cateka
Full Member
I've read many a thread on here and it shocks me to see how many people seem to associate their weight issues with a mental illness of some sort. I'm not just talking about compulsive overeating or binge eating - a handful of people talk about the bipolar disorder and psychosis as a factor in this 'crossroads' most of us seem to be stuck at. Its very eye-opening and in a way reassuring because if you suffer from a mental illness you feel so very alone in the world.
I read an inspiring quote the other day:
"Insanity is a perfectly rational response to an insane world."
I believe it was said by Laing.
It makes me sick... does nobody, nobody on the face of the earth realise how god damn stimatizing it is to point a finger at people with mental illnesses? Telling us we are 'mad' all the time.
Its especially awful because in my case its always from the people who are supposed to love and care for me, my parents' favorite expression being 'looney' and my boyfriend's being 'nutter'. Those words bore themselves into me like a parasite and the memory of it never goes away.
The social withdrawal I have suffered from being labelled 'bulimic' is crushing. I hate that expression too, I'm never "suffering from bulimia" I am always "bulimic", people say it the same manner they talk about my skin colour - why can't they understand its not a part of me, its merely a crisis I am facing. I never talk to anyone now because I have been made so ashamed of it - I'm too afraid. I have no friends and I never go out. I sit on my own at college because I'm too afraid of saying anything to anyone lest they somehow find out the horrible truth about me.
People don't get made ashamed of things like cancer, its a heartwarming story if someone recovers from it, you tell someone and they are inspired. If you tell someone you used to suffer from a mental illness they sortof tiptoe around you afraid you'll suddenly stab them or something. Theres no heroic praise for us 'nutters', recovered or not.
What also makes me sick is that some people are apparantly not crazy enough to get the help they need. If someone is anorexic people worry, want to help, see it as an uncontrollable force and feel so much sympathy for the sufferer. If someone suffers from compulsive overeating they are "just fat" and I recon half the time that people don't seek help with it, its because the general population makes them feel as though they don't deserve it.
As for people suffering from unipolar depression... are we really sick at all? People describe outlooks as "optimistic" or "pessimistic". Could they perhaps be described as "denial" and "reality" instead? Things that other people see as "little things" become "big things" to us. Magnification and minimization I believe this symptom is called - we focus on the bad and ignore the good. Could it be because the world is really at wrongs and we are the only ones who notice that most of the times the bads outweigh the goods, but everyone else has been conditioned to ignore it?
Everybody should read Brave New World by Huxley - a future where civilization stops anybody from being miserable, everyone is conditioned to adore their role, everybody engages in casual sex all the time, love, arts and passion do not exist. Nobody is even familiar with terms like 'liberty'. Everyone is stable, everyone is happy, people aren't even afraid of dying.
Maybe this is the world we live in now - everyone walking around all aloof, not a care in the world except getting a new sofa. I believe the 'mentally ill' help to uphold this - we see all the horrible wrongs in the world and want to change them, so everything is stable and everyone else remains aloof. Only its not possible to do that; I can't stop all the wars can I? This apiphany makes us miserable, we push it deep down inside us where it turns into a psychosis or an eating disorder.
This is how I see the world today - the "mentally ill" trying to do everyone else a favour, and everyone else spitting on us for not being idle. Typically speaking, we are crusaders for a better world, and the only reason no-one else is is that their heads are buried too deep in hypnotic forced like the media to notice there is anything wrong with the world in the first place.
This is my outlook on life, I want to flush all my antidepressants down the bog along with this stigma and scream out my window for hours on end. But what good would that do?
It gets you down sometimes.
Sorry, end rant here.
I read an inspiring quote the other day:
"Insanity is a perfectly rational response to an insane world."
I believe it was said by Laing.
It makes me sick... does nobody, nobody on the face of the earth realise how god damn stimatizing it is to point a finger at people with mental illnesses? Telling us we are 'mad' all the time.
Its especially awful because in my case its always from the people who are supposed to love and care for me, my parents' favorite expression being 'looney' and my boyfriend's being 'nutter'. Those words bore themselves into me like a parasite and the memory of it never goes away.
The social withdrawal I have suffered from being labelled 'bulimic' is crushing. I hate that expression too, I'm never "suffering from bulimia" I am always "bulimic", people say it the same manner they talk about my skin colour - why can't they understand its not a part of me, its merely a crisis I am facing. I never talk to anyone now because I have been made so ashamed of it - I'm too afraid. I have no friends and I never go out. I sit on my own at college because I'm too afraid of saying anything to anyone lest they somehow find out the horrible truth about me.
People don't get made ashamed of things like cancer, its a heartwarming story if someone recovers from it, you tell someone and they are inspired. If you tell someone you used to suffer from a mental illness they sortof tiptoe around you afraid you'll suddenly stab them or something. Theres no heroic praise for us 'nutters', recovered or not.
What also makes me sick is that some people are apparantly not crazy enough to get the help they need. If someone is anorexic people worry, want to help, see it as an uncontrollable force and feel so much sympathy for the sufferer. If someone suffers from compulsive overeating they are "just fat" and I recon half the time that people don't seek help with it, its because the general population makes them feel as though they don't deserve it.
As for people suffering from unipolar depression... are we really sick at all? People describe outlooks as "optimistic" or "pessimistic". Could they perhaps be described as "denial" and "reality" instead? Things that other people see as "little things" become "big things" to us. Magnification and minimization I believe this symptom is called - we focus on the bad and ignore the good. Could it be because the world is really at wrongs and we are the only ones who notice that most of the times the bads outweigh the goods, but everyone else has been conditioned to ignore it?
Everybody should read Brave New World by Huxley - a future where civilization stops anybody from being miserable, everyone is conditioned to adore their role, everybody engages in casual sex all the time, love, arts and passion do not exist. Nobody is even familiar with terms like 'liberty'. Everyone is stable, everyone is happy, people aren't even afraid of dying.
Maybe this is the world we live in now - everyone walking around all aloof, not a care in the world except getting a new sofa. I believe the 'mentally ill' help to uphold this - we see all the horrible wrongs in the world and want to change them, so everything is stable and everyone else remains aloof. Only its not possible to do that; I can't stop all the wars can I? This apiphany makes us miserable, we push it deep down inside us where it turns into a psychosis or an eating disorder.
This is how I see the world today - the "mentally ill" trying to do everyone else a favour, and everyone else spitting on us for not being idle. Typically speaking, we are crusaders for a better world, and the only reason no-one else is is that their heads are buried too deep in hypnotic forced like the media to notice there is anything wrong with the world in the first place.
This is my outlook on life, I want to flush all my antidepressants down the bog along with this stigma and scream out my window for hours on end. But what good would that do?
It gets you down sometimes.
Sorry, end rant here.