Disability flircle meme

I just added a comment to lightgetsin's Disability flircle meme, which looked interesting.

Sanity Score

I can't quite figure out how the tags are broken. This looks OK on full page view, displaying the cuts, but things are weirdly italicized otherwise. Trying to fix. Fixed. Apparently, DW objects to sticking a cut tag in the middle of a block of formatted text.

vatine is off gaming today, so I'm taking it easy and have mostly been camping in front of the keyboard. The poor dog claims he is being sorely neglected, but he does whenever at least one of us isn't petting him.

Update: It turns out that he's also afraid of heavy rain--not just thunder--so I'm going in there to sit with him after posting this!

Out of slightly morbid curiosity, I went and did the PsychCentral Sanity Score quiz phoneutria_fera mentioned yesterday. It requires a login, which irked me, but I went ahead and set up a throwaway account.

The results, pasted?


Your Sanity Score
54
( Score Breakdown )

Interesting, in a fairly typical psych assessment kind of way. For anyone who doesn't know, I spent a lot of time in the psych system over things which were neither psychiatric nor psychological. I am autistic with a lot of interesting neurological stuff going on, and ended up deemed bipolar with a clunky mess of other things tacked on to cover all the stuff the mood disorder didn't.

Bear in mind that, whether they should be or no now that they're accepted as neurological, ASDs (and Tourette's) are lumped into the DSM. You wouldn't know it from this assessment. Things may have changed in practice these days, though an awful lot of kids with ASDs are apparently getting pediatric bipolar labels.

The questions weren't quite as bizarre as a lot of the ones on the MMPI--which surely gives a lot of false positives for "Hypochondriasis"--but some of them came close. Just a small sample of ambiguous ones which caught my eye:

( Question quibbles )

I couldn't help but get the yes-or-no "Have you stopped beating your wife?" feeling a lot, with a lot of the phrasing.

Yeah, a good mental health professional will be able to sort out what might be contributing to a lot of these things. Some are excellent. Unfortunately, a lot are not so good, and many of those are inclined to view things through certain filters which presume a narrow range of mental illnesses above other explanations for the problems their clients are experiencing. That can work OK for some people's situations, but not so much for others. Some of the filters which pathologize people's behavior and communication--eliminating other possible explanations--are unlikely to help anyone.

Going back to the results, the breakdown was interesting--especially in light of the (inappropriate) diagnoses I picked up before. I can't say much about the anxiety and especially the PTSD, other than that a lot of what has been interpreted and treated as anxiety and phobia is actually coming from purely neurological sensory weirdness. The same with rarely going out of the house; management is very different, depending on whether this is due to real sensory overload (plus some built-up anxiety from that, and other people's distress over it), or whether it's based on some horrible trauma in your past (as was assumed). Apples and oranges.

I do have Complex PTSD, and 15+ years of largely getting treated like crap in the psych system did not help with that. On the depression front, the score seems to be so low not because I am not experiencing symptoms these days, but because I am used to dealing with it by now and it doesn't freak me out; the way I look at this has also changed, as reflected in some of the question quibbles. I've learned to do more emotional regulation, not having even known it was possible growing up. Also, some of the relevant questions do not seem to take into account that a person might have experienced chronic depression for long enough that there is not a sharp contrast between "now" and "before".

Some products of neurological things (executive function, inertia, etc.) were taken as symptoms of depression, and figuring out what's what to some extent has also helped; these things also require different strategies, depending on what's behind the difficulty. Are you having trouble getting in the shower because you're depressed, or does it have more in common with How to make a phone call, in 70 easy steps? Maybe it's a combination of the two (my, do I know that one), or something else entirely.

Video: Original Song about Executive Dysfunction "I Grinded the Coffee" by P. Lungstuffing. No spoons for a transcript right now, unfortunately.

The "Physical Issues" score does not reflect anywhere near the actual quantity (or quality) of physical problems I am having now. This is probably down to both question bias and similarly increased mindfulness helping me deal with it. On a related note, I had to get a chuckle out of the "Drugs: 0", the way a lot of people want to act about chronic pain treatment.

"Dissociation", "Borderline Traits" (ah, that old dumping ground!), and "Obsessions/Compulsions"? A combination of neurological stuff and PTSD. I was diagnosed with mild OCD because of tics which fit Tourette's criteria. One therapist suggested that I just didn't want to "improve" when I started ticcing even more under the scrutiny. Seriously.

The test was interesting to mess with, and I think it nicely illustrates a number of systemic problems. I didn't need this to tell me how sane I am now, and not surprisingly, think this assessment deeply underestimated my coping abilities in some ways while just not taking other areas into account at all. Can I clean my house? Rarely, for multiple reasons. And so on.

(Maybe I should throw in a link to my Psychiatry, freedom, and noninterference post here, for clarification. I am all for truly informed choice, and the last thing I'd want to do is tell people to buck up. Urgh.)