Thread by @buttonslives

🧵 A thread about mental illness and identity:

Online mental health communities, which started as support groups, have evolved into vectors for social contagion & have the effect of glamorizing mental illness, where teens & young adults now embrace it as part of their identity.

What’s worse is that the people in online mental health communities (especially TikTok) aspire to be content creators/influencers for their niche psychiatric condition and are incentivized to make it their brand. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

When your mental illness is your identity, rather than something to recover from or manage so that you can live a normal life, it defaults to a victim mentality. When you’re sick you can be excused from uncomfortable and difficult parts of life. Without growth, you stay sick.

I spent my teen years in and out of psych hospitals for self-harm and 1 year in a lockdown residential treatment facility. I was desperate to figure out what was wrong with me. I would “try on” different diagnoses to see what fit, and then that diagnosis would be my identity.

Trying to “find out who I am” instead of participating in life made me sicker. The advice I would give my younger self is to not put so much emphasis on identity labels and instead focus on accomplishments, because that is how self-esteem is built and mental health is improved.

I wish I realized earlier that focusing on accomplishments 1) made me too busy to think about what was wrong with me and 2) drastically improved my self-esteem so that I didn’t feel so much like something actually was that wrong with me.

My mental illness was coddled and heavily medicated in California. The treatment center I went to in Utah at 15 had a tough love approach: “you have to be accountable for your actions, you got yourself in here and only you can get yourself out.” Guess which worked better?

I did eventually get the right diagnosis of Asperger’s, which explained a lot, but as it’s a neurodevelopmental condition and not a psychiatric one, I still had to overcome a lot of mental health challenges. There is such a thing as too much introspection.

I spent a year exploring the online autism communities and left when they became intolerable because of social justice ideology. High functioning adults leaned into being “disabled” for social media points and called me a Nazi for using my diagnosis of Asperger’s.

The autism community, consisting of adults with low needs, were at war with moms of autistic children with high needs. They said they “knew better” than moms because they were #ActuallyAutistic. They tried to cancel therapies and organizations that help children with high needs.

The commodification of psychiatric illnesses and other disorders as a brand or product or as something that gives you social status is not healthy for anyone.
When we move away from seeing mental illness as something to recover from & into a fixed identity, people will stay sick.