sindikat [he/him]

  • 3 Posts
  • 170 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: January 22nd, 2021
  • sindikat [he/him]tomentalhealth•Have you ever seen the weird gatekeeping some people do to other people with 'less severe' with mental illnesses?
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    3 years ago

    Mental illness gatekeeping is absolutely a thing. Dunno about “bipolar > depression”, but definitely see “my depression is real, yours is not” all the fucking time. It usually, though not always, comes from the “depression is just a chemical imbalance, bro” people.

    This is one reason why I like CBT and specifically David Burns so much, even if they aren't perfect. David Burns pretty much rejects DSM and defines depression not as a binary property “you need to be this fucked to have Major Depressive Disorder”, but as a scale. He asks you to self-report 5 characteristics on the scale from 0 to 4, and the bigger the total number you assign to them, the more depressed you are.

    Sure, normal healthy people feel sad from time to time. In fact, if, say, your dog died, of course you should feel sad, it's human. But if you systematically feel sad and/or hopeless and/or worthless and/or unmotivated and/or joyless, then something is going on, regardless of what you wanna call it.

    This gatekeeping is a huge reason why depressed people don't aggressively seek out therapy and instead waste their time on garbage superficial self-help. “I'm not depressed, there are people who deserve to have depression, I'm just a whiny bitch, who needs more self-discipline”.

    Y'know what this reminds me of? When edgelords say that trans people can't have PTSD, because only war veterans can have PTSD. I've heard that quite a few times in my life.

    My take is that I'll have empathy for any motherfucker who feels any of the negative emotions listed above, no matter how little they are, no matter how much you dismiss them, no matter how much you feel “other, more worthy people have depression, I'm just an objectively shitty person, I don't have depression”. Your feelings are valid, and you are allowed to treat them like you would treat depression.

  • sindikat [he/him]toanarchism•*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 years ago

    Can't find it at the moment, but apparently Bakunin frequently referred to himself using female names and possibly had sexual relations with Nechayev. If someone can find receipts, that would be great.

  • sindikat [he/him]tomentalhealth•idk what comm to put this in. is anegosexuality permanent?
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    3 years ago

    People grow up with fear and shame surrounding sexuality even without trauma. Maybe you've never experienced anything abusive from parents, you were never bullied in school, and what you have is a legitimate sexuality, and you should learn to accept it.

    But FYI “awful trauma” doesn't just include sexual or physical abuse. It can be verbal abuse, emotional abuse, or just emotional neglect: parents or guardians not satisfying child emotional needs growing up.

    I can't speak for women or enbies, but many cis men growing up acquire bizarre hang ups surrounding their sexuality, revolving mainly around things like:

    • fear of rejection—as if rejection is a reflection on your moral character and isn't in 99% of cases just an indication that you're incompatible to begin with, so it's actually great to get rejected early on, so you can save time and move on
    • fear of humiliation in public
    • pressure to perform—instilled by male friends and society in general
    • and so on.

    Fear, guilt, shame are highly uncomfortable feelings. Every human brains comes with this self-defeating mechanism that really is just self-preservation run amok. To preserve sanity your brain starts generating stories (post-factum rationalizations really) of why you actually shouldn't do that scary thing, why you should give up even before starting, so you won't have to crash and burn and humiliate yourself.

    It's the preservation of the comfort zone, the status quo, the emotional inertia.

    If you ever seen an incel seeing a girl he clearly likes and then going “that girl is a slut anyway, why would I waste time on her, I'm better than that”, it's that feeling of inadequacy talking.

    It's also related to what David Burns of the CBT fame calls it “fear of success”. Many people deep down don't want to succeed at stuff they seem to want to succeed in, because success means higher expectations next time, which means higher chance of crashing and burning later.

    In my left-wing circles I've had a few acquaintances, mainly women in their late teens and early 20s from the local feminist society. I've always been extremely confounded by their frequent and public proclamations of how they're deadbeat losers, hopeless drug addicts, like they were proud of being dysfunctional and utterly helpless.

    I think it's the same “I'll put myself down before you do” mentality, fear of actually amounting to something, so that nobody ever has high expectations of you, so you don't have to perform.

    Maybe none of what I've said is relatable at all, and that's fine. I still believe that these issues aren't talked about as much as they should be.

  • sindikat [he/him]tomentalhealth•Sometimes when I go to sleep, I wish I wake up as a girl.
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    3 years ago

    Is there any other job that you can get, no matter how shitty, where it gives you just enough financial independence to not rely on your parents?

    You seem confident that the pain you experience is physical and is a direct result of the physical strain of your work. I don't want to sound like I'm invalidating your pain, I believe. But is there even a remote possibility that your pain is psychosomatic? I've heard of countless stories of people with, for example, severe back pain lasting years, and X-rays showed nothing, and then the pain was resolved after psychotherapy and figuring the source of mental stress that caused it in the first place.