6:02pm August 14, 2013

Every chronic condition there is has massive stigma

Not just depression. Every condition. All of them.

People get blamed for not thinking positively enough, not exercising enough, not eating the right miracle diet, being too fat, not praying right, etc.

And get told they’re making it up for attention or that it’s not really that bad or that they can’t possibly understand it.

It’s a thing in mental illness but it’s not unique to mental illness.

I know two people who have the same condition. Everyone worries about one of them. Everyone thinks the other one is doing fine.

The difference? One is very thin and the other is fat. Everyone is all concerned about the thin one.

When my stalker wanted to drum up sympathy she lost weight and cultivated a haunted appearance. Then she said that the things I was supposedly doing to her were making her so stressed out that she was losing all this weight. She contrasted her relative thinness with my fatness to try and convince people I wasn’t really sick because I was fat. She also exaggerated my weight. I weighed 190 pounds at the time (and she started out at 170, but tried to hide that) but she’d tell people I weighed 300 or 400 pounds to try to make me even less sympathetic. Sick people are never fat you know. Even though lots of illnesses, including ones that cause malnutrition, can cause weight gain. She knew the prejudices people had and played them for all they were worth.

Illnesses that make you get fat tend to be more stigmatized then illnesses that make you get thin, and many times people will tell you that your illness is caused by fat rather than the other way around.

My own brother used to think I’d have good stamina if I lost weight. He’s never been fat in his life, so he had no idea that even at my heaviest (240 pounds) I never weighed enough to significantly affect stamina let alone become bedridden. I know plenty of people who are serious athletes and more heavy than that by a lot.

Just some random examples of how fat plays into this.

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