Or, you know, you could just get a real job instead of being a vulture.

Oh please. Find some honest work and quit doing mercenary shit for money. You'd be more honorable selling your own body.

It’s the same thing, “jambes lourdes” translates to veinous insufficiency in the legs. It’s not a specifically French ailment. Yes, it affects women, everywhere, not just in France, ask any pregnant woman. The pills and whatever don’t “combat the condition” but are designated to enhance blood flow. No, the rest of the…

That’s kind of my point. Since Enlightenment thinking (namely Descartes’ cogito) dominates Western constructions of self and mind, people conceptualize mind and body as separate, such that mental illness is perceived as being distinct from biology. Whether or not the binary is legit, it exists as a social…

My aunt “has” Morgellons. I “had” something similar in 2010. I was obsessed with ingrown hairs, to the point that I believed I had almost twice as much hair as I actually had, but it was ‘trapped’ under the skin of my scalp and therefore I had to free it with my fingernails. I waxed all the skin off my chin because I…

Great post. I can attest to how the disbelief of others that your pain is real can amplify the pain you experience. (My ob/gyn didn’t believe me about my endometriosis pain for a while, and it slapped a nice thick layer of desperation on top of the already intolerable pain. I was, in fact, hysterical about it.) Also,…

The fact that their symptoms are bound to psychiatric disorder does not lessen their pain but enhances it.

You don’t think the cultural idea that mental illness isn’t “real” illness has anything to do with how these patients perceive their condition?

What I find especially fascinating about this too is the insistence that these two things (the mental and the biological) are actually distinct from each other. Perhaps if that binary was disrupted accepting mental illness would be a lot easier for people.

Definitely. I have a family member with fibromyalgia who is desperate for effective treatment but refuses to even try antidepressants, because she feels that if her pain turns out to be treatable by antidepressants then it’s not real. As if the source or contributing factors matter more than the fact of the suffering.

Why do these sufferers insist on thinking that the disease is biological and not mental? We have a long way to go towards accepting that mental illness is illness, don’t we?

The only way I can still get an erection is by thinking about my 401k.

Teens also make the best subject for TV shows because everything in high school is SO FREAKIN' DRAMATIC. You do have to keep that in mind when dealing with them, because something you just say in passing will very probably end up causing weeks of internal and external angst.

In just a few short years, I’m going to love my teen the most I have ever loved him and he will hate me and that will just make me love him more and I will have my heart broken in the most beautiful way like when I was a teen myself.

Are 25 year olds desperately clinging to what carefree youth they have left who smoke cool as well?

???

I'm so sick of that car. Leave my family alone!

As soon as anyone passes 30, a six-pack is the misguided poisoned chalice of the fitness world.

Love it! Let's be offended by EVERYTHING!

My 15-year-old niece got a talking-to from her high school guidance counselor for the exact same thing. She’s “too confident in her answers,” and it upsets her male teachers. Because…they’re overly emotional, insecure crybabies, I guess?

The first example to come to mind: