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people wanna care so much about mental illness but refuse to acknowledge people who are otherkin as people who probably have a mental illness.
Why would being otherkin automatically make me mentally ill?
No correlation found.
To be fair, there seems to be a pretty significant correlation between the two (a large part of the otherkin community is also mentally ill), but it’s definitely not a disorder on its own.
I still dislike it when people say this. There’s no way to get a definite consensus on anything among otherkin. You can get opinions of populations on different websites and that’s about it. English speaking websites specifically.
Does anyone really understand how many people that excludes? I have an entire family of nonhumans who either speak poor english or no english, or they’re multi-lingual but don’t know about otherkin communities. But they’re still nonhuman and they still count. And we’re not the only ones. Without knowing the true size of something, you can’t get a majority vote on anything, just the opinion of some websites who are typically populated by the same groups of people. Just because a bunch of bloggers on tumblr or whatever forum feel like their mental illness has something to do with it, doesn’t mean that’s the reality. It just feels that way because the sample size is concentrated.
And there’s definitely a correlation between white/westerners connecting everything “unusual” to mental illness. That’s historic fact. The science changed over time, but the biases didn’t.
^^^
I think a lot of people forget that they’re only including the English-speaking communities, mostly full of Westerners. Like. How many people have ever paid attention to the Spanish-speaking Otherkin community? It exists yet I doubt a majority of people know anything about it or have interacted with it in any way, myself included.Like, I have no idea if any members from this community have ever been included in discussions or surveys or studies.
http://www.otherkin-hispano.org
And again, they’re still people who know this community exists. There’s plenty who don’t and still are nonhuman.
“And there’s definitely a correlation between white/westerners connecting everything “unusual” to mental illness.”
Yes. Like, I’m not saying mental illness, or at least disability/dysfunction, doesn’t exist. But you have to remember so much of the discourse around it is a viewpoint, not a universally acknowledged truth. Not every culture stuffs everything “weird” under the “mental illness” banner so radically as the ones I was raised in.
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