or intimidating to stay ahead of every single possible condition that could affect someone's body and mind and the specific stereotypes to avoid- there's a lot under the vast umbrella of human experience and we're learning more all the time! A good hallmark is, ableism has a few broad tendencies, and when you see those tendencies rear their head, in your own thinking or in accounts you read by others, it's good to put your skeptical glasses on and look closer. Here's a few that I tend to watch out for:

Failing the “heartwarming dog” test

This was a piece of sage wisdom that passed my eyeballs, became accepted as sage wisdom, and my brain magnificently failed to recall where I saw it. Basically, if you could replace your disabled character with a lovable pet who might need a procedure to save them, and it wouldn’t change the plot, that’s something to look into.

Disability activists speak often about infantilization, and this is a big thing of what they mean- a lot of casual ableism considers disabled people as basically belonging to, or being a burden onto, the able-bodied and neurotypical. This doesn’t necessarily even need to have an able neurotypical in the picture- a personal experience I had that was extremely hurtful was at a point in high school, I decided to do some research on autism for a school project. As an autistic teenager looking up resources online, I was very upset to realize that every single resource I accessed at the time presumed it was talking to a neurotypical parent about their helpless autistic child. I was looking for resources to myself, yet made to feel like I was the subject in a conversation.

Likewise, many wheelchair users have relayed the experience of, when they, in their chair, are in an environment accompanied by someone else who isn’t using a chair, strangers would speak to the standing person exclusively, avoiding addressing the chair user.

It’s important to always remind yourself that at no point do disabled people stop being people. Yes, even people who have facial deformities; yes, even people who need help using the bathroom; yes, even people who drool; yes, even people whose conditions impact their ability to communicate, yes, even people with cognitive disabilities. They are people, they deserve dignity, and they are not “a child trapped in a 27-year-old body”- a disabled adult is still an adult. All of the “trying to learn the right rules” in the world won’t save you if you keep an underlying fear of non-normative bodies and minds.

This also has a modest overlap between disability and sexuality in particular. I am an autistic grayromantic ace. Absolutely none of my choices or inclinations about sex are because I’m too naive or innocent or childlike to comprehend the notion- disabled people have as diverse a relationship with sexuality as any other. That underlying fear- as mentioned before- can prevent many people from imagining that, say, a wheelchair user might enjoy sex and have experience with it. Make sure all of your disabled characters have full internal worlds.

Poor sickly little Tiffany and the Red Right Hand

A big part of fictional ableism is that it separates the disabled into two categories. Anybody who’s used TVTropes would recognize the latter term I used here. But to keep it brief:

Poor, sickly little Tiffany is cute. Vulnerable. How her disability affects her life is that it constantly creates a pall of suffering that she lives beneath. After all, having a non-normative mind or body must be an endless cavalcade of suffering and tragedy, right? People who are disabled clearly spend their every waking moment affected by, and upset, that they aren’t normal!

The answer is... No, actually. Cut the sad violin; even people who have chronic pain who are literally experiencing pain a lot more than the rest of us are still fully capable of living complex lives and being happy. If nothing else, it would be literally boring to feel nothing but awful, and people with major depression or other problems still, also, have complicated experiences. And yes, some of it’s not great. You don’t have to present every disability as disingenuously a joy to have. But make a point that they own these things. It is a very different feeling to have a concerned father looking through the window at his angel-faced daughter rocking sadly in her wheelchair while she stares longingly out the window, compared to a character waking up at midnight because they have to go do something and frustratedly hauling their body out of their bed into their chair to get going.

Poor Sickly Little Tiffany (PSLT, if you will) virtually always are young, and they virtually always are bound to the problems listed under ‘failing the heartwarming dog’ test. Yes, disabled kids exist, but the point I’m making here is that in the duality of the most widely accepted disabled characters, PSLT embodies the nadir of the Victim, who is so pure, so saintly, so gracious, that it can only be a cruel quirk of fate that she’s suffering. After all, it’s not as if disabled people have the same dignity that any neurotypical and able-bodied person has, where they can be an asshole and still expect other people to not seriously attack their quality of life- it’s a “service” for the neurotypical and able-bodied to “humor” them.

(this is a bad way to think. Either human lives matter or they don’t. There is no “wretched half-experience” here- if you wouldn’t bodily grab and yank around a person standing on their own feet, you have no business grabbing another person’s wheelchair)

On the opposite end- and relevant to your question- is the Red Right Hand. The Red Right Hand does not have PSLT’s innocence or “purity”- is the opposite extreme. The Red Right Hand is virtually always visually deformed, and framed as threatening for their visual deformity. To pick on a movie I like a fair amount, think about how in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the title character is described- “Strong. Fast. Had a metal arm.” That’s a subtle example, but, think about how that metal arm is menacing. Sure, it’s a high tech weapon in a superhero genre- but who has the metal arm? The Winter Soldier, who is, while a tormented figure that ultimately becomes more heroic- scary. Aggressive. Out for blood.

The man who walks at midnight with a Red Right Hand is a signal to us that his character is foul because of the twisting of his body. A good person, we are led to believe, would not be so- or a good person would be ashamed of their deformity and work to hide it. The Red Right Hand is not merely “an evil disabled person”- they are a disabled person whose disability is depicted as symptomatic of their evil, twisted nature, and when you pair this trope with PSLT, it sends a message: “stay in your place, disabled people. Be sad, be consumable, and let us push you around and decide what to do with you. If you get uppity, if you have ideas, if you stand up to us, then the thing that made you a helpless little victim will suddenly make you a horrible monster, and justify us handling you with inhumanity.”

As someone who is a BIG fan of eldritch horror and many forms of unsettling “wrongness” it is extremely important to watch out for the Red Right Hand. Be careful how you talk about Villainous Disability- there is no connection between disability and morality. People will be good, bad, or simply just people entirely separate from their status of ability or disability. It’s just as ableist to depict every disabled person as an innocent good soul as it is to exclusively deal in grim and ghastly monsters.

Don’t justify disabilities and don’t destroy them.

Superpowers are cool. Characters can and IMO should have superpowers, as long as you’re writing a genre when they’re there.

BUT.

It’s important to remember that there is no justification for disabilities, because they don’t need one. Disability is simply a feature characters have. You do not need to go “they’re blind, BUT they can see the future”

This is admittedly shaky, and people can argue either way; the Blind Seer is a very pronounced mythological figure and an interesting philosophical point about what truly matters in the world. There’s a reason it exists as a conceit. But if every blind character is blind in a way that completely negates that disability or makes it meaningless- this sucks. People have been blind since the dawn of time. And people will always accommodate their disabilities in different ways. Even if the technology exists to fix some forms of blindness, there are people who will have “fixable” blindness and refuse to treat it. There will be individuals born blind who have no meaningful desire to modify this. And there are some people whose condition will be inoperable even if it “shouldn’t” be.

You don’t need to make your disabled characters excessively cool, or give them a means by which the audience can totally forget they’re disabled. Again, this is a place where strong worldbuilding is your buddy- a handwave of “x technology fixed all disabilities”, in my opinion, will never come off good. If, instead, however, you throw out a careless detail that the cool girl the main character is chatting up in a cyberpunk bar has an obvious spinal modification, and feature other characters with prosthetics and without- I will like your work a lot, actually. Even if you’re handing out a fictional “cure”- show the seams. Make it have drawbacks and pros and cons. A great example of this is in the series Full Metal Alchemist- the main character has two prosthetic limbs, and not only do these limbs come with problems, some mundane (he has phantom limb pains, and has to deal with outgrowing his prostheses or damaging them in combat) some more fantastical (these artificial limbs are connected to his nerves to function fluidly- which means that they get surgically installed with no anesthesia and hurt like fuck plugging in- and they require master engineering to stay in shape). We explicitly see a scene of the experts responsible for said limbs talking to a man who uses an ordinary prosthetic leg, despite the advantages of an automail limb, because these drawbacks are daunting to him and he is happier with a simple prosthetic leg.

Even in mundane accommodations you didn’t make up- no two wheelchair users use their chair the exact same way, and there’s a huge diversity of chairs. Someone might be legally blind but still navigate confidently on their own; they might use a guide dog, or they might use a cane. They might even change their needs from situation to situation!

Disability accommodations are part of life

This ties in heavily to the previous point, but seriously! Don’t just look up one model of cane and superimpose it with no modifications onto your character- think about what their lifestyle is, and what kind of person they are!

Also medication is not the devil. Yes, medical abuse is real and tragic and the medication is not magic fairy dust that solves all problems either. But also, it’s straight ableism to act like anybody needing pills for any reason is a scary edgy plot twist.

(and addiction is a disease. Please be careful, and moreover be compassionate, if you’re writing a character who’s an addict)

3. Be mindful of cast composition

This, to me, is a big tip about disability writing and it’s also super easy to implement!

Just make sure your cast has a lot of meaningful disabled characters in it!

Have you done all the work you can to try and dodge the Red Right Hand but you’re still worried your disabled villain is a bad look? They sure won’t look like a commentary on disability if three other people in the cast are disabled and don’t have the same outlook or role! Worried that you’re PSLT-ing your main character’s disabled child? Maybe the disability is hereditary and they got it from the main character!

The more disabled characters you have, the more it will challenge you to think about what their individual relationship is with the world and the less you’ll rely on hackneyed tropes. At least, ideally.

Ultimately, there’s no perfect silver bullet of diversity writing that will prevent a work from EVER being ableist, but I hope this helped, at least!

#disability #writing ruminations #readmore

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venom-system · 2 years

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Hey, if you don't know how to answer this / you don't want to whatever feel free to delete this. But I've been questioning being an osdd system for about a year now, kind of. I'm not very preoccupied with it, I often forget about it actually until symptoms get more obvious again..? And even saying im questioning feels like making too big of a deal out of or sth, like I'm subconsciously faking all of this for attention or to be "special", even tho I don't really tell anyone and I don't ever would want an on record diagnosis anyways for safety / personal reasons ig...? This is the first time im reaching out about this aside from 2 very close friends/ a therapist who didn't seem to think I could have it based on my trauma ig and I'm very nervous tbh... But once in a while I'll do some research to compare it to symptoms I'm observing / beforehand id do research to better understand my did/osdd friends, and I have this question stuck in my head? If you're questioning, especially if you're unable to see a therapist etc about this for whatever reason, how do you differentiate between having osdd or bpd with anps and eps (those were the terms I kept reading in trauma research stuff anyways...), different dissociative disorders, literally all the other possible differential diagnoses...? and also, is it okay if I don't really want to care about all these labels anymore? Like if I don't really want an official diagnosis at all, and don't want to claim one without one either, where do I even fit..? Is it ok if by the end of this I figured out I have alters (sorry if that's not the right term?) and I want to participate in online spaces but still don't want to claim any of the diagnoses..?

I'm sorry this is a lot, but I feel so lost right now. I finally reached a place in life where I'm not going thru nearly constant trauma anymore (Tho I still live with someone who traumatized me a few yrs ago / let a lot of trauma happen as well ig), & tho I've been in therapy since I was 12 i only recently feel like I've been healing in any way or form...? Im 20 btw. And a lot of it has been achieved with abandoning psychiatric diagnoses I've been given/suspected over the years, but also discovering myself at the same time...?

But at the same time, the more I feel like I myself am stable, happy... symptoms keep coming that I can't explain. Voices mainly. But when I try to ask too many questions they always leave, and often it's hard to understand them anyways. They're mostly the same 2 reoccurring people with diff voices.... one older guy and a child... dissociation & derealization used to be super heavy daily but it finally got better, only when I get triggered kinda badly now it happens... i don't have access to many trauma memories/ I sometimes gain and loose access to certain parts of the memories & I don't feel emotions about them at all 99% of the time, & when I do they feel more like emotional flashbacks if that makes sense? A lot of the traumatic years in my life are mostly blacked out for me, aside from a few sparse memories.. im told of conversations I had very recently when I'm being told, that I have zero memory of, despite remembering (most) of that day... i rarely find art or writing I don't recognise... I used to struggle with a lot of diff stuff as a teenager (ed, sh, catatonia, heavy mood swings, depressive & psychotic episodes) but I finally got a lot of it under control... and I can't believe my trauma in childhood would be strong enough to cause my personality to not be? One? On top of all that If that..? how do i know I don't make them up...? And if it isn't sth like osdd, what does that mean about the voices I hear inside my head sometimes? Are they not real? I'm just. So confused.. i want to just ignore it like I've been mostly trying to apart from a few bouts of interest/ confusion but I just don't know where to go from here? I've been writing about symptoms in my diary when they happen (at least I try to remember to?) But I feel stuck? I want this to go away but it won't...i feel like all I can do is wait, but then I forget about it again until I suddenly hear someone, or suddenly realise I have no idea what I did the last 30 mins ish, and my partner tells me about conversations "we" had in that time I don't remember at all.... Usually just casual stuff, but it's like I jumped in time for short bits. And then I feel so weird and lost again... I genuinely feel ashamed even sending this, I tried talking about this with my therapist but she mostly didn't seem to want to talk about it....

I just went thru this message and tried editing typos and all, and edit stuff to make it.. make sense ig because I know it's very rambly and I barely understand it myself- and it so long and I'm very sorry... this is my third try and sending a coherent ask and its hard to do because whenever I more or less seriously think about this topic for longer than a few minutes my body tenses up and I slightly dissociate and I get kinda uncomfortable and my thoughts start to become kinda unorganized and uh... I just hope this isn't annoying you and feel free to not answer this if its too much/ too rambly whatever I'd totally understand it also I'm still terribly afraid I'm somehow obviously imagining this all or making it up or just not understanding stuff correctly or something..

Hey,

That's a lot so let's take it step by step.

First part of your post says that you don't want a diagnosis and you also mentioned your therapist who thinks you are not DID/OSDD system. You want to know if it's ok to be a part of DID/OSDD community even if you don't want to prove anything to you.

It's important to undestand yourself even if you don't care about labels.

It's ok if you decided to take a step back and focus on yourself than how to name your disorder.

However, for some reasons you are asking about it so you seem resigned to the situation and that's something what I'm afraid of.

The thing you should know is- you are welcome here. Even if you are not sure about what's going on with you, even if you want to give up for now.

I think you disagree with your specialist, so it is important that you seek the advice of someone else. To make sure he's wrong/right.

Generally it is good to reach a few people sometimes to express their opinion about your mental state, but I know it's time consuming.

it's also normal to think that you are doing something for attention but it's not true.

How you wrote- you talked about it with your 2 friends, specialist and me (by anonymouse question) so it doesn't have sense even if your brain tells something different.

In next part you said about your symptoms, you are wondering if your trauma was enough to have any disorder cost by it and you wrote that you are ok at the moment.

- voices

- dissociation

- derealisation

- amnesia

- ed

- sh

- catatonia

- heavy mood swings

- depressive and psychotic episodes

Don't be ashamed of who you are. Your brain has a problem and the people who caused it should be ashamed. Not you. You did everything to survive and you did great.

Your trauma makes you feel this way. Because of your trauma you expercience dissociation, derealisation and amnesia.

That's enough. You are valid. You've been through a lot.

Even if you feel like are ok at the moment you need to work hard on yourself. It's not okay, but that's the impression you get.

With the symptoms you mentioned you need intensive care and... diagnosis.

Your amnesia, mood swings, depressive and psychotic episodes, voices can be extremely dangerous. Not for others. For you.

(you didn't mention if you were taking any medications btw)

Last part:

Don't worry about your message. I undestood everything and we had the same problem to answer you so sorry it took us so long. I hope you are ok and please, let us know how are you doing.

I'm proud of you for sending this message.

I don't know if it's DID/OSDD, It can be, it can also be other mental problem.

I don't know what voices are telling you. Is it something bad, is it something that make sense? Are they talking to you or maybe they are talking with each other?

How do you feel when they are talking? How long does it take? How often do the voices appear?

For how long you feel okay?

The answers to these questions tell a lot.

Thank you for your question, thank you for open up. Once again- I'm proud you did it and hope you will let us know soon.

We are always here for you if you want to talk or ask a question.

Sorry for my mistakes, I will check this message tomorrow.

I'm sorry we didn't answer earlier.

Thank you again, stay safe and strong (as always)

- Cornell

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kidmachinate · 5 years

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Making Peace With a Part of Me

My therapist is a sweet lady. She tells me things I know but won’t acknowledge fully. There’s this part of me that might as well be its own separate person, that I sometimes see in the mirror instead of the person I know I can be and mostly show to others. I can take a defeatist attitude. On good days, I just joke around how my memory just doesn’t work. Except it isn’t a joke. I genuinely in games or otherwise can’t remember how I got from point A to point B more often than I’d like to admit. Having it together in life doesn’t mean I’m not without feelings. Sadness. Despair. Depression and anxiety. They suck. The “Part of Me” that I’ve learned to work with. My “Badeline” persona of sorts.

Unforeseen circumstances have taken place and my sessions may have to be put on hold. This doesn’t mean I can’t reflect on what I’ve learned. How far I’ve come. How it is very much okay to be not okay. What’s not okay are the eyes that look over us all and tell us things must be a certain way or no way at all. It’s a closed minded view of things and helps no one. It is highly insensitive as so much more than I even realized, isn’t quite as black and white as we’d like to believe. I want to address a few things and this will likely come out as crude as possible at times, for the sake of both transparency, and perhaps make some of the misunderstood out there more comfortable.

My faith in humanity is...questionable. Lots of moments I shake my head at but I try to give people the benefit of the doubt first. Respect isn’t “earned”, it should be granted from the start. Expect the good from one...until they prove otherwise...and this is where I slip fast. I’ve given very little leverage here at times with others, which is good for the ones who seek not to help themselves. Too much leverage however gets you into trouble. It led to tragic moments I’ve referenced on here before but that’s in the past. We need to be compassionate because it’s one thing to just get shit done. I’m all for that. Not always easy though. America likes to avoid mental health because it’s scary or people are ashamed. Perhaps not just America but even with people more open about all this, it is still a joke to many. We should be more focused on strengthening mental health education than blaming video games. Seeing the good in people is both a blessing and a curse and I’m trying not to buy too much into the negative side of that. In becoming more self-aware however, I’m trusting my gut more. Ignoring what is true to you is the way to slowly start losing your mind. It’s not a place I’m going back to.

I’m good at avoiding people it seems, but it isn't something I always want to do. What if I say the wrong thing? What if I look like crap? What if I get judged for what I wear? What if I say the one wrong thing that ruins a great friendship or relationship? Should I REALLY be that concerned to begin with? Probably not. This is me however. While I stay away from others, in part lately, this is for legitimate self-care purposes. Us introverts need to recharge and all that. However...while I may seem at times like I kinda hate people, I do LOVE connecting people. Community efforts. Getting people chatting about stuff that matters or that I like, even if I don’t fully understand it. I’ve had my thoughts of being a therapist of sorts but I dunno...think it might break me. I can bring help/hope to people in my current ways but not on that kind of scale. Absorbing emotions and such, better at a level where I can manage it and am not forced into it. Forced into it...hmm...

You know what really fucking sucks? Being forced to do literally anything. I can decide myself dammit. Except for when I can’t. That sucks. But I should be allowed to go through that process on my own. Not mocked when I don’t instantly give an answer. How about...if I don’t give an answer, just assume no? Silence is a response too. A powerful one at that, depending on situation. I get we are in a age of instant gratification but anything worthwhile in life requires work. Work which we all need to do to live. Work at times also however, does involve working on ourselves with or without the use of meds and/or a therapist/psychologist/psychiatrist. Depression and anxiety are one thing. Combining that with feeling mostly understood by many is another. If there’s a personality disorder involved however, things can get even more complex. Being curious about what makes people tick always has me looking for perhaps why someone acted a certain way. Now of course if they keep just being a jackass or selfish, you can introduce them to the book your foot wrote...or just tell em to fuck off. Me however...ever heard of the INFJ doorslam? People that have gotten it haven’t come back. No regrets.

You know what else sucks? Having to force yourself out of bed because you feel like a legit piece of shit. But hey...gotta work in the morning, right? The machine mentality kicks in...but then who are you if everything is just on autopilot. The machine mentality however puts me in gear to do all the stuff I’m used to. Being responsible. Adulting. I’m convinced the only reason it is “easy” (sort of) for me is because I’m used to doing much of this alone. Alone. That always sucks to realize, eh? But I’m consistently telling people they aren’t alone. I don’t want people to feel like I do at times, or other can and will do to themselves on a bad day. How can you help others if you can’t help yourself? Um...I just...do? The shit happens. Don’t ask me how tho. Depending on the day, I won’t be able to tell you.

The balance between being the light at the end of the tunnel and a defeatist attitude is a daily struggle. Depression sucks for me and it has gotten worse. Anxiety is not as big a deal but I’ve also found out what a panic attack is like multiple times this year, so there’s that. When it hits is hits. Just gotta be ready to roll with the punches. Music, gaming, and seeking mental health knowledge/help helps with that. Knowledge is power...unless it is clickbait or ACTUAL fake news. No one needs that crap. Social media...that can be crap. I took a break for a weekend. It was nice. Try it sometime. You’d be amazed at the results.

How can I put a voice out there when my own shit isn’t together? Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that is part of the vision to begin with. I’m still figuring it out. Many still are and just not admitting it. The second you think you know it all you’ve lost in life. That and I don’t want to talk to you. You and the horse your ego rode in on can go off a bridge.

One more thing on this digital pad. Love. The word gets tossed around too much to even determine what it means but it is also one of those things without question. I prefer the spiritual connections. The ones with more understanding and less explaining. When you do explain, it is understood. Judgment free zone. Funny from a INFJ, eh? It's possible dammit!

It's okay to not be okay. That's what we need to tell our bad selves without letting it consume us. Is that it? From from it...but I'm working on ways to express the good and bad in more positive manners. Until then, reach out if you need help. Always. Don't you dare go hollow.

#depression #anxiety #mentalhealthawareness #infj #misunderstood #yourenotalone #youareenough #celeste #mattmakesgames #lenaraine #extremelyokaygames #madeline #badeline #tothefuture #gaming #videogames

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willowlark369 · 5 years

Conversation

Competition Drama 02

Judge: ADD and ADHD are also not a mental illness, they are a Learning Difficulties. There is a difference. I understand that to those that don't work in that area, or deal with those with Learning Difficulties, it seems like the same thing, however, it isn't. People with Learning Difficulties have fought to be seen for who they are, and not to be treated like something to be fixed. Children with Autism, ADHD, Downs Syndrome, they were all born that way, it's who they are. When sites or people claim some of these are mental illnesses it's due to being part of the medical model of disbaility, which is out dated and doesn't consider the individuals. I'm going to stop myself from preaching, I have worked in this area all my working life, so it's something I feel very strongly about. If you want to understand the difference you can look at the MENCAP website.

Me: People are also born with bipolar disorder, OCD, and schizophrenia. When you preach that some neurodivergences aren't mental illnesses, you ignore the difficulties that they present for individuals with them. There's a significant difference between autism and Downs Syndrome. One is a mental illness and the other is a chromosomal disorder that affects the whole body. The fact that you lump them in together and claim to be a professional is very worrisome to me. I wouldn't want someone who would do that to work with either my kid or me.

------------------ Taken into PMs ---------------------

Judge: I didn't want to continue this on the forum. I don't want you to think that I am having a go, because I am not. What is being talked about it actually quite contravercial in the area caring for those with learning disabilities and Autism. You seem fairly bothered by what I am saying, so I won't continue and try to 'make you see things my way'. I will say that what I have been taught is based on what people with those sorts of disorders and conditions believe about themselves and wish other to see them as. It is also not medically correct to say that it is a mental illness and this group of people dislike that assumption.

I can tell that you care, and I hope you can tell that I care too. I think that is enough for us to get along?

Me: I'm sorry, but if you want to believe that a mental illness is not a mental illness when medical professionals and individuals with the condition understand that it is, I cannot believe that you are not "having a go" or that you care. This is not a topic where "agreeing to disagree" will work. You (and by extension, the Competition) are telling me and other autistics that we do not have a real mental illness and are just incapable of growing past a certain point. You are infantizing us. The fact that you feel that you cannot say this in public also says that you know that there's something wrong with it. I've had this discussing with the Admin as well: There should be no hidden discussions. If you want to make a ruling that is contrary to reality, fine, but own what you are doing and be consistent. If you cannot accept one mental illness as what it is, then you shouldn't accept any of them. If your reasoning is that a person is born with autism and that's why it doesn't count, then none of the conditions that people are born with (ADHD, OCD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia) should count. But don't make a claim that is not true and frankly, insulting, and then get upset when people call you on it.

Judge: I am really sorry that I have upset you. I can assure you, I mean no disrespect at all, and I speak from my experiance as person that works in the united kingdom with a whole range of children with various difficulties. I have worked with those with Autism too, though I do not consider it to be a learning difficulty, though I can see where it looks as though I have 'lumped' them together. I just happen to be a care worker that works with children with a range of conditions.

I am wondering if actually this is more to do with the countries that we live in? I don't know where your from, but in Britain, it's seen as politically incorrect. Based on neurological conditions and psychiatric conditions. Mental illness is seen as psychiartirc condition whereas as far as I have been taught in my own professional capacity, that Autism is Neurologial. In britain it is most definately something I would actually get in trouble for stating in the work place - as children with autism do not have psychiatric condition. If you are still unhappy with my explanation of myself and my words I can only apologise and research this myself further, I would not want to offend or hurt anyone - it's really not in my nature. I can honestly say that I am very upset that I seem to have caused offense or hurt through what I have said. Having heard your point of view, I take it seriously, and I mean no offense - seriously. I can tell that I have upset you, and for that I am sincerly sorry.

As for you thinking I am 'having a go' I assure you that I am not. I have spoken to you politely and respectfully, even if views differ. I can understand now that this is a senstive topic for you too, and I hope that you understanding where I am coming from with the term 'mental illness' and what it means where I am from, you can see that I don't mean to disrespect or belittle anyone. I only took the conversation of Forum as I thought it was senstive and I wanted to be respectful. That is my intention

Me: It might be a terminology issue. In the US, a mental illness is any condition which originates in the brain; affects the perceptions; and interferes with the ability to perform everyday activities (especially necessary social, work, or family activities). One would not assign a neurologist to the treatment team of an autistic, even though a neurologist may be brought in to rule out other potential causes of the symptoms. A psychiatrist would be, however, given that autism is often comorbid with other conditions which require medication and the autism often creates unique challenges in the individual being treated. A psychiatrist would also be the person giving the diagnosis of autism, which makes it a psychiatric condition, even if there aren't any other conditions diagnosed at the time of the initial diagnosis. A neurological condition would something like epilepsy or migraines. Basically, something which affects the way that nerves (including the ones in the brain) communicate with each other.

I apologize if I came across as too aggressive, but literally everything in my life has taught me that I cannot let things like this slide without speaking up. In order to get any kind of accommodation, one must be prepared to push against people dismissing the need for them, often by using the same language that you did. Years of advocacy work has also shown that a lot of people have misconceptions about what the real dangers surrounding individuals with various neurodivergences are. There is a negative connotation given to the term "mental illness", due to decades of villainization of psychiatric conditions. For that reason, a lot of people have pushed for use of the term "neurodivergence", "neurologically divergent", or "atypical neurology".

I really feel if you (and the competition as a whole) wanted to show sensitivity on the topic, then you would not have included it in the first place. There is a lot of discourse going on concerning how to respectfully handle representation in writing and there are entire blogs dedicated to how to handle that. I would love to see more encouragement to include accurate representation in writing, but what I do not wish to see is exclusion of smaller groups within a larger group on the basis that they aren't "really" a part of the larger group. That kind of gatekeeping is not helpful to anyone in need of that representation.

Judge: You should never apologise for taking these things and speaking up! I think it's great, and I have learnt something here, something I am greatful to have learnt. I would say you were defensive - in a good way! I would hate to make anyone feel like that they needed to defend themselves, or a group. Part of my job is pushing for things on the behalf of children, so I understand. I work specifially with children in the care system who don't have parents to fight for them. If you hadn't pushed, I wouldn't have learnt something that will change how I relate to people.

I can concour that the term 'mental illness' has negative conotations for people in the UK - in fact a lot of medical terms are deemed inappropriate. I think this is because culturally, people in this country have used many medical terms as insults and thus the meaning becomes intirely different. This isn't just in relation to Autism, many areas. I guess this could answer to why I was a little defensive also.

I do think that The Competition wanted to show sensitivity. I was not on board as Admin when the rounds were thought up, but as far as I am aware one of the Mods has experiance of this, and I can only assume that they would have wanted this to be used in a senstive and positive way. As I gather it's a subject of great importance to them too, from another angle.

If you have any ideas that you think would be beneficial for future rounds, something you think would be both positive and respectful, by all means mail them across. I am sorry if you feel that the competition didn't wish to be respectful. I cannot speak for everyone, but as for me, I respect you a lot, it takes courage to speak out in a public forum like that.

----------------------- Later ------------------------

Judges: [proceeds to extract revenge against the team as a whole for protesting]

Me: Yeah. "Courage" is needed alright.

Team: [proceeds to write submissions centered around their complaints with the judges] Suck on these lemons!

#Magi's Rants #Competition Work #Names Omitted Deliberately #Autism #Neurodiversity #No Editing of their words #Yeah That's Right #That's a Judge for a Writing Competition #TW: Ableism

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