#the difference between ppl who use tumblr and ppl who are a waste of space is that tumblr thots acknowledge & choose not to seperate the two

[yutamayo]

I'm sorry not sorry but if you genuinely feel the need to state "Light apologists DNI", then you need to make some friends. Or find god. Or something. BC if you fr think you anyone gives a flying squirrel fuck that you don't like people who enjoy the fictional character that is Light Yagami then frankly you're homophobic, boring, and more of a dissapointment to your mother than I am. Which is saying something.

[persephonbee]

"why do therapists question me when I use the technical term for a symptom instead of describing it" well, some therapists are ableist pieces of shit who feel insecure about their level of knowledge and feel threatened when a client is knowledgeable and assume that if someone is a potential patient then they aren't intelligent and that if a potential patient is using technical terms then they probably looked up a diagnosis that they want to pretend to have but don't actually have.

But also, some therapists have great respect for their clients and don't take it as an insult if a client knows about mental health and believe that hearing what a client thinks they have is valuable and may be correct. They ask you to say more because it's hard to accurately observe and classify symptoms in yourself because you don't have any distance from what's going on. On the other hand, you're your own best expert on what you're experiencing. So they want you to tell them what you're experiencing and then they can assess what label applies, which might indeed be the one that you came up with! Or it could be a different label! There's a lot of inaccurate information out there about what various things are called! If someone comes in and tells me that they're having intrusive thoughts 80% of their waking hours and I ask them to describe it and it turns out that they were told by Tumblr that having a song stuck in your head is intrusive thoughts, the treatment for having that level of anxiety about your mental health is very different than the treatment for having intrusive thoughts 80% of their waking hours. If someone comes in and says they have ocd and you ask them to say more and they say that they really enjoy cleaning and get upset when people make a mess right after they finish cleaning and that's the only thing that has them thinking they have ocd, then just going ahead with the treatment for actual ocd without asking more questions won't be appropriate there.

Instead we need to look at how intense your upsetness is, whether the upsetness is anger or sadness or fear or a mixture, how long it lasts, the manner in which ppl are making those messes (is this an abusive household where they're violently trashing your space on purpose to devalue you or is this basic human carelessness and natural levels of mess), what does "clean" look like to you, is cleaning the only thing that gives you joy anymore, is it actually joy or is it actually relief from extreme anxiety about things being messy, what do you feel when you see a mess in an environment you're not responsible for like a grocery store, what happens when you see a mess in your home and don't clean it, are you getting abused when the space isn't clean, are you terrified you're going to get sick if the space isn't spotless, is the level of dirtiness high enough that there's a solid chance you actually would get sick, are you terrified that someone you love will die if the space isn't spotless, does someone in your household make death threats against a loved one when the house isn't spotless, etc etc. Receiving mental health care is expensive and requires you to do a lot of hard work. If you're getting the wrong treatment, that can be a huge waste of money and energy and can get people to just think that mental health treatment won't help them.

If you come in and say that one of your teeth is constantly spinning in your mouth and that you're really depressed because your dentist is conspiring with your health insurance to prevent you from getting your tooth to hold still, that's all very important information, but what it means isn't that the person is depressed due to the inability to get medical care, it's that the person has a delusion about their tooth and that they're having paranoia as well and they're also depressed because they perceive that they're being conspired against and denied medical care. The feelings they're having are completely valid but their perception of the events that are leading to those feelings is highly inaccurate. Again, very different treatments. You are your own best expert on the raw data of what you're experiencing, and the therapist is the expert on getting the relevant context and seeing if there are major differences between your perceptions and more objective reality and putting accurate labels on things.

This post brought to you by talking with a client who is 100% sure she's pregnant even though it's not possible for her to be pregnant and despite multiple doctors and every pregnancy test being negative, she keeps saying "I'm my own best expert on my body and my mental health, and these doctors don't believe me because they don't respect me." so she just spent several hundred dollars that she cannot afford on a crib. This kind of rhetoric can cause real damage to real people when it's not taught in a responsible way.