‘What’s the most unhinged advice you’ve ever received?’ – 21 so-called pearls of wisdom to make you run a mile

People love dishing out advice, especially parents and those in positions of power, but it turns out that often their wise words are useless. And sometimes not just useless, but actively insane.

Over on the AskUK subreddit, user BigMagic88 posted this:

And it turned out that, yes, people had received some completely wild and utterly unhelpful counsel, as the replies showed…

1.

‘Had a taxi driver a couple of weeks ago tell me I should hunt and eat pheasant and partridge to make my cock strong.’
–benjm88

2.

‘This is actually good advice but the timing was definitely a little bit off. My mum sat me down once and told me to be careful online because of grooming and paedophiles and all that. I had just turned 19.’
–OkayEffectively

3.

‘When I was 14 I had a suicidal friend and confided in my Mum for advice. Her unhinged advice was to talk to my friend less to avoid the difficulty (Note: they didn’t die!).’
–uneasy-chicken

4.

‘Not advice I received but overheard: ‘If she’s finding things really tough at the moment then maybe she should think about having a baby to distract her’. The other person nodded in agreement.’
–soverytiiiired

5.

‘Ha! I got similar advice from my ex-MIL when confiding in her about issues we were having. ‘He needs a baby’. Does he? Does he really? The emotionally abusive, controlling man tied to his mother’s apron strings needs a baby, does he?’
–brandnewsnakemomma

6.

‘I could be dying and my mum would tell me to ‘go outside and eat a banana’.’
–Party-Werewolf-4888

7.

‘My extremely wealthy former boss told me to ‘just get into debt, you’ll wipe it all when you get an inheritance’ when I was explaining that unfortunately I couldn’t afford to go out for lunch with the team every day, because if I do that I can’t afford any other food or heating.

‘He was genuinely bewildered when I said I probably won’t be getting an inheritance, and that I’m not convinced eating out every day when I could bring food from home was a good reason to get myself into debt I wouldn’t have been able to get out of for years.

‘But that’s my bad for accepting a job that required a PhD and only paid £23k, really.’
–JennyW93

8.

‘I was sitting in a cafe with a woman friend. I’m a trans woman but this was way before transition and I was and am happily married. This was just a conversation between two friends, one apparently a man and the other a woman. She was talking about her stuff, events and just generally things going on for her and we had stuff in common because our children were friends, she and her partner had been on holiday with my partner and me and so on.

‘When she went to the toilet, a guy behind me said I wasn’t talking about myself enough and that the best way to appeal to her sexually was to do that! This has always struck me as (a) really bad advice assuming we were on a date, and (b) badly reading the situation of just two friends having a coffee together.’
–nineteenthly

9.

‘A hippie once said to my pale as a ghost face that I shouldn’t wear suncream because I’m an Aries and we’re meant to be ‘fiery’.’
–RaspberryJammm

10.

‘I was told to meditate away my ADHD… you know, just shut my brain off and relax, which is super easy with ADHD, right?’
–oscarx-ray

11.

‘Partner’s dad would tell our children to not walk round with bare feet as they would get a cold in their tummy. Its not particularly unhinged advice just quite odd.’
–vextedkitten

12.

‘Went to the GP to ask to get two year old referred for a hearing test as he wasn’t speaking at all, she told me I needed to have a sibling as that’s why he wasn’t talking. Like a baby would come out talking, she d left (not sure if was asked to leave) the GP practice before he got his diagnosis ‘autism and speech and language developmental impairment’.’
–ceb1995