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Stop Hijacking Our Trauma to Give Bad Internet Advice
It's making our lives harder and the world worse.
My mom was a paranoid schizophrenic. It’s an illness that strikes less than one percent of the world’s population.
Schizophrenia can devastate you. It can devastate everyone around you, and sometimes you have zero control.
There’s a reason why so many cases of demonic possession have turned out to be undiagnosed schizophrenia. It hijacks your mind. It makes you do bizarre things. It makes you speak nonsense. It makes you see things that aren’t there, and imagine things happening that aren’t. It makes you hurt yourself.
It’s terrifying to watch someone you love go through it. Another terrible thing about schizophrenia is that, often, nobody wants to help you. Most people won’t go anywhere near a violent schizophrenic. It’s one of the hardest conditions to treat, because they often think their medication is poison, or part of a plot to control their mind.
Even the police don’t want to deal with it.
I spent ten years trapped with one.
It shattered my family and bled my dad’s wallet dry. It left me and my brother with lifelong trauma. As a bonus, we live with an increased risk of developing schizophrenia ourselves. Imagine having a really bad day, or just a restless night, and in the back of your head you wonder whether the curse that took your mom is finally coming for you.
It can be hell.
We don't survive for their entertainment.
Surviving is what we do every day.
Like millions of other people around the world who deal with mental illness or sexism or racism or poverty, we face daily stigmas. Life doesn’t get easier. We just get stronger. We rise to the moment. There’s always an open question of whether our lives are better because we developed a kind of quiet resilience, or whether we just did extra work to reach the same place we would’ve if none of this shit had happened.
Of course, it’s pointless to debate.
This shit did happen to us. We can’t make it unhappen. We’re better off telling ourselves it happened for a reason, and that it made us stronger, even if that’s just a lie to keep ourselves going.
It’s a necessary fiction.
It’s true that many of us overcome these adversities and go on to achieve amazing things. We inspire others. We share insights we’ve gathered into the human condition, while dancing with our demons. What we don’t do is use our stories to excuse or minimize suffering.
We don’t promise “cures.”
We don’t shame people who haven’t overcome yet, or shrug and tell them to stop complaining because everyone has it hard, or someone else had it way harder than them and still achieved something. We don’t point at celebrities and say, “They made it. Why can’t you?”
Those of us who’ve survived trauma understand that shaming and blaming people serves as its own form of abuse. It was done to us, by our own abusers, and we hate seeing others do it. Nothing triggers us more. We especially hate seeing privileged jerks entertain themselves with our stories of adversity, and then appropriate them in order to trivialize or minimize other people’s struggles. It happens all the time.
I saw it just this week.
Many an affluent dude have sat back and made themselves an armchair psychologist, talking about how much they love stories of struggle, and how everyone should go through a little trauma.
I want to punch people like this.
If anything, we don’t want anyone to go through what we did. There’s no guarantee you come out a stronger person.
Sometimes you don’t come out at all.
Our trauma isn't their latest brand.
Here’s one thing I can’t stand:
I can’t stand it when some dude uses words like “trauma” and “adversity” to describe ordinary inconveniences. One guy I know described a bad prom date as “traumatic” because he didn’t get to pick the restaurant. He would actually talk about how he “overcame that trauma.”
I also can’t stand it when influencers and life coaches dress up in mental illness because it makes for a good story, or because it furthers their brand. This isn’t just a slap in the face.
It’s dangerous.
It’s one thing to share stories about adversity to inspire people, or to share insights into human experiences. It’s something else to say you suffered from “severe mental illness” because you had some bad habits, then promise everyone you can help them “cure” their problems.
I really wish people who haven’t dealt with mental illness and trauma would stop pretending they have.
They’re not helping.
What they’re trying to do is authorize themselves, so they can speak on behalf of people like us, who have. It does incredible damage. These people promote all kinds of unhealthy attitudes, the worst ones being that anyone can overcome severe mental illness with a couple of books and a little meditation — and after that, you’re all set.
That’s a lie.
This is the kind of advice you get from people who didn’t actually live through severe mental illness, but simply read about it or saw it in a movie, and decided to brand themselves with it.
Our trauma isn’t their brand.
They can’t have it.
It’s ours.
You don't "cure" mental illness with life hacks.
You don’t conquer mental illness with quick "fixes" and tips.
You prioritize the right practice and lifestyle.
You educate yourself by reading actual academic books and real scientific journals. You listen to other survivors and people who have actual, provable experience. You lean on friends and family, if you have them. You learn to practice a different kind of self-care, which most certainly does include setting boundaries and learning to spot your triggers and the moments when you’re teetering. You open your heart and give back.
You get used to second guessing your emotions.
You learn to decipher the shades of difference between excitement and manic episodes, or the borderlands between sadness and looming depression. Whatever you do, you never, ever declare absolute victory. That’s when you let your guard down, and stop doing the work.
This is what it’s like for a lot of us.
I’ve seen "life coaches" and self-anointed experts give the worst advice you can imagine, everything from welcoming abusive relatives back into your life to curing anxiety with positive thinking. When anyone talks about “curing” mental illness, they’re making our lives infinitely harder, because they’re telling the world if our trauma or condition lingers, it’s simply our fault for not trying hard enough, or not paying for a seminar.
This is why I get so angry when I see bad mental health advice flying around the internet. This is setting millions of us up for failure, and creating expectations we can’t meet.
We already deal with society’s judgement. We already deal with a lack of awareness and understanding about mental health. We already deal with friends, bosses, and family who think we’re making it up, or just deciding to be clinically depressed, or to have autism.
I love reading stories about survival.
You don’t have to brand yourself with trauma and mental illness to talk about how you overcame bad habits, gave up booze or drugs, or learned to be a more functional adult.
What I loathe are people who appropriate the discourse of trauma for their own personal glorification and entertainment. I loathe it when people use stories of poverty, trauma, and adversity in order to shame others or trivialize their problems. I’m seeing more and more of it. Anyone who does this is just exploiting us all over again.
It’s destructive.
Unless you’ve dealt with severe mental illness or poverty or trauma, or you’re a true expert (with well-documented, at least five years of proof of your methods), you have no right to talk about what we’ve been through, or give the world advice on how to deal with these kinds of problems. You especially don’t have the right to tell anyone else how to think or feel, or invalidate their experiences.
Please stop turning our pain into your profits. Please shut up.
We would appreciate it.
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