laparoscopy on monday. i feel sick.
Things NOT To Say To A Person With A Mental...
Things NOT To Say To A Person With A Mental Illness
- Snap out of it.
- What do you have to be depressed about?
- I know exactly how you feel.
- You’re just going to have to try harder.
- I hope you’re not doing this for attention.
- Have you tried praying about it?
- You’re so melodramatic.
- You just have to get over it and move on.
- Oh, yeah, I have depression, too. But I don’t see a therapist or take meds. I’m strong enough to deal with it on my own.
- Don’t you think it’s time to stop being sad and just cheer up?
- There’s nothing wrong with you. You need to learn how to smile and be happy.
All of these things have been said to me; the last one was what the doctor doing my intake interview at a crisis stabilization unit told me when I described my suicide attempt.
Anyone want to add on to this list?
What sucks is that it’s not even always what the other party is explicitly stating. Sometimes it’s just microagressions. Or it’s like they have said some of these sorts of things in the past, and so I have gradually learned to intuit these sorts of derogatory perspectives from their facial expressions, demeanor, and/or irritated silences.
People who deal with mental illness (or even just a significant degree of cognitive impairment) frequently deal with invalidation, emotional abuse (including shaming, covert microagressions, condescensing language), and unrequested advice. They receive a lot of innane but supposedly helpful advice from people who are not mentally ill themselves but who have a tremendous amount of confidence in their ability to diagnosis other people, un-diagnose other people, and/or resolve other people’s problems by means of antipathy-laden facial expressions or disparaging/abusive remarks.
General things to avoid doing: (1) Invalidating people’s experience, (2) emotionally abusing people, (3) giving out un-requested tips on how to overcome one’s mental illness, (4) repetitively pestering someone verbally in an attempt to motivate them to spontaneously heal themselves of their mental health problems and/or their cognitive impairments.
Question: “Why should I avoid doing those things? I just want to help!”
Answer: “Um… because you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about?”
Regarding mental health professionals:
In a perfect world, mental health professionals would always be right. They would never make diagnostic or treatment mistakes. Their professional instincts would be spot on every time. Sadly, we don’t live in that world. In the real world, many properly credentialed “mental health professionals” aren’t actually competent to handle certain types of issues and/or certain types of intersectionalities. Sometimes professionals have deep-seated biases, bigotries, prejudices, -isms, flawed worldviews, or out-dated knowledge bases. Sometimes professionals are basically competent, yet they still make mistakes periodically. Professional mistakes become more likely during a crisis or a perceived emergency. However, generally speaking, a legitimately competent and non-coercive mental health professional can help a person to resolve (or at least better manage) their mental health issues in time.
Regarding well-meaning laypeople:
Laypeople who mean well can’t really do much of anything. However, some things that tend to be good include: Listening, demonstrating authentic love, providing validation, and in some cases discussing professional counselling options in a non-threatening and non-coercive type of manner. When it comes to pestering the mentally ill person with advice, don’t do it, and don’t give out advice that is stupid; educate yourself like woah, then maybe your advice won’t come across as so self-evidently worthless. Rule of thumb: Don’t just sputter advice or disparaging remarks at mentally ill person in your life. Ponder the possibility that your super-awesome advice is actually horrible and that your low opinion of the mentally ill person is kind of your own problem.
Fuck, the people around me say this shit constantly
fucking relevant as hell
Because normal sensory processing disorder wasn’t enough..
Patulous Eustachian tube, is a rare physical disorder where the Eustachian tube, which is normally closed, instead stays intermittently open. When this occurs, the patient experiences autophony, the hearing of self-generated sounds (breathing, voice, and heartbeat) vibrate directly onto the ear drum and can create a “bucket on the head” effect.
- muffled hearing and autophony
- Some patients with this condition are disturbed by the perceived volume of their voice, causing them to speak very quietly
Treatment
Historically, to temporarily alleviate symptoms, patients have tried positional maneuvers, such as tilting their head to one side or upside down, lie down on their backs, or sit in a chair with their head between their knees. Similarly, a routine of lying down four times per day with legs elevated to around 20 inches for at least two weeks has been attempted as well SOME BULLSHIT
Depending on the underlying cause of the disorder, the individual may need to remove caffeine from their diet, reduce exercise, or gain weight.
Estrogen (Premarin) nasal drops or saturated potassium iodide have been used to induce edema of the eustachian tube opening. Nasal medications containing diluted hydrochloric acid, chlorobutanol, and benzyl alcohol have been reported to be effective in some patients, with few side effects. Food and Drug Administration approval is still pending, however.[4]
In extreme cases surgical intervention may attempt to “bulk up” the Eustachian tube tissues with fat, gel foam, or cartilage or scar it closed with cautery. These methods are not always successful.
More recently, Canadian doctors have found that applying a pea-sized dollop of Blu-Tack to the eardrum reduces vibrations and may provide relief. Trials are said to be starting soon and the procedure itself can be performed in under a minute without anesthesia by an ear nose and throat doctor. The Blu-Tack has to be replaced at regular intervals.[5]
I have read that the only cases that they see a direct link between PET and a cause is rapid weight loss due to chemotherapy or anorexia/bulemia. None of those apply to me. I had one doctor say that since I was thin I should try to gain weight and another ENT said that was ridiculous because by the time i gained enough weight to plump up the tissues around the ET I would be as big as a barn. I agreed with him that it didn’t make sense. My weight has always been stable anyway. But since most of us as PET sufferers will try just about anything I decided I could suffer through a couple of Krispy Kreme donuts everyday in order to put on 15 or 20 pounds. I did and enjoyed the process but it had absolutely no affect on the PET problem.
—
Inner Ear Disorders Message Board
Discussing Patulous Eustachian Tubes
(Source: standingalittletallerr)
I’m honestly terrified right now.
I feel like I’m not emotionally equipped to cope with my heath and my body.
It’s gone from PCOS and Endometriosis to so much worse than anything I’ve ever imagined. I feel so emotionally fragile and scared.
I just wish I could put everything on pause so I could just have a second to deal with it all. And I wish I could just fast-forward to knowing what is really wrong with me right this second.
I’m sorry. If you want to talk or just vent, I completely relate to what you’re going through. Some days I actually feel like the accumulating exhaustion is stealing hours off of each day, and then something else go wrong.. new and more things, things that can’t be attributed to endo or celiac.. Three days ago the sound coming into my left ear all became …it has an echo on it, reverb, autotuned… can my immune even do things like that. and now i’m being overstimulated by things like my own voice, and the sound of wind.
Hearing Disorders Board Index: Pittsburgh area
Discussing: patulous eustachian tube
Echoing ear?
“For the past year now I get echoing in my right ear. I can hear my voice echoing when I speak and I don’t know if I’m speaking loudly or softly. It comes and goes and its quite annoying. I’ve had it checked a few times and one doctor cleaned out some wax which didn’t help and another said take a cold tablet. I’m only 22 and I don’t want to live with this forever. Should I go get it checked out again? “
-viccles
Re: Echoing ear
“It’s called patulous eustachian tube, and it means that the tube between your ears and your throat, the one that clears the pressure in your ears, stays open all the time.
It’s usually due to rapid weight loss, where fat has been lost so that it cant close properly.
Talk to a doctor again, it can be cured, and it’s also not good because it makes you more prone to ear infections.”
-amikael
i don’t think that’s an autistic thing.. i have celiac, and about 70% of the time my doc gives me a new script, it contains something derived from wheat. even after i asked her and she said she checked and it was clear.
like if you can’t handle concrete restrictions, how are you ever going to made intelligent judgments about nuanced effects, or whats to say you’re actually listening when i describe as my symptoms and making a relevant recommendation. not to mention usually they don’t. usually i request a specific medication based on my research, and run it by them, and they always just prescribe whatever i ask. their ease with prescribing whatever i ask doesn’t tell me if i’m making a good decision, or they just don’t give a fuck.
(Source: autistickitten)
Slenderman
So there’s this thing that they don’t what it is - a normal cyst, endo “chocolate” cyst, or a dermoid- on my right ovary that’s about 5x3 inches. demoids are atype of cyst-like tumour that has …stem cells, essentially, that grow into specialized cells like fat, and hair and nerve cells. and they can grow teeth.
and so this this is the greatest thing i’ve ever heard of. while it doesn’t look at all as interesting as i imagine, i want to make plush toys that are just terrible blobs with tuffs of hair and random teeth. i think they’d be cute.
it’s like it’s trying to grow another tiny person. like a sperm-free baby, or a half-formed twin that survived by forming a symbiosis with me. i named it (her?) marla, after fight club.
but it never hurts. it’s the other side that always hurts and lightnings down my leg. there’s little cysts all over the place (PCOS, bitchus) but nothing that.. like. for the amount it hurts, i expect something cartoonish going on, like they look at the spot under extreme magnification and and find a dragon laying siege to a castle with heavy stone turrets that keep exploding and hurling themselves into the courtyard’s mud.
still another month until my laparoscopy and i get an idea of what’s going on in there. it’s weird that they say that the extent of the endo growth/damage isn’t proportionately related to the pain.. so i don’t know what to think. this shit takes forever. and this is only happening as the result of harassing …idfk anymore, like 10 doctors. weekly. WEEKLY. for 3 years straight about this (and the celiac, which i only figured out 8 months ago - before that i thought it was just all one problem). like, fuck. this is so slow. and they’re still treating me like i’m being ridiculous, and only fake-trying, and just hoping i’ll take the initiative in finding a new doctor. it’s unlucky to have a difficult, uninteresting and chronic illness. doctors just want you to go away.
