Fugitivus Discussion Forum

If any of you feel I'm making too many threads, let me know. I just felt a strong urge to put this up because I wanted to share a conversation I just had.

I was telling someone I met on a dating site that I'm mentally ill, and he says, "Are you sure the doctors were looking at the right girl? You just seem so normal! You type coherently and everything."

As if all mentally ill people are sitting around in straight jackets, rocking back and forth and muttering to themselves, or something. As if mentally ill people are incapable of typing. It just irritated me- I know he didn't mean anything by it, but still, that's a gross misconception he just displayed right there.

Oh, not to mention the nosy telemarketer who managed to get me to tell him I was mentally ill (I'm dangerously honest, so I have a hard time just not answering questions) and he asked me if I could read or write. He was very patronizing.

I swear that I won't just complain about my own problems the rest of this thread, honestly.

OMG. That is fail. I'm sorry. D:

I was considering making this thread for the epic-long conversation I had on that other board, but I didn't want to bog the thread down with a huge-ass post. I'm glad someone did, though.

I have another story, too.

As I've mentioned a few times here, I work at a grocery store. One of my favourite people there is a bagger guy who was physically abused by his father and is mentally disabled because of it. He's a super sweet guy despite the horrible things he's been through. <3

Anyway, he was bagging for me the other day when this teenage girl comes through my line, fumbles with her change for a while, and goes,

And he just hands her her bag of consumer goods, and goes, "have a nice day now," sweet as can be.

SO ANGRY AT HER ASIDGHAWIEGO.

Thanks. It got worse, too. After pursuing the subject a bit, he said, "Let's just not talk about this." Not talk about my life? Just sweep it under the rug like it's something ugly and inappropriate? Thanks a fucking lot.

Oh, that's terrible. I can't believe he handled it so well.

One of the friends that I cut out of my life this year got into arguments over mental illness with me 4 times over the course of one year. In all of them, she told me I didn't seem crazy to her so therefore I wasn't.

Oh, ok.

*Facepalm.*

Reminds me of this one guy who was like, "You all can't be mentally ill, because mentally ill people never want to talk about it!" Nice of him to decide how mentally ill people feel and what they actually do.

Almost every person I've tried to get accommodation at school for my anxiety from evar: "Why should you get special treatment" or "Just suck it up" or "I don't want to be an enabler" or "Why should you get accommodation if you're so smart?" etc. etc. And then they wonder why I'm truant.

I... I think I need to peruse my d'aww folder.

That's very upsetting. :l It seems like as long as your disability doesn't show on the outside, people don't feel inclined to take it seriously.

A friend of mine from high school has Bipolar Disorder. She was still not quite adjusted with her medication and was still hearing voices and having these huge bouts of anxiety when she was in classes. We all knew this, and my mother also suffers from Bipolar Disorder/Manic Depression, so I was paying attention to what my friend was going through and trying to help her as best I could.

One day, we'd sat down for lunch, and this girl was having another anxiety attack. I had asked her if she was alright, and she just quietly said, "It won't stop, I just took a pill and I need time for it to kick in." So I just sat and ate my lunch.

A few minutes after this, a couple of girls we ate with came by. Now, at this point this girl is clearly stressed, she's got her knees pulled up to her chest, and her head tucked into her arms and she's rocking herself a bit. These two girls were decidedly immature this day, and they immediately started giggling and saying "Hey, are the voices talking to you again? What're they saying? C'mon! Tell us!" and poking her and shaking her shoulder.

I was pissed and yelled at them to grow the fuck up and leave her alone. I told them "She's having a panic attack here, and she already feels bad enough without you two standing there and giggling like a pair of monkeys!". And the two girls got defensive and one said "We were just trying to talk her through it!".

Yeah, no. One of my friends snorted and said "Maybe you should go away for awhile. Leave her alone, and don't come back until you can act like real adults."

The girl later admitted that while she thought these two were her friends, they were always treating her illness as a joke, and trying to laugh about it with her but she said "After what happened at lunch that day, I haven't spoken to them since, and I probably won't ever again."

That makes me feel really sad, and really frustrated. How can people have such a lack of empathy?

It's staggering, isn't it? And my friend had discussions with these girls about her illness, how it made her feel, what it did to her mentally, and they STILL reacted that way. And we were all 17 at the time!

I found out my mother was manic-depressive when I was 11 years old. After years of her always seeming slightly off to me (and as a child that meant coming home one day to a mom that was happy to watch cartoons, and coming home another to a mom who would berate me for leaving my shoes in the wrong spot on the clean floor), it was good to finally have a REASON for things to have been the way they were. It's no cakewalk though, and she still has her days. Her medication isn't 100% perfect either, so she could take it every day for a month straight and she still have an episode. She also forgets once in awhile to take it, and she hates those days because she ends up on the couch for a few hours after catching up on her pills. She says she feels better when she takes a pill and "naps it off".

I am at a greater risk of developing a mental illness later in life simply because my mother has one, and while that's made me more empathetic towards her, there are times where I wish that wasn't the case for either of us. Nobody wants a mental illness, and it's not like cancer where you get it, and if you fight it, it's gone, you know?