u/Disastrous_Health922

I recently visited the psychiatric department at the hospital; it seems the situation is quite serious. I suspect it might be a form of PTSD or schizophrenia. The doctor told me to come back for a follow-up visit in a while, but I’m still feeling very unwell right now. I think I might need to seek some help before that follow-up visit to make sure I feel a little better.

I don't know; all I know is that it seems to be Pride Month right now, so I wanted to ask this question.

I’m 23 and graduated this past March from an art university in Japan.

Because my undergrad was at an art school, the environment was entirely focused on career prep or practical artistic achievements, like winning awards or putting on exhibitions. Almost no one pursued pure academic research. As a result, the resources for undergraduate research were practically non-existent, and professors rarely had any willingness to mentor undergrads for academia.

During my junior year, I decided I wanted to pursue an academic career. Since I couldn't build a strong research foundation in Japan, and I really struggled with Tokyo's brutal summer heat (which gave me constant heatstroke and sunburns), I wanted to move somewhere cooler with a better academic environment. Even my hometown gets a bit too hot for me sometimes. I talked to several professors, and they agreed that North America offers a much stronger academic environment. Canada’s cooler climate felt like a perfect fit, and a Canadian degree would be a massive advantage if I ever return to China for research or teaching. So, my plan was to go back to China temporarily to study for the IELTS full-time and build my academic portfolio before applying to Canadian grad schools.

While I was still in Japan, my dad repeatedly promised unconditional support—specifically financial—for whatever I chose to do. But once I got back to China, the reality was entirely different.

We went to consult some study-abroad agencies. I had explicitly told my dad that due to my physical intolerance to heat, I absolutely refused to go to regions near the equator. Yet, at the agency, he completely hijacked the meeting and spent hours talking to the counselors about applying to one specific hot, equatorial region. Even when the counselors warned him that this place is currently hyper-competitive and completely lacks the Research Master's programs I need, he still insisted on sending me there. He was just going through the motions to check a box. As long as I went to any school outside the mainland system and grabbed a master's degree, he was satisfied. He didn't care about my actual goals or what I wanted to study. To make things worse, while I was talking to English tutors, my dad would sit right there and openly state that with my learning capacity and mental state, there was no way I could score a 7.5 on the IELTS.

Later on, he saw me playing a video game at home and immediately demanded that I take online classes or find self-study resources to fill up my schedule. He wanted me to treat being at home exactly like being at school: strict schedules, constant studying, and absolutely no resting. When I told him that my workload in college was far heavier than this and I still had to write papers after classes, he wouldn't listen and just stubbornly stuck to his own narrative.

On top of micromanaging my studies, he has been relentlessly pressuring me to get married. Even though I am only 23 years old, he is incredibly enthusiastic about me tying the knot. The reason? Simply because all of his colleagues' children are married. What’s ridiculous is that those people are in their 30s, approaching 35, or even over 35! But in his eyes, the fact that his 23-year-old child isn't married and doesn't already have a kid in kindergarten is a massive humiliation. He genuinely feels that my unmarried status makes him lose face and unable to hold his head high.

But the absolute worst part is how he uses this twisted, hypocritical concept of "altruism" to suppress me. This logic has been a nightmare my whole life. For example, a cousin once stole a plush toy that held great sentimental value to me, and smugly told me boys shouldn't play with toys. When I complained, my dad said it was a "good thing" because it taught me altruism, and he forbade me from holding her accountable, even though it was literal theft. Another time, a relative’s kid took a model airplane off my desk without permission and returned it broken. When I got angry, my dad scolded me, saying anger is impolite. He told me I shouldn't care and should proactively give my things away.

This twisted "respect your elders" and "altruism" logic reached an absurd peak with my grand-uncle. He was supposed to host the family New Year’s dinner but lost his money gambling, so my family ended up paying for it. To save his own face, my grand-uncle took us to his friend's restaurant. The catch? The restaurant was directly across from a crematorium and specialized in catering funeral banquets. So, our entire family—including my elderly grandmother—ate our New Year’s dinner in a freezing, unheated hall where a real funeral had just taken place. When I furiously questioned my dad about it later, he simply said that we cannot question elders, even when they are wrong, because that would violate altruism.

This exact logic is what turned my grandmother’s actual funeral into a deeply traumatic farce.

My grandmother was a devout Taoist. In our culture, making loud noises near the deceased is incredibly disrespectful. Also, Taoists don't follow the Buddhist concept of Samsara (reincarnation)—in our local context, entering Samsara means suffering through the lower realms. Yet at her funeral, someone loudly yelled to "send her into Samsara." Then, a group of women I didn’t even know swarmed her grave, grabbing dirt and wailing like ghouls feeding on carrion.

I was crying out of pure rage, screaming at them, but no one cared. When I later asked my dad how he could think that funeral was okay, he actually said, "It was fine. She suffered too much in life." I asked him: "If you knew she suffered so much in life, why let her suffer in death?"

That argument broke something in me. I felt a rage I’ve never felt before. We haven't spoken since; I moved out, and we barely see each other.

Now, the fallout from all this is destroying me.

My mental health is deteriorating rapidly. I suffer from severe insomnia, constantly flashing back to every time I was bullied or treated unfairly since childhood. I’m starting to get paranoid, wondering if people secretly want to see me suffer. I am trapped in this emotional swamp of his "altruism" and my own anger, and I honestly don't know how to heal from this trauma so I can actually focus on studying for my IELTS again.

What terrifies me the most is my timeline. The last time my mental health crashed this hard, it took me two full years to recover. If it takes another two years, I’ll be 25. By the time I apply, I'll be 27, and 29 when I finish my Master's. If I do a PhD and Post-doc, I’ll be pushing 50 by the time I'm done. I am so scared that starting a Master's and eventually a PhD in my mid-to-late 20s means I'm just too old for this path. I feel like my academic dream is already dead because I’ve wasted so much time.

On top of that, I’m terrified that if I take too long to recover, the Japanese professors who supported me will either retire or forget me. I don't even know what I could possibly say to them right now to maintain those relationships so I don't lose their recommendation letters while I try to put myself back together.

I feel so desperate and out of time. Has anyone navigated out of a mental swamp like this? How do I even begin to move forward?

The following content is not suitable for reading while eating, as it may be a bit gross. I’ll do my best to keep this post as subtle and as non-gross as possible, but please forgive me if I can’t.

I have depression—though it could also be PTSD; I’m not sure which one it is exactly—but I’ve been treating it as depression for seven or eight years. I’ve watched my condition get worse and worse over time. Without any triggers, I’m probably a healthy person—or at least 60% healthy—but if the stress reaches a certain level, I absolutely cannot control my emotions. I might start yelling, throwing things, or even resort to violence.

Throughout my life, there have been many events that I consider traumatic—at the very least, I don’t want them to happen again. Whenever I think back on them or encounter something similar, I experience intense emotional turmoil, and my anger becomes difficult to control.

A few months ago, a series of events caused my condition to worsen. I started having seizures and nightmares, couldn’t get proper rest, and even began experiencing auditory and visual hallucinations. I was forced to abandon my planned master’s program and had to take a break to focus on my recovery. To help lift my spirits, my family took paid leave and planned a trip for me. I was really looking forward to it and spent a long time planning the trip—it was a nine-day journey.

As it turned out, the very thing I dreaded happened. It may sound ridiculous, but when someone farts right in front of me—completely unashamed and brazenly—it really gets my blood boiling. Especially since the incident itself was a traumatic experience.

I remember back in high school, I once talked to my father about transferring schools and studying in another country, because I simply couldn’t stand the routine of starting class at 6 a.m. and finishing at 11 a.m., especially since there were 80 of us crammed into a single classroom—the whole environment felt like a concentration camp.

Then one day, my dad came to pick me up from school, and we talked about it on the way home. He turned into a total monster. Basically, he went into a loop of belching loudly, farting, and shouting my name. I tried to reason with him, explaining what I wanted to do, because the current situation was making me feel desperate and miserable—I felt like I was going to lose my mind if things kept going this way.

His response, however, was to shout “No, my name” and “That won’t do, my name” at almost speech-like volume between loud farts and burps, all the way to our house. Even after I’d stopped speaking long ago, I found myself worrying whether he was having stomach trouble.

Since that was the route local high school students took to and from school, we ran into quite a few of my classmates along the way. It wasn’t until we were almost home that I finally lost my temper and asked him if he was doing this just to humiliate me.

He just smiled at me, then said in a tone of pride, as if he’d accomplished some great feat: “Yes, I did this to make you feel ashamed, to humiliate you in front of your classmates, because you want to study abroad—and that would bring shame upon me and our family.”

(Since I’ve reached the character limit, I’ll continue discussing this in the comments section.)

Yesterday, someone asked on AskChinese which is better, China or the U.S., as things stand right now.

I briefly described the current situation: China’s roads are in disrepair and no one is fixing them, and the youth unemployment rate is absolutely out of control.

I even wrote a long post specifically to explain these points based on my personal experience.

Guess what happened? A bunch of people accused me of lying, some said I wasn’t Chinese, and others even claimed I was smearing China—and my post was subjected to an organized downvote campaign.

Some people even claim that at least China has health insurance. The problem is that anyone with common sense knows just how riddled with loopholes China’s health insurance system is.

In the end, I came up with a solution: to refute some people’s arguments in Chinese. After all, we’re all Chinese, so being able to speak Chinese fluently is only natural. But the result was that the vast majority of my Chinese replies fell on deaf ears, and all I got in return were downvotes.

Looking at the popular replies, they’re just trying to prove one thing: that so-called “socialist” or “communist” China is the best country in the world—just like those weebs who think Japan is the center of the universe and that the Japanese did nothing wrong during World War II. To prove this, they’re even willing to pretend to be Chinese.

It’s downright infuriating. Why? Because in their eyes, if you were born in China, you must be a communist; and if you’re a dissident, then you’re either a racist or a mentally colonized traitor. Yet in reality, under the Communist Party’s leadership, China has not only lost two million square kilometers of territory but has also been forced to export vast amounts of resources—resources that could have benefited its own citizens—to places like Cuba, North Korea, and Africa.

In their eyes, the vast majority of Chinese people—even those who have spent their entire lives in prison-like schools that rival Nazi concentration camps, attending classes from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily, paying exorbitant taxes, and receiving government healthcare that doesn’t even cover the cost of a single hospital stay, let alone the mess that unfolded in Shanghai during the COVID-19 pandemic—simply do not exist. Moreover, they believe that Chinese people are born to meekly accept these injustices and be filled with gratitude, because this is part of Chinese culture, a manifestation of liberation from Western colonialism, or some other nonsense like a “communist paradise” constructed from a jumble of words. Even though communism has existed on this land with five thousand years of history for no more than a century—and was introduced via Japan from Germany—

It is precisely because of this association that tankies forbid Chinese people from voicing their grievances, as this would shatter the idyllic image of the communist paradise in their minds. This is akin to the Nazis or other extreme nationalist movements, which directly brand certain groups as deserving of a miserable existence.

Moreover, this is a shameless and utterly evil act, because they actually force people who are suffering to claim they are happy.