theunitofcaring:

I think for mental illness in particular, most good advice comes from a place of empathy. If you know the brainspace someone is in, you can recognize which things are going to be actively unhelpful and which might help. even if all you can do is say “yep, that thing! that thing sucks!” that’s often really valuable by itself.

And mental illness brainstates are weird, and complicated, and hard to understand if you’ve never experienced them. “I just don’t see any point in being alive” is very hard to make sense of if you haven’t been depressed. (Some people are unusually good at it, though I expect many of them have actually themselves experienced undiagnosed depression too.)

I think the thing people are trying to get at with the ‘neurotypical Karen’ complaint is advice that doesn’t seem to come from a place of empathy, advice generated by someone who fundamentally doesn’t get what is going on in your head and which is accordingly telling you to pull strings that aren’t even there or strings you’ve been pointlessly tugging on for years.

But of course, there aren’t just ‘healthy brains’ and ‘broken brains’, and different broken brains can have different strings. And so even when mentally ill people are talking to each other, they’re often going to be giving advice that lands flat because it’s referencing a different kind of problem. 

And – mentally ill people need to talk to each other. It’s where practically all the good advice is. The more there is out there, the better we can do. So we have to have a way of saying ‘that advice is for a different brain’ without saying ‘that advice is for a whole, healthy brain, which you must have’ or ‘it’s bad to try to come up with advice based on your own experiences’ or ‘if you are wrong about relating your experiences to someone’s, you did something bad’.

Obviously, don’t give specific strangers unsolicited mental health advice. But sharing your tactics, your ideas, the strings you’ve pulled successfully, the strings that you can’t figure out how to deal with? That’s important. We need it.