I don't know if you read my post on the "Sickly Neurotic Geek" trope: http://attackfish.livejournal.com/102382.html but I talked a little bit about the process by which I developed some of my mental illnesses and how my seizures and immune disorder played a big part of that:
To make this trope especially painful to me, my geekiness, mental health issues, and illness are related, and part of the reason they are is ableism itself. First society made me fit a stereotype, and they it derided me for it. The idea behind the trope is that the geeky neurosis causes the “sickliness”, whereas for me, it was the other way around. There are two ways my illness led to my mental health issues, directly, and indirectly through the responses of people around me. By far the less important of these is the direct version. For a person with an illness like mine, where exposure to ordinary innocuous, common substances can cause severe injury or death, avoiding those substances is critical, and the mental effort spent avoiding such substances becomes habitual, and lends itself to developing OCD. Also, being at risk and unable to fully control that risk, leads to a certain level of perfectly reasonable anxiety, but our bodies and brains become used to that, and the anxiety can bleed over into non-illness related areas.
It's pointless; how is someone who experiences symptoms for two months and twenty-nine days not mentally ill, but someone who experiences them for three months is?
Our current psychiatric model doesn't seem to regard anything as a mental illness unless it's chronic. We're used to people getting ill and healing, but you're not mentally ill unless you don't heal or unless you take a long time to heal? Really?
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2013-03-23 12:57 am (UTC)To make this trope especially painful to me, my geekiness, mental health issues, and illness are related, and part of the reason they are is ableism itself. First society made me fit a stereotype, and they it derided me for it. The idea behind the trope is that the geeky neurosis causes the “sickliness”, whereas for me, it was the other way around. There are two ways my illness led to my mental health issues, directly, and indirectly through the responses of people around me. By far the less important of these is the direct version. For a person with an illness like mine, where exposure to ordinary innocuous, common substances can cause severe injury or death, avoiding those substances is critical, and the mental effort spent avoiding such substances becomes habitual, and lends itself to developing OCD. Also, being at risk and unable to fully control that risk, leads to a certain level of perfectly reasonable anxiety, but our bodies and brains become used to that, and the anxiety can bleed over into non-illness related areas.
It's pointless; how is someone who experiences symptoms for two months and twenty-nine days not mentally ill, but someone who experiences them for three months is?
Our current psychiatric model doesn't seem to regard anything as a mental illness unless it's chronic. We're used to people getting ill and healing, but you're not mentally ill unless you don't heal or unless you take a long time to heal? Really?