#ugly symptoms

[postmoderntongues]

I will forever stand by as somebody who knew him in a previous life from having similar interests in a small web community that i do not believe that by the end of his life Soren Hayes was fully cognitively aware that his narrative was fabricated and theres a real possibility that he was being manipulated by a charlatan 80's satanic panic style false-memory implanting psychosis validating abusive unprofessional therapist who actively exacerbated his condition and deepened his gap from fact and what was his brain's honest perception of reality at that point. Behavior that we have evidence that is considered shocking now was considered common and unremarkable in 4chan-dominant autistic oldweb late 00s emo edgelord culture. While a lot of their references and elements of their narrative have been traced back to media including 90s indie cult horror, guro manga, bandshipping MCR yaoi fanfiction (which got dark) SRA testimonies, and creepypasta and even potentially some writing that I showed them at the time based on my own intrusive thoughts and a lifelong paranoid delusion. it is not unheard of or even uncommon for people with psychosis to have delusions related to media they've consumed at some point especially when you throw in autistic special interest levels of fandom. I also believe something really bad DID happen to soren. At one point theres a post with a line of photos going through the years as a child and in two of the young photos maybe around age 9 or 10 which was the age that the most obvious fabrications/exaggerations in the narrative happened. Between two of the pictures something just changes in his eyes or facial expression. Given my own history with mental illness, I was around a similar age when the frequency and intensity of my violent intrusive thoughts and antisocial fantasies began to disrupt my everyday functioning in a way that i not only could no longer deny but was having trouble hiding and beginning to face social ostracization for voicing these thoughts and also first faced exclusion for being neurodivergent although I didn't have the medical or sociological language to describe it.

Weirdly relevant to our participation in the MCR fandom, Soren and I were also close enough in age that he likely carried some degree of cultural trauma from 9/11. living less than an hour outside NYC i remember the event being very traumatic including believing for days that my father had died because he had a mental breakdown and didnt contact anybody and just started helping pull bodies out and my mom made us kids all go in the basement and drink boiled water from a spackle bucket and shit/piss in another spackle bucket and eat room temperature canned food and pray very loudly and sincerely for a little under 72 hours, and im not sure if it's related to that age in my development or in part triggered by that trauma but within a year I started almost all of my self destructive behaviors from SH to Purging to household substance abuse. I also had an odd response when the event was explained to me that hinted at foreshadowing my cluster B diagnosis in adulthood; I was very upset that the terrorists died in the plane crash and suffered the same amount as the American passengers did and didn't survive so their punishment and suffering could be worse than what they caused "my people" (worth mentioning that my father is and especially at the time was an out and proud white supremist with public ties to racist organizations within my community especially in the cultural surge in racism against Muslims and middle eastern and west asian people who a few weeks after 9/11 showed me grainy low quality video footage of a clitoridectomies being preformed on a little girl, explained what id seen, and told me that the people who did 9/11 who we were going to war with were going to do that to me if we didn't win the war and make it illegal for me to go to school (which was my refuge from a household with a severely mentally ill alcoholic criminal parent) and stop me from reading or writing ever again so I couldn't fall for tricks pretending we can all be friends because thats what they will do to me if I don't possibly even personally kill them first when the time comes. My brother regularly downloaded and a few times even included me in viewing war gore on websites like Ogrish and Rotten.

For a long time all non-child specific age-contained content on the internet was held only and often not even to the strictest most technical definition of free speech law and assumed to be fair game for adult content with no content warning. This was before monetized social media when anonymity existed even between burner accounts (its was a very common lonely millennial autistic middle schooler pastime to larp dramatic mary sue OCs on gaiaonline and AIM chatrooms. My best friend from my teens even once created a fake cute emo boy with photos of Alex Evans, dated me over AIM including pretty serious plans to run away together, and then killed the character off in a dramatic car accident along with his twin sister who were an Americanized ripoff of Hansel and Gretel from the anime Black Lagoon in a convoluted attempt to get me to admit that I was neither straight nor cis) and nothing was cleaned up for advertisers and unless a community became a hub of obvious in the open illegal activity very few website owners wanted to shell out the costs of a moderation team. There were pro-suicide forums, NAMBLA had an early internet presence with their propaganda as did hate groups like the Westboro Baptist Church and hundreds of flavors of white cishet male supremacy, Ive mentioned 4chan which at its height was actually quite mainstream, early fetlife which myself and lots of other minors I knew were active on and was for a long time the only transgender-specific community larger than a few dozen regular members that had a space for just FtM people where most trans-related forums were dominated by selfie-obsessed transwomen, livejournal and eventually early tumblr pro-ED anti-recovery anti-harm-reduction communities, recipes for chemical weapons and bomb-building instructions, the rise in the normalization of hybristophilia and violent sexual practices once considered niche like BDSM (everybody into something weird could suddenly connect with a relatively large community of people into the same thing for the first time and the social validation within these communities emboldened predators and exhibitionists) the rapid escalation of taboo content in internet porn, the subculture surrounding shock videos, the availability of films like Salo or August Underground or gunea Pig or cannibal Holoaust that big chains like Walmart and blockbuster refused to carry or distribute. Like the way my parents talk about the normalization of psychedelic drugs growing up in the 60's and my grandpa talked about spending his childhood playing in the woods for 12+ hours a day and how awesome it was to have that much freedom as a child compared to what he saw me have after the child abduction panic of the late 80's/early 90s driven by cases like Adam Walsh and Johnbenet Remsey and Etan Patz in addition to the increased frequency of reporting of both abductions and severe accidental injury due to local and 24 hour TV news needing to fill the air and being used as a tool to raise awareness in missing person's cases and sensational court trials. Like yeah he saw one of his friends drown in a creek in elementary school but he wasn't part of a generation of indoor cats like I was. That's how it was with obscenity laws in the 00s. If you hit your teens after 2010 you missed out on a completely different cyberspace culture.

Being autistic I doubt he had an entirely positive social experience as peers became more aware of his symptoms. As an autistic kid i always felt and still to some degree feel more comfortable existing in cyberspace where not only are interactions easier for me to process given I have both an auditory processing disability and a speech impediment but especially in the days of the oldweb there was a majority ND population especially among heavy users who did most of their socializing virtually. being able to abandon your identity at any time with little to no consequences after a major soial faux pas and rejoin a community with a fresh slate, having complete control to the information other community members were able to gather on you, and I think most importantly for a lot of AFAB teens especially those of us who struggled with gender dysphoria or body dysmorphia or the impossible photoshopped beauty standards of the 00s that was so severe that the body positivity movement originally caught on as a response to how insanely body-negative beauty culture had become, it being normal to not do face reveals or let anybody know your physical appearance at the time and often not even announce that you were female (which immediately drew both public socially acceptable sexual harassment from the males in the community and accusations of something called GOTIS or Girl On The internet Syndrome popularized when a user named Augucat revealed herself to be female and made a sex joke but was later found to be a normal looking slightly chubby girl instead of a victoria secret model and was driven off the internet).

This community was also extremely hostile to trauma survivors, one infamous example involved the mass cyberbullying of an 11 year old Dhavie Vanity SA victim who is now a trans man but at the time was known by the name Jesse Slaughter escalating into his father slapping him while on camera for continuing to use the internet and him being taken into state custody for the crime of telling the truth about his assault by the celebrity to an online drama community. These claims were later proven to have been true but references to the incident including lines such as "you dun goofed" "cyber police" and "ill pop a glock in your moth and make a brain slushie" are such commonly referenced pieces of early meme culture that a lot of people making the reference today don't know the dark orogin, similar to the use of the phrase "Mods are asleep, post sinks" and its variations. Audio clips from the original video posted on a YRYL thread on /b/ are even fairly popular samples unused in millennial EDM music that ive personally heard dropped in clubs and raves enough to consider its use cliche.

If you think tumblr users behave badly with anon privileges it didn't hold a candle to what behavior was considered unremarkable on not only 4chan but eventually anonymous message websites like formspring or the fact that exhibitionism on anonymous/random video chat platforms like Chatroulette were so common that it was the major cliche cultural reference joke about such websites. Cybersex and explicit roleplay and minors trading explicit pictures for in-game currency was commonplace even on what were considered to be reputable well-moderated teen-appropriate websites like gaiaonline.com and a lot of people adopted a dont ask dont tell attitude toward sexual interaction with suspected/alleged minors. I started participating in this activity in 4th grade when my website of choice became gaiaonline instead of the strictly moderated and fairly advanced filtered Neopets. Like I said behavior that is shocking today was unremarkable and often even encouraged in oldweb spaces.

Soren likely did not feel safe telling the truth about whatever trauma he did experience, at least not as himself (females discovered to have any physical flaw were deemed liars because "i wouldnt fuck her if she let me" and ones considered physically attractive were told that they invited or consented to their assault by not making themselves unattractive to potential predators). Tori Amos became a meme for her song "me and a gun". Everybody into horror was talking about A Serbian Film and Maichan's Daily Life. Googling the word "rape" was as likely to get you a porn video as it was to get you a news article or crisis hotline. The word itself was a punchline and colloquial metaphor for any act of violation, dominance, or extortion from winning a video game to getting ripped off by an unscrupulous auto mechanic. This did not create an environment where survivors felt comfortable identifying ourselves or even in many cases understanding that we'd been victimized at all. Frat house gang rapes of girls with alcohol poisoning and supposed confessions of incest and pictures of female children wearing bathing suits or Halloween costumes or warm-weather fashions with sexually explicit captions became the bread and butter of websites like Motherless.

A lot of people's brothers and brother's friends went off to war and came back all fucked up and lot of them became opiate addicts or committed suicide. Kids who were around a certain stage in development when this massive cultural trauma took place are likely to display similar symptoms, which lead to the emo subculture and the commodification and glorification of mental illness as an identity and severity and medical confirmation of debilitating symptoms was social currency and earned you clout within emo subculture. From the timeline of photos they gave, the event that caused the visible signs of traumatized body language could have potentially in theory been 9/11 especially since as an Indian person he would have likely faced anti-Muslimism racism or at least bullying from racist whites who can't tell the difference between Eastern ethnicities. He had a very obvious complex about his race and often complained about gender-trenders, cosplay/fandom communities, and aesthetic tropes associated with white/Eurocentric supremacy and on top of that he was adopted as an infant and likely subject to some degree of neglect in early infancy if he was a toddler or almost that old when he was adopted by a rich white family which in a white supremacist society comes with all sorts of psychological complications and power dynamics.

Just statistically, its unlikely that by the age of 17 when what became the narrative was first recorded to have surfaced, about a year or two after I fell out of contact with him, he had not experienced some adverse sexual event in his life. IDK if it was online grooming or a random violent attack by a stranger but Soren painting "The Bad Guys" with the same sinister anonymity as the SRA panic painted satanists or qanon weirdos paint "the Elite" which leads me to believe he likely knew the person that encroached upon him and had some sort of relationship or implicit trust that was violated by this incident and wished the crime had been committed by a morally unambiguous stranger. he tells in the original narrative what he WISHES happened instead. he wishes hed been a tall thin white grunge model who met patriarchal feminine beauty standards who people would not only believe and sympathize with but possibly even martyr or eroticize, and also that the trauma was more physically extreme and sensationalistic to justify the severity of his symptoms which impaired his day to day functioning and provide an explanation less stigmatized in online circles of the time than PTSD or verbal autism without significant IQ deficit.

it is also necessary to understand that a lot of female parahelia is the misinterpretation of a physical defense mechanism. Unlike male sexual arousal where the body prepares to penetrate, female physical arousal response mainly exists to reduce the potential harm that can be caused to the mucus membrane during penetration. Thoughts of violent penetration often produce a stronger physical arousal response not because the female desires it but to protect the body from the possible harm it could cause. Purity culture especially in religious communities also creates a disconnect where women commonly develop "rape fantasies' to indulge the fantasy of experiencing sex without being at fault or losing standing within the community or potential value as a future wife. Romance/Dating/hookup/Party culture is also just heavily rooted in not just the normalization of using physical forces to get sex but to coerce or influence the state of consent with things like money or substances or the implicit cultural threat that you MIGHT respond violently if she refuses so she may as well negotiate or even the promise of emotional labor. Females even when we are not abused are aware of sex and the fact that people want to sexually abuse us to some degree or another even if we dont have the specific vocabulary for it from the time we are sentient. That in and of itself is fucking traumatizing. We grow up knowing of it as something horrible that males want to do to us. Then in our teens we are suddenly expected to change our view of sex from a lifelong association with violence to an act of intimacy and romance and also a precious finite resource that we must distribute strategically. A lot of ND people, myself included, have a hard time disconnecting sex from violence and re-assigning it the context it is supposed to take on in our teens and as a result associate feelings of anxiety or pain with arousal or develop inappropriate responses to violence.

From both his posts and our conversations, I think there is a good chance that like me Soren had some degree of OCD and experienced violent intrusive thoughts. Contrary to popular belief, enjoying or responding positively to an antisocial intrusive thought is not what separates it from a fantasy and a lot of people with severe OCD's brains cope by responding positively to all intense thoughts and stimuli indiscriminately. Desensitization to violence is also a common but little discussed OCD symptom which I suspect is why all the descriptions are so over the top, he's thinking of things that hes not desensitized to and still considers shocking which by 17 had escalated to splatterpunk territory but this theory would also explain the escalation between the first and final narrative.

Another reason autistics struggle to form a healthy sexuality is because we tend to be developmentally immature in an emotional and social sense. In American culture, your mid to late teens are supposed to include certain milestones and there's a lot of shame around not meeting them; driving, your first part time job, high school graduation and moving away from home for college, certain intensity of friendships and romantic relationships, substance experimentation, pop culture bildungsroman staples, crisis like most people's first peer death, disordered eating, bullying/peer abuse, very special episode type stuff that he really ruminates on. he wants to have lived these milestones but his only references for them are fiction. He wants to have been in such intense love that he can never love again and therefor will never have to explain his romantic struggles. He wants to have not only had a normal adolescent sex life but to have been sexually experienced so much earlier than his peers that his "advancement" in terms of experience would in and of itself be shocking enough to shut down and discussion of the topic where he didn't feel he could control the narrative.

His use of hard drugs is debatable since he did have funding and basic knowledge of Tor and substances like club drugs and controlled substance prescription medication with recreational abuse potential were easily available through the mail and as somebody who didn't party socially I wouldn't be surprised if he had some experience with opiates (not IV tar and her use of slang was regionally and anachronistically inconsistent so i don't believe she ran in those social circles). he also had a record of being prescribed both adderal (pharmaceutical meth) and benzos and mostly lived in blue states with easier access to weed but i don't believe he ever habitually used let alone was addicted to street drugs or socialized with other hard drug users in person with any regularity. I don't think its impossible that on occasion he sold his pills to other nerdy kids. if he did struggle with substances they were prescription and he claimed to be on street drugs for more shock/clout/to further the charade of having what he considers to be interesting life experiences. I don't think he got 'tar" in a gum packet through airport security, maybe his boomer parents were lucky enough to score an indefinite opiate prescription back when those were still a thing and he sometimes swiped their pills for a buzz. Like I said his knowledge of Silk Road and it's convenience and ease of use for a while makes it not impossible that he tried street drugs but IMHO less likely than abusing his prescriptions.

SingitForDanny and catfishing with Ashton Drew's photos and the beginnings of the character of a girlfriend who committed suicide and left him a note which he posted on his blog faceclaimed with some red haired girl who was NOT ginger who i have never seen in another context were the lies he was telling when I knew him personally along with (like myself) open participation in anti-recovery SH and Ed communities that was NOT a LARP i don't even think those two things were that exaggerated. Compulsive lying is not uncommon in trauma survivors. Again hes telling how he wishes it was; he's all alone not because he struggles socially but because all his friends who were the closest people ever died tragic trendy topical deaths.

I strongly believe that from the escalation of the narrative and his tying his identity to this character that he built but unlike every time before this time the web had advanced enough to where most people knew how to reverse search an image and identities were no longer as disposable as they once were. it was the truth because it had to be the truth because the social implications of being exposed in this kind of a lie to his entire social circle was more than his brain could cope with. It was easier to believe about himself that he was experiencing a recovered memories Sybil Dorsett situation from unspeakable trauma than that he lied about something that horrible. Often compulsive lying, a highly stigmatized symptom, is a phenomenon beyond the person's control. it is not calculated or a moral choice and usually serves no practical purpose beyond a momentary immediate dopamine reward and temporary increase in intensity of attention from the person he is attempting to socialize with but does not know how to form a more intense connection with appropriately. In males this usually manifests as aggression and instigating fights because a negative social interaction is still a social interaction and provoking and receiving a negative reaction is safer and more predictable than attempting to provoke a positive reaction and the attempt being rejected. In females it often manifests as compulsive lying or dramatizing of minor events and other symptoms that define whats currently known as HPD (a lesser-diagnosed cluster B disorder).

If hes not a survivor it could also be part of the compulsive part of the theorized OCD which I struggled with as a pre-teen and overcame by forming a pattern of real behavior so shocking and self destructive that i had enough real crazy things to overshare about and didn't need to make them up after my social standing was compromised by a reputation for making shit up. Still today I have a real problem with lying by omission because I've had enormous shameful secrets since Ive been sentient. I also don't think compulsive lying is even totally developmental inappropriate boundary testing behavior and being autistic and not forced into learning socialization for survival through the public school system he just might not have grown out of it. my father never socially or emotionally developed past whats typical for a 8-12 year old child. I maxed out at 14-16. Some autistic people function on the level of an infant or small child. But if the lying was an OCD compulsion and not poorly socialized overly-sheltered autistic arrested development that comes with SO MUCH shame and self blame and stigma and carries such a heavy moral assignment and is still so poorly understood as a phenomenon. Why was he having all these sick thoughts and inappropriate responses and unable to stop insisting these things were true unless maybe they were and he was really remembering buried memories. it makes as much sense as "your brain is doing it because it is malfunctioning and chronically ill and you lost a genetic lottery and theres no real reason or satisfying explanation for why you are experiencing these life-ruining symptoms other than fuck you".

I believe he was severely mentally ill, had made serious attempts on his life although probably fewer than he claimed but had absolutely spent extensive portions of time especially during his formative social years institutionalized in a community where his severe symptoms were more socially acceptable. I also believe his delusions were encouraged by Ellen Lector whose website has at points contained some suspect-sounding articles or conferences. I do not believe he was fabricating his claims of DID, i think he was in the beginning of the current pop medical trend of slapping the DID label on autistic people with rapidly-fluctuating ability levels if we have A comorbid PTSD/CPTSD/Cluster B diagnosis and any cognitive disability related to struggles with memory or attention/alertness. Schizophrenia was over diagnosed in the 60s, ADHD was over diagnosed in the 00s, autism was over diagnosed in the 2010s, there was a female cluster b swell in the last decade, gender dysphoria had become the first rout of diagnostic investigation when addressing pediatric mental illness which Im not totally personally convinced isnt a sugar coating for a eugenics movement to steralyze the mentally ill as children, now the trend is DID. diagnostic fads move through the mental health world just like diet fads do with physical health communities where every other week eggs are going to either save or kill you. These therapists are encouraging psychotic patients to "get to know the cast of their headspace" by indulging fully in these masks as different beings with in a religious sense different souls in one body. Similar to a lot of modern theories about gender dysphoria being caused by a soul being "in the wrong body" this approach to mental health first and foremost insists that diagnostic science officially validate ad recognize the religious concept of a soul or spirit. They now insist indulging it fully is the only way to achieve 'headspace integration" like DID is the vines from harry Potter that strangle you when you wiggle.

Basically in conclusion Im convinced that, by the time he died, Soren was no longer LARPing or lying but believed his version of reality and that there's a plausible medical explanation for his seemingly inexplicable behavior. If King Or Cooper Or Sotos or Welsh or Burgess or Woolf or Ketchum or Plath had access to the oldweb as a teenager they might have behaved similarly (King infamously sold violent stories about his classmates as a kid, which I also did but for free post-columbine so I got suspended and had to talk to cops and then a court-ordered therapist). Soren's poetry and taste in media shows creativity and some sense of understanding art and it is a tragedy that his symptoms became terminal before he was able to settle into a healthy career as an artist. He was also a pretty nice kid in general when I knew him. We need to do better as a society for people with severe and/or stigmatized symptoms than was done for Soren. His symptoms were enabled/neglected at best and potentially exacerbated by a psychologically abusive therapist. Watching the record of it unfolding and his deterioration between the time I knew him and his death is medically fascinating in the same way that gore is but it shouldn't be any funnier than pictures of late stage cancer patients.

[iero]

I really do think that lack of personal hygiene is a mental health symptom that should be talked about more.

[baldurs-gate-official]

Seeing Astarion and thinking

[dimensionzero]

was a little baffled as to why adrien is less careful about using cataclysm on people now after being so horrified when he accidentally hit monarch but like... as far as he knows, it's been weeks and monarch is still kicking. iirc the only time he's seen monarch since was in deflagration and he seemed just fine then, so adrien really doesn't have any reason to think it's not a survivable injury that just hurts like a bitch

[shirogane-oushirou]

no promises anymoooooreeeee i'll appear online when i appear online 😭 every time i say "ooh i think life is almost done being overwhelming!" it. becomes even more overwhelming in the dumbest ways. all i can manage rn when i'm not stressing myself into a shut-down state is staring at the wall while listening to youtube essays + mindlessly crocheting.

i might queue up ppls art and fics w/o commentary in the tags... i want other ppl to see what all of my cool friends have made, but i genuinely can't think right now with this monstrous brain fog. i'm really sorry, just. yeah. maybe i'll think of some way to make it up later!!! once the dust has settled!!!! but until then i wuv u and miss u. smiles.

[venting in tags including familial manipulation and ableism. i. didn't mean to write all of that, thiss was originally going to be a main blog post but. aaaaaAAAAAA!!!!!

also no need for replies or anything, i'd turn them off for just the one post if i could kjsndkn, i just needed to get things out and go eep jsjndsfdn ok bye bye bye bye!!!!]

[number1villainstan]

this pisses me off so bad, i shouldn't be thinking about it for my own mental health, but even with my somewhat limited knowledge of bnha canon the more i think about it the more examples i can find of boku no hero academia's rampant fucking ableism

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

some people go “oh yeah this character is so mental illness they’re soooooo neurodivergence” and then get weirdly offended if you depict them with anything but very romanticised inaccurate versions of depression or autism.

[dandelionjack]

i don’t usually do dnis (i consider them pointless virtue signalling in most cases) but…in relation to the previous reblog. if you think that bullying in school isn’t ��real trauma’; that some people ‘deserved’ to get bullied or ‘humbled’; that it somehow ‘builds character’; or have ever agreed with the statement that ‘bullying works’, please, kindly fuck off to the depths of hell

[newtafterdark]

I'll write my big sum-up post of this hell-year on the 31th, but man... I really, really hope my mind feels less clouded and anxious soon. I know it's the burnout, I know it's the new trauma... but I would really like to have the energy to talk to old friends properly again.

If you read this and we recently got chatting again, know that I will do my best to talk to you soon again.

[seventhheaven1927]

i feel like a gigantic loser at the moment. and like a ridiculous and useless sort of person. when i get this way, i like to think about the professor who reached out to me after i dropped out of this college. a typical compliment from a professor i guess but it really moved me--continues to move me.

[echoleo]

a non-exhaustive list of "ugly" symptoms i wish echo was more frequently depicted with:

psychosis/detachment from reality

violent impulses or outbursts

unhealthy coping mechanisms (like addiction or self harm)

disordered eating/stomach and digestive issues

difficulty with (platonic or romantic) relationships

memory issues

reluctance/resistance to treatment options

psychosomatic symptoms

babygirl's ptsd is NOT pretty no way no how. sincerely, a ptsd haver

[guinevereslancelot]

not my mom informing my uncle right before he's supposed to host thanksgiving that all his dishes were recalled in the 70s and the factory was demolished by people in hazmat suits bc of the levels of arsenic and lead in the glaze 😳

[crumbleclub]

I've been putting some thought into what various Aftons might be like when seriously panicked, and this is what I've got so far.

Evan:

We have the most canon information for Evan in this area

Fear makes Evan cry. In a panic, he'll cry, have difficulty breathing, pretty standard stuff.

It's not uncommon for him to lose coordination and kind of just fall over

Panics easily, but maintains awareness well enough even at his lowest points

Almost always a freeze response, even though he wants to run. Becomes as small and unnoticeable as possible, aside from occasionally trying to seek outside help. (Nobody ever helps.)

Cries nearly silently.

Shakes like a leaf when he's afraid.

Responds the best to comfort out of any of them. Literally just acknowledge that he's suffering and don't torment him further and you'll make it like 10% less bad

Give him something comforting

Elizabeth

Rarely panics. Getting her to panic would require something to be both extremely distressing and surprising, and not many surprises escape her intellect

That being said, enough stressors piled up will result in a sort of burst of frustration that's identical to what a panic attack would look like for her anyway

Fight response. So much fight response.

Throwing things, breaking things. She tends to end up destroying things she really loves, and it often makes her cry afterward.

If anyone else is present, it's yelling, starting arguements about literally anything, insulting anyone within her sight, etc etc.

It's best to give her space and a safe place to calm down without breaking anything she really cares about. She'd benefit from being given the idea of punching something soft or screaming into a pillow or something like that. Put her into martial arts also maybe?

Calms down quickly when left alone, but it makes things worse if anyone tries to engage.

She would benefit from talking about it after she's already calmed down, because at that point she's tired and sad and could use the comfort

Michael

Michael generally doesn't panic during stressful events. He panics after they've ended.

During actual stressors, Mike will either be eerily calm and rational or dissociated to the point of it being obvious to anyone around him. This is directly related to how much focus is needed to survive a scenario; his brain will protect him in the face of danger by keeping him aware, but he's more likely to have to pay for it later during the inevitable panic

He tends to panic about something small and unrelated shortly after something major happens

And Michael's panic attacks are scary.

There are less severe instances ofc but when they get really bad

It's the kind of presentation that would get emergency services called if it happened in public.

It's the ugly kind of panic attack that makes onlookers think you're actually posessed. That strangled, scream-talking that's difficult to understand, sobbing, choking when he tries to breathe, red in the face, falling on the ground– it's really, really bad. It's a huge scene every time

He's got a fight response turned inward, and he's very likely to be a harm to himself in an actual panic

Because of this, he goes out of his way to avoid any possible chance of this happening in front of anybody. He will legitimately hole up in his room for weeks if he's worried something is going to set him off

Or he'll try to trigger one on purpose so he can control the circumstances and maybe lessen the severity

The really bad ones generally don't even happen that often but they really do fuck with him

Best response for Michael: stay with him and don't act like he's the spawn of satan

The drinking water trick works to steady his breathing somewhat

His attacks generally last <10 minutes anyway just bc of the sheer amount of energy consumed, so they basically just need to be waited out

Bonus round:

William

I cannot think of a circumstance that would cause William to have an actual panic attack

That being said, he's a flight response when he's actually frightened. If he thinks his life is in danger, he'll get shaky and sweaty, and he'll run

He always tries to put on the facade of having some kind of power, but it's not always that convincing. Faced with a life or death situation, he's one of those types who would stumble backwards and fall to the ground rather than find some way to fight back

In order to be conniving, he needs the upper hand. If you want to defeat William, scare him.

[wow-an-unfunny-joke]

Ya know something I’ve done to cope with my own disordered eating is, whenever I get into a new fandom, I will assign each and every character super specific ed headcanons.

I do this all the time, all the tf2 merce, nearly every bsd character, not even adventure time is safe from my sort of projection.

I’m tempted to write a fic about it

[iero]

Talking to my family about mental health is so exhausting when half of them think it’s fake and the other half just don’t get it!

[eemcintyre]

A bit of an expansion on my post from yesterday

Even though we've come a long way in the world, it's still all "mental health positivity and awareness" and "ending the stigma" until mentally ill people are inconvenient and difficult to deal with and don't act like your romanticized idea

And then suddenly it's okay to make fun of us or we're just not trying hard enough or we're just inherently bad people. like. listen. We would all love to be happy and "normal."