#this is just my diagnosis

[officialfriendclub]

PLEASE DRAW ADHD X ANXIETY SANS ITS SO CUTE

gay people in my phone

anxiety - @hheisa

ADHD - gudulle_vinyls on TikTok

[ao3-crack]

(x)

[inkskinned]

you wanted to be a good friend, because you loved your friends, but the truth was that everyone else somehow had a pamphlet on being normal that you never received. most of the time you learn by trial-and-error. you are terrified of the next big mistake you make, because it seems like the rules are completely arbitrary.

you've learned to keep the prickly parts of your personality in a stormcloud under your bed - as if they're a second version of you; one that will make your friends hate you. it feels feral, burning, ugly.

instead, you have assembled habits based on the statistical likelihood of pleasing others. you're a good listener, which is to say - if you do speak up, you might end up saying the wrong thing and scaring off someone, but people tend to like someone-who-listens. or you've got no true desires or goals, because people like it when you're passive, mutable. you're "not easy to fluster" which is to say - your emotions are fundamentally uninteresting to others around you; so you've learned to control them to a degree that you can no longer really feel them happening.

you have long suspected something is wrong with you, but most of the time, googling doesn't help. you are so-used to helping-yourself, alone and with no handbook. the reek of your real self feels more like a horrible joke - you wake up, and, despite all your preparations, suddenly the whole house is full of smoke. the real you is someone waiting to ruin your other-life, the one where you're normal and happy. the real-self is unpredictable, angry.

your real self snarls when people infantilize the whole situation. because if you were really suffering, everyone seems to think you'd be completely unable to cope. but you already learned the rules, so you do know how to cope, and you have fucking been coping. it's not black-and-white. it's not that you are healed during the other times - it's just that you're able to fucking try. and honestly, whenever you show symptoms, it's a really fucking bad sign.

because the symptoms you have are ugly and unmanageable for others. your symptoms aren't waifish white girl things. they're annoying and complicated. they will be the subject of so many pretentious instagram reels. if they cared about you, they'd just show up on time. you care, a lot, so deeply it burns you. you like to picture a world where the comments read if they loved you, they'd never need glasses to see. but since that's a rule you've seen repeated - "one must never be late or you are a bad friend" - you constantly worry about being late and leave agonizingly early. there are no words for how you feel when you're still late; no matter how hard you were trying.

so you have to make up for it. you have to make up for that little horrible real you that you keep locked in a cabinet. you are bad at answering emails so every project you make has to be perfect. you are weird and sensitive so you have to learn to be funny and interesting. you are an inconvenience to others, so you become as smooth as possible, buffing out all the rough parts.

all this. all this. so people can pass their hands over you and just tell you just the once -how good you are. you're a good friend. you're loveable.

[thebibliosphere]

Staring at the 5 different Word documents I have open at the moment and muttering, "Once my body gets out of survival mode, it's over for you bitches."

[zombiemollusk]

"you were just diagnosed with an awful condition, why are you happy about it??" bud, i would still have the condition even if i wasn't diagnosed; i'm happy because i now know what it is and what i can do about it

[mercifullymad]

i feel passionately about the need to enfold people experiencing (or diagnosed) with "just" depression or anxiety into the mad pride project. the more people who view themselves as mad, the better. much as the rhetorical move from "neurotypical" to "neuroconforming" emphasizes the artifice & social construction of "neurotypicality," so too will expanding identification as "mad" expose the sane/mad dichotomy as a false one.

it's true that (some) people with "just" depression and/or anxiety have an easier time navigating the psych system than people who have more stigmatized diagnoses. but this is not to say that they necessarily have an easy time — the carceral psych system is hostile to everyone subsumed by it, even the most "privileged" patients. we should of course critique & examine how our experiences are shaped by various intersections of privilege, but we cannot forget or ignore how someone with "just" a depression/anxiety diagnosis can still experience the full force of the carceral psych system brought down upon them (including but not limited to involuntary institutionalization, police intervention, & forced medication or other forced treatment).

we must encourage, if not insist, that those with the least-stigmatized diagnoses view their difficult experiences navigating the psych system as bound up with the liberation of people who have more stigmatized diagnoses &, often, a more violent experience of the psych system. we need more people to drop the "i have anxiety/depression but i'm not crazy" line and say loudly, "i have anxiety/depression & i am crazy. my access to just treatment is linked to the conditions of all other crazy people, who are my allies, peers, & friends. we are united in our cause & we all deserve a more liberating system of care."

[areyoudoingthis]

I am SO grateful that ed and stede exist as characters exactly as they are. I'm so grateful for these two men who are traumatized and messed up and struggle to even like themselves, who are terrible at communicating, who make enough mistakes between the two of them to fill an entire ocean. I am so grateful to watch them struggle and be seen and be loved and reach out for the things they want and are maybe starting to believe that they deserve. I'm so grateful that the show lets them fall in love and get together exactly as they are, that it doesn't say they need to wait until they've become some unattainably perfect version of themselves before they have permission to have that. i am so grateful for ofmd

[fadedstarpng]

autistic people when there's collectable things with tv shows with multiple generations of them:

[uncanny-tranny]

I've noticed this idea that if you're "truly disabled," you must aggressively seek out the diagnosis and the tests to prove it, but...

I got a normal test result recently, and I'm already ready to quit trying to find answers. This is an issue I have had since I was a child, and frankly, I feel grateful to have the very basic test ordered by my doctor. I feel grateful to have been taken seriously enough to have had that basic test ordered.

Add to this the fact that if you're doing test after test after test after test, you might eventually find that your doctor's sympathy and patience run dry. Is it fucked up? Yes. There's this fine line between "is this something that needs to be answered?" and "will my doctor even try to help me?" and not every disabled person can hop from doctor to doctor to find the one who actually fucking cares enough to stick with their patients and believe them.

This entire rant is just a reminder that... disabled people are tired, man. Not all of us can even get our foot in the door of a diagnosis, let alone be officially treated for it. There are so many reasons as to why somebody "quits" trying to find answers. It doesn't mean we aren't suffering or aren't disabled, it just means we aren't trying to find an official answer.

[lil-gremlin-gal]

People when you say you have chronic fatigue: "We're ALL tired, sweetie!! That's just life!! Haha!!"

Meanwhile I just said, out loud, to my partner: "I'd love to be eating, but I just don't have that kind of energy" 🙃

[480pfootage]

clearpilled and mentally sane

hey there ;)

[kingfakey]

anyway borderline people and fellow cluster b socialites you're literally so strong. like i get it, i do, and i wanna give you credit for not smashing that glass, for remembering to breathe. you get too much shit for the one time you crumble, and not enough credit for the 9/10 times you don't. it takes strength and resilience and i know how much work you're putting into it and i love you for it. 💖

[protosstar]

having lyrics addressing how mental health is just completely dismissed coupled with all that religious imagery in the staging hits incredibly hard when the cultural mindset in serbia is one of "mental illness isnt real you just need to go to church"

[gay-jesus-probably]

This is your regular reminder that Asperger's is not a real diagnosis, as it was removed from the DSM a decade ago, because it had only ever meant "autism but with the Good symptoms", and those standards were always vague and poorly defined. Because Dr. Asperger was a Nazi whose job was to murder autistic children, and the diagnosis of Asperger's literally began as just the kids whose autism presented in a way that Dr. Asperger found tolerable enough to not murder them. The whole concept of Asperger's is literally rooted in some autistic people being considered 'better' than other autistic people for having the 'correct' symptoms, with the implication that anyone who doesn't display only those symptoms doesn't deserve respect or basic human decency.

Again, cannot stress this enough, the entire concept of Asperger's is literally a nazi thing, to justify the murder of autistic children. It's just autism. Just fucking call it autism. I'm sorry if you were diagnosed with Asperger's over a decade ago, but that specific diagnosis literally just means "Autistic but in a way that wouldn't get me murdered by nazi's", and that is not something to brag about (and if you were diagnosed with Asperger's after 2013, then your doctor either wasn't familiar with the DSM V, or was just very ableist). It's a shitty diagnosis invented by a shitty person for shitty reasons, which is why it is no longer in use.

It's just autism. Just call it autism.

[cerebralabyss]

the doctor doing my surgical assessment making sure all of my alters are okay with getting gender affirming surgery was very cool of her actually

- 🥀

[solitaryschizoid]

I'm tired of hearing that self diagnosis isn't valid as if so-called medical professionals don't frequently misdiagnose their patients.

As if the industry of psychiatry isn't evil when homosexuality used to be considered a mental disorder and abused slaves were labeled mentally ill for escaping.

As if the DSM actually makes any fucking sense at all being only descriptive of external symptoms that others deal with when dealing with a person with that disorder instead of symptoms that describe how it's actually like to live with that disorder for the person who has it.

As if everyone conveniently ignores that the stigmatization of mental disorders is created by the psychiatric industry and there are mental disorders that therapists refuse to treat or diagnose because of that stigma.

As if everyone forgets that some mental disorders are so stigmatized that having a diagnosis on your record can ruin your life and make you the target of discrimination and abuse by any and every entity who wishes to have power over you by using your disorder against you.

As if the entire population of the world has access to healthcare which is a privilege that only the fortunate and wealthy can afford.

As if the process of formal diagnosis doesn't begin with self diagnosis.