[jlangemeier]

Ah yes, those mild mental health issues that still get people fired for regularly under the auspice of "attendance issues," "cultural fit," or any of the numerous reasons they can get fired for that are totally the result of their mild mental health issue but have to be re-phrased so that the company doesn't get sued.

As someone with ADHD, anxiety/depression, and chronic migraines; the bullshit conversations and 'management' meetings I've had to sit through because people very much still don't have any understanding of these issues is staggering. While I am not getting fired for calling out twice or thrice in a week once in a while, that's mostly due to me being in a "knowledge worker" job, if I was in a customer facing job or other position that requires "butt in seat hours" I am certain that I would have already gotten canned 100 times over due to these mild mental health issues; because quantity attendance is more important that quality attendance in a lot of jobs.

OCD isn't a "normal thing that most people will encounter" problem, neither is depression, neither is anxiety; OCD isn't some "lol I need to fill my gas tank to a round dollar amount," depression isn't "boy howdy did I feel sad for a few weeks after that break-up," anxiety isn't "that was a bit stressful firing that employee." You can feel depressed without having depression, you can feel anxious without having anxiety, you can be exacting without having OCD; but none of the prior are mental illnesses while all of the latter are. So, while the __feeling__ has been normalized, the actual illness absolutely hasn't been; and from experience it's been made more difficult by the generalizing of the words, where now people equate the action/feeling with the much more serious illness - so now I have to spend time explaining how debilitating the actual illness is, just to have people go "well I feel depressed sometimes, and I'm here."

Quite frankly, one of the many reasons folks have to put how bad things are or can get out there is due to this conflation of the feeling with the illness; so you seeing these expressions of "things are actually this bad for me," and conflating it with "emotional porn" because "everybody experiences things like OCD, depression, anxiety, etc" is actually a perfect example of why I can very confidently say that the stigma about mental health hasn't changed that much; it's just been repackaged with a nicer bow.