Tough call - I deal with this too. There are two ways (at least) to deal with this:
- Keep your pledge cap low and just have a strict rule: if you don’t do the task, you have to pay the pledge, illness or not. This helps me out because I have to take responsibility, and it weakens the temptation to feel helpless and incapable and blame the illness (this temptation is itself a thought distortion caused by the mental illness), but the pledge is low so it doesn’t cost me too much when there was legitimately nothing else I could do.
See:
- Or, you can just look back and ask whether you think you dealt with the day in the healthiest way for you. Were you genuinely in need of a day off, and was your decision to take a “sick day” the best for you? If so, it’s not a legit derailment. Or, did you end up feeling worse because you didn’t get out of bed to do something? If so, it was a legit derailment. There’s no simple test for this - just your guess.
It’s not obvious to me that there is a line - I would imagine this varies from person to person.
And if setting up a strict rule (with limited pledge cap) helps people feel better and get more done on the other days, then I would guess dreev has no problem taking someone’s money on the few days they had a mental illness flare-up.