Meanwhile we're gaslit, and our appeals for the urgent need of a treatment and said funding, sabotaged, by the toxic positivity and minimising of our condition,
by members of our own community, who share sentiments to the effect of:
- Tinnitus is nothing!
- I told tinnitus to go fuck itself! Now my life is better than ever!
- My tinnitus is raging like a jet engine right now, and I don't even notice it!
- I just had to teach my brain to stop seeing it as a threat!
- There's a lot of scaremongering on these forums. Just get off them and go live your life!
- The worst cases are online, MOST tinnitus sufferers don't come here and aren't affected by it!
- There already are treatments (TRT, BTS, mindfulness etc.).
My personal favourites:
- It seems people who struggle with tinnitus may just be more sensitive to noise than your average person.
Lol. Mate, I grew up in front of what was basically a motorway in London, between the ages of 0 and 16. I never gave a sh*t about noise until hyperacusis hit me in my 20s. And yet, my first 5 years with tinnitus almost killed me.
- Tinnitus affects 10-20% of the population, yet Tinnitus Talk only has (roughly) 35,000 registered members; therefore only 0.0021875% of people really struggle with our condition.
Where are @convolution and
@Zugzug when you need them, eh? This is just sh*t Mathematics. And not just the numbers, but the logic behind the application of the numbers.
Firstly, is the misinterpretation of the sentence "tinnitus AFFECTS". When written correctly (by slightly more discerning journalists) the sentence used is "10-20% of people EXPERIENCE tinnitus". Why does that matter? Because EXPERIENCE does not imply permanence, whereas AFFECTS does.
There is a BIG difference between
experiencing tinnitus and
suffering from/being affected by it. I EXPERIENCED tinnitus a dozen times in my teen years, and it did not make me want to register with a tinnitus support forum,
because it always disappeared within 2 weeks.
Secondly, the figure "10-20% of people experience" is in relation to the
US population,
not the
global population. So it is
not telling us 1,600,000,000 suffer
chronically with tinnitus (and that only 35,000 of those people struggle badly enough with it to post here).
Thirdly, a lot of us here are the start of a new (and buggered) generation.
Tinnitus used to be a condition that very rarely crippled under 50's. But in our exciting new era of sensory over-stimulation and pharmacological dependency, that has changed, and it is no longer uncommon to find 20 somethings posting on these forums. Forget COVID-19; myopia, tinnitus and early onset dementia are the new and silent pandemics that are
not making headlines.
But for that reason it's easy to forget the old demographic; who for the most part
do not use forums (or even the internet for that matter). So add this undeclared group of geriatric technophobes to our registered number, along with people like me who simply read posts on forums like this while suffering dreadful tinnitus for 12 years before ever registering; now set that against our
vastly smaller number of people who actually
have tinnitus (don't just
experience it for 72 hours after a night at a concert). Remember that we're dealing with numbers from the US, not the world (because you can bet your life there are a f*ck load of tinnitus sufferers in Asia, for example, who have never heard of "Tinnitus Talk"). And what you have is an antidote to your routine gaslighting and persuasion that: you are just a weak minded
minority who can't handle a little noise inside your head(s).
- Threads like this Suicidal one shouldn't even exist.
A continuation of the problem. Not only should we
believe there is no problem, and that we are unique cases, possibly suffering more from mental illness than a legitimate reaction to one of the worst afflictions
humanity has ever misunderstood. But we should also not
express that there
is a problem. That's right,
stop your whining. You want to off yourself because you're slowly being drained of your life and your dignity by this unfixable defect;
keep it to yourself please, we don't need your negativity!
The best part is, the majority of these phrases I've catalogued above, come to us from our own kind in the guise of "help", whose self image(s) are a white robe and a crown of thorns. They weep for the pain
we have chosen to inflict upon ourselves, like humanity in it's "sin"; if only we would visit the
Back to Silence thread, or just go to those concerts we once loved, without caving to the herd-think hysteria. And of course they share this not only with us, but with the tinnitus-free general public, and their doctors, and ENTs; further compounding the widespread belief that those of us that can't continue to live normal lives with this condition are subject to some kind of unfortunate form of neurosis or hypochondria. That is until the day they suffer a relapse and begin posting in the suicidal thread themselves (but that will never happen, because they
beat tinnitus, right?).
Well to those people I say: if you're so concerned for our wellbeing, stop coming here and gaslighting the already gaslit (most severe tinnitus sufferers already get enough of this sh*t from their own families and doctors as it is). If you really want to "help", then instead use the time you currently invest in
belittling our horrendous experience (wittingly or unwittingly) telling those who
don't, have, know about, or appreciate, this never-ending, infinitely worsening, cosmic nightmare playing inside the head of it's host(s); how f*cking bad it is, and how desperately, young men and women, who are offing themselves, are in need of a
solid treatment,
of any kind. Let them know that the only difference between us and those with terminal cancer, is that we don't get the luxury of being spared having to do the job of ending our lives ourselves when it becomes unbearable. Why? Because
the squeaky wheel gets the grease, that's why.
As has been said many times before: we are the only sick and disabled people on earth for whom this denial of experience, bullying into self-doubt and self-inflicted worsening, is allowable and normalised. No one would dare tell a person who was paralysed that the severity was all in their head, and that they should just stand up and walk to the bathroom. No one would dare tell a person with COPD or heart failure that the severity was all in their head, and that they should just go run a marathon.
As usual, an excellent post
@Jerad. You and a handful of others on this website, legitimise the terrible suffering so many with our illness experience, and reassure us that we are not alone, as we are so often made to feel.
You highlight the problems, rather than sweep them under the carpet. I appreciate this because that is exactly what society and medicine has done with us; swept us under the carpet. And I will make no attempt to hide my contempt for the people that suffer with our same condition, yet aid this conclusion, be it by: misrepresenting our numbers, suggesting the censoring of our pain, or just proclaiming to the world that they're "fine and dandy" while suggesting us "others" are "addicted to negativity" or some sh*t.
I don't see any of
this (the mild/moderate sufferers exhibiting
Messiah complexes and preaching to us here, or the underfunding issues) changing anytime "soon" (if ever), but it feels good to call it out for what it is.
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