idk. i just… i have a hard time feeling any anger towards people who seem to briefly hear about madd and jump to conclusions about themselves having it. like… i’m just remembering back to when i first heard about madd through a real brief tumblr post and i freaked out, reblogged the post, and added a tag that said something like “WAIT this thing has a name??????” before i researched it. but then immediately after reblogging it, i opened a new tab, went straight to google and typed in “maladaptive daydreaming” and read a bunch of stuff about it, and went to the madd tag on tumblr to hear personal experiences from people, and then sat with that info for a while to process it, all before officially self-diagnosing myself.
like maybe someone saw me reblog that post and saw my tag and rolled their eyes thinking “ugh i can’t believe this person just self-diagnosed cause of a tumblr post.”
so like, when people seem to be self-diagnosing themselves because of a tik tok… for me at least, it seems safe to give them the benefit of the doubt cause like… if it really was their first time hearing about madd, and it resonated with them that much, they probably left that comment, and then did what i did and went to google to look it up or to an online forum or community to learn more.
and i know there’s people out there (often on tik tok, but also every other social media platform) with large followings who make posts/videos with misinformation about madd, and those people should be held accountable when they do that, and y’all have every right to be angry at them and correct them… but all of this shit where people are accusing others of “wanting to be quirky” just does not sit right with me at all.
like, y’all know how much mentally ill people already struggle with feeling like they’re faking or lying about their disorders, right? if someone thinks they might have madd and they decide to come to the madd tag here on tumblr to help them figure it out, but then they’re bombarded with all these posts talking about how so many people just “want madd to be quirky”, like i’m sure that’s just gonna push them further into confusion and make them feel like shit or like they don’t have a supportive community to help them while they figure things out.
and sure, there is obviously bound to be some confused or ill-informed people who don’t actually have madd self-diagnosing themselves, but that is going to continue to happen consistently, especially while madd is still officially undiagnosable. and that’s OKAY. misdiagnosis is not that bad of a thing, and those people are not as big of a threat to the madd community as a lot of people seem to think they are. also, i’d bet my life to say that NONE of them are doing it cause they “want madd” or “want a quirky disorder.”
if someone hears about madd and does jump the gun on assuming they have it, that person is probably living with other mental illnesses and, statistically speaking, there’s a good chance they’re a trauma survivor if they do daydream immersively and excessively (even if it’s not necessarily maladaptive for them). so maybe they heard about it and got excited thinking there’s a term to explain what they’ve been living with their whole life. and i think it’s very very very unlikely that they just never did ANY research on it after that. but i DEFINITELY don’t think they’re doing it to be quirky. and frankly, these people are not the ones we should be directing all our anger at.
tldr; i don’t think anyone is claiming to have madd just to seem “quirky.”
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