Ending the Stigma Associated with Mental Illness

like u can’t go treating people like shit for being weird or for shit you don’t think makes sense & only turn your ass around when they admit to you they do that shit bc they’ve got [x]

like! you can’t only respect people once they’ve been forced into disclosing highly personal information to you

acting harmlessly “weird” in literally any way

being exhausted all the time/saying they’re too tired to do stuff/needing o sit down when you’re not tired

taking a lot of meds, otc or not

talking a lot/having times where they don’t wanna talk verbally at all

asking, respectfully, for things that take very little effort from you but are mildly “weird” like not wanting to be touched, asking you to repeat yourself a couple times cos they didn’t hear, needing closed captioning on

using hand sanitizer/antiseptic after touching you or your pets etc (it’s not an insult!!)

not wanting to go to crowded events

having intense interests that you think they’re a little too into

Like fun story, your litmus test for “should I be an asshole to this person” should be “are they hurting anyone”, cos if it’s just “do i think they’re weird” you’re literally just enforcing boring regressive social rules that assume everybody’s brain and body should work exactly the same way!!

what i actually do:

That word DOES NOT MEAN you’re making it up. It doesn’t mean you’re imagining the symptom. What it means is that the symptom ISN’T DIRECTLY CAUSED BY ANY OF THE THINGS THAT WOULD NORMALLY CAUSE IT.

I fought to get a PCOS diagnosis for 2 and a half years. For the ENTIRE time I was fighting, I was dealing with 3 cysts that were not going away by themselves and eventually required surgery to remove. At one point close to the end of the battle, I suddenly went blind. I was visiting my parents and was standing on the veranda looking out over the tree we had planted in memory of my dog and suddenly I got one of the shooting pains that I was quite frankly used to at that point and my vision started to go dark. It was like the sun was setting while being completely hidden behind storm clouds but it was 2pm in the middle of Summer on a clear day. Within about 30 seconds I couldn’t see ANYTHING. I was 27 years old and I was screaming for my mother.

My mum raced me to her doctor (he was a 15 minute drive away as opposed to 45 minutes to the nearest hospital) and he quickly worked out that there was nothing wrong with my eyes and what had happened was totally unrelated to them. Then he said it was psychosomatic and I freaked out, yelling that I was NOT making this up and I definitely wasn’t imagining it. Very quickly he calmed me down and said he believed me and I had misunderstood. He explained that whatever was going on with my abdominal pains (he suggested PCOS which I hadn’t even heard of at that point) had been ignored for so long that my body was starting to do things other than the normal pain response to try to draw my attention to the problem. My sight going was my body basically jumping around in front of me going “HEY ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME HELLLOOOOOOO??????”

He gave me some prescription strength painkillers and my sight started to come back as soon as they started to kick in. About 45 minutes after it started I could see well enough to walk around without help and within a day and a half I was back to normal. On top of that I finally had a scan booked to figure out what the hell was causing all the pain.