as small as a world and as large as alone, patternsmaybe: lichgem: isabelknight: ...

7:44pm June 12, 2014

lichgem:

isabelknight:

irwinsecure:

pretending to be depressed will not get your friends

pretending to self harm will not make people like you

pretending to have panic attacks is not something to be proud of

pretending to be socially awkward doesn’t make you cute

please stop portraying mental illness and self harm as something beautiful

Pretending that people who talk about their mental illnesses or who can’t hide their symptoms are non-existent or outnumbered by fakers won’t actually help crazy people find support or help.

Pretending that it is vitally important to police or interrogate everyone with the temerity to talk about mental illness in an attempt to weed out “fakers” is actively harmful.

“Fakers” have not caused me any problems related to being bipolar, or even problems related to being an assault survivor. Having people* feel entitled my medical and personal history so they can scrutinize me and pass judgment on how well I measure up to their idea of what a crazy person looks like has been harmful. Having people decide that crazy people seeking support because of aspects of our illnesses are attention-seeking fakers is harmful.
Bullshit like this isn’t designed to help those of us who are nuts - it’s designed to shut us up lest we get dogpiled for not talking about our crazy in exactly the way that meets with the approval of the “anti-faker”/”anti-romanticizer” police.

So please knock it off.

*Not people I have asked for help - I do discuss history stuff with people who are helping me. People who learn about it either because they overheard me mention it, or who found out because it came up. I don’t usually bother to lie/conceal when my life is impacted by my illness (the exception being my job at the uni), but my refusal to treat it as shameful is not actually romanticizing it.

^Reblogging for commentary.

I’d rather be inadvertantly nice to fakers than inadvertantly mean to people who are telling the truth.

Same here. And I’ve been inadvertently nice to fakers, I’ve even been taken advantage of by fakers. And as devastating as that can be, it’s still not as devastating as the consequences of being considered a faker when you aren’t one. How do I know? Been there. Both ways. Been targeted deliberately for slander as a faker, in a vicious, premeditated way, by people who know better and think it’s a fun pastime. It’s way worse than being taken advantage of, as devastating as that is to your sense of trust in the world. And being considered a faker when you’re not one can kill you. (How do I know? Years of doctors wondering if I was faking symptoms that turned out to be adrenal insufficiency. Only diagnosed after I almost died several times, during some of which I belonged in the ICU but wasn’t put there because doctors didn’t take me seriously.) So seriously, don’t do this. Not about mental illness, not about physical illness, not about disability of any kind.

The idea that there are fakers running around everywhere just ready to screw things up for “the real ones” is a common belief, but it’s not true. There are fakers out there, some of them are really nasty unscrupulous people, but what’s even more nasty and unscrupulous is policing every single disabled person (often on the basis of bad information about the conditions in question – which hurts worse those of us with rare or undiagnosed or misunderstood conditions) on the basis that we might be fake. And even when you think you have all this evidence that someone’s fake, you could be wrong. And even when someone’s faking one thing, they might not be faking everything. So… yeah, I understand the sense of betrayal when you do run across someone who is 100% obviously faking something, but I don’t even trust most people to know what “100% obvious” looks like, let alone act on it. And the consequences of being considered fake when you’re not can be fatal for any illness, mental or physical. So remember that before you accuse. Better yet, don’t accuse. I’ve never accused the fakers I’ve known, I’ve just quietly dropped out of their lives. Which is what you should do if someone is taking advantage of you anyway, whether they’re for real or not. I’ve become more wary about warning signs of being taken advantage of, but I refuse to become one of those people who sees a faker under every rock because I’ve been the target of a bullying campaign about faking and it is not cool and it has far-reaching consequences in the lives of those you accuse. Consequences you might not even be aware of.