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this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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Chronic Illness
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A community/support group for chronically ill people. While anyone is welcome, our number one priority is keeping this a safe space for chronically ill people.
This is a support group, not a place for people to spout their opinions on disability.
Rules
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Be excellent to each other
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Absolutely no ableism. This includes harmful stereotypes: lazy/freeloaders etc
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No quackery. Does an up-to date major review in a big journal or a major government guideline come to the conclusion you’re claiming is fact? No? Then don’t claim it’s fact. This applies to potential treatments and disease mechanisms.
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No denialism or minimisation This applies challenges faced by chronically ill people.
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No psychosomatising psychosomatisation is a tool used by insurance companies and governments to blame physical illnesses on mental problems, and thereby saving money by not paying benefits. There is no concrete proof psychosomatic or functional disease exists with the vast majority of historical diagnoses turning out to be biomedical illnesses medicine has not discovered yet. Psychosomatics is rooted in misogyny, and consisted up until very recently of blaming women’s health complaints on “hysteria”.
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I think at it's core this is deeply rooted in a fear of death/disability
People offer unhelpful platitudes because deep down they know that they can also one day get some kind of diagnoses for an illness. Cancer, dementia, alzheimers, you name it.
It's coming for all of us.
So when they ask "did you try x????" It's them really saying "god please let miracle cures still exist, I can't handle confronting my own mortality"
And if you go "no, I havent tried that yet", they get to smile and proceed in life, "oh well if I was sick, I'd try everything!"
Which is pretty much all that seperates them, for now, from acknowledging the void they just brushed up against.
Some people would rather very carefully arrange a thin sheet covering the giant black pit in the middle of their living room, so they never have to look at it.
Yep this is denial of the very real fact that some things you simply cannot control or cure, that you do not “deserve,” and those things can be bad. Having to then contend with the fact you still (probably) want to live is hard and essentially a lifelong grief cycle, and for abled people that’s scary to imagine.
But that’s our lived experience for years/decades and they don’t get that eventually you get sort of used to it.
I still think there are so many adults out there that wholeheartedly believe in the Just World Fallacy. It's honestly baffling how many people have a hard time accepting that things just happen to people without any moral value being assigned to them.
The people in power have the most influence. The people in power tend to also believe they deserve to be in power — ie. Just World Fallacy — so it’s really unsuprising how societally engrained that bias is.