i put off making this post for a while because i didn’t want to ruin anyone’s fun or be a buzzkill, but it’s about time i did. i want to talk about cryptid/UFO/paranormal/conspiracy theory screencaps and jokes, which have become pretty mainstream as a part of tumblr culture, and how as a schizophrenic person that’s been increasingly alienating and difficult to deal with.
i’m talking about posts about flat-earthers, i’m talking about “relatable” anxiety posts about plastering your wall with newspaper cutouts and red string like a conspiracy theorist, i’m talking about text posts where people joke about putting tape over their webcam so the FBI can’t spy on them, and most importantly i’m talking about posts like these:
these posts are all screencaps from real people’s blogs and websites or comments on forums. and they’re being passed around, uncredited, without any caption or context. not only are all of these things stripped of any credit or source or information about who the original creator was, they’re selective segments of the most “out-there” “crazy” stuff these people say, posted as either an aesthetic thing or as a tongue-in-cheek joke. and as someone who has genuinely been someone like this, who spent my early teens on websites like this reading stuff and posting it myself, it’s really hurtful to see these people treaded so dehumanizingly by a community that claims to care about psychotic people.
a huge amount of these are just literally detailing common psychosis symptoms. for example, this post has almost 300 notes, mainly from aesthetic blogs:
feeling like your thoughts are being broadcasted, overheard, played out loud etc. is an incredibly common symptom of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. this isn’t creepy, “paranormal”, or fun, this is a snippet of something a real human being who was scared and not getting the help they needed said on the internet in hopes of finding that help there. and this type of aestheticizing and demonizing (literally demonizing, in some cases) of psychosis actively contributes to people feeling like monsters or freaks. even if content like this is being initially found and posted by people who genuinely relate or run in these circles, the majority of people circulating these posts are simply doing so because they think it’s cool or edgy or whatever, and as someone who experiences symptoms like these on a daily basis it makes me feel like i can’t talk about my genuine and harmless lived experiences without scaring people, being laughed at, or being seen as some sort of cool inhuman abnormality to be studied. and those are all ways that psychotic people have been made to feel, unfairly, for a very very long time.
i’ve ever reblogged those posts, but it was with the perception that the other people posting and reblogging them also had my experiences. i saw other people reblogging this stuff and felt like having a paranormal conspiracy theorist phase at age 11 where you spent time actually reading and posting on forums and websites like that was a funny relatable thing, the same way that having a deviantart emo phase was. and i thought those posts were made like that – from the perspective of people going, “oh, we’ve all been there!”. but they aren’t. even if it’s not intentional, the attitude people have about the paranormal and conspiracy theories on here is this weird, ironic, voyeuristic joke. and having to slowly realize that – that people were laughing at me, not with me – felt really bad.
people reblog posts that are screencaps of real, actual people talking about how afraid they are that they’re possessed by demons or how aliens are sending them messages, and most of the people reblogging those posts have never actually been “crazy” like that. maybe they relate on some level, maybe they feel like it’s like they’re possessed by a demon because of how emotional they get sometimes, whatever. but i’ve been hospitalized against my will because of the significant physical damage i’ve done to by body trying to “get the demon out of me”, i’ve been made to take antipsychotic medication i didn’t want to take because i thought everyone outside was an alien in disguise and i couldn’t leave the house. and when i felt like that and had no idea what was so different about me or what was wrong, i spent time on websites like this because it was the only place other people shared my experiences, understood me and believed me. and now i have to be on edge every time i use this website because i’m scared something i wrote on my blog when i was a teenager desperately trying to process having untreated early-onset schizophrenia is going to show up on my dashboard as a creepy “weird internet” relic, as if people like us aren’t still using the internet, seeing those things get tossed around like jokes or bad creepypastas.
i can’t look at posts like these without thinking about who the people that made them originally are, where they are now, and if they’re safe, and it’s really unnerving that this doesn’t seem to be the case for a lot of people. apparently, there are psychotic people who are deserving of respect, empathy and compassion, and then there are funny, crazy, weirdos who are fine to poke fun at or treat like horror movie monsters in the making. there are people on the “schizo-spectrum” who are human beings, and there are lunatics and dangerous psychos and the type of people who yell nonsense on busses and street corners. and that isn’t new, treating schizophrenic people like literal demons or prophets or scientific experiments isn’t new. it’s something that’s happened to us since before joan of arc was burned alive, it’s something that keeps people who are suffering from getting the help they need, and it’s something that gets psychotic people murdered by their families to this day.
i understand that lots of genuinely schizophrenic or psychotic people reblog posts like this too as a way of aestheticizing their own lives and feelings, and i absolutely ever have, but i’m stopping. this type of stuff can’t just be “fun” for me, and i think that’s probably the case for a lot of other people too. following blogs like this is a shitty coping mechanism the same way following gore/self-harm/pro anorexia blogs is. frankly put, it makes my symptoms worse, it makes me feel like a freak, and it makes me feel like everyone else reblogging these posts feels that way about me too.
i would encourage everyone, no matter who they are, to re-evaluate their relationships with content like this. i’m by no means saying we all need to stop watching the x-files or blogging about cryptids and ghosts, i love that stuff a lot and i think it’s very possible to engage with those topics in a completely fine way. but this is a really insensitive, dehumanizing, and unsympathetic way of treating people, it’s disrespectful of the actual human beings who are like this because of who they are and it’s alienating and unhealthy for the people like them who see it. i want everyone to remember that schizophrenic people are real, we’re on this website and out in the real world, and you need to take that into consideration if you ever want to contribute to making the world safer for people with mental illnesses.
