The tweet about these people not respecting mental illnesses that have symptoms they can't romanticize is so damn important.
The term "mental illness" has a lot of stigma, and what they're saying perfectly exemplifies the disparity between two kinds of reactions to mental illness: disgust or sympathy.
Depending on the nature of your mental illness, people are either gonna hate you, or they're gonna feel sorry for you, or at least pretend to feel sorry for you. This is why so many people, for instance, use "Being trans is a mental illness" as an excuse to be transphobic instead of offering genuine solutions for distressed trans people.
It's awesome when people encounter someone with OCD for the first time and they keep coming back to "wow, that guy is so irrational" like people have no idea what it is like, or schizophrenia is like, I don't think they are willing to make the leap or it scares them. I always give people the example of a schizophrenic man I knew online suffering from hallucinations of door knocks at night. Even after the guy had a video camera set up to cross reference with his own senses, it's not like he stops hearing the door knock that requires him to either dismiss it as implausible, or check the equipment.
Yeah, it's awful. Normal people have absolutely no frame of reference for what the experience of these symptoms is like. No matter how good you are with metaphors many of them will never "get" it.
For me, it's depression and people saying "just force yourself to x". No real understanding of what's going on, so they think you're just not trying hard enough.
I am autistic and get very stressed in noisy environments. I just kinda shut down after a while and can't really talk anymore.
My dad keeps saying that I should expose myself to more noisy environments as "therapy". I try to tell him that's like telling someone who can't walk because they're paralyzed from the waist down to just keep trying.
He still thinks it'll be fine if I just "learn to ignore the noise".
I'm sorry, comrade. It sucks when people just will not listen to you when you tell them what's happening.
Intrusive thoughts would give me major anxiety when I was younger, and I forget where I learned it from, but one of the strategies I used to help me with them was to mock them.
You should jump over this railing.
Show
YoU sHoUlD JumP OvEr ThiS RaILinG.
This is a great technique!
It can be applied to many negative thoughts as a way to partially dispell or demystify them. Provide some distancing from them. Detangle the thoughts from being an assumed immutable part of one's personality.
Yeah, it's super effective! For anyone curious about trying it, you're basically trying to take that voice you hear and take away the feeling it gives you by modifying the different aspects of it. So like if you feel that voice coming from over your shoulder, move it to the tip of a finger or beyond. Then, if it's the voice of your mom, make it sound like SpongeBob or Goofy. If it's super loud, make it quiet and timid. Experiment, play around with it. If it's got a color, turn it grey. If it's got a shape, smoosh it. Etc. And if you need to visualize yourself a mechanism or story to make that manipulation happen, fucking go wild. The brain is all about narratives and storytelling is a kind of mental magick.
I hate getting intrusive thoughts. I noticed I would sometimes voiced them to others as "What if (terrible thing) happened?"
I was told I think like a bad person and I ended up internalizing it for a long time.
Thinking about the potential for bad things to happen doesn't make you bad, and the reframing in the Tumblr post is comforting. I was voicing fears I had in the hopes of being reassured they wouldn't happen.
Good post, ty. It's getting harder to navigate NT people lately, because of the awareness of how language is used to both dismiss and demonize our neurodivergence to keep us silenced and invisible.
This posts hits hard.
My sister and I were molested as young kids. We are close now and it was more traumatizing for her than it was for me and we have both mostly worked through it. But this kind of off-the-cuff theorizing about mental health by randos and pop-psychology nonsense is why I've made some major decisions in my life.
One of these pop-psychology "truths" you hear a lot is that child molesters where themselves molested as children. I mean, maybe it is true for some or even many but it doesn't make total sense if you think about it. It had to start somewhere where their was an adult who never experienced it as a child and then did it. So it's not necessarily true.
For this reason though I have extreme anxiety about this. I have never thought inappropriately about a child but that doesn't matter. What if it is true? What if one day it suddenly clicks in me? And this deep seeded fear implanted in me by society altered my life. Maybe in another life I'd be a father. Not in this one. I was sterilized by choice. I married an older woman and she doesn't/didn't want kids. We are both past childbearing age anyways at this point. As much as my abuser stole this prospect from me so did this nasty little idea that because I am a victim I'm just one baby-sitting evening away from becoming a predator and I have never been able to shake it. Never will. There will never be a moment in my life where I can be comfortable being alone with a kid.
Thanks for sharing this-- the linked post articulates things I have been struggling with for a long time but a. have been afraid to share with anyone and b. gives me a framework for understanding the pattern of occurence of these intrusive thoughts.
Oh god other people go through this too? I guess I am glad I am not alone... but shit sucks
Its a very common experiance comrade. But people dont want to talk about it much because of how afraid they are already of their own thoughts, so people get even more afraid of being judged for them if they externalize. A lot of people wont even talk to their own therapists about them, especially if theyre particurly nasty or scary.
That first sentence really hits. It’s a problem I’ve had for a long time without a clue as to how to say what the problem is.
I scared away the absolute love of my life because they are my BPD “favorite person.”
I feel like that wouldn’t have happened if acceptance of neurodiverse people extended to OCD, BPD, etc. Because I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with the way I feel. I just experience emotions differently. But just because it isn’t normal to love someone like this, I need to see a therapist, etc.
ROCD is another nice one. If you voice a thought that distresses you, people pile on you to tell you to break up for your partner's sake, that you are a piece of shit etc, as if you have done or intend to do anything wrong. I understand that many people have gotten burned in relationships so they project those bad past experiences on the sufferer but still
I get a lot of intrusive thoughts, ranging from violent to just inappropriate, but the ones the post is talking about by far bring me the most self-hatred. I didn't know this wasn't a problem exclusive to me. On one hand it is horrifying that other people have to deal with this as well, but it is also good to know there are others who know what it is like. I've never opened up to anyone about my intrusive thoughts and seeing how neurotypical people react I probably never will.
It's an interesting read that gives me a bit more framework to describe stuff I've experienced since I was a child. Like I remember when I was a kid getting a thought of "what if I push my grandmother down the stairs" when we were standing on an elevated patio and I got so freaked out about it that it just still stands out to me over 2 decades later.
This is... an immense relief really. Those exact things but also arson and dismemberment and self-harm and all the other nasty shit that runs through my head. I'm sure I've mentioned it before but I was SA'd as a 6 year old child by another child of the same age but a bigger than me, nothing violent or penetrative just touching while I didn't understand what was happening really and later anxieties over it. I'm sure being raised Catholic and being convinced I was Hell-bound for it didn't help. I've fought all sorts of intrusive thoughts since I was young and it added to my anxiety, even though IRL I wouldn't hurt a fly and I've been told directly I don't have a cruel bone in my body. To know that other people have this flavor of horrifying shit flash unbidden through their head is oddly comforting.
