vastderp:

fucking signed. I went decades without help because of the spectre of the evil white coated brainwashers.

It’s bullshit.

Also, this ask. Tumblr reblogging rules, bleh. I don’t follow vastderp because it’s more Homestuck than Kagerou, but I check occasionally and liked these posts.

“mentally ill” is probably the only minority status I can half-reasonably claim. I was diagnosed with chronic severe depression a few months ago, to the mild surprise of nobody but me. My experience with the Combine has been less great than I’d hope, but it’s nothing like the experiences I’d read of in The Bell Jar and One Flew Over and such, and it’s been of some help (pretty sure the hotline people are angels).

I’ve thought that I was crazy for a long time (at least as my young sense of time goes). In high school I read the DSM-IV criteria (or rather, Wikipedia’s summaries of them) and decided that I was bipolar II, or borderline personality, or whatever. Around the same time I got into psychedelic literature a bit. The aforementioned cuckoo, the Principia Discordia, Leary’s bizarre psychological structures, etc. I learned about Jaynes’s ideas, from Snow Crash (I still haven’t read the book itself - I want to). I also got into transhumanism some; I thought the idea of mind modification was quite interesting, and more generally the idea that the mind is a malleable machine/object, something I’ve held on to.

From all this and whatever else I cobbled together a very teen-aged worldview that mental illness is a natural human variation, and that mental health professionals are engaged in a decentralized conspiracy of sorts to limit this variation to maintain societal norms. I also swore up and down that I would never take psychoactive drugs like antidepressants, as they would make me a different person. (I have, obviously, modified this view since then.)

Then I got into using the internet. I found out about some of the “natural human variation” in ideas that prevails around these parts (I mean the internet, not tumblr, which I don’t think yet existed and certainly wasn’t the internet shitornot it is now). I read about people who thought they were animals, and in fact got a prevailing username from them. I read about people who thought they were Sephiroth, or his spirit wife. People who have multiple personalities. And so on, I’m sure there are many more. Tumblr has introduced me to the exciting world of “transethnicity”, for example.

I had the idea of all-inclusiveness, essentially. That insanity, not even just the weak shit that people call “insane” on the internet and television shows but mental illness, is… defensible? I’m not sure what term would be best. I also included a lot of more reasonable ideas in this. For example, I didn’t and don’t understand transsexuality, but I didn’t see anything wrong with it for just the same reasons I didn’t see a problem with otherkin. (Just to be clear - I see the differences now.)

Obviously this is a pretty naïve viewpoint. It’s a kind of “neutrality” that’s pretty similar to the attitudes behind defending NAACP types only as far as you defend racists, etc., I think.

I spent a lot of time looking at these people (not talking to them, usually) and occasionally defending them from mocker types. Eventually I learned to see the patterns. That happens when you see the seventh elf talking about how quantum physics totally means the planet they’re from exists, or whateverthefuck. I got bored. Most of the narratives are just pale clones of commercial media, and much less interesting to me than real-world mythologies. I don’t think you can really draw a line, between mythology and making shit up, but the judged being a shadow of a children’s cartoon plot is probably a good starting point.

I’m not sure where I thought I was going with this. “suicide-shaming” just struck me somehow. Like this person is who I was a few years ago, though I like to think I’d at least have used less caps-lock. Oh well. Maybe I should have written a post about how Kagerou is demeaning to real multiple systems instead.