INACTIVE

It’s “normal” as in “many people experience pain, loneliness, anxiety, self-hatred, and other symptoms of mental illness that feel like they ‘don’t count’ because there’s no real Thing they can point to to explain it, but their pain and suffering are real and ought to be taken seriously.”

One basic test of massive internal pain is a depression test. Here’s one such questionnaire, the PHQ-9. It lists nine symptoms of depression and asks people how much they have experienced them over the last few weeks. Among them are symptoms like, “Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless,” “Feeling bad about yourself – or that you are a failure or have let yourself or your family down,” and “Thoughts that you would be better off dead or of hurting yourself in some way.”

It’s scored by asking people to rate if they’ve experienced the thing: 0, not at all, 1, several days, 2, more than half the days, or 3, nearly every day. Then you get a total score by adding up the ranking of each of the nine symptoms listed. So the lowest possible score is 0 (never experienced any of the symptoms) and the highest possible is 27 (all the symptoms nearly every day). The PHQ-9 considers scores above 5 to indicate mild depression, above 10, moderate, and above 15, moderate to severe depression.

When you run thousands of people through the PHQ-9–for example, if you ask doctor’s offices to ask everyone seeing their doctor for any reason to take it–this is what the score distribution looks like: 

Far and away, the most common score is 0. The vast majority of people experience no symptoms of depression in their daily lives. The vast majority of people do not feel hopeless, do not feel like failures, and do not think they would be better off if they were dead in their day-to-day lives.

egklefdjfsl;fjgsdfg 

everyone be quiet unless ur holosapphic’s tags.

if you’ve been trained to to dislike yourself for enjoying anything due to years of being told you’re annoying clap your hands 👏👏👏

if I listed out every particular instance that was met with negativity enough for me to stop feeling comfortable talking about it, this comic would be like 50 panels.

In my case, I’ve missed out on so many experiences because of this. I had given up trying to make people see the things I like aren’t a waste of time. But I’m slowly trying to claim them back.