Mentally ill person: I’m having a really bad and hard time right now.
Other person: Haha yeah aren’t we all.
You do realise this sort of thing encourages people not to seek treatment for their mental illnesses?
What this post is saying, to everyone not *diagnosed* with a mental illness, is that their current level of misery is normal and proper, and they should just suck it up and deal without so much as a complaint. (Technically, it permits complaining to non-mentally-ill people, but such people are not easy to find, and you usually can’t tell when you’ve found them.)
For some of the not-known-to-be-mentally-ill people who read this post, that claim will not be true. You don’t know which people they are. *They* don’t know which people they are. You have just thrown another stumbling block onto the already difficult path towards even *recognising* that they have a problem, let alone dealing with it.
(This post brought to you by someone who is regularly kept up at night by the worry that maybe she deserves better than her current mental state. Maybe the reason people don’t talk about struggling–multiple times a month, failing–to keep from being overwhelmed by the combined guilt of every wrong they have ever directly or indirectly committed is because they genuinely don’t *have* such struggles. Or maybe they do, and don’t talk about it because of living in a culture that doesn’t allow people to treat guilt as important. Who can say?)
Tags:
#posts I am almost certainly going to regret #(but what’s a few more litres in an ocean) #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost
Brinens and Things 