Love when people’s passion for destigmatizing mental illness ends right at the point where they’re expected to show empathy to someone with mental illness.

Like it feels, sometimes, as though the stance is, “Support people who’ve been diagnosed with a mental illness and treated it and thus are largely indistinguishable from people who don’t have a diagnosed mental illness” which... is not as helpful as you think.

If all you’re destigmatizing is a label and not a struggle that results in a lot of maladaptive (and sometimes ugly and violent!) behaviors then.... what’s the point.

Related to this is the problem of people with anxiety and depression trying to forefront themselves as the face of mental illness broadly, oof.

Like all these “Mentally ill people don’t do [X], all we do is sit at home in the dark and cry!” I mean maybe that’s how *your* mental illness manifests, but people with mental illness have a wide, wide range of experiences. Some of us *do* engage in ugly or even violent behavior

And to be clear, empathy is not the same as tolerance: having a mental illness is not an excuse for abuse or bigotry or violence.

BUT a person whose maladaptive behaviors are rooted in mental illness isn’t necessarily a bad person at their core, and *that* is key.

I’ve been on the receiving end of terrifying anger, etc, from people who have BPD or bipolar or some other dx and it *sucks*. It really *sucks*. But I always try to feel compassion for those people and hope that they get the care they need.

And that doesn’t always mean I keep them in my life! Sometimes taking space from someone is the kindest thing you can do. But I’m not putting them on blast for being some horrible monster.