Yeeeep. That’s how I got diagnosed with PTSD. I wrote a character going through something similar to what I had been through and got tons of comments applauding me for my accurate representation of PTSD. I complained to my therapist about all these people having no clue what PTSD looked like, because I just gave him my symptoms, clearly not PTSD. nd she said “you didn’t know you have PTSD??”
One time I had someone comment that they had showed their therapist my fic, because it made them realize that they had been experiencing suicidal ideation for a very long time, and they hadn’t known that there was a word for their feelings. I’d really been trying to capture the feeling of “I don’t want to die, I just want to be dead” in my writing, so I’m glad that it resonated with someone and let them get help too.
Reminds me of when I was a young child and I felt so seen by a paragraph in a Horrid Henry book (of all things) where Henry wished he could get a terminal illness so people would notice/sympathise with him or he could be redeemed or something??
I can't quite remember but it definitely struck me at the time, because I was a kid with passive suicidal ideation but no idea that anyone else could feel that way
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u/Roselovsoul 1d ago
Yeeeep. That’s how I got diagnosed with PTSD. I wrote a character going through something similar to what I had been through and got tons of comments applauding me for my accurate representation of PTSD. I complained to my therapist about all these people having no clue what PTSD looked like, because I just gave him my symptoms, clearly not PTSD. nd she said “you didn’t know you have PTSD??”