#*DON'T USE TERMS AND TOOLS FOR PEOPLE WITH THAT DISORDER????*

[teacup-captor]

Systems and normal people: We support trauma survivors

"Endogenic" systems and their supporters: Even if we romanticize being a system, steal resources from actually disabled people while claiming to have the same disorders as them and then becoming the biggest hypocrites ever by claiming to not have these same disorders moments later while still stealing their resources and terms?

Systems and normal people: What. What, no, that's like really ableist- also why are you encouraging people to not heal from their trauma by denying it's there and feeding into their denial, which is a huge part of the complicated disorders we're dealing with?!!

"Endogenic" systems and their supporters: OH. OH WE SEE HOW IT IS. SO YOU DON'T SUPPORT TRAUMA SURVIVORS. AND YOU'RE BEING ABLEIST TOWARDS US BECAUSE WE'RE DIFFERENT!!!!

[misty-metropolis]

People with complex dissociative disorders often have difficulty processing or expressing emotions. This can look like any number of things. For example:

Emotions being dramatically dissociated into individual parts, such that a host part feels limited to no emotion, but there exists another part who does nothing but cry, and a part who feels such incandescent rage that they are unable to function properly

Emotions being muted and difficult to parse from each other; alexithymia stemming from trauma / abuse

Emotions being largely dissociated, with random bursts of emotion that are scary and overwhelming

Emotions being very sharp and present, but jumbled and often in combination with each other. This may create an impression of being flaky, fickle, or difficult to please

Emotions cycling too rapidly to properly identify them or process how they are affecting individual parts or the system at large

This is a non-exhaustive list. Feel free to add on your own experiences.

For those who are interested, I also have some resources for emotion regulation, as well as some free strategies shared by my therapist, under the cut.

First, I know this has been said before but it really does work wonders, you need to pay attention to your vulnerability factors. Vulnerability factors are elements of your environment or internal experience that make it more difficult to self-regulate. A somewhat common community term for these is forks (in relation to the spoon theory). Common vulnerability factors include lack of sleep, hunger, and needing to use the restroom. Adequately caring for your body's physical needs allows for more complete emotion regulation and more energy to go toward emotion processing when it's needed. If you are sleep deprived, for example, and then become triggered, you're already expending so much energy just to maintain functionality that you're less likely to be able to prevent yourself from doing something you'll regret, like snapping at a partner.

I'm also happy to provide an overview of a few emotion regulation tools from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.

Positive Psychology has a set of three emotional intelligence worksheets (link) that are a good jumping-off point for exploring where you're at in that regard and strengthening your emotional intelligence skills. The emotion regulation questionnaire (link) is a clinical tool that can also provide some insight.

First, there's the STOP skill. STOP stands for Stop, Take a Step Back, Observe, and Proceed Mindfully.

When you feel overwhelmed by your emotions, or think they may be at risk of controlling you, force yourself to freeze in place. This prevents you from acting impulsively and doing something you'll regret. Try to name the emotion(s) you're feeling as descriptively as possible.

Then take a step back and give yourself some time to contemplate the situation with a little space from it. It's not often that you have to make a split-second decision based on limited information, so don't try to force yourself to do so.

Take in as much information as you can about the events taking place around you. Ask questions of other people in the situation with you. Try not to jump to conclusions, or listen to your automatic negative thoughts, which are based on an outdated belief system.

Use questions like "what are my goals in this situation?" and "how can my decisions impact the outcome?" to guide your decision-making process as you proceed.

Then there's the Opposite Action skill. This is the one that I use the most in my daily life, as a person with Borderline Personality Disorder. Opposite Action encourages you to reject the impulses you feel when you experience a strong emotion, and to instead do something that is the opposite of that. A few examples (mostly dealing with anger, because that's where I use this skill the most):

When I feel frustrated or angry with a console video game, I want to throw the controller, so the opposite action I choose is to press the buttons very gently and deliberately, without force. (Consequently, I also notice more success when I do this!)

When I feel angry with my partner's behavior, I want to yell at xem or say something that will hurt xem, so the opposite action that I choose is to gently explain my feelings and ask them to explain what happened from their perspective.

When I feel ashamed of something that has happened to me, I want to isolate and hide from the world, so the opposite action I choose is to share my feelings (and the event, if I feel capable) with someone I trust and love.

The last skill I want to overview is Cope Ahead. This is a skill in which you practice ahead of time to figure out how you'll deal with a situation when it arises.

Step 1: Identify a situation that may cause you discomfort or strong emotions. I generally prefer to be more on the vague side, because details will vary and that allows me to get more mileage out of my cope ahead, but you should do it however is most helpful for you. Make sure you check the facts and carefully identify the emotions that might arise and interfere with your skills.

Step 2: Pick out your coping and problem-solving skills ahead of time. This is where Cope Ahead gets its name. You identify a situation and then decide in advance how you're going to react to it, allowing yourself to rehearse the possibilities and decrease the chances of acting impulsively*.

Step 3: Imagine yourself in the situation. Picture yourself going through it in the first person, not as though you're watching a film about yourself.

Step 4: Rehearse your reactions to the situation and any strong emotions it may bring up. Rehearse your thoughts and behaviors. Practice coping effectively until you feel like you can ace it. Do this in as many sessions as you need.

Step 5: REST! Do something that brings you peace to care for yourself after each session.

*Impulsive behavior is something with which many people with BPD struggle, and DBT was originally developed to treat BPD, despite its applications in other fields.

Sources:

DBT Tools (link)

Positive Psychology (linked above)

My therapist (can't link that one, sorry)

Also, I've taken DBT twice through and am licensed to teach it.

[jewishvitya]

I was having a conversation about "narcissistic abuse" with a person with NPD. We were talking about the need to call out toxic behaviors that might come with unmanaged NPD, and how it's nothing like what we see now online. We talked about how people like them, who want to treat others well and manage their disorder, deserve to have resources that help them have healthy relationships. And they thanked me for not immediately assuming the worst of them. Which. Just shows you how they're used to being treated.

They got suicide baiting from random strangers just for the fact that they have NPD.

I've seen people getting told "this is doing nothing but making me feel awful about myself" and responding with "you should feel awful about yourself, you're a narcissist!"

It's dangerous to equate abuse with narcissism. It's dangerous to see people with NPD as deserving of harm. Most people with NPD will already be victims of abuse - that's how the disorder is usually developed. If you buy into the idea that they're abusive by nature, you're harming survivors.

There's no harmless way to dehumanize an entire group of people. Especially not over a trait they can't help.

Victims and survivors of abuse should get to talk about their experiences. This doesn't require diagnosing anyone and it doesn't require using a term that's associated with a disorder that's already seen as an inherent evil. There's no kind of abuse that's inherent or exclusive to a specific disorder. I hear the term "coercive control" which sounds really good for the kind of emotional and psychological abuse that gets discussed in those conversations, without adding ableist stigma.

If your opposition to ableism doesn't include people with the most stigmatized disorders, how deeply are you truly thinking about things.

The harm caused to people with NPD through stigma is enough for this to matter. But in addition to that, it's harmful to other people too.

First of all, because you buy into having a group of people who become acceptable targets over a condition they can't help.

Second, because you teach yourself to armchair diagnose people. Which means that you get to put whoever you want into the "acceptable target" group.

When you have a group of people that you think don't deserve to be treated as people, it's easier to persuade you to put unrelated people in that category. Think of the way accusations of "child predator!" are wielded against queer people too. This is not an uncommon tactic.

And it's already a thing here. Sam Vaknin was the one who coined the term narcissistic abuse. That's a man with no credentials to talk about mental health or about abuse. He's a hateful bigoted person. The things that he considers narcissistic include homosexuality, transgender identities, and women who sleep with multiple men instead of settling down with one.

If you buy into the idea that having NPD essentially means being abusive, and then all these things are all narcissistic things. At that point we have a line drawn between queerness and abuse, using the line that was drawn between NPD and abuse.

And another point, about the harassment people with NPD get, is - we shouldn't be punishing people. Just, in general. Punishment isn't justice and it isn't accountability. Withstanding whatever harm people see fit to inflict on you because they were convinced to hate you, rightfully or not, isn't justice or accountability. Even if you convinced yourself that the harm isn't real because… it happens in the virtual space? And that makes it fake somehow?

Think of the way people online talk about narcissists. Think of how easily they armchair diagnose NPD, calling any abuser a narc, and sometimes from one sided stories. And the way people hurry to cyberbully and dogpile.

Abusers will often paint their victims as the abusive ones as a way to escape being known as abusive. And if you take the job of punishing people that you decided deserve it, you will at some point become a tool of an abuser trying to further harm their victim.

Even if you see evidence, it's easy to fake and manufacture. And it'll only become easier with voice and video AI tools. And even if it's all true, punishing people does nothing good.

Convincing you that a group of people is inherently dangerous is a way to make you willing to harm them, or stand by as harm is being done to them. People with NPD don't deserve that.

Stop looking for people that it's acceptable to harass and punish and ostracize. Most of us are susceptible to mob mentality, and having acceptable targets makes you dangerous.

[mai-komagata]

Remember 1968 and 1980

if you wonder why politically involved progressives and leftists are so up in arms about the Harris/Walz campaign needing a stronger stance on israel pragmatically, it is easy to understand if you study the presidential campaigns of 1968 and 1980 (where the Democrats lost, once after changing an unpopular 1 term president, and another time after another 1 term president). Even if you are completely cynical on palestinian lives, or if you just prioritize domestic policies more, please read on. Keep this in mind: Elections aren't won on hype and good feelings alone. it is a huge political liability the situation we are in now. It is irrelevant whether Trump is worse for Gaza. That isn't the political calculation. Trump, like Nixon and Reagan before him, doesn't care about the United States of America. He wants to win. And he will use every tool at his disposal including phoning his good friend Benjamin Netanyahu. And right now Trump's campaign is on the backfoot, and like a wounded animal it will lash out.

You don't win an election by making every leftist a Harris cheerleader or making them promise to vote in Novemeber. You need to neutralize political threats. I know a lot of people think October Surprise refers to Hillary Clinton's emails, but it refers to the Iran-Contra hostages of 1980. US hostages were held in Iran for 444 days. And here is the tl:dr; Members of the Reagan campaign extracted concessions from Iran to delay the hostage transfer, and the hostages were released MINUTES after Reagan was sworn in as president. Let me spell this out. Netanyahu met with Trump recently. They are friends. You don't think they struck a deal to wrap up the Gaza war on jan 21, 2025, in exchange for his protection when he leaves office? Or alternatively, to escalate the devastation to the entire region a week before the election?

The other election I want to highlight is 1968. This election was a referendum on the Vietnam war. Robert F Kennedy was shot before the convention, and there was a contested convention as a result. (keep in mind Harris won't have a divided campaign, so this part isn't analogous). The candidate who narrowly eked out victory, Humphrey, was only "moderately" (i.e. status quo) anti-war. They refused to compromise with the candidate with a more stringent antiwar position and riots broke out. This is not what caused them to lose, mind you, but it was a SIGN of what the electorate wanted. But as the general campaign picked up, this became a liability. From wikipedia: "Nixon led in most polls throughout the campaign, and successfully criticized Humphrey's role in the Vietnam War, connecting him to the unpopular president and the general disorder in the nation. Humphrey experienced a surge in the polls in the days prior to the election, largely due to incremental progress in the peace process in Vietnam and a break with the Johnson war policy. " Neither situation is directly analogous to Israel-gaza. But if israel declares war on iran, and us troops need to be involved in october? You better believe the american electorate will care and it will be a perfect storm. And *that* is the pragmatic case for a much stronger stance on the ceasefire, not just waiting for it to happen. Even if you don't care about palestinian lives, this is why this is important. Let's not leave this to the last minute and the status quo. This is what you should be scared of, not if "messaging will harsh the vibes". History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

[man-i-just-really-like-plants]

🚩Witchcraft Red Flags🚩

🚩In Witches

🚩Believes only women can be witches, gatekeeping practices, worship, tools, etc 🚩Believes that magic/spirituality/energy/crystals can cure mental illness, physical illness, chronic illness, and disorders 🚩Doesn’t respect closed paths or practices 🚩Tells others how their paths should be 🚩Won’t stop telling witches they need to protect themselves from deities 🚩Thinks they are more powerful than anyone else, won’t stop talking about how powerful they are 🚩Judges all witches with Wiccan rules 🚩Treats baby witches like they are idiots and don’t deserve respect 🚩Calls themselves a fancy title without being able to back it up 🚩Thinks hereditary witches are more powerful/better than first generation witches 🚩Dianic Wicca [heavily infested with terfs/radfems and lesbian separatists] 🚩References Silver Ravenwolf, Raymond Buckland or any of these authors 🚩“G*psy witch” 🚩Tells you they can help you be more powerful or you NEED them in particular 🚩Anything that would go on a cult warning list 🚩Tells you to go off your meds 🚩Claiming natural is better for you than man-made 🚩Gives lists of herbal remedies without providing any safety information 🚩Acting like Science is evil, or unfeeling, or inferior to magic 🚩“Only white people can follow the Norse pantheon” 🚩Claiming witch-hunters were targeting secret pagans instead of just heretics and self-sufficient women 🚩Acting like Wicca is “ancient” or calling it “the Old Religion” or tracking it back further than Gerald Gardner [the guy who invented it] 🚩“Wicca and Witchcraft are the same thing” 🚩Claiming St. Peter's cross is Satanic, or that Ankh is Christian 🚩Anything new age [Illuminati, New world order, talks about Atlantis like it's real, aliens, ect] 🚩Claiming they'll provide you forbidden knowledge 🚩Tribal tattoos from a tribe they aren't apart of 🚩"You were meant to see this video" 🚩Recommending any work from scammers 🚩Discouraging learning the history of a practice 🚩Claiming deities from different pantheons are the exact same 🚩 AI art

Toxic Mentors

Quick note: Never trust your mentor as a end all be all source of knowledge, always do other research

🚩Discourages you from learning on your own 🚩Belittles your experiences and undermines your knowledge 🚩Refuses to allow you to have your own beliefs and or opinions 🚩Tries to change your practice and/or push you around 🚩Gaslighting 🚩Berating you when you get information or talk to other witches 🚩Do things that upset/hurt you in the name of ‘keeping you safe’ 🚩Warping your experiences so they fall in line with their own 🚩Telling you that they are the chosen one, or a prophet of god in order to keep you in line by fear mongering 🚩Attempt to build relationships with your spirit companions as an attempt to steal them from you and control you further 🚩Tries to or insists to preform magic on you that is supposed to be connected to your aura, your energy, or your soul 🚩Everything that happens to you seems to magically line up with what is going on with them or something that only they can help you with

🚩In books:

Note: Any extremely old book will have red flags, mostly due to Christianization to when reading books from like 200 years ago keep that in mind and take it with a grain of salt

🚩Anything new age 🚩Uses “Witchcraft” and “Wicca” interchangeably 🚩Black v white magic, Light v Dark 🚩No bibliography 🚩No academic or historical sources sited 🚩Saying baneful magic is evil 🚩Saying baneful magic will always backfire 🚩If you don't cast a circle the spell won't work 🚩The G slur 🚩Using deities or spirits as tools 🚩Westernized Chakras 🚩Suggests that “witch” is a gendered term or refers to witches (and possibly the reader) exclusively with she/her pronouns 🚩It sets hard timelines on length of study before you can call yourself a witch or learn certain skills or try certain activities 🚩It says anything about youth being inherently magical 🚩Law of attraction 🚩Suggests or even hints that witchcraft, magic, whatever can replace medicine or therapy

🚩In Covens

🚩Intimidation, fear, and isolation [key factors to running a cult] 🚩Egotistical leader, they are “always right”, ect 🚩Pay to join 🚩Gender identity/sexuality requirements 🚩Puts their leader on a pedestal 🚩Leader claims they have special abilities/claims they are more powerful or special than the other members, self deification 🚩Any signs of abuse 🚩Instant initiation 🚩Hazardous/puts you, others or animals in harms way 🚩 No age restrictions 🚩Tells you to stop taking your meds, going to the doctors, ect 🚩Forcing beliefs and/or traditions onto you 🚩Forced sexual practices, alcohol use or drugs 🚩Unnecessary security 🚩Lost touch with the physical and mundane world 🚩Distance you from others 🚩Being told by friends and family that your changing (not in a good way) and/or spending too much time with them 🚩Illegal activities 🚩Religious lies 🚩Overly sexual 🚩Make you make changes in your life to be more like them or their standards 🚩Lead by inexperienced members 🚩Tries to get you to rely on them 🚩New members are belittled and treated as inferior to established members 🚩Leaders demand unreasonable amounts of time dedicated to the coven 🚩Coven limits the type of witchcraft that members can practice 🚩Leaders place more importance on serving them than on practicing your craft 🚩Anything that would go on a cult warning list that I haven't already mentioned

[animentality]

in re your post about therapy speak and ship wars, i THINK i agree from what I do understand, but i also dont know what therapy speak means? I looked it up and got this definition "Therapy speak is a colloquial term that refers to the use of psychological, therapeutic, or mental health language in everyday conversation. It can include terms like "boundaries," "abuse," "psychopath," and "trauma"."

So would an example of such be, "X ship is better than Y ship because X ship respects each others boundaries, but in Y ship they're a psychopath"? And then you know probably some added death/doxxing threats cuz ship wars.

Either way, yeah, ship wars dumb af, I just am dumb af too so I don't know what the post means. I also, fortunately, don't encounter much of therapy speak in my fandom spaces or online in general (proven by the fact that I had to look it up) as I just talk to people that I know and avoid the For You pages (which, plot note, are very often not For Me) so I'm lucky to avoid stupid opinions.

Thanks for answering if you do choose to, I know that at least several of the replies/responses to that post are likely stupid af, so I hope that my stupid af question is at least stupid af in a different way :) If I somehow have the wrong definition feel free to just link me to something that explains it better, because regardless it seems like a useful term to know!

not a stupid question at all.

so in the context of that post, abusing therapy speak refers to people who misuse terms like "narcissist" and "bipolar disorder" and "gaslighting" to suit their own personal tastes.

say for example, a character is arrogant and kind of haughty. if you don't like that character because people ship him with the character you like to ship with someone else, you insist he's a "narcissist" when he's you know. just arrogant.

and you say he can't be with her, because he's a narcissist and he has problems. that's problematic.

or say there's a female character you hate for having genuine human reactions to traumatic things. you'd say well I don't like her because she lets her obvious bpd hurt people instead of trying to fix her issues, she's so messy :(

and then if someone lies to another character, say their enemy, because they're fucking enemies, then you'd say oh he GASLIGHTS him, how could you guys ship this??? toxic ship???

so that's what that post refers to.

therapy speak as a whole, by definition, is fine because PTSD and depression and trauma do exist.

but in certain spaces, especially Twitter and TikTok and Tumblr of course, it's been weaponized as a tool to harass people who are fans of characters or ships that they themselves do not like.

which is ridiculous.

like you can say you don't like a ship without feeling the need to diagnose the two characters with whatever fun term your gen z therapist tossed at you that week.

you can say oh I simply do not like this character instead of oh he has an obvious mental illness and that's why I don't like him.

or you know.

he's a terrible representative of (insert illness) and that's why I don't like him-

bitch, we used to just not like things.

now it's like... oh this character is a psychopath.

let me read you a Wikipedia page on dsm-5 and explain that my personal preference is morally correct while yours is amoral.

that's why that post meant.

[hemipenal-system]

Valor

Everyone gives Pilots and Handlers all the credit. I mean, obviously. They're the ones on the front lines, behind the guns, on all the propaganda posters and in the movies. When people think of Front efforts, they think of a Pilot in a snappy skintight jumpsuit and a Handler with an earpiece working together to control the massive machines.

In the mistranslated words of Sun Tzu, "The line between order and disorder lies in logistics." That's where Scuttlers come in.

Sure, the Handlers protect and maintain the Pilots, but someone has to take care of the actual mech itself. Someone has to unscrew, buff, and replace its damaged armor plating. Someone has to load another set of shells into the main cannon, each shell weighing more than the average Pilot. Hell, old mechs have top-access cockpits. Someone has to climb onto the mech and extricate the poor broken thing, holding it delicately in external manipulators, silicone fingertips caressing its forehead and telling it that it's okay while scaling down the mech to deliver it to its waiting Handler.

Scuttlers work behind the scenes, keeping everything running. No dopamine conditioning, no mental linkage, just a quadruple set of four foot industrial arms worn like a backpack, connected through a tiny neurosleeve plugged into a port in the left armpit.

Arms is a loose term. The external limbs react entirely to the wearer's brain, no onboard system necessary, but that's where the similarities end. Each limb is carbon steel, able to lift upwards of three hundred pounds and precise enough to stack dominoes and play cards with. The hands are entirely swappable, too, and some Scuttlers just keep their auxiliary tools on all the time, using the welders and cutting saws enough to justify it.

Scuttlers don't get any conditioning – only a three day instruction course on how to use and care for their external limbs. In theory, this makes them less dangerous than a Pilot or its Handler, but anyone who thinks that hasn't ever pissed off one of them and woken up at night to a foot on their chest holding them down, circular saw spinning at full speed an inch from their throat. Human brains, unaltered, don't necessarily take stress and disrespect any better than Pilots do.

Scuttlers love Pilots, though, just as much as they absolutely despise Handlers. They see the similarities between themselves and Pilots. Just as a Pilot looks for a targeting interface when they're out of the mech, Scuttlers often find themselves reaching for something with a hand they're not wearing. Pilots, for the most part, see Scuttlers as a sort of caretaker, repairing their second bodies, and are fascinated with their ability to control all the arms without any machine assistance. Handlers practically never remember they exist.

The rare Handler who remembers the Scuttlers exist and treats them kindly quickly becomes a favorite on the company, finding snacks and flowers and sometimes even love notes on their desks when they arrive for work. Should they pursue said notes, they find out quickly how close the Scuttlers all are with each other – and how versatile those external hands can be.

[transmutationisms]

trying to work out some thoughts on anorexia/restrictive eating disorders as inherently “mental illnesses” so forgive me for doing that in your inbox lol. but as someone who starved myself for a while as a teenager in order to fit into the ideal of thinness i reallyyyy hate when people call anorexia/bulimia a mental illness. what i was doing was very reasonable — i was trying to get thin, fast, so people would think of me as pretty/desirable, and starving myself was a way to do that. i feel like terming restrictive eating disorders as mental illnesses in & of themselves makes them seem like, unreasonable? or like you’re biologically predisposed to starve yrself? i guess i just want to know if you have any thoughts on the terming of “anorexia” or “bulimia” as mental illnesses (sorry for the vagueness of this question)

i have thoughts lol

in general i don't actually get a lot of mileage out of the concept of 'mental illness', tbh. there are lots of different things going on here—sometimes these labels are used to pathologise behaviours and experiences that are simply normal variations in human populations (& are often experienced as impairments due to the context of a social and economic environment designed to exclude them). sometimes they're just pathologising certain portions of the population, and are a tool for how marginalisation occurs, like 'drapetomania' or 'hysteria' or indeed the racialised nature of 'schizophrenia' diagnoses. sometimes what we call 'mental illness' is what i would argue is a very reasonable response to fucked up circumstances, like what you're talking about or indeed the inherently stressful and traumatising experience of, like, surviving capitalism. you also have to keep in mind that the way the pharmaceutical industry and the psychiatric establishment work in tandem means that some diagnostic labels come into existence after a drug is discovered/manufactured, and needs an insurance billing code in order to start making money.

on top of all this, as a philosophical point, 'illness' or 'disease' in medicine has some specific meanings (contested & varied over time/place, obviously) and i'm not actually convinced that affective distress is best explained or ameliorated by this framework. the argument that affective distress is a disease state has mostly been very useful for people who are invested in claiming medico-scientific authority and prestige for clinical and academic psychiatry. interestingly ofc, they have never fully succeeded in doing this because there are no biomarkers for psychiatric diagnoses, that's not how these diagnoses are made, and it's certainly not how they're treated (despite outright lies like the 'chemical imbalance' myth still being pushed on many patients).

when it comes to 'eating disorders' specifically, one thing to keep in mind up front is that although all eating disorders are restrictive in origin, both the responses to and causes of that restriction vary widely. the 'classic' story here since about the mid-20th century has been a (white, upper-class) girl who wants to be thin and starves herself in pursuit of beauty / social acceptance; depending on how she responds to this attempted restriction, you might see further restriction, binge-type behaviour, binge-purge behaviour, &c. but this is really only one eating disorder 'story'. as i've said before, food / energy restriction can start for a million different reasons, including lack of access to sufficient food, sensory aversions, other illnesses, over-exercise, &c. and people's mental and physical responses also vary a lot. i've probably never met a disordered eater who had NO thoughts on thinness as the beauty standard and beauty as currency—because of the social context we live in, these ideas will usually at some point become wrapped up in the food restriction, and are often major drivers of the sort of guilt response that tends to perpetuate eg a binge-restrict cycle. but this isn't to say that the desire for thinness is every disordered eater's sole or even primary psychological experience.

since my own experience has always been very similar to yours, though, i can speak to that a little. i agree with you fully in how i narrativise my own self-starvation, lmao. i don't think it's ever been some kind of biological predisposition with me, or a weird or aberrant or even pathological response to my circumstances. i actually think, given the social and familial context i grew up in, starving myself is one of the more logical and normal things i've ever engaged in. it's socially rewarded (both the resultant weight loss and the hypervigilant food / body behaviours in themselves) and emotionally numbing in a way that makes literally everything else 1 billion times easier to manage.

again, there's complexity here when talking about 'eating disorders' more broadly; people receive many different messages about food and body size, and respond to them differently as well. (this is a tricky thing with any diagnosis that's given on the basis of behaviours / symptoms—ie all psychiatric diagnoses—the label is ontologically incapable of differentiating between different causes for, and experiences of, what may be externally the same behaviours.) and it's also true that eating disorders involve a biological element in the sense that restrictive food intake (or the threat of restrictive food intake, like guilting yourself for eating something you perceive as unhealthy / fattening / &c) triggers a whole complicated physical response because, yknow, humans need to eat lol. but my point stands, i think: the psychiatric discourse of 'eating disorders' is still very wilfully decontextualising them, because otherwise it would have to become a broader social justice conversation about things like poverty and weight stigma. that's not something that psychiatry is disciplinarily equipped to do!

[dropintomanga]

AI Can't Be the Whole Solution for Manga

So this week I found out out a Japanese start-up called Orange, who wants to be the Netflix of manga by translating a lot of manga with new apps and tools for the world to fight against online piracy. And to do so, the company will use AI to machine translate all of their manga into English. They also received $20 million USD in funding (one of their investors is Shogakukan) for their goal. This company wants to release up to 500 titles a month at some point.

I honestly don't know how to feel about this.

I read a more in-depth report from Deb Aoki of ComicsBeat and Mangasplaining about this whole startup. There's a lot of tout given by Orange about how this will help the manga industry overseas. Terms like deep learning, accessible content, influencers, reducing cost of localization, etc. are thrown around. Orange already has done some work for Shueisha for some of its MangaPlus titles. While it's apparent that the North American market only gets a small fraction of the manga published in Japan, there's concerns over whether this endeavor will end well.

A good number of manga translators and editors in the North American localization scene have commented on how bad this can be. AI machine translation is far from perfect. While DeepL (a Japanese language translation app similar to Google Translate) is arguably better than Google Translate, there's still errors abound. AI machine translation doesn't seem to be at a stage where you can just show it off to the world and have it translate something like a research paper with context. And even if the translation was good, there still needs to be people to fix errors AI will miss and the jobs to fix those errors don't necessarily pay well since they're the equivalent of "data entry" jobs.

And speaking as someone who reads up on mental health news, AI is not good for picking up nuances and differences that can help people for the better. It's only good for standardizing universal treatments. AI can not be open to the vulnerabilities of other people. One recent story I read last year was about a eating disorder helpline that created a chatbot to help those with eating disorders and how it bombed. There were complaints about how the bot didn't address patients' concerns that they were feeling down or bad about their bodies. Even worse, the chatbot gave some horrible advice by telling people to follow behaviors that led to their eating disorders in the first place. The support staff was fired in favor of the chatbot and while the chatbot was taken down after the complaints, it still left a bad taste in my mouth because mental health problems can never be solved without the human element.

I see this with what's apparently going to happen with manga. I don't see this creating a better world for manga readers. I'm well aware that there are a few professional manga translators in the scene who aren't doing a good job, but I feel they're doing fine for the most part. There's a glaring issue though that most people aren't thinking about - the amount of content we have out there.

We're in a golden age of having so much catered to us that it's ridiculous. Anime, manga, webtoons, video games, board games, music, etc. There's a lot out there. And to have a Japanese startup proclaim that they want to put out up to 500 titles a month, who realistically has the time to read all of them? I wonder if that's the point of these ventures - beat down consumers with so much material to consume that they become apathetic to what's going on behind the scenes.

I do want people to read manga, but I don't want them to become so overwhelmed to the point of burnout and numbness. That's the last thing any manga fan should want. I'm already hearing complaints from my fellow manga peers about the amount of manga we're getting here. It's nice to see bookshelves and libraries filled with manga, but which titles are really being read?

I also think there seems to be no universal standard that EVERYONE can agree with regards to localization. You have the professional side that knows a lot due to being inside the industry, but can be hindered by the Japanese publishing side and pestered by fans who think they know better. And you have the fan side that thinks they know everything because of scanlations and miscellaneous fan translations.

If you're a professional, it's a rough job and I applaud all manga freelancers who do it. Sometimes, I may not agree with the localization choices. But I'm not going to raise a pitchfork and treat them like they're witches. I know a few of those folks in-person and see the human in them.

If you're a fan, you can't expect a very casual reader to understand Japanese terms being spoken out right off the bat. It takes a while to get used to those terms. I'll use myself as an example as a riichi mahjong player. I throw out terms like suji, kabe, mentanpin, ryanmen, etc. to my fellow players. However, if there's an absolute beginner I'm talking to, they will have no idea what the hell I'm talking about.

I know some fans are like "Whatever, understanding those terms make me stand out. Yeah, I'm different! Screw the normal world!" But that makes it sound like gatekeeping to a certain degree. It's fine to have that kind of knowledge, but binding it to the very fabric of your identity is not healthy when circumstances change.

Orange seems to want a universal standard for manga translation by incorporating a variety of people into their process, but the fact that people will only be involved AFTER the translation makes me skeptical and the company is being called out for some things on their website. Both professionals and consumers will be screwed here. AI is being pushed so hard by corporations because it can readily applied to real life jobs and regular people in many ways, compared to cryptocurrency/NFTs, which applies only to people with a crap ton of money to spend. I've seen instances of AI usage at the company I work at - some of it good, some of it bad.

But nothing will beat the will and heart of the people. I think that's what scares AI-promoting people. Turning us into total mindless consumers prevents us from being mindful people that want to do right by others. Sure, reading manga makes me happy. But I don't want to be the only one who's happy. I also want people to make informed choices about what to consume.

I also want some people to stop assuming that Japan is the most "anti-woke" country alive out of their rage against localization because it's totally not. Japan has problems and there's people living there speaking out against them. They're "woke" in their own way. I swear that almost everyone who thinks Japan is better than the West hasn't lived there at all and are basing things from a very filtered point of view. I actually feel sorry for them because their lives are just so focused on consuming without thinking for themselves - a perfect market for the AI-pushing crowd.

I'll finish by saying that this AI-powered manga translation venture needs to happen with the right kind of people already on the table through the whole process and where everyone benefits. Everything bad with AI, as far as I've seen, has left people behind with no compassion or empathy. Manga has taught the wonders of compassion and empathy for all and I don't see the Japanese business side of things preaching what their works speak.

[monsterkin-culture-is]

How do you know for sure if you have MD? I'm like, 99% sure I have it as I'm constantly daydreaming to the point it disrupts my life occasionally. But I'm just hesitant on that label as I don't know too much about it and don't know where to begin researching it.

Hiya Anon! I'm so sorry for the delay replying, unfortunately I only saw this whilst I was heading to college. This might end up a bit of a ramble but I'm going to at least attempt to organise it.

Diagnosis Talk:

MD is difficult in the fact that it's not a fully recognised disorder yet so there's no DSM-5 etc to use as a diagnostic guide.

Personally, I would consider it maladaptive once it's becoming a negative experience. This could look like: struggling to complete schoolwork/homework or chores because you can't stop daydreaming, losing time in your day-to-day life, losing information in class/meetings and becoming disconnected from/losing interest in your social life & family. In addition, it can also be the content of the daydreams becoming disturbing or causing you emotional distress when something negative happens in the plotline. That part isn't discussed as much but it's something I personally experience; e.g if a character dies in-story/scenario, I actually cry & genuinely grieve them for a while (sometimes a day, sometimes a fortnight for me). This isn't an exhaustive list nor is it a criteria where you need every single one, it's just what 'maladaptive' can look like.

The difference with immersive daydreaming is that it only happens when the person wants and it's purely for enjoyment.

There is an evaluative tool known as the MDS-16 (MDS meaning maladaptive daydreaming scale). I'll link this for you lower down in the research section!

When it comes to questioning, my #1 piece of advice would be don't stress. That's much easier said than done, but it's important to remember nothing will happen if you're wrong. If you mislabel it, no one is going to be upset. With maladaptive daydreaming, because it's unrecognised, there's even less pressure with self-diagnosis and there's no criteria you have to match. It's a label used to describe an experience. It's also important to remember that imposter syndrome is very common in all disorders & disabilities, physical and psychological, even after diagnosis.

Research Resources:

Eli Somer is the main researcher for Maladaptive Daydreaming and is the original creator of the term back in 2002. You can find some of his papers linked at the bottom of the Maladaptive Daydreaming Wikipedia Page as references (which I also recommend flicking through).

The MDS-16 is a self-assessment tool made by Somer & his associates. You can take it here on traumadissociation.com but other PDF versions are available on the internet. It has 16 questions and the result is the mean of your answers.

This is the official website for The International Consortium For Maladaptive Daydreaming Research. The ICMDR are an informal group of scientists conducting group research on MD. Their site hosts a lot of their research and resources to help you with MD.

The Parallel Lives Podcast is a great way to hear other people's experiences with MD (link leads to spotify).

Honestly I haven't read any papers on MD (I probably should) so don't worry about not doing enough research. I do recommend the MDS-16 especially though as it will help you reflect on the traits of MD you possess.

I hope some of this was helpful anon!! Feel free to send anymore questions you have through, hopefully I'll be able to respond a little quicker this time!! You're also welcome to talk about your experiences more. My DMs are open if you ever need to talk more privately. /gen /nf

[maverick-prime]

fanfiction is worth way more than you might think it is. here's why.

something i don't think anybody ever talks or thinks about is how fanfic helps writers develop incredibly useful skills and tools in the same way that prompts, worksheets, and studying literature does. (i actually think it's much more accessible than many of those types of supposedly helpful methods to build good writing skills. fanfiction makes the possibilities limitless while building upon media that people love and really connect with. you can find whatever you want if you use the right tags in AO3.) to illustrate exactly what i mean, i present these points:

*NOTE: if you're not familiar with fanfic terms, i'll define them as i go! i'm also an AO3 user, so i'll be using that as a basis for a lot of my thoughts.

it’s a really helpful way to get a grasp of how to keep characters consistent in a piece, since you have to work with characters that already have established personalities, backstories, habits, and character traits that carry over from their source material. this can get a bit tricky when writing AUs (alternate universes) or canon divergences (hopefully self-explanatory) in particular, but if you acknowledge that characters are OOC (out of character), this can solve that issue pretty quickly and as long as you make everything make sense within context, you're golden. not only that, but you can fix any flaws that you perceive in a character by adding in your own headcanons (personal ideas/beliefs about a character) or by creating realistic traits in that character that don't exist in canon but make sense for the character. this also works for expanding upon canon traits that are never explored to their full potential in canon.

a great example of this would be tony stark in the MCU. a lot of fanfic interpretations of his character put a stronger focus on his anxiety and PTSD, since the movies hint at those traits existing, but don't do them a lot of justice. another good example that's a bit more broadly applicable is LGBT+ or neurodivergent headcanons. if you really identify or kin with a character and feel that they have a certain orientation, gender identity, or mental disorder/condition, you can make it happen! this often has the great side effect of opening up a lot of possibilities for writing those traits into that character and how they affect the world and other characters around them differently than in canon.

you can think of an almost infinite amount of different scenarios to put characters and story events in. i mentioned AUs and canon divergences above, but there are also fanfic tropes like everybody lives/nobody dies, kidfic, time loop/time travel, role swap, missing scene, and even omegaverse (i'm not explaining that one to you, you're on your own pal) that offer different possibilities for putting characters and story events in all sorts of circumstances and contexts that differ from canon. (continuity soups are one of my very favorite examples of this technique. in a continuity soup, an author working with a franchise that has multiple different continuities can cherry-pick aspects of each continuity they like and smash them all together into a single world. this technique works especially well with transformers, which has, at this point, almost a dozen different continuities that are in fact all canon at the exact same time.) a writer doing this learns how to translate certain necessary story events into a completely different world, or can come up with a whole new world, storyline, or context on their own to play with plot, conflict, characters, and story events.

there are a near-limitless number of AUs out there, and every AU that is widely used comes with its own set of tropes. tropes are another useful tool for writers, because they can either be cliche or they can actually be very helpful for building a compelling plot or for introducing characters in a certain way. there are even fanfic genre tropes that exist, like hurt/comfort, fluff, whump/angst, slow burn, enemies to lovers, dead dove do not eat, crackfic... the list goes on!

writers who have difficulty writing things like romance, intimacy, emotional turmoil, injuries, sci-fi, or magic can easily learn a lot from how different fic writers write those topics (and many others). there are tons of fics that focus a lot on one specific genre and whose authors have developed a really great understanding of how to write those genres. not only can you learn a lot in terms of how to write genre, but you can also learn to develop your own writing style. this is one of the reasons why i think fanfiction is a lot more accessible than traditional books and classics. sure, you could read danielle steel novels or fifty shades of grey (which is itself fanfiction!!) or 1984 by orson welles, but unless you're really invested in the worlds being created, you'll find it harder to appreciate the prose. and, a lot of fic writers are not professional writers, so they don't even care about prose! (this is a broad generalization, and i mean "prose" in a more academic sense because i am literally studying rhetoric and prose for my bachelor's degree. not a lot of fic authors are breaking down writing styles for dialogue, diction, or sentence structure. they just write what they love writing and often develop their own styles out of that, which is also just as valid.)

i myself have definitely not been reading as many books in recent years as i've read fanfics. i go through fanfics like wildfire through a dry field. finding fic authors i love reading has really helped me improve my writing style! not only that, but i feel confident to try writing real romances with kissing scenes, to use actual scientific language to describe in-text phenomena, to describe magical objects and worlds with more clarity, and even to try my hand at writing smut. i've learned to break out of my comfort zone thanks to fanfiction, and it's helped me become a much better writer.

developing a writing style through reading other authors' work is much like developing an art style. any artist knows that you're encouraged to create your own style by mashing together traits from other artists' styles you really love and making them into something that's wholly your own. writing works the exact same way. one of my professors last semester had us do an "apprenticeship" with a short story collection written by a certain author to open us up to styles we like and don't like. she said that's how you create your own style, by figuring out what you like and what you don't like. i've been doing this with fic authors for years, and let me tell you, there are some real literary geniuses out there.

fanfiction helps writers learn to accept criticism as well as suggestions for what to write next. one of the hardest parts of being a writer is having someone read your work and tell you there's something wrong with it. your peers do it, your professors do it, editors do it, publishers do it. i've had the great privilege of participating in multiple writing workshops as part of my university education, but it can be really, really hard to find or create writing workshops outside of an academic setting. sites like AO3 cut out the middleman and bring authors right to their audiences. anyone can leave kudos on a fic if they liked it, and anyone can comment on a fic and chat directly with an author. i know for a fact that most authors regularly check and read the comments sections on their fics for feedback, criticism, and requests for what to write next. you can't necessarily do that with big-time authors like stephen king; you’d have to send a letter that may never be read.

the closest thing this system of interaction comes to is voice actors hopping on twitch streams and taking requests from viewers to say all kinds of things in-character. (this actually has the added benefit of inspiring new and interesting fic ideas.) the community on AO3 is genuinely one of the most accepting and welcoming internet spaces i've ever existed in, with possibly the exception of tumblr. fic authors really value feedback, and they love when people leave comments. sometimes they write fic just for themselves, but sometimes they do it for their audiences too! there's a really deep appreciation for source material and fanon (fan canon) alike in the world of fanfiction, and a lot of that is fostered in the author-audience connection. this is invaluable as a beginning writer, because it can help establish criticism as a valuable tool and not something to fear.

it can be scary when you put so much love into something and people don't like it. but fic readers are some of the most encouraging, wonderful people ever. you can trust them to offer valuable feedback and actually constructive criticism.

in short, fanfiction is a bit like placing a kid into a sandbox that only has a select few toys in it and letting them play however they want. so much creativity can come out of working within certain restraints, and it can really help you develop a lot of skill you might not develop otherwise. more aspiring writers should write—or at least read—fanfiction so they can reap some of these benefits. i wish it were more widely discussed in universities, at the very least, because there is so much to learn from fanfiction.

and if you really think fanfiction is only for gross internet weirdos, i remind you of fifty shades of grey being fanfic of twilight, or that city of bones, the first mortal instruments book, was originally a ginny/draco fanfic. i don't even need to mention the sheer number of more recently published romcom books that are based off of reylo from the star wars sequels. plus, if you really think about it, most modern shakespeare adaptations and homages (10 things i hate about you, leo dicaprio's romeo and juliet, the lion king) are fanfiction! there's no shame in making media of what you love. there's no shame in loving anything in the first place. do what makes you happy, and chances are you'll learn something along the way.

[xenodelic]

can u help give a definition for what mad pride is and where I can learn about it

Hi! We will do our best to give a definition, but keep in mind that Mad Pride is quite a broad movement - it is intertwined with Mad Liberation and Antipsychiatry, which involve entire schools of thought and academic fields.

Mad Pride, in summary, is a movement in which people take pride in being neurodivergent, mentally ill / disordered, mentally disabled, intellectually disabled, and any variance of the mind that isn't considered "normal" by the psychiatric institution or society at large.

The label of "Mad" is in reference to "madness", and is used as an umbrella term. It is a reclamation of derogatory terms used against those who are mentally atypical. People in the movement often also reclaim terms such as crazy, insane, lunatic, etc. The point is to demonstrate that being mad is not something to be ashamed of.

Currently, people are incarcerated against their will solely for being mentally disordered, or even just abnormal in any way. Any sort of neurodivergence is pathologized and treated as something that must be forcefully cured. Many people do not get a say in their treatment, and they are often coerced into taking medications or doing treatments that they don't want. Psychiatry as an institution largely seeks to force people into normalcy, and has a long history of being used as a tool of oppression against people of color, women, queer people, and more.

Mad Liberation is the movement that seeks to give people autonomy in how they deal with their mental health. It is (generally) anti-incarceration, against the blanket pathologizing of neurodivergency, against forcing people into any sort of treatment, and against the idea that people who are mentally disordered in some way must be cured. Central to the movement is the autonomy of individuals to decide what's best for them, no matter how mad they are.

Here's a good list of literature related to Mad Liberation, as well as a few other resources.

What if Psychiatry is Fake? by Mia Mulder is a good introductory youtube video to some of the problems with the institution of psychiatry.

[jewishvitya]

Sorry, I just a bit ago made a post about NPD stigma, but I just saw a video tagged "narc avengers."

That person has a whole account going "healing from narcissistic abuse," "dating after narcissism," "missing the narcissist," "breaking up with a narcissist," "understanding the narcissist"... Instant block.

And this is a whole thing, there's a group of "narc abuse" creators who use the label "narc avengers" and I'm here just... Avengers??? Who the fuck are you to "avenge" anything!? What the fuck kind of word choice is this?

This is why I talked about this shit. They took the term "narcissistic abuse," so now their enemy, the villain of their story, is narcissists. As in, people with NPD, because you can't really separate the terms. And they're not qualified to diagnose anyone, they're just shoving any abuser under this label.

Call it abuse. Call it a toxic relationship. Call them an abuser. Don't describe harmful behavior using a label that belongs to a medical condition.

YOU DON'T GET TO DIAGNOSE SOMEONE FOR HURTING YOU.

Diagnosis is a TOOL meant to improve the life of the person who's being diagnosed. It's a way to figure out the appropriate treatment, accommodations, etc. It's not a label you get to slap onto whoever you feel like. It's not supposed to be a way for you to create scapegoats.

NPD is a disorder, a medical condition. Diagnosis is meant to help that person. You're not helping. Using a term associated with a diagnosis to condemn people is anti-healing and it's ableist.

[orange-orchard-system]

hi i hope this isnt weird. saw a mut rb your 'creative folk having characters talk to them' post and now im like of like. Oh.

ive had some plural friends clock me as 'vaguely plural' / had people assume i'm a system so im like. im having a 'perhaps my experiences are in fact, not universal' moment.

ive just never felt like it fits the bill for plurality, because ive always had a pretty tight grip on 'me' being the pilot / dont have altars switch out/in to talk like i see so often. its complex definitely but i guess im asking if there's any good resources for someone like me :?

(you can answer this privately or publicly, i dont mind either way)

Hi! Not weird at all. I see this somewhat often when people come to me about questioning if they're plural, and I think it comes from a lack of information about just how varied plurality can be. So, let me go over what your situation reminds me of.

Firstly, yes, there are resources for what you're talking about – and communities, too. There are plenty of systems who rarely or never switch, and they're called specutien systems and/or systems with P-DID (Partial Dissociative Identity Disorder). These systems may not experience full switches – as in, a total loss of control followed by someone else having full control – but they may experience switches where someone else has partial control, or are otherwise "close enough" to be able to communicate/affect them in some way without taking any control. These are known as co-fronting and co-consciousness respectively, and it's specifically what "talking to your characters" reminds me of.

There's also, of course, the possibility that you are experiencing full switches and are just forgetting due to amnesia, but if you don't have noticeable memory issues (noticeable by yourself or others, I should note, since the fun part of forgetting is you forget that you forgot), this probably isn't something to be too concerned about. If it is and/or you want to cover all your bases, try keeping a regular journal and see if there's any large gaps you can't explain.

Honestly, I recommend the journal for general purpose, too. It's a very useful tool for communicating, especially if you can't or don't switch; you can write down what your alters say to keep track of conversations, making sure you don't forget or mix up what was said, and use it as a sort of "evidence book" to yourself, especially if you add in other little details that support the idea that you're plural (such as, in your case, others assuming you're plural, too). Even if you've talked to your alters before, learning to talk to them as alters can be a new challenge to get used to, so try what techniques catch your eye and don't be afraid to take your time figuring yourself/ves out.

Of course, there's always the possibility that you're not plural, in the end, but hey, you're looking to learn something, ain't ya? Whether you are or aren't plural, you'll learn more about that aspect of yourself, and probably learn more about systems along the way.

To recap: specutien, P-DID, co-fronting, co-consciousness. Those are the four things I recommend you most look into, but you may find other topics or terms that you think may also fit you, so don't be afraid to explore those. Just looking up those terms on Tumblr will get you some folks talking about their own experiences, but there's also Pluralpedia as a wiki for plural terms, and at least two, maybe three, of those terms have been mentioned in academic and clinical papers about plurality, if you want to read those.

Hope this helps! Good luck figuring out yourself/ves!

[scaryinclusive]

just personally went through a personality disorder criteria / symptom list that i know i don't have and still met 7/7 of the criteria when you only need 4 to meet grounds for diagnosis. it goes to show that a lot of the personality disorder symptoms out there available for self-diagnosing individuals blend really significantly with other personality disorder symptoms as well as general mental health disorders and even neurodevelopmental disorders, and that it's integral when self-diagnosing that you do not simply view a 'checklist' and make a decision based off of that.

the reason i fit 7/7 of these is because i absolutely relate to them, experience them daily and to a point where they disturb my daily ability to function. but my reasoning for exhibiting this behaviour is irrelevant to the disorder. as an autistic individual, even autism is often misconstrued and mistaken for personality disorders, when it's merely that some symptoms are shared between the two. or another personality disorder i do have shares traits with one i don't have, because my baseline purpose for engaging in that behaviour doesn't match the disorder i don't have - if that makes sense.

personally, it has taken me years to research and come to terms with my own mental health conditions, and even today i'm still questioning new ones. remember that there's no rush to diagnose, take time to explore your symptoms, make notes on your triggers, explore and understand the baseline reason for the way you behave - for example has your trauma made you unable to regulate your own self-esteem, has it made you reactive to instability, has it made you impulsive and defensive in the face of threat to autonomy? these are baseline reactions of 3 separate personality disorders. i find watching videos on youtube to sometimes ( if the person is knowledgeable, isn't merely regurgitating information they've read and has experience with the disorder ) be useful, specifically when the individual is diagnosed with the disorder you're looking into. if there are multiple videos from different people - watch them.

understand how experiences differentiate or compare to one another, note whether you relate to any of them or not at all. but something important to remember is that research is your friend. not just mindlessly scanning words, but comparing, processing the data, finding the stigma or lies. anyone can read about antisocial personality disorder, for example - but a lot of the criteria isn't actually experienced outwardly by many with aspd. or are experienced in different intensities with different rates of impulse control. through learning from those with the disorder, you're able to spot ( sometimes, though bear in mind there's a lot of ableism / internalised ableism even among the mental health community ) what's genuine and what's stereotypes or stigma.

many disorders and illnesses can mimic behaviours witnessed in personality disorders, and vice versa. you might relate to a list of symptoms / criteria, but a useful tool is really analysing whether it's the symptom you relate to or the baseline reason for the symptom. all disorders differ, hence there being separate diagnoses, because the baselines differ significantly. don't ever just look at a list and think because you fit every symptom, you have that disorder. i just did that and proved that it's not always correct.

it's really important you take self diagnosis seriously. whatever your reason for not seeking professional help, it's understandable. but by misdiagnosing yourself and then telling others, if you're by any chance incorrect or misinformed you could be adding to stigma by behaving in ways irrelevant to the disorder you believe you have. above all else, i encourage you to seek professional diagnosis at the soonest convenience, with self diagnosis ( unless unequivocally undeniable ) acting as a first step and / or stepping stone for you to find your footing financially or with insurance - whatever is accessible to you. mental health isn't a trend, disorders aren't cute and can be entirely debilitating to many. and of course, it is never to be used as an excuse for negative behaviour.

feel free to reblog, but please avoiding adding to the post to prevent misinformation.

[aspd-culture]

Hi, this is a genuine question, coming from someone with BPD, NPD, autism, and OSDD-1B. I want to make sure I am correct in this information. However, are the terms "p/ychopath" and "s/ciopath" actual slurs? I have read posts and articles referring to the history of these terms and some have been akin to the history of the r slur. I have seen some pwASPD and some prosocials claim these terms are slur. I have seen the exact opposite state otherwise. I have seen posts that explain that these terms have a long entrenched history in targeting and pathologizing people who were vehemently against oppressive authorities and other forces. That apparently these terms existed to not only harm pwASPD (though it is the main target), but also people with DID and people on the schizoaffective spectrum. Oh and other disorders too and people of different classes and other minorities. Also, if any of this happens to be misinformation, please do let me know and correct me. I never want to spread misinformation, so just let me know.

However, with all this information, I am still left wondering is it safe to claim these terms as slurs or just really... derogatory, ableist terms? Like, I want to be able to support pwASPD and language is an oppressive tool. So I'd like to understand the entire situation. Would you and other pwASPD say these are slurs? I don't really use these terms and I don't like to, but I want to know so that I can make sure that when I stand up for pwASPD I use correct information.

Oooooof, okay, this one is going to piss some people off. This is a very very good question anon, and not one with an objective or commonly agreed upon answer afaik. I appreciate the respectful way you asked this! TW for ableist language, for the duration of this post, the terms psychopath and sociopath will not be censored. Also, this is gonna be a long one.

Before I give you my take, let me explain the two sides I have personally seen on this issue.

Position 1.) Psychopath and sociopath are slurs based on the common definition of the term - "an offensive word used to insult someone because of their race, sexuality (the fact of being sexually attracted to people of a particular gender), etc." (Cambridge Dictionary). Because this is a term used to specifically attack someone based on the context of a particular set of mental illnesses (cluster b personality disorders), it would classify under that definition as a slur. People on this side often also cite the r slur being undeniably a slur as a reason that this should count as well. These words are used primarily if not almost exclusively in a negative context to insult a person with these disorders or to imply (in a derogatory way) that the person they're talking to has negative traits associated with one of these disorders. As with the r slur, the intention usually isn't really to imply that they must factually be diagnosable with the disorder, but instead implies that they have negative traits associated with this disorder. The same exists with many slurs; the d slur is thrown at straight women who dress in a "masculine" way, and the f slur is thrown at straight men who do not engage in misogyny and those who dress or act "femininely". That doesn’t diminish the weight of those slurs, so this position is supported by the idea that these terms being used in this way doesn’t change the harm they cause. Also, just as with other slurs, these words are considered synonymous with the disorders, in that if you refer to sociopathy and psychopathy in a serious context - one outside of an insult - it will be generally known that you are referring to the specific mental illnesses that those with actual knowledge of mental health refer to as cluster b disorders. Many people actually believe these are medical subtypes of ASPD, or that sociopathy refers to ASPD whilst psychopathy refers to NPD, or that sociopathy is ASPD without violence and psychopathy is ASPD with violence. All of these are inaccurate, but they hold one thing in common across all of them: that these terms when used in a serious context refer to one or multiple cluster b disorders with *maybe* an exception for some people lumping “psychopath” in with “psychosis” when referring to schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and schizotypal and schizoid personality disorders. Even then though, most people I have seen actually make the distinction that “psycho” and “psychopath” refer to entirely different disorders. Yes, I have seen people actually correct people to use the term psychopath, but not psycho for pwASPD because “psycho refers to schizophrenia”. I have not personally seen either used towards pwDID except to imply that they had the negative traits of personality disorders (see also, as an ableist insult), but tbh I would not be surprised if it’s common and I don’t know about it because I simply do not surround myself with people who use those terms and in my personal space only tolerate it a few times with respectful explanations before it becomes “alright I’ll be a thorn in your side about it until you don’t use them around me just so I’ll shut up” time - if I can’t outright cut them off.

Position 2.) Psychopath and sociopath are not slurs because there is not the history or pain associated with cluster b disorders that there is with other slurs. The concept here is that there is long-standing systemic oppression and societally ingrained hatred involved with the LGBTQIA+ community, people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, POC, etc. Whilst mentally ill people as a whole experience some amount of oppression and certainly experience hate, this argument bases itself in the idea that it is not just hate that makes something a slur; there must be specific and pervasive oppresson associated with it for it to be a slur. For many if not all other slurs (that I know about), there are multiple individual and/or large-scale attempts to erase this identity from an area if not from existence entirely via genocide attempts, eugenics, etc. Another main part of this argument is the usage - that psychopath and sociopath are thrown at people without these disorders much more often than other slurs are used that way. Classic example is “my ex was a psychopath”, and generally they mean in the way of “asshole who didn’t care about my feelings at all” and not “I know the symptoms of cluster B disorders and you’re acting like you have one”. Further, this point tends to argue that most people who use these terms probably don’t know anything about cluster b disorders, even if they know they exist. When someone calls someone else the r slur, f slur, etc. they almost always know exactly what they’re calling you.

These are just the arguments I have personally seen myself and very likely (tbh almost definitely) are *not* the only points/arguments involved. I may also have some things wrong about these arguments because tbh I try to keep myself out of this conversation after the really hateful things I have seen and heard said both to me and other people who disagree with my opinion on this. It seems to me that many people in this discussion come to it in a place of pain and clearly have some trauma being brought up by the discussion on both sides, and therefore it isn't always easy for people to handle it in the calm and respectful manner needed for the conversation to be productive. That said, I am feeling well enough after dealing with the distress this caused my mental health previously to attempt to engage again. *Please* scroll on if you cannot handle talking about this in a respectful manner. I will block people if it can't be a safe place for everyone on both sides to state their opinion.

Please keep in mind that this is just my opinion on the matter, and I am not dead set on this opinion. If a genuine argument is brought to me that is not exclusively "You can't understand slurs because you're XYZ", I am willing to engage in a conversation about why I may be on the wrong side of this. While I *do* have definite privilege and that tints your view of the world in every aspect of life - every event/action/thought/etc. - that is pretty much the case for everyone. There is almost always at least one or two ways that someone has some privilege. I am willing to recognize the way that it affects my opinion of course - and that the ways I deal with oppression are just not the same as other people since I technically have the choice to hide that I am a part of these communities (even though it would be detrimental to my physical and/or mental health to do so) whilst others simply do not have that - but if that’s the *only* thing you have to say on it as to why I’m wrong, I don’t feel this is an actual discussion. At that point, I feel like it’s just finding a way to diminish my opinion because it is different from yours, and I have a feeling a fair amount of (but probably not all) people making that point would believe I was a valid part of this conversation if I was on their side.

I think it is relevant to the conversation to be transparent about my privilege in my point of view, and where I am not privileged. I am not heterosexual, heteroromantic, nor cisgender, and cannot pass as any of those things without making significant long term changes to my appearance/mannerisms/clothing/etc. I am white. I am autistic, but do not struggle with intellectual disorders as of the time of writing (I am unsure if intellectual disorders can come later on in life due to external or internal factors). I have both physical and mental disabilities, but they are invisible and I have somewhere between low and moderate support needs when it comes to my autism.

I personally think they do count as slurs. To say that systemic oppression does not exist for ASPD especially is unfair and honestly ignorant. It makes me think that they haven't done the research needed to try to back that point. People are diagnosed on the stand - sometimes without the presence of a mental health professional and almost always (in this situation) by people with next to no outside interaction with them from before the incident - to destroy their character. People with ASPD are much more likely to end up in jail even when you only compare people who have committed a crime (which removes the issue of "well that happens because of the symptoms of the disorder") because one of the things that is basically required to get a shorter or reduced sentence and especially one without jailtime is to "show remorse". The need to show remorse is also sometimes assessed in hearings for probation or parole according to what I have heard from other people, but I have never seen non-fictional parole/probation hearings, nor have I been involved with legal issues personally. This reliance on remorse comes for pwASPD in two distinct ways - it attacks a direct symptom of the disorder (low or no remorse), and an associated trait (flat affect). ASPD is also disproportionately represented in inmates, and most studies on ASPD are conducted solely or mostly on inmates. As for systemic hate, one of the most common things that is said to "make people human" or "prove the existence of a soul" is empathy. There is a significant portion of people who directly equate empathy with humanity. Whilst the hate and oppression isn't *as* prevalent by any means as it is for, for example, POC, it certainly is there and is significant. This isn't the same as a not-LGBTQIA+ person claiming cishet is a slur - there is plenty of serious and pervasive hate and oppression against people with cluster b disorders. To try to argue that it exists, but isn’t enough turns this discussion into the trauma olympics, which I don’t think is productive.

The argument that they are not slurs because they are medical terms comes with two separate issues, starting with the small (sarcastic) fact that they aren't - at least not anymore in the majority of English-speaking countries. Neither psychopath nor sociopath are in the DSM nor (I believe) the ICD. I have heard/read people say that they used to be which would make them antiquated medical terms, and while that probably is true (I could not find them in previous DSMs, but those books are *huge* so I could easily have missed it), that wouldn't change that antiquated medical terms are not medical terms anymore. That's kind of the whole point of them changing the term. Just because your specific professional still uses that term or doesn't correct you when you call your ex a psychopath does not make it a medical term. Many mental health professionals do not and are not required to get regular updates to their education unfortunately, and even the ones that do may be showing bias which does happen even though it isn’t supposed to. There are also still professionals who believe you can’t possibly have made it through school without being diagnosed with autism if you are autistic. There are still professionals who think DID isn’t real literally at all. We cannot base what is and is not a medical term on it’s use by individual professionals in good faith while simultaneously speaking up about medical gaslighting. You may already see the truly glaring second issue with the idea that these are not slurs because they are medical terms - the r slur. Also used for many, many years even beyond the point where it was known to be a slur, the r slur was itself a medical term. I do not see many people arguing that that isn't a slur, and the ones that do get (rightfully) put in their place for it.

The argument that it isn’t a slur because, unlike other slurs, a lot of people using the terms don’t know that they are related to mental health disorders doesn’t sit right with me either. Firstly, would it be any less offensive and hurtful if the person calling you that slur didn’t know what it referred to? There are people still to this day that don’t know what the r slur refers to - they just think it means you’re “stupid” in a non-disorder sense. I have personally met people who thought that term was entirely okay to use until they were told what it meant - does that remove the harm caused every time they said it to someone? In my opinion, the fact that this language is so ingrained that it can be known to be an insult without any knowledge of mental health nor these disorders says something about just how stigmatized and openly hated people with them are. These terms are both inherently associated with cluster b disorders *and* with being a shitty person. If that isn’t what a slur is (and I mean this as a serious question, not a “gotcha” or whatever subtext meaning allistics use this phrase with), then what is? How would you define a slur if not a term that is undeniably derogatory and associated with the hatred of a specific group of people due to something out of their control? If the dictionary definition is wrong or incomplete or diminishing the weight of that term, all of which is absolutely possible, then what would make that definition complete/accurate? I don’t know that this is a question with a single answer either, to be honest.

I think when you're talking about things like language, anecdotes and personal emotions are a valid part of that conversation. From that perspective, as someone who has dealt with slurs being thrown at me for my sexuality and my autism (before I even knew I was autistic actually), it feels the exact same when someone calls me a sociopath or psychopath. It is intended to hurt in the same way that other slurs are intended to hurt, and for me, it does. It's worth noting many people do *not* feel the same way as I do here, but I would argue that not everyone in *any* marginalized group feels hurt by being called a slur. There are always people who think the way to take the power away from the term is to let everyone use it freely and just decide to not care regardless of how ignorant that position is imo. People are different and feel different about things. I have had plenty of LGBTQIA+ saying the f slur shouldn't even count as a slur and that I “shouldn’t be so sensitive about people using it as an insult when they aren’t even talking to you”. Whenever you are dealing with a large group of people, especially large enough for that number to be stated via a percentage of the world’s population, you will see varying opinion on pretty much anything. Additionally, when you’re talking to people with trauma so intense and/or long-term that it caused a personality disorder to develop (the percentage of needs met to develop a secure attachment style is so much lower than I would have imagined and I’d advise anyone with a cluster b disorder to not look it up unless you’re braced for it), many are so numbed by the trauma that they cannot bring themselves to be bothered by a word - any word. But just because we have dealt with worse, doesn’t mean (in my opinion) that we should have to accept these terms as mere “insults” or “problematic” or even “ableist language”. In my current opinion, I would say they are slurs. I don’t think less of people who don’t agree in any way, and I am, again, open to engaging in that discussion, but I don’t have respect for the idea that because I do not fit into *every* marginalized group, that I should not have any opinion about slurs. That isn’t an argument, it’s a cop out so you don’t have to actually engage with my points.

I’m sorry to anon for taking so long (like months I’m pretty sure) to answer this, and I’m sorry if I end up having to delete this post. For the sake of avoiding this argument as much as possible, this is only being tagged with this blog’s tag. I’d appreciate if anyone were to reblog if you could possibly the ASPD and actually ASPD tags. Thank you.

Edit: TW for uncensored ableist terms (used in an informative, non-ableist context) in the comments.