me, a young, still closeted gay person listening to cecil palmer talk about his attraction to men casually and without fear in literally the first episode of the night vale podcasts:
psych majors should be required to kick it with a mentally ill person for at least 80 hours just to be reminded that we are human and not experiments
As both a psych major and a mentally ill person I cannot begin to tell you how many people I have met in my classes who make me concerned for the safety and health of mentally ill people everywhere, especially the young children who struggle.
My first psychology class was fucking wild. Put of around 35 of us only three (one being a close friend of mine) of us had any sort of mental illness. Intro Psych is mainly about brain development with only a small section at the end being about mental illness but Oh Fucking Boy did everyone’s weird ass stereotypes and fetishes jump out in the last chapter.
We were talking about schizophrenia and the one other girl with mental illness was a schizophrenic (it wasn’t known until this exact moment). We were talking about symptoms when someone just asked outloud, “Aren’t schizos like super likely to murder people though?”
I thought, okay, one guy still stuck in the fucking 80’s, whatever.
But Then A Bunch Of People Start Agreeing
And soon we were 20minutes into class and everyone had shared a case of a schizophrenic murdering, abusing, etc etc and They Saw Nothing Wrong With Thinking These Stereotypes Were A Standard
The prof finally stopped them and asked if anyone wanted to make one last statement and this poor girl just raises her hands and “I just thought you all should know that I’m schizophrenic and have never thought about murdering someone, nor have I ever hurt anyone apart from myself.”
And… no one apologized. They literally felt no guilt at all for bashing this girl.
The same exact thing happened when we talked about depression, anxiety, and ptsd.
“Ptsd is what soldiers get after war right?”
“Yeah sometimes, but anyone can suffer from it after a traumatic event”
“How would you know, are you the professor now?”
“No, but I have ptsd from a car crash that nearly killed me so…”
Like god damn I really fucking hate neurotypicals trying to satisfy some weird curiosity they have for “crazy” people or whatever it is like please stay like 3000ft away from anyone with a mental illness and never fucking talk to them dear god
