I’m sorry you had to go through that No one deserves a rude attitude, especially in the morning. I hope the rest of your morning is filled with happier moments~
No one does that to me but I have a pretty mild case of SzA. I have positive symptoms but not much in the way of negative or disorganized so unless I’m talking to someone who isn’t there, people can’t generally tell there’s something wrong with me.
I’ve experienced similar things from cashiers who saw me regularly, the gas station on the corner where I’ve been buying my cigarettes and soft drinks for several years. Many people don’t understand mental health issues at all, and so many people have a hard time distinguishing between intellectual disability and mental health problems. Then many more people have a difficult time distinguishing between different types of intellectual disabilities and different types of mental health problems. Apply all of that to the brief interactions between customer and cashier, and the average person might mistake some social anxiety for cognitive impairment. And then since most people don’t understand either of those things, they might rely on the only similar experience they are familiar with, which is often speaking to young children or the elderly with dementia (experiences with their own family members, more often than not).
Personally I try to just focus on the good intentions, since it’s such a brief interaction when it happens, anyway. Not like they are my friends or coworkers or medical care providers or anything. They recognize that something seems a bit off, and then their brain’s reflex reaction is to try to accommodate. The cashiers at the gas station I visit have a tendency to regard me as though I’m a 6 year old who is out alone at night. They ask me how I am feeling, try to gauge if I am “okay” and then act almost motherly towards me sometimes as far as reminding me to be safe and fussing over whether or not my clothing is adequate for the weather, etc, while meanwhile they regard every other customer as capable adults who don’t need any fussing, guidance or questioning. Never mind that I’ve been successfully making my way to the gas station and back home for over a decade without any problems. But, their hearts are in the right place, and there isn’t a lot of that in the world.
yeah, maybe he had a previous customer who was acting very bad. so he probably took it out on the next customer, which unfortunately happened to be you…
similar things happen to me. sometimes, people judge me by the way I behave. like if I’m tripping all over the place, constantly turning my head around, doing things in a slow manner, or taking baby steps.
but yeah, I just stopped going outside so much. problem solved… at least in my case
@Wave Don’t feel like he’s doing that because he’s being rude. Maybe he did think you were “special” and was trying to be a little too friendly. The one thing I hate about having schizophrenia is the ignorance that people have about it. A lot of people don’t understand what it’s like so they feel as if they need to treat you “differently”. Ugh
No one deserves a rude attitude, especially in the morning. I hope the rest of your morning is filled with happier moments~
