She might have had a hard life, dealt with a similar kind of depression that you have, and developed these maladaptive views as a way to get herself through dark times.
I know your mom isn’t going to see a therapist, but I don’t see how arguing with someone who has calcified mental trauma is going to help.
Extremely conservative culture… never any mental health awareness… she told me about that supposedly there was someone in either her village or a nearby village thay had someone’s son go “crazy” and they lock him inside the house and basically treat him like a dog. Like she says it in the present tense, like this supposed “crazy person” (her words, not mine) is allegedly alive today, never get to leave home. No idea if she made it up to scare me or if it’s real.
It may have been real, in part of the shame for the family of having a family member deemed crazy. That family may have thought this was the best way to treat him, in part because the greater community wouldn’t accept him and there wasn’t any available treatments for them.
Now, it doesn’t mean that you have the same issues of the person in the story. Your mother’s village probably didn’t have an ability to differentiate people outside of sane enough to work and not. But, in her mind, she probably doesn’t have any ability to understand mental illness so this is the closest she can go to when discussing it.
And it is really hard to bridge that gap in knowledge.
I don’t think I’d have a rebuttal.
She might have had a hard life, dealt with a similar kind of depression that you have, and developed these maladaptive views as a way to get herself through dark times.
I know your mom isn’t going to see a therapist, but I don’t see how arguing with someone who has calcified mental trauma is going to help.
Probably.
70s Rural China was rough.
Extremely conservative culture… never any mental health awareness… she told me about that supposedly there was someone in either her village or a nearby village thay had someone’s son go “crazy” and they lock him inside the house and basically treat him like a dog. Like she says it in the present tense, like this supposed “crazy person” (her words, not mine) is allegedly alive today, never get to leave home. No idea if she made it up to scare me or if it’s real.
She’d “worried” that I’ll “end up like that”… Wtf
It may have been real, in part of the shame for the family of having a family member deemed crazy. That family may have thought this was the best way to treat him, in part because the greater community wouldn’t accept him and there wasn’t any available treatments for them.
Now, it doesn’t mean that you have the same issues of the person in the story. Your mother’s village probably didn’t have an ability to differentiate people outside of sane enough to work and not. But, in her mind, she probably doesn’t have any ability to understand mental illness so this is the closest she can go to when discussing it.
And it is really hard to bridge that gap in knowledge.