avantgardne:

Honestly shout out to people with anxiety and panic disorders, y’all don’t get enough recognition for your hard work. Pushing through your body’s instinct to fight/flee/freeze at the slightest worry is a whole new level of strength. You’re battling almost everyday against a fast-acting animalistic response that humans have been experiencing since the dawn of time, a response that is literally designed to take full control of your actions away from you. That takes so much courage and perseverance. You’re strong as fuck.

daeranilen:

theblackhawks:

the-angelic-witch:

soufflestevens:

Teachers be like “I’m more than happy to accommodate students with mental illnesses or disabilities. I just don’t excuse any absences, offer extra credit, or accept late homework. Also my only office hours are off campus on the last full moon of every other month”

I cannot tell you how real this statement is. I am currently going through some severe trouble with anxiety and have missed a few classes here and there. I tried explaining it to my professors and they were basically like “Oh gosh, that sucks, too bad you can’t make up any of the work though because I could get in trouble :(” It’s utter bullshit the way that mental illness is treated in academia

I feel all of y’all relating to this post. I made it when I was hurting. I hope all y’all are ok.

The most garbage thing about this is that even registering with disability services (if you’re in a college setting) doesn’t necessarily help you or your teacher set up the accommodations you need.

For example: Every student I’ve ever received a disability services letter about has been granted the accommodation of extra time for test-taking. Often this is the students’ only accommodation. This is already silly on its face, because the majority of my students have disabilities that (per their own assessments!) do not affect their test-taking. But on top of that, my class has no tests. So they went to the trouble of registering with disability services (not always an easy process) to be granted accommodations that are irrelevant to both their needs and their work in my class.

I’ve been trying to do better by my students by directly asking them what accommodations will benefit them after they disclose their disability/I receive a letter, but it’s bullshit that I have to (1) put my students on the spot like that and (2) do that on my own with no institutional support.

chibeast:

lunar-lavender:

ironicchronicpain:

Reblog if your illness has shaped your outlook on life and the world.

Reblog if your illness has warped your perceptions of people and social situations.

Reblog if your illness has altered some of the most fundamental aspects of your personality.

Reblog if your illness has impacted all of your relationships, and even been the reason for the beginning or end of some.

Reblog if your illness is often the cause of your moods and emotions, and affects nearly all of your moods and emotions in regard to other things.

Reblog if your illness has changed the strength of your virtues, from compassion and tolerance, to perseverance and determination, to gratitude and generosity.

Reblog if your illness has been a part of your life for so long that you honestly can’t differentiate the parts of your identity that are influenced by your illness from the parts that aren’t influenced by your illness.

Most importantly, please reblog this if you’re okay with your illness being on the incredibly long list of things that define you. Reblog if you don’t feel like your identity has to be completely undefined by your illness in order be valid. Reblog if you don’t necessarily like the parts of yourself that come from your illness, but don’t think that makes them any less you.

As much as it seems like it should go without saying, there’s an overwhelming amount of pressure (mainly from well-meaning abled people) to say that your illness doesn’t define you…but something that you experience all the time, every day, in every facet of your life, yeah, that’s going to have an impact on you, and it’s not wrong to admit that. It’s not even wrong to embrace it. Your ‘normal’ is under no obligation to resemble that of people who live in different circumstances than you do.

This is important. I wish people in my life would stop telling me ‘you need to stop living inside your illness’ like ??? that’s all I can do, my dudes

naamahdarling:

chasing-apricity:

silfreya:

dec19ker:

a-real-archaeopteryx:

I mean it. You’re getting the attention you think you want, all eyes on you. Except ours.
“Isn’t there anything you can do?” Your fellow waiters ask us, concerned. Behind the triage window, you can’t hear our teeth grinding.
You’re in pain, i understand that. This might even be the worst pain you’ve ever felt.
But you’re probably not dying.

Dying isn’t loud.
A patient having a heart attack does not scream and thrash and gasp for air. It’s a whisper, a tightness, with slow flexing fingers.
A stroke happens in a fraction of an instant, and never makes any sound. More whispers, halves of sentences and muscles that don’t quite match up anymore, a puppet with a few of the strings cut. Alarmed and wandering eyes, maybe, but never yelling.
Or the more common killers, infections that shut down organs or the pipes of blood that sever. Cardiac or respiratory failure. If a person can talk they are, in fact, breathing just fine.

Remember this, the next time you come to an emergency department. Remember this when you’re sitting in the waiting room, while a sleepy-looking person in a wheelchair is whisked away without a word.

I’ve been on both sides of the fence on this one. Working in the ER and being a patient. And the fact of the matter is no one can really tell how much pain you feel. One day I got brought into the ER in an ambulance with abdominal pain. I’m an EMT mind you, I hate going to the ER unless I have to. Felt like something from the Aliens movies was trying to get out of my stomach. Got assessed in triage and the pain passed. And then It came back with a vengence. Honest to God 10 out of 10. And I tried to be civil and ask the nurses if I could get moved back just so I could get something for the pain. I got the eye roll, the looks of disbelief, and told to wait. I tried walking away, my knees gave out and I landed on all fours. In the ER. And I screamed. It was the worst pain ever. They tried to put me back in a wheelchair. The movement made the pain worse. It wasn’t until the charge nurse said that I was making a scene that they took me back to an exam room. I sat there for 5 minutes waiting on my nurse. It got hard to breath. It took another 5 minutes for them to get me pain killers and an x-ray. My entire upper abdomen from my diaphragm to my belly button was full of air. My stomach had ruptured and was leaking into all of my abdomen. I was rushed to emergency abdominal surgery and was going into shock when I made it to the OR. 5 more minutes and I would have been dead. I tried to “suffer in silence and with dignity”. It almost got me killed.
You don’t get to decide if people are in pain or not just by looking at them. You’re human. Not a CT scanner.

Reblog for this comment

I rear ended a car at 16 and slammed on breaks & ended up shattering EVERY bone in my right foot & snapping my ankle in half. Later, the specialists said it was the worst foot break they have ever seen. When the ambulance dropped me off at the hospital, strapped to a stretcher, they wheeled me into the break room and left me there for 30 minutes.

They left a child in the nurses break room for 30 minutes with no explanation. Just wheeled me in there and left me crying my eyes out surrounded by people playing angry birds on their phones.

When I finally saw a nurse she gave me TYLENOL and told me to go home with my mom because my foot was “a little swollen”. They wrapped it in gauze. They were mad because I was making so much noise but my foot literally felt like it was on fire.

YOU CANNOT DECIDE HOW MUCH PAIN SOMEONE IS IN!!!!

Seriously, it’s shitty shitty shitty attitudes like OP’s that make me terrified of ever having to go to the ER.

Y’all have a hard job, I know and appreciate that, but y’all can also be jaded, heartless sons of bitches and it’s seriously ill and suffering patients who pick up the tab on that.

popplio-posts:

edgy-night-fury:

neurotypical society: love yourself w.w

me: ok

me: -respects myself enough to know that i shouldn’t have to fit into neurotypical society standards in order to be treated as a person with their own thoughts and feelings-

neurotypical society: wait no not like that.

What’s wild is when other neurpdivergent people do this to you.

s0ftfuzzyman:

me, forgetting that fatigue is a symptom of all my illnesses: why do i never do anything im so lazy :^/

madvocate:

ghostofcommunism:

lichgem:

thethirddecade1121:

nymphebabe:

quit romanticizing staying in your bed all the time and not doing anything productive

who is romanticizing it? it sucks. it’s terrible. what the fuck

Quit romanticizing capitalism and the idea of always needing to be “productive” or else not being worthy of existing

Quit romanticizing able bodies. The work logic of Capitalism violently excludes disabled folks.

“Quit romanticizing able bodies” is my new favorite thing ever.

kaijutegu:

dumbrogan:

kaijutegu:

anthrocentric:

quetikal:

femmethem:

look: our neanderthal ancestors took care of the sick and disabled so if ur post-apocalyptic scenario is an excuse for eugenics, u are a bad person and literally have less compassion than a caveman

Yes but they also when extinct which implies whatever they were doing at the time wasn’t fit for their environment.

So, it’s been awhile since I took a human evolution course, so some of this might be a little out of date, but

1) Whether or not Neanderthals went extinct is still kind of up for debate, and seems to hinge largely on whether you think that Neanderthals are a H. Sapiens subspecies or not, which often seems like a mildly pointless argument to me since it’s largely a fight about which definition of “species” to use

2) Even if we argue that Neanderthals are our direct ancestors and never went extinct, several Neanderthal *traits* (like their noses and their forheads) *have* left the population. Care for the disabled is not one of them.

Saying “Neanderthals cared for their sick and injured and are now extinct, therefore care for the disabled is maladaptive” is like saying “Dodos are extinct therefore beaks are a terrible idea”

Statements about “less compassion than a caveman” still stand.

–Peter

I teach human evolution to college students, so in addition to that, here’s what we know. There’s some citations (and footnotes) behind the cut, if you’re interested.

So Neanderthals aren’t our direct ancestor- more like a branch of the family tree that didn’t lead to us. Close cousins- close enough to breed- but they evolved outside of Africa about 400kya, while our species evolved in Africa about 200kya*. This is important because it means that altruism can’t possibly be a Neanderthal trait that left the population during the evolution into modern humans; we didn’t evolve from them, so it’s not like we can say “well, this was maladaptive in our ancestors.” This is a behavior you see in two temporally coexisting species (or subspecies), and I do mean two, because it wasn’t just Neanderthals practicing altruism. We did it too.

We have really good evidence that early Homo sapiens sapiens (i.e., us, just old) also took care of their injured, elderly, and disabled. At Cro-Magnon in France, a few individuals clearly suffered from traumatic injury and illness during their lives. Cro-Magnon 1 had a nasty infection in his face; his bones are pitted from it. Cro-Magnon 2, a female, had a partially healed skull fracture, and several of the others had fused neck vertebrae that had fused as a result of healed trauma; this kind of injury would make it impossible to hunt and uncomfortable to move. This kind of injury can be hard to survive today, even with modern medical care; the fact that the individuals at Cro-Magnon survived long enough for the bones to remodel and heal indicate that somebody was taking care of them. At Xujiayao, in northern China, there’s evidence of healed skull fractures (which would have had a rather long recovery time and needed care); 

This evidence of altruism extends past injured adults, as well. One of the most compelling cases is at Qafzeh, which is in Israel. Here we see evidence of long-term care for a developmentally disabled child (as well as a child who had hydrocephaly and survived). Qafzeh 11, a 12-13 year old at time of death, suffered severe brain damage as a child. Endocasts (basically making a model of the inside of the skull, where the brain would be) show that the volume of the brain was much smaller than expected; likely the result of a growth delay due to traumatic brain injury. The patterns of development suggest that this injury occurred between the ages of 4 and 6. They very likely suffered from serious neurological problems; the areas of the brain that were injured are known to control psychomotricity. This means that the kid may have had a hard time controlling their eye movements, general body movement, keeping visual attention, performing specific tasks, and managing uncertainty; in addition, Broca’s area might also have been damaged, which likely would have affected the kid’s ability to speak. Long and short of it, without help, this kid wouldn’t have survived to age 12-13. 

But they did. They lived, and they were loved. When they died, they were given a funeral- we know this based on body position and funeral offerings. Mortuary behavior was common among both Neanderthals and archaic Homo sapiens, and this burial was particularly interesting. The body was placed on its back, its legs extended and the arms crossed over the chest. Deer antlers were laid on the upper part of the chest; in the archaeological context, they were in close contact with the palmar side of the hand bones, meaning it’s likely that they were placed in the hands before burial. This points to Qafzeh 11 being valued by the community- why go to the effort for somebody you don’t care about? Compassion is a very human trait, and to call it maladaptive is to ignore hundreds of thousands of years of human experience.

Keep reading

“Compassion is a very human trait, and to call it maladaptive is to ignore hundreds of thousands of years of human experience.”

Would you be alright with me borrowing your words when someone poses the above comments’ line of thought to me?

Of course! (And feel free to use anything else in my anthropology tag.)