This is another one of those weird fucking instances where Bram Stoker got to the "right" answer in the wrongest conceivable way.

The argument Van Helsing is making here is that Jonathan is too strong of character to be permanently traumatized.

Obviously that is not how PTSD works,

I'm not going to pretend otherwise, so be at ease, my friend.

Generally speaking, when PTSD alters your brain structure, those changes are permanent, or long enough lasting that they may as well be. However, as anyone who has undergone half-decent post-traumatic care can attest, the debilitating symptoms of PTSD can ease over time as you learn how better to avoid, control, and recover from triggers, and develop better coping skills.

One common (though far from universal) predictor of how severely an event will traumatize a person is related to autonomy. The freedom and ability to make your own choices. The less autonomy a person is able to exercise during and after an traumatic event (or, the more frequently their autonomy is overridden by the situation), the worse the trauma symptoms tend to be.

In contrast, a lot of early therapeutic steps in treating PTSD involve reclaiming autonomy. This looks different for different people, because it obviously has to be individualized. But, common examples of exercising autonomy after trauma include re-framing the trauma through art (writing, reading, painting, whatever) so that the victim can, in a sense, control the "story" of the traumatic event even though they could not control the event itself.

By sheer coincidence, Jonathan Harker has lucked into probably the best case scenario.

His autonomy during his imprisonment was constantly degraded in tiny and massive ways, from controlled sleep schedule changes to forced denial of grooming habits straight up through undressing and implied penetration without consent.

However, he persisted in making decisions and carrying them out, even in spite of these controls. And eventually one of those decisions saved his life. This can easily be turned into a coping skill. He seems not to have lost the ability to make decisions for himself, thus "that step" (as it were) can be "skipped." And since the "steps" had not been invented yet, that definitely puts Jonathan in a better position for recovery.

But let's loop back around to therapies for trauma. Jonathan also happens to have taken a critical step in enforcing his autonomy post-event, too. By entrusting Mina with his journal, he made the conscious decision to let her be his guide. That too is a type of reclamation of autonomy over the story of his trauma. Yes, it means he isn't "making the decisions" himself, but that is a choice he made and is continuing to make each day, safe in the knowledge that if he changes his mind, Mina will still trust him.

That right there combines both autonomy and stability, which also enable one to learn PTSD skills more quickly.

Combine that with the fact that his wife is probably the most competent caretaker short of Mary Poppins and you have a basically ideal candidate for recovery.

Not in any way because of the weird shit V.H. was saying. Just as a coincidence.

And I think to some degree, Stoker likely recognized that pattern, because it plays out pretty regularly in real life. Just, he blamed it on "inherent moral fortitude" rather than "the external support offered to middle-to-upper-class men is so robust and the freedom of choice offered to them so complete that a man in Jonathan's position is simply much more likely to recover than any working class or otherwise marginalized person in this situation."

(Surprise! It was a post about classism all along!)

every tiktok expert: make short fun videos 9-15 seconds long

me: how about a 2-minute spoken word monolog about unlearning trauma responses?

in case no one told you, or in case you know but you need encouragement taking the next step: it’s never too late to unlearn a law that is now holding you back, it’s never too late to write a new law

UGHH Tumblr ate the first transcript I made. So here is the second, with some more frustration. I mainly made this for myself because some poetry is also pretty and easier to follow in text. 

description: a white man with brown hair, a beard and glasses looks into the camera and says:

[transcript]:

No one told you but there were laws you learned in the wars of your youth. These laws were not written in words or in books, but inscribed in the chambers of the heart that hold fear and remember pain.

“Do not let people close”, says one law, “because ‘close’ is the place from which the traitor’s knife strikes”. And so you kept the world at bay.

“Do not stand tall”, says another law, “because the tall flower calls the shears”. And so you hung your head and hid your petals.

And no one told you but some of these laws were handed down by people who could not bear to see you live in peace. Some of these laws were given to you by guardians who were so desperate to keep you safe that they would rather dig trenches and lay barbed wire around the world than see it hurt you.

Some laws you taught yourself, drafted in the wars of today to give you respite from the siege of tomorrow. And it is possible that for a time, these laws were what you needed to survive.

But nobody told you that one day you could do more than survive. No one told you how to unwrite the laws of war because they had forgotten how to live without them and the besieged heart does not plan for peace.

But I am telling you now because you deserve to know that all wars end and so too will yours.

When you are ready, in those quiet moments between bombardments when peace seems possible, you can start to draft new laws, forged in hope and tempered by experience.

“Let the right people close”, says one law, “because 'close’ is the place in which the deepest love takes root”.

“Stand as tall as you may in the place that you are”, says another law, “because the flower is no smaller for what the shears think of it and your stem is stronger than they would have you believe”.

Your heart is not a bunker, and its chambers hold more than fear and remember more than pain. Your heart is a greenhouse, a granary, a silo overflowing with good things, with hope held and lessons learned. And if war should come to you again it would find you in abundance of yourself, and ready to weather whatever siege tomorrow brings.

[end of transcript]

#sir this car is sobbing (via @jod13whittaker​)

Alsjdhskdjjsdjjsjdkshf poor doc XD

The Hunger Games, Actual Teen style!

On the left, 15-year-old Josh Hutcherson.

On the right, 16-year-old Jennifer Lawrence.

Think how much creepier it would be to see them killing other kids when they look so squishy-cheeked and little.

“Think how much creepier it would be to see them killing other kids when they look so squishy-cheeked and little.”

THAT’S THE POINT SUZANNE COLLINS WAS TRYING TO MAKE

Think about these cute squishy kids being forced into a romance in order to survive

And the threat of these cute squishy kids being forced into prostitution after the games are over. 

REBLOGGING THIS AGAIN WITH A REMINDER THAT FINNICK WAS 14 WHEN HE WAS REAPED/WON THE GAMES AND WAS FORCED INTO PROSTITUTION SOON AFTERWARD

wait the kids were forced into prostitution after they won???

Some of the Victors were, especially if they were attractive to lots of rich people during the games. How do you think you pay off the parachute things people send you to help you win the game? Those books were so fucked up

That’s why I feel like actual teens should have been cast in the movie. It would have hammered in the message of the books so much more.

And if they had cast actual teenages, I’m sure they wouldn’t have focus so much on romance in the films. They would have focus on the horror of the hunger games, like they damn well should have.

The hunger game movies are the exact thing the hunger game books was trying to warn us about

Just going to add in a few other things that a lot of people seem to miss because it was either de-emphasized or cut entirely from the movies:

-Haymitch Abernathy was 16 when he won the Hunger Games, and the Capitol attempted to force him into prostitution as they did with Finnick and many other popular victors. He refused, and in retaliation, they gradually killed off everyone he loved one by one—his friends from home, his family, his girlfriend. He began drinking heavily at a young age to deal with the trauma of the Games, the loss of everyone he’d ever cared about, and subsequently having to continually relive the trauma of the Games in mentoring roughly 50 children, two each year, whom he’d then have to send to their deaths in the Arena. 

-The Capitol also attempted to force Joanna Mason into prostitution. She, too, refused, and like with Haymitch, the Capitol retaliated by killing off everyone she loved one by one. She alludes to this in both the book and the movie version of Catching Fire, not flinching when she enters the Jabberjay area of the arena because there’s “no one left” that she loves. The movies don’t really explore this, though, while the books do more exploration both with everything the Capitol has taken from her and the lingering effects of her PTSD from her imprisonment by the Capitol. 

-The only reason Peeta and Katniss weren’t forced into prostitution was because the Capitol was too invested in the “Star-Crossed Lovers from District 12″ narrative. 

-Also, Katniss spent the latter half of her first Hunger Games deaf in one ear and had to have her middle and inner ear reconstructed after the Games—the explosion at the Cornucopia permanently fucked up her hearing in that ear. She’s able to hear again after the surgeries but never quite the same. 

-And Peeta had a prosthetic leg! He was severely injured while fleeing the “Mutts” at the end of the Games and was bleeding out from his leg by the time he and Katniss reached the Cornucopia. Katniss gave him a tourniquet using one of her last two arrows to tighten it. Doing so saved his life, but by the time the Capitol doctors took them out of the arena, the leg was beyond saving and had to be amputated. Katniss finds this out in their “post-Games” interview with Cesar Flickerman. 

-Just generally the movies glossed over or completely cut a lot of characters whose experiences in the games left them physically disabled (Katniss’s partial deafness and Peeta’s lost leg being cut entirely, Beetee’s spinal damage from the forcefield leaving him wheelchair-bound being largely kinda glossed over) or with PTSD (Katniss and Peeta’s PTSD isn’t really explored that much, Joanna’s PTSD is pretty much skipped over entirely, Annie’s barely in the movies at all, Haymitch’s entire backstory is cut, the fact that Finnick is basically just constantly putting on a show and barely holding it together under the surface isn’t ever really explored, pretty much all of the addiction subplots including Haymitch attempting to quit drinking and Katniss starting to drink at one point and everything related to morphling are cut…). 

-Basically as “rough” as the movies are they sanitized the FUCK out of the Hunger Games and the world surrounding them, and that’s…not a good thing.

TL;DR: @isashi-nigami is completely correct, The hunger game movies are the exact thing the hunger game books was trying to warn us about.

Yep

Do any other american high schoolers have intense survivor’s guilt and trauma with school shootings even though they weren’t at your school?

Like. A laser tag place opened geared towards teenagers and it got no business, we tried to enjoy it but when someone pointed a laser machine gun at me and I instinctively dropped behind the nearest wall and reached to turn off my phone I cried, I wasn’t the only one. The announcements system turns on at an unexpected time and everyone holds their breath until they say something besides “locks, lights, out of sight,” nobody even jokingly pops chip bags anymore, a door slammed really loud during a class change and everyone dropped and ran. Everyone cries during drills, even the toughest ranch kids. Every drill comes with a full day of teachers crying and telling us that they love us all so much and will die for us, and every kid in every class looking around wondering who would I die for? Who would die for me? You walk to the bathroom and wonder every second if it happens right now, where will I go? You test supply closet doors to see which ones are unlocked, you memorize which furniture in the teachers’ lounge your English teacher says is light enough to barricade a door with. The fire alarm goes off and nobody moves, instead you wait for gunshots—it a trap? You stand with a group of freshmen and realize that you’re the oldest, you know you’ll have to die for them. You forget your ID tag and worry that now the police won’t be able to tell your parents if you’re safe, or not safe. Your stats teacher has a baseball bat by the door, your math teacher keeps a stapler under each desk to throw, your drama teacher asks who will be willing to stand by the non-locking door with the Shakespearean swords. Your yearbook teacher tells you don’t worry about breaking a camera because you heard about the kids who died holding them. You don’t use the bathroom during classes because you don’t want to be the only target to shoot at. You keep your phone on silent 24/7 because you worry the one time you forget will be when you get your whole US History class killed. You have a snap saved with your class schedule and school and full name to send in an instant to your internet friends so they know if you were on that wing, you have a note saved with the things you want your mom to know and the things you’re sorry for. At the age of 12 I was told I needed to know who I would die for and that it was okay if it was nobody, that was my decision to make. School shootings control us more than adults and non-Americans could possibly imagine and nobody moves to change anything unless we’re actively screaming for it. Have you considered we’re too scared?

Holy shit...

romanticizing mental illness is dangerous and misleading

Fucking preach.

Uwu smol baby autism: adorably awkward, huggable, acts cute when confused, has some sort of rainman talent and a perfect memory in general

Real autism: worrying about whether you’re interpreting people’s cues correctly/making your tone sound correct for the context, or whether they’re about to get wierded out and uncomfortable bc of something you said, sensory issues that drive you nuts, not being able to adapt to sudden changes in plans and freaking out, melting down or shutting down when stressed by stupid things

^

Reblogging for the autism part that is just too real 

!!!

I would not have started using unhealthy coping mechanisms if people hadn’t romanticized them

I would not have started using unhealthy coping mechanisms if people hadn’t romanticized them

I would not have started using unhealthy coping mechanisms if people hadn’t romanticised them

Louder for the people at the back

reason #75361823612681215698624672183 that one day at a time (2017—) is one of the greatest shows ever made: in penelope’s therapy group we are not only shown a group of female soldiers/veterans overcoming anxiety, PTSD, depression, and other mental health problems, but these soldiers are disabled, transgender, black, hispanic/latino, and are all of different ages and body types. can anybody else name a show thats done that?? anyone??

YASS XD

the fact that one day at a time is not only a show with good humour but touches on topics like racism, drugs, ptsd, queer issues, feminism, normalising a mother sitting down to talk to her kids about her mental health and giving support to them with mental health (especially for a latino family…) this show really has it all

Hell yes

Imagine Hogwarts after the Battle, after the War, sure –

But imagine Hogwarts’ students, after their year with the Carrows and Snape.

Imagine a tiny little first-year whose porcupine pincushions still have quills, but to whom Fiendfyre comes easily. The second-year who tried to go back, to fight; whose bravado got Professor Sinistra killed, as she pushed him out of the way of a Killing Curse. The third-year who perfectly brewed poisons, hands shaking, wishing for the courage to spike the Carrows’ cups. The fourth-year who throws away all of their teacups, their palmistry guidebooks, because what use is Divination if it didn’t see this coming? The fifth-year who can barely remember what O.W.L.S. are, let alone that she was supposed to take them. The sixth-year who can’t manage Lumos to save their life, but whose proficiency with the Cruciatus Curse rivals Bellatrix’s.

Imagine the seventh-year who laughs until he cries, thinking about the first-years who will fall asleep in History of Magic while their story is told.

Imagine the Muggleborn first-years left alive, if there are any: imagine what they think of the magical world, when their introduction to it was Death Eaters and being tortured – by their classmates –for having been born.

Imagine the students who went home to their parents (or guardians, or wards, or orphanages) and showed them what they’d learned: Dark curses, hexes, Unforgiveables; that Muggles are filth, animals, lesser. Who, yes, still can’t transfigure a match into a needle – but Mum, there’s a hex that can make you feel as though you’re being stabbed with thousands. (Don’t ask them how they know.)

Imagine the students who will never be able to see Hogwarts as home.

Imagine the students Hogwarts has left, when it starts up again – the lack of Muggleborns, blood-traitors, half-bloods, dead and gone – the lack of purebloods; the Ministry would have chucked everyone of age (and possibly just below) in Azkaban for Unforgiveables, wouldn’t they?

Imagine how few students there are left to teach; imagine how few teachers are left to teach them.

Imagine the students who can’t walk past a particular classroom, who can’t walk through a hallway, who can’t walk into the Great Hall without having a panic attack or breaking down. Imagine the school-wide discovery that the carriages aren’t horseless after all; that everyone, from the firsties to the teachers, can see Thestrals.

Imagine the memorials, the heaps of flowers and mementoes – in every other corner, hallway, classroom; every other step you take on the grounds.

Imagine the ghosts.

Imagine the students destroying Snape’s portrait, using the curses, hexes, even Fiendfyre they’ve been taught how to wield – it has to be restored nearly every week; Snape stays with Phineas Nigellus semi-permanently. (None of the other portraits will welcome him. His reasons do not excuse his conduct.)

Imagine the students unable to trust each other – everyone informed on everyone, your best friend might turn you in.

Imagine the guilt that everyone carries (it should have been me, it’s my fault s/he’s dead, I told on them, it’s all my fault), the students incapable of meeting each other’s eyes because it’s my fault your best friend, your sibling, your Housemate, your boy/girlfriend is dead.

Imagine the memorials piled high with the wands of the dead. Imagine the memorials piled high with the self-snapped wands of the living.

Imagine the students who are never able to produce a Patronus.

Imagine Boggarts being removed from the curriculum because Riddikulus is near impossible to grasp, even for the sixth- and seventh-years. Because their friends and families dead will never, ever be funny.

Imagine the students for whom magic feels tainted.

Imagine the students who leave the wixen world – hell, the students who leave Britain entirely, because there’s nothing left for them there.

Imagine the students who never use magic again.

(Image source.)

(From the mind of the wonderful lavenderpatil, a keen look at how students might be after war.)

Reblogging this kickass post by the equally kickass lavenderpatil because everyone should read it

I think… I could be wrong… but everyone Prof Trwylany (sp) said would die at the beginning of every term DID die in the battle of hogwarts? BUt yeah. The year after that was probably filled with grand speeches about those who sacrificed their lives, and how they would rebuild hogwarts, etc. meanwhile… the kids knew. They were there. They knew what it was really like. And the incoming first years probably had a very different relationship with the older kids, who’d seen shit, than in years past. I think there’d be a long year of seriousness and severity… or everyone would try to put on a happy face and pretend that Colin Kreevy wasn’t working on the school paper any more because he was dead. Stiff upper lip. But with a very subdued attitude.

Imagine the seventh years who came back. Because nobody finished their seventh year. That year was a loss. But the ones it really mattered for were them. Imagine the older kids who are up in the night because they can’t sleep for bad dreams hearing the crying from the lower dorms and finding that little girl who can’t make pincushions but can make Fiendfyre hugging her knees, and saying, “You know what, bring your pillow up, you can sleep on my bed while I read.” Imagine the new first years, the ones who hear the story on the train, who’re eleven and still young, seeing an older student sitting alone staring blankly and going over to them and saying, “D’you want some of my chocolate frogs?” because they can’t think of anything else to do. Imagine one finding someone who’s sitting staring at nothing one day and asking in a quiet voice, “Do you need a hug?” and then staying for an hour while the older student cries and cries and hugs them, because some eleven year olds are really smart (and some eleven year olds already came to the school from Bad Shit) and know that sometimes it helps to hold someone you could look after. Imagine the older students who look at these younger ones coming in, all new and safe and bright, and swearing on Merlin’s grave that nothing will ever, *ever* hurt these kids. Imagine the alumni of Dumbledore’s Army, who refused to let the fucking Death Eaters win when they were here and kicking and sure as she won’t let them now, finding things to do on weekends, organizing things, refusing to have it so that people just stay there alone being sad. Fuck the third-year rule: *everyone* can go to Hogsmeade, you just buddy up the young kids with the older kids and I mean, fuck, *who’s going to be a threat to the older kids now*? Imagine them making up insulting nicknames for their old enemies, taking Voldemort and the Carrows and Lestrange and metaphorically spitting on them every time they use them. Imagine Ron volunteering to take on the Boggart that takes up residence in the one class cupboard because no, look, the stupid thing *still looks like a bloody spider* and look it’s fucking hilarious when you take its legs off and tie it up with a bow. And the class laughs. Imagine Harry staying at the school for a couple years, even when he’s done, because once people understand how the charm worked - how because he let Voldemort kill him it meant that nothing Voldemort could do could hurt any of them anymore - everyone just feels *better* when he’s there. Imagine the nights where everyone leaves the common rooms and camps out in the Great Hall and drinks Butterbeer and tells stories and cries and sometimes there are shouting matches because people get so raw, but in the end everyone falls asleep in a pile together. Imagine all the really, truly inappropriate jokes the survivors make, the ones that make their parents’ eyes fill with tears and terrify the first years, because actually when you’ve been dragged face-first through Hell the *worst shit* becomes fucking funny. Imagine how the owls don’t have to be kept in the owlry anymore, because every kid needs the animal they brought with them; imagine that for the kids that lost theirs, or never had one, their friends finding them some, buying them some. Imagine the girl who knows the Cruciatus Curse breaking down crying because she can’t believe she did that, she can’t ever believe she would and she knows she’s wrong and evil and tainted, and Ginny holding her while she cries and when she calms down, Hermione tells her the story of Regulus Black, and about how just because you made shit choices once that doesn’t mean you can’t make better ones now. Imagine that people have been dealing with this kind of horrible shit all through human history, and people are out there dealing with it today, and yes it absolutely sucks and it’s horrible and the scars it leaves are real and heartbreaking and sometimes people are too badly hurt to go on, but also former child-soldiers play team games and laugh at funny stories and refugee kids with horrible stories love colouring books with bright colours and play games with the friends they’ve made in the camps. And these are kids who fought. Who fought like little demons. Who *chose* to fight. So yeah, it could be awful. It could be nothing but bleak from beginning to end, a year (a decade) of sternness and unhappiness. But it doesn’t have to be; it isn’t guaranteed. (and as @tygermama notes, we Muggles have been figuring out this shit: we give it names and throw our best guesses at it, and some of them are good. So there’s help there, too.)

This is my favourite response to this ficlet so far, oh my goodness, thank you.

Wow.

Holy shit just rip out my heart will ya

“Iron Man 3…is such a good representation of anxiety. […] We see tony stark avoiding a lot of situations that are difficult for him, and that’s a big hallmark of anxiety. It’s a good example of trauma, because trauma happens when a fundamental belief you have has been challenged in some way. He’s always been able to engineer his way out of danger, and this was the first time that he couldn’t.” —Dr. Ali Mattu, clinical psychologist, Reviews Mental Illnesses in Movies

YES

i would sell my soul to hear tony stark yell you left me in siberia to die in avengers 4 (2019) 

YES

tony stark really out there putting the TS in PTSD huh

I’m screaming

And the PD is “Peter dying”

shut up the both of u 

avengers 4 might just be Parent Tony Stark Dying

Alternatively, Peter (&) Tony Survive Death is a much nicer alternative

All of this

Seriously. What on earth could a 3 yr old do to “warrant” a gun to the chest???

Apparently they were in the process of arresting her mother (whom they beat while handcuffed, naturally), also pointed the gun at the head of the child’s grandmother, and pointed the gun at her when she did what any toddler would do and started wailing. The incident gave her one of the worst cases of child PTSD the expert they assigned has ever seen and she’ll need therapy well into her adult years. 

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of gun safety knows that you do not point a gun at anyone you are not willing to kill. So best case scenario these officers were grossly incompetent and worst case they were willing to kill a child for crying. This settlement is the least they deserve.

That is seriously messed up

Here’s a small comic I made based on @spideystilinski ‘s fic called ‘boxed in’ which the fic I happily got assigned to work on for the @petertonybigbang event! This was a day late because there was some technical problems but it should work now

I LOVE THIS