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#anti psych
starspd · 4 months
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people with personality disorders: it was difficult to survive on the ground, so i climbed in a tree and now im stuck and can’t get down
mental health workers (and everyone really): it seems that they climbed in trees to manipulate us. they are fully capable of getting down but doing so would make it harder to abuse us, so they stay there
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hyperlexichypatia · 1 year
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One of the most common criticisms of "housing first" initiatives (programs to provide housing for unhoused people unconditionally without gatekeeping) is that housing first "does not improve mental health."  Now, let's set aside for the moment that this criticism is irrelevant -- the purpose of housing is to provide shelter, not to "improve mental health" -- what definition of "mental health" could possibly make this true? As much as I try to critique and deconstruct the social construction of "mental health," how could it possibly be true that having a safe, assured place to live would not result in greater happiness, greater inner peace, less depression, less anxiety, less negative emotions, than living on the street?  What possible definition of "mental health" would not be improved by being housed rather than unhoused?
Answering this requires unpacking the wildly different, almost completely unrelated, definitions of "mental health," one applied to relatively privileged people, and one applied to oppressed people.
For relatively privileged people, the concept of "mental health" is centered on emotional well-being, introspection and self-awareness, and the mitigation or management of negative emotions like pain, depression, anxiety, and anger.
For oppressed people, the concept of "mental health" is centered on compliance, obedience, and productivity.
Like most privilege disparities, this isn't binary. For most people who are privileged in some ways and marginalized in other ways, "mental health support" will include some degree of the emotional support given to privileged people, and some degree of the compliance and productivity training given to oppressed people, with the proportions varying on where exactly each person falls on various privilege axes.  All children are oppressed by ageism, so all children's "mental health" has some elements promoting compliance, obedience, and productivity. But relatively privileged children may also receive some emotional support mixed in, while children of color, children in poverty, and children with existing neurodivergence labels will receive a much higher ratio of compliance training to emotional support.
One of the clearest illustrations of this disparity is the contrast between the "self-care" recommended to privileged people, and the "meaningful days" imposed on oppressed people.
Relatively privileged people are often told, by therapists, doctors, mental health culture, and self-help books, that they are working too hard and need to rest more. They're told that for the sake of their mental health, they need work-life balance, self-care, walks in the woods, baths with scented candles. Implicit in these recommendations is that the reason these people are working too hard is because of internal factors, like guilt or emotional drive, rather than external factors, like needing to pay the bills and not being able to afford a day off.
By contrast, unhoused people, institutionalized people, people labeled with "severe" or "serious" or "low-functioning" mental disabilities, are literally prescribed labor. Publicly funded "mental health initiatives" require the most marginalized members of society to work tedious jobs for little or no pay, under the premise that loading boxes at a warehouse will make their days "meaningful" and thus improve their "mental health." And unlike the self-care advice given to relatively privileged people, the forced-labor-for-your-own-good approach is not optional. People are either forced into it directly by guardians or institutions, or coerced into it as a precondition to access material needs like housing and food.
The form of "mental health" applied to relatively privileged people has some genuinely useful and beneficial elements. We could all stand to introspect and examine our own feelings more, manage our negative emotions without being overwhelmed by them, have self-confidence. We all need rest and self-care.
Still, privileged mental health culture, even at its best, is deeply flawed. At best, it tends to encourage a degree of self-centeredness and condescension. It's obsessed with classifying experiences as "trauma" or "toxic." It's one of the worst culprits in feeding the "long adolescence" phenomenon and generally perpetuating the idea that treating people as incompetent is doing them a kindness. Even the best therapists serving the most privileged clients have a strong tendency towards gaslighting and "correcting" people about their own feelings and desires.
But perhaps the worst consequence of privileged mental health culture is that it gives cover to the dehumanizing, abusive, compliance-oriented "mental health care" forced upon the most marginalized people. Privileged people are encouraged to universalize their experiences with sentiments like "We all deal with mental health" or assume that the mild, relatively benign "mental health care" they experienced are the norm, so what are those silly mad liberation people complaining about?
Tonight, I listened to a leader from an agency serving unhoused people talk about how "Everyone struggled with mental health during the pandemic"... and then later mention that their shelter categorically excludes people with paranoid schizophrenia diagnoses. So perhaps "everyone struggles with mental health," but only certain people are categorically excluded from services, from shelter, from autonomy, from basic human rights, because of how their brains happen to work.
As always, it seems like so much effort in the mad liberation/ neurodiversity/ antipsychiatry movement is spent holding the hands of relatively privileged people receiving relatively privileged "mental health care" and reassuring them that we're not trying to take it away from them. Fine, it's great that you like your antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication and your nice therapist who listens to you and your support group. Great. Go live your best life. But that has nothing to do with our fight against forced drugging, forced labor, forced institutionalization, forced poverty. It's not even close to the same "mental health."
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hexpatient · 10 months
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even as a trans person myself im kind of lost about how to help with the general state of things... one good thing i found is that the trans lifeline has a hotline and some microgrant services and such for trans ppl, and their hotline service includes an explicit ban on any non-consensual emergency services calling so. its a good place to donate to or go to if you yourself need help as a trans/nb person.
(from the faq)“Trans Lifeline has a policy against non-consensual active rescue, which means we will not call emergency services or law enforcement without your explicit request – even if you tell us you or someone else is in danger. If you would like support requesting an ambulance or calling 911, we can assist you after informing you about that process and what may be triggered.”
they also have a survivor stories area about harms from hotlines that call emergency services on the caller and some stats on how it causes harm.
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This shouldn't even be need to be said but don't fucking report people who express being suicidal. I don't care how much you think you're doing it for someone's own good, it does NOT help us it only harms further
READ that AGAIN
You are ACTIVELY harming those people when you try to be a goody two-shoes and tell on them when they get suicidal
Don't fucking report them to social media app features that have the report for self harm option. Don't fucking call a suicide hotline on them. Don't fucking report them to therapists, paychiatrists, cops, controlling parents or partners
It does not matter how uncomfortable it makes you - this isn't ABOUT you - it doesn't matter how much it goes against your cute little saviour complex thinking you're being oh such a wonderful kind heroic person by "saving" someone from themself.
When you report a person to any of those places it heavily risks hospitalisation and incarceration. Where I live it's technically still a crime to attempt suicide, they never overturned the law. And if you think being in a ward might help them - do everyone a favour and go check out the actual conditions in the wards and talk to psych survivors about how they actually are. Otherwise shut up about things you have no experience with.
Everyone should have a right to autonomy, especially bodily autonomy, and you don't have to like what they do with their own body for you to know not to take that away from someone. It's not your place to judge, it's not okay to be moralistic about bodily autonomy suddenly because you can't handle the reality of mentally ill people.
And it's not fucking okay to lock us in and remove us from society just because our disorders are too fucking ugly for you to look at.
If you absolutely have to help just talk to a suicidal person if they're up to it, just ask them what will help, and if you can't do that then leave us the fuck alone you snitches
And don't come at me with the law, if you had to be an ally to mentally ill people, to queer people, to women, to any kind of marginalised people, historically a lot of it has always included standing against the law and with us.
STOP REPORTING US
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actuallyverynormalbtw · 5 months
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i dont like to talk about self-diagnosis because i dont enjoy people making assumptions about me, my illnesses, and my diagnostic status. but i will say:
i have self diagnosed and gone on to be medically validated with an official diagnosis. multiple times actually. i was never wrong about my self-diagnoses.
however, i have been misdiagnosed by professionals FIVE TIMES. and let me tell you, a professional diagnosis being wrong is far more harmful than a self-diagnosis being wrong.
if your self diagnosis is wrong, maybe you used the wrong language or put yourself in a box or now feel invalid and whatnot. but if your professional diagnosis is wrong, it can lead to abuse, medical trauma, panic attacks, issues with medication, even suicide.
i was misdiagnosed with BPD when i was 15 by a psychologist that i spoke to for hardly even 10 minutes. this diagnosis was based on my parent's description of my reactions to abuse, and the diagnosis was used to validate and excuse their abuse.
i was misdiagnosed with MDD when i was 12 and put through several different types of anti-depressants. we never found anything that worked, because it was actually ADHD and dissociation, but i did end up with panic attacks and insomnia all throughout middle/highschool!
when i self-diagnosed with autism however, it saved my life. it took me out of active suicidality because i was able to finally able to accept myself after years of feeling like i am just "being a person wrong". i had the knowledge to accomodate for myself and the language to advocate for myself. this was life changing. even if i was wrong, which i wasnt, i dont see how it couldve caused any harm.
my opinions on self-diagnoses arent black and white, and im not entirely settled on them either, but i do think this is important to understand. doctors and psychologists are not all knowing. we live in a time where we can access thousands of dollars worth of university level education on the internet, even the same exact resources medical students use. plenty of people are capable of interpreting themselves and that information to come to a conclusion about what they are experiencing and what might help.
sure, self-diagnosis might be biased. but a professional is most likely going to be just as biased, and possibly less aware of it. its just silly to use bias as a primary argument when it is an inescapable feature of human psychology. there is a reason ADHD is underdiagnosed in women. there is a reason anxiety disorders are underdiagnosed in men.
an incorrect self-diagnosis wont take away resources or your space in your comminities. but professional misdiagnosis can cause real damage.
(i am not trying to fear-monger about professional diagnosis, moreso responding to the fear-mongering surrounding self-diagnosis)
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neuroticboyfriend · 1 year
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no but being told to use your communication coping skills when talking to abusive people is bullshit. abusers do not listen to their victims no matter how reasonable we are.
like. anything that shows we're an individual with thoughts and feelings is going to make an abuser double down. using "i feel" statements isn't going to help if your abuser lashes out at you for showing feelings. speaking calmly isn't going to help if your abuser is threatening you. gently stating what you need isn't going to help if your abuser neglects even your simplest needs.
also so many of us hide our anger and rage. we dont speak our mind, because it's dangerous. it's the most threatening thing to an abuser... but it's also the most empowering for us. anger is the feeling that tells us something is wrong, and we need to embrace it. because our anger is not the danger - our abuser's reaction to it is, and that reaction is not our fault.
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whereserpentswalk · 8 months
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Reblog if you think people going off their meds are valid.
Reblog if you think people shouldn't have to justify their decisions to anyone else.
Reblog if you support unmedicated ND people.
Reblog if you support people trying to get off their meds.
Reblog if you support giving unmedicated people hugs and cuddles and all the affection we so often don't get from the community.
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disabledunitypunk · 5 months
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I am once again thinking about the term "suicide survivors". How it's a term that rightfully belongs to those that lived through a suicide attempt, that literally survived suicide. How instead it means those that lived through someone else's death. How it neans "surviving" in only the archaic use 'survived by" used in obituaries. How suicide "survivors" lived through something that was never going to kill them, that was never even a threat to their life.
How we are only ever a footnote in the stories of others. We're a tragedy that happens to people, a cautionary tale if we die and inspiration porn if we live. How, forever long we do live, we were suicidal, past tense, because it makes people too uncomfortable too acknowledge that suicidality is chronic (whether pathological or environmental).
How everyone wants to do suicide prevention but no one wants to acknowledge the people at the center of it. How it's never actually about our needs - or even about our safety, really. It doesn't matter what trauma or pain we must endure - they'll have us live if it kills us. Never mind social programs to give us housing, food, security, to make us want to live - it's our responsibility to find someone to tell us it's all in our heads and we need meds to fix us, because it's CRAZY to want to die. Make sure the hotlines can all call the cops if we don't comply.
Don't we know how selfish it is to want to not be in pain and be so desperate that we're willing to die for it? Don't we know how selfish it is to not have any access to the things we need to survive? Don't we know that suicidal depression is really our duty to get over, because obviously if we don't take meds that don't work or that make us sick, if we don't submit to medical gaslighting, if we don't "try" to recover, it's not like it's an illness or a disability! It's selfishness, a character flaw.
Don't we know that we're the selfish ones, when they make our struggling, our illness, our deaths, about us and not them?
It's sanism at its most basic. We're not reliable narrators of our own experiences. We're not the main characters of even our own stories. We're there to be a single pretty tear rolling down the cheek of our loved ones. We're tragedy-as-an-object, as an object lesson. "Make sure you pick yourself up by your bootstraps seek help so you don't become an inconvenience for us hurt your loved ones." Even STILL the focus is not on the harm done to yourself, except as a moral failure in that it harms the healthy people around you.
Quite frankly, I'm sick of it. I don't ever want someone to call themselves a "suicide survivor" again who means it not as "I've survived BEING suicidal" but as "I lived through someone else being in so much pain that they took their own life over it". Not when there still exist people that have survived attempts or are actively suicidal. This is our narrative, not one for you to center yourselves in.
I will not go so far as to say your grief is selfish. That would be cruel. But your grief IS about someone else. This is still THEIR story.
It is likewise the same pain, the same trauma, and the same ableism and sanism we face over it, for those of us who have actually survived it, more than it is that of those who have never stood on that edge. It is the same decentering of our own stories when we go through the exact same thing.
It is the same surviving another day of being suicidal, another attempt, and hearing people who have either never been suicidal or simply are not talking about their own survivorship of suicidality, have the audacity to call themselves survivors of something that they never survived. To take something that KILLED someone they love and claim to be survivors of it.
Cancer survivors had cancer. Automobile collision survivors were in collisions. Survivors of critical illnesses or disabling/severe injuries lived through those illnesses or injuries affecting THEIR lives. But suddenly when a deadly chronic illness kills someone, in this one case, the survivors are the ones who watched someone die of it?
Nah. This isn't a mass threat like a shooting or a pandemic, where your life was ever in danger. You're not the survivor. Your grief is valid, and there absolutely needs to be times and places where being a GRIEF survivor is centered, where your healing and well-being is focused on.
But let those of us who we so sick we nearly died for it, or DID die from it, be the center of THAT story.
Dead men tell no tales, so at least have the grace to let the echoes of our voices remain, unspoken over. And for gods' sakes, remember that there are people that DID make it through alive, that we're still talking, that our voices are most important in a conversation about OUR potentially deadly illnesses.
We're still here telling our own tales.
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thatdiabolicalfeminist · 10 months
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I do actually think it's very useful to have an impartial third party available to talk to who you're NOT close to and who's aware of useful possibilities for perspective shifting and coping with distress etc!!
But that relationship being mediated both by capitalism and by the carceral state is a recipe for all kinds of abuse and neglect. As we see in the current system.
We need community care where the community isn't just your constellation of friends and loved ones!!
The dozen people you know best are not a whole community, and we're all feeling that lack when access to the kind of support people currently try to get with therapy is behind huge paywalls and comes with a threat of being discriminated against with no recourse or even forcibly trapped and drugged.
So because actual therapy is often expensive and frequently abusive we're trying to substitute our friends and family... but there genuinely are times when you need to talk to someone who hasn't known you intimately forever and isn't obligated to be loyal to someone else in the situation and isn't PART of the situation. And on top of all this not everyone has friends or family, well-informed or otherwise, supportive or otherwise.
The solution obviously is to build broader, stronger, more interconnected actual communities (and abolish capitalism and the carceral state so people with helpful skills & knowledge can provide this kind of support at no cost without starving and without having the power to coerce and detain people with impunity, and so the harms of living under capitalism & mass incarceration are no longer occurring) so we all have well-informed people to talk to who are outside our most intimate contexts and yet who are known to us and to the community, where we can safely seek advice and support.
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eroticcannibal · 4 months
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Oh hey that stupid fucking post is on my dash. Anyway the point was obviously that the idea that cognitive restructuring fixes an actual, real life problem is a bit fucking silly. Something like this would be more accurate:
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People are obsessed with CBT over actually addressing issues and actually being treated like shit negatively affects peoples mental health even if they don't blame themselves for it.
(This is why many ppl object to CBT for trauma, power imbalances, marginalisation etc. Treating the thoughts as the issue is counterproductive in MANY situations. Its also not nearly as effective a treatment as it is claimed to be. And DBT also has many of the same issues)
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facelessoldgargoyle · 22 days
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When people see deviant behavior and comment that that person needs therapy, they’re not actually wishing that person well. They’re hoping to eliminate the deviant behavior, and failing that, to incarcerate them.
It’s also a gross misunderstanding of how therapy works. If you don’t want to be there, you won’t get anything out of it. I think people who say “they need therapy” do know it works that way, but they’re taking a mental shortcut. They’re imagining a deviant person who wants to change already, whom they can put in the Therapy Vortex and get a normal person out of it. If you’re intellectually rigorous about prison abolition, you have to grapple with the fact that you can’t incarcerate or therapize people into changing.
You also have to grapple with the difference between deviant behavior and harmful behavior! Someone who self-harms displays deviant behavior, which is harmful to them but not anyone else, and it’s your goddamn right to be mentally ill in a way that disgusts other people. If you want to stop, then therapy might be helpful, but it’s offensive to say that someone should get therapy just because you want them to stop.
Compare this to scamming people with fake blood testing machines. I saw people talking about how Elizabeth Holmes was a narcissist, a sociopath, whatever stigmatized cluster-B diagnosis they could throw at the wall. Maybe she is a narcissist. She doesn’t necessarily need therapy about it. She certainly doesn’t need therapy inflicted on her. It wouldn’t stop her from doing a scam again. She needs to be banned from the medical industry. Her actions were harmful, and we should address the actions, rather than trying to solve whatever the psychological cause was.
Much of this has been said before, but I’ve been seeing a lot commentary recently that criminals and deviants should go to therapy. IMO it’s a sanitized way to say “lock them up.”
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tiredapocalypse · 5 months
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maybe psychology and psychiatry should start listening to mentally ill people. just an idea
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yellowyarn · 5 months
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Sometimes i wonder what the people at the psychiatric hospital did with the cords from my pants. i wonder what they do with all the tings they take from us. do they just get thrown away like they are nothing? i cried over losing the cords from my favorite frog pajamas i wonder if the nurses knew i would cry about that.
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metafarers · 2 months
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I think its possible that syscourse will never end until the psychiatric system as a whole is taken down or broadly delegitimized.
There are a variety of factors that have led to the current situation. One of which starts with the broad statement among leftists that 'We believe in science'. I understand how this phrase has been a useful signal in some cases. Vaccine misinformation, flat eartherism, creationism, snake oil salesman, and other similar pseudoscience is rampant. However, I think the phrase is far gone from being a signal, to being a dogma, one that grossly overestimates the validity of anything and everything published or believed under the broad umbrella of science.
Science is a method. It is not synonymous with fact. Very few things in science have enough proof to be considered in the realm of theory, and even then, all scientific fields are in a constant state of learning, updating, and change. The current bulk of study is not useless, but it is not fact. It is a reflection of the current scientific environment, and different fields vary in how much they can be relied upon.
We can reasonably rely on physics, mathematics, and even quantum mechanics when designing new technology and architecture. The latest astronomical science has paved the way for landing on mars, touching the sun, and sending people into space again and again. All impossible without accurate celestial data and the theory of general relativity.
While hard sciences do update over time, the fact that we can quantifiably and materially use their theories in a tangible way, suggests they are more trustworthy to a layperson than not. But even then, the theories are not the same as the bulk of scientific questioning and experimentation. There is still the problem of many laypersons taking every hypothesis and speculative article in the field of hard science as fact, and this absolutely does affect the hard aspects of psychology and psychiatry.
Further more, soft sciences are NOT like hard sciences. Focusing in on psychology, its a study that has its roots in moral philosophy. While there is a lot of useful information to be found in psychological science, there aren't any theories that we can compare to something like general relativity, gravity, or thermodynamics.
The diagnoses you'll find in the DSM-5 are nothing like being diagnosed with cancer, covid, or a genetic anomaly. They are glorified hypothesis about groups of symptoms and behaviors. Are all of these diagnoses completely useless? No, not necessarily. I am not claiming that autism doesn't exist, or various symptoms or groups of symptoms don't exist. However the judgement and philosophy behind the diagnostic groupings is not objective fact. And what is deemed a symptom, or an abnormality, is largely determined by culture, there is no such thing as an objectively abnormal or ill mind, outside of brain disease and injury, which described a physical injury. If you believe you are mentally ill, I am not saying you are wrong, what I am saying is, that is a subjective experience, and someone with your same set of symptoms, may have a vastly different outlook on them.
So getting back to plurality, in a society where one is assumed to be ONE in mind and body, anything deviating from that, will be assumed to be abnormal. And what is assumed to be abnormal, must have occurred through some kind of injury, whether physical or mental trauma. The DSM has historical had many 'conditions' that simply reflected the biases of the time, like being gay or trans. Plurality is no different.
Sysmeds are so entrenched in psychology as a gospel, however, that I do not see much changing unless we challenge the field as a whole, not just plurality. And people need to accept that the label of science does not mean information is accurate, correct, or unbiased.
-Simon
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girlcalledwhatsername · 2 months
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^ Just the very beginning of the Wikipedia article on Neurodiversity.
I bring it up here because too many people have picked us this word because they saw it floating around on the internet and understood it quite superficially without engaging with what it actually is: A Framework.
If you use the term "neurodivergent" to describe yourself, you're using/subscribing to this framework, which draws from the social model of disability.
If you call yourself neurodivergent, it mean you are choosing this framework over one where you'd call yourself ill or sick or disordered.
If you are choosing this framework, it means you are choosing a framework that does not pathologise disability.
If you are calling yourself neurodivergent but then turning around and upholding psychiatry as a legitimate science, upholding the DSM as a valid tool rather than the arbitrary ableist racist misogynistic manual that it is, upholding the idea that people need to be diagnosed by an "expert" otherwise they aren't neurodivergent, then you are using 'neurodivergent' superficially and spitting on the face of the neurodivergent movement.
Mad liberation and anti-psych movements have brought us the freedoms we have today, if you are a young neurodivergent person you Need to know your history and your struggles otherwise you end up bootlicking our very oppressors. Psychiatry is a tool of systemic oppression. [More info on this in my pinned for anyone who is new to this idea, please read up a bit it's worth your time]
If you call your neurodivergent please take a moment to look into what the term means and stop upholding psychiatric systems
Stop
Upholding
Psychiatric
Systems
If
You
Call
Yourself
Neurodivergent
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madliberatiion · 1 month
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what your cluster b diagnosis says about your psychologist/psychiatrist:
npd diagnosis: "I am literally SO scared of being manipulated by you and being lied to. I think youre a bad person bc you dont have empathy btw and any time I start to realize that youre actually human I doubt my diagnosis. I bet youre only here in therapy to learn how to get better at manipulating others anyway ..."
bpd diagnosis: "I feel like every emotional reaction you have is dramatic and irrational (bc youre a woman). I know better who you are and whats good for you (bc youre a woman). I dont believe you when you tell me youre suicidal bc youre only trying to manipulate me into giving you attention anyway ....Also, you have too much sex for my taste (bc youre a woman). I'm a misogynist btw."
aspd diagnosis: "I am literally afraid of you . I carefully choose every word I say to you bc Im so so scared ... I really want to refuse treating you (bc Im scared!) but I think that if I say that you might get violent so I'll just lie and tell you that I'll have a way too long waiting list but that I know a really good psychologist that you can go to. Then I'll tell you that when you call them its really important to say your name so that they know that I referred you. But when you call my psychologist-friend he will refuse treating you as soon as he hears your name (bc I warned them and already told them that you have aspd). Also youre probably only here to get me to prescribe drugs to you anyway and/or bc youre in mental pain from withdrawal."
hpd diagnosis: "I dont take any mental pain that youre in seriously bc I read somewhere that youre feelings are very superficial and everything you do is only for attention. Also the only reason you dress like That is because you want to fuck me (Im a misogynist, could you tell?). Im trying to be really cautious with you bc Ive never had a client like you and Im afraid you'll demand special attention and special rules for you only and if I get manipulated into "allowing" that I might have an inappropriate therapist-client relationship with you. (And with inappropriate I mean a sexual relationship).
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