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#mental health crisis
neuroticboyfriend · 2 months
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After seeing this Mental Health Pain Scale a while ago, I realized that it doesn't really work well for people whose mental wellness changes frequently (ex: people with BPD or C-PTSD, addicts), and very extremely. So, I made some tweaks for myself, and hopefully it can help others:
Here's a version with a table :) Emotional Distress Scale
0 - I feel great! This is the best I’ve felt in a long time!
1 - I’m feeling really good! There’s no distress to address.
2 - I’m feeling good. If I start feeling bothered, I can be easily distracted or cheered up.
3 - I’m okay, but there are some things bothering me. I can easily cope with them, though.
4  - I could be better. There are a few things distressing me right now. It’s not exactly easy to deal with, but I still have the skills to get through it.
5 - I’m not okay. It’s getting harder to do the things I want to do, but I can do them. My coping skills aren’t working as well anymore, but enough of them work to get me through the day. I need some support.
6 - I’m feeling bad, and it’s very hard to do the things I need or want to do. Most of my coping skills aren’t effective right now, and it’s taking a lot of energy to stay stable. I need help.
7 - I’m feeling awful. It’s hard to focus on anything but my emotions, and/or I’m avoiding things that distress me. I can’t do much but try to take care of myself, which is already hard in itself. I’m running low on, or have run out of, effective coping skills. I need a lot of help right now.
8 - I’m feeling awful, and I can’t escape it anymore. How I feel is affecting every part of my day, and I’m reaching the point where I can’t function. It’s hard to sleep, eat, socialize, etc. I need help before I can’t handle anything.
9 - This is approaching the worst I could feel. I can’t function anymore. My emotions have totally consumed me. I may be a danger to myself or others, or I may be neglecting myself. I need urgent help.
10 - This is the worst I’ve felt ever/since [last time]. I can’t care for myself at all. My emotions are so intense, I’m at imminent risk of dangerously acting on them. I need crisis support immediately.
11 - I have acted on my emotions and hurt myself or someone else. Everything else in my life is impossible to comprehend. I need medical care and/or crisis support immediately.
Note that this doesn't really work well if your positive states end up being unhealthy (ex: mania, idealization, etc.), so it's geared towards negative emotions. This is also meant to be about how you feel NOW. The other scale works best for viewing your overall state.
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Kathrin Mentler knows British Columbia’s mental health system inside and out.
She knows it academically because she’s studying to become a counsellor with the goal of working as a peer support worker. She also knows it personally because she’s experienced rounds of depression and anxiety throughout her life.
Mentler says she has accessed suicide prevention services dozens of times while experiencing mental health crises. She has also attempted suicide more than once and woken up in an intensive care unit, overwhelmed with gratitude for the hospital staff who kept her alive.
“I live with chronic suicidal thoughts but that doesn’t mean I never feel joy in my life,” she says.
This spring Mentler found herself in crisis and took herself to Vancouver General Hospital’s Access and Assessment Centre to get help. [...]
Continue Reading.
Tagging: @politicsofcanada
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sugas6thtooth · 2 months
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A six year old tried to commit suicide in Gaza. A six year old. Read that again. Is it still not clicking for you? I can't even put how this made me feel into words. I can only question how people can support this. Where is your empathy???
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sharpestasp · 1 year
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"You don't have to set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm."
Here's the deal. Fire doesn't always start with lighter fluid, gasoline, or other accelerants.
Friction builds, slowly, gets a little warm, and you may not notice it.
By the time it actually puffs into a small flame, you got used to it. And maybe that flame is just an indication that you yourself need to fix something on your side, because it was a gradual flame, you see?
And then it is a blaze, and like with a lot of fires, tracing back the cause is not always 100% reliable.
After all, you didn't even notice the friction until too late.
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xxxamerican-psychoxxx · 10 months
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I'm exhausted after everything that's happened and I need to get away.
My commissions are open. My PayPal is here. My CashApp is here. Please help me out if you can, I need some money to get away. I'm losing my mind and I'm broke as hell right now. Please help me if you can, this is something that I need to do. The sooner I get away, the better for my mental health.
https://www.paypal.me/WastelandCatArt
https://cash.app/$WastelandCatArtist
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byler-alarmist · 3 months
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I've had a really bad couple of weeks. Idk if it's the current state of the world, fear of the future, grieving the past, the shitty weather, worsening ADHD, hormones or all of the above, but I have been completely useless at work and literally just spend all my waking hours scrolling Tumblr or watching shows. My sleep consistency has also tanked--I'm pulling all nighters just to nap a couple hours in the morning before starting work late and my cortisol levels are probably through the roof. I know in my heart, body, and desire for job security that this is unsustainable, but I can't stop
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the-lady-maddy · 24 days
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instagram
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bpdcrybaby213 · 3 months
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They all ignore me when I'm in crisis. I'm in this alone except for Chester's voice in the earphones. He has saved me countless times when nobody else would pick up the phone.
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rachymarie · 2 months
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Oh gawd that feel when as a schizospec you kinda know that your phone was listening in on you yesterday talking about how you would wanna do makeup as a potential job if you could even manage a job and now Insta ads just gave you an ad about a makeup class in your area. I HATE hate hate it that our phones actually stalk us like this it gives me the creeps. Tech companies seriously STOP it. I don't need to be attacked like this in my own home.
Maybe I should start turning my phone off in appointments but like I need it to write notes down cos my foggy ass brain can't remember things the next day or even hour/minute sometimes
I feel like the more tech "advances" the more of a crisis society lurches into, to a point where it's getting harder and harder to convince schizospec/delusional/psychotic spectrum folks out of delusions/paranoia about being spied on
Genuine question: how can we protect ourselves when privacy laws obviously don't? I know i share a lot on here but that's stuff I willingly chose to share
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By: Joseph Burgo, Ph.D
Published: May 11, 2023
In 1942, the psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch published a landmark paper in which she described a particular type of person who relates to the world and to other people in ways that appear normal but who, over time, comes across as inauthentic. “Every attempt to understand the way of feeling and manner of life of this type forces on the observer the inescapable impression that the individual’s whole relationship to life has something about it which is lacking in genuineness and yet outwardly runs along ‘as if’ it were complete.” Hence the term she coined to denote such people—the “As If” Personality.
When these individuals come for therapy, they often appear to engage enthusiastically in the psychotherapeutic process, though over time, no progress is made; a feeling of futility might plague the therapist. The challenge is to recognize and address a fundamental dynamic crippling the work: rather than being used to convey meaning, the words employed by the client instead conceal and ward off an internal truth felt to be intolerable. The personality enacted for the therapist’s benefit embodies a kind of performance, the simulacrum of an actual person with emotions and connections to other people, when in fact, the person feels empty inside and unable to engage authentically with anyone.
In the early years of my practice, one client (a highly intelligent and verbal young man) once asked, “If you tell me what you believe my unconscious is saying based on what you hear, how am I to know if you’re right? How do I know if some other formulation isn’t what’s actually true?” It’s ultimately up to the client to decide whether an intervention is accurate, of course, but this young man couldn’t connect my words with his inner world to assess their accuracy, largely because he relied upon language to obscure rather than to illuminate. He appeared to be a willing client, but the way he communicated instead made sure I’d never get anywhere near him.
As the treatment progressed, he began to offer alternative interpretations to my own. “That’s one way of looking at it,” he might say. “But it could also be …” At that point in my career, I viewed such client-therapist interactions through the lens of dependency and the common defenses against it; I would have pointed out how he was relating me as if we were colleagues or co-therapists and couldn’t allow himself to be a client depending upon me for help. While that formulation is true, I would now add this: while it appeared as if we were engaged in a psychotherapeutic process, he was thwarting my attempts to make contact by substituting an alternative reality for each one that I proposed. Therapy became a competition via language to define what was “true”; he ultimately won that contest and moved on.
Historians of psychoanalytic thought view Deutsch’s formulation of the “As If” Personality as a precursor to our understanding of borderline conditions and pathological narcissism, and my own clinical experience bears that out. The use of language to obscure or annihilate hated truths regularly features in psychotherapy with clients afflicted by disordered personalities; helping them to connect with and tolerate acute psychic pain is a central challenge of this work and means developing a more authentic language connected to emotional truth.
* * *
In my more recent work with gender-distressed youth, I find myself again confronting this disconnect between language and emotion, but it feels less to me about disordered personalities than a social media-induced kind of dissociation. One teenage girl, trans-identified, talks at length about her daily interactions with her mother, her peers at work and at school, but the space between us feels dead. At times, I have a feeling of futility, that if I try to make sense of the actual words she employs and events she describes, we’ll remain stuck in a place without meaning.
Another client, a highly intellectual young man, uses sessions to expatiate on the socio-cultural construction of gender, explains to me why he rejects masculinity and embraces the feminine, but has no connection with his body. He never masturbates and finds his nocturnal emissions to be disturbing. Now and then for reasons that mystify him, he will begin to weep in session. He feels relieved by his tears but has no words to describe what he might be feeling.
Yet another teenage girl, also trans-identified, adamantly insists upon her desire for cross-sex hormones. Like my other two clients, she has no relationship with her body. She spends much of her free time playing video games online, inhabiting her avatar, and interacting with the avatars of other online players she’s never met in real life. The possibility that testosterone will make her sterile or eventually lead her to have a hysterectomy bothers her not at all; she finds the idea of sexual intercourse to be disgusting and has no intention to marry or have children. She has never masturbated and finds the idea “gross.”
Like many young people who survived the lockdown years by going online, these clients have spent so much time inhabiting virtual worlds that they’ve lost connection with what’s visceral, immediate, and real. They live in a realm of imagination where anything is possible, where infinite malleability has taken the place of a physical world with reality-based limitations. By changing your name and your avatar, you can transform yourself into someone entirely new. The laws governing this alternative space give rise to a belief that you can change the very nature of reality simply by describing it in a different way.
The apparent re-creation of reality via language lends an “as if” quality to their personalities. They seem to have an internal psychic life that’s meaningful to them, they appear to have friends and other social relationships, but their emotional lives lack depth. Because their words have become untrustworthy guides to truth, I’ve taken to teaching my clients about how we human beings come to recognize our own feelings as they arise—when it comes to sadness, for example, through the perception of bodily sensations around the eyes, chest, and back of the throat. With the first client I described above, most times when I ask her to move her attention down into her body, she will begin to cry.
For many young people, social media usage has severed the connection between specific words denoting feelings and the visceral indicators that help us to identify those feelings. The signifier has become detached from the signified. As a result, language becomes a disembodied and self-contained set of internal rules and interrelationships without connection to psychic truth and often external reality.
* * *
In our daily interactions with other people, we usually assume that the words they use to communicate accurately represent the meaning they intend to convey; this fundamental assumption underlies all cooperative efforts to engage with other human beings. But in our modern world, it’s increasingly difficult to believe that much of the language exchanged conveys meaning or objective truth, especially in the contentious realm of social media. Like my patients described above, the public language deployed in this space often serves to deny or obscure truth, to replace it with an alternative reality constructed via language. Life on Twitter often boils down to a war of words to determine whose version of “reality” will prevail, a dynamic obscured by the misleading appearance that both sides are using language in the same way.
In her keynote address last month at Genspect’s historic “The Bigger Picture” conference in Ireland, Helen Joyce, author of the book Trans, drew attention to this issue. While proponents of the affirmative care model for gender-distressed youth speak and write in the empirical language of fact-based science, they actually disdain it. Gender ideology is like a cuckoo bird invading the nest of empiricism says Joyce, appropriating its language and apparently respecting its methods while all the while subverting them. Like my long-ago patient who spoke as if he was authentic and in contact while deploying language to obscure truth, the gender ideologues publish studies in professional journals, written in language that appears to respect the empirical method but actually undermines its assumptions and replaces objective reality with their own disembodied version of “truth.”
The work of Jack Turban, for example, relies upon copious footnotes and citations to other studies which, upon closer examination, either have nothing to do with the position he claims they support or directly contradict it. Turban writes as if he were devoted to the scientific method and its standards of proof but actually cares nothing about them. Colin Wright, Jesse Singal, and Leor Sapir have devoted thousands of words to debunking Turban’s claims, highlighting his factual errors and misleading citations; for those of us firmly rooted in reality, their efforts are crucial, but for Turban and his acolytes, they are irrelevant. Gender ideologues only pretend to care about empiricism, mimicking its techniques for understanding objective reality; what they really intend is to replace immutable facts and objectivity with their own subjective version of the truth.
This dynamic reflects core tenets of post-modern thought and critical theory, where so-called reality is supposedly determined by the discourse around it, and whoever controls that discourse has the power to determine what counts as “true.” While it appears as if gender ideologues are engaged in good faith debate over what scientific studies can tell us about, say, the reality of biological sex, their position really boils down to “because we say so.” They amass flawed and flimsy studies published in professional journals and devote entire books to “proving” sex actually occurs along a spectrum of possible expressions, all in order to control the discourse around the nature of sex. Objective truth is irrelevant; whoever speaks with the loudest voice gets to decide what is true.
Helen Joyce’s observations were inspired by a philosophy symposium she attended focused on the work of British philosopher Roger Scruton; she was particularly struck by his delineation of two opposing views of human nature that give rise to very different ideas about how a society should be governed. One views human nature as a blank slate and believes it can be improved and eventually perfected; from this perspective we are evolving toward an ideal society. The other, “constrained” by the facts of biology and our evolutionary heritage, believes humans cannot fully transcend their bodies, and society must therefore pass laws and uphold traditions that restrain the more brutal aspects of our nature. The American economist Thomas Sowell believes these conflicting visions characterize the conservative versus progressive debate in the United States.
On a broader level, these opposing views also help us to understand the current battle about sex and gender, especially on social media. On the one side we have proponents of biological reality who hold that facts are facts and sex is real; they believe in the scientific method and esteem empiricism as a mode for apprehending truth. On the other, we have those who behave as if they care about the scientific method, but in fact care only about wielding power.
* * *
Just as Helene Deutsche’s landmark paper led to deeper insights into borderline states and pathological narcissism, recognizing the as if quality of contemporary discourse helps explain why our society exhibits so many features of the Cluster B Personality Disorders. Disordered personalities characteristically display overly emotional and irrational forms of thinking along with an unstable sense of self and its relation to others. As patients, they at first appear to engage in the psychotherapeutic process but remain quietly hostile to the process. They will defend their fragile sense of self in often hostile and verbally abusive ways against attempts by their therapist to illuminate painful psychic truths.
Due in part to the rise of social media and the increasing influence of virtual online spaces, young people today inhabit an as if world that mimics reality but actually denies many hated truths about it—that sex is real, binary, and immutable, for example. Adopt a new avatar or change your pronouns and you can become somebody else, even alter your sex. Your subjective belief about who you are overrides objective truth. And if anyone should challenge your self-image by asserting so-called “facts,” you are justified in weaponizing language and hurling abuse to ensure that objective reality will not prevail. Rage, invective, and crude insults to dehumanize the other are the order of the day.
Welcome to Twitter, a place where daily interactions between two conflicting visions of human nature resemble one prolonged eruption of borderline rage. On one side are those who insist reality must be what they say it is; they feel sorry for themselves and persecuted by those who, on the other side, assault them with facts and arguments about objective reality. It takes a non-defensive therapist with a high tolerance for pain and a strong sense of self to work with disordered personalities, in part because they so often attack your own sense of self-worth when they feel threatened; it’s no wonder that even the rationalists ultimately resort to contempt and abuse as Twitter discourse descends into name-calling on both sides.
How are we to heal a disordered society such as ours? Most of the time, I’m cautiously optimistic that the Colin Wrights and Jesse Singals of the world will eventually prevail and, through dispassionate analysis and assertions of fact, reinforce our connections to objective reality. But sometimes, in the dark of the night, I worry that the proponents of radical subjectivity will win. Like my long-ago patient who defeated my efforts to connect him with psychic truth and who ultimately destroyed his own treatment, they will shout the rest of us down with brutal abuse, in the process annihilating all the glorious achievements of Western Civilization and the Enlightenment.
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Ideologues like Jack Turban don't post for truth, but for narrative. This is the guy who, like Kendi, blew up his core premise with a single tweet.
Turban's strategy is one he's learned from media on both sides: publish the narrative you want to be true up front (especially in the headline or summary); that's the story the initial wave of your most regular readers will see and retain; when forced to clarify, correct or retract, do so quietly; now you can say it's correct, but you've already convinced your regular readers of the original version.
It's designed to create repeatable memes, with the theater of linking to studies, regardless of whether what he's citing actually says what he claims, or even refutes something else he's already said.
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bpd-aware · 18 days
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Chiefs from across 14 First Nations as well as federal Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Gary Anandasangaree came together in Saskatoon on Tuesday to settle Treaty Salaries Specific Claims, with over $37 million going to the First Nations.
The government of Canada said these claims came from the withholding of treaty annuity and salary payments that were owed to chiefs between 1885 and 1951.
“The resolutions of these claims is an important step in renewing relationships with First Nations. For far too long, Canada has withheld treaty annuities and salary payments that were rightfully owed to your communities. As a country, it’s our duty to acknowledge and address these historic wrongs and move forward, together,” Anandasangaree said.
Chief Delbert Wapass from Thunderchild First Nation said they held a pipe ceremony before the event.
“We could not talk about treaty, we could not talk about things that are spiritual without having a pipe ceremony,” Wapass said. [...]
Continue Reading.
Tagging: @politicsofcanada
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theroadtofairyland · 9 months
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A few things.
I feel really guilty for saying no one loves me. It's obviously and profoundly not true. I'm more hurting about the people who should love me unconditionally and don't.
Yesterday was rough and I'm having trouble shaking it off. I have so much fear.
Last night I called 911 because I knew exactly what I was going to do and I needed to be talked down. The suicide prevention team didn't come. Two police officers did and it was genuinely the kindest police interaction I've ever had.
The suicide team called around noon and it made me feel a lot worse. She suggested I apply for housing that's waitlisted 5 years out. I have 21 days. The services that exist are so overburdened I can't feasibly access them.
So I guess the lesson is you guys will help in every way you can to make sure Georgia, my mom and I are okay. And I'm so grateful.
If I didn't feel like, yeah, actually a lot of people have my back I probably would have done the thing.
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jonghyuns-husband · 1 year
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(CW // Dec 18th, suicide, victims of harassment, violence, mental health talk)
Since I want to spread this hashtag more, I would like to talk about the Shawols that I lost over the years and bring their voices up.
Clem was a friend I met on Wattpad back in 2015 when I was 11 and she was 14. She was one of the closest and the first online friend I’ve ever had. She loved to make SHINee stories for fun and she also helped me to write better. She was an amazing writer who took great passion for her work as well as her being a big advocate for the LGBTQ+ community according to her sister who came out as lesbian a year before we met.
Unfortunately, Clem was bullied at her college and her workplace, including on her online accounts. This would occur about 1-2 month after the death has been announced. On the 15th of December 2018, 3 days after Jonghyun’s first anniversary, she couldn’t take it anymore and took her own life. She was 17.
Sam was a girl in the secondary school who was 2 years older than me. I remembered talking to her once and that was it. She also really loved Jonghyun and Onew and was a BIG fan of the group.
One day, she stopped coming to class. There was a rumour going around saying that Sam took her own life after being hate bombed for posting about Jonghyun positively to cope with the pain. The last time she was in class, a guy mentioned his passing without warning which triggered the girl to stand up and leave. Ever since then, she was never seen again. The guy thought that it was his fault, but it turned out that she was going through a lot recently and couldn’t take it anymore. If it was true, then she died on the 9th of January 2018 aged 16 years old.
Ayami was a close friend of mine since Year 1. Interesting fact, she was actually born in Japan and then came to the UK when she was only 4. That summer, she enrolled in my school where we met on the first day. She didn’t speak much English, but luckily I knew a bit of Japanese so we were able to have a connection together. She was a sweet girl that would look out of anyone who looked like that needed help. She even loved to cook and wanted to start her own sweet shop one day where she would make sweet treats such as cakes, cupcakes, brownies, cookies, etc. Fun fact, my blog @yutassweetshop is actually based on her childhood dream and yes NCT bias was also Yuta! It’s a sweet (no pun intended) tribute to the one I called noona, and yes I’ll never stop calling her that until the day I die. Never mind, she’ll still be my noona anyways.
Although yes she had been harassed around his passing when we went to school together, there were other stuff in her life that really pulled the trigger on her head. I could make a separate post talking about Ayami and what she had went through so you would know, but to keep it simple, her father did some horrible things to her as a kid that when she found out, she took her own life out of fear. She was 14.
The reason why I mentioned her was the fact that Jonghyun’s passing was one of the chain of events she had to go through in her life, and you never truly know what someone has gone through already. Even though she didn’t die over it, that still doesn’t make it ok regardless. It’s still an awful thing to do to someone who is grieving by acting like they are complete strangers and treating them like they had never once seen the man before.
Those 3 girls didn’t took their lives because they were obsessive fans, they died because they were HARASSED to suicide. I know a friend’s friend who was also a blinger that took her own life and her family thought it was because she was sad over the passing of Jonghyun. That wasn’t what happened. She was beaten up at school and was told to kill herself ever since she came back from the Christmas holidays. She ended up doing so in her room and she was so close to celebrating her 16th birthday. It was the same as Jonghyun’s. She took her own life 2 days before at age 15.
There were some people in my cousins’ lives that killed themselves too, but I don’t know them very much, but all of them will be missed. Any Shawols that I’ve missed, please leave their names below and tell me one thing you loved about them. You can even talk about their favourite song or albums.
This tormenting K-Pop fans thing needs to stop. I don’t care if you think teenage girls screaming about their BTS biases are cringe, this needs to end. It’s not funny anymore and it’s claiming lives. I could of lost my friend that I met last year just because of the dumb messages of them saying that he was disrespecting a “deadman.” It just seems so tone deaf that really, they’re actually doing the disrespecting and not him.
This is already a difficult month for all of us and I just beg, PLEASE DO NOT HARASS ANY SHAWOLS. Not just in this month where it’s his anniversary, but WHOLE FUCKING YEAR. Please treat us like human beings and stop making us change for someone who barely even knows about the guy until the news broke and now you want to be the fucking hero when you’re not.
Why don’t you do all of us a favour and just fuck off. I’m sure most of us would want that now. This is why some Shawols like me haven’t yet stopped grieving because of how badly people treated us over the years. It has been 5 years, instead of telling us to “let him rest in peace”, how about you let us “grief in peace.”
It’s like what they say, “don’t give his family condolences if you aren’t going to respect his fans.”
Never mind, I did.
Rest in peace to Clem, Sam, Ayami and everyone else who took their lives due to these kinds of people either in real life or online. Rest in peace to the main guy himself, Kim Jonghyun. Thank you so much for taking care of those lost souls for us. Trust me, this was never your fault. Don’t ever blame yourself for any of this. Disgusting pricks like them (the people who harasses Shawols) has always existed since the beginning of time.
Please don’t cry because of the Shawols that went your route but be happy since you made their dreams come true. 
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fruitycytris · 5 months
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I've been drowning in anxiety and depression. I've been unable to get help because of insurance stuff and now I'm afraid it's just not coming ever. Even being at my family's isn't helping anything. I feel hopeless and helpless to the point all I can do is lay down all day.
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convertgrapeling · 11 months
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people are talking about trauma lots in my corner of the world nowadays and the recognition of the part trauma plays is definitely overdue... but also, it's definitely being used as an excuse to deny people mental health treatment and assessments for neurodivergent conditions.
there isn't a specific treatment to deal with trauma. the 6 sessions you get from a standard IAPT talking therapy intervention won't scrape the surface in most cases. if you want the kind of long-term therapy that would address trauma, you usually have to go private. and if becoming more "trauma-informed" means simply saying "we won't stigmatise you by giving you a diagnosis that comes with actual resources attached" then it's worthless tbh.
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