#and I’m not exaggerating a friend was in a psych class on mental illnesses and they used images of mlp ponies and bronies in fursuits

[bixels]

Wish regular folks on the internet would stop towing the line and continuing to act like furries are some weird, deviant thing nowadays. I’ll be watching Vinny Vinesauce and a hot male furry design will show up in a game and he’ll go ‘oh. Oh god. Oh god chat no. OH GODD WHY. EUGH CHAT STOP. (makes an inhuman noise) WHY ARE HIS TITS SO.’ Like, man, relax. His tits are so because it’s hot, get horny like the rest of us, next question.

[thewingedwolf]

I swear every other day another hot take about self diagnosis and how it can be harmful to people who are *really* diagnosed bc people are using it to seem cool shows up in the bpd tags and I just.

Genuinely wondering where the hell these people live that teenagers saying “i think I’m bipolar I’m so crazy lol” is somehow a) contributing to the stigmatization of mental illness and b) gets them Popular Points with the Cool Kids

Every single person I ever knew who said something like “I’m so crazy I think I have [x]” (I’m not exaggerating here. Every. Single. Goddamn. Person.) wound up getting diagnosed with something later down the line. Granted, it wasn’t always or when often what they claimed to have. Some people who at the age of 15 claimed they were bipolar wound up getting diagnosed with ADHD, one I remember getting an autism diagnosis. Some who claimed they were ‘sociopaths’ eventually found out they were bipolar. They often said stuff like this because they were trying to be flippant about their Weird Quirks (aka symptoms) so people *didnt* think they were crazy. They said it because they felt different and latched onto the first label they came across to explain their behavior. Some of them, were in fact, trying to get attention from their friends - BECAUSE THEY NEEDED SOMEONE TO PAY ATTENTION BECAUSE SOMETHING WAS WRONG. It does not bother me when teenagers say something like this because odds are, if they looked at a personality disorder in their psych class and went “oh that sounds like me” They’re probably not far off! And it is Not A Big Deal. Who cares if a 16 year old says “I think I’m borderline I have an fp” like that is genuinely not something that has an impact on me?? If they believe hard enough that they have bpd that they’re going into actuallybpd to look at what other people are saying, they possibly DO HAVE IT.

Like idk maybe it is genuinely different outside of the Bible Belt but people who talked about having mental illnesses weren’t popular!!! My friend told a few of us she was schizophrenic (she was, diagnosed and everything) and it got around to the wrong people until “oh don’t talk to her she’s crazy” was how people talked about her. One of my friends talked often about how she was ~totes bipolar~. It got around and people said the *exact same thing* about her. Because it doesn’t make you popular. It just makes people think you’re weird, best case scenario.

Not all of us have access to health care. Not all of us have parents who will let us have access to a psychologist. And a lot of psychologists won’t diagnose you, for whatever reasons. The ONLY reason I have a diagnosis now is bc I researched and researched. I spent four years calling myself borderline before I got a diagnosis from a therapist - who I handed a checklist of symptoms to and said “I think I have this” and she looked it over and said “yeah probs.” Because like. They’re not infallible, and while psychiatry tries to pretend like it’s an exact science it is HEAVILY subjective. I had three different therapists who had three different ideas as to what was wrong with me until I suggested (among other things) bpd to the fourth and she agreed (along with one of the other things).

Like. There is no downside to self diagnosis. Just getting those words out there, so more people hear them, is helpful. A teenager saying ‘I totally have SAD’ isnnot going to get them cool points??? Where does this idea come from. Stop making people feel bad because they don’t have access to psychiatric care!!!!!!!

[thenightisland]

explanations/updates under the cut

i haven’t been able to maintain much in the way of interaction with most of the people i care about, also haven’t been able to do much more than get out of bed every day because it’s one thing to be depressed and another to have just had such a goddamn terrible few months that there’s no way your antidepressants can keep up with all the awful

i already had several weeks without my second in command because she’s cursed and had to have another surgery. our unit lost two of our main techs (for new people inexplicably reading this, i charge a locked acute psychiatric ward, and losing techs is a /massive/ loss). the admin demons have been instituting various new things that have been having terrible effects on the units which i won’t get into because that would be a really really long explanation with a lot of jargon in it. one of the things though is the fact that the “do not readmit” list has been low key thrown out the window, so all the pts who were on that list /with good fucking reason/ are of course, now coming back, and spoiler alert they’re just as terrible still.

this one bookstore closed which sounds stupid as fuck but that place was the closest thing i had to a church and it literally kept me alive when i was in high school like i say that completely without exaggeration so it closing was the equivalent of someone hacking off one of my limbs because it was still the main place i went to when i was upset and wanted to feel less miserable and i don’t have it anymore and you wouldn’t believe how hard it is like imagine if your church got demolished or whatever you believe in like it destroyed me and i feel unmoored i don’t have that safe space feeling now because it’s gone

meanwhile the person i spent seven years of my life in love with had a baby with the boyfriend she described as Guy Karen, named me godmother of their firstborn son, and unknowingly made his middle name the pen name i’ve used for a decade because fucking of course this might as well fucking happen too. but i have other romantic bullshit going on now that’s honestly fucking me up worse.

also somehow i still can’t escape a little life like it has haunted me every waking moment since march 2016 and i hate how much i am like the protagonist and it’s kind of fucking with me??????

a fucking garbage man bashed off the side mirror on my car which i still haven’t had the fucking time to get fixed that was great

spent my whole vacation anxious having panic attacks like what is the point in having a long vacation if you’re going to be constantly stressed over nothing like goddammit can’t i just have this

within the last month and a half five people i know have died. three of them were our patients which like doesn’t sound like a thing that would cause that much distress, but due to the nature of our unit, we’re the only family a lot of our career patients have most of our pts are homeless, schizophrenic, intellectually disabled, just plain unwanted people of varying illnesses, like we literally look after the people no one else wants so when we hear one of Our Patients has died it fucks us up so badly. and it’s even worse because it’s not like they died in their sleep or something all of them have been post-discharge suicides like our work already feels like a revolving door exercise in futility because that’s the nature of the field unfortunately but it still hurts like i spend forty hours or more a week with these people i literally see them than i see my friends and family our patients are mostly so close to us that like when the day shift charge nurse came back from maternity leave, pt who had been there when she was pregnant who were there again were asking about how the baby was doing so three of our pts killing themselves in the last month in a half is soul crushing

then the closest thing i had to a friend in nursing school, well, she died too. out of the fucking blue, out of nowhere. she was a 28 year old healthy woman with two young daughters. she worked so hard for her and her girls she went to nursing school to build a better life for them and she genuinely wanted to be a nurse meanwhile i originally got into it for the money like she only got to live her dream working in L&D for two and a half years. and then she was on vacation in florida with her girls who were doing like a cheerleading camp. and she just. went to sleep and never woke up. and i still don’t know what killed her no one has posted it on facebook, and unfortunately, all the people who might know are the people that i cut out of my life because the rest of our class was a toxic mess so i can’t very well be like heyyyyy so i know i deleted you years ago and all but what killed linda? so still no closure. i just hope to god her girls didn’t find their mother dead. like it wrecked me.

i also say that every time i come back from a vacation something awful happens like when i came back from boston/nyc i discovered i was the only nurse left on my shift and when i came back from st louis last fall my dog died a very traumatizing [for me] death, so when i came back from dc i was like hmm what next.

well, another fucking person died is what next. /one of my coworkers/ my alpha tech from my original 11-7 team one of the people who has literally saved my life and kept so many people from getting hurt this is someone i saw five days a week for the last two and a half years of my life. he was already going through a lot because him and his wife split, so he was staying at a friend’s house, a friend who happened to be an NP for one of the psych docs, and the NP’s sister who works as an internal medicine assistant. and then on cinco de mayo we got word that his car had flipped and killed him. and a lot of people attributed it to a classic cinco drunk driving fatality but it gets worse because of course it does because lol it wasn’t /his/ car that flipped. it was the NP’s sports car. and apparently, the NP was driving, and the sister was following. the sister and NP were off the grid for a couple days and then the sister came back to work, but the NP has been taken off the on call list “indefinitely” so not only is one of our team members dead, but he is probably dead from a /drunk driving vehicular homicide done by another team member/ because apparently the world was like fuck our unit specifically.

then i got to spend several days being targeted by a pt who was a behavioral case [aka they’re not actually mentally ill, they’ve learned to play the system to avoid going to jail, basically] and that involved her being in seclusion for seven goddamn hours and her literally endlessly threatening to kill me for days to the point that i was confined to our walled in nurses station because she was you know trying to kill me and just constantly standing on the other side of the glass throwing around some of the worst verbal abuse i’ve ever experienced like i’m already exhausted and fatigued and miserable can’t you shut the fuck up i need to find some kind of meaning in my job because it’s all i have and you’re making it very hard for me to feel like i’ve done any good for anyone

all of this built up nicely into a good old fashioned nervous breakdown to the point that i had to call in sick because lol turns out that that is a lot of fucking shit to deal with in the span of a month and a half and emotionally things are only going to get harder from here this year for a variety of personal reasons that suffice to say have literally kept me up at night and upset me enough that i even had some nightmares break through the medication because i’m seeing so many of my friends find their happiness and i hate that i can’t feel that happy for them because i’m so tired and when the fuck will it be my turn i don’t want to resent my friends’ happiness and successes i’m just fucking exhausted and would really like for some good goddamn things to start happening here any time now i’ve been under so much stress i’m just a human version of the song running on empty at this point it’s all too much and i still can’t write i’m still stuck in the same hell from a manuscript i wrote nearly four years ago all i’ve been able to write is Coping Poetry to keep from going off the deep end and honestly everything in my life just feels completely out of control and i’m just tired of so many bad things happening in such a short amount of time like i can handle my own emotional problems until you dump all this other fucking nightmare fuel on top of them then it’s too much

so for the unfinished ao3 wip i’m sorry for the sheet music requests i’m sorry for the unanswered messages i’m sorry i’m safe i’m not in any danger of hurting myself or anything but i’m overwhelmed and i barely have the energy to get through all the shit that’s been happening lately so i can’t even promise when my interactions with anyone will be back to normal especially given my already awful skill at withdrawing from the people who care about me because i don’t want to bring them down any so just. tolerate the queue’s work. if you see me posting more but not answering you it’s not you it’s me i just cannot manage even talking to more than like three people max right now hence the until further notice psa you’ve seen at the top of my blog

the worst part is that there’s actually /more/ but it’s also three in the morning and i have to work tomorrow so here’s the highlights turns out averaging one death a week takes a toll on a person who’s already isolated and exhausted

hopefully at some point, things won’t suck as much and i can go back to being regular me. till then, apologies, and enjoy the queue