@establishing-a-new-normal / establishing-a-new-normal.tumblr.com
St. Louis poet Neil Hilborn blew the Internet away with his recital of “OCD,” a poem about having obsessive compulsive disorder while being in love, originally filmed during this year’s Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam in July.
WOW. Tears down my face and chills down my spine.
Stop Stigma Sacramento The Mental Illness: It’s not always what you think project was initiated by Sacramento County Department of Health and Human Services’ Division of Behavioral Health Services to: -Reduce stigma and discrimination -Promote mental health and wellness -Inspire hope for people and families living with mental illness
Stop Stigma Sacramento is one of the many projects here working to support those with mental illnesses. These are all over the county—on billboards, community boards, and gas pumps.
For mental health resources in the county, visit the NAMI Sacramento website
Saw this on the front page of Yahoo today. Looks like progress to me!
The accompanying article:
They also get owned in the comments section. OCD can be really debilitating for those who have it. It sometimes negatively impacts their lives and relationships with others in such a major way…it’s not some quirky badge a person can wear if they happen to always carry excedrin and benadryl and tissues in their purse or keep their planner well-organized. OCD is a lot more complex than that.
It’s funny that people often associate OCD associated with being tidy. I was never a neat person until I recovered from OCD. Being messy was one of my compulsions.
Anxiety disorders are all about trying to cope with, check on, or control uncertainty. But sometimes the ways we try to do those are complex and have a lot to do with the meanings and judgments we’ve learned to attach to things.
For instance, being messy helped me control my social anxieties. It was a great excuse—I don’t have anyone to invite over so why bother cleaning? And it was a great barrier—I can’t invite anybody over because my house is embarrassingly messy. I was always trying to control where, when, and how any social interaction happened. Making things messy was just another way I tried to create barriers in my life.
I also just didn’t have time for cleaning. Compulsions took up so much time in my life and seemed so necessary that cleaning just wasn’t at all a concern. I had a world to try to control!
One of the awesome bonuses of recovery is that I have so much more time. And one of the things I can now do in that time is clean. So I’m much neater now that I don’t have OCD than I was when I did.
When you’re examining what you or others do, look at context and motivation. When we react to anxiety in an attempt to cope with, check on, or control uncertainty, regardless of the superficial elements of that reaction, the end result will always be short-term relief at the long-term expense of our health.
- Mark
“We’ll chat about cancer, animal cruelty, saving the whales and what Kim Kardashian will name her baby. People will devote whole Facebook status to their political beliefs, religious beliefs, their opinion on illegal substances, abortion or even who they hooked up with last night. We’ve lost the filter, or any fear of oversharing… and yet, this chronic disease that is mental illness is somehow too taboo to discuss?”
This website gives resources and information of all forms of mental illnesses. Under resources you can order (free of charge!) publications on different things such as depression, anxiety, OCD, schizophrenia, suicide, ED, personality disorders, PTSD, etc. I recently received my order of a bunch of different reading materials from them. Check it out and share with others! :)
Except for extreme cases such as paranoid schizophrenia, or conditions with sympathetic social connotations (Down syndrome; severe autism), there is a tendency in media to regard mental disorders as some kind of put-on or character flaw, that is at best amusing, at worst annoying (not that the extreme illness are exactly treated like cancer-victims— in fact they can be treated worse than milder forms). The two most “comical” conditions are Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Tourette’s Syndrome, both of which can be significant, sometimes disabling problems in real life.
At the very worst, a person is portrayed as being completely able to break out of their illness if they were to simply try hard enough— i.e. they’re just plain lazy in addition to the behavior itself. Depressive? Cheer up (and stop being lazy)! Manic? Just take a deep breath and calm down. Obsessive-compulsive? Relax already. Delusional? Get a grip on that overactive imagination. An eating disorder? Please. You look fine! Hyperactive? Control yourself, my God. Paranoid? It’s not all about you, you know! Anxiety with panic disorder? Suck it up, coward! Severe trauma from abuse during infancy? Grow up and over it!
A genuinely good character will, however, treat the mentally disturbed with kindness and will nicely ask whether they went off their meds and that’s why they’re acting up again.
This prejudice contributes to the mentally disturbed being Acceptable Targets for the most merciless cruel humor and parodization; this pertains to sociological stereotypes that most people will tend to blame the victims of misfortunes, in order to take credit for their own good fortune, rather than owning it up to plain luck of the draw (often because luck runs out, and this means that it’s only a matter of time for them).
Note that this also pertains to the illusion of control that society presents regarding one’s mental state, vs. one’s physical state; i.e. few, if any, will blame victims of cancer (except for lung cancer), leukemia, or similar organic physical illnesses or injuries, telling the person to “toughen up and get over it,” or otherwise calling them “weak” or “lazy.”
Holy Cow! You have to give up to whoever wrote up this trope. They really nailed it!
Excellent minimalist posters representing mental disorders. My personal favorite is Agoraphobia.
Self diagnosis is not: “Mood swings lol I am so bipolar!” “I had a bad day I am clinically depressed,” “I like my house clean because I am so OCD,” glorifying mental illness, or taking pride in mental illness.
Self diagnosis is: The result of research, introspection, close...
