This is a really unfair thing to say, and I'm about to explain why. https://twitter.com/ruckafella21/status/1276760616569417729

To begin with, I don't know what OP's qualifications are. I DO know that "mental health professional" covers all aspects of mental health just as much as "scientist" means "all science".

There is a lot of categories of mental health, a lot of nuance to what you can be~

~qualified to speak on or treat. Anything to do with the mind is not something that you can tie up into a neat little bow with a single term like "mental health professional" because there are too many things that could mean.

I obviously don't know this person. They could~

~very well be an expert in the field of DID or at least treat people with the disorder.

But, even so, it still wouldn't matter.

The fact is, if you are not a part of the oppressed or marginalized group, you cannot speak on what is and is not offensive.~

~A mental health professional CANNOT state that something is not offensive to the DID community anymore than a white person can say that something is NOT offense to people of colour, just because they're an ally. Just like a straight, cis person cannot decide that something~

~is not offensive to the LGBTQ+ community just because they've marched at pride or worked with people who are in that community.

Being a witness to an experience is not the same as actually living that experience. And frankly, it's hurtful that someone who IS a mental health~

~professional would use that fact to dismiss or talk over the people with DID just to assert that a movie couldn't "possibly" be considered offensive.

I am not a mental health professional.

But I do have Dissociative Identity Disorder.

And I am one of many people who has to~

~deal with the backlash that misinformation like "Split" spreads. It's easy to say that a work of fiction won't actually influence how the reality of it is treated -- easy to say and totally untrue.

People have responded to my diagnosis with only this movie as a frame of~

~reference. People have asked me if I have an "evil" alter or if I'd kill anyone, etc. And that's what happens when you present misinformation about a disorder that is already so severely misunderstood.

When people of a marginalized community speak out and say that something is incredibly hurtful and offensive, you NEED to listen to their voices instead of drowning them out with your own insistence of how it can't possibly be.

Because you don't know. No matter what you learned~

~in school, or studied, or watched, or read... you have no idea what it means to live with it.

If you actually, genuinely care about being an ally? Then the best thing you can do with your voice is amplify the voices of those who DO live with it. Not try to drown them out.