#🔥🔥 BE FUCKING NORMAL ABOUT ASPD ON THIS POST OR I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL BECOME THE JOKER ON YOUR ASS 🔥🔥

[wawawawawawawawawawawawawa]

i'm on my aspd izaya bullshit again but like. thru this lens, isnt his arc a perfect encapsulation on how aspd negatively affects the person that has it? even to this day, many professionals do not believe that pwASPD suffer from aspd. like at all. to the point where aspd was specifically listed as an outlier to the "patient distress is what defines a disorder" rule in an abnormal psych textbook

(see why i don't respect the field?)

but... he does suffer! a lot! like- remember his speech to mikado at the end of the first arc? how you need to keep evolving, keep changing in order to escape the mundane? how you have to keep going and going and going, wether it be aiming high or low?

yeah. normal people don't need to do this, izaya. you are a broken person.

but why SHOULD he be content with the mundane? the things people usually have that make them content with daily life- friends, family, a purpose, a distinct lack of extreme chronic boredom that drives you to do completely insane shit- izaya doesn't HAVE any of that!

"wait, chronic boredom?" i hear yall thinking. maybe. "isnt that an adhd thing?"

more than one disorder can have the same symptom. theres like a billion that have "want to die" as a symptom. but i dont really blame you for not knowing, its not talked about much

studies have shown that aspd and adhd are both problems with the dopamine receptors in the brain. more specifically, adhd is a chronic deficiency of dopamine, whereas with aspd, when you DO get dopamine, your brain gives you quardruple the normal amount.

studies have ALSO shown there to be a sort of... adhd to aspd pipeline. the story goes like this: you have a kid with adhd. maybe they're born like that, maybe the symptoms developed from trauma (which can happen? apparently??) anyway. kid gets abused. kid develops conduct disorder as a result of that abuse, as a natural extension of the existing adhd symptoms. they're MORE impulsive, which leads to them hurting others- and if it sets off the dopamine receptors, an abused kid starving for happiness and power is gonna chase it, no matter what. theyre like, six, they dont know anything about like. morality. all they know is, theyre sad and this makes them happy. anyway kid never gets treated, abuse continues to exasperate the symptoms, and now you have an adult with aspd, AND the original adhd diagnosis! and ptsd, which is HIGHLY comorbid with aspd! and probably another personality disorder, because you're actually statistically more likely to have two of them!

anyway! that's ONE of the ways aspd can develop from trauma, which it is Known To Do.

does any of that sound pleasant to go through? at all?

let me ask you a question:

imagine you aren't getting dopamine. maybe it's your adhd. maybe you're depressed. either way, you try to get it any way you can. wether it's throwing yourself into a hobby or a job, so the sense of satisfaction gives you dopamine, or something like drugs or gambling.

now, imagine that "rush" you felt. was Four Times Stronger.

wouldnt that compel you to do increasingly dangerous and risky shit, just to feel okay? imagine if you had no friends. imagine if this was your only way to be happy. wouldnt you, eventually, stop caring about others and only care about yourself? after all, other people have thinga like friends and a family that you don't have. they have a fallback. you only have this.

and you might say, "i'd never do that!" but every addict says that, and most eventually cross that line out of sheer desperation. and this? effectively makes you into a dopamine addict. which is dangerous! you can't just STOP... gettng dopamine....! it's necessary! but you have no help so you keep doing what youre doing. (and how could you get help? its baked into the system that people like you don't suffer. why try if youll just get burned?

anyway, back to izaya.

he's lonely. he has one friend and he sucks. he feels compelled to do these things even though he KNOWS it'll hurt him.

i stole this screenshot from some1 who insulted my friend once for something stupid <3 die

but it illustrates my point very well! does it look like he has much control over things?? he sure like to ACT like he does, but at the end of the day, he doesn't, really. he ends up spiraling more and more, doing increasingly risky and rash things, just to get his end goal... which is to die and ascend to the afterlife. a lofty goal.

aiming high, isn't he? a final, spectacular evolution.

or, it should have been.

but it wasn't.

izaya's impulses and deep desire to continue becoming more and more drastic, coupled with his lack of personal ties to anyone that could keep him from doing so....

it didn't make him ascend. it left him in a wheelchair, with chronic pain that will last his whole life.

THAT is where mental illness takes you. it doesn't make you a hollywood psychopath, reveling in the destruction you chose, of your own free will, wholly and truly, to cause. it makes you want More. no matter what, you need More. you see people content with lives worse than yours, everyone bound together with some sort of invisible thread, some sort of tie that keeps them together. a thread that missed you. your brain refuses to see people as people, thus you remain lonely forever, unsatiafied wirh company other than the superficial, because it's fun. that's all you're allowed to care about. an endless cycle of bigger and bigger actions, impulses slowly getting worse--

--and the worst part is, it tricks you into believing you ever had a choice. it tricks everyone into believing you had a choice. your suffering is worse than disregarded, to all the people you look at from your apartment, all the people you wish you could have been like.

it's nonexistant.