I am absolutely seething at the Guardian for printing this and enabling her, and at her for riding on the coattails of yet another diagnosis she knows nothing about and will actively harm the community of people living with.
I have CPTSD. No, you can’t easily get NHS therapy, it took me over a decade to get diagnosed and I have to pay for therapy privately or there is a 2 year+ waiting list for very poor level of service. CPTSD needs long term, intense and specialist treatment like EMDR, inner child work, and reparenting. Every day life is gruelling and the constant flight/fight/freeze status of your mind and body means you are never far from the risk of horrific spiral into suicidal ideation, horrendous emotional void disassociation and depression. It robs you of the basic joys of life and can stop you functioning in work, relationships, and daily life if you aren’t having therapy or working intensely on your inner self. It makes you a shell of a person, not knowing who you are and that you are totally without worth or value, because repeat and constant trauma has robbed you of the ability to trust, love, emote, and live with natural human reactions and emotions to life. It definitely doesn’t give you an ego the size of a giant’s left testicle and the ability to fabricate an intricate persona that rakes in thousands through media work and online “activism”. It barely lets you survive.
To suggest that her poverty cosplay and alleged (constantly changing and evolving as she embellishes them) incidents in her life even approaches what life is like for me and others who have to try and live with CPTSD is absolutely disgusting. I have lurked here for a long time when alarm bells started ringing about her ED baiting words and pictures, but this might be the lowest of the low for me.