Hey. I don’t know where some of y’all get these ideas but “mental illnesses can be cured” isn’t just weird and often wrong, but it’s harmful as hell and if you believe that, you need to shut the fuck up.
I don’t even know if I can rip enough of my trauma and life-experience out of me to explain WHY that’s so harmful, especially when you use that idea to EXCLUDE people with mental illnesses from your spaces, but if you’re doing that, you’re a JACKASS!
People like to claim my father was “cured” of his mental illnesses because he can take medicine that reduces its affects: HE IS NOT. He has bad days and the very fact he has to take that medicine all the time MAKES HIM disabled and mentally ill! The constant vigilance of keeping up with your symptoms, your medicines, managing your highs and lows is PART OF being disabled, of being mentally ill, of him BEING neurodivergent! He is not cured, he never will be and neither will any of my other relatives and friends who’re mentally ill! To be honest, neither will I.
But just over the last year, with the hysteria over drugs, he has not just been accused of being a drug addict and a liar numerous times, to his fucking face, but he’s had literal doctors take his medicine away and tell him because he’s managing well, he’s probably cured. Because people believe that taking medicine “cures” mental illness and once you’ve been on it long enough and your symptoms have lessened enough(or are at least less obvious), you count as “cured.”
But it’s not true! And that idea? That general idea is used to TRAUMATIZE US, exclude us, patronize us, infantilize us, I should not have to tell y’all not to make generilizations like that. STOP saying mental illnesses can be cured! Period! If you’re talking about a SPECIFIC mental illness, in a particular situation you or someone close went through, fucking enjoy yourself.
But that generilization is such bullshit and I will fucking fight you if you’re going to keep using it.
