as small as a world and as large as alone

4:00pm August 22, 2013

josiahd:

bloodstainedarms:

This.

(images are mostly text that says things like “you wouldn’t blame someone with cancer for needing chemo”)

Except that people do all of those things, all the time.

People are *especially* blamed for having cancer. And told that positive thinking is important to a cure.

And people, especially women, are routinely told that their very real physical conditions are imaginary. That’s a reason why a lot of people with obvious *genetic* conditions aren’t diagnosed until well into adulthood. Including people who’ve been in chronic pain since early childhood.

Everyone condition in the world is stigmatized. Everyone gets blamed for being sick. This isn’t unique to mental illness.

Also not all mental illness can be compared easily to physical illness. It’s not always as simple as chemical imbalances in the brain. It can’t always be treated with meds. I understand that when your condition is mistakenly seen as a moral lapse, it feels a lot better when people say it’s a straight up illness like cancer or diabetes. (Diabetes was the example that got drilled into my head in the psych system, because it’s a really good way to convince someone to take their meds.) But that doesn’t mean it always is a purely physical illness, it doesn’t mean the concept “mental illness” always makes sense.

I’m not saying people whose meds help them shouldn’t take their meds or that no mental illnesses are biological. But I just get nervous when I hear people saying that they are, without giving any examples of the fact that many times they aren’t, or aren’t totally. There are many mental illnesses where some or all of the time, there are strong components, if not all of it, that’s different from a biological illness. That includes SOME depression and SOME schizophrenia. That even includes some things where functional brain scans have been found to be different (thinking and feeling affects what happens in the brain). And this is getting ignored in the rush to declare as much mental illness as possible to be purely physical and neurological in nature.

And declaring that there is NO fix except for biological ones, as many people do, renders things hopeless for many people who have tried biological fixes and gotten nowhere. Also the non biological fixes are not simple or easy or quick in most cases and are not just snapping yourself out of it. It’s a myth that the two options are biological treatments and snap out of it, just as much as its a myth that the two options are forced drugging with things that kill your soul, and the real cognitive and emotional stuff that works.

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