#this post is NOT A DIAGNOSIS

[hadesoftheladies]

you are not “a crazy monster” you are just dealing with repressed anger

you don’t have “memory issues” you’re dealing with the effects of years of gaslighting and emotional abuse

you aren’t “kinky,” you have complex ptsd, it is not healthy to be aroused by physical abuse and violence

you aren’t “sexually liberated,” you have ptsd and hypersexuality is how it presents itself

you are not “different from other girls” or “an alien.” you have anxiety, a consequence of being othered and policed 24/7 by society for your femaleness

you are not “an evil bitch,” you are experiencing burnout because of decision-fatigue and anxiety, since you have so much to prove every second of the day

in short, the problem isn’t you. this isn’t your natural state and it can get better once you acknowledge that you and so many other women are coping with an insane amount psychological and physical abuse and demands. the world has been a war zone for women for AGES. it’s going to take its toll on all of us.

I’d recommend watching and reading up on how to deal with these issues. Personally, I enjoy watching Therapy In A Nutshell on YouTube. She has great techniques and a deep understanding of how the brain works.

PS: THIS ISN’T A DIAGNOSIS. It’s a post highlighting how women often ignore how patriarchy affects them mentally and treat their sickness and coping as a moral failing or personality quirk because of how mundane our suffering is. I believe women and girls can cope better and even heal if they can name what has happened to them and how it’s affected them.

[sapphia]

autism screening quizzes will be like “do you take things too literally” and then ask fifty of the worst-worded questions ever dreamt up by man

[sufferblr]

so sad that in america the only options after a terminal cancer diagnosis is either to make meth or make saw traps

[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.

[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."

[ooppo]

Btw for anyone who needs to hear it: thinking that people are reading your mind/your thoughts are being heard by everyone is not normal. It's a symptom of psychosis and could be linked to a psychiatric disorder. This, too, goes with hallucinations.

This may seem like a no-brainer, but to teens who don't know what symptoms look like, they may jog it off for a number of reasons. I did, too, when I was in highschool! As a freshman I was having delusions/hallucinations and I didn't tell anyone because I thought they were cringe and weird. I chalked up my hallucinations to me being "tired". People who have psychosis often don't realize that what they're experiencing IS psychosis. This goes the same with other classmates/friends/loved ones. If someone comes to you with concerning behavior (even if they are joking about it) you should take note of it.

In highschool I remember a kid talking about how he could go into the matrix and he had a whole other world to protect/do missions in. He would also go still for long periods of time randomly. I thought he was weird and didn't think much of it, but those are symptoms of schizophrenia (delusions/catatonia).

I would appreciate it if this got a reblog so it could potentially help those recognize these symptoms in either themselves or others!

I wish I could have seen a post like this when I was younger. Then I could have avoided a lot of hardships and would have gotten treatment a lot sooner

[mushramoo]

I hate that having ADHD is seen as “quirky”. Or one of the “lesser” mental disorders.

It is agonizing.

You are constantly forgetting everything, names, locations, tasks, items, everything. You misplace things subconsciously and have to spend half hours looking for them, only to find them in places you genuinely cannot recall at all. Your memory is nonexistent. You are constantly aware that you have things you need to do or need to be doing but you cannot remember what. You know you are forgetting something but it doesn’t come to you, so you spend all day anxious. You get awful moments of dysfunction where words become incomprehensible and you are incapable of completing a task, but people are quick to assume you are lazy no matter how hard you’re trying. And one of the worst parts is that you KNOW you’re letting people down. You know you can’t grasp time so you’re showing up late even though you left extremely early. You know someone expected something from you by a deadline but you genuinely couldn’t remember. And in academics, you know some of your teachers are trying hard to be accommodating but you can’t even do the most basic tasks by the given deadlines. Or! You get teachers that do not even understand what mental disorders are and accuse you of not trying. People think you are using your disorder as an excuse just because you know you have it and use it to explain some of your behaviors. If you mask well enough to never need help, you don’t get diagnosed even though it’s taking all of your strength just to get by. If you don’t mask well enough and you are fem presenting like I am you are told you aren’t acting out so you are fine. You can’t win. It’s not quirky to have ADHD, and we aren’t faking it.

It’s a constant struggle, and I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone.

[frankiebirds]

what an incredibly normal and not at all autistic thing to say! (lying)

[chronicsymptomsyndrome]

Childhood trauma culture is being grown and still getting really into whatever was popular with kids/teens when you were that age because you feel like you missed out

[daybringersol]

whats crazy to me is how ready people are to diagnose random people they dont like (‘narcissists’, ‘sociopaths’, ‘psychotic’ & ‘bipolar’ are ones ive heard often, ‘autistic’ has begun to be used like this as well again), but the moment someone genuinely recognizes themselves into these diagnoses, now its a problem. almost like these diagnoses are more weapons to you than actual conditions. who could have seen this coming. /s

[magz]

Feel like some people probably don't even know the basics of what pathologized intellectual disability is, the basic history, and systemic ableism toward Intellectually Disabled / Cognitively Disabled in society that values intelligence as person's worth.

Even Wikipedia it.

[eirianerisdar]

Every time I see a team go “we don’t see anything on the data” when a driver plainly feels something inherently wrong with the car I feel my medicine-trained desire to scream IMPORTANT NEGATIVE FINDINGS DON’T ALWAYS RULE OUT IMPORTANT POSITIVES

[jasperthejester]

me: finally accepting theres a good chance im autistic and starting to work up the courage to ask my parents to see if i could get a diagnoses but being scared to

my mom: do you ever think you have adhd? if you want to do a screening for add next time your at the doctors you can

me:

[starswirls-planet]

rare aesthetic: adhdcore

piles of app games on your phone you played constanly for a week and then abandoned

setting your alarm to 30 minutes earlier than needed to account for the periods of staring into the middle distance that occur while getting ready

impulsively doing arts and crafts when you should be getting ready for bed

always needing some sort of project to obsessively work on cause otherwise you'll spend all your free time doing nothing

carrying bandaids with you at all times because you always end up needing one

constantly setting timers because you have no sense of time

being pretty good at like 20 different and completely random hobby skills because you hyperfixated on it for a month 2 years ago

forcing yourself to finish an important task by withholding something from yourself until it's done (I don't reccomend it)

never being able to throw anything away because you're emotionally attached to every single stupid trinket you have

always feeling at least a little sleepy

always being very longwinded because you fear being misunderstood so you overclarify but end up just confusing everyone

[anghraine]

I know this isn't only an autistic thing or always an autistic thing, but over the least few years, I've realized that a lot of my difficulties with humor are not actually with humor itself. If anything, there are specific kinds of humor that really work for me and I end up laughing so much harder and longer than everyone else that it's uncomfortable or embarrassing.

But a lot of popular humor fundamentally relies on saying things that aren't true. Sometimes this is drastic exaggeration, sometimes it's OTT parody that is far more about Being Funny than about the actual thing being parodied, and often it's flatly false and that's what is supposed to be funny about it. And yes, that's a humorless and ungracious way to describe that kind of humor—I don't mean to say that this is objectively bad or something.

I even understand the jokes intellectually. But in the vast majority of cases, there is something deeply unfunny to me about jokes reliant on something that is either obviously untrue or which I firmly disagree with.

I've seen quite a few posts recently about how, in online fandom, mocking your faves or being amused at other people mocking your faves is an important part of fandom culture. But for me, jokes about my faves based on things they actually said or did, or qualities they clearly possess, can be very funny, while jokes that are based on misrepresentations—even obvious, it's-all-in-good-fun-and-we-all-know-the-truth misrepresentations—are tedious at best.

For an easy example: Anakin and Luke Skywalker are two of my main Star Wars faves. Jokes about sand or Anakin mass-murdering children in his good phase or Luke being far less concerned than Han over the revelation of who his twin is or "it's not faaaaair" can still be really funny to me when told right. Jokes about Anakin obviously mind-tricking Padmé or Luke being obviously an eternally optimistic loser twink are intensely annoying to me regardless of context or delivery, not because they're comparably objectionable or anything but because they're not true.

Functionally this does cut out a lot of humor—especially online humor—but it's not that I literally don't understand it. I get it. I just don't get it.

[crabussy]

turned in my psychology essay with the adrenaline levels of a recently retired racing greyhound who just accidentally ingested a bathtub of black coffee but its okay I survived. thank god I don't have unmedicated adhd or anything like that which would cause me to have this experience every single time I have to complete work. wouldn't that be funny. it would be funny. it would. be so funny if that was the case I'm so relieved that its not the case