My chest feels weirdly tight and I feel like I’m having trouble getting enough air. I’m not sure if this is a delayed reaction to the flu shot (they told me to stick around for 10 minutes to see if I developed that side effect, and I didn’t in the first hour or so) or some sort of low-level panic attack, only partly related to the midterm elections. I’ve been taking a fair amount of Gabapentin but I still feel weird. I even checked my blood pressure while I was killing time at the pharmacy (because I’ve been feeling lightheaded and faint when I stand up after lying down for a while), and that was fine but my resting heart rate was ridiculously high.
Tag: tw: mental illness
I’m going to point it out again: Another genius moment in acting/directing. Look at his expression. He feels nothing. Nothing at all.
There’s no one to put on a show for here. There’s no need for posturing when he doesn’t have an audience. And what do we get when he’s basically alone? Nothing. He feels nothing.
Like I said in a previous post (when he dropped Thor from the helocarrier), this is not a lack of sympathy or regret necessarily. This is not a lack of the normal spectrum of emotions. This is a lack of resolution. He went into this mad plan with expectations. Expectations of feeling powerful. Of finally being equal to Thor—maybe even more. Of revenge. None of those expectations are fulfilled (long before he gets Hulk-smashed).
I’m going to put forth an unusual speculation here. His actions, particularly in these moments, speak less of being a sociopath or psychopath, and more of severe depression. I’m not talking about the blues when you’re having a bad day or a bad week. Severe depression is not being sad all the time.
It’s being numb. All. The. Time. It’s feeling nothing when you know you should feel something. It’s not caring. About anything.
Severe depression messes with your moral center (and I don’t mean religious morals). It’s very difficult to differentiate between right or wrong because you feel no guilt, no shame, no elation. The quest becomes less about finding happiness (while in the throes of such an acute depression, happiness is not only impossible, the notion is utterly unbelievable—a fiction without any truth). The quest is merely to feel better. To feel at all.
Think about it. Despite his act of insincerity, Loki was probably prone to brooding even before his world fell apart. He probably experienced bouts of mild to moderate depression throughout his life. (The mischief might have helped to alleviate that.) Then he finds out what he is—not the son of Odin (whose approval he desperately wanted)—but one of very enemy he was raised to hate. Fast forward through his botched attempt at genocide, fratricide and successful patricide—then a fall through the vortex of the dying Bifrost (who knows what happened there?), and finally he was held captive by Thanos.
How is he not depressed? (If not suffering from a complete psychosis.) And I doubt he is not cognizant enough to realize the severity of his mental illness.
And so he pursues these things, thinking that he’ll feel better (that he’ll feel something) and in the end, he still feels nothing.
You’ll never convince me that Loki’s look of blankness as he lets go of Gungnir, that that was a suicide attempt, is not part of some severe depression issues and that everything just gets magnified to about a thousand times worse and twisted up when he goes through the Void.
So I’ve probably talked about the kind of strange phenomenon of men I dated, or even just went on a few dates with, getting in touch with me years later. There’s one guy I went on a few dates with in 2013 but haven’t seen since who keeps sending me Facebook messages at random intervals. I haven’t replied in a couple years. He’s married; he even gave me a last-minute invitation to his wedding. I didn’t go, obviously. Anyway, I posted some pictures on Facebook from my Renaissance fair outing, including this one of me attempting archery:
And, presumably in response to this photo (or maybe the one of me eating a turkey leg, I don’t know), he sent me the message: “Hey! Your renaissance faire pictures just showed up in my feed – you like like you’re in killer shape now! Clearly moving to Canada agrees with you haha”
Which I found especially creepy, because most of his random messages aren’t specifically commenting on my body. And also this photo, since it’s in profile, clearly displays how thin I am, which is actually not good because I’ve been unintentionally losing weight due to depression and anxiety. But thanks for reinforcing my latent eating-disordered thought patterns by telling me how great I look when I’m unhealthily underweight. That’s really what I needed in my life.
Some Asshole: You can’t be! Truly yourself! If you’re on medication! It’s changing the Real You™!
Me: if the real me is going to lie on the floor for 3 weeks and try to drown herself in the river I don’t want to know her, Barbara
Relatedly… I should probably be really suspicious of a potential new therapist who tells me antidepressants are only supposed to be short-term measures, right?
22 Things Movies Get Completely Wrong About Mental Illness
Cracked doing the Lord’s work and shedding light on ableism and inaccuracy.
So, is it AuntieMeme’s goal to make people with depression feel worse about themselves? Because that’s how people who are predisposed to take any negative portrayal of their condition personally will take a PSA saying they’ll make terrible partners and ruin relationships. If she’s not trying to trigger suicides, her PSA is dreadfully misguided. @cracked
OK, great, thanks for confirming that I’ll never be in a functional long-term relationship. I really needed that, Cracked.
There are a lot of problems with this list – which you can probably predict if they’re given in bite-sized “meme” form.
22. Amnesia. “In The Avengers, Black Widow punches back Hawkeye’s memories” – Did you even fucking watch The Avengers? Because that’s not what happened. It was presented as a way to break magical mind-control (a problem that will never arise in the real world), not to cure amnesia. The “head-bump” amnesia cure thing is a movie/TV trope, apparently, but The Avengers doesn’t use it.
19. Psychopathy. “The charismatic psychopath is everywhere” – First of all, why is Loki’s picture on here? He may be many things, but he is never characterized as a psychopath. OK, Tom Hiddleston inaccurately used the term in some interviews for The Avengers. But psychopaths don’t start crying when their estranged brother urges them to stop the evil plan they’re carrying out under threat from a bigger supervillain.
More importantly, though: “antisocial personality disorder causes a laundry list of symptoms that make a person impossible to be in a relationship with.” Define “impossible.” I don’t think any movie depiction of a psychopath denies that it becomes extremely difficult, unpleasant, or even dangerous to be in a relationship with a psychopath for an extended period of time. But it’s extremely dangerous to suggest that you can identify a psychopath immediately in such a way that no one will ever be tempted to get into a relationship with them. Because people do, and it ends badly. Yes, there are charismatic psychopaths. They can’t keep up the act forever, but they can lure people in.
15. Depression. “Hollywood loves a sad, brooding love interest” – @goingrampant pointed out the biggest problem with the claim in the second picture above: it suggests that depressed people are rightly doomed to be alone forever because they can’t sustain a relationship, which is empirically false. It is true that it can be very hard to sustain a relationship with undiagnosed and/or untreated depression. But really, the problem with the two characters pictured is that they’re immortal vampires in love with mortals, and in Angel’s case, tortured by guilt over centuries of murder (never having read or seen Twilight, I don’t know what Edward’s issues are). Again… probably not gonna arise in real life. What this entry should have said is that depression itself should not be romanticized. If you’re attracted to a sad, tortured person because they’re sad and tortured, whether you think you can save them or want them to stay that way because you think it’s hot… just don’t. Or maybe they should have pointed out that while many creative people are depressed, depression doesn’t make you more creative. If you love a depressed person (or their art), encourage them to seek and/or stay in treatment.
9. Electroconvulsive (electroshock) therapy. Yes, it’s now quite safe and well-controlled. Many of the movie depictions take place in an earlier era, when it was not so safe and well-controlled (here’s the history from the Wikipedia article). It would be good if media also contained accurate depictions of the way the procedure works now rather than allowing the sensationalistic, exaggerated depictions of earlier methods to dominate the popular imagination. But it’s misleading to use the contemporary status of ECT to berate Hollywood for its portrayal in movies set in the 1950s and 60s.
4. Autistic savantism. “Even if the character was meant to be autistic, the likelihood of him having savantism would be a scant 10%.” Um, OK… what’s the likelihood of anything else that happens in movies? If the movie were somehow making the claim that it’s typical for autistic people to be savants, that would be a problem. Maybe audiences have drawn that conclusion, but that seems like a problem with the reception rather than with the film itself. (Unless there are a lot of other movies about autistic savants? Do most media depictions of autistic characters involve savantism? If so, they should have said so.) And then they go on to say that “the prevalence of savantism in the non-autistic population… is less than 1%.” Sounds like they just confirmed that it’s way more common among autistic people than the general population, so it’s actually more probable than if it were just an otherwise neurotypical dude.
Of all the problems you could have picked with Rain Man, this seems like an extremely odd one. Surely there are other harmful inaccuracies in the depiction of autism. Or you could point to the troubling fact that neurotypical actors use portrayals of people with mental illnesses or disabilities as Oscar bait.
The rest are fine and probably helpful to some people. But it’s not helpful to replace misconceptions with different misconceptions.
I’m much better at not eating anything when I’m a mass of self-loathing and anxiety than I ever was when I was deliberately anorexic…
My advisor, a 70-year-old man, saw me at our department colloquium yesterday for the first time in a while (I’ve mostly been at home working, he’s been traveling, etc.) and asked me how I was. I said fine, mostly, just stressed out and busy. He asked me if I had lost weight, gesturing to his face to indicate that that was how he had noticed. (I was wearing a sweater over a button-up shirt, so it would have been hard to tell any other way.) I said yes, and asked if I looked unhealthy. He said no, he thought I looked good, and then said “You can never be too rich or too thin.”
This made me really uncomfortable, not so much because he’s an old man and I’m a young woman (though that makes it weird, too) as because I was anorexic in college, and I weigh about as little now as when the eating disorder was at its worst. (I’m not losing weight on purpose this time; I’ve been losing my appetite due to dissertation and job market stress.) He made a joke about something that’s really sensitive for me, and basically told me that I look good (better? unclear) when I’m at an abnormally low weight.
I probably shouldn’t say anything to him, because that would just make things weirder. Just gotta bitch about it on Tumblr, I guess.
suicidal people deserve a space to talk about their suicidal feelings without risking hospitalization/institutionalization or being accused of being manipulative or attention seeking
It’s a therapist. The word you’re looking for is a therapist.
wrong
The second a therapist thinks you’re even slightly suicidal (ie. Whenever you even say the word suicide) they “pink slip” you, which means you get sent to a mental hospital against your will.
I think about suicide almost every day, but it doesn’t always mean I’m gonna go kill myself.
I just want to say, as someone who has taken courses in ethics and regulations regarding psychology and therapy and has worked at a counseling center for more than five years, THIS SHOULD NOT BE THE CASE. The only time a therapist or other healthcare provider is required to report suicidal or homicidal ideation is if there is a specific plan. I am deeply sorry to anyone who has ever experienced a therapist who acted otherwise. To the person above, I am not sure what your experience has been, but I promise you it is not a typical one, at least not in the area where I live (California). I have never heard of a “pink slip”, and I’ve worked with therapists for 5+ years.
Going to a therapist changed my life. I was able to open up and say “I think about suicide almost every day”, and for the first time in my life someone said “You don’t have to live like this.” She didn’t have me hospitalized, she didn’t raise any alarms. She gently asked me if I had a specific plan, and when I said no, she said “We are going to help you get better.”
YOUR THERAPIST ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT HAVE YOU HOSPITALIZED AT THE MERE MENTION OF SUICIDAL IDEATION.
If you say, “I’m going to kill myself tonight by overdose,” then yes, they are required by law to have you hospitalized. Otherwise it is THEIR JOB to help you process your feelings and find a way to help you function and feel better.
I cannot be more emphatic about this. Therapists, by and large, are here to help, not to hospitalize. If you have health insurance, contact them today to find out about your mental health coverage. Go to your general care doctor and tell them how you’re feeling so that they can refer you to the right person. If you don’t have health insurance, find a resource for a free/reduced fee clinic near you. Marriage and Family Therapist Interns are a great option, as they often see clients on a sliding fee scale. PLEASE GET HELP.
LISTEN TO ME: YOU CANNOT LEGALLY BE HOSPITALIZED AGAINST YOUR WILL FOR SUICIDAL IDEATION. FEAR OF HOSPITALIZATION SHOULD NOT STOP YOU FROM SEEKING HELP.
I understand that many people have hospital related trauma, and I understand, and sympathize. Talk to me. Send me a message. I will be happy to find you further information on laws and regulations in your area, referrals to other counseling centers, or even just listen to what you have to say.
I couldn’t in good conscience scroll past this without saying something. As someone who struggled with depression for much longer than I should have because of fear of seeking treatment, I want to encourage everyone, experiencing any degree of mental illness to get help. I will do anything I can to support those of you going through something like this. I’m here for you.
I literally talk to my therapist about suicidal ideation all the time and all she’s ever done is have me clarify that I wasn’t planning on acting on it. I’m tired of tumblr discouraging people from trusting mental health professionals.
tumblr is full of ridiculous claims about how mental health people behave. like, i know several people who’ve been sent to mental hospitals. most of them asked to be. they specifically tried to check in. people sometimes discuss with therapists whether the degree of planning they had in place constituted “enough” for hospitalization. it’s a cooperative process because the goal is to figure out whether they need that help.
i’ve never seen this “pink slip” thing, and i’ve seen lots of people who talk to therapists about suicidal ideations a lot.
um. ‘pink slip’ means you’re fired. it’s not even a thing in mental health care.
i discussed suicidal ideation with my therapist for years. she had me clarify that it was ideation, not a plan, and hospitalizing me was not even considered.
stop trying to scare depressed people into avoiding help. it’s about as helpful and responsible as trying to talk them into sticking a fork in a light socket.
I’ve only heard pink slip used to refer to firing as well. I don’t know for sure that the post about it is false, but it seems very odd to use the same term for it. Like, idiot ball wielding cartoon villainous.
Heck, I went through a period of having really aggressive, detailed intrusive thoughts involving hurting people, and I could talk about THAT, in enough graphic detail that the poor guy probably had nightmares and I wasn’t hospitalised.
I’m very uncomfortable with tumblr’s whole scaremongering around therapists. I mean for starters, a counsellor, a therapist, a psychiatrist and a psychologist are all different categories and there’s a weird kind of conflation of all of these things, like the dude who did my CBT can force me to go on meds’ despite not having a medical license. And I absolutely believe bad mental health professionals exist, I’ve experienced them myself, but there’s a massive difference between telling people that not all therapists are decent and some are outright horrendous, and telling people (what is in this case I think deliberate, based on the pink slip thing) falsehoods to stir up a sentiment of never ever getting help of any kind.
(I have also just typed up and deleted three different disclaimers regarding how mental I am and what experiences I’ve had with professionals because I am very aware of the likelihood of getting Karen’d when I say shit like this, but I’ve decided I am under zero obligation to show off my scars for strangers on the internet.)
This, exactly.
Bad professionals definitely exist, and can certainly do lasting harm. I’ve had a few clueless ones and one legit terrible one, and she wasn’t nearly the worst out there, and I still occasionally randomly remember something she said and hate everything for a while.
And people should get to decide whether or not they want professional help, too.
But some of the descriptions on here don’t work for me because they don’t stop at “this happened to me” but insist “this will happen to you.”
Apologies if it is not my place to intrude upon this conversation. I have not a lot of experience with this subject. I would like to say that my parents have always cautioned me against sharing certain sensitive details with these sorts of psychological authority figures because of their power to destroy lives. Even if they themselves are solitary humans, they are connected to powerful social structures associated with the government, which is always out to maintain control of its citizens. The psychological authority figures want you returned to a state where you do things the government likes, and that is the underlying reason why they act like they want to help you. They’re henchmen. At least, that is the way my parents presented the issue. It’s not just tumblr. I imagine it has to do with a conservative framework conceptualizing the government as predatory in its authoritarianism vs. a liberal framework conceptualizing it as parental.
I honestly am not sure how to address this because there’s so much to unpack in it.
I think the first thing to say is… I can’t speak to other liberals, much less further-left-ists like communists, but I wouldn’t call my own understanding of the government “parental.” For me, it’s more a belief that I think pooling resources is necessary in some cases, and I think things like taxes seem like better ways to do that than “hoping enough rich philanthropists come through for us.” Especially if you’ve ever looked at how much research and resources something like an infrastructure project requires (which I have, because I’m on citizen advisory boards about local public transit.)
I am for social welfare programs, for example, because I don’t think “laziness” accounts for why they’re needed. Many disabilities prevent people from being able to work enough hours or steadily enough to support themselves; many localities are expensive to live in on top of that, for various reasons. Government programs to help support these people make sense to me. (And honestly, I want to see SSI (and SSDI if possible, but that may just be Math) give MORE money to people, not less, and housing vouchers to be MORE readily available, not less. Yes, this means higher taxes. On the rich, if I’m picking.)
As far as the connections between mental health professionals and the government, I’m still a little confused. Low or no cost mental health services are often provided through local government, which is less than ideal, but again, given the resource pool needed to fund it I’m not sure I have a better idea.
Also… I’m sure it would be easier for the Feds to get information from local governments than from someone random, but I’m still not sure what exactly you’re saying about when and how the information is being shared.
I also am… not at all convinced that mental health care is about putting you in a state the government likes. Having less intrusive thoughts thanks to meds and support thanks to my therapist makes me a MORE effective yelly Resistance lefty, not less of one.
So, more of a conception of the people relating to the government as the cell to the body? One part of a greater thing as opposed to a sheer disconnect between the people and the government? I’m sorry; I was raised in this more conservative household, and I’m still trying to work things out. I think I lean more liberal than not, but I may be generally confused about politics. My own commentary is more social than political.
(Also, I imagine being descended from Holocaust survivors makes one a bit paranoid about the government coming for you one day. Americans tend to view the Nazis purely as a foreign entity and not what was simply the government to its Ashkenazic citizens. Like, “It happened before; it could happen again; so, be vigilant”.)
The thing with mental health services serving the government’s wishes has to do with their power and compulsion to call the cops and have people institutionalized if they seem like they might be overly subversive. Their desire to keep citizens alive appears to be based on not wanting citizens to have too much control over their own lives. The government can choose to execute people at whim because that enforces its control but wants the people to not have that power because it’s subversive and threatens its control, as with the police shooting suicidal people dead before they can take their own lives and seeing no repercussions for it. Suicide is illegal. Is there another, liberal way to interpret that I don’t know about?
According to this site, suicide is not illegal in the U.S. You can’t be prosecuted for attempting suicide; people can only be prosecuted for assisting someone else’s suicide or negligently allowing it when they had the responsibility to prevent it.
This way of thinking – that the government wants to prevent suicide in order to control its citizens, and mental health professionals are its henchmen – strikes me as paranoid and conspiratorial rather than conservative, and I see it on both political extremes, Right and Left. As a progressive centrist (some might want to place me on the Left, but I resist it for a variety of reasons), I see the mental health profession as part of the medical profession more generally, and its aim is to keep people alive and healthy as long as possible. It is not a wing of the government; although medical services are paid for by the government in the case of the poor and elderly, most health care is provided on the private market. This actually fucks things up in a lot of ways, because the profit motive and the best interests of the patient are not always in alignment (see: doctors ordering unnecessary tests because they’re paid based on services provided rather than outcomes).
On the issue of the conservative vs. liberal ways of viewing government (are you getting that from George Lakoff?): liberals like myself are capable of making a distinction between ideal government, or government in principle, and actual government. In principle, the purpose of the government is, as @fierceawakening nicely put it, to pool the resources of individual citizens in order to provide things they can’t provide for themselves individually. Some of that is a matter of correcting for market failures (both negative externalities and “tragedy of the commons” type situations), but some of it is a matter of rescuing the most vulnerable from destitution. On this model, the government doesn’t have its own interests that are distinct from those of the people, and is therefore more trustworthy than private companies – which are motivated by their own profit – and more suitable for providing necessary goods like water, education, and health care. Unfortunately, governments are made up of people, and people can be venal, self-interested, and power-hungry. The point of a rule-of-law system is to establish institutions that ultimately work for the good of the citizenry and keep in check the self-interest of the individuals who run the institutions of government. As a matter of fact, many of the institutions we have only consistently work for the good of a certain segment of the citizenry: namely, wealthy white able-bodied straight cis men; and this has to do with the fact that these were the people who built and for the most part maintain the institutions. But the solution to this is to correct the institutions, which do have the potential to work for everyone’s benefit, with the input of those who have not historically benefited from them.
I ate a donut at 12:30 and have been feeling nauseous for the past 3 and a half hours. This is where my body is at these days. No wonder my pants are falling down.
I weighed myself for the first time in a while and was alarmed to see that my weight had dipped below 90 (I’m 5′1″). I knew I’d been losing weight due to job market and dissertation stress, and my appetite has been really bad recently, but I didn’t realize it was that bad… My home scale might not be entirely accurate, but if it is, my weight is as low now as it got when I was actually deliberately anorexic. Taking birth control masks some of the symptoms (amenorrhea, nonexistent libido), but this is still probably not good.
I’m really not doing it on purpose this time. I either don’t feel hungry before I start feeling lightheaded from lack of food, or I feel hungry but everything sounds disgusting, or I’m too tired/lazy to make myself food, or I can’t finish what I’ve started eating, or hunger quickly turns into nausea. I do still have some bad habits leftover from the anorexic days, including checking calorie counts and recoiling from ones that look high, and just ignoring inconvenient hunger until it goes away on its own. I really gotta stop doing that. So I’m eating an entire 550-calorie tray of Trader Joe’s mac & cheese that’s supposedly 2 servings. Fuck it, it’s one.
Loki is the Philosopher King 