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that I used the words “ego-syntonic” and “ego-dystonic” when talking to a psychiatrist was used as evidence by that psychiatrist that I was obviously faking, additionally, the fact that I have read and memorized various portions of the dsm was presented as evidence by a psychologist that I was obviously faking

this is an attitude I have commonly encountered amongst mh professionals, which is, If You Appear To Have Accessed The Forbidden Psychiatric Knowledge And You Are A Patient, That Is A Bad Sign

like I remember a psychiatrist who got mad at me for my explaining that if I was bipolar I had to be having a manic episode and not a hypomanic episode because my symptoms were, by the criteria in the dsm, definitively manic and not hypomanic

the same psychiatrist brushed it off when i explained that me stimming was not an ocd compulsion, because it did not meet any of the dsm criteria for being a compulsion, saying that “well, no one is ever a textbook case“

same psychiatrist again, said “excuse me, are you the doctor?” when i was genuinely trying to be helpful by suggesting a starting dosage for a med I had been on before

he was clearly very threatened by me knowing or indicating that I knew anything about Official Psychiatric Information, and this is, aside from being very frustrating, is completely fascinating to me

why is it a threat if I know psychiatric terminology? why is it a threat if I have read the dsm? why is a diagnosis only valid if the patient doesn’t have the faintest idea what it means and adamantly disagrees that they have it? (one example: I was dxed with bpd for the first time, had never heard the term and disagreed, saw a different psychiatrist who I told about the dx and the fact that I had googled it and now I was more receptive to the dx given that I had read more about it, and this psychiatrist told me I “shouldn’t self diagnose” and dxed me with bipolar instead. in this instance, me agreeing with the bpd dx instantly made it no longer applicable)

like there is very much a power thing in psychiatry where the ideal patient knows nothing about their diagnosis or medication beyond what they are told by a mh professional, agrees with whatever they are told, and then complies with no further question, complaint or disagreement

I think this problem also v. much exists w/ physical medicine, too, like every time I have expressed an opinion on a possible diagnosis or (especially) suggested potential treatments my doctors have p. much universally responded poorly. In fact w/ my current condition the only reason I even know about some of the treatment options I’ve suggested and been working towards is from personal research b/c no doctor had ever even mentioned those things to me, and every time I have revealed that I know about them that p. much immediately gets me dismissed, despite the fact that their alternative treatment plan always seems to be just “do nothing and deal with it.” More than once discussing my diagnosis and options has resulted in the assumption that clearly I must actually just be mentally ill and that must be the real problem instead. And of course we all know the doctoral tendency to roll their eyes and assume you must be a hypochondriac who saw it on WebMD. So physical doctors really aren’t much better about this, unfortunately.

Also worth mentioning that this is INCREDIBLY true when it comes to pain management. Ever revealing you even know what pain medication is, let alone want some, let alone have any kind of information about it that might be relevant is p. much universally an instant ticket to a “drug-seeker” discharge, which can fuck up your entire life.

Doctors always tend to assume that if you as a plebeian commoner somehow know absolutely anything about medicine, it can only be either b/c you’re misinformed and delusional or b/c you’re malicious and trying to con them.

(possible tmi of menstruation/blood)

In my experience some doctors just want to be the unquestioned authority. I had a very alarming issue with birth control (which... it seems it’s overprescribed for any female problem, but that’s another issue)--massive weeks-long bleeding, nearly bed-ridden, couldn’t be stopped by more pills, etc etc.  Bringing it up to multiple doctors they kept saying things along the line of “that’s how periods go” and nothing else. Pushing more just led to them giving me tests costing in the hundreds of dollars.

Finally at another new provider they said yeah...these things aren’t unusual for birth control. And after a few months the effects should lessen.

Like. Like. How hard. Would it have been. For all these other doctors to just open their mouths to say something so simple? Either they are very ignorant of the effects of birth control, or they just expect me to just accept whatever treatment plan with no questions whatsoever.

It’s not enough for doctors to come up with a plan. But they have to help empower their patients too. And as people have said above, not punish patients when they have empowered themselves.

Cleaning the oceans one step at a time

Two Australians created this container that collects plastic, paper, oil, fuel and detergent floating in the ocean. They want to implement it the middle of next year to clean up the sea worldwide. It seems a great idea. The only “but” as always is money, so they are raising funds to get to their goal. You can see their project and donations here.

Fucking genius!

Boost!!👏🏾

There’s only 9 days left and they aren’t even 35% funded. Boost and help them out!

7 days left, please help out if you can. Trash in the ocean is a massive, massive problem to the eco-system, food chain, climate and wildlife.

Pleaaaaase consider. My environmental science classes talked about this for months. There are literal Giant islands sub islands of plastic floating in our oceans it affects every country if you eat fish it affects you if you eat anything from the ocean it affects you if you eat from anything that has come from water it affects you please consider funding them.

Oh gosh i wish I could donate but ill reblog for those who can

This is actually an old post and the donations here have been closed but you can still support them at their website: https://seabinproject.com

And this is how they’ve been doing thus far

Dr. Robin Di Angelo breaks down white privilege for us.  Required viewing.

“someone else could do it better than me” not relevant babe, no one else is gonna do it. You can’t do a mediocre job if you’re the only one doing it

“what if someone else does it better later?” Good!

Technically the Wright brothers built the worst airplanes in the world. If you do it first, you do it worst, and history will thank you for it.

This is big inspiration for me I was planning on not doing the ideas I had, but now all my excuses are gone

This is messed up

Instructions for how to get around this here. Shouldn’t have to be done, but make sure people know what to do.

^ Boosting this info for all those it can help <3

Carnival of Aros Call for Submission: The Intersection of Religion and Aromanticism

Happy May everybody! For this month’s Carnival of Aros I picked a topic that I wish people talked about more in aro spaces: the intersection of religion and being aromantic. I know that many aro’s don’t practice any particular faith, so I will be including prompts that secular folks can respond to, as well as some prompts specific to religious aros. I can’t wait to see what people have to say!

What is the Carnival of Aros?

The Carnival of Aros is a monthly blogging festival for the aro and aro-spec community. A new host picks a discussion topic at the beginning of each month and people submit responses to the topic throughout the month. When the carnival is over the host creates a summary post with links to every submission. You can find more information here.  

Guidelines for Posting About Religion

Religion can be a touchy subject for many people. As a result, I would like to give a few quick guidelines to follow so that this can be a safe and productive discussion.

Prompts

What Mediums Can be Used to Submit an Answer?

Written blog posts, videos, poems, comics, drawings, etc, are all okay. As long as you can link me to it or tag me in it you can use whatever medium works best for you.

How to Submit

If You have a Tumblr please tag me in your post at aroacepagans, or, if you prefer to post somewhere else, send me a message with a link to your post.

If you don’t use Tumblr or would like to remain anonymous please send a link, or document to the email aspecpagans@gmail.com

I can’t wait to see everyone’s submissions! 

Where does it say in the constitution or any of the amendments that eating is a human right?

it also doesn’t say you have a right to not be murdered, its a piece of paper dipshit not some holy manuscript passed down by god all mighty to be the sum total of human morality

Also literally it says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Guess what you need for life dipshit

Wait, there are people who think human rights are decided by whats written in the constitution? The american constitution?

Friendly reminder that when the UN voted to declare food a human right, there was exactly one country that voted “no”

“Fuck #Ice shoutout to my Mexicans , pass this shit”

-  Fabio Ochoa @QuePasaWindow

All the people in the notes saying “they aren’t protected by the Constitution,” know nothing of our laws and constitution. The Constitution does not state anywhere that it’s protections fall only on us citizens, ( in fact if states wanted they could open up voting for non-citizens ) and this is the opinion held by the supreme Court in multiple cases.

( this article also talks a bit about rights https://www.learnliberty.org/blog/t-he-constitutional-rights-of-noncitizens/ )

Just because you don’t like foreign people doesn’t mean they don’t have rights. Even if they didn’t you should still have enough of a heart to care for others.

Hey! This is the link to the cards, a good resource for anyone who needs them or wants to provide them to their community. https://www.ilrc.org/red-cards

THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT! Nice work @kropotkinisrecruitin! FOLKS PLEASE SHARE!!!

https://www.ilrc.org/red-cards

also my original drawing that sparked probably the wildest death threat attack against me has been salvaged, after tumblr took it down and pretended to give it back to me

goth hijabi and her sweet lolita gf

ASEXUAL, AGENDER, AND AROMANTIC ARE NOW OFFICIAL WORDS IN THE ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Happy Easter to my Christian followers. Chag Sameach to my Jewish followers. Laylaat al-Bara’ayt Mubarak to my Shi‘a followers. May God bless us all on these holy nights and keep us safe until next year.

A perfect example of how talking about the environment seperate from histories of colonialism is bad: on Our Planet, they started talking about bison populations and how “humans slaughtered the herds” when that’s only a small part of the story. They were killed in large quantities as a tactic to starve Natuve populations that depended on them for food. You can’t see the entirity of why the bison and buffalo population is what is is today without acknowleidng the history of deliberate and rampant killing to harm and control Native Americans and take land.

I can’t stand… book culture. One time someone got me a canvas bag that was like “Books + Tea = Perfect Day” and I drove to goodwill with that shit so fast

Most books suck. Most books are goddamn awful or utterly extraneous. Don’t get me wrong, I think we’re deeply lucky to live in a world where most books can vanish without us losing anything culturally or intellectually, rather than a world where books are so scarce that a single person might own like twelve in a lifetime. But still. Books are easy to aestheticize as Magical Portals of Adventure and Whimsy if you only read maybe two genres

AH! Words for that whole… situation.

I work at a public library and book culture there is nauseating. Not really among the other employees (though we’ve had a few come through over the years), but the patrons?

Oh god the patrons. Most of the people who check out books are just regular people who like reading. I even have patrons who L O V E to read, and who spend a majority of their free time reading or discussing books, they’re part of multiple book clubs, they always bring a big bag and leave with it full. They aren’t the Book Culture People.

Book Culture People loudly announce that they’re so surprised that there are children who know what books are!

They act affronted when I mention our ebook service, and scoff at the idea that anyone could enjoy reading from a screen instead of off the page!

They are personally offended that publishers hire actors to read the books for audio versions, because they feel that “audio books cheapen the experience of reading” and “audio books are cheating”!

They have to proclaim their fetish for ‘real’ books, whether through tacky tote bags, weird quote filled pinterest boards and social media posts, or awkwardly shoehorning unimpressive humblebrags about all the classics that they’re reading into unrelated conversations with tired library assistants.

They’re terrible, and I resent them because I fear being grouped with them by the nature of my field.

I was literally just talking about a friend whose classmate in her library science program was bragging because she didn’t use any digital resources for her final paper because she “respected books too much.” It’s such a bizarre attitude for anyone, much less an aspiring librarian, to have

I’ve also been approached by people while I read in public who are like “Oh my GOSH it’s so GOOD to see other people who READ nowadays!! Honestly I just have NO hope for our generation” and it’s like, first of all if you’re a reader you should know the last thing anyone wants is to be interrupted by a stranger for unnecessary conversation, and second please shut up holy crap

Oh god, I’ve heard that one before.

Hating accessible books and shunning technology is basically the antithesis of modern librarianship.

I don’t get the ebook hate, ebooks are literally just books. You cite ebooks the same way, and depending on the format, you don’t even say they’re ebooks.

It’s a performative, self important approach to something that I genuinely enjoy, and I think it bothers me more than, say, fandom antics, just because it’s so much more common. People get offended when I tell them I don’t read a lot in my down time, that I genuinely prefer audio books, that I’ll skip their recommendations because I don’t share their tastes.

It’s so… boring.

“People don’t reeeeead nowadays, everyone spends all their time looking at their phoooooones”

My dude

The thing that they are looking at

Is words made of text

I hate it when an artist uses a book to create a sculpture or a collage and you suddenly get a thousand comments lamenting how they’ve desecrated the sacred books.

It makes me so mad.

Those aren’t the last or only copies of those books. The artist probably got it at a used bookstore for like $5.00 because guess what? If it’s popular enough to be recognizable as a symbol, then every used bookstore in the country has at least a dozen– assuming they haven’t resorted to throwing them in the recycling bin because they literally can’t sell that many copies.

Somehow the experience of me and my friends has found high school English teachers to be some of the worst offenders on this. Who seem to be so caught up in a certain type of book experience that somehow...the actual book and its message gets lost. Who somehow care more that you have memorized the entire book to the point that you can recall on-demand the color of so-and-so’s shirt on page 372, than to know relevant story details.

Or whose adherence to this one specific, old, out of print edition of Les Miserables is so Super Special and Sacred to this teacher, with its specific translation and preface, that she couldn’t allow my legally blind friend to use another copy that has an audio book or large print version. Me, my bro, my mom, and my friend spent the entire summer reading all ~1.5k pages out loud.

This just isn’t how you get people to like reading and understand books.

I’ve been working on a series of esoteric Shi’a Muslim portrait illustrations called “The Fourteen Masoomeen,” (Masoomeen meaning “infallibles”) based on the central figures of Twelver Shi’a Islam, where rather than showing the face of the figures, different designs and symbols allude to important moments in their lives. I’ve finished thirteen–The Prophet Muhammad, Imam Ali, Fatima Zahra, Imam Hasan, Hussein, Zayn al-Abideen, al-Baqir, as-Sadiq, al-Kadhim, al-Rida, al-Jawad, al-Hadi, and al-Askari–and the last one is Imam Mahdi, who is believed to be alive but hidden from the eyes of man until his time of reappearance occurs. I’m stumped on how to approach his illustration and it might take even years for the correct inspiration to hit me, so have these of his beloved thirteen first… :’)