OCD
My entire life has been marred by OCD and well… You’ve seen the results in previous posts I guess. I’m looking for ways to “hack” it. There must be ways, right?
my mental health
Very possibly a new top ten Doctor Who episode there
Alright it just finished, hardly any time to process it, but my initial thoughts are thank you, writers! Yes, “let’s have an episode about the importance of discussing mental health (and call it Can You Hear Me)” seems anvil-icious but it was important, you know? As a mentally fragile person I WANT people to discuss it! So there ya go. Other things I loved:
- Claire-Hope Ashitey! I always wanted her to appear on Who, ever since seeing Children of Men.
- Sonya, Yaz’s sister, I really like her and she got some character development along with Yaz here.
- The whole scene between Yaz and the police officer was beautiful, although I do hope we’ll revisit that period of Yaz’s life at some point, I don’t think it was ever mentioned until now?
- I thought Grace might make an appearance this episode and she did, hooray
- A first for modern-day Doctor Who, an animated sequence!
Happy new decade!
Time for some 2020 vision. (Sorry.) There are many things I want to do this year, things that will set up the rest of the decade, MAJOR things. So there’s that!
And I also want to try and wean myself off a lot of social media. It’s not healthy. I don’t want followers online, just friends, and that’s the part that Twitter etc isn’t set up for. Twitter will recommend you stuff from complete strangers, stuff you don’t want to see and aren’t interested in, just to try and keep you engaged. Facebook does the same, hell, even WordPress does it. I find it really frustrating.
So I thought maybe I would spend some of today archiving some older Twitter jokes/posts that I actually want to keep on here, and maybe I guess make that whole account private at some point this month? S’like, I just want to use it to talk to people I already know, I’m not interested in terrible people’s thoughts on the UK election or the Star Wars Discourse. (My god, the Star Wars Discourse.) It’s not a healthy enviroment, social media, it just… isn’t.
Reddit is another problem in that it is unbelievably toxic and terrifying, but at least it has a forum system rather than a follow one and you can downvote the many, many offensive posts you’ll find. (Plus, the individual smaller forums such as the fanfiction one are very nice on the whole, it’s just, don’t click on anything to do with news or politics.)
So anyway! There’s that but honestly… 2019 was actually good mental-health wise, and that’s… scary. Also sort of survivors-guilt-y because so many people I know are suffering right now. Sigh. I hope 2020 will just be better for everyone and also the planet stops being on fire.
Viewers with OCD review Channel 4’s Pure and share their own experiences of the condition
In the middle of my illness I forgot to show this to everyone. I got a chance to write about OCD for the Radio Times!
You know what I never see on Tumblr? Encouraging or supportive posts about people with trichotillomania and/or dermotillomania. I never see those posts because you can’t romanticize it, people don’t see it as beautiful and therefore don’t want to talk about it. It’s really fucking hard having a disorder that is so painfully obvious to anyone who looks and so hard to understand, so shout out to my buds with trich and/or derm, you are still beautiful and worthy of love
Yeppp. One thing that I do have an issue with in BNHA is that, even though a lot of the main characters are coded as neurodivergent and I LOVE that, the bad guy has derma and it’s definitely played for shock value :/
I have trich. It sucks, is embarrassing, and I can’t spell it.
no offense but this is literally the most neurotypical thing i have ever seen
Uhhhh… no.
This is what they teach you in therapy to deal with BPD and general depression.
When I got out of the hospital after hurting myself a second time, I got put into intensive outpatient program for people being released from mental hospitals as a way to monitor and help transition them into getting them efficient long-term care.
This is something they stressed, especially for people with general depression. When you want to stay at home and hide in your bed, forcing yourself to do the opposite is what is helpful. For me, who struggles with self harm- “I want to really slice my arm up. The opposite would be to put lotion on my skin (or whatever would be better, like drawing on my skin) the opposite is the better decision.” It doesn’t always work because of course mental health isn’t that easy, but this is part of what’s called mindfulness (they say this all the time in therapy)Being mindful of these is what puts you on the path to recovery. If you’re mindful, you are able to live in that moment and try your best to remember these better options.
I swear to god, I don’t get why some people on this website straight up reject good recovery help like this because either they a)have never been in therapy so don’t understand in context how to use these coping tactics. Or b)want to insist that all therapists and psych doctors are neurotypical and have zero idea what they are talking about. (Just so ya know, they teach this in DBT, the therapy used to help BPD. The psychologist who came up with DBT actually had BPD, so….a neurotypical women didn’t come up with this.)
I have clinical OCD and for me, exposure therapy–a version of “do the opposite”–has been fundamental. I’ve had huge improvement in the last year, but I’m 100% clear that if I hadn’t done my best to follow this protocol I’d be fucked. I have a lot of empathy for that moment when you’re just too tired to fight and you check the stove or you wash your hands or go back to the office at midnight to make sure the door is locked. But the kind of therapeutic approach outlined above has been crucial for me.
It’s hard to do. I’ve weathered panic attacks trying to follow this protocol. But I’ve gotten remarkable results. I was afraid to touch the surfaces in my house, okay? I was afraid to touch my own feet, afraid to touch my parrot–deliberately exposing myself to “contamination” has helped me heal. I can’t speak for people with other issues, but this has helped my anxiety and OCD.
I feel that tumblr, in an effort to be accepting of mental illness, has become anti-recovery. Having a mental illness does not make you a bad person. There is nothing morally wrong with having a mental illness anymore than more than there’s something morally wrong with having the flu. However, if you’re “ill” physically or mentally, something is wrong in the sense that you are unwell and to alleviate that you should try to get better. While there is not “cure” for mental illness, there are ways to get better.
There was a post on tumblr where someone with ADHD posted about how much you can get done when you focus and was attacked for posting about being “nuerotypical” – when she was posting about the relief she got from being on an medication to treat her illness.
I saw another post going around tumblr that said something along the line of “you control your thoughts, why not choose to have happy thoughts” which again was shot down as “nuerotypical” but while you don’t have control over what thoughts come into your mind, you absolutely can and should choose to have happy thoughts. In DBT we call this “positive self talk”.
I’m in DBT to help treat PTSD stemming from child abuse. The abuse and abandonment I experienced destroyed my self esteem and created a lot of anxiety over upsetting other people. DBT has taught me to recognize when my thoughts are distorting realty ‘no one likes you’ and answer back ‘plenty of people like you, you don’t need everyone to like you, especially if the relationship doesn’t make you happy’, to respond to the thought ‘I’m so worthless’ with ‘you’re really great and have accomplished something’
And it’s not easy to challenge your thoughts, it’s a skill that’s learned and it’s hard to force yourself to think something that doesn’t seem authentic or even seems wrong to think – it’s hard to be encouraging towards yourself when you hate yourself – but you force yourself to be aware of your thoughts and push back when you fall into unhealthy patterns
That isn’t “so neurotypical” that’s recovery.
Not shaming mental illness doesn’t mean shaming RECOVERY.
Pro-Recovery isn’t anti-disability.
Do not shame healthy behaviors as “neurotypical”.
Learning healthy behaviors and taking steps to treat mental illness and disorders including taking medication if that’s what works for you is important. You shouldn’t be ashamed if you have mental illness, but you shouldn’t say ‘well I’m not neurotypical therefor I can’t do anything to get better’ – while there is no cure for mental illness, there is a lot you can do to get better, to function better, to manage your mental illness and be safer, happier, and healthier for it.
DO NOT SHAME HEALTHY BEHAVIORS AS “NEUROTYPICAL”.
I have social anxiety, among other things. I was terrified to talk to anyone new for years. So I started going to cons and staying too busy to notice that I was nervous af. Immersion one one’s own terms is invaluable as a tool.
I think the assumption some people make about therapy is that recovery is to make us easier to deal with, and no, it’s more like adjusting your diet if you have diabetes.
I am trying to get better because my illnesses are fatal if left untreated.
My therapist: gives me advice on how to cope with something
Me: what kind of neurotypical bullshit!!!Also worth reiterating, again, that the creator of DBT herself had BPD–she was not coming from a “neurotypical” point of view.
I do exposure therapy for my OCD. It can be absolutely, thoroughly horrible. But it does help.