50x:

yehudisha:

dybbuk-dyke:

sinbadism:

meatbabie:

sinbadism:

mulchling:

everyones jokin abt how their intrusive thoughts are super cute and fun, teehee im gonna eat some cardboard mental illness isnt scary or serious!! the idea anyone ever experiences symptoms that manifest in a genuinely terrifying and upsetting way is jsut a media construction lol. like as someone whos intrusive thoughts are 1) constant and 2) incredibly violent and distressing and awful those posts just make me feel like a freak but im glad ur all having fun 

honestly i dont think those thoughts like abt eating weird stuff really count as intrusive thoughts? they’re more like impulses or just ideas. intrusive thoughts are the absolute opposite of what you’d want to do. nobody is like “if i ate cardboard i’d be exactly what i’m afraid of and my family would leave me and i wouldn’t be able to live with myself”

This is why I hate those like “oh I thought about eating a leaf haha intrusive thoughts!” Cuz it’s not intrusive thoughts at all and it just makes me feel even worse about my morally repugnant intrusive thoughts . I wish they just used a different word, like idk, daydream?

daydream isn’t rly accurate. it’s just an impulse that you reject. or just a weird thought

I had an impulse to lick a rock.
My intrusive thoughts tell me to jump off a bridge every time I walk across one, or to think about inappropriate sexual thoughts. I dont actually want to do those things. I wont do those things. Thinking about those things disgusts me. But theyre there. 

Licking a rock is just..silly.

@dybbuk-dyke @sinbadism @meatbabie @mulchling

yeah the key here is the difference between an impulsive thought/urge (which can be a mental illness symptom and isn’t just confined to leaf eating etc) and an intrusive thought. I think that a lot of people calling their more minor impulses “intrusive thoughts” are just unaware of the difference between the symptoms, and may not be trying to step on ppl suffering from intrusive thoughts, but I agree as someone with serious intrusive thoughts it can be jarring/annoying/a bad feeling to see those posts because they’re misinfo about a symptom that rly affects my life. I wanted to add some info to this post below about both symptoms for ppl who didn’t know the difference. 

The amount of impulsive thoughts experienced ( from silly things like “u should just eat some dirt off the ground” to moderate ones like “you should punch this wall really hard for no reason” to even more serious ones) can definitely be higher with certain neurotypes like autism, adhd, as well as mental illnesses like OCD, BPD, bipolar especially during mania, etc I’m just naming some offhand but yeah many disorders effect impulse control. 

Impulsive thoughts, aren’t tics, so you can often stop yourself from actually doing them, but they are urges with varying strength depending on how serious the thought is or what it’s triggered by. more serious impulsive thoughts/urges I get are to: kick things, scratch at my skin, swear or yell loudly at inappropriate times, leave the room or quit something even when I know I can reasonably finish it, trigger myself by touching a bad sensory thing or watching something I hate, engage in a risky sexual behavior, eat something non-food, the list goes on. 

different impulsive thoughts are probably caused by diff things and due to comorbidity I don’t always know what’s what although my autistic or ADHD impulsive thoughts (either triggered by being overwhelmed or just my neurotype) are usually not very harmful, whereas my OCD, trauma, or mood cycling caused ones (which are often triggered by something / an episode) often are. 

Intrusive thoughts can be caused by various things for different ppl ( mostly OCD and CPTSD / paranoia stuff for me). unlike impulses, intrusive thoughts don’t always have to be an urge to do something (they can be but they don’t have to be). They ARE all thoughts that 1) I do not under any circumstances want in my head 2) horrify me or make me feel guilty or scared or disgusted, and 3) are not things I would normally think (aka it doesn’t feel like I’m the one thinking them, they’re not things I should be thinking at all), they just pop into my head and freak me out. they can be random unwanted sexual thoughts about people I would never think of sexually like a passerby or a random adult, thoughts of my family dying in horrible circumstances, thoughts telling me something bad will happen, that I have a rare illness for no reason, etc. 

in short, both impulsive thoughts and intrusive thoughts are symptoms that can affect a person’s life in varying degrees and I’d like to see more correct info about the differences so I contributed a bit here ^.

thank you so much for this post, I hate the ~silly random thought = Intrusive Thought posts. they actually upset me quite a bit lol so this is really validating. intrusive thoughts are truly horrible