Not sure if this headline upsets you as much as it does me: but it’s wrong for so many reasons in my eyes.
1) it shames anyone suffering w a disorder into believing they are a burden. Read the caption – “MY struggle to live w what HE has.
2) it separates us into two buckets – the effected (the person suffering w PTSD) & the “poor person” who has to deal w it – the “healthy/fine/normal/ok” person.
3) this continues to perpetuate the idea that mental health is binary – you are either SICK or your are HEALTHY, and the healthy person is burdened by the sick person and having to take care of them.
Full transparency here – I haven’t even read the article bc the headline disgusted me so much. It’s divisive, wrong, misleading, & causes all the problems mentioned above.
So let me get this straight – the person helping the “other person” with PTSD in this case, has ZERO post traumatic stress? Maybe not to the level of disorder, but they’ve lived a charmed life, void of trauma, and can’t relate to their partner at all – to the point where they have to “struggle to live with it” (it being their partner’s disorder).
Mental health lives on a continuum. We are ALL impacted to varying degrees. We fluctuate daily, weekly, monthly. This topic is not for 1 in 5, it’s for 5 in 5…all of us…and we need to speak loudly against the media positioning things this way. These are the salacious headlines that get eyeballs….while perpetuating a fallacy.
No you are not a burden if you suffer. Yes you are just like everyone else…and yes the amount we are each affected is going to change throughout our lifetimes.
It’s not “us and them.” It’s ALL of us – a group we are all members of, just not everyone knows it yet.