Millie Jaco, from "you people can't do anything:”
The recent discursive shift from empty platitudes about mental health, to the open contempt for people with mental illness and neurodevelopmental conditions more commonly seen pre-2010s, feels reflective of a massive swing to the right in general. But conservatives don’t want us on SSRIs, don’t want us in therapy (it’s woke, apparently), and don’t want any sort of concrete or meaningful change which would improve our lives, such as reducing housing and sustenance costs, better pay, and stringent labour laws to stop us working ourselves into an early grave - and no, banning phones or social media for under 18s as a policy proposal doesn’t count. Corporations pay us lip service, but only so they can extract more of our labour. On the other end of the spectrum, people who posture as left-wing, sympathetic and compassionate post viral memes about how people with ADHD are annoying and infantile, and rehash early noughties moral panic about how Adderall is overprescribed legal meth based on pseudoscience and vibes but presented as gospel, just to set themselves apart from the normies whose psychiatric diagnoses have skyrocketed in recent years. I can’t help feeling like the subtext regardless of political alignment is that if we can’t pull ourselves up by our bootstraps or treat our disabilities in a way that is inoffensive and expedient to them, it would just be more appealing all round if we didn’t exist. They simply want us weaklings dead.
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