I Am Speechless At This Blantantly Ableist Article From Bruce Pardy Of The National Post.

Homicidal Ideation

homicidal ideation is the term for having active thoughts about murdering others. these thoughts can be intrusive, however they can also often be voluntary.

misconceptions:

‘people who have these thoughts either have killed someone or will kill someone in the future’ - this is false. most people who have these thoughts usually have disordered behaviours (most commonly as a result of personality disorders) and struggle to find healthy ways to cope with their emotions, therefore provocation and stress can easily cause thoughts of inflicting harm onto others. this doesn’t inherently mean these people are dangerous, nor does it mean that they’re going to act upon these thoughts. most people who experience homicidal ideation never act on it and use it more as a way to process their distress/frustration internally.

‘having these thoughts about people in your life means you can’t possibly care for them’ - also false. caring for someone doesn’t make them an exception to mental illness and it doesn’t stop your mental illnesses from existing. to think that someone’s love for you is only valid as long as they’re not displaying traits of mental illness is unfair and is hugely misinformed. to love and be loved by someone who is mentally ill is to accept that they will display symptoms of their mental illness. you are not the exception and they do not love you any less by showing traits of being unwell.

‘so you endorse murder’ - no. that’s not at all what this means and if you seriously think this then your grasp of severe mental health issues is too limited to be commenting on such topics.

‘you’re evil’ - for being unwell? don’t be a cunt. if you seriously think that having a disordered manner of processing emotions internally makes someone ‘evil’ then that sounds more like an issue with you being too sensitive and having a lack of understanding, not an issue with the mentally ill person experiencing these thoughts. don’t make your inability to understand mental illness into someone else’s problem.

as someone who does experience homicidal ideation, it’s also important to not make the mistake of assuming everyone who is mentally ill experiences these thoughts either. i had an anonymous ask earlier today that directly associated the fact i’m mentally unwell with murder and homicidal thoughts, to immediately make this assumption just because someone is mentally ill is disgusting.

there’s no place for people like us is there? are there any actual pyros & kleptos on here? i want to have a community for us that isnt just ~aesthetics~

i want us to actually have something. a community. so if you’re a pyro or a klepto thats interested in having relatable posts, vents, memes, and much more than just aesthetics, than maybe we can make one.

message me or reblog this post with a comment if you’re interested

just a reminder that insulting the way people speak because it’s “weird” (i.e. too fast, too slow, too monotone, too animated, slurred, etc) is ableist. many of us with intellectual disabilities, developmental disorders, autism, traumatic brain injuries, physical disabilities, and other conditions speak “weird” because of our conditions.

i see posts all the time like “POV you’re talking to that person who talks like they’re in an anime” or “people who speak monotone are so creepy, they’re like robots” or “people who slur their speech gross me out”. it’s ableist and dehumanizing. insulting the way “certain people” speak may seem harmless on the surface but under the surface those “certain people” are almost always disabled, and these traits are just traits of our disabilities.

I think a major part of destigmatizing narcissism is realizing that it's okay that we have stereotypically "bad" characteristics.

narcissists are arrogant, self-obsessed, egocentric, insecure, antagonistic, callous, irritable, so on and so forth. some of us (such as Myself) are all of these things, and every one of us fits at least some.

anti-narc sanism will never truly be addressed if those who defend us say "they're not selfish/attention-seeking/uncaring! they're just traumatized and struggling," because that's just not true.

most of us are those things because we're traumatized/struggling; these conditions aren't mutually exclusive, but directly influence and cause each other.

non-narcissists are allowed to have flaws, and we should, too. we don't deserve basic decency because we're selfless, compassionate souls hidden under a layer of traumatized self-service, but because we're still people regardless of how we think and feel.

Okay, as a mod of cripplecharacters, I'm about to go off from several different angles. And these aren't even all of my thoughts. I have more. (TW for ableism, mention of prone restraints, caricature characters, and really, really poor writing of disabled characters.)

If she didn't get her information through a collaboration with Autism Speaks then where'd she get it? She claims she did three years of research. Did none of that research include basic stuff about writing disabled characters in general? Also, it takes five seconds to find out that there's an issue with Autism Speaks. It's in the little Wikipedia blurb. She didn't even skim Wikipedia in three years?

Not even come slightly close to the topic of prone restraints (which have a death count,) and definitely not portray is as a good thing twice

Gotten rid of that detail of Music having an accident during Kazoo's relapse. Yeah, that can happen sometimes with some autistics in real life, but the fact that it was portrayed the way it was and by an actress who wasn't autistic-

Similarly, the angry "Brush you hair" scene was... where to even start? No, not by an actress who isn't, at the very least, MSN or semispeaking (or even nonspeaking)

Gotten rid of that inspiration porn Music singing scene at the end.

Significantly rewritten the guy who is... I think he's Zu's love interest?

Actually done something with the kid who seemed to care so deeply for Music.

Explained how said kid managed to acquire twenty thousand dollars to buy Music a service dog over the internet just like that???

Remove Music not doing anything about finding her grandmother dead on the floor??? Or at least acknowledge that the poor girl was probably traumatized from the experience and had no idea what to do or how to help? It's shot almost like she's being selfish and choosing not to help rather than being disabled, terrified, and unable to help.

Not forced Maddie into this movie using their massive power imbalance. Definitely should never have forced a young teenaged girl into a position so bad that she literally broke down sobbing because she didn't want to come across as a caricature, at which point Sia lied to her. Look, Maddie was what, fourteen? And Sia was basically a mother figure and the one responsible for Maddie's success.

Not called stimming tics. Tics come from a very different group of disorders, involuntary stimming behaviours are a completely different thing with different reasons and mechanisms. If she wanted to write Music having tics, she should have given her a tic disorder. Actually, wait, scratch that. She screwed up badly enough with a singularly-disabled character. I don't want to know how much lower she could go by trying to portray a multiple-disabled character.

Not lied about trying to get a nonspeaking actress (because she was quoted long before that as saying she would only make the movie if Maddie was the main role. She wasn't going to try with an autistic actress.) Not acted like firing the fictional autistic actress was a mercy rather than putting some work in and making the set accessible for her.

Like, sure, maybe a hypothetical nonspeaking actress couldn't have been able to handle the dancing. You know what the solution to that is? Either adapt the dancing or get her an autistic stunt double who can do the dancing

Not have Music be significantly less autistic in her head? The stimming and movement abnormalities fade, if not vanish entirely, during the dream sequences. As though the version of Music in her head is less autistic than Music in her body, maybe even not autistic at all. Which is an idea that has blood on its hands

Not tried to portray all of autism rather than just Music, a character who happens to be autistic. What Sia was doing was trying to portray autism as a whole, or maybe even turn the entire idea of autism into a character rather than create a person with autism. Compare this to a (slightly) better example, Wendy from Please Stand By. Dakota Fanning wasn't trying to portray all of autism and her character wasn't written to portray autism as a whole, she was playing Wendy, one particular autistic woman, rather than a caricature.

Given Music literally anything. Why doesn't she have hobbies? Where's her personality? I know nothing about Music as a person and that's because she wasn't written to be a person.

The dead disabled brother plot was unnecessary. As was the HIV plot.

"She can hear two rooms away" she's autistic, not Superman.

The grandmother left absolutely no plan to help Zu care for her H-MSN sister, not even a note in her will like "The neighbour is close with her, he can help." I know she died suddenly but c'mon, she has a grandchild who will need care for the rest of her life, she should have been more cautious as an elderly woman. Her carelessness was setting Zu up for failure and Music up for an even worse time of this massive change in her life.

So yeah, it would make sense that there's some growing pains, Zu has no idea how to interact with her sister and her sister is probably distressed, confused, grieving, and frustrated because her entire world is changing. But rather than treating this as a "Yeah, this would have gone better with a bit of planning and we're both struggling because we're going into this blind," it's portrayed as "Music is the source of all of my problems, she's the worst, she's unreasonable, she's the worst thing that's ever happened to me and I hate her." Why is Music being portrayed as a burden rather than the burden being how ill-prepared the grandmother left all involved parties for this eventuality.

Wasn't Music meant to be HSN? Like, level three autism? Spoken like someone who's never interacted with someone who's HSN before.

Zu is high-key resentful towards Music as though any of this is her fault and she seems so desperately dedicated to either ignoring or despising her sister and the way it's portrayed makes it feel like the audience is supposed to agree with Zu?

Wow, I went off. To keep this from being nine hundred miles longer, she should have just not done that. If she had submitted this plot to cripplecharacters, literally any of us, autistic or not, could have told her not to do this. Did she even talk to someone from the disabled community? You don't even need to be autistic, just disabled, to know that pretty much all of this was a horrific idea.

What SIA Should’ve Done Making Her Movie ‘Music’

Cast an autistic actor for the main character

Consulted with actual autistic people instead of f$&@ing Auti$m $peaks

Did PROPER research

Made the movie accessible to watch - got rid of the whole flashing light thing that could trigger seizures

Used an actual mixed actor instead of doing literal blackface

Started being open to criticism instead of having a flip out at people for calling her out

Not agreed with an interviewer comparing non-verbal people to an actual inanimate object wtf

Feel free to add to this

one thing about retail layoffs i've noticed is they always get rid of physically disabled employees first. it's just fucking sad. you have no right to act like you're such a progressive company for accommodating disabled employees when they're the first to be thrown under the bus.

“Go to therapy” Are you gonna pay?

i think that “people with limited mobility or ability to leave their homes deserve the same access to goods and services via home delivery” and “the exploitation of workers through gig delivery apps is Bad” are two sentiments that can and should exist simultaneously in the brains of like… anyone with the capacity to think lmao

years later House is still as relevant as he ever was