Post · bonfire.cafe

@SheWasSpeaking@toots.matapacos.dog · 3 weeks ago

I've touched on this before, but I really hate how much "mental health awareness" just boils down to neurotypicals excusing each other for their roles in the struggles of neurodivergent people.

Like, imagine if whenever you talked about experiencing transphobia, some helpful cis person would gently inform you that nobody owes you their emotional labor and gave you the number of the Trevor Project. Or if TDOV consisted of cis people talking about how evil a disease experiencing transphobia is and how it spontaneously ruins the lives of trans people, without even a mention of the people who actually inflict transphobia upon us. It'd be absurd.

But that is how we treat mentally ill people. Mental health awareness month doesn't platform mentally ill people. It instead platforms people who have been affected by people in their lives committing suicide or by mental illness in general so that they can talk about what a terrible disease mental illness is and about how *neurotypicals* can handle mentally ill people. The most we can hope for is seeing our feeds flooded with people posting, "there's hope! People care! (Just not me.) Call the suicide hotline!"

And I think one of the major reasons we aren't asked to speak for ourselves is that unspoken understanding that talking about mental illness is *dangerous*. That if mentally ill people are allowed to talk about their feelings honestly and openly, other people might do the same.

And more than that, I think we're just inconvenient. We, like homeless people, are inconvenient social outcasts who need to be swept aside and kept out of day to day life because nobody wants to be reminded that they live in a brutal, unforgiving capitalist shithole that grinds people down to their very bones. People want to be happy, and they want to see other people being happy, and they don't want to think about the world they live in - or worse, they themselves - making other people unhappy.

#mentalhealth #ableism #neurodivergent #suicide

She Was Speaking

@SheWasSpeaking@toots.matapacos.dog replied · 3 weeks ago

That's not to say that you, as a neurotypical, are responsible for your friend or whoever else committing suicide, any more than an individual cis person is responsible for transphobia existing. But as a member of a privileged class being benefited by a bigoted system, it *is* your job to analyze your role in that system and ask yourself what you can do to help those victimized by it.

It's no coincidence that trans, homeless, BIPOC, etc people disproportionately experience mental health issues. Mental illness is not some freak occurrence that happens to people for no reason. Even mental illnesses that we consider largely genetic (e.g. bipolar and schizophrenia) heavily correlate to childhood abuse or other intense traumatic events.

Mentally ill people are mentally ill because they have been failed. Maybe it's by individuals, their communities, or society as a whole, but at some point or another, the world failed us. This failure isn't always being horrifically abused as a child or spending your entire life being subjected to slurs of whichever variety. Sometimes it's as simple as looking at the world you live in and realizing that it's a capitalist hellscape and that you will likely spend the rest of your life breaking your back just to barely make rent and thinking, "what the fuck is the point of all this?"

And I think that's probably another, less malicious reason that neurotypicals downplay their role in mental illness. Ultimately, you as an individual cannot fix anybody. If you're well off, you can maybe offer a homeless friend a place to stay, and that will significantly reduce the pressures they face and maybe facilitate healing. But ultimately, the problems mentally ill people face are *societal* problems. And acknowledging that is scary, because if you have the privilege of believing that you live in a kind and just world, there is very little you gain by shattering that illusion.

She Was Speaking

@SheWasSpeaking@toots.matapacos.dog replied · 3 weeks ago

If you ask most people what they think of anorexia, they'll tell you that it's a horrible disease that claims the lives of far too many people. Ask those same people about fatphobia, however, and you'll get a much more mixed set of answers. And I think that's a good example of how we, as a society, treat mental illness. We are appalled by the disease but ambivalent to the cause. We want to revel in the fruits of the horrors of capitalism without having to acknowledge the orchards of atrocities from which those fruits were picked.

The instinct that drives people to accuse mentally ill people of 'demanding emotional labor' from them for the sin of talking about their struggles in public is the same instinct that drives suburbanites to push for anti-homeless legislation and white liberals on Bluesky to report Palestinian accounts. They not only do not want to know, but they feel that they have a fundamental right to not know. They feel that being forced to understand that other human beings are suffering not just in spite of their revelry but *because* of it is an assault on their freedom.

And yes, seeing someone on Discord or Reddit or whatever contribute to a jovial discussion by mentioning some horrific thing that's happened to them is a downer. It's a *real* fucking downer. It sucks. And it doesn't stop sucking when you start viewing marginalized people as human - it starts to suck *more*.

If someone is on the streets, freezing to death, why shouldn't you be horrified? Why shouldn't you be miserable? And that's the whole fucking problem. A new atrocity is happening in the country you live i every second of every single fucking day without fail. It is not a side effect of capitalism that you ignore suffering, it is a requirement for capitalism's continued existence. The horrors and suffering those in power visit upon the underclasses are an ocean barely held back by the dam of ignorance. As an individual, there's nothing you can do except get washed away by it.

She Was Speaking

@SheWasSpeaking@toots.matapacos.dog replied · 3 weeks ago

I mean, frankly, when a mentally ill person goes on a rant about how nobody could care less whether they live or die, and you respond by just copy pasting the suicide hotline to them... what does that accomplish? How are they supposed to feel? Perhaps your intentions *are* good, but if it was me in their shoes, I'd think, "damn. This person can't even be assed to express a meager few words of sympathy towards me."

I'm not saying you should try to be a therapist for every person in the midst of crisis you come across. I don't think any of us can do that. There's just too fucking many people struggling. Like I said, it's a systemic issue, not an individualistic one. But you can, at the very least, ask yourself whether your right to happily talk about sportsball or whatever the fuck else trumps a struggling person's right to talk about their feelings. You can let yourself feel a tinge of despair in solidarity with that struggling person, even if there's nothing you can do to help them. But what you absolutely should not do is treat them like an inconvenience and try to pressure them into being mentally ill someplace else where you don't have to think about them.

We need to accept that mentally ill people are just *normal fucking people* who happen to be struggling, usually for very legitimate reasons. We need to accept that in a cruel and broken society, mental illness *is normal*.

Ignoring and demeaning the suffering of others because you want to sTaY pOsItIvE or whatever the fuck does not make you strong. It makes you a coward who prefers forsaking their humanity to forsaking their happiness.

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