Day: September 3, 2018

sleyby:

myceliorum:

mattrlx:

Hey, something i kind of thought was important to share (coming from a psychotic person myself) 

There is a big impact on how you tell someone who experiences delusions/hallucinations that what they are experiencing isnt real.

I’m going to elaborate on this a bit, these things are very much real to us, we experience these things as if they were real life occurences, they just arent real to other people. 

So when trying to help someone dealing with these things cope, saying "they arent real, you’re being delusional, you have to realize they arent real” makes us feel terrible or like we are fucked up or should be able to help it in some way 

A proper way to help friends or family cope with these things is to a knowledge that what they are experiencing is real to them, and reassure them that what they are seeing/hearing/feeling/ will not hurt them 

That helps us so much more and makes us feel a lot more valid, and it’s super important that people understand this

When I was delirious, one of the things that helped me the most was a friend giving me a Harry Potter wand and explaining in detail how to use it against my hallucinations. It worked, I slept with a death grip on that thing, and… I still have it, she let me keep it, it means a lot to me. (I have a rut worn into my brain by frequent severe illness enough that I get delirious easily and regularly, so this isn’t a one-off thing. Delirium isn’t identical to psychosis but there’s a lot in common sometimes depending on circumstance.)

I’m glad to know that me giving a psychotic room mate a stuffed dinosaur for protection was probably a better move than I thought. I don’t know if it worked for her because she didn’t talk about it later, but she seemed to appreciate it. There’s an equal chance it would have just been pointlessly infantilizing, but I happened to know the woman in question already had stuffed animals that she treated as though they were alive when she was psychotic. 

sleyby:

pervocracy:

You can ruin almost any social system with enough bad faith.

It takes very little cleverness to go to a toilet with a sign reading “please do not flush paper towels,” flush gravel until it breaks, and then declare victory.

But victory over what?  You haven’t debunked the warning sign or the plumbing system; you’ve just abused them.  You have not made a persuasive case that the warning sign should read “please do not flush paper towels or gravel,” because obviously your wise ass is just waiting to see that sign so you have an excuse to flush a third inappropriate thing.  You also haven’t made a persuasive case that the toilets should be continuously guarded and all visitors frisked for non-flushable objects, because the vast majority of people aren’t as big of a jerk as you.

“This system can be broken by someone who exploits its rules in the most malicious possible way” is true of many otherwise fine systems, and unless the system is safety-critical or there’s a very large group of people motivated to break it, it’s not really an important point to make.

There is nothing original, helpful, or insightful about pointing out that one person with a firehose could ruin a whole sand-sculpture competition.  Yeah, it’s true, that is a risk we are taking.  Please don’t show up with a firehose just to prove your point.

This is how I feel about people who create fake donation posts, and take actual money from real people, to “teach them a lesson” about being too kind. It’s obvious that they don’t care about people getting tricked out of their money, because if they did, they wouldn’t be so eager to do it to people themselves. What they object to is kindness, and they’ll do anything they can to destroy it where they find it.