#you don’t usually see that sort of thing in media. the progression of serious illness. it’s always romanticized

[y2kbugs-moved]

Getting tired of that post about Viktor’s appearance to be honest, it was never very well worded in the first place and it might come off as weird idk

[misrihalek]

This is for one person in particular. Well, maybe two people. 

...I wasn’t good for you, was I? 

You found me at a pretty low point of my life, I’ve said that before. I was trying to do what the world told me, trying to be a good little boy, get that job, earn my place in the world and...I failed. I was lying on a bed in a house in the suburbs, flatmates fighting in the ungodly hours of the morning, desperately trying to escape from the world. That was how you found me and for some reason you saw something worth a damn. 

And then I proceeded to bleed you dry. I didn’t know how to get myself out of my hole and so I just started dragging you down with me, using you as just another means of escape and demanding so much of you...far too much. How many times did you lament that your love wasn’t enough to help me stand on my own two feet? How many times did you think that you were inferior because of it? Did I make you hate yourself because of my failures? 

That’s not to say that it was all bad: we wouldn’t have lasted as long as we did if we didn’t click on some level, after all. The talks we had, the things we shared between us...it would be disrespectful to say that they meant nothing: maybe their value to us makes this whole thing worse in retrospect, who knows. What I do know is that, even if only ashes remain now, you were the best friend I ever had: you were kind, funny and passionate and your presence in this world stood in defiance of the forces that sought to bring you low. You fought for your right to exist, so maybe it makes sense that you waited for so long for me to do the same. I’m sorry I let you down. 

That’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it: why didn’t I leave that hole that I found myself in? I can blame outside forces (and I often did), but the fact of the matter is that I just didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to be the person that the world demanded of me and no-one seemed to be able to tell me, so somewhere along the way I just grew comfortable in that wretched hole, at home in my misery. I started pantomiming my own life, living as if death would never come and not really living in the process, and it was this awful piece of theatre that you ended up being an unwilling part of: despairing about the future that I couldn’t see and slowly wearing yourself away. I imagine the tipping point came after those three weeks together ended and you saw how little things had changed. 

Those three weeks...before long it will have been two years since that trip to see you and it’s...weird to think about. I know that time has lost a bit of its meaning since then, but even then it’s hard to believe that it was really that long ago. I still remember the elevator up to your apartment, walking to the tramlines and going to that one tea shop - and you bet your ass I remember that hike uphill to the castle. The emotions have faded over time, but I have no qualms in saying that those were quite literally the best days of my life: I know that the word “literally” has kinda lost its meaning in this day and age, but I can confidently say that no experience before or since has compared. So why didn’t it change anything? Why did I go right back into my hole when I got back? 

I don’t think either of us knew at the time, but come a few months later it didn’t matter all that much anyway. You found someone else and left and, now that I look back, I really can’t blame you for trying to find a less bleak fate than what was in store for you. I remember you saying to me how scared you were of a future where you had to support the both of us: why wouldn’t you be? I had demonstrated no ability to be a functioning human being and I would have inevitably become a burden...well, more of a burden. What kind of future is that, for either of us? And so you left to find a brighter one. 

It was ugly and painful and I have no doubt that it still hurts you, just like it does me. For a decent amount of time I was blinded by my own pain and I said things that I can no longer stand by in good conscience: I blamed you for how things had gone and eventually cut you out of my life so I could best deal with my wrenching sorrow. To some degree that action has proved successful: being able to live without having reminders of my failures at the forefront of my mind has let me claw back pieces of myself and move forward with my life, even if it has taken some time. I cannot however defend the reasons why I did it though, born as they were from an inability to reflect on my own deficiencies. 

It turns out that there might’ve been a reason for that inability, actually. You remember me talking about my Asperger’s Syndrome diagnosis? It was something that I got told about as I was growing up and it was basically conveyed to me as a low-strength form of autism, something fairly surmountable in comparison to the more traditional forms. Last year though, I found media that suggested that Asperger’s Syndrome was a less-than-credible condition from a doctor that quite literally collaborated with Nazis and further research revealed that the term was no longer in official use. I talked to my mother about this and she casually dropped into conversation that I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. 

ADHD! So many goddamn things clicked into place once she said that and I imagine that the same might be happening for you right now. No wonder I had so much difficulty functioning in that job, how infuriating it was to focus on things, how I would sally forth into different trains of thought mid-conversation. My mother’s general mistrust of the medical system also meant that I’d been dealing with these things all my life without any sort of medication, the usual way that other people with ADHD make themselves co-operate with the strictures of society. No wonder things went to fucking pieces the moment I stepped into the real world. 

I’ve had to do some serious thinking since then, not least of all about my future. I tried to keep on the jobsearching grind for a while after that bombshell dropped, but after months of no luck I snapped and decided to take an alternate route, one that I couldn’t consider while we were together. Since then I’ve moved away from home and I’m studying to maybe one day be a social worker: to one day have the tools to help people like me, people stuck in their own holes and unable to get out without the helping hand of someone who understands what they’re going though. No doubt you’d say that you’re happy for me and I don’t doubt that statement: you’re a better person that I was and even through all this you’ve wished no ill towards me. You’re a good person like that. 

These days I’m doing decently okay: I’m living with 3 flatmates who I get along with pretty well and my studies are progressing as they should. I’m trying to write a bit more as well, although about the only thing I’ve done lately of any tangibility has been...well, this. Even with the progress I’ve made, what happened between us still bobs to the surface from time to time and I have to process things all over again: it gets easier as time marches onwards, but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy. That probably explains why I reacted so violently to the message you sent me, among other things. 

What I said there was true: I can’t face you while things are the way they are. I’m not strong enough to watch you be happy with someone else, because it’s a reminder that I can no longer elicit that same joy from you: a reminder that our time has passed because of my failures. It’s knowledge that hollows me out from the inside. I tried to be strong - tried to ignore that hollowing out and remain friends - and failed over and over, coming close enough to nothingness to feel it encroaching on my soul, so now I put up my walls to protect it.

I need to be okay. And I can’t do that with you around. It’s an awful thing to say and you don’t deserve it, but it’s the truth. Once more you suffer for my deficiencies as a human being. 

I’m sorry that I couldn’t be the person that you needed: I guess the deck was kinda stacked against us from the beginning, considering what I didn’t know about myself and, y’know, the whole long-distance thing, so don’t go thinking that any of this was your fault. You remain one of the best people I have ever met and I am eternally grateful for the time we shared together: do not doubt that you are worthy of love, even in your lowest moments. You’re a damn good human being and you deserve to have good things happen to you, better things than me. 

I imagine you’re expecting me to say this, but oh well: I’d prefer it if you don’t send me a response to what I have written here. Beyond just safeguarding my own wellbeing, I’ve been meaning to write this for a long time now and what you see is pretty much every single thing that I can conceivably say in regards to all that has transpired between us. I don’t really have anything else to say and after this I will hopefully not think about this so much anymore and get on with my life. I would implore you to do the same. 

I wish you all the best. 

...

...there’s a small piece of me that doubles back on what I’ve written here, seeing if it can instill its will within the paragraphs wherein it can wend its way to you. It’s the piece of me that still loves you, that holds out hope that I may one day see you again and that we can rediscover what was lost. It tells me to leave my heart open to the opportunity, to hope against hope that things change. This last paragraph is my concession to it in the vain hope that it’ll finally fucking shut up.

[soakedpaperhearts]

i don’t know what recovery is.

i can’t say for certain whether i’m in a depressive episode now or not. most days i can say that i’m definitely in a better place than i was last year, but that’s only my gut feeling. if i look at my life now, nothing’s really changed from last year other than the fact that i’m in a different country, i’m not with my family, and i’m going to uni. if i look at the similarities, i’m still not showering as much as i would like to, my laundry is a mess, and i’m pretty sure i’m binge eating when i actually remember to eat. i’ve started to cry again at small things for seemingly no reason. i cried when my gf told me i should shower. i cried when i saw the number for the 24/7 suicide hotline. i watch shows and read fanfic probably unhealthily to lose myself in other realities.

i can’t paint a straight line in my road of recovery. i like to say that i am getting better and i say it with confidence when someone asks me about my mental state but honestly i can’t say it with logic. i’m not a all-logic-or-nothing type of person because i do listen to my emotions and intuition. however, i can’t exactly pinpoint my progress because i don’t even have a diagnosis after 4 years of trying to battle my own illness - whatever it is.

i feel like my recovery was slowly getting better if i looked at it from a bigger picture but with every setback, i feel like i revert back to my depression days when i’m living an unhealthy lifestyle that isn’t sustainable. it just keeps getting more and more down and i don’t know how it ever turns around because it seems like it’s not going to this time. the psych said i didn’t look like i was having trouble with depression but it really feels similar to my first depressive episode. i know this isn’t as severe as that was because i remember crying in the bathroom at least once a day very hard, not eating anything, and generally being apathetic to life. i also usually pushed away the people close to me and didn’t want them around because i needed to be alone. in that sense, i guess it’s different now because i eat pretty regularly and a lot. even tho i cry i’ve only teared up a bit and it wasn’t violent sobbing. i still like doing my own thing but i can tolerate people in my space and even appreciate a bit of physical contact while we’re doing our own things. 

still, this mood isn’t like me. i’m feeling pretty ashamed that i haven’t been able to properly take care of myself and recently i don’t think i’ve been putting effort into maintaining my relationships. i’ve hardly spoken to my friend whom i know is having a rough time, i didn’t even think about it until my gf mentioned them. i’ve been avoiding my mother’s calls because i didn’t want her to see how much i didn’t take care of myself and make her worry. god i just cried when i typed that. i called her today but i didn’t even realize that i hadn’t called her for a long time until, again, my gf pointed it out to me. and i’m still crying. and just now my gf and i had a fight and i realized that i havent put in the effort that i usually do to smooth over the situation. in fact, i just perpetuated it. even as i sit here writing this i haven’t made any moves to try to make up with her and i’m just so, so tired.

i know recovery isn’t a straight line and if i give it a little introspection, i can see the minuscule progresses that i have made. i’m just having a little trouble coping with life right now and the people i usually fall back on, my family, aren’t really here and i don’t wanna worry them. i’m thinking about calling the suicide hotline just to have someone to talk to but my roommate and gf will hear me bc i’m in the living room. the only time i haven’t been feeling crushed by the weight of existing is when i consume media or lie my head on my cat. and i can’t even stay with my cat for long because she likes sleeping on a chair under the table and it’s really uncomfortable for me to stay there bc i have to sit on the floor and i can’t bring her to my bed because i’m pretty sure she’s only comfortable to sleep in the chair so i can’t move her but i can’t sleep by myself so i guess i’ll just stay awake all night.

maybe it’s internalized-ableism? i read that that was a thing and there was always this pressure to do something and be something and it actually kind of describes my experience? growing up in my school, UWC, and in Singapore, it was always a go-go-go let’s do-do-do- kind of mindset. you always had to think about your next step and make a plan and figure out what to do after. you had to keep going and never stop. the teachers were always finding ways to make you better, even if you were at the top. if you got satisfactory, it was a serious situation and you needed to improve. satisfactory wasn’t the average, and it was only spoken when you were worried about your grades.

i feel like if i’m not achieving something then i’m not worth anything. right now i’m just existing and even though that’s hard and i’m not accomplishing things that other people can, like laundry or organizing or working or homework or even going to class, i’m doing things that still matter like enjoying the media i consume and eating and giving myself some sort of interaction even if it’s just with a cat. i’m believe that i’m in a better place than i was last year. i really believe that even if i’m typing as i’m crying again.

i’m tired and exhausted from the overbearing pressure of just being but existing shouldn’t be a burden. even if my habits aren’t sustainable or productive, i’m still existing. i’m accomplishing something by just being alive. if the bar is set too high then change the bar. i choose to accomplish something today and even though i feel it was less than what i accomplished yesterday, that doesn’t invalidate my achievement today!

i know my memory is shit and i’m probably going to forget this very soon but i will focus on just existing for now. keeping myself alive seems like a doable task and as long as i keep doing that, i can try again tomorrow.

i can try again tomorrow because i am alive.

[rehkhana]

how to untwist your mentality and have better control of your mental health

This is a guide for the people who have been in a bad place for awhile and don’t really know how to get out of it; this will be more directed at students, as school can be a lot of stress for people and can be what caused people to fall into a slump to begin with, but that doesn’t mean it can’t help if you’re not a student!

You have to remember its all about constant and consistent progress, you’re not going to jump from getting by to thriving in a day, a week, or even a month. You need to set very reasonable goals for yourself, and maybe even underestimate yourself a little at first so you don’t overwhelm yourself, it will only hurt your motivations and make you doubt any progress you’ve made so far. 

Remember, everyone crawls before they walk, walks before they run, and they have to keep running before they can work their way up to the marathon. Also, by no means am I saying that doing all these steps or making all these changes in your life will make depression or other mental illnesses magically disappear, but it can make it much easier to manage and have less intense affects on your daily life.

From what I’ve learned from trying to manage myself, there are five aspects that people usually need to work on to see an overall improvement:

Hygiene/Organization

Self Image

Fitness

Diet

Social Media Usage

Now all of these may seem either daunting or pretty superfluous, but they all work together and can make a huge change in people lives.

Hygiene/Organization

First off, hygiene and organization can make a huge change in people lives. Spending 15 minutes a day and tidying up your desk area, putting away pens and pencils, sorting papers into the correct folders, putting laundry away, cleaning up dirty clothes off of your bedroom floor, cleaning up dirty dishes, putting clean dishes away, wiping off the bathroom sink, anything that cleans up in a small way can make a huge difference on how you perceive your environment. Continually passing by something and thinking “I need to do this” or “I need to clean that,” can take a huge toll on your mental health if it continues to be an issue, as tasks build up and they become much bigger monsters than they should be. I know it can be difficult motivating and getting yourself to do these things, even if you know its beneficial to you. I understand the lethargy, but sometimes you just need to get up and force yourself to do it. Here’s what I started doing to get myself back on track:

Make yourself a habit tracker: don’t put every single task you want to make into a habit on there at once, because you’ll overwhelm yourself. Put two or maybe three tasks on there, and keep them on there until you do them constantly for 21 days or 21 times at the interval of your choosing. 

Once you get a task down for 14 days or intervals, add another task or habit you want on there. For those of us that have the problem of forgetting to shower or eat breakfast, this is perfect. Soon enough you’ll start building habits for the little things.

Don’t put huge tasks on your habit tracker; this is for small tasks that don’t require more than a half an hour of time at max 

For larger tasks, have a small planner. It doesn’t need to be extravagant, just something to get the job done. This planner is for your and you only, and it will stay that way unless you choose to share it with others, so remember that when writing down things you need to do or events you need to attend.

If you still have issues remembering and holding yourself to your schedule, talk to someone close to you and ask them to help you on your journey, or set up reminders on your phone or computer, put sticky notes around the house or apartment, anything to remind yourself.

Self Image

Secondly, and I believe this is the largest obstacle that everything else plays into, is your self image. Hygiene and organization play a large part into self image, as do the other three topics I will talk about soon, but overall there are some small (or large depending on how frequently these things occur or how closely you tie yourself to them) that you can do to improve your self image: 

Stop saying self depreciating things. An excellent guide on specifically this topic can be found here that was made by @colacharm and a few others.

Have an honest self reflection session. Do NOT just focus on your flaws but also celebrate all your positive traits. The simple act of self reflecting speaks great volumes about your character. It should be an informative session for yourself rather than a session for you to chastise yourself. 

For students, start de-associating your worth with your grades. Everyone fails, everyone falls, everyone has weak moments where they have to pick themselves back up. @study-fox made a great guide on how to deal with failure here. Even if you don’t get the grade you were hoping for in the end, it does not mean you’re less of a person or a bad student. 

Air out your issues to someone who you trust. Don’t just drop it on them spur of the moment, but ask them if it would be okay if you rant to them a little bit or have a serious conversation about yourself with them. This will let them know that this means a lot to you and is a serious matter. If they don’t want to or aren’t taking the issue seriously, just choose someone else to talk to or seek out other help. If you have a good relationship with one or both of your parents, they can be excellent support. High school counselors can be a good person to go and air out your emotions to if need be, and most colleges have support groups that you can go to as a good option. Even if you don’t go to school or have completed school, there usually is a support group in your area if you go looking for it. I understand for many money is an issue and professional therapy isn’t a viable option due to it, but there are still other resources that you can seek out:

Anxiety and Depression Support Groups here

Depression and Bipolar Disorder Groups here

OCD Support Groups here

Managing Mental Health in General here

Realize that criticism is not meant to insult you, but help you better yourself. This is a hard lesson I’ve learned and that I’m still learning. There will always be some people in the world that are out to get you riled up, but just realize that you don’t own them anything, not a single explanation or reaction, and just walk away or leave a situation like that. People who truly want to help you improve yourself and help you on your journey won’t try to upset you and will apologize if they do. 

One thing that can contribute greatly to self esteem issues and depression is feeling like you’re not doing anything or at least anything productive. Start a hobby of continue with a hobby that involves physical things or produces something that can be seen in quantity; art, writing, coin collecting, baking, cooking, ect. Even if you hobby is something that may not be able to be put into quantity, find a way to make it visible; if you have a passion or hobby of learning a language, start making physical flashcards. Having something to remind yourself that you are doing something can always help during the rainy days. 

Fitness and Exercise

Another factor that can affect your mental health is fitness and exercise. Now note that I’m not saying yoga will solve all your problems or that you should go out and become a gym junkie (although do so if you would like), exercise and physical exertion in general is an excellent way to relieve stress and pent up tension. While I don’t have the studies on hand, there have been studies linking cardio exercise to improved mood for up to 8 hours after about a 15-20 minute cardio session. Doing some exercise as simple as stretching out your muscles can make a big impact on how you physically feel and can relieve aches that have bugging you for weeks or months if you just stretch it out. Personally, just doing about 15 minutes of stretches a day has made a huge impact on how I physically feel and I’ve been having less issues with my shoulders and upper back because of it. For those of you that want to add a bit of physical exertion to your day but just can build up the motivation to do so, find it too tedious to do so, or just don’t have the time for a serious workout, here are some tips that may help:

If you have a Wii, pull it out and hook it up and play some Just Dance! It’s pretty fun if you like the songs you pick out on there and dancing to about 2-3 songs depending on how long they are will get in about 10-15 minutes of cardio, which is enough time to get in that mood benefit. 

If you don’t have a Wii or don’t have Just Dance, you can pull up the videos of them on Youtube or just pull up some videos of choreography to any song you want and follow along in the motions. The point here isn’t to become a professional dancer or even to become good at dancing, its to have some fun while getting in some cardio. 

If you’re not a fan of dancing, pull up some of those old 80s exercise videos, some of them can be fairly intense, but they can still make exercising pretty entertaining. 

If you’re more for just stretching out, put on some calming songs or sounds and just start stretching out. It doesn’t have to be an extremely long session or anything, it can be as short as 5 minutes, just something to releases some of the stress built up in your muscles. 

In general, you don’t need to go to the gym for hours each day to get benefits from exercise, just 15 minutes at home doing some stretching or something to exert yourself can have so many benefits alone. 

You don’t have to sit there and just run on a treadmill or bike for 15 minutes while staring at a wall. You can pull out a phone, tablet, laptop, or even flashcards and work a bit on studying, responding to emails, working on a paper, anything you want so you get two things done at the same time.

Diet and Nutrition

Now another important factor is diet. The saying “you are what you eat” has quite a bit of truth to it. If you have only an Iced coffee for breakfast, skip lunch, and eat a huge dinner everyday, your body isn’t going to have enough constant energy to keep you going all day and you will hit a wall. Also, what you eat makes makes an impact. Are you eating stuff that fulfills all your daily nutrient needs? Are you eating enough calories? Are you dispersing your food and energy intake evenly throughout the day or do you eat the majority of your daily food intake at one particular time or meal? You need to take note of your diet and see how all these play out in your daily life. My recommendation or this is writing down every single thing you eat every day for 3-7 days, depending on whether you diet is extremely varied or if you eating something fairly similar every day. Now, do not track calorie count, nutrient percentages, or ingredients in any of the foods until after you are done writing everything down; if you calculate all this during your tracking period, you will unconsciously or consciously change your diet to accommodate for nutrients you discover you are lacking or over-indulging on. After this calculating all this, figure out what long-term and permanent diet changes you are able and willing to do. I will make this comment also for my vegan and vegetarian friends out there, to make sure you buy supplements or vitamin fortified foods for nutrients majorly or only found in animal products, like vitamin B12, which is important in maintaining mental health. Now, here are some quick tips that worked for me. As a disclaimer, I am not saying this will work for you or is viable for you, but I’m sharing my own experience on what worked. 

Cut down on a lot of processed sugars. I don’t eat a whole ton of really sugary foods. I still eat things with sugar mind you, I still put a teaspoon of sugar in my morning coffee and eat chocolate every once in a while and what not, but I've cut almost completely cut out a lot of things like gummy bears, sour patch kids, soda, ect. Honestly a lot of my go to snacks have become Triscuits, dried fruits, yogurts, and granola and fruit bars. 

If you drink coffee in the morning, eat something before you drink coffee. Eating something in the morning makes a big difference in how you feel throughout the day, and caffeine suppresses your appetite, so drinking coffee before you eat anything will discourage you from eating or discourage you from eating enough. If you must drink coffee before you eat anything, cut down on the amount you drink before you eat, then drink the rest after you eat. 

Drink enough liquids!! Water is a necessity but honestly just drinking enough healthy liquids in general is key. I like to drink one glass of cranberry juice a day a long with one glass of milk in addition to all the water I drink. It’s crazy how just drinking one extra glass or day or just drinking enough can affect your system in amazing ways. I’d recommend the app Plant Nanny to remind yourself to drink enough water, its for both apple and android. 

Now, this is not something I’ve had experience with it so I’m not going to go in depth about it so I don’t mess up the facts or give anyone the wrong idea of how to deal with it. If you have an eating disorder of any kind, or think you may have one, or something seems off, please go here. I want every single one of you who read this post to be healthy, mentally, physically, and emotionally. 

Do not fall for fad diets! Everyone needs carbs, everyone needs fats, everyone needs enough food! Do not get sucked into thinking that ‘cleanses’ or ‘purges’ are good for you! The best way you can become healthier through diet is by creating a sustainable diet that covers all your needs, not by following one of these diets for a month or two and getting temporary changes or results. These do a lot more harm in both the long and short run than people realize.

Social Media

Now this one also contributes to of the above. Social media is a wonderful invention, it gives everyone a voice, lets everyone be connected, and introduces people to new ideas and things that they may have never known about. But given all this, its a tool that can very easily manipulate your mindset into thinking that you’re not good enough or not doing enough. I will never say to cut off social media, as its become pretty heavily integrated into our culture now, but here are some thing I would recommend:

Do not use social media at all for 1-7 days. See how much more free time you have, how it makes a difference, and how you feel while not using it. Use this time to focus on a hobby, focus on yourself, or accomplish some daily tasks you want or need to tackle. 

When you get back onto social media, purge your subscriptions and follows. Don’t follow or subscribe to anyone you do not enjoy seeing updates from or do not anticipate seeing updates from. You want all your posts or videos in your feed to be pertinent to you, so you spend less time searching or mindlessly scrolling in content. 

Do not be afraid to clean house with your social media. If you don’t really use one form of social media and only check it just to say you did, then just get rid of it. Recently I made an entirely new tumblr account because my other one was about 4 years old and it wasn’t giving me any positivity or joy anymore and I realized was just something I was clinging to because it was habit and a huge distraction from things I needed to do. I only followed a few dozen blogs on this tumblr to prevent me from being able to mindlessly scroll for literal hours and prevent myself from being productive. Sometimes you just need to push the restart button on some things to have good impacts on your life.

Conclusions 

Overall, I’d say take this guide with a grain of salt. All this advice comes from my own experiences and my own progress with my mental health. I still have bad days and bad periods, but overall they are less frequent and less intense since I started making changes like these. My experiences won’t be the same as yours, but I do hope everyone that reads this can find relief in their life and make some positive progress in managing their mental health. Here is some more resources that I’ve used in better knowing, understanding, and managing my mental and physical health: 

To be able to more easily identify emotions and emotional triggers, I use the Youper App, which is available on apple and android.

One category I didn’t touch on was sleep, which is also absolutely crucial. I personally suffer from quite a few sleep issues, insomnia and sleep paralysis being the most prominent, and I use the Runtastic Sleep Better app which functions as a sleep tracker and allows me to track disturbances in my sleep, as well as the quality of sleep I get each night. Its available on both apple and android.

Keeping a dream journal can allow you to more easily recognize what is a dream and what is not while you’re sleeping, which is immensely helpful for us who struggle with nightmares. 

I listen to ASMR a lot and I know its not everyone’s thing but if you haven’t listened to it I’d say try it and go into the experience with an open mind. I’d personally recommend WhispersRed ASMR and Gentle Whispering ASMR, they both have a wide range of videos that you can watch and see what works for you personally. 

Think of one thing a day that you appreciate or enjoy and write that thing down. Keep it in a journal or in a jar, just somewhere those writings will be safe, where you can go back and look at them on those days that are much worse than others.

Lastly, I will say trying to manage your own mental health is hard! Please reach out to someone or a group to help you in your journey. If you can afford a professional therapist then you’re golden, but I know some cannot so even just having someone there to give you support can immensely help. I hope this guide can be helpful to some! 

[scripttorture]

Hello, I hope you are doing well. I was wondering if you could give me some suggestions on this story I have been working. My protagonist has been locked up in my villain's basement for over 2 years now. The basement has windows and the bathroom/washroom has no source of light either. Every time the protagonist tried to run as punishment the villian would give him electric shocks. Thr protagonist is only fed once a week, and has been tortured in several ways over this period of time and the villian is the only human contact he has had since being captured. Thus he's really terrified of the villian and also assumes that the villian will kill him. So if you could tell me what sort of psychology position would most likely my protagonist have at this point? And after all this time how long would it take for the protagonist to trust someone say the villian's daughter who is being nice to him and trying to make things as better for him as possible ? Would he start depending on her entirely because she would be the first proper human contact he has had for years and is trying to help him as much as her positive always?

Honestly I think this character would be dead several times over.

He’s essentially in solitary confinement in extremely poor conditions for a very long period of time. During that time he’s also starved to a point that I’m not sure is survivable over a year let alone two. He’s also being regularly tortured using a method that often causes sudden death.

The torture, poor conditions and solitary confinement make suicide incredibly likely before the first year is out. Starvation makes it incredibly likely that he’d get some kind of infection/disease which his weakened body wouldn’t be able to fight off. Starvation means that repeated electric shocks are more likely to give him a fatal heart attack. Repeated electric shocks by themselves over such a prolonged period are incredibly likely to cause fatal heart attacks or fatal seizures.

I strongly recommend you reduce the time the protagonist is held or reduce the number of tortures you’re inflicting on him or both.

If you want to keep the set up you currently have I think a reasonable time frame is about a month. Any longer than that and I’d have serious doubts about the character’s ability to survive.

If the time frame is incredibly important to you then I think you need to get rid of the electric shocks aspect completely. I think you should also either reduce the severity of the starvation element or get rid of it entirely.

Feeding someone once a week isn’t survivable in the long term. We are not reptiles. We are not adapted to gorging on and storing enough food for weeks at a time in one sitting. Even if the meal he was given contained enough calories for the entire week I think he’d be unable to consume it. I think this starve and binge cycle would mean he’s likely to throw up a lot of what he’s eaten and further reduce the amount of energy he’s getting.

The starvation masterpost is over here. As a minimum I’d suggest 1,300 kcal a day and that he’s fed daily, over either one or several meals.

Honestly I think even with these measures reducing the time he’s held by at least half is sensible. Having him held for six months would be even better.

As it stands I think you’re severely underestimating the physical effects of every torture you’re using. Because every single one you’ve mentioned is individually at a level that could easily be fatal. Compounding them and combining them doesn’t just make death likely it makes survival virtually impossible.

That doesn’t particularly surprise me, because every torture you’ve picked is a technique that’s routinely portrayed as ‘safe’ or much less damaging than it is. So the assumptions you’ve made are perfectly natural, even though they’re wrong.

As for the question itself- I think you’re also severely underestimating the psychological effects of torture.

Torture victims can have positive relationships and get on with their lives. But it’s significantly harder for them than it is for other people. They’re severely mentally ill and they usually don’t have access to support or specialist treatment for up to a decade after torture.

A survivor who’d been in solitary confinement, without the additional tortures, would struggle to form lasting relationships and have basic, positive social interactions after release. They’d probably continue to struggle with social interaction for years or decades afterwards, even with specialist help.

Expecting someone who is currently being tortured and has been in solitary confinement for an extreme period of time (a week is enough time for negative affects to be apparent in most people, anything over that is prolonged and several months is extreme) to form an intense positive relationship- It’s a big ask. I can’t say it’s absolutely impossible but I don’t think most survivors would be capable of it.

Solitary confinement has a profound affect on our ability to interact with others in positive socially acceptable ways. That’s only going to be compounded by the symptoms of torture which are a set of severe mental illnesses which will not get better so long as the victim remains imprisoned.

There’s also the psychological effect of starvation which causes some pretty unique effects.

Among them is a marked tendency towards apathy. Starving people stop caring about other people. They’re also extremely prone to emotional outbursts and violent mood swings.

All of these sets of psychological symptoms exacerbate each other.

Torture victims struggle to interact with other people. The fact you’ve chosen a character the victim would probably see as on the villain’s ‘side’ doesn’t help. But even without that- I’m unsure how much a victim could interact in a positive way with someone ‘outside’ the system while they’re being tortured.

Taking it from the other side for a moment- how patient is this daughter character? Does she have specialist psychological training?

As some one with mental health problems, who has known a lot of people with mental health problems- we can be difficult to interact with. Is this woman mentally prepared to deal with listening to fantasies about suicide? Self harm? Violently murdering her father? How about depressive episodes where the victim goes almost completely catatonic and can’t speak? Mood swings where he suddenly switches from being depressed to being highly aggressive with no provocation she can detect? Panic attacks? Flashbacks? Hallucinatory conversations with faces in the ceiling?

Because she could reasonably be dealing with any of those symptoms any time she interacts with the victim. And frankly- I don’t know many normal people without training who can deal with that on a daily basis.

I think even if you cut down the amount and duration of torture the victim suffers he will still be profoundly mentally ill when he first encounters this character. (There’s a Masterpost on symptoms generally here and even with my suggestions for cutting down the amount of tortures, you’re looking at 4-6 severe symptoms, plus symptoms of solitary and possibly starvation.)

He has ever reason to distrust her and may instinctively view her with the same antagonism he does his torturer.

She would find him difficult to interact with and the majority of interactions will probably be (at best) mentally and emotionally exhausting for her.

Even if the victim wants to interact positively with her he’s going to find that incredibly difficult. His symptoms will get in the way. And those symptoms will be getting worse rather than better.

I think if you want to keep this element, with the relationship between the victim and torturer’s daughter the best thing you can do is have her break the victim out as quickly as possible.

That’s partly because I think actions like that speak louder than words. But it’s also because I can’t see their relationship progressing past the surface level while he is still being tortured. I think it would be more realistic to build the body of their relationship after they’ve escaped, when the victim has a chance to recover.

It would still take a lot of time. Perhaps years. Distrust of other people, even people they knew prior to being tortured, is incredibly common among survivors. It isn’t going to go away because one ‘guard’ gives extra food or bandages wounds. It also isn’t going to vanish with the prison bars.

It’s like a house that’s been bombed; it needs to be rebuilt carefully, one brick at a time, lest the foundations crumble.

This story isn’t a write off. It’s not impossible to make this into something realistic and sympathetic to torture survivors. But I think it does need some major changes to get there.

That isn’t your fault. You’re using a set of tortures that are often portrayed as harmless, both in fiction and in otherwise reliable factual media like news sources. It’s completely understandable that you’d misjudge how harmful these particular techniques are.

But the result is that as this stands it consistently downplays the damage torture does.

From everything you’ve said I don’t think that’s what you want for your story. And as I said all of these problems can be fixed without losing the essential plot or the emotional core of the story you’re trying to tell.

I hope this helps. :)

Disclaimer

[itechnicalshadowwalkers]

Research about social anxiety

This was also handed in by me (Elin) as an assignment for Influencer

Keywords: social anxiety, social media, mental health and well-being.

Our project preaches about how we can help students with fears such as the social anxiety disorder, but before getting into why it can be so important, let’s see what social anxiety even is and how to help it as a teacher first.

According to ScienceDirect.com3 (2001) it is also known as “social phobia”, social anxiety is characterized in anxiety disorders by the very strong need to make a good impression of oneself on other people, lathered in insecurity in their ability to actually do so – meaning that somebody wants people to think good things about them, but doubting if they are actually able to make somebody like them. People with this phobia tend to avoid scenarios where they can trigger negative feelings from others towards oneself, or if they do allow themselves in those scenarios, it’s often mixed with distress and anxiety. People with a social phobia like this have all sorts of different reactions, such as blushing, nausea, hand tremors and trouble concentrating – these can progress to something more serious as a full blown panic attack, via ScienceDirect.com5 (2008).

ScienceDirect5 (2008) also states while it does and has been mistaken for simple “shyness”, social anxiety is rooted much deeper into ones personality and every day life. It can be an early age onset and risk factor for depressive illness, drug and alcohol abuse. It’s not unusual for the person to recognize that the fear is excessive, however they cannot help to hide away from confrontations that possibly embarrass them.

Social networking can help people with social anxiety to easily initiate and establish social connections, it can make it less intimidating by texting in the safe environment of your home. Social media can give you the place to talk about whatever you like, about however you feel and to whoever you want; even if that person is just someone you don’t know on the other side of the world. Platforms that allow anonymous posting can allow these people to feel less alone and think of their disorder in a less negative light (VeryWellMind.com2, 2020). Sadly, there is always negatives to positives. People with social anxiety are more vulnerable to an internet addiction (Weinstein6, 2015) – along with the higher chance of developing substance abuse later on.

As stated before, people with social anxiety stay away from situations which can lead to them being embarrassed – including asking questions as a student. Luckily there are things teachers can do to slowly but surely help this student gain more confidence along the way, and TheMighty.com4 (2017) has given us multiple options. Easy things as just small praises for their accomplishments, rewarding participation even thought that student is wrong, gently encouraging the student by also speaking in a soft, calmer tone. If you’ve noticed, as a teacher, that one of your students has been acting more anxious than as per usual: approach them, talk to them, lift that weight off their shoulders by taking the first step – as that’s often all it takes for somebody to open up. Feel free to thank VeryWellMind.com1 (2020) for some of these tips, teachers!

For the future, I can research way more about other fear inducing factors (such as past traumas when it comes to being curious), but also possibly differences in culture or just the way someone was raised when it comes to asking questions, or ways to go against social media addictions.

1.     Cuncic, A., & Gans, S. (2020, 13 januari). How Teachers Can Help Their Students With Social Anxiety Disorder. Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/teaching-students-with-sad-3024340#:%7E:text=How%20to%20Treat%20a%20Student,feared%20situations%20with%20gentle%20encouragement.

2.     Cuncic, A., & Morin, A. (2020, 29 juni). How to Make Social Media Work for You With Social Anxiety Disorder. Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/social-network-use-and-social-anxiety-disorder-4117143#:%7E:text=Social%20networking%20sites%20may%20help,the%20house%20is%20an%20issue.

3.     Purdon, C., Antony, M., Monteiro, S., & Swinson, R. P. (2001, 1 mei). Social anxiety in college students. ScienceDirect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0887618501000597?casa_token=KOxFrb9P3DkAAAAA:nqVspnhSmWpIgi3zkJptuau0ty9kyShO3AHkfT0wxayTsNPAtA1IYftkQNJCNAwNyUWSYFBX2w

4.     Reid, C. (2021, 16 april). How Teachers Can Help Students With Social Anxiety. The Mighty. https://themighty.com/2017/09/how-teachers-can-help-students-with-social-anxiety/

5.     Stein, M. B., & Stein, D. J. (2008, 29 maart). Social anxiety disorder. ScienceDirect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0140673608604882?casa_token=my7tNJSmSjcAAAAA:wtdALwNX4sllJl7uns1IxEU9wD_0quWP48HzsHMOEMySyu1HtFBPaL-KjmO05WbzPwc6BfwQ3A

6.     Weinstein, A., Dorani, D., Elhadif, R., Bukovza, Y., & Yarmulnik, A. (2015). Internet addiction is associated with social anxiety in young adults. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/file.PostFileLoader.html?id=555bdefc5f7f715c608b459e&assetKey=AS%3A273780113379329%401442285673262

[yeoldontknow]

As Still As Sound: Prologue

Author’s Note: i really didn’t think i’d start another series so soon, really i didn’t. but this came to me one night, and i feel like i’m going to scream if i don’t write it. this story is basically a love note from me to a lot of different things; some of it is personal, some of it is fictional, a lot of it is me doing something i never do and writing real, true love story. i hope you enjoy this prologue!

Summary: Two years after soulmate bonds are formed in our universe, and still the world is reeling from the connections. Everyone seems to be affected, except you. You seem to think you’ve been left out and forgotten, though you don’t really want a soulmate at all. All you really want is to be alone with your music…

O/C’s Spotify song this chapter: Blow - Ghinzu (music for each chapter will be the song the reader/oc/you is listening to)

Pairing: Chanyeol x Reader (oc; female)

Genre: Soulmate!AU; fluff; angst; drama; sci-fi; eventual smut

Rating (this chapter): PG

Warnings (this chapter): references to threats of self-harm

Word Count: 5,024

METRO UK      APRIL 8, 2013

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW! FIRST UK SOULMATE PAIR DISCOVERED: TWO YEARS ON 

Anita and Wesley Goulding made history on this day in 2011 as the first couple in the UK to find their soulmate after the Era Shift. They’ve sat down with us today to discuss how they met, the struggles they endured in the early days of finding one another, and why they think the new soulmate process is a double edged sword.

Q: Congratulations on two years!

Anita: Thank you! It really doesn’t feel like it. I wake up every morning and see him, and I somehow fall more in love with him.

Wesley: I honestly don’t know what I was doing in my life before I met her. It’s been the most magical two years.

Q: Finding your soulmate is different for everyone. Tell us what happened to you both, as the first.

A: Well, I don’t think we were technically the first [laughs], but I think we were the first to find each other and document it in some way, or at least reach out on a national level to alert people that this was happening? But, for me, I woke up one morning knowing I wasn’t alone in my mind. I know that sounds terrifying or awful, but it actually felt comforting. I could feel him there, sort of at the side, all day until I was able to hear his thoughts.

W: Yes, I woke up that day feeling like I was warm. Warm sounds like a silly way to describe it, but I could feel her presence and it just made me feel good, like down to the core.

A: I think we went about two days before we could talk to one another. It was a constant inner monologue. I wanted to tell him everything the second I heard his voice.

Q: How did you end up meeting or finding each other?

A: We were quite lucky that we only lived about an hour away from each other. We suggested meeting in Bristol for the day because it meant we’d have things to do, and we could leave whenever we wanted if it went badly. He waited for me at the train station and when I saw him by the platform it felt like seeing the sun for the first time.

W: I was quite nervous meeting her because already I knew that I was in quite deep. To be honest, I wasn’t even thinking about if I’d find her attractive because I already knew I would. Everything about her felt right, and when she came off the platform it was like having my breath stolen from me but paradoxically, I could breathe easier knowing she was there and she was mine. 

Q: Had you been in a relationship during your time discovering one another?

W: No, and I think again we were lucky in that regard. We’ve all heard stories about people already being married, engaged, or in serious relationships learning that they aren’t soulmates. We were both single and I think that’s why we were able to surrender to the magic of it.

A: I don’t know how we would have handled it had we already been committed to other people. The pull towards him is irresistible and I have great respect for those who are going through that tough situation right now.

[…]

THE SCIENCE OF SOULMATES

Natasha Waters - Edited for Metro UK by Miles Kuyer

Before we begin, it is critical that some discussion on the historical context regarding the Era Shift is initiated as to better understand the complexities arising within the studies of Soul Searching, and the concept of the soulmate bonding itself. Furthermore, I would like to point out that this paper exists only as a method of summarising and categorizing what is known, confirmed, and defined in Soul Searching. New discoveries are being made daily given the tumultuous and varying nature of the science, and so I make no attempt to tangentially comment on, or speak to, what may still be considered hypothetical or theory as these are wholly outside of my qualifications. While there is little progress in the study of how soulmate bonding came into fruition (i.e. the direct connection between ion proportion and pheromone detection), there are many things within scientific circles considered to be true and founded, and my hope is to present these to the public to act as a definitive guide on the subject.

In July of 2010, two separate sunspots were discovered on the Sun’s photosphere, each with a diameter of approximately 75,000km in what was eventually discerned to be opposite magnetic polarity. Each spot traveled at the same velocity and propulsion for two days before converging on the photosphere as one critical mass event with a spot diameter of 160,000km. While it is normal for sunspots of this size to endure for a timeframe that varies between two to seven days, this spot endured for three weeks before resulting in a coronal loop. This became the first of many small solar flares across a six month period.

In September of 2010, two other sunspots were discovered in the exact same positions, however these only had diameters of 50,000km. They followed the same trajectory before converging into a single spot with a diameter of 110,000km. The single spot endured for one week before resulting in yet another coronal loop. 

In March of 2011, a coronal mass ejection of 1 × 10^25 joules was released in the position where the two sunspots had converged and decayed. This coronal mass ejection resulted in possibly the largest solar flare we had seen in three decades and reached Earth’s atmosphere in the early hours of March 27th.

Four days later, the first soulmate couple was reported on American local broadcast station Channel 5 in the state of Maryland.

Scientific circles have been able to connect the events of the solar flare to the discovery of soul mate bonding, and Soul Searching, due to the processes through which the electrons and ions were able to restructure neurological responses within the human brain. Through various methods of MRI and X-Ray technologies, we are able to state with absolute certainty that the amygdala has seemingly adapted to respond to pheromone triggers across long distances.

While it is still difficult to accurately discern which other parts of the brain have been affected, as the case study for this issue could undoubtedly be humanity itself - especially with each soul bond differing from case to case - there is confidence that the Reticular Activation System, Temporal lobes, and Limbic systems have all evolved or adapted since the solar flare of 2011. 

[…]

HE STOLE HER CAR AFTER SHE LEFT HIM FOR HER SOUL MATE

[…]

Tune in TONIGHT on Channel 4 to watch The Bond, the latest reality show from the makers -

[…] 

Two years after the Era Shift, many adults are still trying to adapt to the ways in which their soul bond will take effect. Not least of which are a group of individuals from Manchester who have come together as a support group after the loss of major senses.

‘I thought I was terminally ill,’ says Catherine Fisher, 30. ‘You really can’t imagine what it’s like to wake up in the morning and suddenly…everything is so grey. I’m still not used to it, really. My memories are all in colour, and I have pictures of events that I know are in colour but I can’t see them that way.’

Within the group, there are many, underlying feelings regarding the concept of the soul mate as a whole. 

‘We thought it was supposed to be for the betterment of humanity, you know?’ says Daniel Goddard, 36. ‘I was married to a woman I really did love and we have a beautiful daughter, but how do you tell her mommy and daddy aren’t meant to be together? And how do you explain to your wife that you love her, but it’s not enough? And how can you tell me it’s ok I can’t hear music until I meet the person I’m supposed to be with? I know people have it worse off, really I do, but it’s sh**.’

You shut the paper with a huff and rest your head against the wall of the tube carriage, turning the volume of your music up to drown out the roar. Once again, no Sudoku puzzles. The usual page overrun by redundant soul bond news.

Two years on and still the Era Shift seemed to consume the media, the public, the world. As if this was the only thing to care about. As if love was the only newsworthy event because the lack of choice suddenly made it exciting or mysterious. People falling in and out of love made the front page just as often as a world leader or the start of a new war, and both topics make you feel uneasy and uncomfortable in equal measures.

Love has become an irresistible force and consequently, the heart is now an immovable object. Logically, neither can truly exist. Logically, a love like this should be impossible. Choice of partner has been eradicated, replaced instead with a forced paradox of biblical proportions and you can’t find it in your heart to be pleased.

Some days, admittedly, you feel you may be too ungrateful or scornful. You’ve heard the stories of those who’ve lost colour vision, the ability to hear music, the doom clock on the arm that is constantly counting down, and you know, in some way, you’ve been blessed. Ever since the flare, you’ve felt no discernible or ominous change. Your body and your mind have belonged completely to you, always, never intruded on by someone else’s thoughts or feelings and for this you are thankful.

But you feel the same. Unchanged and unmoved, you’ve yet to feel any sort of connection to humanity beyond the basic framework of how things worked before, and you almost feel as though you are the only one who’s been left behind. 

You think you’re supposed to feel part of a grand design. Perhaps, you should feel an anxious sort of excitement that washes over you at whim, whenever you think about prospect or opportunity or fate. Instead, you feel nothing but a tepid neutrality that leaves you feeling bored and, truthfully, bitterly disinterested.

Your thoughts are interrupted by the sensation of being watched…admired. The hairs on your arms start to rise in knowledge and slight discomfort, and you release a quiet sigh.

You remember when tube journeys were an anonymous, rather stoic affair. Not long ago, you felt like you could fade into the sea of faces in a tube carriage, enjoying the comfortable silence that came with the ride. Now, even with your eyes closed, you can feel eyes scanning your face, searching for some kind of trigger or shock that says she’s the one. Two years ago, this kind of scrutiny would have been impolite and in poor etiquette. Lately, you’ve grown used to it and occasionally welcome it. You’re starting feel comfortable in the disappointment and distraction, sometimes luxuriating in gladness that others are just as lost as you.

As the train comes to a halt, you open your eyes and stand to depart. It’s now that you see who was looking at you, studying you with a quizzical and fascinated stare. You smile brightly, though you know this will have little result. He’s handsome, handsome in all the right ways with broad shoulders and long fingers - a musician with kind eyes, you think, and you know you’d call him your type. He smiles back, but it’s sad - for both you and him.

In another life, you’d call this a meet cute. In another life, maybe you would have slipped him your number. Today, you are strangers and today you are not soulmates, neither of you belonging to the other for any substantial amount of time. And while he will forget you, moving on to the next pretty face to find the right curves and teeth and hair, you will remember him only because he was wrong, a mistake you could have made. And you know that you would have picked him, picked him and relished the disaster of it, had you only been given the chance.

Hesitantly, you depart the train as your heart says goodbye to a man who could have been yours, in another life.

The walk to the pub from Angel station is quick, drenched in uncharacteristic sunshine and tucked away from the busy high street. It helps you recenter yourself, finding joy in the smallness and simplicity of things. Life continues on around you and in the heart of the city, you almost feel as though nothing has changed. There’s comfort here, in the obscurity of city streets and you relish the sensation of being alone with yourself.

When you arrive, Kate is already waiting for you in a corner booth near the back, and she waves at you with an awkward enthusiasm, childlike in its nature. She’s radiating joy, it’s brimming out and over from her smile and into the room, and you’re blinded on impact; she’s even ordered you a cider. 

Immediately, you’re wary. 

‘Hiya,’ you say, shrugging your bag off and onto the cushion between you and the wall. ‘What’s all this about, then?’

‘What do you mean?’ she asks, airily. ‘Can’t I buy you drink?’

‘Kate, you’ve literally never bought me a drink unless it was my birthday.’

She looks down at her own glass, smiling with a warm sort of shyness you haven’t seen since you first met her. It’s unlike her to be so reserved or bashful. Usually, she’s rather frank, even to the point of sometimes catching you off guard with her seemingly absent sense of tact. This is unlike her. She has something she wants to tell you, but she’s afraid of your reaction. She’s afraid of you. 

‘I have some news,’ she begins, lightly. 

‘Of course you do,’ you say, softly, trying to ease her into the conversation. ‘What’s so important it couldn’t wait until after my shift?’ 

‘I bonded last night.’ 

‘Oh…’ 

Words live in your mind and die on your tongue, dissolving before you can birth them into the atmosphere. A slight chill has wandered down your spine, settling in your bones and dropping your stomach with disappointment. For a whole minute, you forget that your surprised sigh is the only sound you’ve made.

‘Wow, that’s incredible!’ You hope this exclamation sounds excited; you’re sure that it doesn’t. 

‘You don’t sound terribly enthusiastic,’ she laughs.

Anyone else, and you know they would have been upset at your reaction. Bonding is meant to be treated like engagement announcements of the past, and your lukewarm response would be considered hurtful and rude. But Kate knows you, knows everything about you down to your core, and she already expected this from you. 

‘No I am, really!’ you backtrack with a laugh. ‘I just…you were like, the one friend, you know? We had the shit end of things. And now I’ve got no one to complain to.’

You’re trying to keep the mood light, lacing your tone with a playfulness you think might have been found on single women before the flare.

As usual, she cuts your words down to the heart of your sentiments.

‘You have a soulmate,’ she presses. ‘I know you do.’

This really isn’t what you wanted, changing her announcement into a debate about you and your seemingly absent soul bond. Truthfully, you’re not in the mood to discuss all the ways you seem to be excluded from a newfound sense of completeness, so you change the subject to something that interests you more. 

‘Whatever,’ you say, dismissively. ‘Let me see the clock.’ 

Resting her right arm on the table with an awed expression, you lean forward to admire the purple-white numbers just below her skin.

23:04:16:17:04:22

Twenty-three years, four months, sixteen days, seventeen hours, four minutes, and twenty-two seconds. That’s how long it took her to find her soulmate.

Unlike many people who were fortunate enough to have a clock that counts down to finding their soulmate, Kate had received a clock that tracked how long it would take. You both found this to be one of the least helpful gifts of the solar flare, and, while it isn’t a major sensory loss, for a time you both considered this to be one of the most traumatizing. 

The morning she woke up and discovered a clock beneath her skin was the first time you ever heard her cry. She’d called in a panic, her breaths falling in quick, shallow succession as her words became mangled in her sobs. Initially, she thought she had been dreaming, but the burn along her flesh was far to tangible to be fiction of the mind. Then, she thought it was a tattoo and, for a brief moment, she felt comforted. But soon, she realized she hadn’t been out the night before and, probably most horrifying of all, the numbers were moving.

They were counting, upwards and towards something, and for days all she did was watch the clock. She’d skipped classes, sat in her bathtub and watched the way the numbers made the water drops glow. After about a week of trying to figure out what it could possibly be counting to, she threatened to cut the numbers out with a kitchen knife. Screaming over the phone, she said they were driving her crazy, that the numbers haunted her even behind her eyes. She was trapped and consumed by time, and if this was what it took to find true love then she didn’t want it at all.

This was her lowest point, her lowest, darkest point, and it’s difficult to have this memory, so visceral and clear in your mind, as you watch her smile at the thing she once so deeply hated.

In the grand scheme of things, you find this to be an incredibly short period of time: to change your mind about the clock, to change your mind about your soulmate - to find your soulmate at all. It’s all happened so fast, and you’re starting to feel left behind.

Shaking your head to clear your head, you lean back and take a large drink of cider. ‘So, tell me how it happened.’

‘It was in Covent Garden actually.’

Your laugh comes out as an unsurprised bark, accidental in the magnitude of its volume. Covent Garden is her favourite part of London. This story almost sounds romanticized and predictable. ‘Of course it was.’ 

‘Ha ha,’ she mocks. ‘He was actually coming out of Whittard’s as I was going down to watch the string quartet, and when I saw him it was…it was like seeing stars.’

‘Stars are just lights in the sky,’ you casually remark with a shrug. ‘They aren’t really that special.’

‘I don’t mean like a standard city night sky,’ she retorts with a roll of her eyes. ‘I mean…imagine whole galaxies blooming in front of you.’

Eyes wide at this statement, you almost choke on your drink. ‘Oh, so suddenly you’re a poet?’ 

‘Maybe I am, now!’ she laughs.

‘So when are you seeing him?’

Her response is terribly quick.

‘Tonight actually.’

Now you do choke on your drink. ‘To-tonight? That’s so soon.’

‘I know,’ she giggles. ‘But within minutes I just wanted to do absolutely everything with him. Like, even right now I’m anxious being away from him.’ 

Everything about this sounds like it’s moving impossibly fast. There’s no courting, no collection of texts to prelude an actual date, no time to actually get to know one another. Perhaps because you’re the only one without the tension and anticipation of emotional connection, it makes you terribly nervous.

‘Please be careful,’ you say, seriously.

‘He’s my soulmate, not a stranger,’ she sighs.

‘I mean he kind of is.’ Your voice is colder than you intended, so you soften yourself before continuing. ‘You’ve known him, what, twenty-four hours and you’re already in this deep?’

She narrows her eyes at you, and you can feel her frankness before she even opens her mouth.

‘You know,’ she says, voice warm but stern. ‘Not long ago we would have considered this standard excitement over a cute guy. I feel like you think it’s different now because we just know we’re meant to be together.’

‘I’d still be telling you to be careful,’ you reply. ‘Especially if he was just some guy and not your soulmate.’

She takes a long sip of her drink and furrows her brow. ‘Yeah, but he is my soulmate, so I don’t think he’s going to hurt me.’

‘I just have to say it, okay?’ It almost sounds like a plea, and perhaps it is.

Her features relax into an expression of gentle understanding, her lips pulled into a sympathetic smile. Today is not the day for arguing.

‘Sometimes I don’t know why you’re so hard on the soulmate thing,’ she says, changing the subject. ‘You know, considering your parents.’

After the Era Shift, most marriages began to dissolve and shatter as nearly everyone had somehow wound up with the wrong partner. There really wasn’t a single person you knew whose family wasn’t broken because of this, except your own. Somehow, when your parents woke up affected by the solar flare, they faced each other in bed and found The One, the one they had shared a bed with for 35 years. They’d spent the morning laughing, touching, and rediscovering each other, the bond only magnifying their love for one another. This was how it was meant to be, you thought, an awakening and discovery of what was already there. It rarely worked out this way. 

‘They were the minority,’ you clarify. ‘And their fate really has nothing to do with mine, you know? They had each other. You have a soulmate. I’m not even sure what I have.’

Kate sips her drink and regards you with a cool stare. She knows there’s more you want to say, and you know she’s already slightly exasperated with you. None of this is new. It’s a discussion you’ve had with her, and many of your other friends, for the past two years and you keep coming back to it like a crutch. You don’t really feel passionate about love, because you’ve been excluded from it for so long. Nor are you passionate about people, but you feel very passionately about free will and you can’t help but feel like it’s been taken from you.

‘Love is complicated,’ you concede. ‘It’s so complex and difficult, and people are always making promises to each other they can barely keep -’

‘That’s why soulmates are a thing now,’ she interjects, smoothly. 

‘Okay, but it tripled divorce rates because suddenly these people weren’t meant to be together.’ 

‘There’s every chance those marriages would have failed along the way, regardless.’ She tries to say it as gently as she can, but it still comes out a little bit callous.

‘Yeah, but not all of them,’ you say, voice rising. ‘Those people entered into a marriage because they loved each other, and some of them would have worked through their issues or weathered that storm because they chose to. That to me is more beautiful than just knowing things are going to be ok because some kind of fate tells you it’s going to be.’

‘I get that, really I do,’ she asserts in hushed tones, trying to coax you back down. ‘But I don’t think you’re counting the fact that you’ll want to choose your soulmate. At every turn, you’ll want to choose them. And no one is saying the problems are gone. You can’t have a relationship that never, ever has an argument, but it makes it easier to forgive.’

‘You’ve literally known yours for a day and you’re already lecturing me,’ you groan, though you can’t seem to hide your laughter.

‘It comes from a place of love,’ she says dryly, reaching out to touch your hand.

You regard each other in silence for a long while, and mentally you’re already preparing for yet another loss. Soon, her time will be entirely taken up with her soulmate. If you do spend time together, it will include a person who effectively turns you into the third-wheel of a nine year friendship. It pains you to see things this way, but you’ve lived through it enough to know this is how it starts and, though you are aware of it, you’re never quite prepared for how it ends. Several of your friends and family have coupled off, their days spent in a marital bliss unlike anything you’d ever witnessed. You know that Kate will always be your friend, but you know, deep down, things will never feel like this again.

Pensive and just a little bit sad, you glance at the clock on your phone and begrudgingly start to gather your things.  

‘I’ve got to head to the shop,’ you say, coming to stand and downing the last of your cider. ‘Tell me how everything goes, yeah?’

‘Will do,’ she replies, standing with you to offer you a hug.

Her embrace is warm and comforting, connected in a way you know you will soon miss. Pulling away from it is almost painful, but you give her a kiss on the cheek and tell her that everything is going to be just fine. You will be just fine. 

The walk to the record shop is short and what would have been a peaceful stroll is now consumed with thoughts of Kate’s bond. You don’t like to consider yourself envious, you don’t envy her clock and you don’t really envy the fact that she’s found her soulmate, but you think you envy her ability to surrender into the dream of it all. She makes it sound and feel easy, makes it sound like something beautiful and wondrous. Sometimes you think with your guard so high and impenetrable, it’s no wonder you haven’t felt any sort of change. 

Pushing open the door to Flashback Records, you’re relieved to see your favourite coworker standing behind the counter cleaning a record. You don’t often get to work with him, seeing as the market for second hand records is rather small. There’s been a slight influx of customers over the years, the advent of soul bonding seeming to make people nostalgic for the romance of tangible, physical music played from a turntable. Still, business is never busy enough to require more than one person on the till. 

‘How long are you here?’ you ask, sliding behind him to get to the employees only closet. 

‘Until about half-six,’ comes his reply, though he doesn’t both to look up from the record he’s cleaning. His blonde hair has fallen into his eyes, and he’s so focused on his task he doesn’t both to brush it away.

‘Nice. Looks like you’re stuck with me for three hours,’ you tease, nudging him with your hip.

‘Don’t!’ he hisses. ‘You’ll make my hand slip and scratch it.’

Rolling your eyes, you start to clock in on the till computer but you briefly become distracted. On the turntable in the back of the store, Chris has chosen to play something that sounds vaguely familiar to you. You know you’ve heard it before, perhaps with a different guitar effect or voice, but you know that you’ve heard it and you know that, at some point, it meant something very dear to you. 

Part of this doesn’t feel like a memory that belongs to you, but you’re fond of the song and the way it tells a story. All at once, you think you’ve figured it out.  

‘Hey, Chris, wasn’t this in Pulp Fiction?’ you ask, frozen in place at the counter. 

Even as you suggest it, it feels wrong. You know it was used in the film, you’re sure of it, but this doesn’t feel like the question you want to be asking or should be asking. The song feels heavier than a soundtrack, heavier than a memory of cinema or cult fan-boy connection.

‘This is Neil Diamond,’ he snorts. ‘How do you not know this song?’

‘I know the song,’ you say quickly, frustrated. ‘Can you just answer my question.’

‘This is the original version,’ he explains, though he doesn’t sound terribly interested. ‘Urge Overkill did a cover of it that was used in Pulp Fiction.’

‘Where’s the sleeve?’ you demand.

He nods in the direction of the end of the counter, and you eagerly reach for the album sleeve. With it in your hands, you get the passing sensation of slipping, like you’ve held this exact item in your hands before, or heard this precise version or sang it to someone important. You know that you haven’t, and think maybe what you’re experiencing is a prosthetic sort of nostalgia, a nostalgia brought on by a wish for a life you could have lived.

Closing your eyes and taking a deep inhale of breath, you center yourself and, as quickly as it came, the moment passes. You decide then that you need this song in some way, need it to be close to you always, so you pull out your phone and add the album to your Spotify. Truthfully, you don’t think anything has ever been as important as this song is, right here, right now.

It’s important that you have this song with you, tonight and for every tomorrow. Important that you make it yours.

[teachanarchy]

Teachers are some of my favorite people in the world. I mean I really love teachers! They tend to be enthusiastic about changing society, and more often than not, they care so deeply about their work and their students. What’s not to like?

As a former teacher myself, I feel so very fortunate to meet teachers from all over the United States in my work. Despite all of the BS that teachers have to deal with in our political climate, they remain optimistic about the state of education, which honestly blows my mind.

It is from this place of love that I work with teachers to help them improve their practice. And with the realities of the “education debt” and considering that 80% of our teachers are White while nearly half (and growing) of our students are youth of Color, part of improving teaching practice means paying more critical attention to race in our schools.

Though I know there are actively racist teachers out there, most White teachers mean well and have no intention of being racist. Yet as people who are inscribed with Whiteness, it is possible for us to act in racist ways no matter our intentions. Uprooting racism from our daily actions takes a lifetime of work.

Thus, as we head into the first weeks of school all over the US, here are 10 ways that White teachers introduce racism into our schools paired with things we can do instead.

1. Lowering or Raising Achievement Expectations Based on Race/Ethnicity

It’s probably best to start with one of the more common and obvious ways that racism can enter teaching practice: our expectations of student ability and achievement.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are constantly inundated with racist messaging about what students can and can’t achieve.

Whether we see media narratives about the math prodigy Asian students or the “ghetto” Black students who are reading 5 grade levels behind, we end up getting pretty clear messages long before we start teaching about what our student can handle.

In my own teaching, I know that I had a hard time actually teaching my students within their ZPDs because I was told from before I even started teaching that they simply weren’t capable of writing complex papers about world events. But they could! All it took was coordinated effort from multiple teachers pushing them as hard as we could!

We know that the expectations students are held to often correlate less to their ability than their race and class, so what should we do about it?

What to Do Instead

First, we need to spend some serious time reflecting about our own internalized biases. We all have them (not sure about yours? Consider taking this test!). And if we are working to understand our biases, then we can begin to mitigate their effects.

Second, we need to be sure that we are using effective, non-culturally-biased measures to determine student ability and to push them to their zones of proximal development. By making sure we are basing the ways we push our students in data drawn from legitimate (if limiting) measures, we can hopefully use that data to check some of our own biases.

2.  Being ‘Race Neutral’ Rather than Culturally Responsive

In my work with teachers, I sometimes meet teachers who claim that they “don’t see Color,” both in naïve attempts to be “progressive” but also in an ill-advised attempt to avoid tracking students based on race/ethnicity.

But our students don’t need a “race neutral” approach to their education.

There is endless research about how students of all races need a culturally responsive education; it’s just that White students who have White teachers are far more likely to receive one.

Culturally responsive teaching is not just a box that we can check with simple changes to curriculum. Instead, it is a pedagogical shift that all teachers must work to cultivate over the course of a career, one that works its way into every aspect of how we teach.

Part of culturally responsive teaching also demands that we not simply focus on the races of our students but, instead, turn the lens on our own racial identity.

Race neutrality lends itself to defensiveness to the ways Whiteness and racism are problematic in our teaching.

Cultural responsiveness demands that we do the difficult work of exploring a different way of being White, one where we see our liberation as bound up with that of our students and their families.

What to Do Instead

Start by reading the amazing literature on culturally responsive teaching, looking to Geneva Gay, Beverly Daniel Tatum, and Gary Howard for starters.

And get creative! One of the most amazing things I see in teachers is the wonderful imagination that so many use to reach students.

Apply that creativity to a race-conscious classroom, and we could see some powerful (and innovative) results.

Then share! Blog about them or publish them in educational publications (while being open to critical feedback) so that we can all learn together.

3. Using Racially Coded Language

With how common racially coded language in the US, there are surely words that enter our common vocab that can do damage to our efforts to build racially just schools.

Whether we’re referring to our students as “ghetto” or to their parents as “tiger moms” or saying “if only the parents cared about their kids education,” there are many overt ways that we can introduce racially coded language that devalues and/or otherizes our students and their families.

Perhaps even more common (particularly for White teachers in poorer, often urban areas) is treating our students as inspiration or poverty porn when talking to other White people.

This is one I know I have done many times. There is no need for me to include details about the harrowing life experiences of my students when talking to friends, yet I do so anyway to express just how “tough” things are for “those kids.”

While we may be able to argue that this is to help our White peers empathize, rarely is this done in any sort of humanizing way.

Rather, we are usually just trying to prove our credentials as a teacher who taught in the “inner city” or “the barrio.”

What to Do Instead

We as educators know the power of language, so we must be extra careful and precise with ours. We need to be hyper vigilant about how we talk about our students and their families/communities.

When we do the work to build relationships and to partner in the areas where we teach, then we see our students and their families as fully-realized human beings, and as a result, we can talk about our students in more humanizing ways.

Thus, we have a responsibility to do more than to just connect with our students. We have a responsibility to act in solidarity toward collective liberation!

4. Intentionally or Unintentionally Mispronouncing Names

One of the more subtle but powerful ways that White teachers inject racism into our schools is in how we engage with names that are different than those we grew up knowing.

Sometimes it shows up in simply not taking the time to learn how to properly pronounce a student’s name – but other times, it’s active resistance.

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard of teachers saying, “Their names are just too hard for me to pronounce,” so they settle for assigning nicknames.

What we communicate with this microaggression is that the student’s identity ought to conform to the world we know, not that we ought to be responsive to the student.

What to Do Instead

Take the time to learn names. Apologize when you get names wrong, and work really hard to learn names the right way.

Sometimes students who are used to White teachers mispronouncing their name will settle for you doing it “good enough.”

Stress that you don’t want “good enough.” You want to call them by the name they want to be called!

5. Enforcing Harsh Discipline Practices That Disproportionately Impact Students of Color

In virtually every school in the country, from the most mono-racial to the most diverse, discipline practices are set up to fail students of Color, both in design and implementation, and there are dire consequences for students who “struggle with discipline problems” in our world of hyper-criminalization.

Ta-Nehisi Coates demonstrated well in a recent interview how a lack of cultural awareness on the part of White teachers can lead to serious consequences for Black students who grow up in violent neighborhoods.

Describing an incident where he was suspended for threatening a teacher who yelled at him in class, he noted how when “you don’t have anything else to lean on” except the basic respect of others, it means something wholly different than for students from a wholly different cultural context to have a teacher scream in their face.

What to Do Instead

In our own classrooms, we have to be willing to carefully investigate how we dole out discipline and work to change our practices.

Do our management procedures reward students whose cultural backgrounds and expressions of, say, showing excitement reflect our own while punishing those who express these things differently?

Perhaps more importantly, though, this is a problem that must be addressed in community.

If you are great about mitigating racial bias in your management but your school has a zero-tolerance discipline system that sees kids leaving in handcuffs for acting out in school, then we must organize together as educators.

It’s time to get cops out of our schools and to demand discipline policies that are based on principles of nonviolence and restorative justice.

6. (Inadvertently) Valuing Whiteness

One of the more insidious ways that White teachers bring racism into schools is in how we (often inadvertently) value Whiteness and European ways of being above all others.

Whether we are strictly teaching the “canon” that is almost exclusively White or using examples in math or science problems that are more accessible to White and/or wealthy students than others, White teachers inject Whiteness into our classrooms all the time.

In my own teaching, I found that I was calling my lightest-skinned students (in an almost all-Black classroom) by name when I couldn’t remember the names as readily of darker-skinned students.

That’s valuing Whiteness.

What to Do Instead

We need to do obvious things like diversifying our curriculum and our materials, but beyond that, we must look inside for the more insidious ways that we value Whiteness.

By questioning all aspects of how we teach to consider whether we are devaluing some people and valuing others, we are taking important steps toward racially just pedagogy.

7. Tokenizing Students’ Cultures to Connect with Them

The other side of the coin that comes with diversifying our curriculum and materials is that it can be done in a tremendously tokenizing way.

If we don’t get to know our students first, then we might assume that our Dominican students and our students from northeastern Mexico all are the same and that they all could relate to a book about the migrant farm struggle in the southwestern US.

Thus, we have to be careful not to tokenize students’ identities in our efforts to connect with them.

What to Do Instead

It’s a lot more work, but we ought to consider waiting to decide on the books we teach or the curricular examples until we’ve had some time to listen to our students and their families.

Ask questions about what they want to learn about, and listen and respond accordingly!

Unfortunately that means that we can’t just teach the same exact ways every year, but there are all sorts of resources to help!

8. Culturally Appropriate in an Effort to Connect with Students

For many of us White teachers who grew up with little-to-know exposure to people and cultures of Color and who don’t have a connection to our own ethnic cultural identities outside of Whiteness (notably, a lack of cultural identity), it can be hard to know how to connect with students.

Unfortunately, this often means appropriating other cultures, particularly those of our students, to try to connect with them.

A friend, mentor, and my co-author in an upcoming piece about White teachers who wish to develop anti-racist ways of being, Shelly Tochluk, cites a time when she wore a lappa (African skirt), an ankh around her neck, and carried a djembe to class in a misguided effort to connect.

Reflecting on the experience, Shelly notes that it would have been far better to “include more African American voices into the curriculum.”

If you’re not sure exactly why this is a problem, perhaps look here and here.

Otherwise…

What to Do Instead

Invest in understanding your own ethnic, religious, and cultural heritage (particularly that from before your people became White) through an anti-racist lens.

Then work hard to create space for authentic and accountable cultural exchange in your classroom!

9. Devaluing What Non-Teachers Contribute to the School Community

Everyone is trying to tell teachers how to do their job, and teachers are sick of hearing it from non-teachers.

But from some White teachers, I hear the “if you haven’t taught, don’t tell me how to do my job” mantra used as a blanket for everyone from Bill Gates to the parents and community advocates where they teach.

When we decide that teachers are the gatekeepers to what works in education and when the vast majority of teachers are White, we end up devaluing the insights and knowledge that many people of Color offer.

What to Do Instead

From parents to community leaders to other non-White staff in your building, there’s a lot we can learn if we are willing to humbly listen to people of Color and implement what we learn about race in education.

Actively seek to build relationships across difference and seek input in your classroom.

Hell, invite folks into your classroom to observe and share and teach!

10. Doing Little or Nothing to Advocate for More Teachers and Staff of Color

Finally, and probably most importantly, there’s simply no substitute to teachers of Color teaching students who share their race (see here, here, here, and here).

Unfortunately, many progressive White teachers note that it would be great to have more teachers of Color, but at the end of the day, what are we doing about it?

What to Do Instead

Organize! It’s what teachers do so well! Pressure our unions to make hiring teachers of Color the top priority.

Advocate for alternative licensing options for paraprofessionals and teaching aides (who are disproportionately people of Color, especially in cities). Get on hiring committees at your school and ask hard questions about what we consider “qualified candidates.”

This is somewhere that well-meaning White teachers can have a profound impact if we’re willing to invest our energy.

***

Regardless of what it looks like, we need more White teachers who are willing to do the hard work of combatting the subtle racism we bring into our schools while working vociferously to change our own pedagogies and make our schools more racially just places!

If not now, when? If not us, who?

[emlydunstan]

6 Things Everyone Should Know About Children in Families with Mental Illness

I grew up with a mentally ill father. More than once, I woke up on the “morning after” my father was institutionalized during a mental breakdown. My father would hallucinate that someone or something was out to get him: aliens, God, the FBI, his coworkers, famous people. It was usually the culmination of months of paranoia—a hard stop on reality during which my father would scream accusations at people in public, moan and sob at the top of his lungs, and act like a trapped animal trying to elude capture if someone came near him.My mother always found a way to trick my dad into checking into a hospital for treatment. Waking up midweek at either of my grandparents’ houses was a sure sign that something had gone wrong with my dad.My father’s illness progressed gradually over time. He was briefly institutionalized when I was five, again when I was six, and then, lastly, when I was 12. All three times, my family welcomed back a functional, but not healed, father. Although doctors deemed him treated and sent him home, his behaviors remained bizarre and upsetting to me.When I was younger, my father was distant, yet never disturbing. We did some of the typical father-son activities: went to football and basketball games at the local university, talked about sports, and visited his parents to have snacks and throw darts with my grandfather. But then, when I was 12, he publicly accused my family of being aliens sent to harvest his testicles.After that, he changed forever: talking to himself in public, watching Catholic mass on TV three times daily, and amassing a basement full of unopened books, records, CDs, and videos. My father’s illness had a huge impact on who I was and how I developed as a teenager, and also on how I’ve developed as an adult.We frequently turn our attention to mental illness in the aftermath of horrific acts. We wonder what makes people do crazy things, and how we can we prevent these tragedies. Politicians debate the issue, yet we see little movement towards a resolution. Our community members ask why there isn’t more support for identifying and treating mental health problems. Children in families with mental illness ask this same question every day.But we don't talk enough about the children who live with, and rely on, a family member with a mental illness. What sort of support do they need and how can we provide it?Here are six things I think everyone should know about children in families where one or more members have a mental health condition.1) They need to know that their loved one is not “nuts,” “crazy,” and “psycho.”I hated having a crazy family. I knew it was bad and I knew it made me a bad person, without even thinking about it. The media handed me much of the stigma I attached to mental illness. I saw reports on the news of a “psycho” killer on the loose. The TV roared with recorded laugh tracks when someone did something “nuts” and acted like a “loony”—words that sound silly unless you internalize them because they reflect someone responsible for your creation.The media portrays crazy as synonymous with criminal, violent, and murderous.I remember lying in bed the night before my father was due to come home from the hospital. I vowed to keep an eye on him. I knew he would come home and want to kill his family. The TV told me this is what crazy people do. I’d protect my mother and sister, damn it. Instead, he moped around acting confused, talking to himself, and spending all his money on useless records, CDs, and videos that sat piled and unopened in the basement. My father ignored me completely. He managed to hold down his job, but his family fell apart around him.I turned into the one who wanted to become violent. Watching my functional yet useless-to-me-as-a-parent father enraged and embarrassed me. The homeless men on the streets of D.C. were the only other people I saw talking to themselves in public as adamantly as my father talked to himself in public and at home. I walked the halls of my school fearing I had “Son of a crazy man” written on my chest. I stood as far from my father as possible when we were in public. He didn’t seem to notice. He was busy crossing himself and muttering in a half-shout about God and the devil.The media freely hands out stigmas, particularly for mental illness. This is unacceptable. Many successful people are managing mental illness, and most never harm a soul. Numerous friends and family members are better people because they know and love someone who has a mental health diagnosis. We should discuss mental illness as a serious topic, worthy of respect to both the people with the mental health condition and their families.2) They feel they are alone.Growing up, I usually felt alone. I was the only person I knew with a family like mine, except for my younger sister. I looked at my friends’ families and they seemed normal.My father hallucinating Martians with a mission to harvest his testicles had replaced his family. He talked to himself and gestured wildly in public. I didn’t see any of my friends’ parents doing that.My father’s life, a non-stop cycle of work, watching mass on TV, and then shopping for media, seemed different and bad compared to the lives I thought everyone else was living. I didn’t want people to know this about me.I felt disconnected and unable to communicate with friends. I was afraid of discussing my home life, particularly my father. I always preferred to play or stay at a friend’s house. I lived in fear of being exposed as the child with a crazy father. I never brought my father up in conversation. If any of my friends ever met him, I told them my mother was planning to divorce him—something I prayed for daily. I knew it would never happen. She told me she was sticking to her wedding vows. She firmly believed we were better off as a whole family than as a single mom raising two kids on her income alone.I didn’t realize at the time how prevalent mental illness is. Many of my friends likely had parents with mental illness, parents with addictions, or abusive parents. If I had realized anyone had a family life like mine, I would have reached out to try to connect with someone else my age. I was alone and aloof in the solitude I created. In a high school with over a thousand students, I did my best to go unnoticed. I refused to bare my soul, express my emotions, or have anything related to a deep conversation with friends. I knew if I spoke up I might reveal my embarrassing secret—a mentally ill father. All I had to do to feel my stomach squeeze with anxiety was to imagine my peers knowing about my family. I carried the stigma of mental illness internally. No one else had to tell me I was inferior.Keep this in mind if you know a child with a family member with a mental health problem. These children need to know their situation isn’t unique; many others have experienced mental illness or live with someone who has. They know they’ve been dealt an unfair hand. You can’t change that, but you can provide comfort and understanding. My mother used to say that my sister and I were dealing with something that wasn’t fair for kids. That was true. I felt like she understood me when she made statements like that. Empathy goes a long way for helping children in families with mental illness.3) They need free access to behavioral health services.I saw a counselor for a number of years. My mother demanded I attend the meetings at first. As an adult, I am appreciative that she did. I know it cost money she didn’t have. At the time, I was angry and confused at everything. It wasn’t until afterward that I realized the value in seeing the counselor. He was truly my only outlet for emotions. We teach children to go to their parents or a teacher if something is bothering them. If you are in a family with mental illness, you learn to keep your thoughts to yourself. You don’t want to risk having your feelings invalidated by a maniacal laugh or an accusation that you are an alien.In middle school, I called a helpline. The guy answering the call thought I was a liar when I described my father’s actions. He told me nothing I said made sense. I hung up feeling empty, because if the person staffing a helpline couldn’t acknowledge my situation, it proved my family life was shameful and wrong.As an adult, I found out these helplines are often staffed by volunteers, most likely taking social work courses in college. Helpline volunteers need training to handle calls from children such as myself. Never tell a child from a family with mental health problems that what they have seen or heard doesn’t make sense. Of course it doesn't. We must help children deal with how to process the odd acts and the pain their family situation causes. Validating their situation is the first step toward accomplishing this.Children witnessing mental illness up close and personal do not feel like they can share their life with others. Often things aren’t all right, but you won’t find out just by asking. Mental health care services by trained professionals should be the norm for children with mental illness in the family, ideally free of charge. Without mental health interventions, we increase the likelihood that the children will struggle with a mental health challenge themselves. Heredity already increases this risk. Social and economic costs increase exponentially when we fail to treat an illness at the onset—mental healthcare for a child should be proactive, and can be preventative.4) Simple things mean the world to them.Children with a family member who has a mood disorder or other mental health condition fantasize about being “normal.” For me, this meant having a dad who came home and threw a baseball with me. Or better yet, a dad who took me to baseball games, called me “slugger,” and told me how proud he was of me, but didn’t cross himself and utter to God while we sat in the bleachers. I was fully invested in the most prominent cliché about American fatherhood, and I certainly wasn’t seeing examples of my father portrayed in cartoons or sitcoms.Families with mentally ill members need a sense of normalcy. Community support systems need to include an understanding of the trauma these children are going through. Our focus should shift from what we consider normal to how a family with mental illness might define normal. Children going home to unstable or destructive parents need outside support so they can focus their energy on constructive tasks and find their talents. They want understanding and love.5) They don’t trust stability—they crave the excitement of drama.You quickly get used to a series of peaks and valleys when you live with mentally ill family members: the adrenaline rush of watching your father screaming that the FBI is after him as he refuses to come inside the house; the thrill of a car ride when your father tells you he might get reassigned to an office in outer space, as he swerves through rush hour traffic; waking up every day unsure what to expect. These adrenaline rushes become addictive.I realized in my mid-30s that I was living a cycle of adrenaline-fueled drama. I could never sit still and accept the current situation. If things were okay, I’d have to get drunk and destroy something. I’m less than two years out of an abusive relationship with alcohol—one that stunted my professional and personal growth almost as much as growing up with a father with mental illness. I pressed the reset button on progress every time I chose to get drunk. I found comfort in the whirlwind of negative activity that followed a binge drinking session that might end with me sleeping in the backseat of my car.If things were bad, I’d have to stay up all night worrying about what was next. My mind was stuck on finding the drama in every situation. I reflect on my childhood and I can see where this started: fretting over the next breakdown, experiencing the adrenaline rush of watching my father start speaking in tongues in the middle of the mall, and knowing that any calm moment was just the prelude to the next screaming match between my parents.Youth in these families develop a craving for drama. We don’t have the right to judge these children. We have the responsibility to understand that a child might continually act out in school, commit crimes to end up in juvenile detention, set fires, or create lists of people they would like to see harmed. These children spend a lot of time contemplating their fate. Will they suffer from the same illness as their parent? This question swirled in my head and rung in my ears as I grew up. I made a number of poor decisions with the mindset that insanity might be my destiny, so why worry about the future.6) They need exposure to adults who behave like adults.One of the most confusing things for me was leaving the family and not realizing what a responsible adult male is supposed to do. I graduated high school into a great abyss of confusion. My male role model taught me everything I didn’t want to be, but I had no clue how to go about finding what I wanted to be. Yes, I had years of counseling that was comforting during the time I was in it. But I did not have a roadmap or even a trail of breadcrumbs to follow a path to becoming a responsible adult. I had fear and uncertainty.Children without suitable adult role models at home need to see how adults take on their duties and responsibilities. We need to connect children, especially once they are teenagers, with role models through school and after-school programs. We should be proactive in offering our advice and experience to children in mentally ill families.We are all part of raising the future, whether our children are from families with mental illness or not. We need to have a generation that stops passing along the stigma of mental illness. We need to remove the belief that being mentally ill means you aren’t a part of the “normal” piece of society. We can do this by publicly saying that someone can successfully manage mental illness and have a great life, and by not blaming what goes wrong on “crazy” people.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241841 https://www.thefix.com/6-things-everyone-should-know-about-children-families-mental-illness

[alexdmorgan30]

6 Things Everyone Should Know About Children in Families with Mental Illness

I grew up with a mentally ill father. More than once, I woke up on the “morning after” my father was institutionalized during a mental breakdown. My father would hallucinate that someone or something was out to get him: aliens, God, the FBI, his coworkers, famous people. It was usually the culmination of months of paranoia—a hard stop on reality during which my father would scream accusations at people in public, moan and sob at the top of his lungs, and act like a trapped animal trying to elude capture if someone came near him.My mother always found a way to trick my dad into checking into a hospital for treatment. Waking up midweek at either of my grandparents’ houses was a sure sign that something had gone wrong with my dad.My father’s illness progressed gradually over time. He was briefly institutionalized when I was five, again when I was six, and then, lastly, when I was 12. All three times, my family welcomed back a functional, but not healed, father. Although doctors deemed him treated and sent him home, his behaviors remained bizarre and upsetting to me.When I was younger, my father was distant, yet never disturbing. We did some of the typical father-son activities: went to football and basketball games at the local university, talked about sports, and visited his parents to have snacks and throw darts with my grandfather. But then, when I was 12, he publicly accused my family of being aliens sent to harvest his testicles.After that, he changed forever: talking to himself in public, watching Catholic mass on TV three times daily, and amassing a basement full of unopened books, records, CDs, and videos. My father’s illness had a huge impact on who I was and how I developed as a teenager, and also on how I’ve developed as an adult.We frequently turn our attention to mental illness in the aftermath of horrific acts. We wonder what makes people do crazy things, and how we can we prevent these tragedies. Politicians debate the issue, yet we see little movement towards a resolution. Our community members ask why there isn’t more support for identifying and treating mental health problems. Children in families with mental illness ask this same question every day.But we don't talk enough about the children who live with, and rely on, a family member with a mental illness. What sort of support do they need and how can we provide it?Here are six things I think everyone should know about children in families where one or more members have a mental health condition.1) They need to know that their loved one is not “nuts,” “crazy,” and “psycho.”I hated having a crazy family. I knew it was bad and I knew it made me a bad person, without even thinking about it. The media handed me much of the stigma I attached to mental illness. I saw reports on the news of a “psycho” killer on the loose. The TV roared with recorded laugh tracks when someone did something “nuts” and acted like a “loony”—words that sound silly unless you internalize them because they reflect someone responsible for your creation.The media portrays crazy as synonymous with criminal, violent, and murderous.I remember lying in bed the night before my father was due to come home from the hospital. I vowed to keep an eye on him. I knew he would come home and want to kill his family. The TV told me this is what crazy people do. I’d protect my mother and sister, damn it. Instead, he moped around acting confused, talking to himself, and spending all his money on useless records, CDs, and videos that sat piled and unopened in the basement. My father ignored me completely. He managed to hold down his job, but his family fell apart around him.I turned into the one who wanted to become violent. Watching my functional yet useless-to-me-as-a-parent father enraged and embarrassed me. The homeless men on the streets of D.C. were the only other people I saw talking to themselves in public as adamantly as my father talked to himself in public and at home. I walked the halls of my school fearing I had “Son of a crazy man” written on my chest. I stood as far from my father as possible when we were in public. He didn’t seem to notice. He was busy crossing himself and muttering in a half-shout about God and the devil.The media freely hands out stigmas, particularly for mental illness. This is unacceptable. Many successful people are managing mental illness, and most never harm a soul. Numerous friends and family members are better people because they know and love someone who has a mental health diagnosis. We should discuss mental illness as a serious topic, worthy of respect to both the people with the mental health condition and their families.2) They feel they are alone.Growing up, I usually felt alone. I was the only person I knew with a family like mine, except for my younger sister. I looked at my friends’ families and they seemed normal.My father hallucinating Martians with a mission to harvest his testicles had replaced his family. He talked to himself and gestured wildly in public. I didn’t see any of my friends’ parents doing that.My father’s life, a non-stop cycle of work, watching mass on TV, and then shopping for media, seemed different and bad compared to the lives I thought everyone else was living. I didn’t want people to know this about me.I felt disconnected and unable to communicate with friends. I was afraid of discussing my home life, particularly my father. I always preferred to play or stay at a friend’s house. I lived in fear of being exposed as the child with a crazy father. I never brought my father up in conversation. If any of my friends ever met him, I told them my mother was planning to divorce him—something I prayed for daily. I knew it would never happen. She told me she was sticking to her wedding vows. She firmly believed we were better off as a whole family than as a single mom raising two kids on her income alone.I didn’t realize at the time how prevalent mental illness is. Many of my friends likely had parents with mental illness, parents with addictions, or abusive parents. If I had realized anyone had a family life like mine, I would have reached out to try to connect with someone else my age. I was alone and aloof in the solitude I created. In a high school with over a thousand students, I did my best to go unnoticed. I refused to bare my soul, express my emotions, or have anything related to a deep conversation with friends. I knew if I spoke up I might reveal my embarrassing secret—a mentally ill father. All I had to do to feel my stomach squeeze with anxiety was to imagine my peers knowing about my family. I carried the stigma of mental illness internally. No one else had to tell me I was inferior.Keep this in mind if you know a child with a family member with a mental health problem. These children need to know their situation isn’t unique; many others have experienced mental illness or live with someone who has. They know they’ve been dealt an unfair hand. You can’t change that, but you can provide comfort and understanding. My mother used to say that my sister and I were dealing with something that wasn’t fair for kids. That was true. I felt like she understood me when she made statements like that. Empathy goes a long way for helping children in families with mental illness.3) They need free access to behavioral health services.I saw a counselor for a number of years. My mother demanded I attend the meetings at first. As an adult, I am appreciative that she did. I know it cost money she didn’t have. At the time, I was angry and confused at everything. It wasn’t until afterward that I realized the value in seeing the counselor. He was truly my only outlet for emotions. We teach children to go to their parents or a teacher if something is bothering them. If you are in a family with mental illness, you learn to keep your thoughts to yourself. You don’t want to risk having your feelings invalidated by a maniacal laugh or an accusation that you are an alien.In middle school, I called a helpline. The guy answering the call thought I was a liar when I described my father’s actions. He told me nothing I said made sense. I hung up feeling empty, because if the person staffing a helpline couldn’t acknowledge my situation, it proved my family life was shameful and wrong.As an adult, I found out these helplines are often staffed by volunteers, most likely taking social work courses in college. Helpline volunteers need training to handle calls from children such as myself. Never tell a child from a family with mental health problems that what they have seen or heard doesn’t make sense. Of course it doesn't. We must help children deal with how to process the odd acts and the pain their family situation causes. Validating their situation is the first step toward accomplishing this.Children witnessing mental illness up close and personal do not feel like they can share their life with others. Often things aren’t all right, but you won’t find out just by asking. Mental health care services by trained professionals should be the norm for children with mental illness in the family, ideally free of charge. Without mental health interventions, we increase the likelihood that the children will struggle with a mental health challenge themselves. Heredity already increases this risk. Social and economic costs increase exponentially when we fail to treat an illness at the onset—mental healthcare for a child should be proactive, and can be preventative.4) Simple things mean the world to them.Children with a family member who has a mood disorder or other mental health condition fantasize about being “normal.” For me, this meant having a dad who came home and threw a baseball with me. Or better yet, a dad who took me to baseball games, called me “slugger,” and told me how proud he was of me, but didn’t cross himself and utter to God while we sat in the bleachers. I was fully invested in the most prominent cliché about American fatherhood, and I certainly wasn’t seeing examples of my father portrayed in cartoons or sitcoms.Families with mentally ill members need a sense of normalcy. Community support systems need to include an understanding of the trauma these children are going through. Our focus should shift from what we consider normal to how a family with mental illness might define normal. Children going home to unstable or destructive parents need outside support so they can focus their energy on constructive tasks and find their talents. They want understanding and love.5) They don’t trust stability—they crave the excitement of drama.You quickly get used to a series of peaks and valleys when you live with mentally ill family members: the adrenaline rush of watching your father screaming that the FBI is after him as he refuses to come inside the house; the thrill of a car ride when your father tells you he might get reassigned to an office in outer space, as he swerves through rush hour traffic; waking up every day unsure what to expect. These adrenaline rushes become addictive.I realized in my mid-30s that I was living a cycle of adrenaline-fueled drama. I could never sit still and accept the current situation. If things were okay, I’d have to get drunk and destroy something. I’m less than two years out of an abusive relationship with alcohol—one that stunted my professional and personal growth almost as much as growing up with a father with mental illness. I pressed the reset button on progress every time I chose to get drunk. I found comfort in the whirlwind of negative activity that followed a binge drinking session that might end with me sleeping in the backseat of my car.If things were bad, I’d have to stay up all night worrying about what was next. My mind was stuck on finding the drama in every situation. I reflect on my childhood and I can see where this started: fretting over the next breakdown, experiencing the adrenaline rush of watching my father start speaking in tongues in the middle of the mall, and knowing that any calm moment was just the prelude to the next screaming match between my parents.Youth in these families develop a craving for drama. We don’t have the right to judge these children. We have the responsibility to understand that a child might continually act out in school, commit crimes to end up in juvenile detention, set fires, or create lists of people they would like to see harmed. These children spend a lot of time contemplating their fate. Will they suffer from the same illness as their parent? This question swirled in my head and rung in my ears as I grew up. I made a number of poor decisions with the mindset that insanity might be my destiny, so why worry about the future.6) They need exposure to adults who behave like adults.One of the most confusing things for me was leaving the family and not realizing what a responsible adult male is supposed to do. I graduated high school into a great abyss of confusion. My male role model taught me everything I didn’t want to be, but I had no clue how to go about finding what I wanted to be. Yes, I had years of counseling that was comforting during the time I was in it. But I did not have a roadmap or even a trail of breadcrumbs to follow a path to becoming a responsible adult. I had fear and uncertainty.Children without suitable adult role models at home need to see how adults take on their duties and responsibilities. We need to connect children, especially once they are teenagers, with role models through school and after-school programs. We should be proactive in offering our advice and experience to children in mentally ill families.We are all part of raising the future, whether our children are from families with mental illness or not. We need to have a generation that stops passing along the stigma of mental illness. We need to remove the belief that being mentally ill means you aren’t a part of the “normal” piece of society. We can do this by publicly saying that someone can successfully manage mental illness and have a great life, and by not blaming what goes wrong on “crazy” people.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241841 http://bit.ly/2BrFgL1

[pitz182]

6 Things Everyone Should Know About Children in Families with Mental Illness

I grew up with a mentally ill father. More than once, I woke up on the “morning after” my father was institutionalized during a mental breakdown. My father would hallucinate that someone or something was out to get him: aliens, God, the FBI, his coworkers, famous people. It was usually the culmination of months of paranoia—a hard stop on reality during which my father would scream accusations at people in public, moan and sob at the top of his lungs, and act like a trapped animal trying to elude capture if someone came near him.My mother always found a way to trick my dad into checking into a hospital for treatment. Waking up midweek at either of my grandparents’ houses was a sure sign that something had gone wrong with my dad.My father’s illness progressed gradually over time. He was briefly institutionalized when I was five, again when I was six, and then, lastly, when I was 12. All three times, my family welcomed back a functional, but not healed, father. Although doctors deemed him treated and sent him home, his behaviors remained bizarre and upsetting to me.When I was younger, my father was distant, yet never disturbing. We did some of the typical father-son activities: went to football and basketball games at the local university, talked about sports, and visited his parents to have snacks and throw darts with my grandfather. But then, when I was 12, he publicly accused my family of being aliens sent to harvest his testicles.After that, he changed forever: talking to himself in public, watching Catholic mass on TV three times daily, and amassing a basement full of unopened books, records, CDs, and videos. My father’s illness had a huge impact on who I was and how I developed as a teenager, and also on how I’ve developed as an adult.We frequently turn our attention to mental illness in the aftermath of horrific acts. We wonder what makes people do crazy things, and how we can we prevent these tragedies. Politicians debate the issue, yet we see little movement towards a resolution. Our community members ask why there isn’t more support for identifying and treating mental health problems. Children in families with mental illness ask this same question every day.But we don't talk enough about the children who live with, and rely on, a family member with a mental illness. What sort of support do they need and how can we provide it?Here are six things I think everyone should know about children in families where one or more members have a mental health condition.1) They need to know that their loved one is not “nuts,” “crazy,” and “psycho.”I hated having a crazy family. I knew it was bad and I knew it made me a bad person, without even thinking about it. The media handed me much of the stigma I attached to mental illness. I saw reports on the news of a “psycho” killer on the loose. The TV roared with recorded laugh tracks when someone did something “nuts” and acted like a “loony”—words that sound silly unless you internalize them because they reflect someone responsible for your creation.The media portrays crazy as synonymous with criminal, violent, and murderous.I remember lying in bed the night before my father was due to come home from the hospital. I vowed to keep an eye on him. I knew he would come home and want to kill his family. The TV told me this is what crazy people do. I’d protect my mother and sister, damn it. Instead, he moped around acting confused, talking to himself, and spending all his money on useless records, CDs, and videos that sat piled and unopened in the basement. My father ignored me completely. He managed to hold down his job, but his family fell apart around him.I turned into the one who wanted to become violent. Watching my functional yet useless-to-me-as-a-parent father enraged and embarrassed me. The homeless men on the streets of D.C. were the only other people I saw talking to themselves in public as adamantly as my father talked to himself in public and at home. I walked the halls of my school fearing I had “Son of a crazy man” written on my chest. I stood as far from my father as possible when we were in public. He didn’t seem to notice. He was busy crossing himself and muttering in a half-shout about God and the devil.The media freely hands out stigmas, particularly for mental illness. This is unacceptable. Many successful people are managing mental illness, and most never harm a soul. Numerous friends and family members are better people because they know and love someone who has a mental health diagnosis. We should discuss mental illness as a serious topic, worthy of respect to both the people with the mental health condition and their families.2) They feel they are alone.Growing up, I usually felt alone. I was the only person I knew with a family like mine, except for my younger sister. I looked at my friends’ families and they seemed normal.My father hallucinating Martians with a mission to harvest his testicles had replaced his family. He talked to himself and gestured wildly in public. I didn’t see any of my friends’ parents doing that.My father’s life, a non-stop cycle of work, watching mass on TV, and then shopping for media, seemed different and bad compared to the lives I thought everyone else was living. I didn’t want people to know this about me.I felt disconnected and unable to communicate with friends. I was afraid of discussing my home life, particularly my father. I always preferred to play or stay at a friend’s house. I lived in fear of being exposed as the child with a crazy father. I never brought my father up in conversation. If any of my friends ever met him, I told them my mother was planning to divorce him—something I prayed for daily. I knew it would never happen. She told me she was sticking to her wedding vows. She firmly believed we were better off as a whole family than as a single mom raising two kids on her income alone.I didn’t realize at the time how prevalent mental illness is. Many of my friends likely had parents with mental illness, parents with addictions, or abusive parents. If I had realized anyone had a family life like mine, I would have reached out to try to connect with someone else my age. I was alone and aloof in the solitude I created. In a high school with over a thousand students, I did my best to go unnoticed. I refused to bare my soul, express my emotions, or have anything related to a deep conversation with friends. I knew if I spoke up I might reveal my embarrassing secret—a mentally ill father. All I had to do to feel my stomach squeeze with anxiety was to imagine my peers knowing about my family. I carried the stigma of mental illness internally. No one else had to tell me I was inferior.Keep this in mind if you know a child with a family member with a mental health problem. These children need to know their situation isn’t unique; many others have experienced mental illness or live with someone who has. They know they’ve been dealt an unfair hand. You can’t change that, but you can provide comfort and understanding. My mother used to say that my sister and I were dealing with something that wasn’t fair for kids. That was true. I felt like she understood me when she made statements like that. Empathy goes a long way for helping children in families with mental illness.3) They need free access to behavioral health services.I saw a counselor for a number of years. My mother demanded I attend the meetings at first. As an adult, I am appreciative that she did. I know it cost money she didn’t have. At the time, I was angry and confused at everything. It wasn’t until afterward that I realized the value in seeing the counselor. He was truly my only outlet for emotions. We teach children to go to their parents or a teacher if something is bothering them. If you are in a family with mental illness, you learn to keep your thoughts to yourself. You don’t want to risk having your feelings invalidated by a maniacal laugh or an accusation that you are an alien.In middle school, I called a helpline. The guy answering the call thought I was a liar when I described my father’s actions. He told me nothing I said made sense. I hung up feeling empty, because if the person staffing a helpline couldn’t acknowledge my situation, it proved my family life was shameful and wrong.As an adult, I found out these helplines are often staffed by volunteers, most likely taking social work courses in college. Helpline volunteers need training to handle calls from children such as myself. Never tell a child from a family with mental health problems that what they have seen or heard doesn’t make sense. Of course it doesn't. We must help children deal with how to process the odd acts and the pain their family situation causes. Validating their situation is the first step toward accomplishing this.Children witnessing mental illness up close and personal do not feel like they can share their life with others. Often things aren’t all right, but you won’t find out just by asking. Mental health care services by trained professionals should be the norm for children with mental illness in the family, ideally free of charge. Without mental health interventions, we increase the likelihood that the children will struggle with a mental health challenge themselves. Heredity already increases this risk. Social and economic costs increase exponentially when we fail to treat an illness at the onset—mental healthcare for a child should be proactive, and can be preventative.4) Simple things mean the world to them.Children with a family member who has a mood disorder or other mental health condition fantasize about being “normal.” For me, this meant having a dad who came home and threw a baseball with me. Or better yet, a dad who took me to baseball games, called me “slugger,” and told me how proud he was of me, but didn’t cross himself and utter to God while we sat in the bleachers. I was fully invested in the most prominent cliché about American fatherhood, and I certainly wasn’t seeing examples of my father portrayed in cartoons or sitcoms.Families with mentally ill members need a sense of normalcy. Community support systems need to include an understanding of the trauma these children are going through. Our focus should shift from what we consider normal to how a family with mental illness might define normal. Children going home to unstable or destructive parents need outside support so they can focus their energy on constructive tasks and find their talents. They want understanding and love.5) They don’t trust stability—they crave the excitement of drama.You quickly get used to a series of peaks and valleys when you live with mentally ill family members: the adrenaline rush of watching your father screaming that the FBI is after him as he refuses to come inside the house; the thrill of a car ride when your father tells you he might get reassigned to an office in outer space, as he swerves through rush hour traffic; waking up every day unsure what to expect. These adrenaline rushes become addictive.I realized in my mid-30s that I was living a cycle of adrenaline-fueled drama. I could never sit still and accept the current situation. If things were okay, I’d have to get drunk and destroy something. I’m less than two years out of an abusive relationship with alcohol—one that stunted my professional and personal growth almost as much as growing up with a father with mental illness. I pressed the reset button on progress every time I chose to get drunk. I found comfort in the whirlwind of negative activity that followed a binge drinking session that might end with me sleeping in the backseat of my car.If things were bad, I’d have to stay up all night worrying about what was next. My mind was stuck on finding the drama in every situation. I reflect on my childhood and I can see where this started: fretting over the next breakdown, experiencing the adrenaline rush of watching my father start speaking in tongues in the middle of the mall, and knowing that any calm moment was just the prelude to the next screaming match between my parents.Youth in these families develop a craving for drama. We don’t have the right to judge these children. We have the responsibility to understand that a child might continually act out in school, commit crimes to end up in juvenile detention, set fires, or create lists of people they would like to see harmed. These children spend a lot of time contemplating their fate. Will they suffer from the same illness as their parent? This question swirled in my head and rung in my ears as I grew up. I made a number of poor decisions with the mindset that insanity might be my destiny, so why worry about the future.6) They need exposure to adults who behave like adults.One of the most confusing things for me was leaving the family and not realizing what a responsible adult male is supposed to do. I graduated high school into a great abyss of confusion. My male role model taught me everything I didn’t want to be, but I had no clue how to go about finding what I wanted to be. Yes, I had years of counseling that was comforting during the time I was in it. But I did not have a roadmap or even a trail of breadcrumbs to follow a path to becoming a responsible adult. I had fear and uncertainty.Children without suitable adult role models at home need to see how adults take on their duties and responsibilities. We need to connect children, especially once they are teenagers, with role models through school and after-school programs. We should be proactive in offering our advice and experience to children in mentally ill families.We are all part of raising the future, whether our children are from families with mental illness or not. We need to have a generation that stops passing along the stigma of mental illness. We need to remove the belief that being mentally ill means you aren’t a part of the “normal” piece of society. We can do this by publicly saying that someone can successfully manage mental illness and have a great life, and by not blaming what goes wrong on “crazy” people.

[semem-dar]

Hey guys, so i’m not sure how to format this, but i need somewhere to put this where i can get some help.

So, if you know me irl, or you read any of my more serious tags, you probably know that I’m disabled. I’ve been professionally diagnosed with a long list of things, no idea what i have and what was a misdiagnosis, no way to tell because symptoms between them overlap so heavily it could be either, or, or both. Who knows. The total list, as of this year is Autism spectrum disorder, major depression presenting with psychotic symptoms, generalized anxiety disorder, attention deficit disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, gender dysphoria, and two specific phobia: one of heights, and one of needles. All are under some form of medication or theraputic treatment, and have been for years, with only minor progress on anything but the PTSD, I am at least being kept out of crisis-mode and have not attempted suicide for almost a year, so it could always be worse.

The situation is, my family is pushing me to get a job. My mother is pushing the angle that its for my independence and self-esteem, my father is pushing the angle that its my responsibility. I recently turned 21, so i need to either find work, or get on disability and stop asking them for things. Either way, they have made it clear to me that it is unacceptable that i am 21 now and have no work history or source of income. The issues with this come in three flavours: i cannot drive, and i cannot care for myself without regular supervision, and i have little in the way of marketable skills or skillsets. Not to mention the standard mental illness difficulties.

The mental problems come in the standard “autistic with sensory issues” fare. I cant be around bright lights or loud noises, anything brighter than a fluorescent office light is too much, and even with those i often need sunglasses. Loud or sudden noises, anything above say, the level of a car-door shutting is too much and sustained sounds above the level of a printer are intolerable enough that i cannot think around them, freezing up or outright attempting to curl in and cover my ears/face/front and getting nothing done. Being allowed to wear noise-cancelling headphones helps, but muffles conversation to a point i cant understand others. Being around people for more than 4 hours a day, 5 if i push it and am willing to be irritable and upset for the rest of the day is my limit. I have difficulty understanding speech over digital media if i cant watch the lips of whoever is speaking, or be provided with subtitles or a transcript. Telephone-based jobs are right out thanks to this particular issue. I have difficulty holding attention, and cant process complex commands well, or deal with things that aren’t sequenced. I don’t deal well with other peoples emotions, and barely cope with my own. I cannot think of any job that would tolerate a worker like this in your standard retail/restaurant/gas-station entry-level, or anywhere that takes workers without a resume, or anything to put on one did they have one.

Driving, which requires many tasks (keeping track of your hands, both of your feet, the speed, the road lines, other cars, road signs, stoplights, the mirrors, the gas, etc), is impossible for me without risking my life or another drivers. I live rurally, and with no public transport to speak of in my area, I have to rely on my parents to get me places. Their schedules are rotating, and at odd hours of the day, and i have to budget for two hours around their schedules to get me to and from college. With the schedule i have now, and their schedules to work around, i cannot find any work during the week, leaving the few days of the weekend being necessary to find work on. But even this is limited, as I cant go far from home, and I still have to work around my parents rotating schedules since they frequently work weekends.

The usual recommendation at this point is to move somewhere with transportation, but here’s the real kicker. I cannot care for myself on my own. I cannot, on my own power, remember to eat, drink, bathe, or sleep properly. I cannot get my medications in without reminders and double-checks. I have difficulty with any amount of flexibility in a schedule, as i get lost when i cannot check either of my watches and know where i should be and what i should be doing, and will instead simply scroll through blogs or edit code or mod games for hours on end, doing nothing productive or useful. I cannot enforce a schedule myself, and any attempts at reminders through technology or mundane means have repeatedly failed. Ive utilized calendars, day planners, sticky notes, alarm clocks, watches, cellphone reminders, other people calling me to check if ive done something, and any other number of methods. Without another living being hounding after me to get something done, it slips my mind.

At this point, i’m  usually asked, in disbelief, how someone can forget to eat. It’s simple, i do not feel hunger until i am in physical pain from it, and often only eat one meal a day as a result of packing a meal and just, grabbing something out of the bag as i see other people eating. Often, this gets to a point where i forget to eat so long that i wind up in pain. This, as most people know, disinclines one from eating. You hurt, you’re tired, and you feel nauseous, you likely do not want to eat anything thanks to this, and simply want to go to bed. I have been hospitalized before for winding up in such a condition that i couldn’t stand thanks to this odd spiral of not eating. The same goes for drinking. I am lucky if i get more than 10 ounces of fluids in in a day separate from any snacks i might have shoved in a bag or pocket or other carry-able container. It is a wonder I am not sicker than i am regularly.

regardless, the point is made, i have extreme difficulty with remembering and motivating myself to preform basic daily activities, and will often do without to the point i sicken myself if left to my own devices. I assume it is like living with a large, depressed, child. I assume it is unpleasant, irritating, and difficult living with someone with these issues, and can think of no one who would willingly take care of someone they are living with to this degree short of a spouse or the parents of the person. Seeing as i am not exactly a catch for marriage given my life difficulties, lack of income, and lack of looks, and cannot live on my own, im rather stuck in a poor, rural area, with few job opportunities and  even fewer that wouldnt essentially be working in hell for someone like me.

Im certain, by this point, if youre still reading, you understand why im having difficulty finding a job i would want to put myself in, or even be able to tolerate. All of the career options ive considered, that i think i might be happy in, require a degree (which requires money we dont have, and years of student loans, and a job in the interim while you earn the degree), or are too far away, or require a cost upfront (such as starting a home business, or taking up a trade where you have to buy your own materials [any type of craft work]), or simply have skillsets that i can only do part of and would be incompetent to outright incapable of the rest of the skillset.

the longer I think about this, the more depressed and frozen i become, and the less and less it feels like i have any options. I’m at a point in my life where i have been unhappy and stressed and frequently outright suicidal too damn often, and i refuse to even potentially put myself in a place where i risk becoming that again. I dont know how to get past that and force myself to take a standard job. I do not know if i have any other options, with my lack of skills and mostly useless talents. I do not know how to run a buisiness, or have to cost for materials and real trainign needed to learn a craft, or the ability to run off my wn schedule that working from home would require.

i feel like i have no options. I do not want to continue this. I do not want to have no options. I do not want to be here. i do not know how to make this stop. i do not know how i can be 21 and be incompetent enough that i cannot find any sort of work i would be suited for. i do not understand how someone could end up with no motivation or skills or any amount of ability to make money. I do not understand. I do not know how to fix this. Threapy is not helping, medication is not helping, support (what little i can get of it) is not helping, i do not know how to become competent. i do not know how to become a person. i do not know how to get money at a price i am willing to pay or even can pay. I do not understand.

[leviathangourmet]

In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue that well-intentioned adults are unwittingly harming young people by raising them in ways that implicitly convey three untruths:

The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.

The Untruth of Us vs. Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.  

In their telling, the spread of these untruths, especially in the middle and upper classes, helps to explain a spike in mental-health problems among young people and recent tumult on the campuses of highly selective colleges. But if parents and educators change course, they argue, they can raise happier, healthier kids who’ll turn into better citizens.

I liked the book, which has its origins in a 2015 cover story in this magazine. The updated thesis, when fleshed out across detailed chapters, struck me as clearly stated, logically argued, and plausibly true—and the proposed remedies struck me as highly unlikely to do harm.

“Whatever your identity, background, or political ideology,” the authors advise young people, “you will be happier, healthier, stronger, and more likely to succeed in pursuing your own goals” if you do three things:

Seek out challenges “rather than eliminating or avoiding everything that ‘feels unsafe.’”

Free yourself from cognitive distortions “rather than always trusting your initial feelings.”

Take a generous view of other people, and look for nuance, “rather than assuming the worst about people within a simplistic us-versus-them morality.”

They even include practical advice for conveying those lessons in child-rearing. How significant are the ills that they identify relative to all the others that confront higher education or young people generally? I don’t know. But their prescriptions seem sensible, low-cost, likely to help some, and unlikely to prevent other reformers from addressing other problems.

Some critics have praised their work. Thomas Chatterton Williams reviewedthe book favorably in The New York Times. Wesleyan University President Michael Roth’s Washington Post review seemed to endorse the book’s advice in its last paragraph.

Lots of folks who responded to the book more critically argued that it gave short shrift to the thing they regarded as the most pressing problem in society or on campus. Few challenged its core arguments, whatever they were worth.

But I wanted to hear from critics of their central thesis. That’s how I found myself reading Moira Weigel’s review in The Guardian, having seen folks on social media flagging it as a devastating takedown. “Moira Weigel eviscerates with ease ‘The Coddling of the American Mind,’” the biologist Stephen Currywrote. The sociologist Kate Cairns asserted that the review “systematically demolishes” the book, while another observer characterized the review as “an excellent shredding.”

Imagine my surprise when even that review contained a passage that appeared to grant the potential value of the advice at the book’s very core. Weigel wrote:

Despite the title, which suggests cultural or civilisational diagnosis, the checklists and worksheets distributed throughout this book make clear that its genre is self-help. The tips it contains may benefit upper middle class parents. They may benefit students from minority or working class backgrounds who arrive on elite campuses to find that, despite good intentions, those campuses have not fully prepared for them.

It’s the sort of passage that would usually appear in a positive review. It is no small thing to identify a problem that harms families from different economic classes and to offer tips that may help folks in each to help themselves.

But as it turns out, that passage is a brief aside, anomalous for its substantive assessment of the book’s thesis. The review’s first paragraph complains that the book doesn’t discuss financial hardship among college students (though the authors trace the mental-health trends that worry them back to high school and to the wealthiest families, not the ones struggling to pay tuition). An entire section complains that the book’s style “wants above all to be reasonable. Lukianoff and Haidt include adverb after adverb to telegraph how well they have thought things through.” Is it bad to want to be reasonable? Have they thought things through? The merits of such substantive questions are rarely Weigel’s focus, though. Many critiques are implied rather than stated, rendering them unfalsifiable.

The balance of the review is scathingly negative not in its arguments—a few pop up along the way, some concerning peripheral matters—but in its ad hominem attacks and other rhetoric disguised as argument as though its mere trappings confer heft. An argument can be strong or weak, civil or ill-mannered, calm or heated, edifying or misleading. Even the most frustrating arguments, though, offer readers more than the tropes pervading this frustrating review, and other journalistic work of the same genre: Let us call them Idioms of Non-Argument.

The Guardian review is a useful illustrative example in part because its entire mode is foreshadowed in the headline that announces the article:

The Coddling of the American Mind review – how elite US liberals have turned rightwards

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s book sets out to rescue students from ‘microaggressions’ and identity politics. But perhaps they merely resist change that might undermine them

That display copy says: Never mind the merits of the book’s thesis—what’s important here, fellow leftists, is where the authors fall on a left-right ideological spectrum and what psychological factors may be motivating them. What’s a truth proposition when there’s an ongoing culture war to fight?

What unfolds over the body of the review isn’t quite a character assassination of the authors so much as a series of premeditated assaults.

The book is utterly in keeping with the longtime professional interests of both authors, and closely tied to Greg Lukianoff’s personal experience using cognitive behavioral therapy to fight serious depression. But Weigel dismissively speculates that they wrote the book “perhaps, because an article that they published in The Atlantic went viral.” Is she implying that the subject doesn’t justify book-length treatment? Some other dig? Is the line merely included to convey contempt?

Both authors have long records of producing work that is intellectually honest; neither happens to be an ideological conservative. Yet over the course of the review, Weigel compares them not only to Allan Bloom, but also to Dinesh D’Souza, and then, using guilt-by-association tactics, to the alt-right:

Hints of elective affinities between elite liberalism and the “alt-right” have been evident for a while now. The famous essay that Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos wrote in 2016, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” cites Haidt approvingly. At one point Lukianoff and Haidt rehearse a narrative about Herbert Marcuse that has been a staple of white nationalist conspiracy theories about “cultural Marxism” for decades.

Nassim Taleb, whose book Antifragile Haidt and Lukianoff credit with one of their core beliefs and cite repeatedly as inspiration, is a fixture of the far right “manosphere” that gathers on Reddit/pol and returnofkings.com.

The commonality raises questions about the proximity of their enthusiasm for CBT to the vogue for “Stoic” self-help in the Red Pill community, founded on the principle that it is men, rather than women, who are oppressed by society. So, too, does it raise questions about the discipline of psychology – how cognitive and data-driven turns in that field formed Haidt and his colleagues Pinker and Jordan Peterson.

Are Haidt and Lukianoff correct or incorrect about Herbert Marcuse? Is Antifragile a good book? Is cognitive behavioral therapy a worthwhile approach? Is there wisdom to glean from the Stoics or the discipline of psychology? Weigel offers the reader no arguments of substance—just the Idioms of Non-Arguments that all of those things raise questions because ostensibly bad people are tenuously associated with each of them. God help Kevin Bacon if he’s ever the subject of a similarly crafted profile.

The apotheosis of Weigel’s vilification tactics comes a bit later. In the book, the authors recount what they regard as examples of “catastrophizing” on college campuses. But the authors also go out of their way to point out that today’s college students are sometimes behaving totally rationally when they perceive a threat to their physical safety. Among other examples, they flag an apparent rise in hate crimes, a college student’s online threat to “shoot every black person” at the University of Missouri soon after Dylann Storm Roof’s neo-Nazi murder spree, and the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia.

They write:

Students of color facing ongoing threats to their safety, and seeing frequent reports of threats elsewhere, are not new phenomena; the history of race in America is a history of discrimination and intimidation, intertwined with a history of progress. And yet, this new wave of racial intimidation may be particularly upsetting because of recent progress … The shock of Trump’s victory must have been particularly disillusioning for many black students and left-leaning women. Between the president’s repeated racial provocations and the increased visibility of neo-Nazis and their ilk, it became much more plausible than it had been in a long time that “white supremacy,” even using a narrow definition, was not just a relic of the distant past.

Judge for yourselves whether passages like that are fairly or unfairly characterized in the part of Weigel’s review where she likens the authors to a character in a recent Hollywood film, who kidnaps black people and steals their bodies:

Like Mark Lilla, Steven Pinker and Francis Fukuyama, who have all condemned identity politics in recent books, [Haidt and Lukianoff] are careful to distinguish themselves from the unwashed masses— those who also hate identity politics and supposedly brought us Donald Trump.

In fact, the data shows that it was precisely the better-off people in poor places, perhaps not so unlike these famous professors in the struggling academy, who elected Trump; but never mind. I believe that these pundits, like the white suburban Dad in the horror film Get Out, would have voted for Barack Obama a third time.

Cheap shots like that serve no purpose other than to prejudice readers, and bear not at all on the quality of the book’s ideas. (And not that it matters, but famous professors in the struggling academy are, contra the inapt analogy to better-off people in poor places, a demographic that surely voted overwhelmingly against Trump.)

Vilification and guilt by association are not the only Idioms of Non-Argument. Misrepresentation is another.

Consider the treatment of intersectionality in the book. The authors sketch the framework as it was articulated by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, now the director of the Center on Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia University, and they favorably quote an explanatory  passage from Intersectionality by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge.

The authors write:

Intersectionality is a theory based on several insights that we believe are valid and useful: power matters, members of groups sometimes act cruelly or unjustly to preserve their power, and people who are members of multiple identity groups can face various forms of disadvantage in ways that are often invisible to others. The point of using the terminology of “intersectionalism,” as Crenshaw said in her 2016 TED Talk, is that “where there’s no name for a problem, you can’t see a problem, and when you can’t see a problem, you pretty much can’t solve it.”

Only then do they add:

Our purpose here is not to critique the theory itself. It is, rather, to explore the effects that certain interpretations of intersectionality may now be having on college campuses. The human mind is prepared for tribalism, and these interpretations of intersectionality have the potential to turn tribalism way up. These interpretations of intersectionality teach people to see bipolar dimensions of privilege and oppression as ubiquitous in social interactions. It’s not just about employment or other opportunities, and it’s not just about race and gender.

Their argument is that while the originators of intersectionality and careful adherents of the theory offer important insights, some less nuanced interpretations are misleading students about reality by training them to see the world “in terms of intersecting bipolar axes where one end of each axis is marked privilege and the other is oppression.”

By way of illustration they cite teaching tools like this one:

They reason:

Since “privilege” is defined as the “power to dominate” and to cause “oppression,” these axes are inherently moral dimensions. The people on top are bad, and the people below the line are good. This sort of teaching seems likely to encode the Untruth of Us Versus Them directly into students’ cognitive schemas: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

Perhaps their reasoning is flawed or their concerns are not borne out by the facts. But how does Weigel distill that very carefully qualified argument?

For all their self-conscious reasonableness, and their promises that CBT can master negative emotion, Lukianoff and Haidt often seem slightly hurt. They argue that intersectionality theory divides people into good and bad. But the scholars they quote do not use this moral language; those scholars talk about privilege and power. Bad is how these men feel when someone suggests they have had it relatively easy – and that others have had to lose the game that was made for men like them to win.

Once again, there is a truth proposition, like Can CBT help master negative emotion? But rather than use the best available evidence to adjudicate something so plainly relevant to the book, Weigel casts doubt on the proposition in the reader’s mind by claiming that the authors “seem slightly hurt,” citing no particular passage, as if that should bear on our faith in cognitive behavioral therapy.

She then offers a misleading account of their beliefs about intersectionality—they are explicit that neither intersectional theory nor the scholars they quote commit the Us vs. Them fallacy—and concludes by asserting how they feel (which is to say, how her ideology tells her that they must surely feel) in a hypothetical situation that she made up.  

Later, Weigel writes:

Predictably, Lukianoff and Haidt cite Martin Luther King as a spokesperson for “good” identity politics—the kind that focuses on common humanity rather than differences. But there was a reason the speech they quote was called “I Have a Dream” and addressed to people marching for jobs.

Keeping faith with the ideal that all humans are created equal means working to create conditions under which we might, in fact, thrive equally. In the absence of this commitment to making the dream come true, insisting that everyone must act as if we are already in the promised land can feel a lot like trolling.

“Can feel a lot like trolling” is dense with weasel words, but what’s more notable here is the clear implication that Haidt and Lukianoff insist “that everyone must act as if we are already in the promised land.”

Later, Weigel writes, “Enjoying the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination, they therefore insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads.” No, they do not so insist! Lukianoff leads an organization—the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—that constantly advocates on behalf of students facing unjust discrimination, and battles administrators who violate their civil rights. And their book explicitly states this about social-justice activism:

College students today are living in an extraordinary time, and many have developed an extraordinary passion for social justice. They are identifying and challenging injustices that have been well documented and unsuccessfully addressed for too long. In the 1960s, students fought for many causes that, from the vantage point of today, were clearly noble causes … Students today are fighting for many causes that we believe are noble, too, including ending racial injustices in the legal system and in encounters with the police; providing equal education and other opportunities for everyone, regardless of circumstances at birth; and extinguishing cultural habits that encourage or enable sexual harassment and gender inequalities. On these and many other issues, we think student protesters are on the “right side of history,” and we support their goals.

Despite that passage, Weigel goes on to write, “The authors cite the ‘folk wisdom’ ‘Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child.’ They call this attitude ‘pragmatic.’ The prospect that a group of children might get together to build a new road themselves is not one they can countenance.”

The authors themselves, though, believe they are offering advice to young people that will make them more likely to succeed in building a new road.

That brings us to yet another Idiom of Non-Argument: reduction to privilege anxiety. Forget about counterarguments that address the merits of a proposition. Simply assert that its advocates fear losing their privileged status, and obviously acted in order to thwart the rise of marginalized people, and you will discredit their project without having to grapple with it at all.

Thus:

… the consensus that has ruled liberal institutions for the past two decades is cracking up. The media has made much of the leftward surge lifting Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But as this new left-liberalism gains strength, a growing number of white men who hold power in historically liberal institutions seem to be breaking right.

As more and more Americans, especially young Americans, express enthusiasm for democratic socialism, a new right-liberalism answers. Its emerging canon first defined itself in reaction to new social movements highlighting the structural or systemic elements of identity-based oppression. By deriding those movements as “clicktivism” or mere “hashtags,” right-liberal pundits also, implicitly, expressed frustration at how web platforms were breaking up their monopoly on discourse.

One wonders: What makes the book’s thesis right-leaning? How has Haidt or Lukianoff broken rightward? Does democratic socialism bear on their subject matter in any way? If Lukianoff is motivated by frustration at web platforms for breaking up an elite monopoly on discourse, why does the organization he leads fight to expand the ability of leftist college students and faculty members to post their views without punishment on blogs and social media? And what, precisely, is it about their claim that students are prone to catastrophizing that preserves privilege? A review operating in the mode of argument and ideas would grapple with such questions rather than begging or eliding them.

The Idioms of Non-Argument reward those adept at using book reviews as a chance to denigrate ideological adversaries, ascribing to them motives that fit their in-group’s preferred narrative. But they do little for readers.

The Guardian’s review is terribly unfair to The Coddling of the American Mind’s two authors, but that is of comparatively little consequence. If the book’s thesis is correct and its insights are actually adopted, it could help a lot of people; if it is incorrect in a way most people fail to appreciate, it could do harm or impede a search for better solutions. That’s why it would be valuable to have a rigorous critique from a skeptical reader. Put another way, testing the truth of its claims really matters.

But Weigel’s look at the book—perhaps the most prominent skeptical review it received—spent little time arguing about its actual claims. Instead, it focused on the attributes of its authors and how they might be invoked to reify the progressive left’s notions of what ostensibly motivated them to write, or who has the better overarching ideological narrative to advance. This is the problem with the Idioms of Non-Argument. They don’t leave us any closer to understanding.  

[theconservativebrief]

The president of the United States is a serial liar.

In May, the Washington Post created a tally of Trump’s false or misleading claims. The number they found was 3,001, which averages out to roughly six lies or half-lies each day in office. That number has climbed to nine per day in recent months.

For some, this is a sign that we’re living in a “post-truth” world — a place where shared, objective standards for truth have disappeared. Trump seems to pay no political price for his lying, and the news cycle is dominated by references to “fake news” and “alternative facts.” Some of this panic is overstated, but some of it feels justified.

So what the hell is going on? Does the phrase “post-truth” make any sense? Has something really changed?

To get some answers, I reached out to Simon Blackburn, a philosophy professor at Cambridge University and the author of On Truth. We talked about what’s misleading about the phrase “post-truth,” and why the real problem may stem from a lack of trust.

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

How did we get to this place where the American president is able to lie so shamelessly and so casually without any tangible political consequences?

Simon Blackburn

That’s a very good question, and I wish I knew the answer. For most of my adult life, I lived in what was sometimes called the postwar consensus. There were decent ways of doing politics. There were people who might veer toward free markets, and others who might veer a slightly different way, toward state interventions and subsidies, and so on. But basically, there was a general consensus about baseline facts, and disagreements were rooted in those facts.

Things have changed, though, and people often use the metaphor of a silo. We live in information silos now. The individual is insulated from outside forces and surrounded by people who think and believe the same things he or she thinks and believes. There’s no doubt that Facebook and other social media have played a huge role in that.

There’s always been selection of news — people basically read what they want to hear and gloss over things they don’t want to hear. I don’t think that’s a new phenomenon. But it has become easier to do this, and the insidious power of things like Facebook and Twitter exaggerates it.

Sean Illing

Is the phrase “post-truth” useful? Does it capture something unique about this moment?

Simon Blackburn

I think there are legitimate concerns out there, which I sympathize with, but I don’t think this phrase pinpoints them accurately. The message of my book is that you cannot be post-truth.

You know perfectly well that if you go out in the street and there’s a bus bearing down on you, it’s very important that you believe that there’s a bus bearing down on you. If you’re wrong about that, you could be dead. Your whole life is premised on things like that.

In that sense, we can never really be post-truth.

What we do have, though, is a problem in other domains, like politics and religion and ethics. There is a loss of authority in these areas, meaning there’s no certain or agreed-upon way of getting at the truth.

This is a very old problem in philosophy that goes all the way back to Plato, so it’s not exactly new — although it’s interesting that it’s come to the fore again in the way that it has.

Sean Illing

That’s the thing about this “post-truth” panic — it usually goes too far. We’re only post-truth in a narrow sense.

Even the most ardent Trump supporter doesn’t challenge his oncologist’s cancer diagnosis, or walk into a physics conference and question the validity of string theory. It’s only when a proposition is contaminated by politics that truth suddenly flies out the window.

Simon Blackburn

The problem is that in politics, people get very attached to hope. They hope for a vision which may or may not be realistic, and may or may not be grounded in truth and facts.

It’s a bit like conspiracy theorists, who actually thrive on the fact that all the evidence points against their theory, because that just shows that the establishment is clever enough to conceal what’s really going on. People get attached to certain ideas and nothing will shake them. And when convictions start to live in opposition to reason or truth, that’s a very dangerous thing.

“One of the first things that a serial liar wants to do is undermine your trust in the providers of fact that would check his lies”

Sean Illing

So preserving these convictions becomes far more important to people than some abstract commitment to truth.

Simon Blackburn

Absolutely. In the book, I write about a great American pragmatist, Charles Sanders Peirce, who thought that doubt was such an uncomfortable position that people would do almost anything to seize on a belief or conviction that removed it.

I think that’s what we’re seeing in politics.

Sean Illing

But is the problem really about trust, not truth? Is the real issue that we don’t trust each other, and we don’t trust the institutions that are supposed to unearth the truth?

Simon Blackburn

That’s an interesting question. One of the first things that a serial liar wants to do is undermine your trust in the providers of fact that would check his lies. If you’re a criminal bent on asserting your innocence, then you undermine trust in the police. You undermine trust in the judiciary. You may be a murderer and a rapist, but you claim it’s the system that’s against you. This is sort of Trump’s best move: It’s the thing he understands most.

He sprays around accusations of fake news while knowing full well that he’s the liar. It’s a tactical move that absolutely works in a media landscape like ours, and he knows it.

Sean Illing

Let me ask you a strange but, I think, necessary question: Why should people care about truth in the first place?

If the choice is between believing something false that provides meaning and comfort or believing something that’s true but inconvenient, why choose the latter?

Simon Blackburn

It’s a good question, and I’m not sure how to answer it concisely. Of course, many people vote with their feet, in terms of believing something that’s false but provides meaning and comfort. After World War I, many people thought they could talk through mediums to their dead children, and unsurprisingly, a whole industry of fake mediums appeared to help them.

Like Nietzsche, who I know you’ve written about, I’m very cautious in matters of truth. If there is no evidence for a belief and lots of evidence against it, it should not matter what you would like to be true or hope or wish to be true. Follow the probabilities and put up with the inconvenience.

That’s an academic or a scholar speaking, but it has always been the only hope for human progress.

Sean Illing

How do we encourage people to care about the truth and to hold liars accountable for their lies?

Simon Blackburn

This is really a moral problem, and it is always difficult to predict what will make people act on their moral compasses. I do point out in my book that perjury is still a very serious crime; maybe it will be the downfall of the Donald one day!

Of course, people are good at shirking the facts and threatening and bullying anyone who challenges them; this has always been the case. But I believe that all decent people eventually reject this kind of behavior, and want to see liars held responsible for their lies.

I can’t say whether or not this will happen … but I sure hope it does.

Original Source -> A philosopher explains America’s “post-truth” problem

via The Conservative Brief

[kidsviral-blog]

The Strange, Isolated Life Of A Tuberculosis Patient In The 21st Century

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/the-strange-isolated-life-of-a-tuberculosis-patient-in-the-21st-century/

The Strange, Isolated Life Of A Tuberculosis Patient In The 21st Century

While volunteering for the Peace Corps in Ukraine in 2010, I contracted a severe version of drug-resistant tuberculosis. Two years of painful, isolating treatment taught me the vital role social media may play in finally eradicating this disease.

One of the loneliest nights of my life was when I masturbated for an Australian stranger on the only webcam chat site that would load on the shitty hospital Wi-Fi. He didn’t want to show his face on camera, and I didn’t care whether it was because he was famous, married, or ugly. The internet was so slow that the sound stalled, so the dirty talk had to be typed.

It was a terse, space-economizing raunch, pounded out letter by letter with his left index finger, since his dominant hand was busy. I WANT TO VERB YOUR NOUN. But the artlessness was a relief. The more work it took to type, the less likely he’d waste time asking about my hospital bed and IV rack. If I didn’t mind him being headless and talking like a filthy grown-up “see spot run,” couldn’t he handle a naked stranger in a tuberculosis sanatorium?

Nor did he mention the armband, which hid the nozzle nurses screwed to dripping sacks of drugs during infusions. Three times a week, amikacin seeped down the skinny 2-foot-long tube inside and up my arm, leading behind my collarbone to splash into a big fat artery over my heart.

Just please don’t fucking ask, I thought. It was exhausting to explain. Screw this guy. Wouldn’t it be weirder if he had inferred a medical emergency, but resolved not to let it ruin his hard-on? Do virtual strangers without heads even have cognition? What the hell was wrong with this guy’s face, anyway?

Who cares? I had been in that room in Denver for almost a month. I was days away from lung surgery to remove my upper right lobe, where the bulk of the disease was headquartered. This was the last goddamned time I’d ever get to show my tits to a stranger without any scars. And it was the skinniest I’d ever been.

I had contracted extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB (a severe version of multidrug-resistant, or MDR tuberculosis), while serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine. The National Jewish Health Center is no longer a sanatorium, but it is still one of the country’s top TB research facilities, staffed by worldwide mycobacteria experts and equipped with properly ventilated rooms for the infrequent consumptives who turn up there.

When I was admitted to the hospital, the state of Colorado dispatched a guy to my hospital room to read me my legal quarantine order. I’d be in isolation for however long I was contagious.

During my stay, I started a two-year course of harsh antibiotics, including an IV drip. I had two surgeries, which flanked a blood transfusion and peskily recollapsing lung. I lost 12 pounds and half my blood, which have been replaced, and the upper lobe of my right lung, which hasn’t. I wish I could be more inspiring. But I didn’t use that time to write a novel, learn yoga, or even plow through a beach read. Falling into a trance and getting off strangers was all I felt capable of.

Objectifying? Sure. So is being sick.

Such isolation — both physical and emotional — takes a serious toll on TB patients. From the 18th century glory days up to the modern rise of MDR, tuberculosis went from being a relatively universal human experience to being a profoundly lonely one. Isolation and stigma make long treatments even harder to endure and inhibit public consciousness that could lead to more meaningful progress. But we may be approaching a new historical moment: Social media makes it easier than ever for patients to find and support one another. These connections can improve patient morale and treatment outcomes and ultimately raise the profile of MDR-TB in global health policy.

Because I was never as alone as I thought: Five thousand miles away in Siberia, a woman my age named Ksenia Shchenina was also suffering. So are patients in dozens of other countries, and more and more of them are beginning to use the internet to combat the solitude that has long not only defined the disease and its treatment, but kept it from being eradicated for good.

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Most people don’t spend much time thinking about tuberculosis. If pressed, they might make a few basic generalizations. It was a very serious disease in the olden days. It killed your great-great-grandfather, all of the Brontës, and Nicole Kidman’s character in Moulin Rouge. But then it was cured. It doesn’t exist anymore. So we’ll all just have to get Ewan McGregor’s attention some other way and die of something else.

Tuberculosis has been on the scene since ancient times, but it only reached menace status in filthy, urbanizing mid-17th century Europe. It went on to dominate the continent’s “cause of death” list for over two centuries. This makes sense, if you know how germs work. Poverty and bad sanitation — e.g., the Industrial Revolution’s toxic work conditions and shantytowns — made toppling immune systems a cinch. Before germ theory caught on, some people even saw TB as a sort of moral retribution for the sins of modernity.

Even the disease’s classic name — consumption — implied a physical and spiritual connection. It consumed you; it devoured you from within. Before the scientific consensus on how an infectious disease was transmitted, many people assumed a person could be predisposed to consumption. (They caught on to genetics before they unraveled epidemiology.) An entire family of consumptives probably meant they were ill because they had all inherited the proper preconditions for the illness — not because they lived together and coughed fatal microbes into one another’s food. Similarly, researchers couldn’t help but notice that consumption disproportionately seized writers and artists, whose lifestyle was practically synonymous with urban poverty. But when it was still assumed that the disease grew from within, many scientists searched for a link between consumption and genius. This is the kind of factoid that makes you feel smug when modern doctors are really, really surprised that you got this.

The jig was up in 1882. A German bacteriologist named Robert Koch zeroed in on the Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterial cause of consumption. It spread from person to person by air.

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Robert Koch Ann Ronan Pictures / Getty Images

Koch’s early attempts to develop a vaccine failed, but his efforts did yield a valuable diagnostic tool: the tuberculin skin test. It’s a shot that scans for TB antibodies. If you’ve been exposed to the disease, the injection site on your forearm will flare up into a BRIGHT RED SKIN MOUNTAIN. The test is still part of routine checkups today among grade-schoolers, teachers, cops, and — as I would learn — Peace Corps volunteers.

There is a photo of me on Facebook from early 2010, lodged between a handful of party shots with fellow volunteers. We had traveled to Kiev from across Ukraine to make a weekend out of our mid-service medical checkups. I’m 23, hamming it up in melodramatic distress, and twisting my left elbow up over my head to show off the swollen red splotch on my forearm.

A positive skin test usually doesn’t mean you have TB — less than than 10% of people with positive skin tests ever develop an active case, because healthy immune systems can usually defeat the bacterial intruder. Several volunteers each year end up with the telltale red blotch; it was really nothing to worry about. We’d need a follow-up X-ray, but an active case was highly unlikely. So I cracked a few jokes and went back to pounding flat Chernigivske beers with my friends.

I had been in Ukraine since September 2008, after studying Russian in college. I volunteered at a school in an eastern mining town called Antratsyt. The town borrows its name from anthracite coal. The region is flat, but you can see hills in the distance — they’re “slag heaps,” or piles of debris extracted from mines. The town only runs water for a few hours a day to protect the mines from mudslides or collapse. But life wasn’t as bleak as it sounds. I had students who were so excited to practice their English that they would chat with me after school, perched in a row on the edge of a Soviet-era fountain long-since bone-dry. I struck up friendships with their parents and my fellow teachers. I toasted my colleagues over champagne and chocolate on Ukrainian holidays. One time, I even gave a thickly accented speech on international education at a school assembly that ended up on the TV news. I was happy.

My follow-up X-ray was two weeks later, in Kiev. Taking yet another 17-hour train trip felt like an epic hassle. Is there a word that means the opposite of hypochondriac? There should be, because that’s what I am. In hindsight, of course I had symptoms – I just wrote them off to other things. I had a bad cough, because I was a smoker at the time. I’d lost weight, because there was no American junk food to lose my will power around. I was run-down and sluggish, because it was the Ukrainian winter!

I got a ride with Dr. Sasha, one of the Peace Corps’ Ukrainian staffers, to my screening at a tuberculosis dispensary — tubdispensar — on the edge of the city. He spoke the sort of English that made me self-conscious about my Russian. He carried my Peace Corps medical history file on his lap. The most dramatic thing in it was an allergy to mangoes. (Not exactly a significant handicap in Ukraine.)

I was X-rayed in a machine that looked like an iron colossus. In the waiting room, I tried to distract myself with a biography of John Adams. (His son, John Quincy, spent years in the Russian Empire as Ambassador and managed to stay consumption-free.) Soviet-era medical facilities are much more dimly lit than their Walmart-bright American counterparts. To see the page, I had to squint.

The head TB doctor finally called me into the office. He explained the X-ray results and prognosis to Dr. Sasha, who relayed them in English to me. But when Dr. Sasha asked a follow-up question, they flipped back to Russian and cut me out of the triangle. My Russian was good – but not “unfamiliar medical jargon” good. But this wasn’t a conversation I could stand to be excluded from. I was on the brink of a tantrum.

“Goddamn it!” I wanted to shriek at the TB doc. “Don’t say it in his Russian. Say it in mine.”

My face must have looked like a cartoon teakettle. So he slowed down and turned toward the image pinned to the light board.

“Classic pulmonary TB,” he said to me. (Words like pulmonary and tuberculosis are cognates.) “It’s strange that it advanced so quickly. Especially for a healthy young girl.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “I heard you guys muttering about bronchitis or pneumonia before. Could it be one of those?”

“No. We assumed it could have been at first, but this is a clear case. See, on an X-ray, healthy lungs should look solid black. See the contrast down by the lower ribs? But now look up on the right. See the [blahblahblah]? The [blahblahblah] is the tuberculosis.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t get that word. What part is the tuberculosis?”

He sighed. It would have been easier to let Dr. Sasha translate. Now he had to dumb down his lexicon for a rattled American.

“Up there. Upper right. Well, left on here. That white spot? The part that looks like a ghost.”

That night, I started treatment in a studio apartment the Peace Corps rented for me in Kiev. My prognosis was good. For two weeks, I took pills, got X-rayed, and hocked up sputum — a polite word for loogies — into sterile plastic cups for lab work. One set stayed in Ukraine; the other was shipped according to special biohazard protocol to an American facility to better coordinate my care at home.

Eight weeks later, just as life was settling down back in Chicago, I was surprised to find an ominous number of missed calls on my phone: from the diagnostic lab, my mom, my American pulmonologist, my mom, the Cook County Department of Public Health, my mom, my mom, the Cook County Department of Public Health Epidemiology Unit, my mom, my mom, my mom, my mom, my mom.

Those loogies had yielded bad news. I had XDR-TB. The bad kind.

Effective immediately, I was placed under an isolation order. I was told to stay home whenever possible — I could go outside sparingly, but any other indoor space was off-limits until I was noninfectious. A few months, at least. The police could get involved if I didn’t comply.

A month into my quarantine, my Chicago doctors were stumped. They’d rarely seen anything like this.

So I set off on a journey not unlike those taken by consumptives a century before. I left my bustling, industrial Midwestern city and headed west, to the National Jewish Health Center in Denver.

It was the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives back then. In 1899, the brand-new philanthropic institution was brimming with needy patients. In 2010, I was the only one.

I told almost no one where I was going. I had already been avoiding friends who tried to contact me. It is exhausting to have your life flipped around by something people know nothing about. You get so damn sick of telling the story. Weird caveats demand exposition. Here is what I have. Here is why it’s bad. Here is why I had to evacuate Ukraine and leave the Peace Corps early. Here is why I can’t be in public or see anyone for the foreseeable future. Here is why I am going to some hospital in Denver for a long time. Here is why they chopped off a big chunk of my lung. Here is why I have this IV armband thing for nine months. Here is why I puke a lot. Here is why food tastes all wrong. Here is why my hearing got warped. Here is why I can’t feel my toes. Here is why I am not supposed to drink any alcohol. Here is why I’m still going to anyway.

Since I was on the no-fly list, we drove the 15 hours by car. I wore a mask the whole time so I wouldn’t infect my parents.

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National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives c. 1920

Basic infection control, like isolating the sick and using protective gear to lower transmission risk, may seem primitive compared with modern medicine. But the truth is, public health measures like quarantine and mouth covering did more to eradicate tuberculosis than drugs did. We never did figure out a great way to cure TB; we just got better at preventing it. That is, until it caught up with us.

After Dr. Koch’s splashy 1882 debut of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the medical community was certain a surefire solution was close behind. But they were disappointed. No cure came.

Forty years later, a new vaccine — Bacillus Calmette-Guerin, or BCG — entered human testing. But BCG was never that good. Most researchers believe that adults are just as likely to wind up with TB whether they get BCG or not. It also suffered a major PR setback as the center of one of the worst vaccination disasters in history. In 1930, 73 babies died of tuberculosis meningitis after being injected with BCG in Lubeck, Germany. The vaccines had been contaminated after getting mixed up with a virulent live TB strain back at the lab. (Life hack: Always be sure your doctor has a label maker.)

It wasn’t until 1943 that a team at Rutgers University pinpointed streptomycin, the world’s first antibiotic effective against tuberculosis. TB’s staggering cultural legacy made the discovery a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize, but streptomycin was nonetheless terribly flawed. It was toxic, and patients quickly developed antibodies that resisted the drug. The only solution was to scrape around for more options and blitzkrieg every case of TB with several so-so drugs at once. The first-line regimen has hardly been tweaked in nearly 50 years. It was never a secret that such a long and tedious course of antibiotics would, like a Shakespearean hero, engineer its own demise.

But that hardly seemed to matter. By the time streptomycin ‘n’ friends showed up, barely anyone even needed them. Throughout the 20th century, people gradually stopped getting TB in the first place. We got healthier, cleaner, and smarter. We could contain disease and catch it early. It nearly disappeared.

Then, in the early 1990s, it bounced back. Two global crises — the rise of HIV/AIDS and the fall of the Soviet Union — helped resurrect the scourge of the 19th century. The World Health Organization declared a worldwide TB emergency in 1993. (It just goes to show: Don’t count your eradicated diseases before they hatch.)

AIDS was even harder on human bodies than the Industrial Revolution had been, and millions of centuries-won immune systems were suddenly wide open to infection anew. TB remains the leading cause of death among AIDS patients.

The collapse of the USSR spread TB in even more complicated ways. The year 1991 saw the traumatic birth of 15 brand-new post-Soviet republics. Each of these new countries was in economic and social turmoil. They were broke. They had no central government or public health system. Before their independence, everything had more or less filtered through Moscow. In some places, there were few to no supplies or institutional infrastructure, let alone money for health care workers. Alcoholism and malnourishment soared. People lost their savings. Rampant crime stuffed the prisons — notorious hotbeds of TB — to well over capacity. Released inmates carted these germs back to their communities. By the time the 15 new countries had smoothed things out, they already had a new old epidemic to battle.

Even as the immediate post-Soviet crisis improved, other factors played into treatment interruption and new infections. These have been beautifully documented by experts like Dr. Lee Reichman in his 2001 book Timebomb and are easily rattled off by every post-Soviet MDR expert I’ve come across. Treatment in prisons has been badly underfunded, so for years people didn’t get the meds they needed. There is often subpar follow-up for ill prisoners after they’re released. Infected migratory workers are tough to treat and track. The Soviet-era mentality of medical specialization has made the region slow to coordinate HIV and TB care. Both illnesses are also correlated with substance abuse, and addicts often turn out to be less-than-diligent patients. In sum, the long, hard treatment places economic, social, and physical strain on patients.

Antibiotic treatment is an all-or-nothing game. Patients need to take every dose by the book, or germs acquire resistance. Getting it done right depends on stupendous public health programs, not to mention stupendous patients. Once a strain does acquire resistance, it can’t be undone — and the stronger, harder-to-treat germ is passed on to others, like me. If the best drugs don’t work, doctors are forced to use drugs that are even harder on the body. All of these factors collude to paint a grim reality. In former Soviet countries, only around 60% of patients who begin tuberculosis treatment ever successfully finish it. The rest of them flee, slip through the cracks, fail to respond to treatment, or die before they are cured.

So it is no surprise that the region has the highest rates of MDR-TB in the world — as many as 30% of all newly detected cases are impervious to first-line drugs. (The global average is reportedly less than 5%, but statistics are widely believed to be low, especially in resource-poor countries. In the U.S., there were fewer than 100 cases of MDR in 2013.) Even in optimal conditions, the difference between a case of run-of-the-mill TB and MDR can be the difference between a moderate inconvenience and a life-threatening catastrophe. A standard case can be cured for less than $100 with a daily dose of four different drugs for six to nine months. My treatment cost taxpayers seven figures and lasted well over two years.

On paper, many of these problems have already been fixed. A decade ago, Tracy Kidder’s best-seller Mountains Beyond Mountains lauded the achievements of Dr. Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health and other global health organizations in revolutionizing worldwide MDR-TB care. The region’s TB programs are now relatively well-organized and padded with funding from global health mammoths like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. There are detailed and standardized treatment guidelines. TB drugs are fully subsidized. So why are so many patients still failing their treatments?

Without an effective vaccine or better drugs, efforts to curb MDR-TB face a serious paradox. As a strain becomes more resistant, it becomes simultaneously more painful and more urgent to treat it. Many countries have responded by adopting stringent patient monitoring policies, which improve cure rates but are nonetheless no small imposition in patients’ lives. Public safety overrides patient agency, which is a tough pill for victims to swallow (and they’ve already got plenty of those to worry about).

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A patient receives the TB vaccine in 1949 Cornell Capa / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images

During my treatment, I felt sick for two years. Nausea became my baseline. Sometimes the drugs make you puke, or give you the kind of diarrhea that makes you need a nap. One screws with your nervous system, and I permanently lost most of the feeling in my feet. I’ve tracked blood across kitchen floors because I can’t tell if I’ve stepped on shattered glass.

And I had it lucky. I had no comorbidities like HIV or diabetes, which make everything even worse. Being on amikacin cost me some low-frequency hearing, but it has caused deafness in others. And I got to take it by IV drip, instead of the painful upper-thigh injections that leave some patients too sore to sit up. And while cycloserine — a drug nicknamed “psychoserine” for its notorious mental and behavioral effects — makes some patients hallucinate and scream, I got away with confusion. I had trouble with reading, organization, and paperwork. It’s an especially tough break if you’re dealing with a workers’ comp claim for a medical disaster. I couldn’t keep it all straight, and walloped my credit.

Even worse, most patients in former Soviet countries and across the world get practically no social support during the crisis. They get little help with side effects, and suffer serious social and economic strain. Many of them have no way to make up for lost wages over the course of their treatments. Some even face lasting discrimination. In 2011, an undercover Ukrainian journalist wrote an exposé about being iced out by hiring managers after casually mentioning a past bout of TB.

The reason why boils down to one key factor: Tuberculosis remains highly stigmatized throughout the world. In the former Soviet Union, people associate it with painful memories of the lawless, chaotic ‘90s. Having it means you’re a crook, a junkie, a drunk, a bum, or a sewer rat.

Stigma makes epidemics worse — it gives people a reason not to be seen walking into a clearly labeled TB clinic to see a doctor when they should. Loneliness and despair can convince someone that health doesn’t matter, so why take these pills? And stigma shuts people up, so they’ll never organize, influence funding, or change minds about TB. Stigma means more stigma.

When patients are silenced and isolated from one another and their communities, it stymies progress against the disease. The WHO estimates more than a $1.3 billion worldwide funding gap in TB research and development, and the number threatens to grow. Even though investment in new drug research is one obvious way to improve treatment, AstraZeneca, Novartis, and Pfizer recently pulled a combined $50 million out of the fight. According to an email from the Treatment Action Group, a TB and HIV advocacy nonprofit, this steep loss amounts to a full third of private-sector TB investment since 2011.

Erasing stigma, combating TB’s chronic underfunding, and promoting new research and drug development are incredibly lofty goals. But similar barriers have been conquered before in diseases like breast cancer and HIV/AIDS, where passionate activism made incredible inroads in raising awareness and influencing policy. If former and current TB patients joined together, could they build the first real advocacy movement centered on patients?

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llustration by Ashley Mackenzie for BuzzFeed

Tuberculosis patients haven’t always felt so alone.

After leaving Denver, I read The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann’s sprawling 1924 classic novel about a Swiss sanatorium. I forced myself to finish it, but it’s the most boring book I’ve ever read. It’s the story of a total wiener named Hans Castorp who goes on a trip to hang out in the Alps and visit his TB-stricken cousin. Then Hans ends up sticking around and living there for seven years even though he doesn’t really have tuberculosis, just so he can do stupid crap like spend 70 pages talking about the nature of consciousness.

Ugh, I’m still so mad at him. But maybe it’s because I’m a tiny bit jealous. So what if he’s a fake person with fake tuberculosis? It would have been so nice to have someone to be sick with.

Sanatoriums, like National Jewish and the one atop The Magic Mountain, bridged the gap between the mid-19th century and the 1940s discovery of streptomycin. With no cure in sight, the ill had long made do with an iffy array of treatment options. Some doctors stuffed people’s windpipes with vacuum contraptions to simulate lazy lung capillaries. Cottage industries of miracle cures gorged on ad space in periodicals, sandwiched among serial installments of now beloved classics. (If you liked Great Expectations, you’ll love Daffy & Son’s Natural Miracle Multi-Purpose Health Elixir! Available wherever fancy wool top hats and snuff boxes are sold!!!) But the White Plague seemed to beat them all.

Tuberculosis did have one semi-formidable opponent, though — one hope that physicians agreed on. It wasn’t a cure; it wasn’t a given. The idea came from an 1840 pamphlet written by Dr. George Bodington, a British family doctor who covered a large area by making his house calls on horseback. His essay was based on a simple observation: that consumptives in wide-open spaces fared better than those packed tightly in cities.

But Dr. Bodington drew a further conclusion: It must have been the country air that healed them. Their bodies need pure, unsoiled air, shared with as few people as possible. Depending on the severity of their case, they might need months or years of it. In the disease’s final stages, Mycobacterium tuberculosis finally chews through the lung tissue, resulting in the bloody cough that famously beckoned death (but, curiously, couldn’t stop the heroines of Les Misérables, La Bohème, and La Traviata from singing). If combated early with the right dose of air, the process could drag to a halt.

And where could patients find such magic air? The best stuff was nippy, clean, and thin. Way up high, where no one can spoil it with industrial factory smog. And so, for the next 100 years, sick city-dwellers left their crowded hubs by the thousands and set off for specialized tuberculosis hospitals in the mountains. These sanatoriums treated patients with Dr. Bodington’s “rest cure” — medical observation, a generous binge diet, and hours a day in rows of canopied outdoor beds. In The Magic Mountain, characters traveled to Switzerland from places like England, Italy, and Poland. For months or years at a time, consumptives at sanatoriums lived and breathed together far away from real life, in their own little communities up in the sky.

Denver — the Mile High City, full of its own magic mountains — thus became America’s magnet for the dying who wanted to live. In the late 19th century, nearly a third of Colorado’s population suffered from tuberculosis, after journeying west for the air that might save them. At the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives, they slept two by two, tucked into each of its dozens of bunk beds.

By the time I showed up, the bunk beds were long gone. There were no pretty canopies or breezy napping patios. And all that oh-so-edifying “virgin air” stuff? Turned out to be bunk. The bump in survival rates among patients who spent all that time outdoors wasn’t because of the air; it was the sun. Vitamin D is good for the immune system. They could have gotten the same effect on the roof of a tenement house. Or by taking sunshine stuffed into Vitamin D pills, like I did, supplemented by the UV light in my hospital room. (In a 21st century American city, you don’t just let a case of active tuberculosis run around outside.) Other times, patients’ health improved simply because sanatoriums gave them a badly needed break from lives of poverty and labor.

Still, the sanatorium era continues to be considered a public health success. Not because sanatoriums ever did much to help “lungers.” But because they kept them away from healthy people. By shooing contagious patients off to remote treatment complexes, Dr. Bodington had inadvertently pioneered the concept of infection control. Keeping sick people away from vulnerable populations seems so obvious now. But back then, would the idea of germs — invisible, flying disease pods — have sounded any less silly than magic air?

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Tuberculosis treatment in 1942 D. Hess / Fox Photos / Getty Images

I tried seeing a therapist after my quarantine order was finally lifted. My mom made the appointment. I didn’t really want to go; I’ve never liked therapy.

But I hated doing this to my mom. This wasn’t just my crisis; it was my family’s too. And it was harder on my mom than anyone. She’d just spent 10 days next to me on a cot in the Denver ICU after my first lung surgery went wrong. She’d held my hand when the stiff chest tube draining blood from my lungs made breathing hurt so badly I got tunnel vision. She’d lost so much weight and was thinner than I’d ever seen her. So when she kept insisting that I talk to someone, I figured I could force myself to muster an hour of sincerity. And if I didn’t like it, I could lie, quit, and just find my own answers in some book.

I got to the office and we made our introductions. Then I broke the ice.

“Has anyone ever told you that you look like Laura Linney?” I asked.

She paused. For too long.“No. I’ve actually never gotten that.”

“No. I’ve actually never gotten that.”

BULLSHIT. She looks exactly like Laura Linney.

“I spoke to your mother on the phone. She said you contracted tuberculosis while you were in the Peace Corps in Russia?”

“No, I was in Ukraine. But yes. I mean, it was the Far East. The Russian-speaking part.”

“And so you’re going through chemo now? How long is that?”

“Well, I was hospitalized in Denver and got the part of my lung removed with the TB on it last month. So now I’m on chemo. It’s the IV drip. None of the radiation stuff. And I never lost my hair. So I don’t know if it even counts. I have nine months of that, and a total of two years or so on everything else.”

OK, it’s not like I’m uniquely hyperaware of Laura Linney or something. There’s no way I could be the first person to notice.

“And then…it goes away?” she asked.

Wait, is she pissed? Why? It’s a compliment, right? Hold on. Does she just, like, hate Laura Linney?

“Knock on wood. It can come back, hypothetically,” I recited. “That’s why they treat it so aggressively. They just want to make sure that it’s really, really dead. But they can’t, like, promise you anything.”

I went back once or twice for additional sessions. I tried to explain that I wasn’t scared about dying or anything. By then, doctors seemed confident that I wouldn’t. But I had this anxiety I couldn’t shake. I wanted closure in Ukraine, and the people in my town. I wanted to be moving toward something. I tried to convert the emotional fallout into a momentum that more closely resembled psychosis. I took 36 practice LSATs but was hospitalized the day of the test. But panic was a problem I couldn’t obsess my way out of. I’d pick up a book but just hold it in my lap and forget what the hell it was for. I had no job and no idea what to do with myself. I lived with my parents, who at that moment seemed to be trying to keep me alive by never letting me out of their sight. I felt timid and stuck. I felt cheated out of that rosy immortality my friends had. All those toxic meds made me feel like someone else. I was very, very tired. And I felt like I was failing. I wanted my sense of control back. I was so damn sad.

My mom picked that therapist because she specializes in treating patients with life-interrupting illnesses, like MS or cancer.

“It can be hard for people to lose their control,” the therapist told me. “Here’s something I suggest that people can do to feel like they have some power over everything. Next time you go for an infusion, try to close your eyes and think of the chemicals in the drugs coursing through you, attacking all of the bad cells. And concentrate on them, and really see them. Then, envision the chemo forcing them out of your body. Picture them floating away.”

I skipped my next appointment and never rescheduled. It wasn’t a therapist that I wanted. I wanted to connect with other patients like me.

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llustration by Ashley Mackenzie for BuzzFeed

I’m not the only person to conclude that TB patients may be uniquely equipped to help each other. In 1907, a Boston-area internist named Dr. Joseph Pratt had the same idea while searching for innovative treatment alternatives for TB patients who couldn’t afford faraway sanatoriums. He had the hippy-dippy idea that bringing patients together could replicate the revitalizing effects of places like the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives, and help patients heal. Couldn’t they guide each other through the experience better than any doctor could?

Pratt tested his hunch with a trial of a dozen patients. Modern medicine’s first recorded support group was deemed a success. Moral support really did help combat tuberculosis. His destitute patients had made do without the magic air that wasn’t really magic and replaced it with something that was.

That’s one thing the sanatorium era got right that today’s TB control programs get wrong: the need for community. Today, the sanatorium era is thought of as a relic of medical quackery rendered moot by modern science. But to mock it in favor of enlightened antibiotic cures is to dismiss the lived experience of patients. For all their problems, sanatoriums were designed to heal patients. Today, treatment is primarily concerned with limiting threats posed to others. Patients’ lives are collateral damage.

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I showed up at the radiology department of George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., for my final chest X-ray in late spring of 2012. I stood in the yellow foot outlines and assumed the TSA body scan position without even waiting for the technician’s spiel.

“Oh, you’re an old pro, then!” he said from the processing room. “OK, deep breath and hold it… Good… Now let’s just make sure that… Whoa, you’re missing a big part of your lung! Sorry, wasn’t expecting that!” That makes two of us.

But the Mycobacterium tuberculosis had indeed been destroyed. What was left of my lungs showed up as solid black — just as a healthy X-ray is supposed to be.

But somehow, it wasn’t as satisfying as I’d hoped. Once again, I wanted to share the moment with someone who understood what it meant. Moral support is nice for the good stuff too.

I began to find out how many patients felt the same way in June 2013, when I finally went back to Ukraine. I made a ring around the country to gather data for my master’s thesis: I traveled to Kiev, Lviv, Crimea, Mariupol, Kharkhiv, Lugansk, Donetsk, and my beloved Antratsyt. I visited hospitals, clinics, and met doctors, health care and nonprofit workers, and, of course, patients. No matter who they were, tuberculosis had a profound impact on their lives. Many had lost friends or even family members over their illness, or felt forced to keep the experience secret. Loneliness and shame were practically the default.

For as long as I’d spent surviving and learning about tuberculosis, one big question stuck in the back of my mind. I posed it to Oksana Viktorovna, a training coordinator for the Stop TB in Ukraine initiative in Donetsk. Why, I asked her, is there so little communication and coordination within the TB patient community, and so much of it — working successfully, by the way — in other diseases?

“You’re right,” she told me. “People are ashamed to be associated with the fringe. And even though TB is curable, the stigma makes them think it would be better to have cancer.” And perhaps, she continued, people who survive TB are ready to forget it and move on.

But, this might be changing, Oksana said. Lately, she’d noticed a few groups pop up online, on Russian networking sites like LiveJournal and VKontakte. Some people even created entirely new accounts to be able to discuss their lives with tuberculosis anonymously. “They write about their experience, their worries, their questions,” Oksana told me. “It seems to increase their optimism. I think it helps them get better.”

The clandestine online TB clubs were easy to find. As soon as I started poking through them, I found someone my age from Khabarovsk, Russia, whom I felt like I already knew.

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The Kyiv Tubdispensar or Tuberculosis Dispensary Photograph by Natalie Shure

I finally met Ksenia Shchenina face-to-face in Moscow this past spring. Even in the tourist-thick crowd by the famous Tretyakov Gallery, she wasn’t hard to spot. By now we’d already spent hours of our lives talking on Skype.

Ksenia maintains a patient-centered website about TB, as well as pages in English and Russian across several social media platforms. Her project’s slogan, “Being ill isn’t shameful,” challenges the negative cultural narratives about TB and the people who have it. Visitors can read the blog she kept during her treatment and her interviews with doctors and survivors. She regularly interacts with new patients from all over the world.

Social media has the potential to finally address the long-standing need for support among TB patients. Last month, Doctors Without Borders published a study that identified serious benefits for users of these online platforms, including TB & Me, the organization’s own blogging portal. Social media, they conclude, helps MDR patients adhere to treatment, gain back a sense of control, fight feelings of despair and solitude, and educate health care providers and the public. After treatment, survivors like Ksenia can continue to serve as mentors and advocates for the global patient community.

I strolled with Ksenia across the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, along the edge of Red Square, and up the fabled Arbat Street. We drifted between languages and talked about being sick. I told her how badly I wished I knew people like her back when I was diagnosed.

“I can’t find the words in English to explain how much I agree with you,” she said.

I’m not sure I could have, either. But then, it hit me: “I’ve spent years researching tuberculosis. I’ve toured hospitals, read books and articles, conducted dozens of interviews. But this is the first time I’ve ever told my story to another patient.”

How magical to find her in a world with 5,000 miles, two screens, and three healthy lungs between us.

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llustration by Ashley Mackenzie for BuzzFeed

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