youarenotyou:

i wish people would stop blaming us crazies for violence when we live in a world in which violence is in no way irrational

i mean, who’s surprised when a white guy is violent? every time a white dude’s power is challenged he’s bound to get angry about it. and white male anger=violence. the combination of patriarchy and white supremacy, and the sense of entitlement it grants, is fucking terrifying.

not to mention the fact that the state never hesitates to use violent tactics to control & keep marginalized people in their place. isn’t this shit taught to us from an early age?

but it’s just way easier and more convenient to separate ourselves from these so-called isolated incidents and NEVER consider the systemic reasons someone may be violent.

toopunktofuck:

screamingdustspecks:

toopunktofuck:

pro tip: going through therapy can be an exhausting, draining process, especially if you need to work through trauma

so aside from being expensive if you don’t have excellent health insurance or full coverage from medicaid or charity care,

some people don’t have the mental strength at the moment to work through situations in their past that were extremely traumatic (wow who would have thought)

some people are in abusive situations where it is unsafe for them to seek help

if someone, for whatever reason, tells you that they are not able to get therapy after you suggest it, it’s usually a pretty good reason, and you should drop the issue.

Also some people have had bad experiences with therapy that make them unable to trust therapists or seek help from them.

very important addition!

malkatz:

i hate when people vilify psychiatric pills as ‘mind-altering drugs’

like

yes

that’s exactly what they are

they are for mental illness

mental

if i had a kidney-related illness, i would hope to have kidney-altering drugs on the market

aloofshahbanou:

not interested in politics that don’t incorporate love

not interested in the anaesthetisation of politics

not interested in theory sans emotion 

let’s use our feelings to talk about power

let’s use our feelings to fuck up power

what the fuck are you waiting for

learn how to cry again

learn how to scream again

pour yourself into things

bleed onto things

fuck shit up

let’s get visceral

don’t let dead men with books hold your heart hostage

youarenotyou:

TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE, ANTI-PSYCHIATRY BULLSHIT

toopunktofuck:

californiaexpatriate:

drugsandanarchy:

mh-things:

Unfortunately true.

It’s a bit unfair to compare something life threatening to something not immediately life threatening.

Also, psychiatric care is really just a nice way of saying, “mind-altering drugs”.

I’m writing my own response to this, because honestly I am absolutely SICK of this photo set and its ignorant comments and have a lot of things to say that haven’t already been covered.

Hello there, my name is Stiv, I’m almost 21 years old, and I have been mentally ill as far back as my conscious memory goes. I have Borderline Personality Disorder, OCD, and dysthymia as official diagnoses. I also might have some other issues my therapist hasn’t disclosed to me because BPD patients sometimes have an issue where any new diagnosis becomes their new identity, and I totally understand their fears.

Do you want to know the main theory as to why I am mentally ill?

Physical illness.

The day before my fourth birthday, in upstate new york, in the year 1996, I got bit by a tick and by the end of the night of my birthday, I had a full-blown fever, bullseye rash, and aches and chills.

That’s right, I had lyme disease.
This might sound unrelated, but there are new studies coming to the surface regarding young children who had lyme disease - many of them have various neurological and mental illness symptoms, and BPD is particularly common among people who had lyme disease as small children. One of my best friends also had lyme, and she has BPD traits. Her little sister had it too and she has full blown BPD at age 15.

The bacteria that causes lyme disease infects the spinal cord and nervous system in children much quicker than it does in adults. It’s thought to cause neurological damage.

And yes, at that age, lyme disease almost killed me.

But years later, my BPD almost killed me more than once. I wanted to die.

What really, really baffles me about everything is, this is just one example of many, MANY instances of a physical illness, life-threatening or no, becoming a mental illness. Many older people with chronic pain become depressed, anxious, or develop substance abuse issues. Hell, why do you fucking THINK people with cancer get therapeutic counseling?!

“NOT IMMEDIATELY LIFE THREATENING” also pisses me off, because nobody who has been in a room with a person who has just attempted suicide and can come out and say that shit.

Suicide is a HUGE risk in BPD. 10% of BPD patients eventually successfully commit suicide.

That’s REALLY high

and do you fucks know why there is shitty quality of care for mentally ill people?

BECAUSE OF SHIT LIKE THIS

People spread myths about mental illness like “they’re not life threatening” and these myths are one of the biggest contributors to stigma.
As a result of stigma, people won’t admit they’re mentally ill, people won’t admit their relative is mentally ill, or their friend, and because of stigma, very little hospital funding actually goes into helping people on psychiatric inpatient and outpatient units. Our medications are ridiculously expensive ($700 for Abilify without insurance) and not well-researched and many of the newer ones could be dangerous, as they were just shuffled onto the market without extensive years of study.
Many psychiatrists in the United States are not psychiatrists because they wanted to help the mentally ill, but because they were failing out of med school. There’s actually a shortage of people who actually give a fuck in the systems that are supposed to be helping us.

I hope you’re all happy with yourselves because this is an attitude that legitimately kills people.

i am genuinely amazed at people who think mental illness isn’t life threatening. y’all can go fuck yourselves. locked psych wards exist for a reason, dipshits

and yr “mind altering drugs” ARE ACTUALLY REALLY NECESSARY FOR SOME OF US TO CONTINUE LIVING

THX

tuimitchams:

when you’re talking about something or someone changing a lot (rather than referring to bipolar disorder or someone with bipolar disorder) please don’t use “bipolar” to describe this.  because using “bipolar” when you’re annoyed with the weather or to insult your ex is really shitty.

• moody
• capricious
• erratic
• temperamental
• volatile
• inconsistent
• fickle
• impulsive
• vacillating
• mercurial
• variable
• unpredictable 

similar post for words to use instead of “OCD”

youarenotyou:

crystalsavestheday:

uggatrip:

tumblr could learn a thing or two from yahoo! news

seriously, I’ve been thinking this forever

tw: abuse, victim blaming

mental health off limits sure but she deserves to be attacked/criticized for telling rihanna she deserved to be beaten b/c she’s “ugly”

i have no interest in defending someone who would say something like that. the worst thing about how people are talking about her is this idea that we ought to excuse every vile thing she says because of untreated mental illness. are you fuckin serious?? let’s stop perpetuating the myth that mental illness makes a person abusive & actually hold her accountable for this shit, how about that?

nunslinger:

Hush girl, shut your lips; do the Helen Keller and become an outspoken supporter of radical socialism.

b1a4gy:

disabledtalk:

“Teachers have held up Helen Keller, the blind and deaf girl who overcame her physical handicaps, as an inspiration to generations of schoolchildren.  Every fifth grader knows the scene in which Anne Sullivan spells water into young Helen’s hand at the pump.  At least a dozen movies and filmstrips have been made on Keller’s life.  Each yields its version of the same cliche.  A McGraw-Hill educational film concludes: “The gift of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan to the world is to constantly remind us of the wonder of the world around us and how much we owe those though taught us what it means, for there is no person that is unworthy or incapable of being helped, and the greatest service any person can make is to help another reach true potential.”

To draw such a bland maxim from the life of Helen Keller, historians and filmmakers have disregarded her actual biography and left out the lessons she specifically asked us to learn from it.  Keller, who struggled so valiantly to learn to speak, has been made mute by history…Keller, who was born in 1880, graduated from Radcliffe in 1904 and died in 1968.  To ignore the sixty-four years of her adult life or to encapsulate them with the single word humanitarian is to lie by omission.

The truth is that Helen Keller was a radical socialist.  She joined the Socialist Party of Massachusetts in 1909…Keller’s commitment to socialism stemmed from her experience as a disabled person and from her sympathy for others with handicaps.  She began by working to simplify the alphabet for the blind, but soon came to realise that to deal solely with blindness was to treat symptom, not cause.  Through research she learned that blindness was not distributed randomly throughout the population but was concentrated in the lower class.  Men who were poor might be blinded in industrial accidents or by inadequate medical care; poor women who became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindness.  Thus Keller learned how the social class system controls people’s opportunities in life, sometimes determining even whether they can see.  Keller’s research was not just book learning:  ”I have visited sweatshops, factories, crowded slums.  If I could not see it, I could smell it.”

At the time Keller became a socialist, she was one of the most famous women on the planet.  She soon became the most notorious.  Her conversion to socialism caused a new storm of publicity—this time outraged….Typical was the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, who wrote that Keller’s “mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her developement.”

Keller recalled having met this editor:  ”At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them.  But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error.  I must have shrunk in intelligence in the years since I met him.”  She went on, “Oh ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle!  Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which we are trying to prevent.”

Keller, who devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind, never wavered in her belief that our society needed radical change.  Having herself fought so hard to speak, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union to fight for the free speech of others.  She sent $100 to the NAACP with a letter of support that appeared in its magazine The Crisis—a radical act for a white person from Alabama in the 1920s.  She supported Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, in each of his compaigns for the presidency.  She composed essays on the women’s movement, on politics, on economics…

One may not agree with Helen Keller’s positions.  Her praise of the USSR now seems naive, embarrassing, even treasonous.  But she was a radical—a fact few Americans know, because our schooling and our mass media left it out.`

-Lies My Teacher Told Me - James W. Loewen, 2007

wow.

youarenotyou:

girljanitor:

crackerhell:

Triggers are supposedly when you are very suddenly pulled into a flashback, crawl into a corner and start sobbing like a baby/screaming/some OUT THERE!!!!! and obvious reaction that everyone can see.

This is wrong.

This is wrong because different people have different panic responses. Discomfort isn’t being triggered for sure, but becoming unable to function? By that I mean things like being able to read signs and navigate your way around your neighborhood and suddenly becoming unable to. I mean suddenly being unable to eat. For an entire day or days. Having a LATENT reaction where you don’t flip out until you’re in private. Becoming manic.

All of these things are trigger reactions, and on TOP of that, one’s life circumstances and experiences DETERMINE what sort of trigger reaction a person is prone to.

How likely do you think a person who knows that a single bad reaction at work will lose them their job and their livelihood will allow their triggers to be obvious in public? Do you really think that just because a person has been forced to figure out how to hold it in for an extra hour, or to find other ways that don’t threaten their entire lives, they’re less triggered than others?

On the contrary, the only people who are allowed to do heinous, egregious shit in public with little to no long-term effect are FUCKING WHITE PEOPLE. So it’s really fucking smooth that the only triggers that are real are triggers that WHITE PEOPLE are the only ones likely to actually display.

That’s not even going into the racist ass psychiatry that will say that a PoC who DOES flip out is just “overexaggerating” anyway. 

Bewarey of people claiming triggers? Yes. Especially in situations where they did something that could’ve triggered others and got rightfully yelled at. But that’s a completely different situation.

Like when people at work would think it was funny or playful to “sneak up” behind me to try and scare me, or put their cold hands on the back of my neck. When I’m in “work mode”, all normal startle reaction are completely and preemptively suppressed; I don’t react at all except to freeze and my face goes completely blank. They can’t see that my entire body is being flooded with stress and panic hormones, and it’s a survival mechanism to go motionless until I can understand what’s happening.

I’ve actually injured myself from the muscular tension in the way i carry myself in situations where something like that can conceivably happen. Even if I’m not injured by it I still come home feeling quite literally like I’ve been beaten by a sack of potatoes, and endure muscle spasms in my shoulders, legs, face, and neck (esp hate the face ones).

On the plus side my lack of reaction usually causes people to stop doing that, which is probably why it developed in the first lace. People used to grab me all the time because my reactions were so “funny” to them.

so fucking relevant to my life. so. fucking. relevant.