The reason reassuring people that theyāre not faking their mental illnesses for attention has never worked is because mental illnesses, while not fake, generally are for attention.
of course we want attention. weāre social animals that live in communities and individual survival is based on the ability of others to see and care about our needs. Itās not going to fucking work to convince people that they have no desire to have their suffering recognized by others. Of course they do. They want to be helped.
We convinced people that itās wrong to want your individual needs recognized. Anxiety and depression have to be just plain suffering, not a sign that you need something, but how the fuck do you suffer without needing.
It is bullshit, because thereās actually evidence that the way mental illnesses WORK is that they manifest in ways that draw āattention.ā This was hypothesized in a book I read once, Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters. The book had the idea that cultural differences in how mental illnesses manifest have a lot to do with what, in that culture, communicates that something is wrong.
it has always stuck with me because āsomaticā manifestations of mental illness (like, physical rather than āmentalā/emotional symptoms) are more the norm outside of western cultures, and in western cultures theyāre treated as something weird and exotic enough to have their own disorderāsomatic symptoms disorder. It sounds super weird to us for someone to have chronic pain or stomachaches from an emotional problem, but it absolutely happens, and thatās often how anxiety manifests in kids?? Which makes me think that itās the āmentalā part thatās learned. When you think about it emotions all are not that different from physical feelings and they physically affect the body.
My anxiety symptoms have lots of āphysicalā manifestations with no mental/emotional component. Phantom pain associated with my triggers. Etc. and over the past year Iāve been becoming convinced that I got that way by suppressing my emotional responses. I donāt experience anxiety as an emotion anymore. Like. At all. Iām not sure how itās supposed to feel as an emotion. I cannot have panic attacks any more. Not donāt. Canāt. At present, Iām completely back to square one with coping, because the distress is still there, itās just found totally new ways to manifest.
What Iāve learned is that it really is about Attention, and sometimes your brain wants attention from other people, and sometimes it wants attention from you.
So long spent firmly branding my anxiety as irrational, dismissing it, treating it as this foreign object inside my head I didnāt want...but it was me. It was me the whole time, me trying to protect me, trying to keep me safe, and I spent YEARS trying to turn it off and now here I am. Iāve had the most unintelligibly stressful year of my life and have been falling apart but canāt identify what exactly is falling apart. I got to the point where whenever I stopped myself thinking about something that upset me, I would immediately go back to having nightmares about it.
idk. This is a tangent. The problem is that we think āwanting attentionā is bad. Literally no itās not. Why is āIām not having my needs met, Iām not having my pain seen, I am hurting and I need helpā seen as something wrong to communicate?
