This!!! Thank U So Much For R Saying This Omg

this!!! thank u so much for r saying this omg

No question just reminding you that your writing makes a difference and I love both your analysis series and your fic! If it's something you're interested in exploring, I would love to hear your thoughts on how pop psychology and over reliance on short form content lead to community issues. For years there's been a trend of people with surface level knowledge using out of context buzzwords to police and shame people who dare have symptoms they're not 100% in control of.

Wow, such a kind thing to say! I often feel like I’m bashing my head against my own fist so I’m glad to know something worthwhile is coming out of it lol

An interesting question, and I would first ask: do we know that this is happening? The general mental health-ification of the internet has been happening for a few years now, and it’s sort of hard to know the effects given it’s still an evolving situation. But I’ll speak to some things I’ve seen personally that might be relevant.

The first is that people, and particularly young people, are more mental health literate than they have ever been. This is largely good! AND - TikTok and other social media has become kind of like WebMD for mental health disorders and relational dysfunction. Because of this, a lot of people fall down the self-diagnosis rabbit hole in the same way. And sometimes that’s helpful when it motivates people to seek treatment, but can be harmful because of the vast amount of misinformation on the internet. And treatment is still very inaccessible due to cost and availability, leaving people to go it alone with unvetted resources. So we have a climate where people are aware of mental health issues, there’s lot of misinformation, and credible help is hard to get. This is a breeding ground for pop psychology and therapy influencers to take root.

So to your questions: I do see a lot of folks using (and misusing) clinical terms in irl situations. Its part of the reason I hate that mental healthcare is so embedded in the medical systems because everything gets shoehorned into diagnostic labels when it’s not necessary. Some top culprits include boundaries, gaslighting, triggers, as well as diagnoses like BPD, NPD, DID, etc.

Ex: gaslighting is often thrown around when people disagree. Someone remembering something different than you is not abuse - the more likely reality is that human memory is complex and bad. Gaslighting is a deliberate tactic used to make you question your memory/sanity. It requires intent to deceive.

Ex: Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a medical diagnosis that requires a person to experience distress and loss of functioning from the consequences of their compulsively self centered behavior. Sometimes people are just being assholes. A person treating you badly doesn’t require a diagnosis. But labels can make people feel more oriented and in control, because YOURE the bad/wrong/sick one and therefore I don’t have to look at myself.

I think this has two effects:

1. An overly cognitive view and experience of human behavior that pathologizes normal, messy multi-faceted reactions and interactions in an effort to find a sense of security and predictability via control.

2. A lower tolerance for productive conflict and adverse experiences that robs people of opportunities to build resilience and experience meaning from the suffering that visits us all at some point or other.

In fandom spaces, I think this shows up as an unwillingness to question why we react to things the way we do, why certain things make us uncomfortable instead of immediately rejecting them wholesale. There’s valuable information in the things that chafe us, and so much of the work I do with folks is about being brave and actively seeking that information in a safe, contained space. It’s a vulnerable thing, and it’s natural for our defensive responses to get activated (fight, flight, freeze, and fawn). and my totally unfounded theory is that the folks who are being vicious and keyboard warriory are defaulting to a fight response: be scary to make the thing stop. It’s a self-protection strategy at its core, but it fandom spaces it translates as bullying because well.. it is. They’re trying to defend a space, even an online one, by trying to be scary enough not to fight with.

Art is inherently self-reflective, both in the making of and the interacting with, where consumption is about satisfaction. My hope is that in fandom we can move toward creation as a conversation instead of as a product that does or does not fulfill what someone is looking for. I think there will always be demand for super tropey, digestible, just for fun content and that’s great, but I also would love to see more folks be willing to engage with things that make them uncomfortable in an effort to find out why. That’s the kind of fandom I’m interested in being a part of. For some people it’s never going to be that deep, but I’d like to think in my little corner that’s the kind of stuff we get excited about.