People online will really be like, “This piece of media I really hate has the nerve to depict a hard-to-live-with mental illness that is known to have some pretty ugly symptoms accurately, by showing said symptoms, and for that, they are adding to the stigmatization of said mental illness. If we want to normalize x (BPD, ADHD, CPTSD, NPD, etc.), we need to normalize it for everything it should be in the minds of people who haven’t personally dealt with it, and not for what it actually is.”
I hate to break this to you, but YOU are the person contributing to the stigma.
The whole point of destigmatization is to spread awareness about a phenomenon and to normalize its presence. That doesn’t necessarily mean a piece of media rationalizes the actions of a character with one of these illnesses to the point that we aren’t expected to see the flaws in their thinking or to expect any changes from them. It means, rather than making blanket statements about them being manipulative, evil, irredeemable abusers, we honour that they are often abuse victims who cope with their environments in maladaptive ways to survive, and the world isn’t a two-dimensional, black-and-white gradient.
Sometimes, the symptoms of trauma come out in ways that are unattractive to the general populace. People can be cruel, and desperate, and lose the ability to empathize properly. The disordered thinking and behaviours they develop can be harmful, even if it’s all the individual has. Understanding why someone does something is usually more important and conducive to positive change than supporting them doing said thing and not wanting better for them. Just understand, you can absolutely criticize. In fact, it is the root to empathy and to a better life.
Please let mentally ill people with “ugly disorders” and symptoms that aren’t marketable and deemed compassion-worthy in mainstream media have the sliver of media representation we’ve been given. And please stop trying to exclude us from our own representation and support groups for things like CPTSD or BPD, when we literally meet the criteria for a diagnosis and for treatment, often to the more extreme end of things.
If you’re a person with the same psychiatric diagnosis, and you’ve never developed a fight response to survive, and you’ve never said a harsh word or struggled with empathy, been clingy or paranoid— Good for you. But please stop trying to act like we don’t exist or belong when we ourselves often suffer the most severely, and the psychiatric assessments were literally designed to include us.
