melissa boles

So Thomas Aquinas walks into a bar...

Bartender pours him a big goblet of mead and says, "How you doing?"

Aquinas says, "Oh, not so great… I’ve been working on this treatise for seminarians… Uh, basically explains all the major points of Catholicism… It could be the most important theological document of our time… I even thought of the perfect title…. ‘Summa Theologica’... So, I-I finish it, and I misplaced it... I can't find it anywhere, and I can't understand why God would inspire me to do this and then allow it to be taken away… What is God trying to tell me?"

An Exotic Dancer Demonstrates That Her Underwear Was Too Large To Have Exposed Herself, After Undercover Police Officers Arrested Her In Florida

Dorothy Counts – The First Black Girl To Attend An All-White School In The United States – Being Teased And Taunted By Her White Male Peers At Charlotte’s Harry Harding High School, 1957

Austrian Boy Receives New Shoes During WWII

Jewish Prisoners After Being Liberated From A Death Train, 1945

The Graves Of A Catholic Woman And Her Protestant Husband, Holland, 1888

A Lone Man Refusing To Do The Nazi Salute, 1936

Job Hunting In 1930’s

German Soldiers React To Footage Of Concentration Camps, 1945

Residents Of West Berlin Show Children To Their Grandparents Who Reside On The Eastern Side, 1961

Acrobats Balance On Top Of The Empire State Building, 1934

Mafia Boss Joe Masseria Lays Dead On A Brooklyn Restaurant Floor Holding The Ace Of Spades, 1931

Lesbian Couple At Le Monocle, Paris, 1932

The Most Beautiful Suicide – Evelyn Mchale Leapt To Her Death From The Empire State Building, 1947

The Remains Of The Astronaut Vladimir Komarov, A Man Who Fell From Space, 1967

Race Organizers Attempt To Stop Kathrine Switzer From Competing In The Boston Marathon. She Became The First Woman To Finish The Race, 1967

Harold Whittles Hearing Sound For The First Time, 1974

gifset request meme →  requested by captainsamerica 

and it’s fucking killing me because ???  the idea of being annoyed by people telling you that stuff is because those people honestly think that doing yoga and “looking on the bright side” will magically cure your depression, because they can’t imagine happiness not coming as easily to someone else as it does to them.  the idea isn’t that getting exercise and practicing positive thinking are useless ways to treat depression.  but that’s what i’m seeing a lot of now and i just want to say…. i got some fucking bad news, cause that is the treatment for depression.

therapists telling you to get good nutrition and exercise are not the same as your yoga-instructor aunt on facebook posting pictures of the sunrise and wondering how anyone can be depressed when the world is so wonderful!!! thats not just an anti-recovery attitude, it’s an anti-treatment attitude, and it’s unbelievably ignorant.

there’s sort of this interesting circular form to dealing with mental illness, where you start in a place of “i just need to think positively and push myself out of this ditch” and then you move to step 2, which is “depression is a real and very serious illness and it’s not my fault that i’m tired all the time, stop telling me to just “think positive” all the time.”

But then there’s step three, which is where you size up your situation and say “look, i understand how serious my illness is, and i’m no longer blaming myself for it.  And it sucks, and I don’t “deserve” this, and I didn’t bring it on myself.  But regardless of how unfair it is, the truth is that I’m the only one who can actually do anything about it.”  And so in a lot of ways, you end up with parallel ways of thinking as before, but this time you’re coming from a completely different source of understanding.  People who don’t know anything about mental illness say “depression is a choice.”  People who are fed up with being depressed and realize that wallowing in the comforting embrace of self-pity is useful to erase guilt, but ultimately won’t help them lead a better life say, “recovery is a choice.”

The first group means that if you’re depressed, you can just magically decide not to be depressed.  The second group means that depression is a crushing weight on your back determined to make your life as miserable (and as short) as possible, and that you didn’t do anything to cause it, but that ultimately you have the choice of giving up and accepting being depressed for the rest of your life, or you have the option of making an effort to improve your quality of life.  Similar statements, totally different meanings.

But I think a lot of people are sort of seduced by the comfort of giving up, and with the good intention of creating communities of understanding and non-judgement between mentally ill people, social media has unwittingly created communities of mentally ill people encouraging each other to give up.  To just accept that this is the way their lives are, and there’s no possibility of getting better.  And that’s how it’s gotten to the point of people dismissing actual mental health professionals as being no different than some ignorant person who doesn’t know the first thing about psychology and thinks an avocado smoothie will solve all your problems.

Avocado smoothie people are coming from the first perspective, that being depressed is a free choice that you can easily opt out of.  Therapists are coming from the second perspective, where mental illness is a horrible reality, but given that you’re seeing them, a provider of mental health treatment, of fucking course they’re going to give you advice on how to treat your mental illness!  Your therapist isn’t going to sit around and say “yeah man that sucks, haha look at this funny meme about how much you want to kill yourself.”  Your therapist is going to give you recommendations of activities and habits that will help you recover.  And they understand that these activities are not easy!!!  They get that!!!  The reason they’re there is to help you introduce these activities and ways of thinking into your life!!!  Otherwise they’d just hand you a pamphlet and walk out!!!

But you can’t access that kind of help - the kind where you say “getting out of the house is a real problem for me, I never have the energy to get out of bed” and your therapist says “okay let’s figure out how to break this down into small steps, we’ll set a small goal for this week, and next time we meet you can tell me if it worked out, and if it did then we can figure out what the next goal will be, and if not then we can figure out why it didn’t work and try a different approach” - if you immediately dismiss any mention of recovery as “neurotypical bullshit.”

Anyways please please please take your healthcare seriously, get treatment, and realize that giving up and normalizing your depression/anxiety/etc as something that will never ever get better (yes, even if it’s a chronic condition that you’ll never fully cure, you still need to treat it) is not okay.  Try to get good nutrition. Try to get sunshine and exercise.  Try to be social.  Making an effort to do things that will help you is not the same as thinking mental illness is a switch you can easily flip.  Getting treatment is not the same thing as pretending your mental illness doesn’t exist or isn’t serious.  On the contrary, getting treatment is taking your mental illness seriously.  I’m not saying you should never make a joke or reblog a fucking meme or anything, I’m saying don’t use social media as your mental health care provider.  Social media can be a way to vent, but venting is not the same thing as recovering.

I’ve got my boyfriend calling me at 8am every weekday morning to get me out of bed so that I *get out of bed*. I then tell him when I’ve gotten to the gym.

We have worked this out between us, consensually, because I can’t fucking make myself do it. Because depression. But when I get up and go to the gym, suddenly my days get way, way more functional. I eat real food, I run errands, I cook- instead of laying on the couch feeling like my diaphragm got nailed to the floor. (They don’t all necessarily happen every day, but they become at least theoretically feasible.) This isn’t part 1, it’s part 3. Because dammit, I am fucking sick of this shit. I don’t deserve it and it’s a real issue- and for me, having someone to basically hotwire me because my starter is broken is how we’re gonna get a routine that takes minimal spoons to run.

Sometimes depression is cureable. Sometimes it’s just treatable. But dissing treatment because “gah neurotypicals” is shooting yourself in the foot.