like you can exist for Years??? never noticing??? never thinking about Yourself. assuming you are the host, or assuming you are another alter.

it is WEIRD to sit there with your morning coffee, having a conversation, and just suddenly the stars align . and you realize how different you are from "you" . you realize you werent "you", you were actually YOU the whole time.

i have self diagnosed and gone on to be medically validated with an official diagnosis. multiple times actually. i was never wrong about my self-diagnoses.

however, i have been misdiagnosed by professionals FIVE TIMES. and let me tell you, a professional diagnosis being wrong is far more harmful than a self-diagnosis being wrong.

if your self diagnosis is wrong, maybe you used the wrong language or put yourself in a box or now feel invalid and whatnot. but if your professional diagnosis is wrong, it can lead to abuse, medical trauma, panic attacks, issues with medication, even suicide.

i was misdiagnosed with BPD when i was 15 by a psychologist that i spoke to for hardly even 10 minutes. this diagnosis was based on my parent's description of my reactions to abuse, and the diagnosis was used to validate and excuse their abuse.

i was misdiagnosed with MDD when i was 12 and put through several different types of anti-depressants. we never found anything that worked, because it was actually ADHD and dissociation, but i did end up with panic attacks and insomnia all throughout middle/highschool!

when i self-diagnosed with autism however, it saved my life. it took me out of active suicidality because i was able to finally able to accept myself after years of feeling like i am just "being a person wrong". i had the knowledge to accomodate for myself and the language to advocate for myself. this was life changing. even if i was wrong, which i wasnt, i dont see how it couldve caused any harm.

my opinions on self-diagnoses arent black and white, and im not entirely settled on them either, but i do think this is important to understand. doctors and psychologists are not all knowing. we live in a time where we can access thousands of dollars worth of university level education on the internet, even the same exact resources medical students use. plenty of people are capable of interpreting themselves and that information to come to a conclusion about what they are experiencing and what might help.

sure, self-diagnosis might be biased. but a professional is most likely going to be just as biased, and possibly less aware of it. its just silly to use bias as a primary argument when it is an inescapable feature of human psychology. there is a reason ADHD is underdiagnosed in women. there is a reason anxiety disorders are underdiagnosed in men.

an incorrect self-diagnosis wont take away resources or your space in your comminities. but professional misdiagnosis can cause real damage.

and I've had some pretty spectacular professional misdiagnoses. hypothyroidism, multiple sclerosis, HIV.

1) It is a lot of white people comparing involuntary inpatient stays with prison and using a lot of the same prison abolitionist language and terminology for something whose effects cannot be wholesale compared to prison. Because a) your 72 hour-2 week stint in the ward is not comparable to people spending years in state wards is not comparable to being in or having a prison record. These are all 3 different experiences with different effects, though they may share some similarity and be interconnected. After a psych ward stay you are still going to be employable and still going to be able to find housing for example--nobody automatically sees psych ward on your record when they go to hire you the way they do prison records. b) it ignores and muddies the very real issue that mentally ill/ND POC have a DIRECT connection between exhibiting MH symptoms and prison because Black and Brown people are more likely to get thrown behind bars (or killed! Btw. Since we are on this topic) for exhibiting the same or even milder symptoms that would get a white person a wellness check. Like you cannot be saying these are the same carceral experiences when a white person went to the ward and a POC went to prison for the same symptoms. This is NOT saying there is nothing bad about psych wards but I wish people would stop just comparing Everything. Not everything is the same. Experiences can be different. You can talk about your harm without using somebody else's harm to hold it up. This also goes for using ACAB about literally ANYBODY else but the police. Tbqh.

2) It tends to ignore levels of functioning, independence, and ability. There are suicidal people who can be talked down. There are suicidal people who cannot be. There are homicidal people who can be talked down. There are homicidal people who cannot be. There are people with eating disorders or severe forms of harmful obsessive or compulsive behaviors who will not stop just because you are nice to them and tell them you're there. There are addicts who Will drive intoxicated and kill or hurt other people. Like peer support is a neat concept and many people benefit from it but within the current framework and within the current existing world there are people who are not able to make rational decisions in the moment, and in the current existing world there is no way to employ the right to die without it being eugenicist and affecting very specific demographics. In order for right to die to exist WITHOUT it affecting primarily poor POC, you would first have to dismantle everything else. And preventative care with preventative social support systems to make sure people DON'T get to those specific points is good conceptually but it does nothing for what happens when people get there. And I am tired of primarily people who CAN be talked down, CAN be assisted socially saying there is no need to discuss what happens when people get to that point because we can just prevent it. You can't prevent it entirely. Nobody ever has an answer for me on this topic and I recognize that it is a difficult topic with a lot of nuance, because it deals with autonomy and the lack of it vs harmful behaviors. And I am not using hypotheticals; I will be the first to say that nobody has ever once been able to stop me by offering me social support and nothing else if I'm suicidal, self harming, using substances, or restricting.

3) The really odd and false idea that mental health is a solely Western concept and/or is solely a result of capitalism. I don't know where you guys got this from but unfortunately as a cunt from the global south whose mother is just slightly older than the psychological association of my homeland, people are mentally ill everywhere and they were mentally ill before capitalism too. This is sort of just social model of disability issues 2.0 with a dash of romanticizing nonwhite cultures--just because there are specific issues that were caused, exacerbated by, or are symptomatic of societal ills doesn't mean everything would be some pristine utopia without those social ills. We can say that certain nonharmful behaviors that are just perceived as "odd" are punished by a conformist culture, and we can talk about the racial implications of that wrt diagnosis and treatment of POC, without acting like every symptom is ONLY seen as negative because of conformist cultures. There are many symptoms that would still cause distress whether or not capitalism exists and whether or not we are in the West.

4) A lot of the people who are talking about anti-psych have contradicting beliefs that seem more self serving than an actual conviction, with many (not all) seeming to have very little personal experience with the psych field and do little but spread fear. You will get people who will say they're anti-psych and then they'll talk about how their therapist is refusing to diagnose them with x disorder and that's why all therapists are bad and why they're anti-psych when many therapists refuse to diagnose specifically because therapists are social work degree holders in most cases in the USA and many of them are anti-diagnosis because...they are anti-psych. 💀 This isn't the only reason of course but it is a fairly common one, especially for diagnoses that therapists know are stigmatized. Many therapists will straight up list that they do not like formal diagnoses because they are opposed to how it is used systemically on their websites. The critique of mandatory reporting is also confusing because therapists and psychs aren't the only mandatory reporters. Teachers, religious leaders, non-therapist social workers, daycare staff, regular doctors are all mandatory reporters. There are people acting like you immediately will get conservatorship and shoved into group homes if you have a diagnosis when that isn't how that works *and* there are people for whom, while group homes/conservatorship do hold quite a lot of potential for and commonly involve abuses, a group home/conservatorship is the only way that they can live. There is in general a lot of fear mongering from this side of things and if there is one thing I have always hated it is people who incite fear where education would be better. This goes again back into ability and independence as well--some of you have the ability to go undiagnosed and still be independent, still function in life, still exist. Some of us do not. And until you come to terms with that and start giving people resources they can use instead of telling them all these bad things will happen to them 100% guaranteed and they have no hope, I do not consider you someone who cares for our rights and well-being.

another fact is that 500 calories isn’t even enough for a new born.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/17/bush-torture-memos-commer_n_188190.html

In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.

“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”

Another another friendly reminder that the Minnesota Starvation Experiment subjected adult men who were VOLUNTEERS to 1,560 calorie diets and the psychological effects were so profound that one volunteer cut three of his own fingers off and could not remember why.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment

These men were volunteers who knew exactly what they would be going through and when it would end, and who believed they were doing it for a good and moral reason (the research was used to help rehabilitate victims of starvation and famine at the end of WWII).

And these are the things we are expected to engage in FOREVER to stay at a “healthy” weight.

Reading about the Minnesota Starvation experiment was my wake-up call.  It was what kicked me out of my eating disorder.  The guy missing three fingers, whatever his name was, he was the last straw for me.

But you know what? Being upfront about my disease does not reduce who I am. It is an acknowledgment of reality. Whoever dates me is going to have to deal with abruptly canceled plans. Whoever lives with me is going to have to deal with me being semi-regularly bedridden. Whoever spends their life with me will never be able to live more than 30 minutes or so from a major hospital.

And letting someone know that I'm sick and always will be immediately lets the folks who aren't right for me slide on by. It stops my disease from being a Big, Scary, Shameful Secret that needs a tactful coming out moment. And best of all? It helps me find the right person.

Because I don't want someone who transforms into an absolute monster on my sickest days—something I've seen other chronically ill people's partners do. I don't even want someone who merely, passively tolerates the worst aspects of my health with no interest in understanding what being alive feels like for me.

A few months ago I made a friend. We clicked immediately, in a way pretty rare for adulthood friendships, and later, when we both found out we were spoonies, it just made sense. Friendship with her is so easy—there's no guilt-tripping or anger on days when we can't function well enough to hang out. There's just mutual understanding. There are lots of lazy hangout days where we do nothing but chill in our pjs and eat microwaved snackies. It's really great. Our diseases are very different, but mutual awareness of disability makes the friendship lovely.

If I'm going to be in a relationship with someone, I need to be with someone who can offer that.

I want something like what my two chronically ill married friends have: They didn't decide to get married, and then one of them fell ill, and the other one bravely took on the burden of having a sick partner. Instead, one of them fell ill, and then they decided to get married, because the health scare made them realize how much they wanted to share health insurance, have the right to help each other make medical decisions in the hospital, and be each other's emergency contact. When, after marriage, the other partner also became disabled, they had the assurance of knowing their relationship was built on a strong foundation of anti-ableist support.

There are also ways to signal disability and chronic illness, even if you don't want to disclose your specific condition(s) on an app or on a first date.

Like, if anyone can't handle me saying that I take things at a slower pace because I'm disabled/chronically ill...I don't want them in my life.

Also being open about pandemic-related stuff (i.e. that in 2024 the Covid-19 pandemic is very much still here and that I take serious precautions because getting Covid could kill me -- or significantly lower my already-rock-bottom baseline). Mentioning that will weed people out fast.

Does that kinda suck? Yes. Losing old and new connections is not fun.

But I have no interest in anyone who thinks I'm less than.

i feel like the problem with this question is best illustrated by a conversation i had with a friend a while back, where i said something like, "i feel very safe with you because you don't do subtle hints and you are always very straight-up with me about what you are thinking and feeling."

it’s not. this is barely disguised eugenics that they have ACKNOWLEDGED may (will) do more to harm than good for people with abnormal mental states. what else could the end result of finding a “mental illness gene” be than a reason to further marginalize those who are already marginalized, already branded as more likely to be (or even inherently) “mentally ill” and eventually discourage them to reproduce, either by coercion or force?

Given where these hardships cluster most intensely, it is extremely useful to white supremacy and eugenics to have a "scientific" method of proving that pathology is more common among "degenerate" populations.

Being a people pleaser is not a positive quality. It's unhealthy and it doesn't make you a nice person.

This isn't a callout or an attack on people who habitually engage in people-pleasing behavior, it's a call for you to bring the behavior to your awareness, to suss out what the behavior stems from and what you're afraid will happen if you let it go, and to look for ways that you can start reclaiming your agency.

If you habitually shove your needs out of the way to make room for other people, it's likely that you will become resentful and harm your relationships in other ways, whether it's through sudden outbursts of bottled-up emotions or sabotage. That is because people pleasing is exhausting and you will naturally start to seek relief wherever you can get it.

The healthier thing to do is watch for that behavior and give yourself permission to defy it.

just so you know

imo way too many people are going through life thinking they're just going to be sensitive to rejection for life because of how some people (not OP, but definitely plenty of ADHD influencers) talk about this "symptom." I don't think it's terribly productive that it gets constantly cordoned off as its own thing. like a lot of ADHD, while it sucks to have it shape your life up to the point you realize what it is, it is indeed possible to exposure therapy & DBT your way out of it.

What conceptualizing RSD as a category of trauma response to social triggers does is allow us to treat it like any other trauma response. It pulls RSD out of the bioessentialist framework and into the realm of injuries that can be treated, learned associations that can be unlearned. It turns out that the same techniques that help with PTSD triggers, including the same damn meds (hi, clonidine), are effective for helping reduce RSD. (It also explains why RSD is also common in autistic people, who often have a similar history of social error and narratives of self blame, without requiring inherent neurological differences.)