What If The People In Your Life That Matter Don't Accept Ptsd As A "real" Thing?

[aber]

Have tried and given up on that. People are scared of mental health problems, so scared that they would rather ignore it.

Have tried to explain it to my only child a little, but found that it is of no benefit to me. Why should I spend years and years trying to convince someone that I have a certain disease: that is what it is: it is not mental illness. I witness mental illness every day when I go to work and watch the people that call themselves normal: I swear 80 percent of those people are mentally diseased.

So would you try to explain to a herd of pea brained sheep what kind of disease you have? Nope

 

[greenleaf]

I can really relate to wanting certain people to accept this diagnosis and support you through it; if you have some attachment to those people, their opinions can matter a lot. Validation is important, and our communities matter in this. While those people may or may not change (and sometimes they have their own undealt-with trauma that causes them to fight against admitting your trauma's effects too) -- you should not have to wait for them, in order to heal. Some people here are expressing anger at those folks; for me, doing that can help me put a boundary up against harm from people... even people we are close to in some ways. You don't have to be close to those folks in all ways though, you can pick and choose with some work.

Can you work, perhaps, at deciding what your community on this issue will be, and perhaps put boundaries around your mental community re. the ptsd, so that only people who "get it" are inside? So your ptsd community can perhaps be some people here, a T, that sort of thing...