hate my biology teacher

beth's relationship with the dining room and food is complicated and stem's from childhood trauma, and an eating disorder called arfid ( avoidant / restrictive food intake disorder ) _ repost of an old headcanon / meta of mine below the cut.

beth has an eating disorder called ARFID ( avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder ) - it is severely unacknowledged and overlooked by her family to the point where it could be considered outright dismissive. for the most part, i don't think it's intentional. they wouldn't know what it is, they wouldn't recognise the signs or symptoms and even beth herself, while aware of her relationship ( or rather, lack thereof ) with food, doesn't actually realise it for what it is either. an eating disorder. while a lot of her discomfort at eating at the table in the dining room does actually stem from the table itself and what it's supposed to represent, she subconsciously uses it as an excuse to escape meals without actually eating anything. she disguises her lack of interest in eating and her overall apathy to food by picking fights or becoming combatant, often prompting her to walk away mid-meal, if she even makes it that far at all. it's become so normal for her that the rest of her family ultimately don't recognise that she hasn't eaten, likely assuming she'll eat later. she eight times out of ten, will not.

a lot of what we see her consume in the show is predominantly alcohol, which while she does state is not a problem for her, she is correct in saying that it is a crutch, and one that she relied on consistently for years. she doesn't typically like eating in front of or with other people. she will outright avoid it, hence the unofficial diagnosis. that's not to say she doesn't eat, because she does when she feels the need or actually wants to. but she also is simply not interested in food most of the time. it did start young, as beth was known to be a picky eater as a child and would often refuse to eat certain things. that would develop into completely skipping or walking out of meals.

there are maybe two people who might know about her disorder, whether they realise that's what it is or not. the first is actually gator, who started picking up on beth's tells. they did have a conversation however brief and uncomfortable. it's why gator will often make whatever beth asks him to make knowing that if she's asking him for something specific, there is a high chance she will actually eat it. there are also times where he's either walked in on her in the kitchen making something or he's made her something just for her to eat when she wants to. he doesn't know she has an ed. the other person is likely lee, who is/was the closest to beth when it comes to the siblings. lee also probably didn't know what it was but he would have noticed her not eating. he never said anything to her or to the family, but there were times after beth left the ranch where he would text her often and occasionally ask her if she'd eaten yet. she knew he knew, but again, they never talked about it.

it does get better, especially throughout the events of the show and as she starts to feel less restless and more settled, in particular after finally allowing herself to love and be loved by rip. he notices her eating habits but doesn't really know what it means, though she will eat when he makes her something, so it might not be as prominent when she's with him until they move back into the lodge. it doesn't necessarily have a huge impact on her overall health. hell, she drinks and she smokes so if her body can withstand that, she must be made of iron anyway. but it is a factor in why she also doesn't sleep much early on, affecting her mentally more than it does physically.

while beth doesn't recognise that she has a disorder, she is aware that she doesn't eat enough. some of the medications she takes are actually supplements. so she has an eating disorder, but it is for the most part, manageable. it will never affect her overall health.

This is a vent, however I welcome ALL suggestions or thoughts. I appreciate different perspectives.

I have cptsd following an unhealthy family and a long and abusive marriage. I'm in therapy, I'm steadily working on myself and on building my new life as a single parent. My current partner is diagnosed with avoidant personality disorder. They also display MANY characteristics of BPD. (The two disorders do have overlapping symptoms, so do knows)

It is very hard to stay. Much of the bad times are very similar to the mental abuse in my marriage. It's hard to trust my own judgment and memory, and it's also hard to believe the kindness that I experience in the good times. When things are good, it's great! When things start getting difficult, I try to show care and love. They don't make it easy to do though. I'll do 5 caring type things, and it's the 6th thing I should have done that gets all the attention and anger. When things are bad, I am treated like the problem, I am snapped at, I walk on eggshells to keep things calm and then I'm snapped at for walking on eggshells. Help, but don't over help. Give attention, but also don't give any. Engage in conversation, but don't overwhelm and also don't take anything personal when the entire conversation is sharp, critical, occasionally explosive, and dismissive.

The weaknesses I'm working on are mocked or criticized, and then excused away as me making assumptions. And then I get depressed, I feel cloudy headed, I think the bad thoughts I have worked through in therapy. The bad times provoke me and then I regress.

Good times are great. We do things people do *together* rather than isolated and ignored as I was before. Displays is affection. Help when I need it and don't know how to ask. Compliments. Support for my personal goals. Support when I'm feeling defeated or stuck. Laughing, playing games, watching movies. The stuff people do with their partners that I never got to do in my whole life. So much good.

It feels like the effects of my partner's mental illness is reliving my past abuses. My ex did this negative stuff to maintain coercive control and ego. I was essentially a servant at home and a trophy at career events. My current partner does this with cyclic moods or following stressful events and when I'm needed for shielding. Their individual motivations may be different, but the effects on me seem to be the same.

I don't want to end an important relationship with a truly loving, carrying, devoted person. I also don't want to continue living my life on someone else's emotional rollercoaster. Loving someone with mental illness is hard, and I don't want to let the bad stuff ruin the good stuff. I want to better handle the bad times but I haven't figured that out yet. Being logical and predictable with a person in an illogical state is so hard, especially when I'm being blamed and nit-picked. I'm worried I won't figure it out and I'll go right back to the way I was before I left my ex. I want to work with this rather than let it break me, or break us. It's just so hard to see the difference between illness vs abuse when they are so similar.

I'm sad and tired and angry and fed up and sad again.

-D

Thank you for providing a space to vent. I don't know who to talk to right now but I need to talk to someone, or at least let it out. I appreciate that this is a space to do so.

I think that the relationship you're describing here sounds very toxic and unhealthy, and that even if your current partner is a genuinely well-intentioned person who is only acting out because of their mental health issues, that still doesn't mean you should put up with being mistreated like this. Because facts are that for these toxic patterns to actually get resolved, your partner needs to fully realize and take responsibility for changing their behavior - and if they aren't capable of and/or willing to lift that task, nothing you can say or do will make the relationship healthy and safe. So you gotta ask yourself whether your partner is ready to really, truly face their issues and actively work on themselves or whether it's time to walk away. Because there's no shame in walking away from someone who can't treat you right. No, not even if they aren't hurting you on purpose.

beth has an eating disorder called ARFID ( avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder ) - it is severely unacknowledged and overlooked by her family to the point where it could be considered outright dismissive. for the most part, i don't think it's intentional. they wouldn't know what it is, they wouldn't recognise the signs or symptoms and even beth herself, while aware of her relationship ( or rather, lack thereof ) with food, doesn't actually realise it for what it is either. an eating disorder. while a lot of her discomfort at eating at the table in the dining room does actually stem from the table itself and what it's supposed to represent, she subconsciously uses it as an excuse to escape meals without actually eating anything. she disguises her lack of interest in eating and her overall apathy to food by picking fights or becoming combatant, often prompting her to walk away mid-meal, if she even makes it that far at all. it's become so normal for her that the rest of her family ultimately don't recognise that she hasn't eaten, likely assuming she'll eat later. she eight times out of ten, will not.

a lot of what we see her consume in the show is predominantly alcohol, which while she does state is not a problem for her, she is correct in saying that it is a crutch, and one that she relied on consistently for years. she doesn't typically like eating in front of or with other people. she will outright avoid it, hence the unofficial diagnosis. that's not to say she doesn't eat, because she does when she feels the need or actually wants to. but she also is simply not interested in food most of the time. it did start young, as beth was known to be a picky eater as a child and would often refuse to eat certain things. that would develop into completely skipping or walking out of meals.

there are maybe two people who might know about her disorder, whether they realise that's what it is or not. the first is actually gator, who started picking up on beth's tells. they did have a conversation however brief and uncomfortable. it's why gator will often make whatever beth asks him to make knowing that if she's asking him for something specific, there is a high chance she will actually eat it. there are also times where he's either walked in on her in the kitchen making something or he's made her something just for her to eat when she wants to. he doesn't know she has an ed. the other person is likely lee, who is/was the closest to beth when it comes to the siblings. lee also probably didn't know what it was but he would have noticed her not eating. he never said anything to her or to the family, but there were times after beth left the ranch where he would text her often and occasionally ask her if she'd eaten yet. she knew he knew, but again, they never talked about it.

it does get better, especially throughout the events of the show and as she starts to feel less restless and more settled, in particular after finally allowing herself to love and be loved by rip. he notices her eating habits but doesn't really know what it means, though she will eat when he makes her something, so it might not be as prominent when she's with him until they move back into the lodge. it doesn't necessarily have a huge impact on her overall health. hell, she drinks and she smokes so if her body can withstand that, she must be made of iron anyway. but it is a factor in why she also doesn't sleep much early on, affecting her mentally more than it does physically.

while beth doesn't recognise that she has a disorder, she is aware that she doesn't eat enough. some of the medications she takes are actually supplements. so she has an eating disorder, but it is for the most part, manageable. it will never affect her overall health.

First up, I wanted to thank all of you for running this blog. It’s such an important resource for as I’m sure it is to many others.

TW: Possible child abuse (emotional neglect / slight physical / overall unhealthy dynamic). LGBT-phobia. Ableism, perhaps? Mentioned disordered eating and suicidal ideation.

I’m looking for something more in the advice or reassurance vein, please? So, I come from a more traditional family: I constantly have to walk on eggshells around my dad, he and my mom rant about how LGBT is “corrupting” the world (which is so stressful for me because I’m genderfluid), my mom called me stupid for sobbing in front of her and saying I felt depressed… that type of stuff. Only last year did I realise that these aren’t healthy family traits. However, as I speak more and more with my recently-acquired mental health counselor, I’m getting unsure on if my parents are actually abusive or not. We’re practicing stuff like reframing (this mental health help is for a limited time only, though, so it’s not full-on therapy) and part of me agrees with what my counselor says, but another is angrier and insists they might be watering down my problems because of my miscommunication.

For example, I explained how my mom once told me that “family is the only you can trust” and how she “bets my friends are talking about me behind my back right now,” yet they say my mom is communicating poorly and that she’s right; friends can and will drop you, unlike family. They highlight that I’ll always see the worst in my family because my parents will come home tired from a work day and might just be stressed. Or whenever I explain stuff like my frequent skipping meals or suicidal ideation, their response is a “it happens to the best of us” and then moving on to the next topic (apart from things like that, they handle most other problems well.)

But as I’m writing this, I feel like it’s all my fault, you know? Like I’m antagonising my first and only therapist for the sake of it. Like I’m grappling onto the tiniest, pettiest moments in my life to announce “I’m an abuse victim!” and demand others pity me.

I’m sorry if this is a too long/a confusing ask, but I’d like to know whether this seems like I’m blowing it all out of proportions or if it’s justified? (If you don’t want to answer or don’t have a clear opinion, that’s completely fine! /gen)

Thank you,

— Void

Hello Void,

My sincere apologies for taking so long to reply to this - thank you so much for your kind words, we appreciate them <3

I am so sorry for the things you are experiencing, it sounds like there is a whole slew of issues and concerns to unpack, and I’m glad that there is some therapy in place already - though I hope the short term develops into something more concrete as you slowly peel back the layers. Just from the examples you shared in your ask, I personally feel you are living in an unsupportive, abusive home environment, and have unequal relationships with your friends who are dismissive of your mental health and attempts to speak your truth in vulnerable moments.

It is quite reasonable to me that you would feel anger, and several other emotions as well, surrounding all this, because you have been attempting to label, and advocate, for your needs, and (I assume) ask for the bare minimum: mutually respectful relationships. Because as much as several people keep trying to downplay what is being said/done to you, I wonder how they would feel if they were experiencing the same? Would they feel just as dismissed if they came to you sharing suicidal ideation and you replied with a “happens to the best of us?” I would feel sad if they felt this was the best standard to be found in friendships. And how would your mom feel if she were the one crying, sharing she’s depressed, and you replied by calling her “stupid”?

You have been working hard trying to see their perspective, but to me, by what you shared, they aren’t extending you the same courtesy, and you deserve mutually respectful relationships. We all do.

As for advice, I don’t think it’s as simple as “ghost everyone”, but perhaps tweaking how much you share with people whose track record is subpar at best when it comes to handling your truths of vulnerability?

Maybe an option to consider could be building your support system one step at a time - therapy is a fantastic start, because they can help work on a treatment plan with coping skills, as well as provide safe spaces to explore your feelings - but maybe also consider branching out where/how you meet people? Perhaps online groups of niche interests, or community volunteering programs, both can be a wonderful space where you might meet others on the LGBT+ spectrum who will honor your identity, and/or have connections to further mental health resources. There’s also support groups (both in person, and online) that might be an option as well?

I wouldn’t want anyone to spread themselves too thin between relationships, and potential commitments, and yet on the other hand, exploring your available options might be of service - in that the very least you can start building your own tribe, where you can let people in who are willing to extend you the same empathy and compassion you’ve been trying to do for yourself.

Regardless of what the next steps might be for you, I am so sorry for the things that have happened so far, and I hope that things improve <3

- Mod Kat

Loved 6

Written for Dannymay 2021 Day 15: Nature

.

“Danny,” said Sam, “what’s wrong?”

The question was, really, far too vague. Many things were wrong all the time, especially with Danny. Part and parcel of being what he was, living where they were, and doing what he did. Although she was more comfortable with it all than Tucker, she could acknowledge that things were… bad. That the world was messed up. That, although people could be horrible to each other on their own, the monstrous beings lurking under the fabric of reality did not help.

But Danny had been in especially low spirits for the last few days. She’d almost say he was depressed, but she was hesitant to apply mental health disorders to someone who wasn’t even entirely human anymore. He’d also been unusually quiet, but he had admitted some time ago that he was having progressively more difficulty ‘finding words,’ so that could be the reason instead.

If she could find out why he was upset, maybe she could cheer him up. Or at least support him.

He made a face, one hand covering his mouth as he talked. “You remember that time, um, when Clockwork… The gifts?” He touched his wrist.

“Yes?” said Sam, prompting him to continue.

Danny glanced down the otherwise oddly-deserted school hallway. “It’s… He had me eat with him. Sort of. Ever since then, my teeth have been…” He paused his hand now firmly pressed to his face.

“Weird?” suggested Tucker, voice low.

Danny nodded. “I had – I was venomous, in the Dream, I don’t—” He faltered.

“Do they hurt?” asked Sam.

“Mhm.”

“Do you think biting into something might help?” asked Sam as she swung her backpack off her shoulder and rummaged in it.

Danny’s eyes seemed to glaze over as he considered the question. Finally, he shrugged.

Sam found what she was looking for. “Here,” she said, holding out the shiny red apple. “Try this.”

Danny examined the apple, careful and silent. The fruit was reflected, vividly, in his eyes. Once. Twice. Three times? No. Danny had two eyes. Two perfect, insightful, soulful eyes.

Delicately, he took it. He still didn’t remove the hand over his mouth.

“We’ve seen worse, man,” mumbled Tucker.

“Not when I’m being human,” protested Danny. Gingerly, he removed his other hand from his mouth and brought the apple to his lips.

When his lips parted, Sam could see what he was talking about. Those were definitely, clearly, fangs. Sharp, smooth, and white. They sparkled even in the flat overhead school lights. Something bluish and clear glistened at their tips.

Was Danny venomous?

(Why did that excite her?)

They crunched into the apple. Danny held it there, still and tense, for a few seconds before his expression melted into absolute bliss.

“Feel better?” asked Sam.

“Mmmhmm,” said Danny, eyes half closed.

“Guys?” said Tucker. “We should probably go now. Before they kick us out.”

“Huh?”

“It’s the end of the school day. School’s been out for half an hour.”

Sam frowned. Was it? She… Did she… She did remember going to all her classes. She shook her head, dismissing the momentary lapse.

Danny regretfully disengaged from the apple, blinked, and swayed. His outline wavered. Sam grabbed his wrist, and a jolt ran up her bones, making her teeth hurt as if she had just bitten down on ice. He stabilized again.

“Thank you,” he said.

He did not notice that she had taken the apple.

.

She set the apple on her desk, and the color stood out vibrantly against the dark-stained wood and her black, goth-themed knickknacks. The color, which was a different than what it had been when she had given the apple to Danny.

The neon blue skin was cold enough to gather condensation and smooth under her fingers. There was otherwise little evidence that Danny had bitten into it. The holes had sealed over, leaving only small depressions.

She knew what she wanted to do. She knew what she shouldn’t do.

Danny said she couldn’t die. That he had destroyed her death, among others. She trusted him.

But it was always good to be prepared.

She set up a text on a timer. If she wasn’t able to cancel it in the next ten minutes, it would go out to Danny and Tucker.

The bed would be the best place to do this. She sat down on the edge, feet firmly planted on the floor.

She bit into the apple.

For a few seconds, she was disappointed, but then.

Then.

She let herself drop back onto her bed, the springs creaking slightly and the covers gently fluttering. She exhaled. Inhaled. Exhaled. Blinked. Closed her eyes. Opened them again.

Everything. Everything.

It was like seeing for the first time. The world was as thin as rice paper. The light was shinning through. It’s true nature.

And all the people. Everywhere. Everyone. Connected.

She—

Everyone.

Beyond the rice paper they could see and touch and feel, the false veil above the truth they couldn’t look at directly, but Danny could and, oh.

Was this what he saw all the time? Was he always filled with this sense of—

Of charity? Of- of—

What could she call this? Care? Empathy?

Could she call it love?

(She could. He was. Because he was loving. But his understanding of love was overwritten and subsumed by his understanding of Love. There could be no other way.)

(To love was human. Love was divine.)

If everyone could feel like this…

Sam knew how much people could hurt each other. She knew how terrible the world was.

(Her grandfather had only died a few years ago. He’d been born in Germany.)

She knew how stressed Danny was about hurting others, even when it was his mere existence that was harmful – And Sam wasn’t so sure that it was harmful. If Danny hadn’t just internalized the vitriol and hate that his parents practically consisted of.

If everyone could feel like this…

They’d had a conversation, back when they’d connected the others to cults, about whether or not cults were a natural result of the others’ presence, or if they were actually encouraged by the others. Maybe it was a combination of the two, but Sam now had good evidence for the former.

This. This was natural. This was right.

And she would work hard to make everything else right, too.

The feeling faded after another few… minutes? Hours?

Minutes. It had to be minutes. Otherwise, Danny and Tucker would be here.

The timer.

She fumbled her phone open just in time to cancel the text.

.

Sam was tempted to take another bite of the apple, but she knew that she had to be careful with her resources. She had her vision. Her goal. Her plan to make the world a better place.

It started here.

She leaned on her shovel and checked the depth of the hole in the ground. Good. Good. Room enough for the apple and room enough for the fertilizer.

She used her fingernails to slit open a bag of the latter and then placed the apple reverently on top of the small pile. A shadow passed over her. It didn’t seem like quite enough, did it?

Perhaps… an offering? She emptied the contents of her pocket. Coins. A six-sided die with a bat in place of its ‘one’ pip. A caramel and a strawberry candy her grandmother had given her that morning. A small picture of herself, Danny, and Tucker. A safely pin.

She arranged them carefully around the apple. The safety pin gleamed in the light.

Staring at her. She stared back.

Maybe…

She picked up the pin and squeezed it to free the sharp end. Then, before she could hesitate, before she could have second thoughts, she drew it over the ball of her thumb. Blood welled up from the small wound, and she let it drip on the soil surrounding the apple.

.

The tree grew into a sapling overnight. The next day, it was taller than Sam. On the third, the trunk was thicker than both her wrists together. By the end of the week, it had burst into bloom.

Sam made sure to water it every day.

Danny, meanwhile, continued to have problems with his teeth. He spoke less, his words slurred and lisping around his still-growing fangs, but that didn’t matter to her and Tucker. After the years they’d spent together, they could read each other pretty well.

Sam maintained a constant supply of apples for him to bite down on. Most of the time, he ate them afterwards, which she couldn’t really begrudge him, but sometimes he’d leave them on his desk or on the table or just out and Sam would put aside her next afternoon for experimentation.

Before she knew it, the tree was bearing fruit. Rose-red and perfectly shaped, not a trace of scale or insects. Sam knew exactly what to do with them.

.

“Hey,” she said, as her parents walked in, “I made an apple pie. Tell me if it’s any good.”

Mental Health Headcannons - Tsukishima, Kageyama, Ushijima, Tendou & Bokuto

All these are from my knowledge and based off of each character’s actions haikyuu, this is all my opinion so feel free to discuss other thoughts! I’m happy to talk about each more in depth if anyone would like it :) this is just me projecting my own problems on fictional characters

You can also message me if you wanna talk about these too!!

This is going to be long

TW: Mental health, learning difficulties, eating disorders, self-harm

Tsukishima - Depression, Anxiety & OCD

Tbh someone else (I’ve been trying to find their username to tag them but I can’t find it, they’re called something like theguessmonta but idk) has amazing posts about Tsukishima and his mental health which I totally agree with all of it so some of this is going to be pretty similar

I think his mental health problems started when he was quite young, around the time when the Akiteru drama happened so he’s been dealing with these for a while

Having depression can often make a person seem very disinterested/sarcastic/negative as a way of pushing back emotions and self-protection which explains a lot of the way Tsukishima acts towards some people (I have a whole post on how he isn’t just some asshole)

His anxiety stems from a place of terrible self-esteem and self-image, it’s clear to see he has a bad sense of self-worth when he talks about how people are obviously a lot better than him, he’s just there to ‘stop trouble happening’

Tsukki suffers from panic attacks quite regularly (especially when he was a bit younger) but he tends to shut himself off then they happen, he doesn’t want anyone else to see him like that

His anxiety and overthinking is often why he keeps his headphones on him at all times, listening to music helps drown out the sounds around him and those in his head

His OCD got worse over time - first it was things like turning the light switch on and off repeatedly until it felt right, or tapping on his desk before he went to bed, but as his anxiety and self-esteem got worse it developed into him needing himself to be perfect

This included only eating a certain amount of calories a day (no where near the amount he should be eating) or getting a very specific grade on an exam, where even one number over or under set him into a panic

Things got to their worst for Tsukki around the age of 13 - this is where he was much too underweight and self-harming on his hips (so no one else could see)

Probably also thought about suicide a couple times around this point

He has tried a couple different types of anti-depressants in the past, however none have seemed to help

He likes a lot of time alone - he gets too overwhelmed dealing with other people

The only person besides his family and Yamaguchi that knows about his OCD is Kageyama - they both noticed each others odd, repetitive habits until Kageyama asked him about it one day, while they don’t get along too well, they feel some comfort in each other understanding their actions

Kageyama - Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

wow what a smooth segue 

this boy is like a walking definition of ASD - coming from a person with ASD

Kageyama was diagnosed with Type 1/High-functioning Autism when he was very young (probably around 3-5 years old)

He struggles with social interaction, knowing what to say to people and most importantly, how to say it, e.g. when he smiles people often think he looks angry

Kageyama has never had many, if any, friends before Karasuno, as he has often struggled with conversation and speaking in an inappropriate tone that may make some people uncomfortable or even scared

He isn’t very good when it comes to remembering academic studies but if it relates to his fixations (volleyball) he is extremely intelligent - this is seen clearly when Daichi shows their team hand gestures and Kageyama says he remembered them in a day

Kageyama uses masking a lot - it’s a technique people with ASD tend to do which involves copying other peoples actions in order to understand social situations, he does this many times in the anime/manga such as his awkward BBQ song dance, or high-fives

He visited a social worker once a week while he was little until he started middle school, resulting in his behaviours getting worse

Towards the end of his first year at Karasuno he went back to therapies regularly and has anger-management training in order to help him express himself in a manageable way - he probably won’t admit it but it helps a lot (key note is that having anger-management training often does not have anything to do with anger, simply just managing emotions in general but it often a great type of therapy for those with ASD although he is a bit of an angry boi sometimes)

ASD comes with repetitive, almost OCD-like tendencies - two examples include filing his nails every single day and having a very specific routine before going to bed that consists of drinking milk, putting on pjs, laying in bed and throwing + catching a ball, brushing his teeth and going to bed on his left side - if he doesn’t do these things at the right times/in the right order, he gets extremely anxious and agitated

It is important to remember people with ASD tend to also have another mental health issue, such as anxiety or depression

Ushijima - Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

autism buds with kageyama

I kid thats probably a bad idea

Ushijima was also diagnosed with Type 1/High-Functioning Autism when he was 5

Unfortunately due to the stigma around Autism, his family (besides his father) were not very accepting of this and he was put into therapy at a young age

While this was actually helpful for him, his family insisted his therapies should ‘cure’ him and were dismissive of the many times a doctor told them that ASD is not a curable disorder

Outside of therapy he does not receive much support from his family, except his father who got him a pair of noise-cancelling headphones he used to wear until he 8 whenever they went out together - he was only allowed to wear them if it was just him and his father, the rest of his family thought it made it too obvious there was ‘something wrong with the child’

Extending on this, Ushijima was very sensitive to sensory input as a child, and while he still is, it has become easier to manager as he has gotten older

His ASD is most prevalent in his lack of understand ways of communication, such as sarcasm or jokes, and tends to take things very literally 

@simp4satori and I came to the conclusion that if you were to call him daddy during sex, or ask him to ‘punish you’ the poor boy would have NO CLUE - would probably call your dad and tell him you needed to speak to him, or say you can’t watch anime for a week lol 

He is extremely direct when he talks, to the point where it comes across rude or hurtful but he doesn’t realise this until someone mentions it

Tendou probably helps him rephrase things from time-to-time in order for him to get his point across

He gets very anxious when faced with things he doesn’t know about or understand (this is mentioned by Tendou in the manga), this can include people, going to new places or trying new foods

It is important to remember people with ASD tend to also have another mental health issue, such as anxiety or depression

Tendou - Depression and Anxiety (also a highly sensitive person - that’s not a mental health disorder or illness but it does affect him)

Tendou’s mental health suffered from a young age due to bullying in school

This caused a lot of low self-esteem and low mood, and he was later on diagnosed with depression and anxiety

Only his family, Ushijima and his coach know about this, and even then, only his family know any details

No one would really expect Tendou to deal with such mental health issues as he always keeps a bubbly, happy persona around others - he doesn’t want people to think he is weak or cowardly

It is also hard for others to see and he is someone with high-highs and low-lows, so when he is happy or excited his emotions are quite extreme

Tendou’s anxiety relates a lot to his image, mainly his appearance and the way he acts, but he is also a general over thinker

He doesn’t have panic attacks as often as Tsukishima does, however they do happen occasionally when things just get too much

He often thinks that people are staring at him, or talking about him whenever he goes out, and he tends to hid this by seeming overly cocky or sardonic

When his depression hits, he tends to just feel sad or hopeless instead of numb, which tends to trigger his anxiety too

Tendou used to self-harm often around his hips/thighs however he hasn’t done so since the end of his first year of high-school 

Probably makes a lot of dark ‘jokes’, especially around suicide and people semi are like ‘...dude...you ok?’ and he’s just like ‘hahaha yeah im fine what’

He doesn’t like alone time too much as he tends to get trapped in his own thoughts

As expected of the guess monster, he is extremely good at reading and understanding people, which is how he finds it easier to help and communicate with Ushijima

Bokuto - ADHD

A lot of people at Fukurodani think Bokuto is just stupid, however he actually has ADHD

He was diagnosed a lot later than the rest at 12 years old

Bokuto tends to struggle with his studies as his attention-span is very low and can get distracted easily - either by things in the classroom or his own thoughts

He’s very forgetful, often forgetting his lunch at home or forgetting to do/bring in his homework, and this goes into volleyball too where he forgets how to do certain moves

Taking exams are the worst for Bokuto, he hates having to be still and quiet for such a long time and is very sensitive to little sounds or movements that distract his attention - you’ll often find his bouncing his leg or fiddling with his pen

He tends to butt into conversations or interrupt people when they are talking, he just gets a bit too enthusiastic to share his thoughts

He has extreme mood-swings too which we see often in the anime, especially when he is stressed or someone mentions his behaviours

Is very reckless - Akaashi has probably had to stop him from leaning too far out the window and almost falling to look something

The whole Fukurodani volleyball team are aware of his ADHD and do their best to help him and make him feel comfortable or accepted

They are the only people allowed to call him stupid - they will fight anyone else

I think there are more characters with mental health illnesses or disorders, such and Yamaguchi, Yachi, Kenma and Asahi having anxiety so I might write more at some point!

Urgh. Okay, full disclosure, I haven't been on tumblr much over the last week or so, because I was one of the people that Raven initially called out after the COAR mess, and it was in the interest of my own mental health to fuck off for a while so I didn't stress myself out into oblivion. So I'm scrolling through most of this stuff for the first time, and talking to other people who were targeted. And pardon my French here, but I'm fucking disgusted at the lengths Raven has gone to assert themselves as a victim, how many people they've affected, and the waving around of something as serious as suicide for brownie points.

I have sympathy for people who overinterpret things in a strictly emotional and mental sense (actual reactions aside) because they lack the maturity. There's always a reason for that, and it's not their fault. And I have sympathy for people if they legitimately feel suicidal. That, too, isn't their fault. If I hadn't been blocked, I would've reported Raven in case their claims were true as well, because yeah, I don't mess around with that stuff either. But what's unacceptable is how Raven acted on those sentiments and behaved towards others, even after people tried to provide perspective. How Raven claimed to be done with the drama, but continued inciting it; how they claimed to be suicidal and had left tumblr, but wrote what amounts to a "fuck you" in their header and were still putzing around on their blog, and were apparently still editing their posts until as late as today; how they claimed to have deleted but only changed the url; how they weaponized all of this stuff and used it as a tool for guilt-tripping. Like, come on. It's okay if you're down in the dumps, but it's not okay to treat innocent people like garbage, and carpet bomb half the RPC. To me, it really feels like there was an intent to weaponize all of their hurt, offense, anger, and suicidal ideations, despite the possibility it did come from somewhere genuine, and that's so harmful to anyone who is actually struggling with depression.

Every time someone weaponizes mental illness in this way, it just makes people more and more apathetic the next time someone is genuinely just hurting, and saying they feel like they're at the end of their rope. And it makes people suspicious of whether those words are being used maliciously, or legitimately. That suspicion and that association is now there, unconscious or not. And every time this kind of stuff happens, the association gets stronger. What happens if Raven does this again? Some people will still report, but some people might just scoff and walk away - people who might've actually acted before. So in a way, that kind of behaviour impacts Raven as much as it impacts other people.

And you know what? They're not the only one dealing with serious shit. I've been suffering from MDD for the last fifteen years, and I've been in the process of changing medications and having little success for months. I've been going through hell offline. I have a shit list of people I want to yell at because they're dragging their feet on really important things I need to function; I'm constantly running a deficit on spoons. Until a week or so ago, roleplay was one of the only ways I could unwind. So for Raven to bully me by sticking that stupid post in my tags, because they needed to make a scene on COAR, which I was obviously going to comment on (like many other people), then to "like" an unsubstantiated callout about me and other innocent people related to that mess, it's only worsened my own mental health. It sounds melodramatic, but really. Someone else mentioned this too, but the fear of being in another callout, and the fear of that first callout somehow exploding, was in the back of my mind all week, despite being away from tumblr. So that was a little anxiety-inducing, much as I tried not to think about it.

And I'm debating whether to return now, or take more time off, and I have no idea what to do. Because that callout post is still in my blog's tag. I'm freaking out because I was planning on approaching some people to roleplay, which is something I rarely ever do, but now I'm concerned that I'll contact someone, they'll look at my tag to get an idea of my writing/partners/who I am, and see the callout post, and immediately dismiss me because even seeing the word "callout" on its own will send up red flags, by unconscious association with more impactful drama. And as long as that callout is up, these fears are going to be there.

That's just not fair.

And Raven's "apology" is completely unacceptable. Like you and others said, it doesn't reach anyone who needs to hear it, because they've all been blocked. I would fucking love an apology if it came from a place of honesty, but am I going to receive one? Probably not. And even for the followers who can still see that apology, it doesn't address anything. It isn't directed to anyone in particular. It doesn't mention the specific behaviours that were wrong on their part. And miss me with the "my intentions were good" part. No, they weren't; going around blocks and sticking shit in peoples' tags is vindictive and entirely intentional in all the worst ways, and shame on them for pretending otherwise, and by leading with such a poor example for many roleplayers, some of whom are in their teens. One of the people who tried to message Raven (they, too, were called out on Raven's blog) was speaking to a nineteen-year old who was completely clueless about the extent of the manipulation Raven was pulling. They thought all of it was normal and acceptable behaviour. That genuinely terrifies me. And while I imagine if Raven was genuinely apologetic, they would've gone to the callout blog and ask them to delete the callout post (attempt it, at the very least), somehow, I don't think that would've happened given all of their prior actions. God forbid something else is going on there.

Phew. Yeah, I'm angry. Maybe I'm just biased and tired. But honestly, I have a right to be. Raven's apology is a handwave, and they know it. It's a slap in the face to me, to you, and to everyone else who was involved in this clusterfuck. They're not the center of the universe. They affected real people, with real problems of their own. Anyways, I am so sorry for this, argh. Really had to get this out, and I didn't want to dump it on discord or somewhere else; I sure as heck didn't want to go to COAR with it. But hey, maybe people here will feel less alone if I added my own account to the mix. The more, the merrier? In a sense, anyways. Sometimes if you feel like you've been singled out, it's nice to know you're not actually the only person it's happened to.

Sorry for saving your reply for last, Anon. It's such an important one, I wanted to be properly thoughtful!

I think that it is going to make some people feel less alone, and there is always some relief in sharing one's trials. That might be especially true when one has been unable to share them anywhere else. It's not like you can address this on your own blog right now, COAR is definitely not a safe place to do so, it's a very isolating feeling that is made worse for having done nothing.

Coming back and being required to wade through this shit was really damn disgusting to me as well, but at least in my case, I had neither been obliged to distance myself for the sake of mental health nor was I treated to the sickening display of drumming up ideas of victimization from someone who victimized me. What I experienced was just incredulity and disgust, I cannot imagine how incensing this must be for you, I am so very sorry. If it makes me angry having a degree of removal and watching in it real time? What you're experiencing...there really isn't a single word to adequately encapsulate that, I'm sure.

You've still expressed so many of the things I've thought and felt. I found all that initial behavior uncalled for, shameful, yet another display of what's actually wrong in the RPC, but it was increasingly upsetting to me the more I looked into it because it did feel a little (a lot) too reminiscent of the sort of bullying experienced in person. It's really something else to be viciously picked at by someone who keeps upping the game until such point as it begins to cause them trouble, then get to be painted the wrongdoer and punished in some way for it because they're presenting as a sympathetic victim. A more sympathetic victim than you, that's really what I mean, I'm just going to say it.

And that was already in swing by the time I got from the launch point to the smoking crater of then current events. I got to Raven's again after bouncing back and forth between their interactions with others, largely from COAR, yes, and the shit on the callout blog...to see...everyone else being blamed in increasingly drastic ways.

Because on tumblr, unlike reality, if you throw out enough times ahead of time that you have disorders people can get behind, you're more sympathetic, not less. So long as one has set that foundation and has others to broadcast it once convenient, any horrible action one undertakes is given a pass. Anyone disagreeing, anyone not tolerating the abuse, is in the wrong now. In the worst possible way, of course.

This whole thing began with incredibly unnecessary bullshit and every, I mean fucking every, further action taken was a new level of fucked up, but the trivializing of and damage done to the perception of mental health and differences is quite possibly the worst. Are those things that need any more of that? It's already such a problem! I already see suspicion and fatigue with this, every time it's given validation, it grows.

Even if I wasn't mentally ill, with one of the disorders that gets vilified even on tumblr, even if I were not autistic, even if I never knew a single person who suffered worse than I do from the the complications they won by way of being born, hadn't anyone I loved that took their lives, this would be extremely upsetting to me. Using the idea that "whatever I do, it's got to be acceptable because I am X" while not caring that anyone else is X, Y, and/or Z. Weaponizing it for bullying and sympathy simultaneously. Way too much. Incredibly gross and harmful, legitimately fucking problematic.

I want people to be taken seriously when they choose to speak of the boundaries their mental health requires, I want muns to be able to say that they are having a difficult time without it coming off (even to the rest of us with mental health conditions) as a ploy for attention/guilting for whatever action they desire be taken by partners, and I want people to take threats of oncoming, serious harm seriously. How are they to do this, when it is continually used as tool or weaponized against others? At very best, it becomes another thing to ignore and scroll by on the dash.

As we've all had the misfortune to experience or witness so recently, once it is weaponized, it's a problem of priority. I've said in damn near every message I've gotten that Raven isn't the only person involved here who has serious shit going on, but like the absurdity with trying to spin an accident as transphobia, or having the audacity to attempt speaking from a place of peace in a way that might benefit everyone, Raven included, resulting in a callout about being against ND people...it doesn't matter. Doesn't matter that any of us are neurodivergent, have serious chronic mental health complications, or are not cisgender. Raven was swinging that around like a flaming sword to drive off bigots real and imagined before we ever got their attention.

Attention they fucking asked for.

Reblogging that post from COAR was just like posting those rules. The intention was to get attention, and it was asked for with extreme hostility. I have no idea how that is coming off to anyone as simply them defending themselves. It was a great moment to either not out themselves as the person in the confession at all, not engage with it, quietly remove the post, or to reblog it and take responsibility in a meaningful way at that point. Can you imagine what a difference that would have made then? If Raven had chosen instead to reblog it and apologize for doing what they had. Just that. No shitty, snide little comments about how they're sorry, but still absolutely correct and here are five reasons why everything they've misconstrued won't be tolerated. Just an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, an apology for doing so, and awareness gained moving forward.

Their decision to interact with that post in the way they did wasn't just more of the same nonsense, it was actively upping the game. I don't really care if it was intentional bait or just continuing to let malicious impulse run free, it was used as bait. Everyone who interacted with that post was effectively consigning themselves to harassment, and if they happened to interact on literally any other topic that group held a passionately opposing opinion on, they were attacked for it. Curiously, it became necessary for them to be harassed by way of the callout blog, but that is getting a little close to off-topic, so, I'll leave it at that.

So, while I initially really wanted to have the appeal to Raven work because their expressions of regret that I was greatly on the fence about being genuine, I'd say those flags were accurate. I cannot believe that someone who took every opportunity to do the wrong thing is genuinely sorry. Sorry for themselves, absolutely, sorry for anything they did, not so much. This constant narrative I got of "they SAID they were sorry" and "they apologized again and again and took the posts down," including from Raven, is incredible. On that last one, they, yet again, couldn't actually address me.

Appropriate response: messaging me or reblogging that post (you know, the rules snippet I found right the hell there still, despite the claim of it being deleted and the final catalyst of me needing to say something after I saw that, nope, surely was not) with the acknowledgment of a single thing I said.

Extra appropriate response: ^ plus going to everyone who could still be located that they harmed with a genuine, individual, private apology.

Inappropriate response that was had: new post, shitty, childish tone like they at once wanted to argue with me and didn't want to drop the act, restating of this apology that had already been deleted and meant exactly shit while it existed, restating of how they deleted this post and couldn't control reblogs, ignoring that I literally reblogged the original copy from their blog.

Apology neither believed nor accepted. Just as it wouldn't be if my nephew came to my house, broke a bunch of my things, said he was sorry while throwing the pieces at my pet, then threw himself on the floor screaming that he said he was sorry when I told him to go have a time out.

(Yes, I absolutely did just make a comparison to a child, y'all can shit yourselves again. It's not my problem if you want to misconstrue "this person's actions are not befitting of an adult" as "Vespertine said autistic people are children!" Fucking miss me with that. I'm an autistic adult who pays my bills, apologizes, doesn't treat people like shit while trying to excuse it by being ND. You're offensive with that shit, and contributing to the negative perception people have of those on the spectrum. Be a good ally today! Don't valid that! Free ninety-nine offer!)

Again, sorry for yourself does not equal being sorry for what you've done. The former can contribute to the development of the latter, but as I said in a response yesterday, there has been no display of that beginning to transpire. I genuinely hope that will eventually be the case because that would be the best outcome, the only "best" outcome at this point. Even if it was two years from now, if it did happen, I certainly would not be kind to people refusing them any such growth in peace, and I hope that, by some distant chance, I get to prove that.

But...stating "my intentions were good" over any part of this is not remotely promising. When? Where? At what point? Oh, right, when you took it upon yourself to label a random mun you took issue with. That's when your intentions were good. Then, when you vehemently needed to defend that point by callouts and individual attacks under the guise of it definitely not being about your pride, no! It was the defense of everyone else! Defending the community by carpet-bombing it, yes. This is not a "the path to Hell is paved with good intentions" situation.

I am so disturbed about the nineteen-year-old mun, my god. I'm telling y'all, my anger and disgust almost reach what I think is a pinnacle, then there's something new like this.

I don't even subscribe to tumblr's ideology that anyone under twenty-five is an actual infant who needs be kept in a protective bubble and forgiven for all bad behavior with infinite kindness, nineteen-year-olds deserve the agency of the adultier adults they are becoming, but it is a transitional age. Especially today. Most socialization and formative ideas take place online, and by the time younger RPers are entering the adult sphere of RP here, they've already got some really unhealthy ideas. About themselves, about others. There is such a demand for rabidly performative action that gets internalized, it shouldn't be being heartily fed by people in the community they might look up to.

At that age, someone like Raven is going to be a person looked up to. They espouse all the right ideas, and it's an age in which aggressive interaction over those things is seen as amusing and correct, no matter how wrong the actions taken are or the basis upon which they are founded. When these people foster an environment of cruelty for questioning, of course, that is not going to be the natural response. The response is now going to be the requirement of being told otherwise with adequate proof.

I have suspected that many of the hateful anons I've gotten were from Raven's even younger followers who feel like it's normal, acceptable, and that everything they're being told by Raven's sales team over at the callout blog is absolutely true. Of course, they're now morally obligated to come harass me for the things they were told I did! I think it's likely that several of the anons people got were from actual minors, which is so many levels of scary and irresponsible. Really great example all around, yes!

Because whether it is one's intention or not, that is potentially exposing minors, or muns who are still close enough to be more negatively impacted, to who even knows what. As well as violating the rules of blogs who do not interact with minors for good reason, setting those blogs up for yet another callout for treating someone they didn't know was a minor the way they did or having "freak shit" on their blog. Setting up the other party to be treated with full hostility as an adult would be. Very cool, very responsible.

There is just so much here that is unacceptable, I don't think people who were not directly impacted or have never had a callout against them understand the results, and that is one more unacceptable thing you've been good enough to talk about.

Even while taking a break from the RPC, it affects you negatively. Wondering what you're coming back to, your blog is no longer a safe feeling space, and there's nothing you can do to "cultivate your blog" to change that. They've taken away the ability to simply block and avoid others, the thing that keeps all of us comfortable here as well as allowing that to be all of us no matter how disagreeable we might be to each other. Callouts negate adult behavior. Callouts mean that one doesn't know where more potential for harassment might be coming from, or how long we might have to be worried about that.

It would be a major concern for me as well about what putting myself out there to new writing partners might bring. What the success of that might be. It's incredibly unfair that they've made finding new people precarious and more unpleasant than it can be anyway. That puts all of the future of your RP here in question, and if you're like me, just dropping a muse, picking up another, and moving to a new URL isn't going to be a good choice for you. It isn't that simple if you dedicate time to a muse for a long period of time, when that's the case, that's the RP you want to do and have laid the groundwork for.

I don't know if it will help at all, but it has seemed to me, over the past several days, that there are fewer people in the RPC who are inclined to believe or support callouts than there once was. I was hoping that was the case, since there is always so much interaction on my posts against callout culture, but until this crap went down, I had no idea just how many people are not positive toward it. It has seemed to be that the people who are inclined to listen to callouts are just louder.

I've also noticed that those people have the same set of red flags, so maybe sharing that will help you or others?

They don't have simple, basic, reasonable Do Not Interacts. It isn't simply asking that minors don't interact because the mun is over eighteen, that muns writing a triggering topic not interact, or that sort of thing. No, it's URL dropping of specific muns, outright links to callouts or "receipts," and an accusatory tone about any topics or types of muns who shouldn't interact. Such as "nasty ass proshippers" or "pedo apologists shipping incest."

Their rules are reflective this as well. A statement cannot be made that they do not write, let's say, toxic ships and left at that. There will be some morality wank present about normalizing or romanticizing toxic/abusive relationships.

There are less assured flags, but literally, anything that stands out as an interest in RPC or fandom-based activism as opposed to an interest in writing, their muses, or even their friendships with a variety of muns. I don't mean a rounded-out interest in things, I really do mean a glaring predominance of buzzword-laden reblogs and PSA's while they've not written a reply, headcanon, or answered a meme in months.

I'm not saying any of that because I feel like you, or anyone else's, judgment is terrible or that you're oblivious to warning signs! It's just that when we've experienced bad situations, it can compromise our ability to see clearly. It becomes easy to see a potential threat everywhere, and maybe that seems contrary, but it's then easy to fail to see real threats from those we're blowing up. We question whether we're being just as judgmental as the people who wronged us, putting words in other muns' mouths and thoughts in place of their own as was done to us. While we still are afraid to be wrong in giving someone an in to ruining our time again.

So, please, don't feel like I'm questioning your intelligence or speaking from a place of ultimate knowledge, never making mistakes in such a choice! I just really hate that you, and many others, are going through this, and anything at all that I can think of that might help you move forward from this utter bullshit you've been through, I've got to try to grab it.

Because, Anon, like all those sharing their experiences these last few days, you sound like the kind of mun we need in the RPC.

You're someone willing to share with others for the benefit of others. You're being honest about your feelings of anger and even the hopeless sensation of whether it's even worth it to try to return, having your progress on and offline stomped on, while still maintaining a sort of fairness and calm that I know is not easy. Because that's the mature thing to do, it's the right thing, and unfortunately, those are usually the harder things to do as well.

You did the right thing in expressing your opinion and doing what people like Raven's group love to be on about, can only do through bullying: not tolerating it. I'd hate for the RPC to lose someone like you!

Just as your message matters to more people out there than myself, I have no doubt that your choice to not quietly allow this behavior mattered to more muns than you'll ever know. I'm sure that none of them would have wanted this result for you, but so many muns have experienced such toxic, bullying behavior over the years in which not a soul spoke up.

Many of you proved something very important with challenging Raven and the callouts blog, that unlike them, it isn't necessary for good people to even know each other to do the right thing. They have to dogpile and engage in cliquish behavior, what they do isn't coming from a place of inner ethics and strength, but what you all did? It's the opposite.

So, not only do I thank you again for sharing and providing the important support of simply not being alone to others, I thank you for being the example to the RPC that people dealing in callouts and generalized shaming cannot be, no matter their platform.

I hope that, whether you choose to remain, leave, or take a very long break, everything you've been dealing with starts to look up. I know it's easy to say things made hollow for their repetition and flippant use, like telling you not to let them win, or that their bullshit just isn't that important. So, I'm not going to say them.

It doesn't work that way when you're dealing with mental health concerns! You can logically know that this is just petty bullshit not worth being run out of something important to you, but that doesn't stop the worry, frustration, or depression. You can have all the determination in the world to hang in there, even the spite to back it up, but neither is a match for the things you cannot control coming from your brain. That is the cruelty of mental illness on the very best of days.

You have all of my respect, support, and genuine sympathy that this happened to you. No one should be allowed to continually and unapologetically go out of their way to throw a wrench into someone's hard-won progress. You did nothing to deserve this, and the people out there worth interacting with are going to be the same ones who will have no question of that.

Lastly, I also hope that some of the anons sharing their experiences have helped you feel less alone, or like you're not just irrationally upset. Please know that you're seen and supported as well! And that you are always welcome to talk more, vent, share successes here.

Thank you, Anon.

I’ve spent over 16 hours in two different ERs and I’d like to vent

CW: Doctors hospitals, chronic illness, incompetence, female hysteria, humiliation, mental health stigma,

What follows is my original post made on Thursday, there is a update as of today at the end and the news is not all bad. This is made to spread awareness talk about an issue I feel is way too often ignored and most importantly let other people feeling this they aren’t alone.

So. I have ehler danlos syndrome, celiac, endometriosis, fibromyalgia, and an (so far) otherwise specified seizure disorder. So basically I am a medical dumpster fire. Getting a or in my case several diagnosis has been a long terrifying and grueling for both me and my partner. We have enountered many doctors and nurses who were kind attentive willing to listen and knowledgeable about my Miriad of admiditally uncommon diagnosis. But today I am so incredibly hurt, frustrated, angry and scared and I want to put this out there because this is part of the many problems that chronically ill and disabled people face everytime they walk into a doctors office, emergency room or even out in public.

So I look sick, it’s obvious and it’s been obvious for a long time. I sit at around a six to seven on a pain scale most of my life, which sucks. I have chronic nausea and weight loss that makes me weak and thin in a sick way, which also sucks. But by far the hardest thing is hoe many people refuse to take my seriously. So today after three months on a waiting list I saw a gastroenterologist. I was scared, underweight, sick and tired. I wanted answers like always and let my partner drag me into a beige fluorescent room to try and make some sense. Overall the doctor was nice, but put heavy emphasis on my past of CPTSD from repeated abuse, and implied that my weight loss and severe gastrointestinal problems could be “just a side effect of my anxiety”. That was dehumanizing to say the least. Because I know I’m traumatized, I’ve sat in therapists offices and cried, I’ve pulled myself together, fought addiction and anorexia and I know that I’m healing. I know it’s his job to look between the lines but I also want to just have a chance to be understood, and not dismissed as a psych case.

Later today I had an episode of vomiting and loss of consciousness, over all not great stuff. So my partner in their amazing sense of love and compassion took me to th ER. Because that’s where you’re supposed to go when you’re scared, sick, hurt, in danger and don’t know what to do.

My experience there was by far the worst I’ve ever had. My vitals were highly abnormal (high pulse at rest, low BP, and low pulse ox). I was having neurological symptoms related to my seizure disorder and instead was given a barrage of tests that had nothing to do with why I was there, the condition I repeatedly told them I had, or the worrying vitals. So after two hours a head CT and useless blood work the ER doctor looked at me and my partner (who was forced to wait in the car in 94 degree weather) and told me I was fine and dehydrated.

I’m a nursing student, I’m new, I’m a novice at the most, and I have a lot to learn. But never could I imagine having a chronically patient, with abnormal labs and vitals with numerological involvement be given saline and discharged. My partner and I were terrified because we didn’t know what else to do. I needed help. I needed answers. I needed them to hear me. After me panicking my partner told me that we should try again. Because doctors are here to help us, and if your scared and there’s something wrong they took an oath to help.

So I called the nurse who was awesome, he went and got the doctor and I was ready to make my case. My partner at this point as well as me were terrified frustrated and close to tears. And this ER doctor after hearing our concerns, my history (with chronic illness and anorexia) proceeded to throw up her hand and as’ my partner “what they her to do”. This was shocking but sadly it doesn’t end here. The doctor proceeded to insist that I was fine and the situation was both non emergent and out of her hands. I responded in a passive way because at that point I was scared triggered and exausted. And I asked what she thought I should do”. And the words that came of her mouth hurt me and made more angry than any four syllables ever has.

“Psych referral”

Now let me something straight. I am a survivor, I am working in me healing, I am growing and changing for the better. I take my meds go to therapy and work everyday to get a little better. But this woman who obviously hadn’t read my chart which denotes not only my diagnosis, psychological history, and notEs from speacialists on the severity of my physical condition has just implied that I’m crazy. This was horrible but 8 could see how it would seem that I am overreacting but, due years of gaslighting, medication being forced on me to cover abuse and trauma, I hate being called that. It’s not a real term, nor does it help anyone, nor does it doing anything but make me remember the nights I spent wondering if that word was me.

In one visit, one person managed to dehumanize, humiliate dismiss me and maybe risk my life based on the fact that 8 wasn’t worth the time it took to read my chart.

It so incredibly weird to have to say this but I as a queer, gay, chronically ill, Latin person am in fact still a human being WHOS painand concerns deserve as much respect as anyone else. We all deserve to be helped and heard and people like this are one of the many reasons that I and so many others are scared to ge5 help, scared to tell the full story, or scared to speak up. This kills people. This is killing people. And this is why I in all my chronically glory and working so hard to advocate and move forward in medicine as a whole. Because nobody deserves that. Because I didn’t deserve to sit in an ER terrified and be told I was crazy. Because my partner doesn’t deserve to be dismissed and mocked for being scared. Because I nor anyone else have to prove I am sick enough or disabled enough to be worth someone’s time.

I hope anyone who reads this and understands even a little. Who’s been through it, whose family and partners have been through it know that this is not okay, that this not your fault, and that you are by no means crazy. That the people who make feel like burden or an annoyance are the problem. Because you deserve to be heard. I m hoping everybody’s doing okay, I’m hoping your journeys are treating you well. Because as always no matter who are, where you are and what you’re feeling you are not alone, you are worthy and I believe you.

***Update**

I later went to a larger hospital not in my home town, and through a long stay in the ER got a formal epilepsy diagnosis, given a anti convulsants drug, and overall treated like a human being. I now have contact with their epilepsy unit and have the tool and education I need to start this part of my chronic illness journey. I’m exhausted and getting used to knew meds but am highly grateful for the good doctors out there, the nurses who listen and the partner who was angelic enough to be with me through it all.

im 31, and after over a decade of trying to figure out what is wrong with me, my therapist and I are finally thinking it’s ADHD. i’ve had a gut feeling about it for a while and every ADHD post is relatable. now the problem is finding an place that does adult assessments and is affordable (no insurance). do you have any tips on going through the assessment as an adult? and if i can’t afford it, and can’t get medication. how do i ever become the productive focused person i want to be? thanks.

Sorry in advance for the long post... I put the most relevant bits in bold for a TL;DR version.

 I know getting diagnosed as an adult can seem daunting, but you shouldn’t worry too much. While ADHD was once viewed as something that only affected children, it is now widely recognized as a lifelong disorder and you shouldn’t have to fear being dismissed because you weren’t diagnosed early in life. It’s extremely helpful that you have been seeing a therapist, and they also think you have ADHD. Ask them to send over their notes when you do go to the doctor.

As for how to get diagnosed - I’ll start by saying I hate the way American healthcare is set up, as medication and healthcare in general are expensive. I have to move frequently for me and my husband’s jobs (we both work in hospitality, and as the saying goes, “You have to move out to move up!”). Because most (all?) ADHD medications are a Schedule II drug (highly regulated but still legal), I have to get rediagnosed in every new state. I always bring my past history, but most doctors want to complete testing as they are monitored for prescribing stimulants and can lose their license if found to be providing this medication without ample documentation. (All of this to say - I have been through the procedure many times as an adult.) Depending on the state, some doctors also require bloodwork and an EKG to ensure you are healthy enough to receive the medication (although some will accept past test results if done recently enough.) Also depending on the state and doctor, they may have additional requirements. In Florida, my doctor wanted a multitude of tests, and asked for a sleep study to ensure the medication wasn’t causing poor sleep. In California, as part of the Kaiser HMO system, I was required to do periodic drug tests to ensure I wasn’t also using street drugs, and to check that the Adderall was in my system (as a test that I was using it as prescribed, and not selling it). Some states are much easier – Utah, Alabama and West Virginia all were able to diagnose me in one appointment and prescribed the medication same day. Last, a General Practitioner won’t typically prescribe it and will direct you to a psychiatrist. Even if you did have insurance, most don’t cover psychiatrists or if they do, it comes with a different deductible (because obviously mental health isn’t part of regular health (heavy sarcasm)). After diagnosing, you have to meet with the doctor once a month to get the prescription refilled – due to the Schedule II status, they can’t have it on an auto-refill like other medications and they need to ensure you aren’t abusing it or having negative side effects. (although the one good thing to come out of COVID is that it normalized tele-health appointments, since an in-person meeting with a doctor once a month can be difficult to schedule). Even though I have health insurance, I typically pay out of pocket $120 a month for my visit with the doctor, and after insurance and a coupon I pay $73 for two medications (Adderall & Vyvanse). I’m fortunate now to be able to afford that expense – at the times in my life where I couldn’t, I would request a 30 day supply of the more affordable pills and only take medication on days where I couldn’t function without it (such as doing large amounts of paperwork) and try to use learned behavior techniques the rest of the time, to stretch out my resources.

As far as what goes into the actual diagnosis – doctors most commonly use a questionnaire about your daily life to assess you. Here is a link to commonly-used questionnaires: https://www.additudemag.com/adhd-assessments-and-tests/.

I know I just made it seem very daunting to get diagnosed and on a medication, but I want to be honest with you about what the process looks like, and again, depending on where you live it can be done in one session. Now that is out of the way, let me give you some information that is more helpful:

If you can, skip asking a regular GP for a referral and make an appointment directly with a psychiatrist. This will save you the extra cost of the doctor’s appointment, just to be told someone else will help. Many places have low cost mental health centers and ADHD falls into that realm, so I would check out what is available in your city. Before making an appointment, confirm the following:

-          Do they diagnose ADHD?

-          Do they prescribe medication? (Therapists don’t prescribe, only psychiatrists, and some will not prescribe ADHD medication at all so it’s important to be clear that it is your intention to receive medication if diagnosed)

-          What tests do they require for diagnosing, and prescribing medication? (Some places may have more or less requirements, and it can even vary within a city or state. This way you will know if it’s something you can afford at the time.)

Talk with the doctor about your specific situation, and what medications are affordable without insurance. Adderall, for example, is past the 10 year exclusive patent and now has a generic version available. It comes in quick release and slow release, depending on your needs. You can also talk to the doctor about a prescription to both quick and slow release, so you take the correct medicine based on your needs for that day (marathon work day? Slow release that extends over the entire day. Afternoon project – quick release that lasts for four hours). Vyvanse is great but doesn’t have a generic version and is insanely expensive without insurance (to the tune of $350+). Use the GoodRX app to find deals on medication without insurance (Adderall is about $15 for a month supply with this app). There are a ton of drug options so look up the pricing during the doctor’s visit, so you can confirm that you can afford what they prescribe. Also keep in mind that getting a prescription filled is the same cost whether you get 1 pill or 30 (a fact I learned the hard way when getting a 10 pill prescription filled once.)

 If you read all that and thought, Thanks but no thanks, here are some other options:

-          My psychiatrist in Florida recommended that I take Rhodiola Rosea supplements in addition to medication, as it has clinically proven positive effects on ADHD symptom control. I found it on Amazon. Omega-3 fatty acid supplements are also proven effective.

-          If you’re interested in this sort of thing, here is a super comprehensive study of various dietary supplements and behavior modifications that work or don’t work for ADHD: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4968082/

-          Practicing meditation is a great way to relax your body (increased stress, while helpful for short-term tasks, can make ADHD symptoms worse long term) and train your mind to hold onto singular, important thoughts (people’s names, why you walked into the kitchen, etc). I use the Waking Up app and love it – there are also many free options in the App Store and on YouTube.

-          Regular exercise is another great way to manage ADHD symptoms, as it gives your body a natural serotonin and dopamine boost, two important chemicals your body has trouble producing and absorbing naturally.

-          Caffeine is a great, easily accessible stimulant that has a focusing and calming effect on ADHD individuals. My doctor actually asked my parents to give me coffee each morning before school when I was a child, before we moved onto prescriptions.

-          Often, there are other factors that go along with ADHD, such as anxiety and/or depression. Getting this under control can go a long way in managing ADHD as well. I’m not sure if you have any issues with those, but it can be helpful to treat both if you do. The medication Wellbutrin is used to treat depression and also has mild stimulants, which would be helpful for both conditions. It isn’t a Schedule II drug, so you can probably ask your doctor for a 3 or 6 month prescription.

-          There are a ton more mind hacks and learned behavioral mechanisms you can try – read some of my other posts for suggestions.

Of course, I have to give the legal disclaimer – all of this is based on my personal experience, I’m not licensed in the medical field in any way and only a doctor can give you proper advice for your body and situation, and what medications will be most helpful. 😊

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend season three full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

100% (thirteen of thirteen).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

41.16%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Seven, so just over half. Three of those are 50%+.

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Twenty-four. Thirteen who appeared in more than one episode, five who appeared in at least half the episodes, and two who appeared in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Thirty-nine. Eighteen who appeared in more than one episode, seven who appeared in at least half the episodes, and one who appeared in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

Not nearly as good as you might expect or hope. As with previous seasons, the show’s most impressive content is not the feminist stuff at all, and on the feminist front it feels sometimes as if the show spends more time denouncing different aspects of the feminist movement as ‘the wrong kind of feminism’ than it does declaring and upholding the aspects it does approve. I tend to feel that it spends time talking the talk on women’s issues, but doesn’t often get up to walk the walk (average rating of 3).

General Season Quality:

Easily better than the previous two seasons, despite a deflated ending. It takes a much more focused approach to its storytelling in the beginning of the season, in a manner which briskly becomes refreshingly confronting and leads in to a powerful middle. Unfortunately, it never sustains quality for very long, and overall the show still suffers for being too easily distracted. It’s not infuriating, but it can be frustrating.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

Ok, let me explain something about myself first, something I’ve mentioned in other (non-Crazy Ex) posts which have gone live long before this one will, but for anyone who missed it in any of those other places, here it is: I am, right now, pregnant. In fact, I am pregnant with a child conceived non-traditionally with a gay friend of mine, and as such, Darryl’s non-traditional quest for biological parenthood in this season struck a very personal chord (though, unlike Darryl, I used the phone-a-friend option as my first choice, not a fallback. Would recommend, if it’s ever relevant to your life). I bring all of this up because I can categorically declare that there are certain plot threads that you absolutely will NOT have the same reaction to if you don’t have that very personal chord being struck, and even moreso if that chord is relevant to your life right now, rather than being something that you’ve experienced in the past but has since slipped from the forefront of your attention. Thus, when I talked about feeling like the emphasis was in all the wrong places for Darryl’s part of the narrative, and expressed irritation with Heather’s pregnancy and birth? I sure ain’t mad about it for no reason. I am extremely, extremely aware of what those processes are actually like right the heck now.

I’m not going to linger on all the details, but I am particularly annoyed at the writers for dropping the ball on the pregnancy/birth part, specifically because it’s something which is so often badly dramatised in tv and film already, and the writers not only know that, they openly reference it as if they’re somehow doing better. The same way that medical professionals sometimes find it too frustrating to watch hospital dramas because of all their inaccuracies, or someone in law enforcement might cringe their way through all the egregious breaches in procedure in a cop show, there’s always a significant risk that anything depicted in fiction will make you want to tear your hair out over the way the plot warps or disregards reality that is pertinent to your life, either through a lack of proper research or understanding of the subject matter, or a conscious choice to prioritise desired storytelling beats/developments over actual logic and realism. Suffice to say there are a LOT of concessions Crazy Ex-Girlfriend asked me to make to their storytelling with this little subplot, some of which most people who have never been pregnant wouldn’t notice, and yes, some of which I would probably dismiss if I were not in the midst of the reality right now. I’m someone who has been present at actual births before and has been raised with an above-average understanding of what’s involved, so I’m used to gritting my teeth and hoping to just not be too annoyed by the way pregnancy and birth is typically depicted on screen. The fact that I am currently immersed in the reality of preparing to give birth makes me less forgiving of fictional contrivances, yes, but in the case of this show’s approach, it’s also more than that: it’s the fact that this show actively promotes itself as a feminist text. And if you’re gonna do that, and criticise the way other things (”written by men!”) depict labour, but then you also choose not to include any education/empowerment of your pregnant character, rattle off a variety of (uneducated, disempowered) cliches anyway, and then handwave it all with ‘nevermind, she just got an epidural!’ as if that ‘solves’ the difficulties of birth (and post-birth recovery, for that matter), frankly that’s just...a really unimpressive failure of feminist storytelling. Congratulations, you neglected the subject completely, at the same time as actively claiming your intent to do better than all that written-by-men schlock out there! What a tiresome charade this turned out to be.

Setting that aside though (difficult for me, as I am...very preoccupied with it), there was actually a good lot of things to like about this season, even if I do still feel that I ultimately have more criticisms than I do praise. Having Rebecca actually reach crisis point in the form of a suicide attempt, and consequently getting a diagnosis for her mental disorder and finally being able to move forward in learning to live a balanced life with BPD? Frankly, it’s not a move that I anticipated, and if you’d asked me where I thought Rebecca’s mental health plot was heading, I probably would have just shrugged it off as an unfocused thread where the ultimate goal was just ‘figure out how to be happy on your own terms instead of defining happiness through someone else’ (which is solid advice, but generalised advice, not something that would require the show to commit to a genuine mental illness). Acknowledging that Rebecca’s behaviour comes from a more distinct source than just the nebulous idea of being ‘crazy’ is a vitally important development, and it ushered in some of the best storytelling the show has offered thus far, at least when the plot maintained steady focus and made an effort to be responsible and mature in its exploration of the issue. As ever, there were still times when the show used Rebecca’s mental state for comic relief in a manner which made me uncomfortable, and times when I couldn’t interpret the intentions of the narrative - I have come to the conclusion that this show and I are on completely different wavelengths, which makes us a bad match, regardless of any elements which I do appreciate. 

On the subject of things I appreciate, I’m going to discuss the true character highlight of the show, someone I wanted to talk about after last season, not realising that if I held off until this review instead, he was gonna wind up so terribly underused in the meantime that it’s almost weird that he’s still technically part of the main cast at this point: Josh Chan. Josh Chan is...kinda the most believable part of this show, both in the bumbling good-natured balance of the character himself, and in other character’s feelings about him. Being able to buy the idea that someone would give up their whole life as they knew it to chase after this guy is kinda important to selling the concept of the show from the outset, and honestly, Josh Chan is the only time I’ve ever seen a central male love interest for whom the hype seemed to make sense. Is he perfect? Not by a long shot, but that’s fine because ‘perfection’ is as conditional as it is unattainable. The problem with male love interests, often, is that they’re written by heterosexual men who treat the character as some kind of masculine wish-fulfillment, a combination of ‘guy I wish I could be’ and ‘guy I think women should want (me)’. Josh Chan is a great example of a love interest written by women for women: he displays positive masculine-coded traits (protective, physically capable), while rejecting negative, toxic-masculine elements (aggression, possessiveness), and he embraces key ‘feminine’ traits (non-threatening, kind, soft, emotionally expressive, family-oriented), while his flaws are unobtrusive and potentially even endearing (the main one is that he’s quite stupid, which is something a lot of straight women will happily admit to liking (at least in theory), and other traits such as Josh’s childish streak can be a source of joy under some circumstances, as well as being something Josh mostly keeps a hold on so that it doesn’t become a burden to his partners). Also, it would be remiss of me to neglect to mention how refreshing and meaningful it is to have an Asian male love interest. I really enjoy not being bored to death by Josh Chan, and I am annoyed at how little of him we got this season while we wasted time with that generic slice of white bread, Nathaniel. Bring back the Chan plots, season four. Do it for me.

Closer To The End (part III)

I contend that human beings are not suited for the world we've fashioned for ourselves. Cases of anxiety and depression are practically ubiquitous, and suicide in all age groups is once again on the rise. Some will suffer mental afflictions that last years -- perhaps even for a lifetime. This is the third and final part of my story.

~By Billy Goate~

Cover art by Ruso Tsig additional art by Karl Briullov

I'm so tired of hearing that I'm wrong Everyone laughs at me, why me? I'm so tired of being pushed around I feel like I've been betrayed

We take each other's love, forget to give back Isn't it a pity, how we break each other's hearts I know we're only human and not to blame But who the hell are you to cause so much pain Why...

MEDICATION

My parents have been anti-establishment for as long as I can remember. In the climate of the 1980s, the institutions of the day were being called seriously into question. One of them was the authoritarian nature of public education (there's a reason why Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" resonated so strongly with people). It's no surprise that my family got caught up in the first wave of the homeschooling movement. Other areas of modern life began to be called into question, as well, taking the family down a dark, windy road that led into conspiracy culture, extreme libertarianism, and religious dogmatism.

This distrust of the "experts" put us at odds with the medical establishment, too. "Doctors only know how to do two things," mom would often proclaim loudly in one of her famous rants, "cut you open or prescribe you pills." Natural medicine held the keys to recovery from all ills, be it cancer or the common cold. "All those chemicals aren’t good for your body," she insisted. "God put everything we need for healing in the ground." I’m not here to knock naturopathy (I was an ardent follower of this way of life for years) nor my mother for her convictions, but there are some things that can’t be cured by Saint John's Wort and herbal tea -- major depression being one of them.

At one point, my anxiety, melancholy, and a generalized feeling of social isolation reached such a heightened state I turned to hypnotism, enamored by an obscure radio program hosted by Roy Masters and his Foundation for Human Understanding. I was too young to understand the significance of most of the bullshit he was spewing, but it was the comprehensive approach to life that appealed to me. I wanted answers -- all of them. About the only thing I got out of it, though, was learning how to make my own arm go numb through self-hypnosis.

Later, I'd get caught up in a movement of Biblical counseling that rejected psychiatry altogether. "Christ has given us all things we need for life and godliness," says the holy writ, ergo we need none other than Jesus to cure our mental ills. Furthermore, the thesis said, since "God has not given us a spirit of fear" it must mean that the root of depression and anxiety is ultimately sin against God. The answer? Confess your sins and walk by faith, not by sight. In short, pray the sadness away. All of this had limited effectiveness in coping with the claustrophobic cloud of melancholy that was constantly with me.

Cough & Windhand: Reflection of the Negative by Windhand

The stigma of psychiatry and modern medicine kept me from treating my depression for damn near a decade. Somewhere in my late twenties, after a prolonged and particularly dark depressive spell, I decided to talk to my medical doctor about antidepressants. He started me on the industry standard, the well-known and well-marketed Prozac, which became a household name in the '90s. I took the first dose at bedtime and when I woke up, I was seriously hating the daylight. Feeling extraordinarily fatigued, all I wanted to do was sleep. I called in a rare sick day from work. The next day I was feeling groggy, but well enough to return. Giving it the good ol' college try, I took Prozac for several weeks as directed, but the side-effects just weren't worth it for me. That’s when I was referred to my first psychiatrist.

It was a weird feeling sitting in the waiting room for my appointment. I felt like I’d joined the ranks of the fragile, broken, and confused, perhaps even the insane. It was hard for me to see myself sharing anything in common with the others that shared the tiny lobby. The psychiatrist who greeted me looked like a regular chucklehead -- you know, one of those sidekicks from a sitcom that's not coming to me now. (It just came to me: Glen from the Tom Green Show.) A paunchy man in his 30s with wavy dirty blonde hair parted to the side donning wire-rimmed glasses, the shrink pulled out a notebook and started asking me about my background, while he busily took notes. Turned out, the man was very methodical in his approach. Over the course of the year, we cycled through all kinds of drugs -- Paxil, Effexor, Wellbutrin, Lexapro, Zoloft, and a lot of other names I'm not remembering, before finally settling on Cymbalta.

Certainly, this was something I didn't want to share with my coworkers, much less mom and dad. The first time I told my brother I was taking antidepressants, he was outraged. “You don’t need that stuff in your body. You don’t need pills to feel good.” I don’t know what it is about antidepressant medication that offends people so badly, but some people feel it is their personal mission in life to get you off of them. Why all the evangelical fervor? Are they secretly afraid they are "nuts," too? It’s not like I’m trying to get everyone else to take my medication, but suddenly these people, well-meaning or not, are trying to get you off of your meds.

I’ve seen YouTube videos from a guy claiming that God has cured him of his bipolar disorder and he flushed all his pills down the toilet (bad idea, by the way). Then a month later, he comes back online crying uncontrollably, talking about how he feels like God is testing him and asking viewers to pray to stop Satan’s onslaught. Moral of the story: It's dangerous to let people's religious opinions and untested hunches drive the agenda for our mental health.

I'm very reluctant these days to talk to anyone about my depression, because of all the rush to judgement involved. Ironically, it's this breakdown of community that I believe is at the heart of much of our mental health issues as a society. Look at the comments on any confessional video addressing burnout, depression, or anxiety and you'll find everyone is suddenly an expert who knows so well the precise and perfect solution to your problems. Well-meaning or not, it's incredibly annoying and I'd rather not have trouble with it. Hell, it took me two years to finish this article.

Depressed people are often viewed with the same cynical dismissiveness ascribed to angsty hormonal teens. "It's just a phase, you'll get through it," you're told with the reassuring wave of a hand. Besides, they remind you, "Happiness is a choice!" Because they are feeling chipper today, they have little patience for you dampening their mood. Others call you edgy when you say the pressures of life are so great that you feel like just turning off the lights on all of it. Still others will view you as selfish for leaving the family reunion early (or not wanting to participate in holidays at all). When you spend the whole weekend in bed sleeping, they'll accuse you of being indulgent, not realizing sleep gives you a respite from the hurt, guilt, and regret of painful memories or the misery of an unstable home life. Or the well-meaning "It Gets Better!" It doesn't always get better as life moves on.

Then there are those who try to talk you off your meds, entirely (cue: the ridiculously overwrought Facebook posts). We've all been privy to those conversations that strike a conspiratorial tone about how it was really the pharmaceutical companies that led to Chris Cornell's death. "You should just get off the stuff," they argue -- be it from noble intentions or just pride from clinging to an opinion they've stubbornly invested in.

Then there are those who are convinced that since Jesus (or Buddha, Allah Oprah, Jordan Peterson or juicing) gave them an escape from their depression, certainly it is the universal cure for all that ails you. Understand that I was a committed Christian for decades. I know what it is like to feel spiritually serene and I value many of the things the church gave me as a young adult, namely the fellowship, tolerance, and love. I know the feeling of peace that comes from believing in someone who reigns over the chaos and cares about your every need -- an ultimate being who will make sense of the nonsense one day.

I don't wish to diminish anyone's faith or diminish your personal experiences. The fact is, however, that major depression is as much a physical illness as cancer is. Certainly, there are transitional feelings of unhappiness, emptiness, and despair that come from facing situations that seem out of one's control -- the nightmare roommate, being laid off from a job, losing a loved one. It's also true that in most cases, this sadness can be overcome by a new perspective, trying better strategies, or simply allowing the passage of time to do its healing work. Depression can be impacted by one's beliefs, but there is a kind of depression that exists independently of one's perspective on life.

SUICIDAL TENDENCIES

Apart from this series of articles (which took me a good two years to publish), I've stopped sharing my depression with other people. It's annoying, because most people don't know how to listen and empathize. They want to jump in with a solution that, if implemented by nightfall, just might make a difference by daybreak. It's just more hassle than it's worth. Over time, I've gone from being someone with an intense need to belong, to not caring what people think about me at all. I'll often go out of my way to avoid anything deeper than transactional relationships. Once a social butterfly, you'll find me quite the hermit these days. As a consequence, while I was once open to sharing my feelings of loneliness and despair, I rarely mention them any more on social media and practically never to my IRL friends. I would be the last person to call a suicide hotline, by the way. Judge me if you wish, but I'm just being honest. If you want to know what is going on in the head of a severely depressed person with suicidal ideation, here's a least one brain you can peer into.

There's a general consensus that suicide is a selfish decision, even a cowardly act. This was a casual opinion of my own for years, as well. Not until suicide touches someone in your life -- or when you enter its despondent realm yourself -- does the ridiculousness of that notion becomes apparent. Understand that for a person to commit suicide, they have to overcome the brain's own strong predilection for self-preservation. It's not so easy to take the step of ending your life. Something has gone terribly wrong with the brain's ability to convincingly cry, "STOP!" for that to happen.

In my worst bout of depression, following the demise of long-term relationship, I reached the point where every waking moment was sheer misery. Some call this anhedonia -- the inability to feel pleasure. Normally, when we are feeling blue, we seek out something to stimulate our pleasure receptors. That's why ice cream, chocolate, and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are popular go-tos for the bummed out. For me, it's always been music and movies. On this particular week, though, I had somehow lost the capacity to find any joy whatsoever in the usual pastimes. Anything that attempted to pacify my mood met with my contempt. The only thing I could do to escape the agony of just being alive and conscious was to sleep...and sleep I did. At first 8 hours a night, up from my usual 7. Then it advanced to 9, 10, 11, 12 hours. When dawn came, a wave of misery washed over my mind again.

Once, I woke up feeling so despondent that I knew with absolute clarity that I could end my life. Today, I could actually do it. Immediately upon this realization, I wept bitterly. I've not cried like that before or since. If anything, I've become more stoic about the idea of suicide. Don't get me wrong, my internal sense of self-preservation is still quite strong. The problem is that in moments of severe depression, that instinct is dampened. You'll do just about anything just to get rid of the feeling of misery making it unbearable to be awake.

DOOM AWAKENING

One of the most important developments in treating my depression, besides medication and therapy, was the discovery of doom. There's an old expression that misery loves company. I don't know about you, but when I listen to music it's not generally to cheer me up. No, I want my tunes to have a certain level of commiseration with what I'm feeling and going through at the time. When I discovered (quite by accident) Saint Vitus, I knew I'd found my soul food. I can't fully explain that eureka moment when Dave Chandler belted out that first downtuned note on the guitars on "Born Too Late" or when Wino joined with plaintive lyrics for "I Bleed Black." This resonated with me powerfully. It brought chills. This was medicine for my weary head, a kind of mental morphine to dull the pain. I'd come to the Roseland Theater for Down and left with Saint Vitus.

As a funny aside, my roommate (who accompanied me to the show) and I rehashed the bands of the night, giving our two cents on this or that. One thing he said still makes me smile a little inside. "What did you think of Saint Vitus?" I asked. "I don't think they're the kind of band that will withstand the test of time," he remarked. "Well," I rejoined, "they have been playing now for over 30 years and were the co-headliners on a national tour, so their sound must be resonating with a good number of people." Sure, it wasn't for everyone, but on that night my doom had come.

Every song on 'Born Too Late' (1986) so perfectly captures the malaise of the deeply wounded soul, not just in lyrics but in the whole vibe. There's a thick, smoky haze permeating the record and it reminds me a lot of what it feels like after you've poured out your heart until you've got no more tears left to cry. Come on, don't pretend you're so macho that normal human emotions elude you. It's hard to put doom into words, but I'll try: on the one hand you feel emotionally exhausted because you've emptied out all those pent up feelings of loss, fear, regret, and frustration, on the other hand there's a feeling of "reset" and it often makes things much clearer to sort through. For me, when I've exhausted all my emotional resources, I'm left with a feeling of blithe acceptance. A sense of being dealt a set of cards by the impartial hand of fate. That's the kind of vibe that Saint Vitus captures perfectly for me on this record.

I spent entire weekends on those long, wonderful rabbit trails of discovery. "Dying Inside" led me to Trouble's "The Tempter" with its oh-so-tragic central riff. Lyrically, the songs I was running across could not have been more apropos.

Pentagram, The Skull, and Candlemass were not lingering far behind. Then came the more recent monoliths of doom: Electric Wizard, Windhand, High on Fire, Burning Witch, Khanate, Pilgrim, Serpentine Path, Usnea, Demon Lung, Ancient VVisdom, Dopelord, and the NOLA sludge scene, along with lesser known but equally as powerful acts like Undersmile, Shepherd's Crook, Reptile Master, Purple Hill Witch, Witchthroat Serpent, March Funèbre, Beldam, Hooded Priest, Regress, and 71TONMAN (listen to the Spotify playlist).

Doom metal spoke to me with a sharp realism that I connected with immediately. When you have no strength left to get angry at the world, you switch your listening habits from Car Bomb to Cough. You can say, I suppose, that doom was my salvation. It kept me hanging on a little while longer. The salve of those slow, low riffs gave me a strange feeling of consolation. "We know life sucks, too. Welcome to reality." It's like being awakened to the Matrix, but feeling there's not a damned thing you can do to change any of it. Your fate is sealed. It's an honesty that is both refreshing and freeing, I suppose, though one does wish to reclaim the notion of hope.

Believe it or not, even after writing all of this, optimism is my default mode. When I'm feeling well, and even when my depression is at low levels, the needle always leans towards inspiration, creativity, even a mischievous sense of humor and an aw, shucks smile that people tend to notice. I don't want to be depressed. The problem is that severe depression can make you feel, illusion or not, like you're paralyzed from doing anything about it.

As I've experienced more and more cuts and scrapes of life, I've become increasingly numb to it all, like the massive build-up of scar tissue. Things that upset me easily in the past might still hurt, but I've come to expect them, so they have the impact of a dull table knife. Perhaps I'm becoming a nihilist, despite my optimistic tendencies. It's hard not to be. Don't worry about me, though. If anything, I want to stick around to see what's going to happen next. It's the inborn curiosity we all have inside of us -- the same thing that I imagine kept Stephen Hawking going for decades after being wrecked by a disease that cruelly mangled his body into its famously misshapen form, stealing away his most basic expressive freedoms -- save for the power of his eyes and the thoughts behind them.

I've also made a deliberate attempt to pursue treatment (both psychiatric and psychological care) for my depression, which I urge you to do if you are likewise laboring under its crushing weight. The perspective of time, coupled with a remedy for mind and body can have a significant impact on your perspective, if not your life circumstances.

THE WINDY ROAD AHEAD

Learn from your mistakes, don't dwell on them. Repeated affirmations like this one may seem trite, but they are ultimately true. You can be free from the chains of guilt and move forward, as one performer puts it, "from strength to strength."

Don't kill yourself (literally or metaphorically) for someone else or for someone else's decisions. It may bum you out that a roomie decided to take your money and run or that you were rebuffed by a long-time crush or made jobless through corporate-wide cuts. You don't own that, they do.

Walks

Get off the couch, move that bod. Something as simple as a walk down the block or a drive out of town can do wonders for your perspective. As a homeschool teen living under the strict rule of a radical fundamentalist household in rural East Texas, my one salvation were those long walks in the open field -- especially when my parents started having loud, intense fights related to my mom's own mental health. I sorted through so many of life's problems (most of which seemed much larger then than they do now) through those solitary, hour-long strolls.

I really miss that where I live now, in a more congested neighborhood, so I have to find other ways of getting away from it all (getting up and out a half-hour before the other walkers, for instance, helps). Even if I don't want to rustle myself awake and move around to do as simple a task as taking out the trash, sometimes the feeling...let me revise that...quite often the feeling follows after the decision has been made and the body is in motion.

Projects

Another piece of advice I have for coping with depression is to channel your frustrations in projects. When I'm depressed, I throw myself into my work. Hell, Doomed & Stoned started because I needed a project to pour myself into. My counselor asked me once, "If you woke up tomorrow without depression, what would be different about your world?"

She encouraged me to start with the things that were in my immediate vicinity. "Well, there wouldn't be mail strewn all over the floor. My dirty clothes would be in the hamper, my clean clothes folded and put away. I'd take the time to cook myself a meal, instead of running out the door eating a quick bite out of some package."

Good, let's make a list and start there. Do at least one of the things on your list between now and the time we meet again next week.

Talks

Despite my isolationist ways, I begrudgingly admit that talking often helps, too. Though I'm an introvert and am horrified at the idea of sharing my feelings with others, I've reached points in my depression where I was compelled to tell others about it. It's as natural to do that as to cry out when your body is experiencing jolting pain. I'm one of those verbal processors that tends to sort through my problems by talking to someone else. Often, pride or shame or lack of trust gets in the way of sharing with our family and friends, so at the very least the much talked about Suicide Prevention Hotline could actually help you gain perspective on your situation.

Journals

If you don't talk, at least journal. Again, I'm not a journaler and this is the first time in almost three decades that I've written about anything related to my depression. Role play with me. You're a scientist studying the human psyche. How would you describe those feelings you call depression? When I was first asked to describe it to a counselor, I found myself at a loss for words. She helped me with prompts:

Can you tell me what it feels like?

"I walk around feeling like a dark, thick raincloud is hovering all around me all the time."

Do you feel it in a part of your body?

"Well, yeah, I guess. The head. And the chest. It feels like there's pressure building from all around me, like my head is going to explode. My heart feels like it's going to leap out of my chest."

What's happening around you when these feelings arise?

I'd then go on to detail some recent happenings. She'd press me further to describe the kinds of thoughts racing through my head in these situations. All of this was really helpful in getting me to define this nebulous, gray malaise that was following me everywhere I went.

I don't keep a journal, per se. Something about it feels needlessly egotistical, a vain attempt to reinforce the illusion in our YouTube fame crazy world that my life is worth discovering and remembering at some point in the distant future. And yet, writing down one's thoughts can be another effective way of untangling that anxious ball of feelings that keeps me from thinking rationally about the depression I'm feeling.

Today is my birthday, but I couldn't care less. It's not about getting old. I stopped caring about that 10 years ago. It's something about celebration, specifically when the attention is on me. I can't adequately describe how contemptuous I find it. My last birthday was spent alone in an empty house and a bottle of Scotch, catching up with past seasons of Game of Thrones. I was so glad it was over and the happy birthday wishes stopped. There's nothing special about this day for me.

At some point, my family stopped celebrating birthdays and holidays. I'm not sure when it happened or why. Certainly not for religious reasons, more probably for financial ones. I grew up in a family that barely scraped by, so birthdays seemed a luxury we couldn't afford. Now, it just feels indulgent. More than that, it feels sad. It reminds me of all the disappointments, hurts, and failures of the past year. It's not as though it's all bad, of course. If nothing else my birthday gives the illusion that a chapter has turned, with new possibilities for the future. I also have to come to terms with how many people out there actually seem to care about me, maybe even love me.

And later that day, I forced myself to go to a show I was quite enthused about, but didn't factor in depression being the party pooper.

I can't account for what it is that comes over me. There are people here that genuinely like me, who probably even want to get to know me better, but I push them away. Not so much directly, but indirectly, by excusing myself to use the restroom and then changing my mind midway and just leaving the venue -- without even the courtesy of a "goodbye" to friends or a "great show" to the bands. I feel awful about it afterwards, but in that moment it's like a flood of emotional pain washes over me and it feels like I'm carrying an anchor chained around my neck. I feel the great urge to find my way to unlit corners. To look busy and preoccupied. Would it hurt me to say hello? To smile? Perhaps not, but right now my psyche is tingling like some kind of Spidey Sense telling me, "Get out of here! Just get your shit and leave...NOW."

As dour and hopeless as that may feel, just the act of writing it down afforded me a release, which incidentally I did not feel until the writing was all said and done.

Hope, a new beginning Time, time to start living Just like just before we died

Hurt, falling through fingers Trust, trust in the feeling There's something left inside There's no going back to the place we started from.

ONE MORE THING

For those of you who are wondering what you can do for a friend, family member, coworker or just someone you know casually from shows you both frequent, I couldn't say it better than one of my longtime fellow travelers in doom, who offered up this advice:

"While it's all very well and fucking dandy that there are so many people telling those who are struggling to reach out to them, I don't think people are quite understanding just how mental illness works sometimes. People quite often don't reach out, because those that are suffering from mental illness, at times, feel like they are a burden by unloading their shit onto someone else, despite the invitation to do so. It's generally the same concept that leads on to suicide.

I obviously can't speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself when I say the last thing I want to do is reach out to anyone because I feel like I am a burden and everyone would be better off without me -- and that is ultimately why I don't reach out. The point that I'm trying to get at is if you see someone struggling YOU reach the fuck out. If you don't see someone who used to be around, YOU reach the fuck out. Think about it. It's not that hard."

Well said and completely on the mark. At the same time, if you're feeling alone and uncared for, you may look at people’s lack of inquiry as more confirmation that you are worthless trash. You may interpret a busy person's slight as utter rejection. Don't worry about what others may or may not think of you. You need to take care of you, for you. The future is fickle. Your fortunes can change on a dime, so why base your self-worth and your decision about whether to live or die by how you feel right now? Ride it out, seek out help, get a game plan in play.

I say this as someone who knows how hard it can be to get mental health. I was double insured -- through my employer and the Veterans Administration -- and I couldn't get a god damned psychiatric appointment to reevaluate and adjust my meds. I called all over town trying to get in with someone. "Sorry, we're not accepting new patients" was the universal refrain. The VA would just be too many month's wait, I told myself, based upon how long it has taken me in the past to get a conventional medical appointment. In desperation, I called up my primary care doctor who asked if I was suicidal. For the first time in my life, I knew with full certainty the answer was yes. The more miserable I felt, the more I contemplated dying. If I did it, it would be something quick and sudden, I would daydream in my most despondent moment. "You need to check yourself into the hospital now," she told me adamantly. I did exactly that. I walked into the ER and told them I was suicidal. They led me to a room, had me take off all my clothes, and put on a hospital gown. I stayed in a padded room waiting for a social worker to see me. It was a desperate move, but it did pay off in getting me fast-tracked to see a psychiatrist.

One thing I learned about medication from my new psychiatrist (because he was very caring, very careful, and hence very effective at his job) is that everyone’s brain chemistry is uniquely different. There can be other issues impacting mood, too, such as thyroid, environmental stressors, sleep problems, vitamin deficiencies, and so on. Again, it’s often hard to see whether the cart is leading the horse or the horse is leading the cart, in terms of the mind-body connection. Long story short, this doctor adjusted my meds to near perfection to get me through the rare summer-long depression I was experiencing.

Just a few months later, he got hired away to work for the County and I was left back in the same boat once again. I got a great referral, but didn't realize until bills came in I couldn't pay that the doctor was out of my insurance network. Believe me, many people prefer to go without care entirely than to go into debt and I was one of them (truthfully, I still am). I went another year until I couldn't take it anymore and this time in my desperation reached back out to the VA. Surprisingly, they saw me within a week and prioritized my suicidal depression. I'm now in a good spot as a result, but it was a long, windy, uncertain road getting here. I know it's hard to find help. Sometimes you don't know what's available to you until you knock a little louder and get people's attention.

The older I get, it seems the more stubborn I am, particularly when it comes to reaching out and asking for help. Perhaps I've always been that way and am only now realizing it's become a liability. After taking off three weeks during the holidays to catch up with the many projects that were piling up around me, I realized that my depression was sometimes stronger than my will to power through and do my best work. I would find myself sitting at the computer for hours trying to get started with a story, trying to edit audio for a podcast, trying to prepare a team member's submission for publication, and every time I would find myself coming up against something painful, perhaps similar to the long recognized creative crimp known as writer's block. I describe it as an inhibitor chip in my brain that sends pain signals to my psyche whenever I contemplate moving forward.

Of course, rationally, I know it's all just a matter of the will, right? That's what those who aren't experiencing depression will tell you, at least. They don't want to go to the gym, but they make the choice to do it anyway, so why can't you just "man up" and do what needs to be done? Well, those aren't so much the messages other people give me, as they are my own conscience. The guilt itself from a day coming and going without results adds its own layer of complication to my mood. Thankfully, I have a wonderful counselor who understands and is helping me to tackle this with cognitive strategies. This, coupled with sensible medical treatment, has at least helped me to find "even flow" again.

Finally, you're going to have some bad days where you may even want to be productive, but your body feels like it's in revolt. As a creative person who loves to pour myself into as many projects as I can when I'm feeling good, it can be extraordinarily frustrating to not even feel the will to check email, open a letter, or listen to a stitch of music. Most days, I'm trying to work in concert with my body's natural rhythms. I'm more of a morning person and get my best work done between 8AM and 11AM. Anything after that is going to be hit or miss with diminishing returns. With that in mind, I have to hold back from starting new projects before the ones already on my plate are finished, because when I'm feeling good, I think I can take on the world.

This is all a part of me rediscovering what it's like to feel balanced, bright, and in love with life. It can be frustrating to have that feeling back, only to watch it wither away as the week progresses. Since I have very high expectations of myself, it's natural for me to heap guilt upon guilt for all the missed opportunities, but beating myself up only compounds the problem (it took me a long time to really get this about myself, too). Every day is a struggle, but I've decided I'm staying in the fight for the long haul.

In short: Be patient with yourself. Be fair with yourself. Be good to yourself. Remember, this too shall pass.

"Someday you're going to die, just like some day I'm going to die. But until then, you fight like hell to stay alive, you get that?!"

-- William Holden, The Earthling (1980)

Feeling insulted and wounded. Never measuring up. Walking on eggshells. If these statements describe your relationship, it is likely you are being emotionally abused. In general, a relationship is emotionally abusive when there is a consistent pattern of abusive words and bullying behaviors that wear down a person's self-esteem and undermine their mental health. What's more, mental or emotional abuse, while most common in dating and married relationships, can occur in any relationship including among friends, family members, and coworkers.

Emotional abuse is one of the hardest forms of abuse to recognize. It can be subtle and insidious or overt and manipulative. Either way, it chips away at the victim's self-esteem and they begin to doubt their perceptions and reality.

The underlying goal in emotional abuse is to control the victim by discrediting, isolating, and silencing.

In the end, the victim feels trapped. They are often too wounded to endure the relationship any longer, but also too afraid to leave. So the cycle just repeats itself until something is done.

Impact of Emotional Abuse

When emotional abuse is severe and ongoing, a victim may lose their entire sense of self, sometimes without a single mark or bruise. Instead, the wounds are invisible to others, hidden in the self-doubt, worthlessness and self-loathing the victim feels. In fact, many victims say that the scars from emotional abuse last far longer and are much deeper than those from physical abuse.

Over time, the accusations, verbal abuse, name-calling, criticisms, and gaslighting erode a victim's sense of self so much that they can no longer see themselves realistically. Consequently, the victim begins to agree with the abuser and becomes internally critical. Once this happens, most victims become trapped in the abusive relationship believing that they will never be good enough for anyone else.

Emotional abuse can even impact friendships because emotionally abused people often worry about how people truly see them and if they truly like them. Eventually, victims will pull back from friendships and isolate themselves, convinced that no one likes them. What's more, emotional abuse can cause a number of health problems including everything from depression and anxiety to stomach ulcers, heart palpitations, eating disorders, and insomnia.

How to Spot the Signs of Emotional Abuse

When examining your own relationship, remember that emotional abuse is often subtle. As a result, it can be very hard to detect.

If you are having trouble discerning whether or not your relationship is abusive, stop and think about how the interactions with your partner, friend or family member make you feel. If you feel wounded, frustrated, confused, misunderstood, depressed, anxious or worthless any time you interact, chances are high that your relationship is emotionally abusive.

Here are signs that you may be in an emotionally abusive relationship. Keep in mind, even if your partner only does a handful of these things, you are still in an emotionally abusive relationship.

Do not fall into the trap of telling yourself "it's not that bad" and minimizing their behavior. Remember, everyone deserves to be treated with kindness and respect.

Emotionally abusive people display unrealistic expectations. Some examples include:

Making unreasonable demands of you

Expecting you to put everything aside and meet their needs

Demanding you spend all of your time together

Being dissatisfied no matter how hard you try or how much you give

Criticizing you for not completing tasks according to their standards

Expecting you to share their opinions (you are not permitted to have a different opinion)

Demanding that you name exact dates and times when discussing things that upset you (when you cannot do this, they dismisses the event as if it never happened)

​Emotionally abusive people invalidate you. Some examples include:

Undermining, dismissing, or distorting your perceptions or your reality

Refusing to accept your feelings by trying to define how you should feel

Requiring you to explain and explain and explain how you feel

Accusing you of being "too sensitive," "too emotional," or "crazy"

Refusing to acknowledge or accept your opinions or ideas as valid

Dismissing your requests, wants, and needs as ridiculous or unmerited

Suggesting that your perceptions are wrong or that you cannot be trusted by saying things like "you're blowing this out of proportion" or "you exaggerate"

Accusing you of being selfish, needy or materialistic if you express your wants or needs (the expectation is that you should not have any wants or needs)

​Emotionally abusive people create chaos. Some examples include:

Starting arguments for the sake of arguing

Making confusing and contradictory statements (sometimes called "crazy-making")

Having drastic mood changes or sudden emotional outbursts

Nitpicking at your clothes, your hair, your work, and more

Behaving so erratically and unpredictably that you feel like you are "walking on eggshells"

​Emotionally abusive people use emotional blackmail. Some examples include:

Manipulating and controlling you by making you feel guilty

Humiliating you in public or in private

Using your fears, values, compassion or other hot buttons to control you or the situation

Exaggerating your flaws or pointing them out in order to deflect attention or to avoid taking responsibility for their poor choices or mistakes

Denying that an event took place or lying about it

Punishing you by withholding affection

Emotionally abusive people act superior and entitled. Some examples include:

Treating you like you are inferior

Blaming you for their mistakes and shortcomings

Doubting everything you say and attempting to prove you wrong

Making jokes at your expense

Telling you that your opinions, ideas, values, and thoughts are stupid, illogical or "do not make sense"

Talking down to you or being condescending

Using sarcasm when interacting with you

Acting like they are always right, knows what is best and is smarter

​Emotionally abusive people attempt to isolate and control you. Some examples include:

Controlling who you see or spend time with including time with friends and family

Monitoring your phone calls, text messages, social media, and email

Accusing you of cheating and being jealous of outside relationships

Taking or hiding your car keys

Demanding to know where you are at all times or using GPS to track your every move

Treating you like a possession or property

Criticizing or making fun of your friends, family, and coworkers

Using jealousy and envy as a sign of love and to keep you from being with others

Coercing you into spending all of your time together

Controlling the finances

If you suspect your partner, family member or friend may be emotionally abusing you, contact a counselor, an advocate or a pastor for assistance. You also can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline 1−800−799−SAFE(7233) or visit their website thehotline.org and chat online with someone right away.

7 Ways to Deal With Emotional Abuse

The first step in dealing with an emotionally abusive relationship is to recognize that it is happening. If you were able to identify any aspect of emotional abuse in your relationship, it is important to acknowledge that first and foremost. By being honest about what you are experiencing, you can begin to take control of your life again. Here are seven more strategies for reclaiming your life that you can put into practice today.

Make your mental and physical health a priority. Stop worrying about pleasing the person abusing you. Take care of your needs. Do something that will help you think positive and affirm who you are. Also, be sure to get an appropriate amount of rest and eat healthy meals. These simple self-care steps can go a long way in helping you deal with the day-to-day stresses of emotional abuse.

Establish boundaries with the abuser. Firmly tell the abusive person that they may no longer yell at you, call you names, insult you, be rude to you, and so on. Then, tell them what will happen if they choose to engage in this behavior. For instance, tell them that if they call you names or insult you, the conversation will be over and you will leave the room. The key is to follow through on your boundaries. Do not communicate boundaries that you have no intention of keeping.

Stop blaming yourself. If you have been in an emotionally abusive relationship for any amount of time, you may believe that there is something severely wrong with you. Why else would someone who says they love you act like this, right? But you are not the problem. Abuse is a choice. So stop blaming yourself for something you have no control over.

Realize that you cannot "fix" the abusive person. Despite your best efforts, you will never be able to change an emotionally abusive person by doing something different or by being different. An abusive person makes a choice to behave abusively. Remind yourself that you cannot control their actions and that you are not to blame for their choices. The only thing you can fix or control is your response.

Do not engage with an abusive person. In other words, if an abuser tries to start an argument with you, begins insulting you, demands things from you or rages with jealousy, do not try to make explanations, soothe their feelings or make apologies for things you did not do. Simply walk away from the situation if you can. Engaging with an abuser only sets you up for more abuse and heartache. No matter how hard you try, you will not be able to make things right in their eyes.

Build a support network. Stop being silent about the abuse you are experiencing. Talk to a trusted friend, family member or even a counselor about what you are experiencing. Take time away from the abusive person as much as possible and spend time with people who love and support you. This network of healthy friends and confidantes will help you feel less lonely and isolated. They also can speak truth into your life and help you put things into perspective.

Work on an exit plan. If your partner, friend, or family member has no intention of changing or working on their poor choices, you will not be able to remain in the abusive relationship forever. It will eventually take a toll on you both mentally and physically. Depending on your situation, you may need to take steps to end the relationship. Each situation is different. So it is best to discuss your thoughts and ideas with a trusted friend, family member or counselor.

I recently received two very important and interrelated questions:

Anon 1:

My psychologist don’t believe my mental illness, I feel like I couldn’t take it anymore, I want to choke myself until I passed out.

Anon 2:

Hello, I’ve been seeing a psychologist for a few months now. I’ve had problems with emotion dysregulation and abandonment issues for almost my entire life, but recently I’ve started reading about BPD and looking at the symptoms, I can say that I’ve never related to anything else more in my life. I’m not 18 yet, but is it still worth bringing it up to my psychologist? Ugh, sometimes I feel like I’m just faking it for attention.

I get questions like this frequently and have addressed them many times on this blog. However, considering the fact that this is clearly a persistent and pressing issue for many people, I’ve decided to do the following:

I’ll give a deep-dive answer to both these questions that is hopefully informative and helpful.

I’m working on a new resource that offers guidance and solutions to the frequent, common problems of BPD.

Before you read on any further, I want to emphasize that dying is absolutely out of the question. Not an option. No dying allowed on my blog. Life is short. You don’t have forever. So please don’t cut your precious time off prematurely. 

But this only points to the fact that this incredibly overwhelming impulse is an (over)reaction to the desperate, stressful, and toxic situation that is reinforced by psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists. There’s a problem where there should be a solution, blame and shame where there should be help and support.

The misbeliefs that Borderlines have about themselves are prevalent and persistent, both out of the sheer ignorance as well as the viciously cruel design of the psychiatric community. It’s time to start changing the way we think about mental health and mental help.

In the plainest possible terms, it’s really hard to find a good mental health worker. The only way to actually do it is through trial and error. Misdiagnosis. Informing yourself and building your own networks when you get referrals from doctors. Going out of town because no one in your area is accepting new patients, then having to pay all the gas and parking bills yourself.

This is all assuming that you can afford a decent mental health worker, of course.

People caught up in the healthcare system, especially in North America, quickly find out how uncaring and ineffective it really is. Why? Because the way it is set up is to run exclusively for profit.

Healthy people are not profitable.

For example, this is reflected in the mentality that pills are given to patients as the very first option for “care.” Psychiatrists in particular receive kickbacks from leading pharmaceutical companies depending on the kinds of pills they prescribe. But pills are not a viable long term solution, in my opinion, because they do not teach life skills and healthy recovery. 

So, it is no surprise that a mental health worker who is concerned about profit over long term care will push pills as the first (and often primary) option.

Another example is that there are tiers of help, according to how much you can pay a certain type of mental health worker.

Psychiatrists are trained medical doctors, which means that they can prescribe medications, and often exclusively develop a medication management plan as the only course of treatment. Typically, you can expect to pay up to $500 for an initial consultation, and at least $100 per hour for ongoing services.

Psychologists focus extensively on psychotherapy (i.e. talking through experiences) and treating emotional and mental suffering in patients with behavioral intervention. Psychologists can also be exclusively academic researchers. They are qualified and trained to critically assess a person’s mental state in order to determine the most effective treatment plan, which often includes total lifestyle changes.

Both of these are psychotherapists, in that they use a form of therapy (medication, behavioural intervention) to treat your mental health (the psyche). Hence the term psychotherapy. Given these definitions, personality disordered people should lean toward seeing psychologists.

In North America, some psychologists can charge as much as $200 or more per session, but most will charge around $75-$150 a session. Many also work with a sliding scale fee schedule, which means their fee will depend on your income level (a crucial point for young people and young professionals).

University/college mental health workers (including counselors) are always understaffed and over worked. They are paid from a portion of tuition, so technically their services are free. But their “walk in services” are often the first line of defense, but their sessions are limited to 15-30 mins. There is very little accountability both for the worker and the patient; you’re seen as just another number in a very long, long line. When it’s determined that you’re “well enough”, you will be kicked out to make room for the rest of the people who are waiting. This is the lowest tier of care and it also happens to be the one that is accessed the most often.

Whoever the mental health worker is, then, they are working within a profit driven system. On the one hand, they need problems in order to generate profit. On the other hand, this promotes the idea that mentally ill people (particularly the most “difficult” personality disordered people) should be reduced to nothing more than a problem.

As if it isn’t incredibly dehumanizing and disgusting to reduce us to nothing more than a problem to be solved, at a significant cost.

Then on top of that, we have limited means to complain if we are abused by the system and all the people in it; we cannot hold mental health workers accountable for misdiagnosis, unproven treatments and pills, sudden appointment cancellations, and lack of follow up because we are dismissed as just being “too difficult” and “too crazy” to be listened to.

I was doing some consulting work for the largest mental health organization in my region. They were under pressure to have their services evaluated. They were by no means underfunded or understaffed; they had hundreds of psychologists and psychiatrists. The facility was modern, clean, environmentally friendly. They treated even the most “severe” patients, including Borderlines and Narcissists.

Yet they had no complaint process or means for mentally ill people to provide feedback. Why? I was told it was because the feedback that these people could potentially provide could never be trusted, due to the fact that it’s coming from an unstable mind.

I suggested that resources need to be created with mentally ill people in mind, and that they should be written in language that each person, given their mental illness, can easily understand and implement. I was told the pros had never even considered this idea before.

I was told that people with BPD and NPD in particular were just “too difficult.” They were drug addicts. They were irresponsible. They were violent. They were prone to suicide. One client had killed themselves recently, and when the outraged family demanded accountability, they had no course of action because there was no framework put in place by the organization. The mental health worker responsible for care was not held accountable because they had washed their hands of that client. They were already “too difficult” and suicidal, so their death came as no surprise.

Mentally ill people are not taking responsibility, I was told, because they are lazy and unwilling to work for recovery. Why? They supposedly like their mental illness. And these mental health workers apparently work oh so hard, but it is useless because their clients cannot be cured. The topic of E-health was touched on as a means to counter the fact that a lot of mentally ill people are too intimidated or too ill to actually come in for a session. But this organization did not want to implement even monitored Skype calls because “bringing the care to the people who need it most” was too complicated and they didn’t have any accountability measures in place. E-health is an emerging field, and as such, I was told that it is too risky to try this suggested approach.  

Sitting there and listening to all this made me sick to my stomach.

I recall a tumblr post along these lines:

“if you want us to see a doctor so bad does that mean you’ll pay for our doctors appointment, pay for all our sessions, get rid of our fear of doctors, shorten the absurd amount of time we have to wait to get appointments, take away the intense stigma professionals have against people with certain mental disorders, transport us to our sessions, remove us from abusive environments that prevent us from booking appointments, make sure that professional diagnosis is always 100% right every time, and remove all the abusive psychiatrists in the system??? (x)

Essentially, the underlying message that is given to mentally ill people on behalf of the health care system and its workers is that no one gives a fuck about us.

Yet somehow, we are still expected to invest tremendous amounts of money, time, and energy to get better- because despite reaching out for help from professionals who we expect will competently do their job with our well being in mind, the entire burden of being mentally well still falls entirely on us.

And we’re supposed to be the crazy ones?

The Validity of Self-Diagnosis:

Taking all this into consideration, I think that self-diagnosis is valid.

As personality disordered people, when we are faced with incompetent mental health workers whose professionalism is questionable at best and life threatening at worst; when there is such prevalent stigma against personality disordered people out there; when we cannot afford care; when the quality of that care is poor; and when we’re so scared and confused that we turn to finding information on our own and then find it accurately applies to our life-

Why wouldn’t we frame our own thoughts, feelings, and lived experiences (for free!) within a diagnostic framework that matches our internal processes?

It’s true that not everyone has a psychology degree. It’s true that the DSM is a flawed diagnostic manual (something I extensively critique in my own work Between The Lines: Comparing BPD + NPD and suggest five keys ways it can be improved). It’s true that there’s a chance for misdiagnosis.

But that chance is still 50/50, because despite the “professionalism” of mental health workers, they are also just as likely to misdiagnose personality disordered people (most notably, with anxiety/depression/bipolar) than they are to accurately “prove” that we are accurately mentally ill.

It’s really no wonder that people like Anon 2 feel that they are “just faking” their mental illness for “for attention.”

Dear Anon 2, you’re not “just faking it for attention.” Your thoughts and feelings about your own mental health are real and valid. If you relate so strongly with the symptoms of BPD, then that demonstrates your admirable level of self-awareness and willingness to recover! I talk about situations just like yours here and here.

Please don’t let people invalidate you out of their own sheer ignorance, arrogance, cruelty, and lack of compassion.

The “expertise” of Professional Diagnosis:

People like Anon 1 have been so deeply invalidated and dismissed by their mental health worker that they feel suicidal.

Please take a moment to let that sink in.

All mental health care workers follow the “medical model.” That is to say, you are either “sane” or “insane.” As a result, diagnostic criteria are developed with the assumption that there is only one “normal,” “right” and “healthy” way to live. Everything else is just pathologized and labelled as a disorder (especially in North American society, which has a disturbing propensity for black and white thinking as well as pathologizing emotions)

In contrast, Neurodiversity itself “ is the infinite variation of neurocognitive functioning within our specifies and it is a biological fact.”

Building off of this, the neurodiversity paradigm suggests that the diversity in our ways of thinking and feeling makes us stronger as a species, as communities, and as people. The neurodiversity paradigm is a specific perspective on neurodiversity – a perspective or approach that boils down to these fundamental principles:

1) Neurodiversity is a natural and valuable form of human diversity.

2) The idea that there is one “normal” or “healthy” type of brain or mind, or one “right” style of neurocognitive functioning, is a culturally constructed fiction, no more valid (and no more conducive to a healthy society or to the overall well-being of humanity) than the idea that there is one “normal” or “right” ethnicity, gender, or culture.

3) The social dynamics that manifest in regard to neurodiversity are similar to the social dynamics that manifest in regard to other forms of human diversity (e.g., diversity of ethnicity, gender, or culture). These dynamics include the dynamics of social power inequalities, and also the dynamics by which diversity, when embraced, acts as a source of creative potential.

This is where the terms neurodivergent and neurotypical come from:

Neurodivergent, sometimes abbreviated as ND, means having a brain that functions in ways that diverge significantly from the dominant societal standards of “normal.”

Neurodivergent is quite a broad term. Neurodivergence (the state of being neurodivergent) can be largely or entirely genetic and innate, or it can be largely or entirely produced by brain-altering experience, or some combination of the two (autism and dyslexia are examples of innate forms of neurodivergence, while alterations in brain functioning caused by such things as trauma, long-term meditation practice, or heavy usage of psychedelic drugs are examples of forms of neurodivergence produced through experience).

A person whose neurocognitive functioning diverges from dominant societal norms in multiple ways – for instance, a person who is Autistic, dyslexic, and epileptic – can be described as multiply neurodivergent.

Some forms of innate or largely innate neurodivergence, like autism, are intrinsic and pervasive factors in an individual’s psyche, personality, and fundamental way of relating to the world. The neurodiversity paradigm rejects the pathologizing of such forms of neurodivergence, and the Neurodiversity Movement opposes attempts to get rid of them.

Other forms of neurodivergence, like epilepsy or the effects of traumatic brain injuries, could be removed from an individual without erasing fundamental aspects of the individual’s selfhood, and in many cases the individual would be happy to be rid of such forms of neurodivergence. The neurodiversity paradigm does not reject the pathologizing of these forms of neurodivergence, and the Neurodiversity Movement does not object to consensual attempts to cure them (but still most definitely objects to discrimination against people who have them).

Thus, neurodivergence is not intrinsically positive or negative, desirable or undesirable – it all depends on what sort of neurodivergence one is talking about.

Neurotypical, often abbreviated as NT, means having a style of neurocognitive functioning that falls within the dominant societal standards of “normal.”Neurotypical can be used as either an adjective (“He’s neurotypical”) or a noun (“He’s a neurotypical”).

Neurotypical is the opposite of neurodivergent. Neurotypicality is the condition from which neurodivergent people diverge. Neurotypical bears the same sort of relationship to neurodivergent that straight bears to queer.

Hence, neurodivergence is a very real and very valid approach to mental health, especially when it comes to personality disordered people. It is supported and used by some credited therapists as well, such as the website Eggshell Therapy.

Despite this reality, mental health workers generally remain unwilling to acknowledge it. This is highly unprofessional. A competent, knowledgeable mental health care worker should be willing to consider all possible perspectives when it comes to the way a human mind works. But as we’ve established, most mental health care workers are far from professional. 

They rigidly cling to the medical model because it justifies the existence of their particular field of study and somehow automatically qualifies them to (mis)diagnose people, all while being paid very well for it. Dismissing self-diagnosis and neurodiversity invalidates mentally ill people; increases the risk of misdiagnosis; blocks the development of a meaningful and practical treatment plan; and obviously makes for a very strained working relationship.

Talking To Mental Health Workers About Your BPD:

Before you start you first assessment or initial session with a mental health worker (and even if you make it past the very first one), it’s a good idea to ask them what they think their job really is. Literally. Ask them for a job description, in their own words, about their work and how they view their client relationship.

Chances are, they’ll spew something along the lines of:

“My job is to help you. But you have to put in the work yourself.”

We’re already off to a bad start here: being condescendingly reminded that you have to actually make the right choices for yourself and learn how to live in a healthy way is a moot point. If you are coming in to see a psychotherapist, it is very probable that you have already put in most of the work (including self-diagnosis or at the very least, prepared points and questions) but that you are expecting a professional to competently and compassionately help you have the capacity to implement positive changes for your mental health.

My naïve understanding of the work that mental health workers do is that, precisely because of their “expertise”, they would be able to make up for the skills and knowledge that I could not do on my own. Instead, the concept of “self-help” keeps getting shoved down the throats of people who are tremendously vulnerable due to their mental illness. If you wanted to rely solely on self-help, it is fair to presume that you would not be seeking professional help.

Of course, “help” in their eyes is usually supplying pills (especially if the mental health worker is a psychiatrist). Even if your body reacts badly to it. The rest is, of course, up to you. Just help yourself!  

On top of all this, mental health workers are operating under the assumption that they will “cure” you of your mental illness, even though they should know that this is impossible. In other words, they aren’t there to help you learn to live with your mental illness in a healthy way (because that’s not profitable). They’re here to tell you what you should do about how “wrong” you are according to the medical model, while you pay them to help yourself.

And if you really want to reaffirm that point, ask them next what they think of the concept of neurodivergence and how it applies to you (you can even use Eggshell Therapy as a reference point). Their answer will likely be dismissive and re-emphasize that if you do not follow their specific treatment plan, then your condition will just worsen-maybe to the point that they cannot even “help” you anymore.

Having said all this, I don’t want to paint all mental health workers with the same bush. There are brilliant young professionals and aspiring mental health workers out there now who are working their asses off to make mental health better and more accessible for all. But I’m still talking about how the health care system is right here and right now. Good mental health can’t wait.

It’s also important to keep in mind that personality disordered people can cross the line as well: resenting authority and stubbornly refusing to implement a mutually agreed upon treatment plan; acting out and raging;  manipulating mental health workers; failing to show up for appointments all together; lying and smearing; threatening; being “offended” by deep, probing discussions about their own mental health; and dropping out of care without a valid reason after only one or two sessions.

There are evidently massive issues coming from both sides. The key takeaway is that bringing up mental health to your psychotherapist cannot possibly thrive in a climate of intimidation, confusion, and invalidation.

When you discuss your mental illness, it is important to draw from facts, your own lived experiences, seek clarification about the DSM criteria, and have plenty of examples how your daily behaviour fits into this framework. What prompted you to relate to this criteria so strongly, and why is it worth considering?

It’s always important to be as polite and respectful as possible. That goes both ways. And although it feels like you’re going through the wringer, if one mental health worker doesn’t work out, you are not chained to that situation. You are free to leave and seek out the services of someone else who is, in your opinion, more qualified to help you. This does take a lot of time and effort, with plenty of mistakes thrown in during the meantime.

But you are not alone.

Start building support networks: family, friends, teachers, social workers, colleagues…anyone who is willing and able to help you. Good mental health is not something that you should feel like you have to achieve on your own. You should be supported and cared for.

Hopefully, mental health care will improve drastically within our lifetime. I want us to keep in mind that we are striving for our own recovery in a kind way. That we can set good examples of how important it is to make sure no one gets left behind.

Above all, despite these systemic obstacles, we do need to talk about our mental health because that’s the only way anyone will ever listen to us.

I just had like...the worst experience w/ a doctor that I have ever had (and that's saying something, for realz). I know I've seen other trans women post on here about, like, having trouble accessing medical care (esp. mental health care, but also physical) that isn't about being trans b/c like the doctor just zooms in on that one thing and will not talk about anything else, and this was like that but honestly worse. It just was so obvious that like the instant she walked into the room and saw me she thought "oh, this person clearly has serious trauma and mental health issues, maybe also an eating disorder, and that is the main problem" which, I mean, she wouldn't be wrong about me dealing w/ those things but that is just not at all why I was there and it's extra ridiculous b/c to be clear this is not a psychiatrist or even a general practitioner, like this is a specialist doctor whose specialty has nothing to do w/ either mental health or trans stuff. But like the first thing she asked me when she started taking my history was like "so you're transgender, when did you figure that out? Have you been living as a woman since then?" and I like kind of laughed b/c it's actually been a while since I've had to do that particular little song and dance of outdated terminology, so I was just like "yeah, I came out at like 17" and she straight up turned to me like she was a talk show host and asked "so, was that traumatic?" in this like expectant and almost voyeuristic way. She then tried to say like "so that's when your symptoms started, right?" and I had to be like "...no, actually? This started several years later. Why would you even think that's related?" But she kept asking me these like personal questions about trans stuff. She asked me like two or three times if I'd ever been raped, too, which is like more of a normal question than it sounds in context b/c like she was obvs. trying to determine if there was some kind of physical trauma that could have caused my symptoms, but she like specifically asked if I had ever been raped, and I was just like "nonono, nothing like that," sort of trying to breeze past it, like, b/c I was uncomfortable. But she seemed like...almost skeptical when I said no and kept asking. She also kept asking if I had an eating disorder, which like I used to and I said that, but then she just kept pushing like "are you sure you don't have an eating disorder? Do you restrict your eating? Do you worry about your weight? Because you're very thin. Like, you're VERY thin, and that's not normal." So I tried to tell her that I've just sort of always been like that, but she clearly didn't believe me. And then like the whole time I was there like all she wanted to talk about was mental health shit even though 01. I did not initially tell her I even had any issues w/ that, and 02. again, I was literally there for a specific and very serious physical illness that is not even remotely related to that. So I just kept trying to say, like, "that's not relevant, can we please deal w/ this obvs. and serious thing that is ruining my life" but she just kept coming back to it, and it was really my exact worst fear come true b/c like I am always worried that my OCD and autism and stuff will get in the way when it comes to dealing w/ medical people and that the doctors will refuse to treat me and just send me to therapy, saying like, "well you just have to learn how to live w/ this and deal w/ it," which is p. much...exactly what happened, and she went super hard on that, b/c like the one thing I did tell her is that I had OCD (b/c that is actually kind of relevant, at least in that it makes this disease more difficult for me to deal w/) which she just like latched onto it and she made it super clear that she thinks, like, that is the cause of all my problems and that I just need to fucking suck it up and be less crazy or w/e. And I kept telling her that like that is v. much not the case b/c like when my body worked fine my OCD was fine, but she just really did not want to hear it. She kept trying to get me to list all of my other OCD symptoms. And it was just such an obvs. case of profiling or w/e where, again, it felt she had already decided like "this weird tranny is super traumatized and fucked up her body by being crazy" even to the extent of almost ignoring me talking about my actual symptoms and medical history, which is so fucked up esp. b/c like my physical therapist has been really wonderful about all of this stuff and so I was just kind of floored to have all my concerns dismissed again and to be asked all this irrelevant inappropriately personal shit. She like clearly did not like me, too, and kept talking down to me. Like she kept trying to explain stuff, but you know I've been seeing so many doctors about this specific illness for like two years now that I've heard all of these basic explanations before, so I kept just trying to say "yes, I know what that is" but she would just talk over me and keep going. It was the worst, and to be clear my opinion on doctors in general is "they suck," maybe just short of "kill them" but this woman was the whole extra mile. Idk, I'm pissed tbh. If anybody has any advice for dealing w/ this kind of shit or even just wants to commiserate, I'm down to hear it. This was a lot.

The lasting emotional damage of child abuse

Trigger warning: mentions of rape, suicide, eating disorders, self harm and abuse. Plus start of alcoholism.

I'm in no way a psychologist or an expert on this. But I have first hand experience with emotional neglect, emotional manipulation, fear being used as a mean of manipulation, fearing a parents next move and just generally not being treated like a human being.

I cannot say that I have had the worst childhood and I know that. I'm thankful that I was never hit or sexually assaulted. But I was pretty much fucked up.

I'm still young, being only 16 years old. I've been away from my father for a little over a year. Having only seen him 5 times during this. One of these being alone.

I'm absolutely terrified when I think back to the apartment I used to live in. When I think about my father. I know that I have a lot to still work on with what happened.

My father was never one to hit if he didn't have too. He was never one to sexually assault people and in fact, he beat up someone who raped a girl he knew. I pretty much grew up with my father being my sole care giver. Having him take care of all my needs. Everything was fine until we moved in with my step mother. She's controlling, manipulative and just over all a bad person.

She and my father controlled my entire life for a little over 3 years. I had a schedule with everything I had to do. It wad written so that it had the time when we should start doing it and when our next task was. Sometimes we had multiple chores to do in that same hour. We were 3 kids. We had to clean up the entire house except the bathroom. Which we later had to clean as well.

I told them the sheduale made me extremely stressed out. I did not tell them I was hearing, seeing, feeling, tasting, smelling things that wasn't there and losing time because of multiple peraonalities. They had seen my self harm before and told me I was doing it for attention(even though my father self harmed as well when he was younger). They did nothing to help me.

I delt with eveytging myself and pretty much tried ended my life twice. Never succeeding. I kept begging my father to get me help but he kept dismissing it as I was trying to get attention. One day he promised me he would take me to a doctor because he saw my self harm continuing. Nothing big, just in the top layer of the skin. Away after 3 days to a week.

I got help, he found out I had tried to kill myself and I had a shit ton of these psychosis things. He started believing what I were saying. All my life he had told me I were normal and that there was nothing wrong with me. It turned out I had autism. I went into a psychiatric hospital to see if it was autism or skizofrenia. I got the psychosis symptoms when I'm severely stressed and under a lot to pressure to perform perfect.

At these point I had fled from my father house with none of my possions, up to my mother's house. Because my step mother was angry at me going out even though we had an agreement that I could go out for 12 to 16.

She had forgotten we had a deal that I could be gone for 4 hours. I even said I would do all my chores when I got home. I made that promise. She called me and I was thinking, she's probably just wondering where I am. I was 5 minutes late, I was 3 minutes from my door. Nothing unusual there. I answer the call and she's pissed at me. About to have a mental break down, I call my mum, crying violently. Telling her everything my step mother had said, asking if I could come live with it. It is worth saying that my mother and I, never had a good relationship. Not until about 4 weeks before that.

She knew of the entire thing that went on at home. How I was being threatened to be thrown out if I kept misbehaving, tbey didn't feed us properly. So, I stole food in order to get enough nutrients. It was wrong but I were really hungry. It is also worth saying i was skinny back then. Not unnaturally skinny. I looked like a good looking straight girl. I ran 5 km everyday. So it made sense with little to no food and running this much that I would be skinny.

I told how my father was trying to emotionally manipulate me into believing she was bad. By saying stuff like "I'm not going to shit talk your mum, but *insert something minor she does and a rant as to how it's bad for us kids to see*"

I hated living at home with my dad. We were 5 people in a 3 room apartment. We had 20 birds, fish, a snake, a cat, a dog and a bloody rabbit. Too many god damn animals.

I loved the animals and helped out with them. I did the excise and all my chores. At the expense of my mental health. I had extra homework because I "needed" it. But when I asked for help I was told I was big enough to figure it out myself. We had 1 hour of electronics time each day. Now I don't mind parents setting rules for electronic time. I think it's healthy to learn a child when they should be on it and when they shouldn't. The walls are pretty damn thin in this house. Me being a chronic insomniac teenager, made me sleep around 5 or 4 hours before waking up at 6 very morning to walk the dog. Sometimes even earlier.

I suffered from depression back then. Meaning I had a hard time getting out of bed. But if I didn't, I would get yelled at, break down crying and self harm/starve myself.

I weighed 78 kg. Which I were told was too much. It really isn't. I'm 173 cm and have a pretty solid build. Meaning I'm more robust and have bigger bones then most girls my age. Always had. I've never broken my arm even though I really should have on many many occasion. Only ever gotten a spiralled fracture on my right upper arm. So I have to weight from 72 to 78 kg. Which is pretty realistic. I was cosntaly being weighed, measured and told I was too fat. I was constantly being told that everything I ate would make me more fat and that I should get my head out of my arse and start losing weight. Which resulted in my eating problems. I don't really know how to classify it and every psychologist have dismissed this and never talked with me about it since my suicidal tendencies and autism was more important.

But I starved myself as much as I could possible do. I saw myself being as fat as I am now. I couldn't see how perfectly normal I was in weight. I would crash and steal granola bars from the cupboards, steal an apple and eat it or god forbid me in eating a single carrot. I would starve myself as much as I could before purging food. As much as I could. I feel worse after it.

I cannot control myself around sweets and nutella. I know it's all about self discipline but I have that about 1 week or 2 before I eat the sweets and stuff like that. Which is also why I don't go to town with extra money and only carry cash.

My step mum said and I quote "I do not wanna live under the same roof as a thief."

Which hurt me a lot. Yeah I know I was stealing food, because I was hungry and I was too afraid to ask for anything. Because every time I did, I would either being yelled at or told to go away.

Every time I tried to open up or come out of the closet. I was made fun off. My dad would use the things I've said in the few moments I trusted him, against me as he saw fit. He would make me break down crying and have the nerve to call me weak after that.

I still have major trust issues to this date when it comes to family. I can easily share things with strangers because tbey probably won't have to ever see you again. Which is a nice thought.

With my insomnia and fear. I was up way too much and woke up way too much. Had nightmares or no dreams at all. I was afraid of my own father, coming into my room during my sleep and that he would kill me. Because I know he would be 100% capable off it. If he truly snapped, then Ted Bundy would have nothing on him.

So still to this day, I have major issues with calling asleep before everyone else. I self medicine with alcohol. Which I'm trying not too do, but it's hard not too. It makes me fall asleep easier in the night. Makes me feel calm and not feel so scared about everything. I really hate it but it's during the job self harm used to do. I don't know what is worse, self harm or the alcohol.. But either way, I'm trying to stop. I'm 2 months clean from self harm. But I am still consuming alcohol in large amounts from time to time.

I still have major eating problems. Over eating or not eating at all.

I cannot sleep, before everyone else in the house is sleeping or have gone to bed.

So yeah, abuse can really fuck someone over. I know that I'm by far, not the worse case. I never saw my parents drink or do drugs in front of me. But I knew it was a part of childhood. I knew about it without knowing what it was.

I know a lot of people won't even make it to here. But I just had to get this odd my chest. So thank you if you read this far.