Who is going to tell them?
(I have seen a few of these very examples.)
this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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Especially the first one
Where's the sports ball coach saying "walk it off" to a person with no legs?
It's not comparable. Whenever I see these posts, it always feels as if the author is suggesting that mental illness is just like a flu, you just get it accidentally and can't help it and you just need to rest to get over it.
But that is completely wrong. Unless you have developed schizophrenia or bipolar etc, that's a whole different kettle of fish which will likely require medication for the rest of your life. You need to help yourself out of depression and anxiety etc. You can't wait around for it to disappear, you need to see a therapist, take your ass outside and force yourself into uncomfortable situations.
You'll have days you can't do anything and that's completely okay. But I feel like the 'nurturing' of mental health can do some harm.
See Soteria Houses. Schizophrenia or psychosis is not always a permanent state that requires medication for the rest of the patient's life. Soteria Houses achieve remission in individuals with little to no psychiatric medication. They use antipsychotics for stabilization, in controlled doses, and usually (to the best of my knowledge) only for a few months - though every case is different.
I feel you might be missing the joke, from my interpretation of it you are in agreement.
My read is that it is implying that mental illness are real diseases, but they're treated like you should just get over them, which would be ridiculous if you were bleeding out, but since they aren't usually visible people will just tell you that you should just be better.
The medication stigma is based on basically magic thinking: That medicine is alien, external, unnatural while the human body is pure and natural. Therefore any difference between medicated and unmedicated is artificial and caused by the medicine.
No, the body is fucking dropping terror chemicals in my bloodstream. It is changing my personality from easygoing and outgoing to snippy and reclusive. The body is malfunctioning and changing my personality for the worse.
The medicine is reducing the amount and effectiveness of the body's excess of terror chemicals. It restores normality.
For me, I have a stigma to medication because the side effects are terrifying. I almost died from SSRIs, I got very ill and also suicidal. On benzos, I got paradoxically anxious and angry after cessation/when I wasn't taking them (I am not an angry person). I took them as prescribed - always.
I only got more and more unstable after taking various psychiatric drugs, and everyone in my family who has taken psychiatric drugs was not better off for it. Seems like suicidal ideation is a common reaction for those in my family. Perhaps there is a genetic cause for it, like how we metabolize drugs.
I don't know a single person in my life who has had a good experience, but if you or someone you know has had a good experience, I'm happy for you. It's just unfair to say it's magical thinking when there are real life reasons why people are hesitant.
hugs you
I know this doesn't change what your body is doing to you, but I hope it at least makes you feel loved.
Thanks, friend! I'm all in all in a consistent good place and living a very active functional life, but it's 30% medication, 30% being stubbornly careful of what I let into my head, and 40% luck.
"Don't you think that eating healthy food every days is changing you from who you really are?"
munches on bacon flavored doritos judgingly
theres also the possibility that life today is truly a terrible situation for many, and your body refuses to lie to itself.
and its way better than it usually has been.
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ok, but in america this IS how physical diseases are treated
Me: Doc, I'm in constant pain, my lower back is killing me, my hips are killing me, and random parts of my body go numb or twitch and randomly hurt for no rhyme or reason.
Doc: You need to lose weight and see a therapist, this is most likely depression and anxiety.
Therapist: Yes, you have depression and anxiety, but the 7 years of therapy you've had shows it's not just anxiety or depression causing this, advocate for yourself.
Friend: Have you tried yoga?
In the four european countries I’ve lived in as a physically disabled person unable to work, this is exactly how I’ve been treated as well.
Good advice is to look at what America does, and do the opposite.
Source: American citizen
If you say 'mental illness' 3 times in the mirror, someone with a Live Laugh Love t-shirt will appear behind you and ask if you've tried going outside.
Haha brilliant 😄
Agoraphobia is a really fun one. “Just go outside! You’ll feel better if you hang out with people!” I’d love to! I’d love for my brain to not put up a great big roadblock that says “you are not going to be able to go into Walmart” or “you cannot complete that piece of paperwork.” That’s the problem I have. If it was as simple as just doing the thing, I’d be doing the thing.
I'll be honest, going outside does help. The problem is when you don't have a compelling enough reason to (in my personal experience. This might not be everybody's experience)
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And now the cropping is fixed, so the comments deriding the cropping don't make sense anymore.
The confusion it will cause...
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1, 4, and 6 is how my mom is about flu, cold, medicine.
When you're sick you need to rest and let your body do its thing. You can eat food containing the resources your body needs to potentially speed up recovery. But ultimately you need rest.
Not according to mom.
You have to work your flu out. If you're lying in bed feeling like shit you're just being lazy. You'll stay sick longer if you don't work, so out of bed you go. Come on, it's like you're not even trying to get better!
And of course the medicine your doctor gives you is just poison, because doctors don't know anything and just want to keep their career. Here, have these homeopathic pills instead.
Because medical science really has very little understanding of how mental illness happens, most of thier treatment boils down to "deal with it". Medications help treat some symptoms, but often with lots of side effects.
So really the way we treat mental illness is often simply all we have. And that is the real problem.
We are still in the dark ages of medicine. People like to refer to modern medicine, but we are far from it. If we mobilized even half the amount of population that currently works on war related efforts, we would see astounding progress.
But it is modern! We already have germ theory, we know about inoculation and have a hazy idea that our endocrine system is very important. And yes, here is where all your words ring true.
I used to be way more sceptical towards any brain-chemistry-tampering compound, as I prejudged doctors to behave as they are next to an assembly line, prescribing chemicals based on archaic formulas. I'd hate to be stuck in a half-zen state married to some foreign chemistry with myriads of side effects. That is what I was seeing.
Then a friend had a pretty graceful mental breakdown. He couldn't sleep and he institutionalized himself farely quickly. Rivotril or something along those lines let him sleep. And then he was put on antidepressants (seratonin reuptake inhibitors , if I'm not mistaken, which was a huge bogeyman for me), was gliding on them for about a month or so, then weened off. I was seriously surprised that such an episode can be handled so well and so quickly without any residual medicating.
I think they didn't fix the underlying issues, but were able to unlock a cramp. I believe my friend has a fresh chance to figure out what brought him to that type of collapse and adjust his life accordingly.
All this said, even with the shittiest medications, it can definitely be worth being locked into some medicine than being a pool of dysfunction lying on the floor or causing major harm to your loved ones. I mean a good ayahuasca session gets a person pretty far, but not everything can be psychosomatic.
You are right to judge, but better off appreciating how far we come. Also thank you for expressing your opinion on it. I almost came in with an 'acktchually' after reading the comic, even though I agree and it resonates, it's such a delicate topic. I guess you got dosed with my contrarianism instead of OP!
It has improved since the dark ages, but it's still the same approach. Trial and error. And we still treat many illnesses by poisioning the body and hoping we kill the disease before the patient (chemotherapy, and actually antibiotics), just like leeches. And most treatments aren't even specifically delivered to the site of the issue. We swallow them and let themspread everywhere. So we have to take way more to get the concentration we need where we need it. You need look no further than at the abysmal suscess rate of stage 3 trials to see that they have no idea what a medication will do to most of the body. We can split the atom, walk on the moon, and annilate every human on the planet. But we can't even reliably cure a headache, or even stop pain. We can dull your mind so you don't care about the pain with addictive substances that have lots of side effects, or we can knock you out (and only most of the time wake you up). We need more understanding. We need better diagnostic tooling. We don't even have a non-invasive way to reliably tell if an illness is viral or bacterial for a reasonable enough price to use it often.
Yeah, about that... my Depression-raised dad didn't even think physical problems were an excuse for slacking or being negative. I think it was the general mood of the 30s when he was a teenager. There was very little public help for people in trouble - basically you could turn to charity or starve. So people were highly motivated to keep going in spite of whatever happened. Bouncing back from problems ASAFP was a survival trait. I always said if my dad saw me get my leg cut off by a chainsaw or something, he would probably run over and say cheerfully, "Oh well, you've still got your other leg, just hop!"
If you have a physical illness you go to physical therapy, so if you have a mental illness you should go to mental therapy.
Yeah definitely feel like at least in America we treat physical illness that way a lot of the time too
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