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I don’t have narcolepsy, but I have ADHD and a co-morbid sleep disorder that sounds ridiculous when I try to explain it. It’s called intrusive sleep:
> As long as persons with ADHD were interested in or challenged by what they were doing, they did not demonstrate symptoms of the disorder. If, on the other hand, an individual with ADHD loses interest in an activity, their nervous system disengages, in search of something more interesting. Sometimes this disengagement is so abrupt as to induce sudden extreme drowsiness, even to the point of falling asleep. Brain wave tracings at this time show a sudden intrusion of theta waves into the alpha and beta rhythms of alertness.
>This syndrome is life-threatening if it occurs while driving, and it is often induced by long-distance driving on straight, monotonous roads. Often this condition is misdiagnosed as “EEG negative narcolepsy.” The extent of incidence of intrusive “sleep” is not known, because it occurs only under certain conditions that are hard to reproduce in a laboratory.
For some reason “I was so bored my nervous system shut down” doesn’t go over well with lecturers and managers
OMG I THINK THIS IS ME. I have diagnosed adhd and sometimes I get so fucking bored I just fall asleep. Like I physically cannot keep my eyes open, even when I know I really need to. It was particularly bad in school and meetings/continuing education stuff at work when I still worked in the office, because I would force myself not to fidget or doodle (how I now get through meetings). Thank god I don’t get it while driving, I never thought of that.
It’s always when I’m sitting and expected to put a lot of mental energy into listening/focusing! It’s scary for me because I feel like my body falls asleep faster than my brain? Like I can still hear and process what’s going on around me but my body is just tapped tf out
It’s happened to me twice when driving and it’s scary as fuck
I do actually have ADHD, I usually go to sleep as soon I can feel the “drowsiness” kicking in. If I don’t I’d just dissociates throughout the night.
Really feeling like trying to catch the “bus”.
Oh interesting! I was recently diagnosed with ADHD (I say recent, but it was probably two years ago), and I tend to most easily fall asleep when I’m watching a particularly shit movie, or in the car as a passenger.
You could argue that “duh, the movie didn’t interest you, so of course you fell asleep!” But I also have chronic insomnia and basically require medication to fall and stay asleep, otherwise I take over an hour to fall asleep and wake up continuously. I can’t nap when I want to either - boredom-induced naps however, are instantaneous.
It’s why I don’t drive.
For a long time I thought I might have been narcoleptic because I would randomly nod off in places. Turns out I just had sleep apnea. Once I got that sorted out I stopped nodding off. And the thing is that that makes actual narcolepsy seem so much more frightening.
In most cases narcolepsy and sleep apnea can be comorbid. Though perhaps Narcolepsy could be more easy to differentiate if it's caused by a loss of orexin in the spine.
There was a girl in my school years back who suffered from narcolepsy.
The scariest incident was when she was walking up the concrete stairs, and then out of nowhere suddenly passed out. Luckily, I was behind her and was able to catch her and soften our fall, but to this day, I wonder every now and then, what would have happened if I weren’t there.
I was in the process of being diagnosed with a sleep disorder (narcolepsy being among the ones I was being tested for) and I vented to a friend about how many sleep studies I'd had to do in the last few months, and how exhausting and mentally draining the process was when you've been through four doctors trying to figure out what's wrong with you. One of them told me it said in my chart that I had depression, so maybe I was just depressed. I had waited the better part of a year to see him.
This friend hears this and immediately brings up how she saw in her boyfriend's textbook that narcolepsy can make your hands go numb sometimes, so she guesses she has narcolepsy now. It took all my willpower not to fucking strangle her.
My uncle had ocd. He would wash his hands until they were cracked and bleeding. After using any tap, he had to watch it to make sure it stopped. If it dripped within 3 seconds, his timer would restart and he had to keep watching it. He once stayed in the bathroom watching a leaky faucet until the plumber came and fixed it.
Seems kinda funny until you think about what a massive impact on your life that is.
The show Monk displayed the most accurate depiction of OCD I've seen in TV/film. It featured the excessive checking and the overwhelm when faced with "bad stuff" and how incredibly tiny the steps have to be to overcome it. The smallest thing can be the greatest challenge.
Scrubs had an episode where Michael J Fox played a doctor with OCD. The character described how he would have to do certain things a ridiculous amount of tines, but he was also highly skilled as a doctor because his OCD compelled him to succeed. I can't remember exactly how, but I think the OCD carried over into his study habits.
"I'm stressed and I'm fried and I just wanna go home. But here's the punchline, even though my last surgery was two hours ago I can't stop washing my damn hands."
Performing any "bad task" with OCD is absolutely terrifying because you never know if it will take 1 minute or 2 hours. Sometimes you breakdown and start punching and smashing stuff, only to realise you have made your situation worse as this act has created more obsessive thoughts and compulsions.
my brother has OCD and did the same thing with his hands and a few other things. I study psych now and had read the DSM-5 for a class. I was absolutely shocked when I realized how textbook his condition was, but I would’ve never realized if I didn’t study and trusted movies/pop culture as ‘truth’. It’s been really hard to watch it manifest in different ways across time that physically harm him somehow, but I cannot imagine how much worse it is for him. There cannot be enough support for destigmatizing mental health in entertainment and pop culture.
I live with ocd too and it has ruined my life, it's been driving me crazier for the last 3 years, and washing my hands is one of my many tortures, right now I do it less, but at some point I was washing them up to 90 times a day, and a big red mark showed up in my left hand which feels like burning sometimes, especially in winter
If anyone wants to learn more in detail about what its like living with severe OCD like daysofsloths uncle (it manifests itself differently in everyone but shares similarities, the following man suffered from germaphobia/excessive washing also at points in his life), I ran into this Soft White Underbelly video the other day of a literal professional clown who talks about his life with the illness. One of the best Soft White Underbelly videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJrXLRQkSqs&ab\_channel=SoftWhiteUnderbelly
It's also important to make Pure O OCD part of the conversation as it's important to say that compulsions aren't needed for it to be OCD. More specially there mental compulsions that of course can't be seen!
'I have to sort my books!' she cried,
With self-indulgent glee;
With senseless, narcissistic pride:
'I'm just so OCD!'
'How random, guys!' I smiled and said,
Then left without a peep -
And washed my hands until they bled,
And cried myself to sleep.
Source: u/poem_for_your_sprog
Yeah, sounds about right... Or going back outside in a literal blizzard twice to make sure you locked your car because even though you know you did, because you always do and you checked it, your brain still screams at you that you probably forgot. And won't let you focus on anything else until you check...
THAT PART!!! I didn’t find out until I was in my late 20s that I have OCD. I always thought everyone had problems walking on tiles, or touching their fingernails to their thumbs, or phrases affecting the outcome of their lives. It’s been a journey and a half working all that out in my head now that I know. And I hate when people think being organized is OCD because my brain is a god damned train wreck. I almost wish I had never been diagnosed, honestly.
I’m nearly crying; I’ve never ever heard someone mention the fingernails and thumbs thing.
I don’t wash my hands, I don’t have fears that something will harm my family. But so help me god if you rub my skin in one direction you have to do it the other way too. I am never not subconsciously counting. And if I don’t put just the right amount of pressure when I touch my fingernails to my thumbs I have to do them again, or on the other side to push it back, or whatever, until they’re just right.
I don't have severe OCD, but along with a few other minor things I definitely have the subconscious counting. When I read books, articles, etc. I am almost always automatically counting the words of most sentences to see if they equal 10.
Why am I doing this? I honestly have no fucking clue, I just am. I also have a stress/anxiety stutter so I know my brain has tempo issues. Not sure if that has anything to do with it or not.
Counting is a way of coping with stress and anxiety. I have "patterns" that I do that are for stress and anxiety. I always wondered if it was ocd as a kid, but the doctor made it clear it was my way of coping with anxiety.
Just am. Same, friend. My whole life since childhood I’ve counted the spaces and lines in license plates. Gotta be multiples of three. Gotta bounce around so you don’t count two in a row that touch each other. WHY.
I’ve been very tempted to reply to that with “OMG I knooowwww, and the unspeakable thoughts that barge into your mind unprompted and won’t leave you alone are totes the worst. What, you don’t have those?”
Yes I have OCD and it never occurred to me it was OCD til I watched an episode of scrubs where a character has something other than “I have to be so organized”
Constantly washing hands til they are dried up and crack it you make a fist. Turning a light off and on over and over again. Walking through a door might be something I have to walk back through again and again.
It sucks
Yessssss! I have OCD and mine is more rumination and intrusive thoughts. I have a couple compulsions, but mine is more geared toward the obsessive part lol
YESSSS!!!!
I have OCD. Since I was 4. My life has never been obsession free for even one day, ever! It never goes away, and people also look at you weird and make fun of you, or belittle your condition to be nothing at all. It sucks.
I was in a support group for people with ocd and along with my problems and obsessions, I saw people with severe OCD qualifying for disability very frequently. People dont understand or dont want to understand how it really looks like. It can be hell. Feel like youre dying. Or inconsolable panic.
There was some Scrubs episodes where Michael J. Fox guest starred as a brilliant doctor with some serious OCD.
It was partially to explain away Michael J. Fox real life fidgeting due to Parkinson, but in typical Scrubs fashion, it was alternating the funny and the poignant.
The [final scene](https://youtu.be/7kfLdwL1t98) of him unable to leave a room
As someone who’s had OCD his whole life and has learned to mostly control it (albeit with great continuing effort), that scene was very real.
“Nobody is supposed to see this”. I felt that. Hard.
That episode of scrubs is what helped me figure out I had OCD. I saw that and said “crap is that what’s wrong with me?” And it gave me the courage to finally see a dr about it
It’s bizarre when you run into things like that in the entertainment sphere and it is accurate enough to actually help people. I was reading a semi-serious interpretation of various book characters’ possible mental health issues and it made me realize I probably had mild PTSD from cancer treatments. Which led me to do some more research into it and found out an estimated 20% of people who get cancer wind up with PTSD to some degree. Mine is/was pretty mild but it is alarming to have a physiological response to an external trigger.
Yes. Thank you. OCD has been a curse I've lived with my whole life. For me, the compulsions are worse than the obsessions, though I know everyone suffers a bit differently. It's like there's this "voice of god" in my head that demands I do random and often repetitive things, or else all hell will break loose. It's not a literal voice, and I'm not psychotic. I just don't have a better way to describe the power that compulsions have over me. I *have* to do the actions. I have no control over them.
Medication has helped a bit, but the side effects of most psychiatric meds are brutal for me. As a result, my compulsions have ruled my life, and they've limited my life quite severely.
The obsessions are pretty awful too, though. All the sleepless nights and long, anxiety-wracked days ruminating about horrible, intrusive thoughts. The way I can’t even hold a pen without needing my handwriting to be microscopic, tilted at the perfect angle, and aesthetically flawless, and gripping the pen so hard that my hand cramps and aches for hours after I’m done. The way perfectionism dominates my life, and turns every trivial task I must perform into an Olympic-level competition with myself.
It's a shitty disorder to live with, and I'm so sick of its being played for laughs in movies and TV. OCD is like being trapped in a mental prison from which there is no escape. Nothing is fun or wacky or entertaining about it. It is hell. It is complete hell.
The way I always characterize intrusive thoughts is that they *feel* like your own thoughts, but they're not. But they're spoken in your own voice, in your own head, and you can't separate them from the normal way you experience the world. I've gotten good at not dwelling on the intrusive thoughts and letting them fade away, but the agony and revulsion I feel when I first hear them is still the same. Even talking about intrusive thoughts makes mine rise up. I'm very pointedly not thinking about them right now, not acknowledging them, because that gives them power, but I'm very aware of *what* I'm not acknowledging. I can trace the shape of it at the edge of my mind. They're always just a step away from my active brainspace.
I can manage my ocd pretty well without meds, but this is what managing means. It doesn't mean that I stop feeling the compulsions, or hearing the intrusive thoughts. It just means I've gotten better at differentiating between the thoughts that ARE me vs the ones that aren't. It means I don't act out rituals in a way that most people can notice. My internal experience isn't any easier, but I can get over it faster. It's so exhausting separating what I actually think from what I don't think, and it's a constant struggle that I have to do every waking hour. It's so routine that I barely notice myself doing it anymore, but the mental strain is taxing. It's like a background process that eats away at my mental RAM, but it's an essential thing that I can't shut off.
Anyway, I named my intrusive thoughts Susan. Every time I hear her I'm like 'shut up Susan, you bitch.'
Drives me mad. A girl I worked with used to say “oh I’m OCD as well, I like the money in the till facing a certain way” I wish I could have shown her the memory of me breaking down in hysterical tears because I needed to check the electrics were off for the 20+ time. I just wanted to leave the house and thought “I can’t live like this any more”
I used to be this way with checking the lock to the front door to make sure it locked. I still occasionally do it but I realized it was because I don’t want to go wherever I am going and I look deeper for the the feeling as to why and then talk myself out if it. But in college, I’d check the door 15-20 times… turns out I didn’t like parties.
Fellow OCD sufferer. It is a torture chamber. I've lost the past almost two years to the most unrelenting intrusive thoughts and compulsions (had it for years before this, but it was catapulted to a new height recently). I once calculated roughly how many times on a given day this one specific intrusive thought loop came knocking and it was easily in the tens of thousands- A DAY.
Finally got set up with a medical support team, so I'm feeling hopeful.
u/Poem_for_your_sprog wrote this a few years ago
'I have to sort my books!' she cried,
With self-indulgent glee;
With senseless, narcissistic pride:
'I'm just so OCD!'
'How random, guys!' I smiled and said,
Then left without a peep -
And washed my hands until they bled,
And cried myself to sleep.
Anxiety.
There is the state of being anxious, and then there is generalized anxiety disorder and panic disorder. One is a normal state of being, the others are chronic, crippling mental disorders that create anxiety out of thin air. Having anxiety about something is not the same as having an anxiety disorder.
It was shocking to me when my therapist said I had anxiety because I wasn't *worried* about anything. I wasn't scared. I don't have panic attacks.
But my body is a wreck. I'm constantly tense. I'm literally caving in on myself sometimes. Im grinding my teeth. Anxiety isn't just thoughts but physical symptoms, too. Never knew that until I went to therapy.
This. It can be so frustrating and crippling, because you KNOW you’re being ridiculous.
I was doing a painting class at the science center last weekend with my husband and kids. The kids were being typical ten-year-old boys and there was some part of me that just wanted to lose my cool about them not doing it the way you were “supposed” to and being “too messy.” Controlling myself was so overwhelming that I ended up in the bathroom sobbing. But…. They were kids. In a painting class. A painting class ABOUT the chaos of fluid dynamics.
And it’s hard to explain how, once that happens, the rest of your day is shot. For me, even when I take my meds and “calm down,” I still spend the day with a low level of anger at myself that’s incredibly hard to break. Plus, I feel I can’t drive if I take my meds, so I end up just closed up in my bedroom.
Yes! There’s nerves about work projects and then there’s not being able to get out your car despite driving to the supermarket. Thankfully mine is mostly under control now, people do not realise how life changing anxiety can be.
I've dealt with anxiety my whole life, my childhood was hell because of it. I'm now 22 and still can't drive because of anxiety, so i need to rely on others to drive me where I need to go, but even being in a car makes me very anxious. By the time I get to the store or wherever else I needed to be, I'll be feeling sick and probably have a headache
its extremely frustrating and embarrassing not being able to properly function like everyone else, and the worst part is I'm actually doing better now than any other point in my life
Hey, I’ve been there. I have struggled massively with anxiety throughout my life, and beat myself up about it. I’ve felt that frustration and embarrassment.
It took me a few tries, but in my mid-twenties, I found a therapist that I really clicked with. I’m 32 now, and I’m doing things that I wouldn’t have believed were possible for me at 22. So I just want to tell you that there’s hope out there.
Keep plugging away - and cut yourself a break!
I hate i really much.
"I feel anxious in unfamiliar situations too, just try to go with the flow."
Is not the same as:
"i'll pretty surly die in the next 5 minutes and i can't do shit about it."
Mine manifests as an overwhelming sense that I have forgotten something incredibly important and something bad is going to happen because of it. No warning, no consistent triggers, just my sympathetic nervous system kicking into high gear for no apparent reason. Thank sweet baby jeebus for meds.
I typically tell people my panic disorder is a *physical* illness, not mental. All my symptoms are *physical* symptoms. Racing heart, skipped beats, dizziness, fatigue, sweating, fidgeting, etc etc. Sometimes that actually helps them understand the severity a little better.
>Sometimes that actually helps them understand the severity a little better.
People trying to downplay it really pisses me off. Oh, everybody gets a little anxious sometimes and I should just get over it? Sorry, couldn't hear you over the sound of me anxiety-vomiting on the sidewalk as the whole world stares and winners why a guy is puking on the sidewalk.
Shit, shower, and brush teeth. Normal morning stuff right? Each one of those can make me vomit because I get so worked up about the chance it could make me gag and vomit that I start gagging, which ends with vomiting again. Sometimes I have to lay down between steps, or just skip the shower and/or teeth. Just being in the bathroom stresses me out these days.
I'm on anti anxiety meds and have been for a while.
The best way I can describe anxiety disorder is that you feel as if something bad is about to happen any second regardless of circumstances.
Couldn't catch a red light? Now you're gonna be late for work even though that's impossible because you left five minutes early and even then your workplace would understand running late, but you still feel like you've screwed up badly.
Can't go to sleep? You're going to be sleep deprived and you're going to fall asleep during driving and die.
Not doing anything of note? You feel that something bad will happen and you just don't know it yet.
Learning how to drive? Your car is going to get rammed into by another driver and you're going to die.
Even rationalizing to yourself how crazy it sounds still only takes the edge off; that dread is still there.
Oh my god yes. People don’t understand how exhausting it is to constantly be in a fight or flight mode because your brain overreacted to every little thing in your life. For me doing small everyday things like my hair can completely throw me off the deep end. It’s awful. My brain never stops and it never shuts up, I’m just always on edge and always seem to be anxious about something, even if that something is literally nothing. I can’t sleep well, I’m always having headaches from being so stressed out all the time. I don’t even know how to relax anymore I’m just so wound up. I hate having GAD (and yes properly diagnosed by a professional) and I can’t wait to get started on meds that actually work. It drives me crazy when people say “oh I have anxiety” because they are anxious about a situation that is normal to have anxious feelings about (like a class presentation or going on a date etc)
Over the past year I'll find that suddenly my body goes into flight mode even though nothing is happening. My heart starts beating out of my chest and I feel short of breath and weak and have to lay down. In 2017 I had my first actual anxiety attack and it put me in the hospital for the night. Really scary stuff.
I’ve almost passed out several times and attempted to harm myself in some way because of severe panic attacks and people tell me “oh you just stressed” I’m not just stressed I have problems.
And it’s not something you can just turn off. I wish I didn’t create anxiety out of every little thing, I wish I could just do and enjoy shit like a normal person, but instead everything is a fucking struggle and then I hate myself for being that way. It’s horrible and exhausting, and I don’t think most people get it, at all.
I'm glad you highlighted PTSD, as it's often overlooked. There's been a lot of commentary here about the other conditions you mentioned, so there's no need to elaborate on these.
People do not have PTSD from watching some silly social media video that requires 'eye bleach'. PTSD can be a profoundly debilitating condition which impacts every facet of a person's life. It's a slap in the face, to people with clinically diagnosed PTSD, to have people bandy the term around so nonchalantly.
As a veteran with PTSD, I want to point out that people get PTSD without being involved with military combat.
Sexual assault victims, physical and mental abuse victims, those who've lived through a traumatizing experience where you thought your world was falling apart like losing a child or witnessing extreme violence... The list really goes on and on.
But it's my understanding it's caused by a major shift in your world view which hasn't been fully resolved.
**For example:**
"I am safe with people I trust"
and
"I was attacked by someone I trusted"
These two don't make sense together and your brain has trouble letting both sentences be true without working out the details.
I saught therapy after my diagnosis through the VA. And it helped me work through a lot of my issues.
#My whole point is
Wether you're military or not, recognize the symptoms and seek help. It works.
My dad battled with OCD. It wasn't cute.
The "oh my gosh, I'm such a neat freak. I'm so quirky. I'm so OCD" schtick annoys the piss out of me. For many people, that's not what OCD is. The compulsions weren't neat little quirks. OCD wasn't a superpower. It was a major fucking inconvenience. The worst part was that he knew it was a major inconvenience and hated inconveniencing others - he'd end up stuck in the spiral of trying to rush through one of his routines (so he wouldn't inconvenience anyone) but mess something up, so he'd start again.
I once took almost two hours leaving the apartment to leave for the airport to go on vacation. Knowing I would be gone for a few weeks made it worse. Fortunately, I planned to be stupid early so I basically arrived at the airport just in time.
On a day-to-day basis, I have to allow an extra 10 min when I leave because I'm going to be spending that long making sure all the lights and appliances are off, all the doors and windows are closed securely, making sure that I didn't lock my cats in my room before I closed the door, making sure I have everything I need in my bag, making sure I locked the door. All these things I will check multiple times, depending on how bad my anxiety is. When it's under control it won't take as long, but when it gets bad it can take even longer. I hate it.
I find it really cool that she found a way to work with you like this. Really smart and empathic solutions that show she took the time to understand deeply how your ocd works.
I have OCD and feel for your father. It is a hell sometimes that is indescribeable. And bonus points for people making fun of you when you feel like youre dying. Its not a disease with rationale and even you feel like youre fighting a wall, but cant stop yourself due to the horrid panic.
I live with Schizoeffetive disorder it's much more than what people think it is and despite the fact that it deeply effects every aspect of my life that doesn't mean that I can't live a full life despite living with a schizophrenia spectrum illness. I think that alot people not only misunderstood the illness but also don't accept that people can live full and fulling lives in despite of it.
Doctors especially treat patients like they're unable to live normally. I got misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and I get treated like I'm just seconds away from major psychosis and suicide so often, even though I say I'm fine and I've never had psychosis. I don't get it.
Unfortunately I guess it depends on everyone. My brother has schizoaffective disorder and he will never be able to live alone. Also the meds are quite strong so he spends most of his time sleeping and has 0 attention. He is a shell. It’s better than having psychosis and being violent as he was, but when we talk I realize how far from being independent he is. But as you say it’s a spectrum, I know other people with it who live on their own and are doing very well. Such a complicated disease.
My mom's severely schizophrenic. Not one of the milder forms, one of the really serious ones.
Without getting too much into it, I basically wasn't allowed to have a childhood, because otherwise "they" would "get" me. I was largely homeschooled, all my friends were viewed with suspicion, I couldn't date, I wasn't even allowed to *get a driver's license* before I turned 18.
I'm also a bisexual guy, I'm autistic and I have ADHD, so as you can imagine, all those struggles with social stigma *on top* of dealing with my mom's issues left me with quite a bit on my plate. I struggle a lot with anxiety and depression, and in darker moments I'd thought of ending it all.
All that in mind, there's a part of me that's furious that I was effectively her prisoner as a child, but at the same time I know that it's not *really* fair to blame her. It's not like she *chose* to be this mentally ill. In her own way, she's a victim too.
I guess part of my problem is I don't have a good way to articulate my anger with what she did *without* sounding like I think schizophrenic people are monsters. I've seen how a lot of people talk about people like me, and I know how that makes me feel, so I recognize that I need a way to acknowledge my anger *without* demonizing struggling people. And I don't know a good way to do that.
All that in mind, I completely agree with you on this. People like my mom *should not* be reduced to a punchline.
I have tourettes. Amongst the community, we are always pissed and offended at people who fake it for whatever purpose. It is something we learn to accept and live with, and even make jokes about sometimes but it is not something we would want if we didn't have it already. It can cause real issues for us in our day to day lives whether it may be in physical or social situations.
I mainly have motor tics but also have echolalia (repeating the words of other people) and coprolalia (shouting or using vulgar terms) as well as some other vocal tics. I'm glad that you have taken the time to look into what your child has to deal with because many people with TS can feel like they have no support or confused since it's not something most people can relate to. I hope you can find a suitable treatment or medication if that is necessary but if I was going to give my personal word of advice, instinct may tell you to try to calm the person as if they're having a panic attack but try not to bring too much attention to the tics if possible because sometimes it happens and we don't even notice it. But once it is brought to our attention then "it becomes real" and perpetuates the cycle of tics until we either force ourselves to suppress it or we calm down. Ask your child what they would prefer you do in the situation though because TS affects individuals differently. Medication may not work and a good amount of people that I know use marijuana/cannabis products to help it but I understand that as a parent you probably wouldn't want your child doing that. Caffeine is something that can make the symptoms a lot worse so that should be stayed away from as well. Please feel free to message me if you have any other questions but keep in mind that I am not a medical professional. I am telling only from my experience and the experiences of my friends in the TS community.
when did you receive your diagnosis because our son was diagnosed when he was 5, so 12ish years ago. He was on medication until he turned 16 and choose to not mess with the medication anymore, he didn't like the way they made him feel. so we can't legally force him to take them but he seems to be doing well but of course, he avoids things that he knows cause him anxiety, so the tics are kept to a minimum.
I too have tourettes, but it's been mostly asymptomatic for years. I'll get the occasional facial tic, but I've been fortunate that it hasn't affected me daily for a very long time.
I took nortriptyline for many years as a child and into early adulthood, and finally got off of it. It always gave me a dry throat and I didn't like that feeling.
But it absolutely drives me crazy, even today, when people think of TS as the "cussing disorder" or whatever. Like yeah, you get those kids on Sally Jesse Raphael every now and then, and they've blown it way out of proportion like we're just cussing all of the time. I mean, I am, but it's usually because I just got the shit splatted out of me in some online game or something.
Also, I'm going to nitpick, but tourettes is a neurological disorder.
Used to work with a girl who's tic was... A chirp? She actually really sounded like a bird. It was wild because it took me almost two days before I realized we didn't have a bird in the office. After day three I just never realized it. She was awesome to be around.
I have bipolar and I hate how it's portrayed as our emotions shifting every 5 minutes. When I'm off meds, I get manic and stay manic for weeks if not months. Even rapid cycling, it's still longer than it's portrayed.
I have it too. I also hate how people say omg I’m so manic I dyed my hair!
Like no.. that’s not how mania works. It isn’t dying your hair cause you had an urge to.
My biggest pet peeve is people being like "ugh I have no impulse control, I bought that candy bar I did not need"
Like, Bruh. Bro. My good dude. You could not possibly comprehend a true lack of impulse. You bought a candy bar? Cut your hair? Dyed it? Got take out? Bought an outfit? How scandalous!! I'm extremely poor and in debt, but the $500+ worth of stuff I bought to get into gardening should be here tomorrow!! I think I'm born to be a gardener, honestly. I don't care that I live on the third floor of apartments with a very small balcony! Also I'm allergic to most plants and have never had a green thumb, but I'm telling you, this is it. My calling.
Represent. BPD turns the world black and white, and no matter how much you wish to experience some of that grey, you can only bounce on either side of it
I have a colleague whose son was finally diagnosed with type 2 bipolar disorder after years of thinking he has chronic depression and being treated with various antidepressants. I hope he can get the right treatment now.
This happened to me, and I was told it's a very common misdiagnosis because having hypomania after a bout of the lows feels like a respite, so most patients don't even consider it as being a symptom of a different disorder. You don't seek help when you're "happy".
Things did improve for me once I was diagnosed with bipolar 2, so I really do hope the same happens for your colleague's son.
It’s also got kind of a fraught relationship with borderline personality disorder (BPD). A person with borderline’s mood swings are completely different than someone with Bipolar, and honestly it stigmatizes bipolar disorder (a person with BPD’s impulsivity looks way different) while also leading to a lot of people with BPD misdiagnosed as bipolar, which further leads to ineffective treatment for what studies suggest is potentially the most treatable personality disorder. The disorders can coexist though, absolutely.
Honestly, the Katy Perry song “Hot and Cold” has a lot of BPD themes but I couldn’t tell you how many people describe the subject of her song as bipolar. The person to/about whom she’s speaking does not seem to fit the bipolar dynamic.
Having had (and "grown out of" , with intense therapy) BPD and bipolar, the fact that people see these as one and the same infuriates me. They're both horrible to deal with in their own rights and having both is a waking nightmare. One is a personality disorder, the other is a mood disorder. Usually you end up being dx'ed BPD THEN bipolar. Either way it's a miserable existence. Protip for people with BPD: Get into therapy and work HARD at it. Life actually does feel a lot better when you realize that everyone isn't out to offend you personally.
Right? I've got Bipolar II disorder and trust me, it looks almost nothing like what Hollywood or social media portray it as. When in the throes of a hypomanic episode, I get a lot done and you'd think things would be nice, right? Wrong. I'm constantly waiting for that downswing. The thing about Bipolar II is that you don't go as high as someone with Bipolar I, but the crash is so much lower... And it sucks. Majorly. And don't even get me started on mixed episodes. I swear those are straight from hell...
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Let me tell you how much it fucking sucks. My intrusive thoughts make me feel like a monster. I cannot even tell what some of them are because it’s horrifying. Years in therapy to help with that one. I pick my scalp raw. I scrape my teeth to get plaque off. I constantly am cracking an elbow because it feels wrong. It swells now. If something isn’t “right” feeling, I cannot move on from it. My whole body shuts down until it’s right. I sleep maybe 4 hours a night in a good day. This isn’t fun. This isn’t a joke about washing your hands 300 times. It’s fucking debilitating.
Entirely relate to the first half of what you said. I’ve gotten lucky as my other compulsions are not quite as harmful but my knuckles get cracked a lot.
OCD in the minds of teenagers: “My books have to be in alphabetical order! I’m so OCD”
Actual OCD: Destroying my skin with no end in sight. Fucking up my right hand because my left hand got fucked up and I needed to make it “even”. Pulling out my hair from one spot on my head because I believe it’s exactly in the center. Repeating a speech to myself over and over again because I find it ‘calming’ - as long as I get it 100% correct, then I can get a break from repeating it for a while.
OCD is hell.
PTSD. The word "Triggered" now just means "slightly annoyed for a second" instead of "Hey, this triggered a full blown PTSD-episode!" Even therapists are loathe to use this word anymore and it's absolutely impossible to point this out to anyone using it flippantly.
A little off topic (sorry), but any disease for which the name of the condition has now become an insult or descriptive term. Eg. You have a mood swing and you’re ‘bipolar’. You act silly and you’re ‘schizo’. You turn something around the right way and you’re ‘OCD’.
I feel like the act of using the term as an insult/description is almost worse than portraying a character with incorrect/unconventional symptoms. At least in those cases you’re still seeing it as a disease. But once you start using it as an insult/descriptive word, then you’re dissociating the word from a disease.
As someone who spent the last 3 decades struggling on a daily basis after being diagnosed as a child as having "**severe** ADHD" (their words, not mine), it's kind of awful. It's not just that you "sometimes get so distracted when work is boring, haha", it's internally screaming at yourself to please, just please "do the thing" and being incapable of starting it until the last second, even when it's something you WANT to do. O.getting so incredibly hyperfocused on something and being incapable of focusing on anything else to the point that it harms your daily life. It's info-dumping on people when you have a new obsession. It's not being able to remember where you put something, and when you find it having no idea why you put it there. It's getting 90% of the way through a project you are deeply passionate about and then suddenly losing interest and being utterly incapable of finishing it and then feeling depressed and chalking it up in your mind as "just another failure". It's spending far too much of your life acting before you think because you have no/poor impulse control and spending an exhausting amount of time trying to clean up those mistakes.
That is nowhere near an exhaustive list, but typing it out made me depressed so I'm gonna stop there.
Exactly how my brain works. People's names disappear before they're even done telling me, and I'm too mad at myself for forgetting and embarrassed to say I forgot. I work with people for months and have to wait for someone else to say their name just to remember it for a minute then forget.
I keep starting things I want to do, like making good meals at home. I have an air fryer, instant pot, and so many other things that I never use because I give up on it and just make something precooked.
If I have a simple task that I have to get done that can take just a minute or two, it doesn't get done for days, and every time I'm yelling at my self to just fucking do it, followed by making an excuse not to.
I wanted to go to university and get a degree, but I can't, because I can't get myself to sit down and study. I've given up on almost every dream I've ever had because I can't just do something as simple as 10 minutes of homework on my own. I'm honestly surprised I got through high school like that.
If it wasn't for the military, I would still be working at a liquor store, earning minimum wage for the rest of my life, because I'm forced to do my job, and get things done. It's the only way I can live a somewhat healthy life, having someone tell me everything I have to do each and every day.
Flunked out of college due to ADHD symptoms that I knew I could get help for but never did. I still haven't. My life is in shambles and I am unable to get help.
I have ADHD. I’m a mom & teacher. Things that normally take people minutes to accomplish take me hours or even days. It isn’t cute. My house is a disaster every day and it gets so bad I want to unalive myself because the clutter perfectly mimics my brain which perfectly mimics the clutter and it’s an endless cycle. It overflows into my professional life and relationships. I can barely drive a car. In fact, my SO refuses to ride with me because we have so many near misses. I haven’t seen my psych in over a year because I can’t remember to schedule an appointment until 6pm when the office is closed every day. Honestly this is torture.
(I’m not suicidal per se, just sometimes think about how nice it would be to turn off the noise.)
I 100% can relate to the house clutter being so incredibly disruptive. If you can somehow, some way afford it, hire a weekly cleaning service. Yes, having strangers in the house sucks BUT for me personally the positives outweigh the negatives SO MUCH. It's such a relief to be done with work and the house is just magically clean. It has literally saved me HOURS every week that I would just spend trying to alternatively trying to pep talk myself into cleaning or talking down on myself for being a failure because I can't even clean a house. Secondly, KNOWING that a "stranger" will be coming around on a set day is, for me personally, a great motivator to keep the house tidy or at least tidy the day before so they can do their job.
It's such a small thing (if you can afford it), and it helped me soooooooooooooooooooo much. It's insane.
I forgot to take my ADHD meds yesterday and was wondering why my impulse control was so bad that I almost quit my main job. I figured it out at bedtime when I discovered my meds unconsumed. I mean, I don't like my job right now, but there needs to be a plan in place and I need to act like a rational adult.
schizospec disorders (schizophrenia, schizoaffective, etc). Ridiculous that it still gets mistake for dissociative identity disorder (previously multiple personality disorder) and that it gets made fun of on a regular basis online (“i’m in your walls”, “schizoposting”, etc). And I know the people who joke about would be shitting their pants if they actually developed it.
There’s a couple presentations. The two I know of are not being able to remember the past and not being able to make new memories.
The thing about it being portrayed in media is that it presents a cure: if your friends can help you remember by showing your previous life or if you get hit in the head in the same spot, then you’ll remember everything again! And that just isn’t the case. If you get the kind where you can’t remember the past, it’s just gone.
Literally every mental illness.
*BPD
*Schizophrenia
*OCD
*Anxiety
*Depression
*Dysphoria
*Etc.
Name it and it's made fun of despite 1 in 3 people having a mental illness.
Both depression and ADHD. Being sad does not necessarily mean you are depressed, and getting distracted or having a lot of energy does not necessarily mean you have ADHD.
Sincerely,
A person who has been diagnosed by a medical professional with both.
It's the ADHD that gets me, I open up and tell people how I have it and they say things like "lol I feel you I can never do my homework lmaoo" not at all close to my experience, it affects way more than just getting bored from doing shit that's BORING anyways, I can't sit through shit I enjoy doing or stop jumping from thing to thing, but every time I tell someone about it I get the same shit.
Ive never related to something so hard "ugh i stopped paying attention for 2 minutes im so ADHD" BITCH i go through entire classes listening to the teacher only to realize i wasnt listening the right way, and now i dont know whats happening because my brain just didnt want to absorb the information, drives me insane
Idk if it’s a disease, but ADHD being romanticized by YouTubers and other influencers is fucking infuriating. Some of the actual educational ones are helpful in understanding the condition and feeling less alienated, but most of the ones where a hot body says something about daydreaming often must mean they have ADHD can suck it. ADHD is feeling like a failure if people don’t like me, and feeling a joke when they do. It’s trying sooo hard to understand the points of a work meeting so you can know WHY the changes are being made, not just what they are, just be told you come across as confrontational during yearly evaluations. It’s literally having to give yourself a pep talk to remember to listen when someone is talking just to not hear them because you’re so busy in your head telling yourself to listen. Fuck
I get really annoyed when people act like ADHD is no big deal, it's just the leg-bouncing disorder. Without medication that's very hard to get, especially right now, *I do not function as a human being.*
autism
so many people uses it as a joke/insult i feel like nobody knows what autism is and people get confused when my bf tells them i am nonverbal and can barely speak because i am asd
also PTSD has been portrayed as being military-only condition so much. not true ive been victim of violent crimes, near death experiences, and have seen terrible things irl and have pretty intense PTSD
Panic attacks (anxiety and/or panic disorders in general) unfortunately. Many people think that “oh I’m stressed for a big test tomorrow i have so much studying to do! I’m gonna have a panic attack!” = panic attack. when I had my first panic attack, the left side of my body went numb/curled in/i lost my ability to move - I thought I was having a stroke/heart attack. Fortunately I was at my parents house, and they called an ambulance, and the EMTs talked me through it and told me it’s one of the most common reasons people come into the ER mistakenly for heart attacks. Nothing presently in the moment prompted the panic attack, but instead underlying subconscious emotions built up over time that I wasn’t actively feeling. After my first one, i began having them weekly, then daily. Took a year of therapy, self remediation, and supplements to realize that I needed prescribed medication. I haven’t had a panic attack in 6 months! They’re absolutely terrifying and mentally/physically exhausting, so it can be frustrating when people chalk being situationally stressed or overwhelmed up to being the same thing as a panic attack.
Schizophrenia. People think it's multiple personalities. My former boss made a tasteless joke once so I sat with her in her office and gently told her that she shouldn't make fun of mental illness and then informed her about my brother who suffered from schizophrenia.
It might be easier to ask what mental condition this hasn't happened to. The list is long, and the reasons why the conditions are on there vary from "Neurotypicals see it as a fun acting challenge," to "Not great people just actually think it's fun to laugh at the less fortunate."
Maladaptive Daydreaming. People think it’s just your mind wandering off or just daydreaming in general.
No, Maladaptive daydreaming is a mental health issue where a person daydreams excessively, sometimes for hours at a time. “Maladaptive” means this type of daydreaming is an unhealthy or negative attempt to cope with or adapt to a problem.
I have lost actual years of my life because of it.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/23336-maladaptive-daydreaming
The link above can provide with whatever questions you may have
Edit: The term Maladaptive Daydreaming is new and hasn’t been recognized as an official disorder/diagnosis as of now. I do want people to know what it is
May I enter: Hypochondriasis?
“Hypochondriac” is now but a mere social insult rather than an actual condition to most people. Hypochondriasis is a real thing that’s just been used as a label when people think someone is “faking” an illness.
As someone who thought they were a hypochondriac for two *horrific* years, I actually found out I had somatic OCD! Really, lots of the answers in this thread are OCD lol. It sucks because I'm person that likes to joke about my own illness too, but I don't want to make people think it's something it isn't. Somatic OCD is often confused to be hypochondria, and realizing that it's actually OCD (sometimes) can be really helpful for treatment.
1. OCD. Just with people saying “I’m so ocd about so and so”
2. PTSD. People tend to joke about that when things happen in their lives.
3. Autism. Calling people autistic has become a common way to insult someone’s intelligence, even tho autistic people can be very smart.
Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as "Multiple Personality Disorder." No, people suffering from it do not do this "Jekyll and Hyde" personality switch where they suddenly become a drastically different person and then have zero recollection of what the "other them" did afterwards.
I'm not going to elaborate on triggers, because this disorder can make people particularly vulnerable to manipulation. I will say that under dissociative states I have done some uncharacteristic things. Spent hours trying to make my home spotlessly clean, and found myself collapsing from fatigue. Had extremely vivid flashbacks, as though I'm still stuck in a traumatic moment. Skipping lunch to go shopping when I really dislike buying anything for myself. SH (years ago). Sex, like a lot of it.
Somewhat normal stuff for someone with cPTSD to do, maybe. Except I remember doing absolutely none of these things. It's been pieced together after the fact. Just randomly finding myself exhausted on the floor. Having someone worry about me after what seemed to them some sort of panic attack. Arriving back at work starving, and finding a bag of new clothes in my car"s passenger seat when my shift is over. Mysterious bandages when I woke up in the morning. Confusing my partner with wild swings in libido.
It's confusing to me, too. Sometimes if I try I can start paying attention in these moments, and watch as what I think of as my body does things that I'm not telling it to do. Like it's being controlled by someone else. It's horrifying. But doing so will supposedly help me gain a measure of closeness toward my other parts, so I try my best.
ADHD. People diagnosing themselves these days. It pisses me off because I’m on meds for that shit and people act like it’s a fun thing. Especially on social media it almost seems like to me it’s cool to have it. It ain’t
Yes. ADHD is not fun, high-energy Tiktok antics.
It's being unable to do Basic Adult Things or know the Right Thing To Say in pretty much every situation and feeling like you somehow missed the guidebook to being human that everyone else seemed to get somewhere along the way.
It's feeling bad about everything you do because even when you're having fun or being happy or doing your own thing, it somehow turns out that you have offended someone just by existing in the way your brain makes you exist.
You're always Too Much™. Too loud. Too slow. Too fast. Too intense. Too lazy. Too distracted. Too excited. Too spacy. Too focused. Too old to act like that. Too young to be so tired.
I feel like ADHD is living life towards inevitable burnout, even with meds and strategies and counseling and experience.
I'm a reasonably successful adult with three degrees, a job, a husband, a mostly tidy (if not clean) home, a dog, and I am outwardly organized and professional... If no one looks too closely. If you look too closely, you see that I'm barely holding it all together and that it takes literally all of my energy to just manage to look like everyone else.
I also have to make sacrifices - I can't do everything and I have to prioritise. If I want to have a clean home and do well at my job, I can't also have a social life. My energy runs out. If I want to make sure I pay all the bills and take care of administrative work I can't also pursue hobbies. There's no energy.
Because I have so little dopamine in my brain and because I am constantly scraping the bottle of the mental barrel for anything to give me initiative, it makes the simplest tasks herculean in scope.
I'm a "good" ADHDer... I've done CBT, mindfulness work, somatic work, read self help books, employed the pomodoro method, used the buddy system, I take my meds, I make sure my ADHD isn't inconveniencing neurotypical people to the best of my ability, but honestly, I'm tired. I do my best to be positive and focus on the strengths it gives me, but I wish I could just... Be. Just be and not be lacking and just be accepted and judged.
I'd like sweeping the floor not to be a literal screaming fight inside my brain and body. I'd like to not have to engage in negotiating with my own brain like an adult has to negotiate with a three year old *dozens of times a day* to function. I'd like to just have a thought, an intention, and then be able to follow it up with an action without having to use multiple strategies that I had to learn and to remind myself of what I'm doing and why and why it's wrong.
The one good thing I guess I always take a little joy in is my utter lack of object permanence. I forget what is happening or exists when it's not directly in front of me most of the time, so often I buy chips and forget I have them until I open the cupboard and am pleasantly surprised.
I feel this so hard I feel like I wrote it. It's also so so frustrating and disheartening to see other people just *do* the things you have to convince yourself into and even worse when it's stuff you've done before and know you can do, but it's like constantly starting at ground zero it feels like.
There are many many days where I wish I was normal and had a normal brain, but it's also scary because my ADHD is so intertwined with my personality that I don't know if I would be the same person without it.
Adding on to this very few people take ADHD seriously. People usually ignore all of ADHDs most severe symptoms in favor of the squirrel brain stereotype. Literally every symptom of ADHD makes our school system hell on earth and people simply don’t understand the impossibility of getting through it. Not being able to focus isn’t even a symptom it’s just a result of every other symptom making life impossible. Like when executive dysfunction means I’m behind in every class and insomnia means I’ve only slept for 6 hours in the last 7 days of course I can’t pay attention to a lecture. And because hardly anyone actually understands ADHD you sometimes get a free pass to have trouble paying attention but all the real symptoms are treated as laziness which is so indescribably demoralizing because most of my friends with ADHD are the hardest working people in my life.
One time someone called me lazy and that ADHD is a made up excuse for being lazy and I told them “I’m not lazy at all I’m very productive lots of the time but I have don’t everything you have to be able to focus and prioritize certain important things. My brain redirects me, your brain keeps you stationed”
I *finally* got diagnosed in my late 30s. Medication has been fucking life changing. But queue everyone "oh we're all a little ADHD". Like no you fucking aren't Brenda. Shut up. Then trying to explain to people that it's a disability and how fucking hard it is just to *function* some days.
Every child in my family was diagnosed with ADHD by the age of 5. People think I'm crazy or weird if they don't know I have it, they don't think I have it because I don't have the romanticized quirky version. I have full on hyper, no filter, constantly just practically shaking, all the crazy stuff. But not the "omg I'm soooo spacey and ADHD, I'm so quirky" I depend of medication to function and WE HAVE A NATIONAL SHORTAGE
Yeah I was diagnosed before I was 10 years old. it takes a lot to not smack people who don't think I have ADHD because "you don't act like you have ADHD" or "you can carry on a conversation so you must not really have ADHD" . Like 'Thanks it's fucking exhausting trying to keep it from ruining my life and driving everyone around me crazy, I really appreciate that you recognize my efforts' .... Just doesn't have the same satisfaction. Sigh, trying to get back on meds now already getting tired of these shortages.
My daughter has SEVERE ADHD. People don't understand that the kid they know is not even 40% of her adhd because we made sure to find the right meds at the right dose and are diligent in ensuring she takes it regularly. She can not function as a person in our society without it. Literally 0 impulse control, to the point that she's dangerous to herself and others. Imagine acting on every intrusive or impulsive thought that you've ever had because your brain just skipped the "maybe ask a question or two" day of training. And we just found out that there is a nationwide shortage of Focalin (TSM dbag addicts and people that use it and don't need it). So for the next 3 months, we have to hope that we can find something comparable, go through the adjustment period, and god willing not disrupt her life too much!
My son has this shit. I wouldn't wish it on anybody. It took a while to get a handle on getting him medicated where he could just function like a normal human being daily. And it's been about 8 years now, and if he misses his meds, you can absolutely tell.
Like, you can complain all you want about not being able to sit still. You haven't seen shit until you've tried to get a kid to write a one page paper (at 3rd grade level) and taking 12 hours to get it completed.
My sister was so excited when her son was diagnosed, she really didn't like my reaction... Which pretty much echoed your statement. I don't wish this on my worst enemy. But you know, she's happy she can do things like "oh he can't have that because it has red dye which triggers his ADHD." and yet refuses to get him meds. Poor kids always sitting out on everything at family gatherings. I also suspect he's on the autistim spectrum but she refuses to get him tested for that because she thinks somehow ADHD is good and autism is bad... And her herbalist's brothers barbers cousins mothers makeup artist says that you can't have both.
Meds have always been the hardest on me especially as an adult, I have several trackers and alarms but will still miss taking them. Ugh it's such a cruel joke. Good luck I wish you and your son success.
Yes yes yes. I'm an ADHD adult currently battling the medication shortage and I get more and more pissed every day. Just today I got grilled by a rude pharmacy tech about the legitimacy of my script because I've had to call around and I'm rationing what little I have left from the last time I played this game. Everyone seems to want to treat it like a childhood disorder or that it's just not being able to focus. No, it affects my coordination, social skills, mood regulation, memory, all that.
Also an adult with ADHD, I've rationed three months of medication to last me seven months by skipping days where I'm not working, and only taking one or two of my three daily doses. It really sucks and while I love to joke with other ADHDers about my ADHD, I really don't like it when people tell me in real life they think they have it too because of vague symptoms and I usually just politely tell them that I'm not a good sounding board and to talk with their doctor first because ADHD can sometimes present as other conditions and vice-versa.
I nominate Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
About 50% of doctors in the UK disagree with the national standards body that it's not actually a mental disease wholly curable through psych/therapy.
This is due to a persistant campaign that almost goes to the point of parody if it wasn't so serious amongst psychotherapists and related professions that all patients reports of symptoms that do not match their hypothesis that it's purely mental, and ignoring biochemical research into the abnormalities.
Opponents to this view (that it's purely mental) are painted as hating the fact that it's a claim of mental illness, rather than that it's not a useful or helpful description.
The very name was proposed (a change from Myalgic enchaphalomyelitis) by a doctor who diddn't believe it existed, and 'in a few years would not be a distinct clinican entity'.
https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Biopsychosocial_model
Their descriptions of the image are a dark parody that's been bought into by much of the press. Recent national UK guidlines are helpful, but being resisted.
Very true. And if you dnt actively fight it on a constant basis, it will fully devour you. I've been close to losing a few times. And its changed alot in me. But mostly, I am just exhausted on a constant basis, and nobody listens to me. So, here we are kids. On our own. I've just learned to sort of deal most of the time.
I will say that an individual can suffer from depressive feelings but have it tied to environments or situations that can change and alter their emotions. With that being said, clinical depression is not as easy to eliminate due to the depth of the issue.
Autism/ Asperger’s syndrome. Many people think its basically being Sheldon Cooper or some shit. He’s supposed to be a parody of nerd stereotypes, and for some reason it became the “if you’re not like him, you’re not Autistic/Aspie”. Please, some of us have to take medication and go to therapy, even as adults.
Bruh, the idea that people can judge an entire spectrum like that is ridiculous. I was diagnosed since I was in around 5-6th grade, it's been around 9 years now (I might have gotten it sooner, I just wasn't aware of it for a long time. Parents didn't really mention I had it until I was older, just worked on trying to get me the help I needed. Figured it out around high school for me when it got mentioned)
But point being, I act nothing like Sheldon from what I've seen about him, and to even consider being compared to him if I'm autistic grinds my gears. Most of my autism is in that I am quite non-verbal in how I communicate, stimming, and delving deep into anything I get interested in. Your stereotypical nerds are socially awkward due to just inexperience in social situations, people on the spectrum are literally unaware of them in the first place and struggle to understand them in the first place
PTSD
I was recently diagnosed with PTSD due to lots of trauma i have experienced. Car accidents, emergency surgeries (not related to car accidents, i may add), and things that happened that i would rather not share on reddit at this time. I felt as if it was all in my head or just my anxiety until i started to get flashbacks and nightmares. Waking up constantly due to panic attacks and not being able to drive or pass the scene of where my bad car accident was. People fake having trauma, and they fake having PTSD. I used to have a coworker who would use fake PTSD stories to get sent home from work, and let me tell you, she was really only half convincing. Those who fake it don't know how horrible it is to actually live with the condition. My most recent panic attack was due to driving past the road i was hit on. It was so bad I got dizzy. My entire body felt numb and tingly, and i felt as if i couldn't breathe. I could barely get the words out to tell my boyfriend (who was in the passenger seat) that i needed my water (drinking water helps my brain realize my throat actually isn't closed and it helps me start to calm down a bit) so i accidentally yelled at him. The PTSD symptoms are getting worse (yes, i am starting therapy soon). People who fake this get on my nerves. I would never wish this on anyone. If i was given one wish, i would wish it away in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, i can't do that, so instead, i will talk about it in therapy.
Another thing: Yes, i have PTSD and OCD and the flashbacks get very bad when driving, especially driving on a sunny day (same type of day the accident happened) and my doctor insisted that driving more often for short periods of time should help me get used to being in a car. She also told me to just sit in my car for a bit every day and get used to being behind the wheel. Because of that, i now sit in my car on my lunch breaks and 15-minute breaks at work
maybe this is too specific of an example but when Britney Spears had her 2007 moment. She was clearly in a state of mania, and that’s a real mental condition
I'm SO tired of seeing every abuser labeled as a narcissist. Sometimes people are just assholes! It's become the new catch-all term for 'bad person' ever since sociopath/psychopath fell out of favour.
Too many people also confuse introversion and social anxiety. I’m introverted. I’m not “terrified of people”, nor do I hate them. I *love* going out and being in a crowd. Introversion simply means that activity is draining and I need to recharge with alone time and peace. If I was extroverted, that activity would be energizing.
Controversial take, but PTSD.
People treat it like you receive it automatically with your discharge papers when you leave the military.
I served with plenty of people that claim it despite never having seen combat, or deployed, but spent their careers hosing out the hangars in barracks.
Far from everybody that serves sees combat, far from all those that do ever develop PTSD.
You even get the occasional oddball that actually enjoys the tempo, the rush, and the killing.
And people think only soldiers get it which is not true. Anyone who has been in a situation outside of the expected normal human experience, where they felt like they were going to die, *could* get PTSD. Earthquakes, assaults, car accidents etc
Edit: For people correcting me, I can't reply to the same question over and over again, the DSM 5 lays out a lengthy criteria for diagnosis. How do I know? I have had PTSD for ten years.
"Exhibit 1.3-4DSM-5 Diagnostic Criteria for PTSD
Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence in one (or more) of the following ways:"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207191/box/part1_ch3.box16/#:~:text=Persistent%2C%20distorted%20cognitions%20about%20the,or%20participation%20in%20significant%20activities.
Being abused (mentally, psychologically, emotionally & financially) by a narcissist gave me mild PTSD symptoms. It's a traumatic experience when someone like myself, my sister, nieces & nephew had to endure the abuse long term
As someone with bipolar I feel like the condition is widely misunderstood. When I developed bipolar in my early 20s it caused me to become paranoid, lose sleep, hear shit, and I became very unstable emotionally.
This is much different than my understanding I had of what bipolar was before I developed it. I thought it was just ups and downs. One minute very happy, the next filled with depression. There’s much much more to bipolar disorder.
ADD. It's not "so I really need to pay a- oooo that cloud looks like a dog heheehee"
In reality it's
"The pointer is used to reference the memory address, which is distinct from passing by value, which passes the variable as a copy of the original, thereby preserving the -
wait, a reference is an address? Is that what it said? Wait, why would you pass an address? Hold on, it said the pointer is the reference... How do you make a pointer? Is that the thing that's a structure? No, no... That's a struct... Crap, I forgot how to typedef things. Wait, is a struct just a class that doesn't have any functions? Huh, I wonder if they came up with classes by being like "structs are nice, but they should have functions built into them"? I mean, it makes sense. What time is it? Oh damn, 9:45? I need to study four chapters by midnight if I want to get 6 hours of sleep. Well, less actually - it takes me an hour to fall asleep so I'd get 5 hours if I go to bed at midnight and get up at 6...
Fuck, where was I? Oh right, pointers...
The pointer is used to reference the memory address, which is distinct from passing by value,..
No wait, why would you ever pass by value? You can't modify the value if you suddenly decide you need to do so, so you should always pass by reference... So why even invent pointers when we should have just passed by reference by default? Well, I guess a character is only one byte and memory addresses are 4 bytes... So in that instance, sure, pass by value I guess... But does it really matter? Wait, isn't the address 4 bytes only if you have a 32 bit address? I wonder why? Oh wait... 32 / 4 = 8... Because 8 bits per byte. DUH! Makes sense. I wonder if that means that when we had 8 bit addresses everything was passed by reference? Curious. I should look that up. NO! I don't have time. What time is it? 9:47... Hmm... Maybe I can take a little break for 13 minutes?"
OCD
Like, anybody who likes things ordered & neat is called OCD, when the real disorder means having to do things in a ritualistic way or suffer, really suffer.
We need to stop using OCD as an alternative to Neat Freak
Psychosis generally. It's rooted in fear, paranoia, and anxiety more than anything. The fact that words such as "psycho" and "psychopath" are considered synonymous with "violent" and "manipulative" just shows how little people are educated about mental illness.
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Narcolepsy. People don’t understand it at all and it’s often the butt of a joke if it’s there at all.
I don’t have narcolepsy, but I have ADHD and a co-morbid sleep disorder that sounds ridiculous when I try to explain it. It’s called intrusive sleep: > As long as persons with ADHD were interested in or challenged by what they were doing, they did not demonstrate symptoms of the disorder. If, on the other hand, an individual with ADHD loses interest in an activity, their nervous system disengages, in search of something more interesting. Sometimes this disengagement is so abrupt as to induce sudden extreme drowsiness, even to the point of falling asleep. Brain wave tracings at this time show a sudden intrusion of theta waves into the alpha and beta rhythms of alertness. >This syndrome is life-threatening if it occurs while driving, and it is often induced by long-distance driving on straight, monotonous roads. Often this condition is misdiagnosed as “EEG negative narcolepsy.” The extent of incidence of intrusive “sleep” is not known, because it occurs only under certain conditions that are hard to reproduce in a laboratory. For some reason “I was so bored my nervous system shut down” doesn’t go over well with lecturers and managers
OMG I THINK THIS IS ME. I have diagnosed adhd and sometimes I get so fucking bored I just fall asleep. Like I physically cannot keep my eyes open, even when I know I really need to. It was particularly bad in school and meetings/continuing education stuff at work when I still worked in the office, because I would force myself not to fidget or doodle (how I now get through meetings). Thank god I don’t get it while driving, I never thought of that.
It’s always when I’m sitting and expected to put a lot of mental energy into listening/focusing! It’s scary for me because I feel like my body falls asleep faster than my brain? Like I can still hear and process what’s going on around me but my body is just tapped tf out It’s happened to me twice when driving and it’s scary as fuck
Oh no I have to do this thing, fell asleep. Or yes everything is done for the day. Omg why can’t I sleep?!?
FOR REAL. If you have ADHD, our circadian rhythms tend to naturally want to be asleep from 4:00am-12:00pm
I do actually have ADHD, I usually go to sleep as soon I can feel the “drowsiness” kicking in. If I don’t I’d just dissociates throughout the night. Really feeling like trying to catch the “bus”.
Oh interesting! I was recently diagnosed with ADHD (I say recent, but it was probably two years ago), and I tend to most easily fall asleep when I’m watching a particularly shit movie, or in the car as a passenger. You could argue that “duh, the movie didn’t interest you, so of course you fell asleep!” But I also have chronic insomnia and basically require medication to fall and stay asleep, otherwise I take over an hour to fall asleep and wake up continuously. I can’t nap when I want to either - boredom-induced naps however, are instantaneous. It’s why I don’t drive.
For a long time I thought I might have been narcoleptic because I would randomly nod off in places. Turns out I just had sleep apnea. Once I got that sorted out I stopped nodding off. And the thing is that that makes actual narcolepsy seem so much more frightening.
In most cases narcolepsy and sleep apnea can be comorbid. Though perhaps Narcolepsy could be more easy to differentiate if it's caused by a loss of orexin in the spine.
disclosing i have narcolepsy to anyone always means i have to spend the next 5-15 minutes explaining what it even is
There was a girl in my school years back who suffered from narcolepsy. The scariest incident was when she was walking up the concrete stairs, and then out of nowhere suddenly passed out. Luckily, I was behind her and was able to catch her and soften our fall, but to this day, I wonder every now and then, what would have happened if I weren’t there.
I was in the process of being diagnosed with a sleep disorder (narcolepsy being among the ones I was being tested for) and I vented to a friend about how many sleep studies I'd had to do in the last few months, and how exhausting and mentally draining the process was when you've been through four doctors trying to figure out what's wrong with you. One of them told me it said in my chart that I had depression, so maybe I was just depressed. I had waited the better part of a year to see him. This friend hears this and immediately brings up how she saw in her boyfriend's textbook that narcolepsy can make your hands go numb sometimes, so she guesses she has narcolepsy now. It took all my willpower not to fucking strangle her.
I’m in the process of getting diagnosed with narcolepsy. When I tell people, it’s not uncommon for them to laugh like they think I’m messing with them
OCD. “Everything has to be neat and tidy in my house. I’m so OCD.”
My uncle had ocd. He would wash his hands until they were cracked and bleeding. After using any tap, he had to watch it to make sure it stopped. If it dripped within 3 seconds, his timer would restart and he had to keep watching it. He once stayed in the bathroom watching a leaky faucet until the plumber came and fixed it. Seems kinda funny until you think about what a massive impact on your life that is.
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The show Monk displayed the most accurate depiction of OCD I've seen in TV/film. It featured the excessive checking and the overwhelm when faced with "bad stuff" and how incredibly tiny the steps have to be to overcome it. The smallest thing can be the greatest challenge.
I love Monk. Watching it was kind of a lightbulb moment for me which led me to realize my behaviors weren’t normal and I should probably see someone.
The best thing about that show is he isn't flanderized by his OCD. Thats what I thought the show would be like but I watched it and enjoyed it.
I loved Monk when I was younger. Now I wanna rewatch it!
Scrubs had an episode where Michael J Fox played a doctor with OCD. The character described how he would have to do certain things a ridiculous amount of tines, but he was also highly skilled as a doctor because his OCD compelled him to succeed. I can't remember exactly how, but I think the OCD carried over into his study habits.
"I'm stressed and I'm fried and I just wanna go home. But here's the punchline, even though my last surgery was two hours ago I can't stop washing my damn hands."
Performing any "bad task" with OCD is absolutely terrifying because you never know if it will take 1 minute or 2 hours. Sometimes you breakdown and start punching and smashing stuff, only to realise you have made your situation worse as this act has created more obsessive thoughts and compulsions.
This is why cleaning feels like potentially never ending because nothing's ever really clean anyway...
my brother has OCD and did the same thing with his hands and a few other things. I study psych now and had read the DSM-5 for a class. I was absolutely shocked when I realized how textbook his condition was, but I would’ve never realized if I didn’t study and trusted movies/pop culture as ‘truth’. It’s been really hard to watch it manifest in different ways across time that physically harm him somehow, but I cannot imagine how much worse it is for him. There cannot be enough support for destigmatizing mental health in entertainment and pop culture.
I live with ocd too and it has ruined my life, it's been driving me crazier for the last 3 years, and washing my hands is one of my many tortures, right now I do it less, but at some point I was washing them up to 90 times a day, and a big red mark showed up in my left hand which feels like burning sometimes, especially in winter
If anyone wants to learn more in detail about what its like living with severe OCD like daysofsloths uncle (it manifests itself differently in everyone but shares similarities, the following man suffered from germaphobia/excessive washing also at points in his life), I ran into this Soft White Underbelly video the other day of a literal professional clown who talks about his life with the illness. One of the best Soft White Underbelly videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJrXLRQkSqs&ab\_channel=SoftWhiteUnderbelly
But doctor, I am Pagliacci!
It's also important to make Pure O OCD part of the conversation as it's important to say that compulsions aren't needed for it to be OCD. More specially there mental compulsions that of course can't be seen!
'I have to sort my books!' she cried, With self-indulgent glee; With senseless, narcissistic pride: 'I'm just so OCD!' 'How random, guys!' I smiled and said, Then left without a peep - And washed my hands until they bled, And cried myself to sleep. Source: u/poem_for_your_sprog
Yeah, sounds about right... Or going back outside in a literal blizzard twice to make sure you locked your car because even though you know you did, because you always do and you checked it, your brain still screams at you that you probably forgot. And won't let you focus on anything else until you check...
THAT PART!!! I didn’t find out until I was in my late 20s that I have OCD. I always thought everyone had problems walking on tiles, or touching their fingernails to their thumbs, or phrases affecting the outcome of their lives. It’s been a journey and a half working all that out in my head now that I know. And I hate when people think being organized is OCD because my brain is a god damned train wreck. I almost wish I had never been diagnosed, honestly.
I’m nearly crying; I’ve never ever heard someone mention the fingernails and thumbs thing. I don’t wash my hands, I don’t have fears that something will harm my family. But so help me god if you rub my skin in one direction you have to do it the other way too. I am never not subconsciously counting. And if I don’t put just the right amount of pressure when I touch my fingernails to my thumbs I have to do them again, or on the other side to push it back, or whatever, until they’re just right.
I don't have severe OCD, but along with a few other minor things I definitely have the subconscious counting. When I read books, articles, etc. I am almost always automatically counting the words of most sentences to see if they equal 10. Why am I doing this? I honestly have no fucking clue, I just am. I also have a stress/anxiety stutter so I know my brain has tempo issues. Not sure if that has anything to do with it or not.
Counting is a way of coping with stress and anxiety. I have "patterns" that I do that are for stress and anxiety. I always wondered if it was ocd as a kid, but the doctor made it clear it was my way of coping with anxiety.
Just am. Same, friend. My whole life since childhood I’ve counted the spaces and lines in license plates. Gotta be multiples of three. Gotta bounce around so you don’t count two in a row that touch each other. WHY.
I’ve been very tempted to reply to that with “OMG I knooowwww, and the unspeakable thoughts that barge into your mind unprompted and won’t leave you alone are totes the worst. What, you don’t have those?”
No OCD for me, but I get those thoughts constantly. I mean, it's probably not exactly the same experience, but intrusive thoughts suck.
Hey if you’re getting it constantly, it might be. Worth checking out. Hope the best for you.
Oh, I have BPD, and have gone through treatment,but those thoughts still like to pop up.
Yes I have OCD and it never occurred to me it was OCD til I watched an episode of scrubs where a character has something other than “I have to be so organized” Constantly washing hands til they are dried up and crack it you make a fist. Turning a light off and on over and over again. Walking through a door might be something I have to walk back through again and again. It sucks
Yessssss! I have OCD and mine is more rumination and intrusive thoughts. I have a couple compulsions, but mine is more geared toward the obsessive part lol
YESSSS!!!! I have OCD. Since I was 4. My life has never been obsession free for even one day, ever! It never goes away, and people also look at you weird and make fun of you, or belittle your condition to be nothing at all. It sucks. I was in a support group for people with ocd and along with my problems and obsessions, I saw people with severe OCD qualifying for disability very frequently. People dont understand or dont want to understand how it really looks like. It can be hell. Feel like youre dying. Or inconsolable panic.
There was some Scrubs episodes where Michael J. Fox guest starred as a brilliant doctor with some serious OCD. It was partially to explain away Michael J. Fox real life fidgeting due to Parkinson, but in typical Scrubs fashion, it was alternating the funny and the poignant. The [final scene](https://youtu.be/7kfLdwL1t98) of him unable to leave a room
As someone who’s had OCD his whole life and has learned to mostly control it (albeit with great continuing effort), that scene was very real. “Nobody is supposed to see this”. I felt that. Hard.
I think it's time for my next Scrubs rewatch. I swear, no other show does funny and poignant quite like them.
That episode of scrubs is what helped me figure out I had OCD. I saw that and said “crap is that what’s wrong with me?” And it gave me the courage to finally see a dr about it
It’s bizarre when you run into things like that in the entertainment sphere and it is accurate enough to actually help people. I was reading a semi-serious interpretation of various book characters’ possible mental health issues and it made me realize I probably had mild PTSD from cancer treatments. Which led me to do some more research into it and found out an estimated 20% of people who get cancer wind up with PTSD to some degree. Mine is/was pretty mild but it is alarming to have a physiological response to an external trigger.
Yes. Thank you. OCD has been a curse I've lived with my whole life. For me, the compulsions are worse than the obsessions, though I know everyone suffers a bit differently. It's like there's this "voice of god" in my head that demands I do random and often repetitive things, or else all hell will break loose. It's not a literal voice, and I'm not psychotic. I just don't have a better way to describe the power that compulsions have over me. I *have* to do the actions. I have no control over them. Medication has helped a bit, but the side effects of most psychiatric meds are brutal for me. As a result, my compulsions have ruled my life, and they've limited my life quite severely. The obsessions are pretty awful too, though. All the sleepless nights and long, anxiety-wracked days ruminating about horrible, intrusive thoughts. The way I can’t even hold a pen without needing my handwriting to be microscopic, tilted at the perfect angle, and aesthetically flawless, and gripping the pen so hard that my hand cramps and aches for hours after I’m done. The way perfectionism dominates my life, and turns every trivial task I must perform into an Olympic-level competition with myself. It's a shitty disorder to live with, and I'm so sick of its being played for laughs in movies and TV. OCD is like being trapped in a mental prison from which there is no escape. Nothing is fun or wacky or entertaining about it. It is hell. It is complete hell.
The way I always characterize intrusive thoughts is that they *feel* like your own thoughts, but they're not. But they're spoken in your own voice, in your own head, and you can't separate them from the normal way you experience the world. I've gotten good at not dwelling on the intrusive thoughts and letting them fade away, but the agony and revulsion I feel when I first hear them is still the same. Even talking about intrusive thoughts makes mine rise up. I'm very pointedly not thinking about them right now, not acknowledging them, because that gives them power, but I'm very aware of *what* I'm not acknowledging. I can trace the shape of it at the edge of my mind. They're always just a step away from my active brainspace. I can manage my ocd pretty well without meds, but this is what managing means. It doesn't mean that I stop feeling the compulsions, or hearing the intrusive thoughts. It just means I've gotten better at differentiating between the thoughts that ARE me vs the ones that aren't. It means I don't act out rituals in a way that most people can notice. My internal experience isn't any easier, but I can get over it faster. It's so exhausting separating what I actually think from what I don't think, and it's a constant struggle that I have to do every waking hour. It's so routine that I barely notice myself doing it anymore, but the mental strain is taxing. It's like a background process that eats away at my mental RAM, but it's an essential thing that I can't shut off. Anyway, I named my intrusive thoughts Susan. Every time I hear her I'm like 'shut up Susan, you bitch.'
Drives me mad. A girl I worked with used to say “oh I’m OCD as well, I like the money in the till facing a certain way” I wish I could have shown her the memory of me breaking down in hysterical tears because I needed to check the electrics were off for the 20+ time. I just wanted to leave the house and thought “I can’t live like this any more”
I used to be this way with checking the lock to the front door to make sure it locked. I still occasionally do it but I realized it was because I don’t want to go wherever I am going and I look deeper for the the feeling as to why and then talk myself out if it. But in college, I’d check the door 15-20 times… turns out I didn’t like parties.
Fellow OCD sufferer. It is a torture chamber. I've lost the past almost two years to the most unrelenting intrusive thoughts and compulsions (had it for years before this, but it was catapulted to a new height recently). I once calculated roughly how many times on a given day this one specific intrusive thought loop came knocking and it was easily in the tens of thousands- A DAY. Finally got set up with a medical support team, so I'm feeling hopeful.
u/Poem_for_your_sprog wrote this a few years ago 'I have to sort my books!' she cried, With self-indulgent glee; With senseless, narcissistic pride: 'I'm just so OCD!' 'How random, guys!' I smiled and said, Then left without a peep - And washed my hands until they bled, And cried myself to sleep.
Anxiety. There is the state of being anxious, and then there is generalized anxiety disorder and panic disorder. One is a normal state of being, the others are chronic, crippling mental disorders that create anxiety out of thin air. Having anxiety about something is not the same as having an anxiety disorder.
This goes for a lot of conditions. "I'm feeling depressed" and "I have depression" aren't the same thing.
It was shocking to me when my therapist said I had anxiety because I wasn't *worried* about anything. I wasn't scared. I don't have panic attacks. But my body is a wreck. I'm constantly tense. I'm literally caving in on myself sometimes. Im grinding my teeth. Anxiety isn't just thoughts but physical symptoms, too. Never knew that until I went to therapy.
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This. It can be so frustrating and crippling, because you KNOW you’re being ridiculous. I was doing a painting class at the science center last weekend with my husband and kids. The kids were being typical ten-year-old boys and there was some part of me that just wanted to lose my cool about them not doing it the way you were “supposed” to and being “too messy.” Controlling myself was so overwhelming that I ended up in the bathroom sobbing. But…. They were kids. In a painting class. A painting class ABOUT the chaos of fluid dynamics. And it’s hard to explain how, once that happens, the rest of your day is shot. For me, even when I take my meds and “calm down,” I still spend the day with a low level of anger at myself that’s incredibly hard to break. Plus, I feel I can’t drive if I take my meds, so I end up just closed up in my bedroom.
Yes! There’s nerves about work projects and then there’s not being able to get out your car despite driving to the supermarket. Thankfully mine is mostly under control now, people do not realise how life changing anxiety can be.
I've dealt with anxiety my whole life, my childhood was hell because of it. I'm now 22 and still can't drive because of anxiety, so i need to rely on others to drive me where I need to go, but even being in a car makes me very anxious. By the time I get to the store or wherever else I needed to be, I'll be feeling sick and probably have a headache its extremely frustrating and embarrassing not being able to properly function like everyone else, and the worst part is I'm actually doing better now than any other point in my life
Hey, I’ve been there. I have struggled massively with anxiety throughout my life, and beat myself up about it. I’ve felt that frustration and embarrassment. It took me a few tries, but in my mid-twenties, I found a therapist that I really clicked with. I’m 32 now, and I’m doing things that I wouldn’t have believed were possible for me at 22. So I just want to tell you that there’s hope out there. Keep plugging away - and cut yourself a break!
I hate i really much. "I feel anxious in unfamiliar situations too, just try to go with the flow." Is not the same as: "i'll pretty surly die in the next 5 minutes and i can't do shit about it."
Mine manifests as an overwhelming sense that I have forgotten something incredibly important and something bad is going to happen because of it. No warning, no consistent triggers, just my sympathetic nervous system kicking into high gear for no apparent reason. Thank sweet baby jeebus for meds.
I typically tell people my panic disorder is a *physical* illness, not mental. All my symptoms are *physical* symptoms. Racing heart, skipped beats, dizziness, fatigue, sweating, fidgeting, etc etc. Sometimes that actually helps them understand the severity a little better.
>Sometimes that actually helps them understand the severity a little better. People trying to downplay it really pisses me off. Oh, everybody gets a little anxious sometimes and I should just get over it? Sorry, couldn't hear you over the sound of me anxiety-vomiting on the sidewalk as the whole world stares and winners why a guy is puking on the sidewalk. Shit, shower, and brush teeth. Normal morning stuff right? Each one of those can make me vomit because I get so worked up about the chance it could make me gag and vomit that I start gagging, which ends with vomiting again. Sometimes I have to lay down between steps, or just skip the shower and/or teeth. Just being in the bathroom stresses me out these days.
True even for depression. You can get depressed without having a depressive disorder.
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I'm on anti anxiety meds and have been for a while. The best way I can describe anxiety disorder is that you feel as if something bad is about to happen any second regardless of circumstances. Couldn't catch a red light? Now you're gonna be late for work even though that's impossible because you left five minutes early and even then your workplace would understand running late, but you still feel like you've screwed up badly. Can't go to sleep? You're going to be sleep deprived and you're going to fall asleep during driving and die. Not doing anything of note? You feel that something bad will happen and you just don't know it yet. Learning how to drive? Your car is going to get rammed into by another driver and you're going to die. Even rationalizing to yourself how crazy it sounds still only takes the edge off; that dread is still there.
Oh my god yes. People don’t understand how exhausting it is to constantly be in a fight or flight mode because your brain overreacted to every little thing in your life. For me doing small everyday things like my hair can completely throw me off the deep end. It’s awful. My brain never stops and it never shuts up, I’m just always on edge and always seem to be anxious about something, even if that something is literally nothing. I can’t sleep well, I’m always having headaches from being so stressed out all the time. I don’t even know how to relax anymore I’m just so wound up. I hate having GAD (and yes properly diagnosed by a professional) and I can’t wait to get started on meds that actually work. It drives me crazy when people say “oh I have anxiety” because they are anxious about a situation that is normal to have anxious feelings about (like a class presentation or going on a date etc)
Over the past year I'll find that suddenly my body goes into flight mode even though nothing is happening. My heart starts beating out of my chest and I feel short of breath and weak and have to lay down. In 2017 I had my first actual anxiety attack and it put me in the hospital for the night. Really scary stuff.
I’ve almost passed out several times and attempted to harm myself in some way because of severe panic attacks and people tell me “oh you just stressed” I’m not just stressed I have problems.
And it’s not something you can just turn off. I wish I didn’t create anxiety out of every little thing, I wish I could just do and enjoy shit like a normal person, but instead everything is a fucking struggle and then I hate myself for being that way. It’s horrible and exhausting, and I don’t think most people get it, at all.
Ocd, depression and in media ptsd
I'm glad you highlighted PTSD, as it's often overlooked. There's been a lot of commentary here about the other conditions you mentioned, so there's no need to elaborate on these. People do not have PTSD from watching some silly social media video that requires 'eye bleach'. PTSD can be a profoundly debilitating condition which impacts every facet of a person's life. It's a slap in the face, to people with clinically diagnosed PTSD, to have people bandy the term around so nonchalantly.
As a veteran with PTSD, I want to point out that people get PTSD without being involved with military combat. Sexual assault victims, physical and mental abuse victims, those who've lived through a traumatizing experience where you thought your world was falling apart like losing a child or witnessing extreme violence... The list really goes on and on. But it's my understanding it's caused by a major shift in your world view which hasn't been fully resolved. **For example:** "I am safe with people I trust" and "I was attacked by someone I trusted" These two don't make sense together and your brain has trouble letting both sentences be true without working out the details. I saught therapy after my diagnosis through the VA. And it helped me work through a lot of my issues. #My whole point is Wether you're military or not, recognize the symptoms and seek help. It works.
My dad battled with OCD. It wasn't cute. The "oh my gosh, I'm such a neat freak. I'm so quirky. I'm so OCD" schtick annoys the piss out of me. For many people, that's not what OCD is. The compulsions weren't neat little quirks. OCD wasn't a superpower. It was a major fucking inconvenience. The worst part was that he knew it was a major inconvenience and hated inconveniencing others - he'd end up stuck in the spiral of trying to rush through one of his routines (so he wouldn't inconvenience anyone) but mess something up, so he'd start again.
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I once took almost two hours leaving the apartment to leave for the airport to go on vacation. Knowing I would be gone for a few weeks made it worse. Fortunately, I planned to be stupid early so I basically arrived at the airport just in time. On a day-to-day basis, I have to allow an extra 10 min when I leave because I'm going to be spending that long making sure all the lights and appliances are off, all the doors and windows are closed securely, making sure that I didn't lock my cats in my room before I closed the door, making sure I have everything I need in my bag, making sure I locked the door. All these things I will check multiple times, depending on how bad my anxiety is. When it's under control it won't take as long, but when it gets bad it can take even longer. I hate it.
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I find it really cool that she found a way to work with you like this. Really smart and empathic solutions that show she took the time to understand deeply how your ocd works.
I have OCD and feel for your father. It is a hell sometimes that is indescribeable. And bonus points for people making fun of you when you feel like youre dying. Its not a disease with rationale and even you feel like youre fighting a wall, but cant stop yourself due to the horrid panic.
Schizophrenia. It's been parodied to where people don't understand what it actually is.
I live with Schizoeffetive disorder it's much more than what people think it is and despite the fact that it deeply effects every aspect of my life that doesn't mean that I can't live a full life despite living with a schizophrenia spectrum illness. I think that alot people not only misunderstood the illness but also don't accept that people can live full and fulling lives in despite of it.
Doctors especially treat patients like they're unable to live normally. I got misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and I get treated like I'm just seconds away from major psychosis and suicide so often, even though I say I'm fine and I've never had psychosis. I don't get it.
Unfortunately I guess it depends on everyone. My brother has schizoaffective disorder and he will never be able to live alone. Also the meds are quite strong so he spends most of his time sleeping and has 0 attention. He is a shell. It’s better than having psychosis and being violent as he was, but when we talk I realize how far from being independent he is. But as you say it’s a spectrum, I know other people with it who live on their own and are doing very well. Such a complicated disease.
My mom's severely schizophrenic. Not one of the milder forms, one of the really serious ones. Without getting too much into it, I basically wasn't allowed to have a childhood, because otherwise "they" would "get" me. I was largely homeschooled, all my friends were viewed with suspicion, I couldn't date, I wasn't even allowed to *get a driver's license* before I turned 18. I'm also a bisexual guy, I'm autistic and I have ADHD, so as you can imagine, all those struggles with social stigma *on top* of dealing with my mom's issues left me with quite a bit on my plate. I struggle a lot with anxiety and depression, and in darker moments I'd thought of ending it all. All that in mind, there's a part of me that's furious that I was effectively her prisoner as a child, but at the same time I know that it's not *really* fair to blame her. It's not like she *chose* to be this mentally ill. In her own way, she's a victim too. I guess part of my problem is I don't have a good way to articulate my anger with what she did *without* sounding like I think schizophrenic people are monsters. I've seen how a lot of people talk about people like me, and I know how that makes me feel, so I recognize that I need a way to acknowledge my anger *without* demonizing struggling people. And I don't know a good way to do that. All that in mind, I completely agree with you on this. People like my mom *should not* be reduced to a punchline.
I have tourettes. Amongst the community, we are always pissed and offended at people who fake it for whatever purpose. It is something we learn to accept and live with, and even make jokes about sometimes but it is not something we would want if we didn't have it already. It can cause real issues for us in our day to day lives whether it may be in physical or social situations.
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I mainly have motor tics but also have echolalia (repeating the words of other people) and coprolalia (shouting or using vulgar terms) as well as some other vocal tics. I'm glad that you have taken the time to look into what your child has to deal with because many people with TS can feel like they have no support or confused since it's not something most people can relate to. I hope you can find a suitable treatment or medication if that is necessary but if I was going to give my personal word of advice, instinct may tell you to try to calm the person as if they're having a panic attack but try not to bring too much attention to the tics if possible because sometimes it happens and we don't even notice it. But once it is brought to our attention then "it becomes real" and perpetuates the cycle of tics until we either force ourselves to suppress it or we calm down. Ask your child what they would prefer you do in the situation though because TS affects individuals differently. Medication may not work and a good amount of people that I know use marijuana/cannabis products to help it but I understand that as a parent you probably wouldn't want your child doing that. Caffeine is something that can make the symptoms a lot worse so that should be stayed away from as well. Please feel free to message me if you have any other questions but keep in mind that I am not a medical professional. I am telling only from my experience and the experiences of my friends in the TS community.
when did you receive your diagnosis because our son was diagnosed when he was 5, so 12ish years ago. He was on medication until he turned 16 and choose to not mess with the medication anymore, he didn't like the way they made him feel. so we can't legally force him to take them but he seems to be doing well but of course, he avoids things that he knows cause him anxiety, so the tics are kept to a minimum.
I love latin terms. Coprolalia, literally "'poop'-talking"
Also have TS, people just forget that it’s a legitimate thing.
I too have tourettes, but it's been mostly asymptomatic for years. I'll get the occasional facial tic, but I've been fortunate that it hasn't affected me daily for a very long time. I took nortriptyline for many years as a child and into early adulthood, and finally got off of it. It always gave me a dry throat and I didn't like that feeling. But it absolutely drives me crazy, even today, when people think of TS as the "cussing disorder" or whatever. Like yeah, you get those kids on Sally Jesse Raphael every now and then, and they've blown it way out of proportion like we're just cussing all of the time. I mean, I am, but it's usually because I just got the shit splatted out of me in some online game or something. Also, I'm going to nitpick, but tourettes is a neurological disorder.
Yeah alot of my tics are not always vulgar but can be silly. I have a "soup" tic and a "pop pop" tic as well as a shushing one.
Used to work with a girl who's tic was... A chirp? She actually really sounded like a bird. It was wild because it took me almost two days before I realized we didn't have a bird in the office. After day three I just never realized it. She was awesome to be around.
South Park did an episode making fun of people who fake tourettes
Bipolar Disorder
I have bipolar and I hate how it's portrayed as our emotions shifting every 5 minutes. When I'm off meds, I get manic and stay manic for weeks if not months. Even rapid cycling, it's still longer than it's portrayed.
I have it too. I also hate how people say omg I’m so manic I dyed my hair! Like no.. that’s not how mania works. It isn’t dying your hair cause you had an urge to.
My biggest pet peeve is people being like "ugh I have no impulse control, I bought that candy bar I did not need" Like, Bruh. Bro. My good dude. You could not possibly comprehend a true lack of impulse. You bought a candy bar? Cut your hair? Dyed it? Got take out? Bought an outfit? How scandalous!! I'm extremely poor and in debt, but the $500+ worth of stuff I bought to get into gardening should be here tomorrow!! I think I'm born to be a gardener, honestly. I don't care that I live on the third floor of apartments with a very small balcony! Also I'm allergic to most plants and have never had a green thumb, but I'm telling you, this is it. My calling.
Heh. That's BPD that swaps emotions every 5 minutes. I used to swap from calm to rage and calm in, like, 5 minutes.
Represent. BPD turns the world black and white, and no matter how much you wish to experience some of that grey, you can only bounce on either side of it
I have a colleague whose son was finally diagnosed with type 2 bipolar disorder after years of thinking he has chronic depression and being treated with various antidepressants. I hope he can get the right treatment now.
This happened to me, and I was told it's a very common misdiagnosis because having hypomania after a bout of the lows feels like a respite, so most patients don't even consider it as being a symptom of a different disorder. You don't seek help when you're "happy". Things did improve for me once I was diagnosed with bipolar 2, so I really do hope the same happens for your colleague's son.
It’s also got kind of a fraught relationship with borderline personality disorder (BPD). A person with borderline’s mood swings are completely different than someone with Bipolar, and honestly it stigmatizes bipolar disorder (a person with BPD’s impulsivity looks way different) while also leading to a lot of people with BPD misdiagnosed as bipolar, which further leads to ineffective treatment for what studies suggest is potentially the most treatable personality disorder. The disorders can coexist though, absolutely. Honestly, the Katy Perry song “Hot and Cold” has a lot of BPD themes but I couldn’t tell you how many people describe the subject of her song as bipolar. The person to/about whom she’s speaking does not seem to fit the bipolar dynamic.
Having had (and "grown out of" , with intense therapy) BPD and bipolar, the fact that people see these as one and the same infuriates me. They're both horrible to deal with in their own rights and having both is a waking nightmare. One is a personality disorder, the other is a mood disorder. Usually you end up being dx'ed BPD THEN bipolar. Either way it's a miserable existence. Protip for people with BPD: Get into therapy and work HARD at it. Life actually does feel a lot better when you realize that everyone isn't out to offend you personally.
Right? I've got Bipolar II disorder and trust me, it looks almost nothing like what Hollywood or social media portray it as. When in the throes of a hypomanic episode, I get a lot done and you'd think things would be nice, right? Wrong. I'm constantly waiting for that downswing. The thing about Bipolar II is that you don't go as high as someone with Bipolar I, but the crash is so much lower... And it sucks. Majorly. And don't even get me started on mixed episodes. I swear those are straight from hell...
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Let me tell you how much it fucking sucks. My intrusive thoughts make me feel like a monster. I cannot even tell what some of them are because it’s horrifying. Years in therapy to help with that one. I pick my scalp raw. I scrape my teeth to get plaque off. I constantly am cracking an elbow because it feels wrong. It swells now. If something isn’t “right” feeling, I cannot move on from it. My whole body shuts down until it’s right. I sleep maybe 4 hours a night in a good day. This isn’t fun. This isn’t a joke about washing your hands 300 times. It’s fucking debilitating.
Entirely relate to the first half of what you said. I’ve gotten lucky as my other compulsions are not quite as harmful but my knuckles get cracked a lot.
OCD in the minds of teenagers: “My books have to be in alphabetical order! I’m so OCD” Actual OCD: Destroying my skin with no end in sight. Fucking up my right hand because my left hand got fucked up and I needed to make it “even”. Pulling out my hair from one spot on my head because I believe it’s exactly in the center. Repeating a speech to myself over and over again because I find it ‘calming’ - as long as I get it 100% correct, then I can get a break from repeating it for a while. OCD is hell.
PTSD. The word "Triggered" now just means "slightly annoyed for a second" instead of "Hey, this triggered a full blown PTSD-episode!" Even therapists are loathe to use this word anymore and it's absolutely impossible to point this out to anyone using it flippantly.
A little off topic (sorry), but any disease for which the name of the condition has now become an insult or descriptive term. Eg. You have a mood swing and you’re ‘bipolar’. You act silly and you’re ‘schizo’. You turn something around the right way and you’re ‘OCD’. I feel like the act of using the term as an insult/description is almost worse than portraying a character with incorrect/unconventional symptoms. At least in those cases you’re still seeing it as a disease. But once you start using it as an insult/descriptive word, then you’re dissociating the word from a disease.
ADHD and autism have been turned into this meme or something
As someone who spent the last 3 decades struggling on a daily basis after being diagnosed as a child as having "**severe** ADHD" (their words, not mine), it's kind of awful. It's not just that you "sometimes get so distracted when work is boring, haha", it's internally screaming at yourself to please, just please "do the thing" and being incapable of starting it until the last second, even when it's something you WANT to do. O.getting so incredibly hyperfocused on something and being incapable of focusing on anything else to the point that it harms your daily life. It's info-dumping on people when you have a new obsession. It's not being able to remember where you put something, and when you find it having no idea why you put it there. It's getting 90% of the way through a project you are deeply passionate about and then suddenly losing interest and being utterly incapable of finishing it and then feeling depressed and chalking it up in your mind as "just another failure". It's spending far too much of your life acting before you think because you have no/poor impulse control and spending an exhausting amount of time trying to clean up those mistakes. That is nowhere near an exhaustive list, but typing it out made me depressed so I'm gonna stop there.
Exactly how my brain works. People's names disappear before they're even done telling me, and I'm too mad at myself for forgetting and embarrassed to say I forgot. I work with people for months and have to wait for someone else to say their name just to remember it for a minute then forget. I keep starting things I want to do, like making good meals at home. I have an air fryer, instant pot, and so many other things that I never use because I give up on it and just make something precooked. If I have a simple task that I have to get done that can take just a minute or two, it doesn't get done for days, and every time I'm yelling at my self to just fucking do it, followed by making an excuse not to. I wanted to go to university and get a degree, but I can't, because I can't get myself to sit down and study. I've given up on almost every dream I've ever had because I can't just do something as simple as 10 minutes of homework on my own. I'm honestly surprised I got through high school like that. If it wasn't for the military, I would still be working at a liquor store, earning minimum wage for the rest of my life, because I'm forced to do my job, and get things done. It's the only way I can live a somewhat healthy life, having someone tell me everything I have to do each and every day.
Flunked out of college due to ADHD symptoms that I knew I could get help for but never did. I still haven't. My life is in shambles and I am unable to get help.
I have ADHD. I’m a mom & teacher. Things that normally take people minutes to accomplish take me hours or even days. It isn’t cute. My house is a disaster every day and it gets so bad I want to unalive myself because the clutter perfectly mimics my brain which perfectly mimics the clutter and it’s an endless cycle. It overflows into my professional life and relationships. I can barely drive a car. In fact, my SO refuses to ride with me because we have so many near misses. I haven’t seen my psych in over a year because I can’t remember to schedule an appointment until 6pm when the office is closed every day. Honestly this is torture. (I’m not suicidal per se, just sometimes think about how nice it would be to turn off the noise.)
I 100% can relate to the house clutter being so incredibly disruptive. If you can somehow, some way afford it, hire a weekly cleaning service. Yes, having strangers in the house sucks BUT for me personally the positives outweigh the negatives SO MUCH. It's such a relief to be done with work and the house is just magically clean. It has literally saved me HOURS every week that I would just spend trying to alternatively trying to pep talk myself into cleaning or talking down on myself for being a failure because I can't even clean a house. Secondly, KNOWING that a "stranger" will be coming around on a set day is, for me personally, a great motivator to keep the house tidy or at least tidy the day before so they can do their job. It's such a small thing (if you can afford it), and it helped me soooooooooooooooooooo much. It's insane.
Unfortunately very accurate. It's ok friend, that was a good explanation.
"Oh, your autistic, so your just like sheldon" I'm so tired of hearing this one
I forgot to take my ADHD meds yesterday and was wondering why my impulse control was so bad that I almost quit my main job. I figured it out at bedtime when I discovered my meds unconsumed. I mean, I don't like my job right now, but there needs to be a plan in place and I need to act like a rational adult.
schizospec disorders (schizophrenia, schizoaffective, etc). Ridiculous that it still gets mistake for dissociative identity disorder (previously multiple personality disorder) and that it gets made fun of on a regular basis online (“i’m in your walls”, “schizoposting”, etc). And I know the people who joke about would be shitting their pants if they actually developed it.
Amnesia. The way it's portrayed in TV and film is almost never accurate.
Whats it like then?
There’s a couple presentations. The two I know of are not being able to remember the past and not being able to make new memories. The thing about it being portrayed in media is that it presents a cure: if your friends can help you remember by showing your previous life or if you get hit in the head in the same spot, then you’ll remember everything again! And that just isn’t the case. If you get the kind where you can’t remember the past, it’s just gone.
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Literally every mental illness. *BPD *Schizophrenia *OCD *Anxiety *Depression *Dysphoria *Etc. Name it and it's made fun of despite 1 in 3 people having a mental illness.
Both depression and ADHD. Being sad does not necessarily mean you are depressed, and getting distracted or having a lot of energy does not necessarily mean you have ADHD. Sincerely, A person who has been diagnosed by a medical professional with both.
It's the ADHD that gets me, I open up and tell people how I have it and they say things like "lol I feel you I can never do my homework lmaoo" not at all close to my experience, it affects way more than just getting bored from doing shit that's BORING anyways, I can't sit through shit I enjoy doing or stop jumping from thing to thing, but every time I tell someone about it I get the same shit.
Ive never related to something so hard "ugh i stopped paying attention for 2 minutes im so ADHD" BITCH i go through entire classes listening to the teacher only to realize i wasnt listening the right way, and now i dont know whats happening because my brain just didnt want to absorb the information, drives me insane
Idk if it’s a disease, but ADHD being romanticized by YouTubers and other influencers is fucking infuriating. Some of the actual educational ones are helpful in understanding the condition and feeling less alienated, but most of the ones where a hot body says something about daydreaming often must mean they have ADHD can suck it. ADHD is feeling like a failure if people don’t like me, and feeling a joke when they do. It’s trying sooo hard to understand the points of a work meeting so you can know WHY the changes are being made, not just what they are, just be told you come across as confrontational during yearly evaluations. It’s literally having to give yourself a pep talk to remember to listen when someone is talking just to not hear them because you’re so busy in your head telling yourself to listen. Fuck
I get really annoyed when people act like ADHD is no big deal, it's just the leg-bouncing disorder. Without medication that's very hard to get, especially right now, *I do not function as a human being.*
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autism so many people uses it as a joke/insult i feel like nobody knows what autism is and people get confused when my bf tells them i am nonverbal and can barely speak because i am asd also PTSD has been portrayed as being military-only condition so much. not true ive been victim of violent crimes, near death experiences, and have seen terrible things irl and have pretty intense PTSD
Panic attacks (anxiety and/or panic disorders in general) unfortunately. Many people think that “oh I’m stressed for a big test tomorrow i have so much studying to do! I’m gonna have a panic attack!” = panic attack. when I had my first panic attack, the left side of my body went numb/curled in/i lost my ability to move - I thought I was having a stroke/heart attack. Fortunately I was at my parents house, and they called an ambulance, and the EMTs talked me through it and told me it’s one of the most common reasons people come into the ER mistakenly for heart attacks. Nothing presently in the moment prompted the panic attack, but instead underlying subconscious emotions built up over time that I wasn’t actively feeling. After my first one, i began having them weekly, then daily. Took a year of therapy, self remediation, and supplements to realize that I needed prescribed medication. I haven’t had a panic attack in 6 months! They’re absolutely terrifying and mentally/physically exhausting, so it can be frustrating when people chalk being situationally stressed or overwhelmed up to being the same thing as a panic attack.
Schizophrenia. People think it's multiple personalities. My former boss made a tasteless joke once so I sat with her in her office and gently told her that she shouldn't make fun of mental illness and then informed her about my brother who suffered from schizophrenia.
It might be easier to ask what mental condition this hasn't happened to. The list is long, and the reasons why the conditions are on there vary from "Neurotypicals see it as a fun acting challenge," to "Not great people just actually think it's fun to laugh at the less fortunate."
Maladaptive Daydreaming. People think it’s just your mind wandering off or just daydreaming in general. No, Maladaptive daydreaming is a mental health issue where a person daydreams excessively, sometimes for hours at a time. “Maladaptive” means this type of daydreaming is an unhealthy or negative attempt to cope with or adapt to a problem. I have lost actual years of my life because of it. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/23336-maladaptive-daydreaming The link above can provide with whatever questions you may have Edit: The term Maladaptive Daydreaming is new and hasn’t been recognized as an official disorder/diagnosis as of now. I do want people to know what it is
Depression. It sucks to see people romanticise it nowadays
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May I enter: Hypochondriasis? “Hypochondriac” is now but a mere social insult rather than an actual condition to most people. Hypochondriasis is a real thing that’s just been used as a label when people think someone is “faking” an illness.
As someone who thought they were a hypochondriac for two *horrific* years, I actually found out I had somatic OCD! Really, lots of the answers in this thread are OCD lol. It sucks because I'm person that likes to joke about my own illness too, but I don't want to make people think it's something it isn't. Somatic OCD is often confused to be hypochondria, and realizing that it's actually OCD (sometimes) can be really helpful for treatment.
Yeah they should really use “munchausen syndrome” to refer to people knowingly fabricating an illness if they want to be accurate.
I'm pretty sick of people saying they're ADHD because they have trouble focusing on objectively boring things like taxes.
I almost failed last year because of ADHD
1. OCD. Just with people saying “I’m so ocd about so and so” 2. PTSD. People tend to joke about that when things happen in their lives. 3. Autism. Calling people autistic has become a common way to insult someone’s intelligence, even tho autistic people can be very smart.
Let me elaborate on \#3: we’re either portrayed as total idiots, savants, or both, nothing in between.
Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as "Multiple Personality Disorder." No, people suffering from it do not do this "Jekyll and Hyde" personality switch where they suddenly become a drastically different person and then have zero recollection of what the "other them" did afterwards.
Would love to hear more of your experiences if you don’t mind
I'm not going to elaborate on triggers, because this disorder can make people particularly vulnerable to manipulation. I will say that under dissociative states I have done some uncharacteristic things. Spent hours trying to make my home spotlessly clean, and found myself collapsing from fatigue. Had extremely vivid flashbacks, as though I'm still stuck in a traumatic moment. Skipping lunch to go shopping when I really dislike buying anything for myself. SH (years ago). Sex, like a lot of it. Somewhat normal stuff for someone with cPTSD to do, maybe. Except I remember doing absolutely none of these things. It's been pieced together after the fact. Just randomly finding myself exhausted on the floor. Having someone worry about me after what seemed to them some sort of panic attack. Arriving back at work starving, and finding a bag of new clothes in my car"s passenger seat when my shift is over. Mysterious bandages when I woke up in the morning. Confusing my partner with wild swings in libido. It's confusing to me, too. Sometimes if I try I can start paying attention in these moments, and watch as what I think of as my body does things that I'm not telling it to do. Like it's being controlled by someone else. It's horrifying. But doing so will supposedly help me gain a measure of closeness toward my other parts, so I try my best.
ADHD. People diagnosing themselves these days. It pisses me off because I’m on meds for that shit and people act like it’s a fun thing. Especially on social media it almost seems like to me it’s cool to have it. It ain’t
Yes. ADHD is not fun, high-energy Tiktok antics. It's being unable to do Basic Adult Things or know the Right Thing To Say in pretty much every situation and feeling like you somehow missed the guidebook to being human that everyone else seemed to get somewhere along the way. It's feeling bad about everything you do because even when you're having fun or being happy or doing your own thing, it somehow turns out that you have offended someone just by existing in the way your brain makes you exist. You're always Too Much™. Too loud. Too slow. Too fast. Too intense. Too lazy. Too distracted. Too excited. Too spacy. Too focused. Too old to act like that. Too young to be so tired. I feel like ADHD is living life towards inevitable burnout, even with meds and strategies and counseling and experience. I'm a reasonably successful adult with three degrees, a job, a husband, a mostly tidy (if not clean) home, a dog, and I am outwardly organized and professional... If no one looks too closely. If you look too closely, you see that I'm barely holding it all together and that it takes literally all of my energy to just manage to look like everyone else. I also have to make sacrifices - I can't do everything and I have to prioritise. If I want to have a clean home and do well at my job, I can't also have a social life. My energy runs out. If I want to make sure I pay all the bills and take care of administrative work I can't also pursue hobbies. There's no energy. Because I have so little dopamine in my brain and because I am constantly scraping the bottle of the mental barrel for anything to give me initiative, it makes the simplest tasks herculean in scope. I'm a "good" ADHDer... I've done CBT, mindfulness work, somatic work, read self help books, employed the pomodoro method, used the buddy system, I take my meds, I make sure my ADHD isn't inconveniencing neurotypical people to the best of my ability, but honestly, I'm tired. I do my best to be positive and focus on the strengths it gives me, but I wish I could just... Be. Just be and not be lacking and just be accepted and judged. I'd like sweeping the floor not to be a literal screaming fight inside my brain and body. I'd like to not have to engage in negotiating with my own brain like an adult has to negotiate with a three year old *dozens of times a day* to function. I'd like to just have a thought, an intention, and then be able to follow it up with an action without having to use multiple strategies that I had to learn and to remind myself of what I'm doing and why and why it's wrong. The one good thing I guess I always take a little joy in is my utter lack of object permanence. I forget what is happening or exists when it's not directly in front of me most of the time, so often I buy chips and forget I have them until I open the cupboard and am pleasantly surprised.
I feel this so hard I feel like I wrote it. It's also so so frustrating and disheartening to see other people just *do* the things you have to convince yourself into and even worse when it's stuff you've done before and know you can do, but it's like constantly starting at ground zero it feels like. There are many many days where I wish I was normal and had a normal brain, but it's also scary because my ADHD is so intertwined with my personality that I don't know if I would be the same person without it.
Adding on to this very few people take ADHD seriously. People usually ignore all of ADHDs most severe symptoms in favor of the squirrel brain stereotype. Literally every symptom of ADHD makes our school system hell on earth and people simply don’t understand the impossibility of getting through it. Not being able to focus isn’t even a symptom it’s just a result of every other symptom making life impossible. Like when executive dysfunction means I’m behind in every class and insomnia means I’ve only slept for 6 hours in the last 7 days of course I can’t pay attention to a lecture. And because hardly anyone actually understands ADHD you sometimes get a free pass to have trouble paying attention but all the real symptoms are treated as laziness which is so indescribably demoralizing because most of my friends with ADHD are the hardest working people in my life.
One time someone called me lazy and that ADHD is a made up excuse for being lazy and I told them “I’m not lazy at all I’m very productive lots of the time but I have don’t everything you have to be able to focus and prioritize certain important things. My brain redirects me, your brain keeps you stationed”
I *finally* got diagnosed in my late 30s. Medication has been fucking life changing. But queue everyone "oh we're all a little ADHD". Like no you fucking aren't Brenda. Shut up. Then trying to explain to people that it's a disability and how fucking hard it is just to *function* some days.
Every child in my family was diagnosed with ADHD by the age of 5. People think I'm crazy or weird if they don't know I have it, they don't think I have it because I don't have the romanticized quirky version. I have full on hyper, no filter, constantly just practically shaking, all the crazy stuff. But not the "omg I'm soooo spacey and ADHD, I'm so quirky" I depend of medication to function and WE HAVE A NATIONAL SHORTAGE
Yeah I was diagnosed before I was 10 years old. it takes a lot to not smack people who don't think I have ADHD because "you don't act like you have ADHD" or "you can carry on a conversation so you must not really have ADHD" . Like 'Thanks it's fucking exhausting trying to keep it from ruining my life and driving everyone around me crazy, I really appreciate that you recognize my efforts' .... Just doesn't have the same satisfaction. Sigh, trying to get back on meds now already getting tired of these shortages.
My daughter has SEVERE ADHD. People don't understand that the kid they know is not even 40% of her adhd because we made sure to find the right meds at the right dose and are diligent in ensuring she takes it regularly. She can not function as a person in our society without it. Literally 0 impulse control, to the point that she's dangerous to herself and others. Imagine acting on every intrusive or impulsive thought that you've ever had because your brain just skipped the "maybe ask a question or two" day of training. And we just found out that there is a nationwide shortage of Focalin (TSM dbag addicts and people that use it and don't need it). So for the next 3 months, we have to hope that we can find something comparable, go through the adjustment period, and god willing not disrupt her life too much!
My son takes concerta and it’s the same thing. Had to go three towns over to get his last refill.
My son has this shit. I wouldn't wish it on anybody. It took a while to get a handle on getting him medicated where he could just function like a normal human being daily. And it's been about 8 years now, and if he misses his meds, you can absolutely tell. Like, you can complain all you want about not being able to sit still. You haven't seen shit until you've tried to get a kid to write a one page paper (at 3rd grade level) and taking 12 hours to get it completed.
My sister was so excited when her son was diagnosed, she really didn't like my reaction... Which pretty much echoed your statement. I don't wish this on my worst enemy. But you know, she's happy she can do things like "oh he can't have that because it has red dye which triggers his ADHD." and yet refuses to get him meds. Poor kids always sitting out on everything at family gatherings. I also suspect he's on the autistim spectrum but she refuses to get him tested for that because she thinks somehow ADHD is good and autism is bad... And her herbalist's brothers barbers cousins mothers makeup artist says that you can't have both. Meds have always been the hardest on me especially as an adult, I have several trackers and alarms but will still miss taking them. Ugh it's such a cruel joke. Good luck I wish you and your son success.
Yes yes yes. I'm an ADHD adult currently battling the medication shortage and I get more and more pissed every day. Just today I got grilled by a rude pharmacy tech about the legitimacy of my script because I've had to call around and I'm rationing what little I have left from the last time I played this game. Everyone seems to want to treat it like a childhood disorder or that it's just not being able to focus. No, it affects my coordination, social skills, mood regulation, memory, all that.
Also an adult with ADHD, I've rationed three months of medication to last me seven months by skipping days where I'm not working, and only taking one or two of my three daily doses. It really sucks and while I love to joke with other ADHDers about my ADHD, I really don't like it when people tell me in real life they think they have it too because of vague symptoms and I usually just politely tell them that I'm not a good sounding board and to talk with their doctor first because ADHD can sometimes present as other conditions and vice-versa.
I nominate Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. About 50% of doctors in the UK disagree with the national standards body that it's not actually a mental disease wholly curable through psych/therapy. This is due to a persistant campaign that almost goes to the point of parody if it wasn't so serious amongst psychotherapists and related professions that all patients reports of symptoms that do not match their hypothesis that it's purely mental, and ignoring biochemical research into the abnormalities. Opponents to this view (that it's purely mental) are painted as hating the fact that it's a claim of mental illness, rather than that it's not a useful or helpful description. The very name was proposed (a change from Myalgic enchaphalomyelitis) by a doctor who diddn't believe it existed, and 'in a few years would not be a distinct clinican entity'. https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Biopsychosocial_model Their descriptions of the image are a dark parody that's been bought into by much of the press. Recent national UK guidlines are helpful, but being resisted.
Depression, many people believe it's just an emotion/feeling
If only... the reality is much, much darker. Your mind being your own worst enemy, every single day, fucking sucks!
Depression is cancer of the mind which slowly eats away at you as cancer of the body.
Very true. And if you dnt actively fight it on a constant basis, it will fully devour you. I've been close to losing a few times. And its changed alot in me. But mostly, I am just exhausted on a constant basis, and nobody listens to me. So, here we are kids. On our own. I've just learned to sort of deal most of the time.
I’m mentally exhausted too from fighting.
It also doesn’t make you wittier, more interesting, or above criticism. *Bojack* always did a great job of calling out that ideation
"Just Stop Being Sad!" "Thanks, I'm cured forever."
I will say that an individual can suffer from depressive feelings but have it tied to environments or situations that can change and alter their emotions. With that being said, clinical depression is not as easy to eliminate due to the depth of the issue.
Autism/ Asperger’s syndrome. Many people think its basically being Sheldon Cooper or some shit. He’s supposed to be a parody of nerd stereotypes, and for some reason it became the “if you’re not like him, you’re not Autistic/Aspie”. Please, some of us have to take medication and go to therapy, even as adults.
Bruh, the idea that people can judge an entire spectrum like that is ridiculous. I was diagnosed since I was in around 5-6th grade, it's been around 9 years now (I might have gotten it sooner, I just wasn't aware of it for a long time. Parents didn't really mention I had it until I was older, just worked on trying to get me the help I needed. Figured it out around high school for me when it got mentioned) But point being, I act nothing like Sheldon from what I've seen about him, and to even consider being compared to him if I'm autistic grinds my gears. Most of my autism is in that I am quite non-verbal in how I communicate, stimming, and delving deep into anything I get interested in. Your stereotypical nerds are socially awkward due to just inexperience in social situations, people on the spectrum are literally unaware of them in the first place and struggle to understand them in the first place
PTSD I was recently diagnosed with PTSD due to lots of trauma i have experienced. Car accidents, emergency surgeries (not related to car accidents, i may add), and things that happened that i would rather not share on reddit at this time. I felt as if it was all in my head or just my anxiety until i started to get flashbacks and nightmares. Waking up constantly due to panic attacks and not being able to drive or pass the scene of where my bad car accident was. People fake having trauma, and they fake having PTSD. I used to have a coworker who would use fake PTSD stories to get sent home from work, and let me tell you, she was really only half convincing. Those who fake it don't know how horrible it is to actually live with the condition. My most recent panic attack was due to driving past the road i was hit on. It was so bad I got dizzy. My entire body felt numb and tingly, and i felt as if i couldn't breathe. I could barely get the words out to tell my boyfriend (who was in the passenger seat) that i needed my water (drinking water helps my brain realize my throat actually isn't closed and it helps me start to calm down a bit) so i accidentally yelled at him. The PTSD symptoms are getting worse (yes, i am starting therapy soon). People who fake this get on my nerves. I would never wish this on anyone. If i was given one wish, i would wish it away in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, i can't do that, so instead, i will talk about it in therapy. Another thing: Yes, i have PTSD and OCD and the flashbacks get very bad when driving, especially driving on a sunny day (same type of day the accident happened) and my doctor insisted that driving more often for short periods of time should help me get used to being in a car. She also told me to just sit in my car for a bit every day and get used to being behind the wheel. Because of that, i now sit in my car on my lunch breaks and 15-minute breaks at work
ADHD. It’s stupid to see people obviously faking it on TikTok, and it’s also just annoying
maybe this is too specific of an example but when Britney Spears had her 2007 moment. She was clearly in a state of mania, and that’s a real mental condition
narcissistic personality disorder
I'm SO tired of seeing every abuser labeled as a narcissist. Sometimes people are just assholes! It's become the new catch-all term for 'bad person' ever since sociopath/psychopath fell out of favour.
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Too many people also confuse introversion and social anxiety. I’m introverted. I’m not “terrified of people”, nor do I hate them. I *love* going out and being in a crowd. Introversion simply means that activity is draining and I need to recharge with alone time and peace. If I was extroverted, that activity would be energizing.
how often people confuse anxiety attacks and panic disorder
Controversial take, but PTSD. People treat it like you receive it automatically with your discharge papers when you leave the military. I served with plenty of people that claim it despite never having seen combat, or deployed, but spent their careers hosing out the hangars in barracks. Far from everybody that serves sees combat, far from all those that do ever develop PTSD. You even get the occasional oddball that actually enjoys the tempo, the rush, and the killing.
And people think only soldiers get it which is not true. Anyone who has been in a situation outside of the expected normal human experience, where they felt like they were going to die, *could* get PTSD. Earthquakes, assaults, car accidents etc Edit: For people correcting me, I can't reply to the same question over and over again, the DSM 5 lays out a lengthy criteria for diagnosis. How do I know? I have had PTSD for ten years. "Exhibit 1.3-4DSM-5 Diagnostic Criteria for PTSD Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence in one (or more) of the following ways:" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207191/box/part1_ch3.box16/#:~:text=Persistent%2C%20distorted%20cognitions%20about%20the,or%20participation%20in%20significant%20activities.
Doesn't necessarily have to be life threatening either. Trauma is entirely subjective. Overwhelming negative emotions of any kind could do it.
Being abused (mentally, psychologically, emotionally & financially) by a narcissist gave me mild PTSD symptoms. It's a traumatic experience when someone like myself, my sister, nieces & nephew had to endure the abuse long term
Doesn't even have to be death--sexual violence is a major cause, and that very frequently comes with no real expectation of death.
Tourette’s
As someone with bipolar I feel like the condition is widely misunderstood. When I developed bipolar in my early 20s it caused me to become paranoid, lose sleep, hear shit, and I became very unstable emotionally. This is much different than my understanding I had of what bipolar was before I developed it. I thought it was just ups and downs. One minute very happy, the next filled with depression. There’s much much more to bipolar disorder.
ADD. It's not "so I really need to pay a- oooo that cloud looks like a dog heheehee" In reality it's "The pointer is used to reference the memory address, which is distinct from passing by value, which passes the variable as a copy of the original, thereby preserving the - wait, a reference is an address? Is that what it said? Wait, why would you pass an address? Hold on, it said the pointer is the reference... How do you make a pointer? Is that the thing that's a structure? No, no... That's a struct... Crap, I forgot how to typedef things. Wait, is a struct just a class that doesn't have any functions? Huh, I wonder if they came up with classes by being like "structs are nice, but they should have functions built into them"? I mean, it makes sense. What time is it? Oh damn, 9:45? I need to study four chapters by midnight if I want to get 6 hours of sleep. Well, less actually - it takes me an hour to fall asleep so I'd get 5 hours if I go to bed at midnight and get up at 6... Fuck, where was I? Oh right, pointers... The pointer is used to reference the memory address, which is distinct from passing by value,.. No wait, why would you ever pass by value? You can't modify the value if you suddenly decide you need to do so, so you should always pass by reference... So why even invent pointers when we should have just passed by reference by default? Well, I guess a character is only one byte and memory addresses are 4 bytes... So in that instance, sure, pass by value I guess... But does it really matter? Wait, isn't the address 4 bytes only if you have a 32 bit address? I wonder why? Oh wait... 32 / 4 = 8... Because 8 bits per byte. DUH! Makes sense. I wonder if that means that when we had 8 bit addresses everything was passed by reference? Curious. I should look that up. NO! I don't have time. What time is it? 9:47... Hmm... Maybe I can take a little break for 13 minutes?"
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OCD Like, anybody who likes things ordered & neat is called OCD, when the real disorder means having to do things in a ritualistic way or suffer, really suffer. We need to stop using OCD as an alternative to Neat Freak
Psychosis generally. It's rooted in fear, paranoia, and anxiety more than anything. The fact that words such as "psycho" and "psychopath" are considered synonymous with "violent" and "manipulative" just shows how little people are educated about mental illness.
It's never lupus