iron-roses - Tumblr blog

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when I was younger I didn’t understand why “may you live in interesting times” was considered a curse in ancient greece.

I get it now.

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Guy at the comic book store saved some Spider-Gwen comics for me. I'm doing it chat I'm a regular he knows me

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There's this idea, fairly common in society, that mental illness is for teens and up. Children are happy little creatures, generally, right? Sometimes they're abused and the trauma can make them mentally ill, but that's not common.

There are two fundamental problems with this attitude. One, it's incorrect to assume that trauma is the only reason a young kid can be mentally ill. Two, trauma is more common than people think. I'll be covering the first problem in this post through the lens of my particular experience.

Where I live, you can be diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 18 years old. You cannot be diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a minor. This poses a problem because my age of onset was in first grade, roughly six years old. Because of the fact that I was very young and new to the world, this was also the age of my first suicide attempt. Thinking I wouldn't be able to pass a spelling test genuinely felt like something worth trying to die over. So, I ate some hemlock, since I'd read about Socrates being killed with it. Luckily, I ate western hemlock, an unrelated species, and just felt kind of sick.

I'm not recounting that for fun or pity. I'm recounting it because children with mental illness are in genuine danger because they have little to no experience with managing their emotions, have little to no concept of the idea that their life can change and improve, and are dismissed by adults. I told a teacher that the test made me want to die, though not that I'd attempted to, and it was brushed off as little kid hyperbole. If I had used a method that was effective rather than one I thought would be, I would have been dead at six years old.

I would not receive medication that worked even a bit for another two years. I would not receive treatment for bipolar disorder specifically for ten years, and that required my PCP fudging the reason for the medication because she was afraid I would die if she didn't, and diagnosis was still two years off at minimum. I received a formal diagnosis at age 19, thirteen years after onset.

But surely that's uncommon, right? This story is a huge edge case, right? I actually have no idea, because age of onset and age of diagnosis are massively conflated for most disabilities. Policies like the one in my area that restricted bipolar diagnoses by age can artificially raise the age of "onset", in my case by thirteen years. The general idea that children are somehow immune to mental illness can also delay diagnosis by several years, perpetuating the idea that young children can't be mentally ill. The data on when people start experiencing mental illness is inherently skewed upwards, and I frankly don't have a good estimate on how bad that skew is. If anyone does have that data, please chime in.

Listen to children. If they're saying they're sad all the time, that they don't care about anything, that they don't see a future for themselves, those are signs of depressive symptoms. If they say that tests make them feel sick, that they can't do anything because they're scared, that they can't breathe and freeze up, those are signs of anxious symptoms. Many children talk about imaginary things, and that's just fine, but slip in a question or two about them to make sure that the kid is just playing, and not experiencing psychosis.

Children are new to the world and vulnerable, and they don't know what's normal and what isn't. They need people who are more experienced watching out for problems they might be having, and listening when they talk about having problems. If you can, try to be the person who perceives them, and tells them that things can be better.

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HAPPIEST OF BIRTHDAYS TO MY FAVOURITE SEIYUU!!

Thank you so much for everything, Seki-san ❤️

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Im not autistic about cars or makes or models but I AM autistic about crumple points and field of vision and blindspots and conflict points. do you understand. urban design, anti car dependency/anti car centric infrastructure, and so cars themselves are part of that interest. because car design is urban design. cybertrucks SUCK as cars and also dont function well in infrastructure thats designed to care about people. there are good cars and vehicles that are designed good and fit well with good urban design

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Compilation of flag confusions I’ve seen online

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LOADING SCREEN TIP: any character, regardless of their gender in canon, can be made more interesting by becoming transmasculine

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ah yes, the two genders:

man and bath

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my official stance is a pregnancy is whatever the pregnant person wants it to be. if it’s a 4 week old clump of cells and they want to call it a baby it’s a baby. if they're 20 weeks and they want to call it a parasite it’s a parasite. if they're 39 weeks and call it a fetus it’s a fetus. “why are you so sad about miscarrying at 6 weeks it was literally just an embryo” because that was their baby. “how can you get an abortion at three months” because that wasn’t a baby. hope that helps.

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@arsonstick said i should post this. bedman lester

insp:

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"why do jewish girls always have such big racks" idk about everyone else but as an ashkenazi i can speak for myself when i say that my body was built to feed 15 children in the shtetl and i resist it every day

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Rin Tohsaka - Chibi ver by SC Studios

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no one is born to be alone

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