The reason reassuring people that they’re not faking their mental illnesses for attention has never worked is because mental illnesses, while not fake, generally are for attention.
of course we want attention. we’re social animals that live in communities and individual survival is based on the ability of others to see and care about our needs. It’s not going to fucking work to convince people that they have no desire to have their suffering recognized by others. Of course they do. They want to be helped.
We convinced people that it’s wrong to want your individual needs recognized. Anxiety and depression have to be just plain suffering, not a sign that you need something, but how the fuck do you suffer without needing.
It is bullshit, because there’s actually evidence that the way mental illnesses WORK is that they manifest in ways that draw “attention.” This was hypothesized in a book I read once, Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters. The book had the idea that cultural differences in how mental illnesses manifest have a lot to do with what, in that culture, communicates that something is wrong.
it has always stuck with me because “somatic” manifestations of mental illness (like, physical rather than “mental”/emotional symptoms) are more the norm outside of western cultures, and in western cultures they’re treated as something weird and exotic enough to have their own disorder—somatic symptoms disorder. It sounds super weird to us for someone to have chronic pain or stomachaches from an emotional problem, but it absolutely happens, and that’s often how anxiety manifests in kids?? Which makes me think that it’s the “mental” part that’s learned. When you think about it emotions all are not that different from physical feelings and they physically affect the body.
My anxiety symptoms have lots of “physical” manifestations with no mental/emotional component. Phantom pain associated with my triggers. Etc. and over the past year I’ve been becoming convinced that I got that way by suppressing my emotional responses. I don’t experience anxiety as an emotion anymore. Like. At all. I’m not sure how it’s supposed to feel as an emotion. I cannot have panic attacks any more. Not don’t. Can’t. At present, I’m completely back to square one with coping, because the distress is still there, it’s just found totally new ways to manifest.
What I’ve learned is that it really is about Attention, and sometimes your brain wants attention from other people, and sometimes it wants attention from you.
So long spent firmly branding my anxiety as irrational, dismissing it, treating it as this foreign object inside my head I didn’t want...but it was me. It was me the whole time, me trying to protect me, trying to keep me safe, and I spent YEARS trying to turn it off and now here I am. I’ve had the most unintelligibly stressful year of my life and have been falling apart but can’t identify what exactly is falling apart. I got to the point where whenever I stopped myself thinking about something that upset me, I would immediately go back to having nightmares about it.
idk. This is a tangent. The problem is that we think “wanting attention” is bad. Literally no it’s not. Why is “I’m not having my needs met, I’m not having my pain seen, I am hurting and I need help” seen as something wrong to communicate?
