I KNOW I TOTALLY JUST POSTED, BUT:

[two_grey_rooms]

i had to share this post. i officially declare it Required Reading if you know someone who lives with a mental illness or a personality order. (which you do if you are reading this post right now, so HAH THAT MEANS YOU HAVE TO READ IT. YOU HAVE BEEN COMMANDED BY THE CRAZY.) (also, you probably also know someone who is not me with a mental illness or personality disorder, even if you don't know it, just 'cause statistics say so. WE WALK AMONG YOU.)

Comments

[madman101.livejournal.com]

cool

you may appreciate:

crisis_911

marginal_agora

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

i am going to have to politely decline, but i appreciate the recommendation.

[coniferous_you]

A lot of people on my friendslist, except me it seems, have this person on their friendlist so I get linked to BPD month posts a lot!

The sane privilege comment that I find worst is "that's just for attention." As far as I know, I don't personally have a mental disorder but I do know a lot of people who do and I have heard this comment thrown at them and, if I can, I take the time to get over my fear of looking like a pedantic jerk and correct them.

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

heehee. i don't actually, but i do have apiphile on my friendslist, and she's been linking to jumpthesnark's posts all month. alas. i am a poseur. but not because i have a mental illness. "you're just doing it for attention" is one of my least favorite idiotic assessments of anything, ever. that is just...wrong on so, so many levels. obviously, i want some kind of attention from you, else i would not have mentioned the matter. i don't want pity or weeping or a cinematic swelling of violins; i just would like some validation that i exist and can freely talk about what's on my mind without fear of reprehension, or worse. it's fucking human to seek validation; everyone does it; everyone needs it to avoid going completely fucking batshit. only apparently crazycakes people deserve a slap on the wrist when they do it.

[ohdelighted.livejournal.com]

i am reading this and crying because it's just so real. ugh.

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

aw. i am sorry i inadvertently made you cry. i actually had a totally opposite reaction, in that blindly euphoric, oh-my-god-you-just-articulated-everything-i-needed-to-say-but-have-never-voiced-before! kind of way. that post, and others of its ilk, should be read by as many people as humanly possible, i think. it's important to be reminded of privilege and all the ugly ways it manifests. important to be reminded that hey, there are kind of sort of a lot of different people in this world, who live in very different ways, and sometimes you don't even realize how baneful your ignorance of how others live can be.

[ohdelighted.livejournal.com]

oh, i think the crying is only halfway related to the posts. lots of it is probably due to intense family-related stress that is going on as we speak, but also due to the fact that so much of these posts are things i have wanted to articulate but never could, for fear of judgment/rejection/abandonment/blah blah blah. linking to these is a very wonderful gesture, and i thank you. ♥

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

well, you're welcome for the linkage, and i'm sorry about the family-related stress. i hope things get better for you soon. *hugs*

[descartes-rock.livejournal.com]

I have to admit to only scanning the post, but the thing that kept jumping out at me was the distinction between mentally ill and mentally healthy. I have trouble seeing mental health in absolutes like that. I guess I see mental health in similar terms to physical health. Some of us are obese, some of us have arthritis, some of us get migraines, allergies asthma. Who is "healthy" and who is "unhealthy". I see mental health in the same way -- we are all sick to varying degrees and healthy to varying degrees.

And it gets even more nuanced than that for me -- sometimes I wonder whether depression or anxiety should be considered a normal response to the world. Maybe those of us who are happy in spite of it all are actually mentally ill. Or what about those people who go around being high performing even though they are on 40 ounces of booze a day, or the people who are abused as children and function perfectly well because they've burried their pain under a big pile. Is that mental health?

I've on occasion suggested to people that they consider trying psychotherapy, and I haven't yet got a positive response. Apparently you have to be whacked out crazy to get therapy. I sometimes say, well, you are not really obese, but you still exercise and eat right, and you still go to the doctor to get your blood pressure checked. Why wouldn't you treat your mental health the same way? You might not be in desperate need of therapy, but maybe it would help you just generally see the world in a slightly different light that is kinder and gentler. But they can't get past the idea that one must be sick to see a therapist, and having a sick soul is shameful. There are a lot of people carrying an enormous burden thinking that they right thing to do is just tough it out because there's no way they are mentall ill.

Hi by the way. Thanks for friending back.

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

hi :). where'd you stumble across my journal, if i may ask? i'm totally cool with ninja friendings (...obviously), but i'm always curious about where people find me.

yeah...i am not actually a huge advocate of psychotherapy. i don't know. if it works for you, awesome. but it's never really helped me. and, yano, having depression or an anxiety disorder is a very different thing than just being in a depressed or anxious mood. everyone has personality flaws and shit to deal with, but there's still a huge difference between mentally healthy and mentally ill. maybe you wanna actually read that post? or elaborate on what you mean by "varying degrees"?

[descartes-rock.livejournal.com]

I think I may have come across you on exceptindreams. My friends page has dwindled as people dropped off the map or moved to facebook or whatever, so I'm always looking out for interesting new people.

I've read the post more carefully. The writer makes good points about stigma. I totally agree that it's a big problem -- and in fact, a national commission studying the state of mental health in Canada identified it as one of the four or five major issues that needs to be dealt with urgently.

What I was trying to get at in my comment was my discomfort with an "us and them" view when it comes to mental health. I am very uneasy with dividing the world up into two groups -- those who are mentally ill and those who are not. Over time, people's mental health status evolves. I may be fine today, but in a year I may have psychotic depression, and in two years I may be fine again, and then in five I may come very close to having mild clinical depression again, but not quite, and then in 15 I may start showing signs of OCD etc etc. Or my child might die tomorrow and you might find me dead by my own hand three months from now, even though I spread cheer and good will across the world for my entire life up to that last three months.

A large minority of people in North America -- tens of millions in fact -- will predictably have clinical depression over the course of their lives. For some, it will recur. Some will battle it their entire lives, some will only have it for six months.

What I'm tryint to say is that there is no us and them -- there is only us. Dividing the world up into the "sick" and the "well" risks increasing rather than decreasing stigmatization. People should self-examine, and they will see that in fact they are not that different from the person two desks over that was diagnosed with depression -- that they may in fact have experienced something similar at some point, or that the capacity for it exists within them for the future.

The varying degrees idea is just to say that there is no magic point at which a person becomes mentally ill. There are varying levels of dysfunction in life, and mental health professionals make somewhat subjective assessments of the threshold at which a dysfunction deserves a diagnosis.

[usakeh.livejournal.com]

We do indeed! I'll be sure to check out that post; I have many friends with BPD. Are you a BPD sufferer? I'm Bipolar I and OCD, instead.

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

nah, i just have boring ol' clinical depression.

[usakeh.livejournal.com]

Which can be as debilitating as any other disorder, as I'm sure you (unfortunately) know. I love that icon by the way. Yay for A Softer Word!

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

hah. oh yeah, depression and i are old friends. we're tight. way too close for comfort, some may say. ahem. a softer world is fucking aces though. i have a major braincrush on joey comeau.