I mean, I’m anti-meds for treating exogenic issues when something can be done for those exogenic issues.

If I’m sitting at home with the heater on and I start feeling warm and flushed, I wouldn’t take an ibuprofen (as an anti-pyretic) to bring my temperature down, I’ll turn the heater off.

It’s the same for mental health, if the sole source of the stress/sorrow is external, medication is nothing more than a bandaid, which is better than nothing if the exogenic influence is outside your individual control (which it often is)… But we are at a point where the majority of people with mental health issues are experiencing a level of exogenic influence and there are enough of us that if we organised we could change the factors that are causing or worsening our mental health symptoms.

So it bears talking about, is medication always appropriate?

Medication is important, especially for endogenic conditions, and medication is life saving. But if you have exogenic depression and the meds aren’t working, the new prescription is protest.

This is what is breaking my mental health.

Life is not guaranteed to be good, nature is cruel and has no rhyme or reason. People die and suffer in horrific ways every day because of nature.

Why the fuck are we adding to that cruelty!?

The chaos of the natural order of the universe sucks and you’ve got to learn to cope with that. But I’ve always found that side of life easy to accept because it is so inevitably universally unavailable.

I was born with a genetic illness, it causes lifelong disability due to structural deformity, but can also just randomly cause fatal aneurysms in young people. That’s nature, that sucks, but hey, what are you going to do? Figure out how to do what you need to do to live and live it.

But then I’m born into a country with no disability discrimination laws, and no right to access laws. Fortunately we had public healthcare and public disability services, and public welfare services, and when I was younger a disability act was finally brought in (though it’s often just lip service)

Growing up I felt safe and secure knowing I had a good social support system…but the public disability services shut down and was replaced by an insurance model, the public healthcare has been functionally split to a semi public copay system and a private paid system, and the welfare pension is so far below the poverty line that people on a disability pension don’t earn enough money to meet the eligibility for public housing.

(yes, You can be too poor, for public/social housing.)

And it’s one thing for law and legislation to lag behind the needs of the people, it’s another thing altogether when an individual or small group of individuals in power systematically impose laws to remove the support and resources you used to have, for barely no more reason than “they want to”.

I can’t help but feel that a significant portion of my suffering is the result of the few people in the local conservative government that shut down the public disability service providers because it was “costing too much” … Even though the insurance model they replaced it with costs the government more and supports less people than the previous system, and supports them less effectively.

And how do you live with that?

Like it’s one thing for nature to have cursed me to suffer, but a human being heard my story, and countless stories like mine, and still said “nah, fuck em” when it came to vote.

We are living with psychopaths and sociopaths in complete control over our lives. The suffering is happening for a reason, and the reason is that those who are causing the suffering are enjoying the situation (because it gives them money, power, influence, or straight up sadism)

How the fuck do you reconcile that and “learn to sit with your emotions” in one CBT session and in the very next session my therapist is going to teach me about “enforcing my boundaries”… How do I enforce my personal boundary to get the homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic and ableist government to stop abusing me? Oh, I don’t, I sit with that emotion.

I can’t afford the pills they recommend.

I’m on board!

I’m a big fan of the word cunt in all of its current uses it’s my preferred slang term for my own, though it’s rare to find someone who’s not taken aback by that in the bedroom.

Would it be a grammatically consistent pronoun? “oh, someone left cunt wallet, I hope cunt come get it” or do we need a cunt/cunter situation? So cunt can collect cunter wallet.

The way the OP phrases it rules out trans men who have vaginas, trans women who have vaginas, and a bunch of cis women who’ve had certain pelvic traumas or cancers and therefore don’t have vaginas.

What he’s trying to say is “if you were born with a vagina and you align with it” which is actually still funny because I was born with my vagina, I like my vagina, I’ll be happily keeping it even after all my surgeries…but if this OP saw my face he would put me in the “trans man” bucket because they lack nuance around identity.

You need to get big into two tone ska, then the fedora is socially acceptable again.

partners they could hypothetically reproduce with

“fertile women”

“women capable of pregnancy”

Outdated, slight red flag option: “gynephile”

Or you could even try “I find women attractive and would love to have kids with the woman I love one day”

There, language isn’t that hard.

I love that half of these are fully gender neutral terms of endearment in Australia 😂

See this way of thinking has actually landed me in a pretty bad place with my mental health.

“I’m in charge of my own emotions” is not something an autistic person with rigid lines of thinking should internalise, but I did.

As a result I never gave myself permission to feel negative emotions, because who wants to feel negative about anything if they don’t have to?

It seemed so smart and healthy, just be happy, that’s what everyone always says about the easy fix to mental health. It was easy too, regardless what was happening around me, if I pictured myself feeling happy, I’d feel happy.

I’m in my 30s and regularly mistake sensations with other sensations (am I tired or do I need to pee? They both cause a headache) and also I think all my negative emotions are skipping my brain entirely and coming out my arse in the form of IBS.

I can’t picture myself feeling sad to experience sad because I …don’t remember what sad feels like.

I remember what vomiting feels like, because that’s how my body has reacted to “sad” recently.

I can see how it’s directly linked to “people are out there shooting CEOs for this, you’re next” is threatening, but I dont see how the language of the threat implies that the person saying the threat has any intention to also be the shooter, and not just that they wish and believe that a shooter is out there with this CEO on their hit list.

This, if anything it might clarify a few confusing exchanges we’ve had in the past, and it will certainly help me be a better friend in the the future.

If I already know you, I know you, I’m choosing to be friends with you because of how you treat me and how you treat others when we hang out together. If I had any problems with that, I wouldn’t be friends long enough to hear you tell me about your NPD diagnosis.

Now that said, I’ve had friends tell me about a diagnosis and it shouldn’t change anything, but now that the diagnosis is out in the open they want it to change things and I can’t offer that to the friendship, such as compromising on my own boundaries (eg: I had a friend who after explaining their condition asked me to provide tone indicators for everything I say, but I have alexithymia so that was really difficult for me to do and I couldn’t adjust my behaviour to meet the new expectations of the friendship, so we faded out of each other’s lives, they told people I stopped being friends with them because of their anxiety disorder… No it’s because I couldn’t meet the changed expectations of the friendship, describing my emotions every minute is hard for me and I choose not to be friends with people who require me to do that for their comfort)

“you people are next” doesn’t sound direct to me because “next” for what? Next for a random vigilante to shoot, next to die in general, next to face bad PR?

My interpretation also leaves no room to imply I’ll be the one actioning whatever the “next” thing is. I’d use “you’re next” in the same use case as “karma will get you” or “the universe will balance out your luck” it’s more of a cosmic wish than a rise to action.

People’s work preferences are their own, these guys are having fun, good for them.

I always maintained I can’t work from home, I was forced to teach via zoom during lock downs and even now my job is hybrid, I teach in person in a shared classroom but I don’t have an office, I do all my prep and notes from home. Only I don’t. My productivity genuinely dropped when I lost my office.

Then I house sat for a friend who had a home office and I realised I can work from home, just not my home, because it’s not set up for work and my head space in my home can’t flip to that “productive mode”.

So now I go to the local library, which is better than my house but still not as good as an office because it’s still distracting.

But it depends on the type of work, I prefer lesson planning alone in quiet peace, I get so much done, but when we’re developing community events I love being in our open staff room with laptops out, some of us sitting on the floor, others standing and just shooting ideas around, we always get so much done.

But I’ve worked in other centres where that level of collaboration and communication wasn’t there - we didn’t have the right mix of personality types, and a workplace like my current staffroom would be chaos and nothing would get done.

In Australia cigarettes are sold behind the counter, all packets are identical brown with plain white text with the brand. You can’t smoke them in public, and they’re one of the highest taxed products (a 25 pack will easily cost you $50)

And yet we still have a major smoking problem here.

Mostly because of black market fags, $20 illegal import packs, and “vape wars”. It’s shocking when a tabbaconist shop doesn’t get fire bombed by a competing shop.

That said, the tax revenue is nice, if people wanna smoke the rest of the community may as well get something out of it.

Tax the birdie.

I still feel like the nouns are in the wrong place when I read this.

I’m reading it as “New York cows new York cows bully bully New York cows”

When I want it to read “New York cows bully new York cows” which would be “Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” which isn’t enough buffalo.

I have to inset my own “that” to be able to get my head around “Buffalo buffalo (that) Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”

Gay lead; when being a stone top just isn’t hard enough.

No idea, he lives on the other side of the state and I only see him 3 times a year for his birthday, father’s day and Christmas. My brother used to live with him but he spends most of his time with mum now.

I’m certain my dad is getting this rhetoric from social media because he’s a lonely and isolated man in his late 60s with no friends outside of his male dominated blue collar job.

But it’s not my job to reform him, I don’t have the skill set or energy.

I’d had the same recurring dream since early highschool. It was dream like in that it was a true labyrinth that mademoiselle no structuralism sense, walking around in the dream was ethereal, but the objects within were mundane, the toilets were broken or dirty in ways that could be reality not fantasy, but I always knew it was a dream, and for me it wasn’t panicked, it was just helplessly frustrating.

Because it was so recurring (at one point I was having this dream weekly) I told every therapist I ever had and they’ll all suggested it was about performance anxiety, since many of the toilets were missing doors, or contamination anxiety, or even just having a full bladder before bed. None of that really resonated.

It was in my 20s, having lunch with and old friend, they’d brought their new partner and we got talking about recurring dreams somehow. We covered the usual, the teeth falling out dream, the highschool exam you never studied for that you’re also naked for, etc. I start describing the toilet labyrinth, specifically mentioning that I’m not panicked in the dream, in just confused and frustrated, and this new guy excitedly exclaims “you’ve got an undiagnosed disability, I guarantee it”. He was half right, I was diagnosed, but I didn’t have any support systems because I’m broke.

The toilet labyrinth is a very common stress dream, but everyone has a slightly different response to it, and it’s motivated by different factors. For some people it’s performance anxiety, for some people it’s health anxiety. Sometimes it’s a fear that your private secrets will cause public shame if they got out. In my case it was my subconscious asking the question “how is everyone else making this look easy? how is everyone else able to do this? The tools I’ve been given fundamentally don’t work! why do people keep staring at me like I’m the idiot for not being able to use a broken toilet? why is no one else talking about how to broken and unusable these toilets are? How is it everyone else managing to do this!?” because I in my real life I was trying to keep up with the able bodied peers while disabled with no support, and I wasn’t eligible for support so it was very much “but how do I do anything when I don’t have the tools? Stop asking me to jump, and punishing me for not jumping when I have no legs to jump with”

(I have legs, that’s just a metaphor)

Jesus, now that its terrifying!

What would even be the point of a link that allows you that? Like, why was it designed to do that!?

Props to that person who PM’d you the warning.

I’ve been out as queer since I was 14. I’m in my 30, he still hasn’t come around.

Given his age and health, if he’s planning too come around he’d better get on it quick, at this rate he’s dying a bigot.

I’m not waiting any more, I put my whole life on hold waiting for him to come around so I could live my life safely. If I need to cut him out of my life I will.

I appreciate they kind words, but please keep in mind mind that it’s not always smart or safe to tell a trans person to be patient. The individual will know their level of safety, and advice to be patient and understanding can in some cases case be very, very harmful.

This is the thing. Musk and everything his company does in terms of labour and marketing, and just their whole ethos is unethical as fuck, and I can’t stand that as a society we are celebrating Tesla.

But self driving cars are not inherently bad or dangerous to persue as a technological advancement.

Self driving cars will kill people, they’ll will hit pedestrians and crash into things.

So do cars driven by humans.

Human driven cars kill a lot of people.

Self driving cars need to be safer than human driven cars to even consider letting them on the the road, but we can’t truly expect a 0% accident rate on self driving cars in the early days of the technology when we don’t expect that of the humanity driven cars.