as small as a world and as large as alone

12:02pm August 3, 2014

bittersnurr:

azhuresunsoar replied to your post “I don’t feel like arguing …..

I guess my definition of “self diagnosed” isn’t the same as yours, most of the time when I see people who have self diagnosed, they seriously do not actually see anyone. They just say “I have x and you can’t disagree because I fit x”. Peer diagnosis is something I obviously agree with since like you said and many people say - doctors do not always listen, and I know that. I know I have been pretty lucky even in my shitty situations that eventually I find someone to listen. And it

Yeah I am for these purposes using what I have been seeing lately.

there are 3 basic self dx categories:

1. a 13 year old who thinks being mentally ill is cool and edgy (I have never seen an adult do this)
2. people who are intentionally deceive people
3. people who self diagnosed with something but really obviously have some other kind of mental illness
4. people who do it because they can’t get a real one

For the most part on tumblr at least I see #4 the most. This is possibly because I read a lot of illness disability blogs.

#1 cannot exist in a space with people who actually have the illness without someone noticing. Due to the lack of research people who do this usually end up looking like a bad stereotype so they stick out pretty well. It basically is the disability version of cultural appropriation

#2 can sometimes be #1s who decided to do research, but didn’t like the result so they are now faking, or just jerks trying to trick people. I wouldn’t call this the same as self diagnosis because once you are intentionally saying you have an illness you don’t anymore. You are lying and hurting people this is not ok. This is where most of the harm comes from.

#3 is something I occasionally see which is… interesting. I don’t entirely know how to explain it. Like the person’s thought processes are blatantly neuroatypical but it doesn’t seem to be what they are saying it is. Like maybe someone who thinks schizophrenia is multiple personalities, but actually has multiple personalities? Or someone confusing depression and anxiety? They aren’t lying or faking but they aren’t correct either.

#4 the majority of the people who are active in chronic/mental illness/disability communities probably fall under this category. This is the one that “peer diagnosis” fits under. These are the people who do research, using whatever they do have access to, and are looking usually for help coping.

So I think anyone in 4 is being perfectly reasonable. You can get a working diagnosis pretty well depending on the thing. I think someone at home could for example, trigger point test for fibro pretty damn successfully.

1 is frustrating but generally not convincing enough to be too damaging, idk what you even do about 3? 3 is kind of ironic because they are NOT ABLE to tell how they are disabled.

2 is the real problem. But unfortunately you can’t really fix it by being angry at self dxrs because well, 2s are lying on purpose. If you try and go after them they will simply lie and tell you they are officially diagnosed.

bittersnurr:

azhuresunsoar replied to your post “I don’t feel like arguing …..

I guess my definition of “self diagnosed” isn’t the same as yours, most of the time when I see people who have self diagnosed, they seriously do not actually see anyone. They just say “I have x and you can’t disagree because I fit x”. Peer diagnosis is something I obviously agree with since like you said and many people say - doctors do not always listen, and I know that. I know I have been pretty lucky even in my shitty situations that eventually I find someone to listen. And it

Yeah I am for these purposes using what I have been seeing lately.

there are 3 basic self dx categories:

1. a 13 year old who thinks being mentally ill is cool and edgy (I have never seen an adult do this)
2. people who are intentionally deceive people
3. people who self diagnosed with something but really obviously have some other kind of mental illness
4. people who do it because they can’t get a real one

For the most part on tumblr at least I see #4 the most. This is possibly because I read a lot of illness disability blogs.

#1 cannot exist in a space with people who actually have the illness without someone noticing. Due to the lack of research people who do this usually end up looking like a bad stereotype so they stick out pretty well. It basically is the disability version of cultural appropriation

#2 can sometimes be #1s who decided to do research, but didn’t like the result so they are now faking, or just jerks trying to trick people. I wouldn’t call this the same as self diagnosis because once you are intentionally saying you have an illness you don’t anymore. You are lying and hurting people this is not ok. This is where most of the harm comes from.

#3 is something I occasionally see which is… interesting. I don’t entirely know how to explain it. Like the person’s thought processes are blatantly neuroatypical but it doesn’t seem to be what they are saying it is. Like maybe someone who thinks schizophrenia is multiple personalities, but actually has multiple personalities? Or someone confusing depression and anxiety? They aren’t lying or faking but they aren’t correct either.

#4 the majority of the people who are active in chronic/mental illness/disability communities probably fall under this category. This is the one that “peer diagnosis” fits under. These are the people who do research, using whatever they do have access to, and are looking usually for help coping.

So I think anyone in 4 is being perfectly reasonable. You can get a working diagnosis pretty well depending on the thing. I think someone at home could for example, trigger point test for fibro pretty damn successfully.

1 is frustrating but generally not convincing enough to be too damaging, idk what you even do about 3? 3 is kind of ironic because they are NOT ABLE to tell how they are disabled.

2 is the real problem. But unfortunately you can’t really fix it by being angry at self dxrs because well, 2s are lying on purpose. If you try and go after them they will simply lie and tell you they are officially diagnosed.

There’s also another category, which is people who have been pressured into believing they have something they don’t have, to the point they act it out even though they know they don’t have it.  This can happen through self-diagnosis or professional diagnosis equally though.  I went through that and it was hell on earth, and I’m still getting punished for it even though it stopped happening by the time I hit adulthood.  (This was entirely a mental illness thing, not a physical illness thing, for me.)  This can look like #1 in a lot of ways, but the motivations are totally different.  Either the person is being pressured from the outside to appear as if they have something, or they feel pressure from inside or outside to appear as if they have something (or even “if you appear to have it long enough you’ll actually have it and that will be good” or something), like… I had this long set of rules that I had to live by and part of it involved that the worst possible thing was to have no explanation for my actions, so I would explain my actions with conditions I didn’t have, because that was better than no explanation or an incomprehensible explanation.  (Ironically, I was being diagnosed with autism at the time, and also “severe/complex developmental disability”, and since autism and developmental disability were words that meant nothing to me, then I totally ignored them and considered them worse than no explanation, even though they turned out to be the actual explanation.)

Anyway I don’t think that teens trying on identities are a horrible thing, nor do I think that confused teens like I just described above are doing anything horrible either.  I think they’ve been made to feel horrible by this idea that there’s no actual reason behind what they’re doing, and that they must “just want attention” or something.

Oh and I did at one point run into an adult who faked disabilities and basked in the attention it got her… like she looked just like a lizard soaking up the sun, if she could make herself the center of attention that way.  And she did a lot of destructive things to a lot of people.  But people like her are the rare exception.  And the stuff she self-diagnosed with was beyond ludicrous.  (“My IQ is in the thirties so I have the mind of a five-year-old and I need an adult to come along and adopt me so I can be a five-year-old forever.  All DD people are really children they just won’t admit it because it’s not PC.”)  The problem is that people use examples of people like her all the time, when they’re extremely rare compared to people who get falsely accused.

Plus often irregularities in how a disability presents itself are actually normal, and everyone getting hypersensitive to “does this person present the way a typical person with this disability presents?” ends up shutting out people who have atypical forms of the disability.  And atypical forms, despite the name, can be more common than typical forms.  (Atypical autism for instance is more common than autism straight, IIRC.)

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