as small as a world and as large as alone

3:09pm September 8, 2014

lichgem:

clatterbane:

lichgem:

trickstarbrave:

drtanner-sfw:

madeofpatterns:

lichgem:

As someone with a “real mental illness” I am going to take a stand here:

Depression is not “mental illness lite.” Depression, like all other forms of neurodivergence, varies widely in how it affects people. Some people with depression can basically get by, maybe they need meds, but they can still work, cook, clean, and run errands.

Some people with depression can barely get out of bed in the morning and bathe and feed themselves, much less work.

You don’t have to delegitimize other people’s mental illnesses in order to call attention to the fact that things like psychotic disorders are highly demonized in both the psychiatric world and the public.

I don’t want to see people deprived of support and solidarity by people who are going to insist that they “don’t have real problems.” The world outside of Tumblr still exists and still tells those people that they don’t face “real problems.” There is no difference: It’s ableism no matter if it’s from a doctor, parents, employers, or from a neurodiversity advocate.

Depression is only socially acceptable when it’s not significantly disabling, or when it’s something in the past you can talk about overcoming. And even then, not reliably.

The only way to have depression be reliably socially acceptable is to be rich.

In other words, it’s just like absolutely every other disability.

One of the worst things is being shit on by someone else with depression because their depression affects them differently to the way your depression affects you, and they can’t understand why you can’t manage your depression in the same way they’ve been managing theirs.

Whatever your mental illness issues may be, rule number one is always to be respectful to others with mental illnesses - mental health problems are always highly individual, and just because someone isn’t healing in the same way that you have and isn’t making progress the same way you are, it doesn’t make their condition invalid, it doesn’t make them lazy, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they’re “wallowing”, “comfortable” or in any other way content not to get better. 

Let’s all be understanding of each other, okay?

What I got from that post was, how about we take a minute to also talk about psychic disorders, which YES, even tumblr seems to ignore. Until of course, you know, someone needs to throw us under the bus (“I’m not crazy like I hear things ha”) or until they feel the need to point out that people with psychosis are someone inherently “violent” (ew). 

I have seen DOZENS of people who will defend depression and anxiety but once violence comes up they will say people with psychosis are just VIOLENT and SHOULDNT BE TRUSTED and you know what? that fucking hurts. A lot. 

I have had MORE people thing that others with psychosis can’t do anything, or can’t even type, that somehow I CANNOT SIT IN FRONT OF A COMPUTER (and oh god do the ones like myself who cannot function like that need more help than I ever will because they get some of the WORST treatment) to say anything.

I have had people tell me I was WRONG about psychosis, when they don’t have it, ever been around someone who has it, or researched it at all. YES. 

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT PSYCHOTIC ILLNESSES AND MENTAL ILLNESSES BESIDES DEPRESSION. WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT VERY SEVERE DEPRESSION AND DEPRESSION IN GENERAL, YES, BUT I AM SICK OF THAT BEING THE ONLY FUCKING REPRESENTATION AROUND. ON TUMBLR, REAL LIFE, MANY SUPPORT GROUPS….

NO ONE IS SAYING DEPRESSION IS BETTER OR EASY. PEOPLE ARE SAYING THEY WANT TO TALK ABOUT OTHER THINGS THAT ARE TREATED WORSE IN THE MEDICAL COMMUNITY. 

“What I got from that post was,” which post? I wasn’t responding to a specific post.

“NO ONE IS SAYING DEPRESSION IS BETTER OR EASY.”

People are literally saying that, and that’s what I’m responding to. People are saying “depression is the least serious of all mental illnesses” and literally calling it “mental illness lite.”

Yeah, we can and should talk about ableism that mentally ill people level at other mentally ill people they perceive as “really crazy,” or as my friend puts it, trying to pass the unperson ball to other mentally ill people. That’s not the discussion I’m talking about. That’s an important discussion I am 100 percent invested in. I’m talking about people who are literally saying that depression is not a real mental illness.

It seems like you’re drawing conclusions from something outside of my post.

Aha. With the timing, I also figured that your OP was likely prompted by a particular post that was going around. (Which I interpreted similarly to trickstarbrave, and reblogged.) I was a little confused there too.

Though the attitudes leading to your general point are really freaking hard to avoid. And I think most people who want to trivialize depression probably do not have that much experience with severe depression to the point that you’re barely making it through the day every single damned day. The ones that might have experienced that and still feel a need to trivialize it and act like people dealing with depression are really the “walking worried well” as I have seen it condescendingly described somewhere? I really don’t know what to say.

But yeah, I was glad in a way to see that this wasn’t in response to any particular post. Which wasn’t trivializing at all, AFAICT, but more focused on not throwing some people who are often considered to have “unacceptable” psych disabilities under the bus and, making them even more afraid to talk about their experiences. :(

CW: Suicide mention

Yeah. It’s just that… whenever people try to have that kind of conversation, there’s always a ripple effect of people trying to play one-up games and decide that this group of people is the new Acceptable Target No One Has To Give a Fuck About.

I’ve seen the other posts, too, and I’m responding to the ripples of nasty ableism that sprout up around them, which is not the fault of those OPs for trying to talk about a real issue. It’s like people jump on any chance to make it their turn to cause pain.

FTR, and I know you know this, I’m schizoaffective and I know that there’s extreme stigma against people with psychotic disorders. What I’m trying to quell is the inevitable bullying brigade that always crops up when people are trying to shed light on an issue. I’m not going to let people say “depression is the least serious mental illness” when people lose their jobs and kill themselves because of depression.

I know that it’s inevitable and I should adjust my expectations accordingly, but I really, really wish people wouldn’t look at my post and go “she’s not talking about the things she actually said, she’s talking about THIS thing, so I’m going to respond to it as if she’s talking about THIS thing.”

Also there is psychotic depression, and nobody ever talks about that.

I consider myself to have a ‘cousin condition’ to psychosis – severe, persistent delirium that happens pretty much every time I get sufficiently sick.  The symptoms can mimic psychosis exactly, or can resemble but not be exactly the same as psychosis.  And there is absolutely no community for delirium on tumblr or anywhere else I have found, so I’ve found myself reading stuff by people with psychosis just because it’s the closest I can find to my experiences, anywhere. 

But psychotic depression – it’s a real thing, it really happens to people, and people are completely forgetting about it in these discussions.

317 notes