insane-cripplepunk

[insane-cripplepunk]

For those not in the know, this is one of the Amanita mushrooms referred to as a Destroying Angel. Never, ever, ever, ever forage with an app. Especially for mushrooms.

[insane-cripplepunk]

A Man of Few Words

[insane-cripplepunk]

fellow narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths,

we're going to hear those words being thrown around a lot over the next few years. more than we already do, which is not an insubstantial amount. i want you to remember that you are not monsters, or fascists, or scum.

as more and more people throw around diagnoses they do not care to understand and words that they do not see as harmful, i want you all to remember that you are not alone and that the entire world is not against you.

there are people out there who care and understand and are not afraid. you are not alone, and you are not unloved.

dont let them make you fearful of yourself, you deserve so much better than that.

stay safe

[insane-cripplepunk]

notes for my impostor syndrome:

• no, it's not painful to walk for abled-bodied people

• no, healthy people don't usually use every chance they get to lean against walls or sit down

• no, ableds don't dream about shower stool

• no, ableds don't celebrate days when they're not in pain. because usually they're not in pain

• no, ableds don't want to stop walking mid-way, lay down on the ground, curl up and cry and whine from pain

• no, ableds aren't exhausted by their own bodies 24/7

[insane-cripplepunk]

I've been disabled for almost 29 years. Here's what I've learned.

Tablets sink and capsules float. Separate out your tablets and capsules when you go to take them. Tip your head down when taking capsules and up when taking tablets. Liquigels don't matter, they kinda stay in the middle of whatever liquid is in your mouth.

If your pill tastes bad, coat it with a bit of butter or margarine. I learned this from my mom, who learned it from a pharmacist.

Being in pain every day isn't normal. Average people experience pain during exceptional moments, like when they stub their toe or jam their finger in a door, not when they sit cross-legged.

Make a medical binder. Make multiple medical binders. I have a small one that comes with me to appointments and two big ones that stay at home, one with old stuff and one with more recent stuff.

Find your icons. Some of mine include Daya Betty (drag queen with diabetes), Stef Sanjati (influencer with Waardenburg syndrome and ADHD), and Hank Green (guy with ulcerative colitis who... does a bunch of stuff). They don't have to be disabled in the same way as you. They don't even have to be real people. Put their pictures up somewhere if you want; I've been meaning to decorate my medical binders with pictures of my icons.

Take a bin, box, bag, basket, whatever and fill it with items to cope with. This can be stuff for mentally coping like colouring books or play clay or stuff for physically coping like pain medicine or physio tape.

Decorate your shit! My cane for at home has a plushie backpack clip hanging from the end of the handle and my cane for going places is covered in stickers. All of my medical binders have fun scrapbooking paper on the outside. Sometimes, I put stickers and washi tape on my inhalers and pill bottles. I used my Cricut to decorate my coping bin with quotes from my icons, like "I've seen enough of Ba Sing Se" and "I need you to be angrier with that bell".

If a flare-up is making you unable to eat or keep food down, consider going to the ER. A pharmacist once told me that since my eye flares can make me so nauseous that I cannot eat, then I need to go to the hospital when that happens.

Cola works wonders for nausea. I have mini cans of Diet Pepsi in my coping bin.

Shortbread is one of the only things I can eat when nauseous. Giant Tiger sells individually-wrapped servings of shortbread around Christmas or the British import store sells them year-round. I also keep these in my coping bin.

Unless it violates a pain contract or something, don't be afraid to go behind your doctor's back to get something they are refusing you. I got my cardiologist referral by getting in with a different NP at my primary care clinic than who I usually saw. I switched from Seroquel to Abilify by visiting a walk-in.

If you have a condition affecting your abdomen in some way (GI issues, reproductive problems, y'know) then invest in track pants that are too big. I bought some for my laparoscopy over a year ago and they've been handy for pelvic pain days, too. I've also heard loose pants are good for after colonoscopies.

Do whatever works, even if it's weird. I've sat on the floor of the Eaton Centre to take my pills. I've shoved heating pads down my front waistband to reach my uterus.

High-top Converse are good for weak ankles. I almost exclusively wear them.

You can reuse your pill bottles for stuff. I use my jumbo ones to store makeup sponges and my long skinny ones to hold a travel-size amount of Q-Tips.

Just because your diagnostics come back with nothing, it doesn't mean nothing is wrong. Maybe you were checking the wrong thing, or the diagnostic tool wasn't sensitive enough. I have bradycardia episodes even though multiple cardiac tests caught nothing. I probably have endometriosis even though my gynecologist didn't see anything.

You can bring your comfort item to appointments, and it's generally a green flag when someone talks to you about it. I brought a Squishmallow turkey (named Ulana) to my laparoscopy and they had her wearing my mask when I woke up. I brought a Build-A-Bear cat (named Blinx) to another procedure and a nurse told me that everyone in the hall on the way to the procedure room saw him and were talking about how cute he was. Both of those ended up being positive experiences and every person who talked to me about my plushies was nice to me. If you don't feel comfortable having it visible to your provider during the appointment, you can hide it in your bag and just know it's there, or if you're in a video appointment, you can hold it below frame in your lap.

Get a small bucket, fill it with stuff, and stick it in your bed (if you have room for it). I filled a bucket with Ensure, juice boxes, oatmeal bars, lotion, my rescue inhaler, etc. in October 2023 in anticipation of my laparoscopy and I still have it in my bed as of January 2025.

If your disability impacts your impulse control (e.g. ADHD, bipolar disorder), you should consider setting limits around your spending -- no more than X dollars at a time, nothing online unless it's absolutely necessary, and so on. Or, run these purchases by someone you trust before committing to them; I use my BFF groupchat to help talk sense into myself when I buy stuff.

Feel free to add on what you've learned about disability!

[insane-cripplepunk]

Medical schools don’t teach their students well about disability, which can have negative effects for both disabled patients and disabled medical students, according to a new study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Researchers found that medical school curriculum often treats disability as a problem, leading students to make negative assumptions about the health and quality of life of people with disabilities. That makes them ill-prepared for treating disabled patients.

The overall attitude also results in fewer disabled people becoming doctors.

“Doctors do not know how to care for people with disabilities because they never learned,” lead author Carol Haywood, PhD, assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said in a press release.

“Ultimately, our work reveals how medical education may be playing a critical role in creating and perpetuating ideas that people with disabilities are uncommon and unworthy in health care.” (Read more at link)

Imagine if they just fucking listened to us.

[insane-cripplepunk]

Y'all need to get a lot less comfortable telling disabled people what they can and can't say/feel about their disability.

"My disability does not make me unworthy of life, love, or happiness."

and

"I don't like being disabled and would like to no longer be disabled."

Are two statements that can coexist. Fuck you if you want to try and police people's perspective of their own bodies.

[insane-cripplepunk]

you can always give your blorbos mobility aids btw . you can always make them disabled its always morally correct

[insane-cripplepunk]

99% of "mysterious disappearances" esp of people in their 20s who start acting weird for 48 hours and then vanish are not mysterious, thats just when a lot of reality-obliterating mental illness tends to kick in and it's pretty easy to get a short circuit in your brain that makes you go family guy death pose in joshua tree national park. it's not any less tragic, it's just a documented phenomenon and not particularly predictable. its a big reason the medical advice is for people with a family history of schizophrenia to completely avoid weed and psychedelics. "people just go crazy sometimes" is a principle of human health that used to be a lot more accepted prior to the american midcentury and to a certain extent thats a healthier way to conceptualize and prepare for the risk, as opposed to the modern assertion that anyone acting weird is dangerous and broken forever.

[insane-cripplepunk]

Mental illness doesn't excuse someone being an asshole. But assholes STILL deserve mental help. It doesn't matter how much you hate them or how unlikable they are. They are still a person.

[insane-cripplepunk]

it's funny that people act like disabled people are such a downer and negative and pessimistic for acknowledging their health conditions when we have to be the most optimistic suckers on earth to repeatedly go to drs with the expectation of actually recieving treatment. did i say funny sorry i meant soul destroying

[insane-cripplepunk]

Mobility assistance

[insane-cripplepunk]

when i say that i can’t do something due to my disabilities, like the dishes or mop the floors, the thing i hate most is hearing other disabled people go “well i can’t do it either but i don’t have a choice so i do it anyways” because like, there are those of us who can’t do a thing under no circumstances. it doesn’t matter if i don’t have a choice or if im forced to do it, i still can’t.

my entire apartment looks like shit, it’s very dusty, there’s dirt all over the floors, i have no clean dishes & im tuning out of bowls/plates & cutlery. and i can’t do anything about it. like literally.

for some of us, “i can’t do it” very literally means I CANT DO IT.

[this is MAINLY about physical disability, but people who can ACTUALLY relate to this even if it’s not because of physical disability can reblog & share their thoughts etc.]

[insane-cripplepunk]

I think “punk wasn’t political at first” is erasure of women, particularly women of color and queers who created and spearheaded the movement to go against their daily discrimination upfront and without apology and only for their contributions to the scene and their distinct leftist, feminist, anti racist and anti capitalist viewpoints to be erased and rewritten by yt posers who favored bands that had their apolitical or conservative viewpoints that still gets to some degree accepted by other yt punks in discourse to be pretty insulting.

[insane-cripplepunk]

The latest essay from Cripple Punk Mag 3 is now online. "Whatever Happened to Dying With Your Mask On If You’ve Got To?" a fantastic piece by @/boo_cool_robot about being an emo kid of color, a disabled music fan during Covid-19, and the band Proper. You can also buy a print copy here

[insane-cripplepunk]

Hell yeah!

New terms, new research

We are THRIVING

syscourse is extremely fascinating to me because random internet users somehow managed to parallel a real, ongoing psychiatric debate, but at the same time it’s obvious that no one involved is aware of this.

this may shock you, but we have actual clinical terms for “traumagenic” and “endogenic”. it’s trauma-based and fantasy-based (or sociocognitive or iatrogenic- depends on the position and paper).

(Image from Dalenberg et al)

And that’s just for DID alone. Some argue that newer clinical presentations aren’t DID, but a novel condition. Gauld et al calls it “DIC”, but I’ve read other papers calling it “false positive DID”.

“But which one is correct?” There’s a Nobel prize with your name on it if you can definitively find one. The debate is ongoing- there tends to be more evidence towards the trauma-based side, but there’s still an argument towards fantasy as well. Although to be transparent- 3 of the papers on the fantasy model were written by one guy (Harald Merckelbach), but with different teams each time. And this is before you consider iatrogenic cases which have been a major problem historically in DID research (see the satanic panic and false memory cases).

[insane-cripplepunk]

btw saying that disability accommodations gives someone an "advantage" over abled people is like saying people with glasses/contacts have an advantage over people who can see fine without them and if you say this you're really ignorant