Pocky Squirrel (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pockysquirrel) wrote2014-05-01 09:58 pm
pockysquirrel) wrote2014-05-01 09:58 pm
It's May!
And May is Mental Health Month, so it's time for my annual offer to make use of my education and chosen career for the general benefit of fandom. Ask me about mental health stuff, friends list! I will answer anything put to me, to the best of my ability. That means both fandom-related stuff ("Do you think [insert character here] could have [insert psychiatric condition here]", "How can I portray mental health issues more accurately in my fanfic?" etc.) and IRL stuff ("What's your opinion of this antidepressant medication?" "Is this an issue I should be seeking help for?" "I'm worried about my friend/family member, what can I do?") and anything in between.
If you feel more comfortable asking something privately, send me a PM or comment anonymously. But unless you flat-out ask me not to, I will be posting answers publicly. Because chances are, if you're asking, you're not the only one it's relevant to.
So let's raise some awareness, kick stigma to the curb, and perhaps even have a little fun, eh?
If you feel more comfortable asking something privately, send me a PM or comment anonymously. But unless you flat-out ask me not to, I will be posting answers publicly. Because chances are, if you're asking, you're not the only one it's relevant to.
So let's raise some awareness, kick stigma to the curb, and perhaps even have a little fun, eh?
no subject
I think I will ask two- one RL, and one Fandom.
My mom has body image issues. She is stick thin, always has been, has never had to try, right? And you've met me- I'm overweight, but not morbidly obese... like she says I am. She has called me obese several times. I have always wondered, from a professional POV, what causes her to blow my weight out of proportion. Is it her own thinness that has skewed her perceptions? Is it that she's prejudiced because she's never had to work at being thin? Why does she act like I am morbidly out of proportion when in actuality I'm closer to the mean and she's too thin? And what are some ways I can curb this behavior in a 62 year old woman? I don't want to deal with this for the rest of our (her) lives.
Fandom: Do you think growing up in the Samurai clans might have felt a little cultish to the rangers? Like, do they feel brainwashed into the duty? Some more than others? Do they ever realize, after defeating Xandred for good, how unhealthy some of the things they were told as children were? I mean really, how could "You will be a Samurai, you will have children, you will be the ones to defeat the most evil thing ever even though generations before you have died trying" would effect a kid? What could the permanent repercussions be?
You're lovely for doing this. <3 Yay mental health.
First question
I'm a firm believer in the axiom that hell is other people. You wouldn't believe the number of people I deal with on a day-to-day basis - both professionally and personally - who are massively unhappy because one or more people in their lives just won't behave the way they want them to. The simple fact is that you cannot change someone else's behavior. You cannot do it, and trying is as futile and painful as banging your head against a brick wall. What you CAN change is your own response to other people's behavior.
The situation with your mother is a prime example of this. She's doing something that bothers you, and she's persistently doing something that bothers you. So it falls to you to start setting some limits. Begin by explaining to her in a clear, calm, and concise way that you find her comments hurtful, that your weight is no one's business but your own and your doctor's, that you'd prefer not to have that conversation with her anymore, and pretty much that you're not willing to listen to it anymore. And then comes the tough part. You stick to it. When she tries to push back, you don't let her. She brings it up, you remind her what you said before and change the subject. She continues badgering, you end the conversation or excuse yourself. Ultimately this may mean having less contact with her, which is tough, but worth it to avoid that negativity. And ultimately, one of two things will happen. She'll get the hint and give up, or you'll get exceptionally good at putting the kibosh on it. Either way, you'll find yourself having to listen to it a lot less.
And second question
I think it had to have been something like this for the Samurai Rangers, or at least certainly some of them more than others. But at the same time, there seems to be an element of choice present in some of the backstories as well.
If any one of them figured it out first, had the thought "Hey, this is fucked up and I'm not going to let anyone tell me how to live", it was Mike. He is clearly the one out of all of them who tried the most aggressively to have a 'normal' life, and he grieved the loss of that when he was called to become a Ranger and fight. I think he is a Ranger not because his family expects it of him, but because he realized after he set eyes on the Nighlok for the first time how important this actually was. For similar reasons, he's probably the one who adjusts back to a civilian lifestyle the easiest after Xandred is defeated.
Kevin is also one who we see clearly trying to have a life outside of his destiny as a samurai. We also see the massive amount of pressure his family puts on him to abandon that life because being a Ranger is more important. And Kevin totally caves to that pressure. He makes a choice, sure, but the choice he makes also means totally buying into the propaganda, for lack of a better word.
Emily, man, it had to have been interesting for her. If Mia and her brother are any indication, there tends to be less pressure and "OMG destiny" bullshit directed toward the younger sibling in a samurai family. They have a bit more freedom than the older sibling does. But then Serena fell ill and nobody had planned for that. Emily is so motivated by her family. Not motivated to please them or honor them like Kevin, but motivated to take care of them and protect them. Save Antonio, she's probably the one with the most actual agency when it came to becoming a Ranger, and I think she's healthier for it.
Mia, though. I'm pretty sure she drank the proverbial Kool-Aid. There's no questioning from her. There's no rebellion from her. The only thing she ever outright says she wants from her future is...to get married and have a family. As a samurai is supposed to. She's a Samurai Ranger and that's that. Outside Jayden, she's probably going to have the most difficulty coming to terms with having been released from her obligations.
Jayden and Lauren, as we know, are just hot hot messes. There is literally nothing else for them BUT the life of a samurai. They were so sheltered that they don't even know what they were missing. With Jayden at least we see some efforts made by Antonio and later Ji to mitigate the effects of that, but when the series ends, what has Lauren got to go back to? Particularly since she had one job, and when push came to shove, she failed?
The DSM-IV, in describing the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, uses a phrase that I like a lot, and that resonates for me with these characters. And that phrase is, "a sense of a foreshortened future". It's basically a belief, expressed consciously or unconsciously, that you will never have a long, healthy, or normal life because of what you've experienced. We see in canon that he is utterly lost after Xandred is defeated, because he has literally never thought beyond that point. I think, particularly since Lauren was always waiting in the wings to take over as the 'real' Red Ranger, that he fully expected to follow in his father's footsteps and die in battle against the Nighlok. But now Xandred's dead and he's alive, and he's left without any sense of purpose, facing a life he never thought he'd have.
Imagine how terrifying that must be.
And that's true of all of them, though it's by far the worst for Jayden. Though I assume it was only the Red Ranger who fell in the last battle with the Nighlok, The other four MUST have grown up hearing the story. They MUST have gone into their own service as Rangers knowing how easily it could be any of them meeting the same fate. And then once that threat is over, well, I imagine it's the same sort of adjustment process that members of the military face when they return home from their service. It is a process. And it's one that some people navigate more easily than others.
The reactions can run the gamut.
Anger - Picture Mike storming into his parents' house and railing at them for making him give up the best years of his life for their stupid war.
Depression - "I used to be the one saving the world every day. Now what good is my life?"
Anxiety - "What the hell do I do now?"
Problems with interpersonal relationships - Picture Mike trying to pick up where he left off with his friends and being spurned because he ditched them. Picture Kevin trying to get back into competitive swimming, but no team wants him because of his long and unexplained hiatus. Picture any of them realizing that they don't have any relationships outside their families and their team - they were never able to make any before.
And the worst case scenario...I hate to say this, but I think the Shiba kids are at high risk of suicide, for the reasons I enumerated above. I think the real reason Ji has been foisting things like guitar lessons and road trips on Jayden since Xandred's defeat is that he saw what Jayden could have done to himself when Lauren showed up and he felt he wasn't needed anymore. (And really, couldn't that whole debacle easily have turned into a Deker-assisted suicide?) Ji got scared, and now he's trying to undo the damage he himself caused. But really, I think he's worrying about the wrong Shiba. Jayden at the very least has his ties to the team - particularly Antonio - to keep him safe and somewhat sane. Lauren, though...she lacks those bonds and I can easily see her coming to a bad end.
...Fuck, now I've made myself sad AND given myself plot bunnies.
Re: And second question
Bunnies. Bunnies everywhere.
no subject
So, this is a fandom question. A friend and I were discussing the idea of the body swap trope the other day and it raised a few questions about mental illness. The main one was this: if you swapped bodies with someone who had a mental illness, would it go with them or stay with the body? Obviously as an answerable question, that's useless since not every mental illness works the same. So my specific question is this: what about depression? From what I understand there is an imbalance of chemicals in the brain that at least contributes to depression, right? How much of depression is psychological and how much is biological? Is it both?
And my follow up questions about about depression in general, and in particular: how do antidepressants work? Because I know friends who have been on antidepressants and still have "low" periods when they can't get out of bed and seem to exhibit all the symptoms that I would think that antidepressants should prevent...? But since I don't really know how they work, I don't really know why they don't. O_o;;;
(Also, bonus crack fandom question: if someone were to try to self-medicate for depression, what kind of things would they be drawn to?)
(*coughs* This, uh... may or may not be gearing up to actually attempting this fic, but I guess we'll see. ^_~ Thanks for doing this!)
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One thing about pretty much all mental health conditions that people tend to overlook is that you just can't divorce what's going on in the mind from what's going on in the body. Many mental health conditions have physical symptoms. Eating disorders are the most obvious. But anxiety disorders? Panic attacks are very physical experiences that can cause elevated heart rate, muscle tension and increased sweating, to name a few. And depression? Aches and pains, fatigue, sleep disturbance, and changes in weight.
I personally don't care for the term "chemical imbalance" because I think it does very little to educate people on how depression actually works and tends to provide fuel for divas with personality disorders to try and convince their providers (and themselves) that their depression is 'special' and harder to treat. But that's just my personal beef. And we still know so little about how the brain actually functions that a lot of what goes into mental health treatment and the development of psychiatric medications is frankly guesswork. There's the physical brain, the more nebulous concept of a mind or a consciousness, and the two are inseperable. Granted, some cases of depression are situational, caused by stress or grief, and some are more chronic and seem to have more of a root in brain chemistry or genetics. But when you ask how much of depression is biological and how much is psychological, the answer is that it really is both.
Which brings us then to antidepressants and how they work. Now, I'm only going to cover SSRIs here because I'm most familiar with them and because they're the most common form of antidepressant on the market. There are a handful of other meds that work in different ways, but all the medications you think of when you think of antidepressants - Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, etc. - are SSRIs. SSRI stands for Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor. Say what? Let's unpack that. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that impacts mood. In a non-depressed brain, serotonin is released, floats around for awhile, and then gets sucked up into specialized receptors. In a depressed brain, the receptors suck up the serotonin prematurely, leaving a lower-than-average amount of free-floating serotonin. The medication in an SSRI blocks some of those receptors, so serotonin reuptake happens more slowly, leaving more serotonin floating around, which in turn, can reduce depression.
If you have a friend who is on an antidepressant and still has symptoms of depression, it could be due to any number of things. Sometimes, the medication itself doesn't work as well as it could. Everyone's brain is unique, and even though a lot of antidepressants belong to the same class of medications, they are each slightly different and some people respond better to one than another. A person for whom Prozac doesn't work well might have a great response to Zoloft, or vice-versa. Or if it is the right medication, a dosage adjustment may be needed. Or the person isn't using their medication correctly. SSRIs are long-acting meds that build up in the bloodstream over time - we're talking weeks, here. So they need to be taken consistently to work, and missing doses can cause the level of medication in the body to drop, and the medication to therefore not work as well.
But those are the simple explanations. 9 times out of 10, when I see someone with depression complaining that their medication isn't working, the problem isn't with the medication. A lot of people think taking an antidepressant will make you happy, and that isn't true. For one, a person on an antidepressant still experiences the normal gamut of emotion - including sadness, grief, and yes, even depression! Depression as a mood is different from depression the illness. Even the most neurotypically-brained people feel depressed from time to time, and it's normal. And there's usually a reason for it. Which brings me to my second point: the absence of depression is NOT happiness. The absence of depression is...the absence of depression. So being on an antidepressant won't make you happy, and it won't fix your life. Because depression is both a biological and psychological illness, there are usually both issues with serotonin that the medication can treat, and environmental issues, which the medication can't treat.
Say a guy is being treated for Major Depressive Disorder. He's on an antidepressant and taking it as he's supposed to. But he's also in a shitty relationship. He and his partner have a massive argument. Afterwards, he notices he's not sleeping well, he can't get out of bed in the morning, he's crying all the time, and his motivation is shot. "Well gee," he thinks. "My medication must not be working." Uhm, no, dude, you're depressed because your relationship sucks. For this reason, people get the best results by using BOTH counseling and an antidepressant AT THE SAME TIME.
And my third point is that some cases of depression - the ones that seem to be more biologically-based, not that we have any real scientific evidence of that - are chronic and can be managed but not cured. An analogy I use with patients a lot when they're discouraged about their progress in recovery is to liken it to another chronic illness. Diabetes, for instance. A person with diabetes can do everything right - mind their diet, take their meds, track their blood sugar. But bodies are weird sometimes, and one day that person's blood sugar may randomly go wonky on them, no matter how good they are at managing their illness. Similarly, someone with depression might just have a flare-up or a bad day, and be back to their baseline in short order.
So now that you've got some info on how depression works, let's come back to the body switching. (NGL, this is my favorite thing about this question and I was saving it for last.) Depending on what you want to accomplish with the fic, you could handle it in two different ways. For simplicity's sake, let's say A is the depressed character and B is the not-depressed character. You could have it so that the presence of A's consciousness in B's body causes B's serotonin to go off the rails, so that A is still depressed regardless of whose body he's in. Or you could have it so A's wonky serotonin levels stay in his own body, leading to a scenario in which B in A's body is going "OMG how do you live like this", while A in B's body is going "...I had forgotten what it was like to feel this good." Both have merit. The second situation could be a good way to make a B who doesn't understand A's depression and thinks he should just "suck it up and deal" realize what living with depression is really like.
And finally, self-medication. How someone with depression might try to self-medicate depends a lot on the person. And some self-help techniques are a lot healthier than others. Some people force themselves into doing positive things in an effort to make themselves feel better: diet, exercise, self-help books, volunteering, meditation, etc. Some people try to comfort themselves: food, staying in and watching TV instead of trying to go out and do things. And some people self-destruct: drugs, alcohol, self-injurious behavior.
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no subject
My question is ... I was going to say kind of simple, but then I thought abou... Doesn't matter. Here's the thing. I have ... severe anxiety problems. I also have a lot of body image problems.
So why is it when I cosplay I feel a little more ... secure? (well, in those rare moments I'm not sitting going 'Oh gods, I'm not the right shape, I'm ruining everything, I should never even try')
[Fun fact: I've re-wrote this way too many times, and I still don't think I'm asking the question I want to ask. Sorry to be a bother, dear. Thank you for reading the comments and answering what you can]
no subject
Second...oh, hon. I can practically hear the anxiety coming out in how you phrased your post. I know all too well how easy it is to feel like you're being annoying when you have problems with anxiety, and how hard it is to believe when people tell you that you aren't, but I'm going to try anyway. You aren't a bother, and you certainly aren't stupid! It's a completely valid question, and I wouldn't have offered to answer these things if I didn't want people to ask them. :)
Now, as to your actual question. Clothing and other methods we use in presenting ourselves to society can carry HUGE psychological weight. On a day-to-day basis we make decisions about what we wear to make ourselves feel comfortable and safe, or attractive and sexually desirable, or powerful and confident...or any number of other things. And cosplaying takes this idea a step further. Because when you dress as a character who I would assume has some kind of personal relevance to you, you're sort of symbolically ascribing that character's persona to yourself. And these are usually characters who are special in some way. Heroic, strong, confident, charismatic, attractive...or heck, even if the character you're cosplaying is a creepy monster (the legions of Pyramid Head cosplayers out there come to mind), being shocking or fearsome is powerful, too. When you dress like a character, you can start to feel like that character. I've experienced this. Particularly with my Sentinel Prime cosplay. If you're unfamiliar with the character, he's arrogant as fuck. Boundlessly overconfident. And I am...well...not. But I find that Sentinel's ego starts seeping into the way I carry myself when I'm dressed as him.
Cosplaying gives you the opportunity to be something other than yourself for a little while, and that can be immensely freeing. It's also a way of putting yourself out there and asking for attention in an environment that is - usually - pretty safe and accepting. If you have social anxiety, a costume becomes an overture to conversation with other fans. You feel shy about approaching them? Hey, you're in a costume! If they're in your fandom, they'll come to you! "Oh cool, you're dressed as character X! Hey, what did you think about that episode where Y happened?" and so on and so forth. And a costume is a very visible labor of love. You put time, money, effort, and ingenuity into cosplaying. And that effort gets NOTICED. And complimented! And that can be such a validating thing.
So yeah, cosplay can be extremely empowering. Obviously individual mileage and experiences may vary, but off the top of my head those are some of the reasons I can think of why you would experience a sense of security in a costume. And hey, if it helps you and it's something you enjoy, keep at it. Don't let your doubts about yourself get you down. If anyone cares that much about your costume or what your body looks like in it, they need to get a fucking life and stop being a hater. :P