yeah fuck this, my soul crushing depression and ADHD are largely independent of my environment. I get that this is true for some people, but posts like these make me angry.
As someone who also has depression and ADHD. There is nothing wrong with us. It's OK to take medication to survive in an environment that's actively hostile to people like us, but it's also OK to acknowledge that if our society actually valued people we could live the way we need with the community support we need and likely wouldn't need to be medicated any more.
It's like covid, catching covid doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. It means our society isn't structured in a way to prevent people from getting sick (masks, vaccines, etc) and values profits more than people's wellbeing.
Right or wrong doesn't factor for me. I do not make value judgements about my neurochemistry, I just care about how well I am able to exist. I do not believe I'd live a happy life if I was unmedicated, regardless of our society. You are free to believe that about yourself, but I know what my untreated depression feels like—an absolutely crushing nothingness where I starve myself because I'm too apathetic to eat. I know what my untreated ADHD feels like—a bottomless pit of unmotivation and a maddening lack of emotional mindfulness. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong or shameful with having a medical condition that requires medication to treat. People with physical conditions shouldn't be told that they'd be fine if society just accepted them when the consequences of not treating their condition is misery or death. I have a physical condition that affects my neurochemistry to a degree that prevents me from being happy and living. Some people have depression and can deal with it by making concessions or exercising or meditating and I'm happy for them. Therapy helped me a lot with my depression, but the baseline miserable nothingness is still there. Some people have ADHD but have found coping strategies and don't need meds, and I'm happy for them. The D in ADHD is too strong for me to deal with on my own in any conceivable circumstance, and that is fine. There's nothing wrong or shameful about that, it is what it is, like how someone with a congenital issue might need a wheelchair. I am entitled to my own understanding of myself, the shit I've suffered through, and how I deal with it.
I absolutely agree that our society treats neurodiverse people like shit. I agree that we're generally lonely and don't support each other well. Nothing wrong at all with that premise. I categorically disagree with your statement that we "likely wouldn't need to be medicated anymore" if things were to change. I am either not a part of your "we," or you are attempting to invalidate the decades I've spent coming to grips with what I need to survive.
EDIT: I don't like being this hostile, but as I said, I am very fucking touchy about this topic. I've had enough of people assuming they know how my head works.
It has nothing to do with profits because it is something that happens everywhere even in countries/companies that are less profit focussed (yes that exists, you see it more in companies following the Rhineland business model).
A friend of mine is way to smart for his own good has depression and is autistic. It is not like he couldn’t do the work, but it is A that he cannot guarantee he will be there every day and B he cannot really deal with people having authority on him. Nor does self employment work for him. Working together with him on anything doesn’t really work cause you cannot expect anything from him sadly.
And it is getting worse and worse the more he realises that there is a lot wrong with society. He is now basically pushing anything and everybody away, but apparently he is getting more productive now he stopped blowing weed (his words, not mine).
Yeah there are companies who don’t want to help people for profit/loss reasons, but that is not the only reason why some people cannot function like others in the world.
yeah fuck this, another example of someone being mad at a meme that clearly wasnt aimed at them. Comments like these make me angry.
Like, it kinda is aimed at people like me though? I've talked with my therapist about how fucked up the state of the world is over the decade or so I've been working with them. I had a psychiatrist try to increase my antidepressant dosage when I was struggling through some really terrible EMDR therapy (dealing with childhood trauma caused by how shitty our society is) because they thought it would make my life more bearable, which is exactly the meme. I pushed back on that because I knew what was causing that specific misery and I was solving it with therapy, not psychiatry. I don't engage with my psychiatrists like they're therapists, but I have otherwise been in this picture. Psychiatrists treat problems with pills, and sometimes they try to fix things that aren't best addressed with medication.
I've also spent my life being told that I was stupid, weak, incompetent, or lazy because no matter what else is going on with my life, I have baseline physiological issues that prevent my brain from functioning. I am far from alone in this. I would have had a better life if my condition had been treated as soon as it was noticed. The stigma surrounding psychiatric medicine meant that I wasn't and I suffered as a result. This post perpetuates the stigma that caused my suffering so I do not like it and will say something about it.
How does that work? Environment is everything
I don't think your sick, I don't think I am either... I think we're hunters in a society of farmers
No.
Do not assume you understand my mental state. You can be a "hunter in a society of farmers." I'll just continue being a person with an imbalanced neurochemistry that I use medication to balance. I just want be able to get out of bed on a Saturday and do things I love.
My life has been filled with enough invalidation and unsolicited "advice" about my mental health, so I'm a little fucking touchy about this shit sometimes.
Some of my meds, sure, but others are no doubt helping regardless of the late-stage capitalist hellscape.
Yes. SSRI isn’t a “make you happy pill” it’s legitimately something countering a physical problem with serotonin production in the brain.
I beginning to suspect it's the pills that have convinced us this is last-stage capitalism instead of simply next-stage capitalism.
Oh no, a solution that helps me to not be a blob, laying in my bed, womdering if should i even get up. The horrors of therapy actually helping me to get shit done.
God, i hate anti-therapy or anti-meds posting.
Both can be true at the same time. Therapy and meds can be wonderful to help create a better world than the soul-crushing dystopia we're currently heading for.
Nothing here is anti therapy.
And I wouldn't interpret it as anti meds either. It's just pointing out the absurdity of a society that's so miserable it forces people to seek medical attention just to exist. Any rational society would change until people are happy.
The problem with portraying it like this is there is no room for nuance, it pits medication against society with no room for both. Maybe it wouldn’t read like that if there wasn’t a societal stigma against mental illness and meds, but that’s ironically the world we live in.
I don't think it's either of those things. We all need to cope. The meme just laments that coping is necessary
The problem is that those it doesn’t work for just get told to keep trying. Just keep throwing money at something that doesn’t work. “Try therapy” is almost a thought terminating response to any problem.
It’s wonderful that medication and CBT work for some. They do not work for me, and that’s something I know because I’ve tried and tried and tried. But the only response I’ve gotten when seeking support is the “try therapy and meds!”
There’s also a substantially amount of privilege in being able to access therapy and medications. They are not universally accessible. If you are LGBT in a rural area, the “problem” that they will try to fix and medicate you for will be that you are LGBT. Most therapists in my area do not take insurance because getting it covered is complicated and my state is attempting to get therapists notes entered into a publicly accessible database. I’m losing insurance this month, but even with insurance before $500 or so a month to try to get my brain working, especially when it hasn’t been fucking working because my problems are external - like what’s the fucking point?
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.
Medication isn’t just a bandaid on outside factors, it can serve as a short term treatment tool to help someone face the issues they are struggling with. I would bet most people on some kind of antidepressant were not on them permanently, just long enough to get stable and see results from therapy and work. That’s the problem with being anti-medication without much nuance, it stigmatizes the tools people use as being unnecessary bandaids or crutches. It just screams “you don’t need meds, just deal with your issues”.
TBF there is something to be said for coping with and learning to live in the world you inhabit, not the world you wish it to be.
Doesn’t mean you should stop trying to make the better future happen, but contribute, don’t just wait for it to magically happen.
The issue isn't the fact that the world is bad; it's the fact that there are evil people out there actively trying to make it worse (Trump, Putin, etc). I feel like it would be a lot easier to cope with a bad world compared to an evil one.
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.
Real Photo of a True American Patriot, circa 2025 (colorized)
The game came out in 2008. I can't believe it was that long ago.
man this is just like counter-strike!
They don't even do that. They just take the edge off enough that I don't actually try to throw myself off a bridge.
yes AND please pleeeeease try meds if you and your doctor think it could potentially help...
...but also yes
Better to not be miserable and still work to better society. Depression will just be an obstacle
This is a huge issue. People really do stop when they are hopeless and it really messes you up. Optimism is hella dorky and feels dumb and wrong to a lot of people, but it's not just a low IQ take for nerd ass dicks it's also a necessity you need to protect you from shut down and languishing in your own endless dispair. You HAVE to be hopeful. You HAVE to look forward and you HAVE to believe things can get better in order to move forward.
This has been so much of my problem with therapy. It’s the shit situation that needs to be fixed. If I was currently in a home that belonged to me, knew that I would have food next month, and wasn’t terrified of being arrested for now carrying “wrong” documentation… I don’t think I’d need therapy. I’ve got a fuck load of coping mechanisms, but journaling and art don’t beat hunger and fascism.
Weed just seems better than anything else I’ve tried. It makes various physical pains go away. It makes food palatable. It makes sex better. It makes every film high cinema. It unlocks creative freedom. Video games are like stepping into a new world.
I don’t understand why replacing 50 mg of THC with whatever mg of Wellbutrin or Lexapro or whatever is the “better” solution. I don’t understand why CBT is pushed as the “gold standard” to the point where practitioners will lie on intake and say they don’t push it.
And as someone who has taught research design and statistics, taken graduate courses in social science research… so much of the base frameworks in psychology have very little evidence. Things like the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram just were not good (or ethical) research. Freud was so full of shit it’s funny that his name is a letter away from Fraud - look into how he treated the victims of sexual assault. A lot of surveys and instruments have questionable validity (cough, cough IQ)
Fuck, I was helping a girl work through a psychology textbook, and it basically claimed that girls didn’t get autism because they are naturally more empathic.
In southern states too - the bulk of providers are the Dr. Phil type. “Tough love,” hypocrisy, and dubious sexual ethics. Institutions are prisons. Most mental health crises end in jail.
Mental health care is seriously fucked and maybe that’s why the situation is so shit.
Not to skip over everything else in your comment, but 50mg?! I would die lol
I wrote that comment on 50 lol.
Best paper I’ve ever written was done over 36 hours on a couple of addy, three pink Monsters, several shots of rotgut vodka, and 200 mg THC spread over the course of it.
500 mg is where I get fucked up. I did 1000 mg once and experienced the Christian hell. 50 mg is like being a normal human being.
In my opinion, part of what I think the message by liberals should’ve been for the last 10 years is not to just vote early and often, but to actually run for office. I can easily see how the critical deterioration of the average person’s mental health would make it challenging to reach this end. Our understanding of mental health still leaves so much to be desired
I’ve know some low level elected officials, and I think an aspect there might (especially w/r/t mental health) be how crushing taking your role seriously can be. Most campaigns I volunteered on lost, and those that made it burnt out pretty quickly. It’s easier to do nothing and not care, and financially beneficial to do evil.
One campaign we lost because the candidate got outed as a lesbian. Any form of queer identity guarantees that you can only run for one party, and that party just doesn’t win.
I want those pills.
They don't actually work... your just miserable AND have dry mouth.
I can only dream of drymouth. My pills interfere with pooping
L4D was a phenomenal game. I wish I could go back in time and get a group of four of us together to play the way we used to.
There's new games out with the same vibe, try uh, Helldivers 2 or that WH40K: "Darktide"
Killing Floor 2 is a good zombie fps that I think rivals L4D and L4D2. Excellent gunplay, multiple classes. Six player co-op, runs well even on potato, goes regularly on deep discount Steam sales.
I've tried countless prescriptions. None of them did anything helpful and a handful of them were a nightmare to come off of. Doctor's literally just throwing random pills at me telling me to "try this one and see if it helps."
Nothing helps.
It is wild to me that it’s just a guessing game for them, when were the ones stuck with a new pill and all the possible side effects that come with (not to mention the prescription cost) just for it to probably not work, and then onto the next pill on the list.
I can offer options, but I'd prefer express permission to do so.
But it's more profitable to keep people miserable and medicate them!
"DEEP STATE MANUFACTURED COVID IN A LAB TO SELL MORE VACCINES! REEEEE"
That you? 🤨
Cuz that's what you sound like.
Yes because there's no difference between challenging the profit motive of the healthcare industry and conspiracy theories, you fucking dipshit.
There’s a difference between conspiracy theories and having an analysis of incentives and structures.
There doesn’t need to be a conspiracy for profit seeking corporations to decide not to invest their money into something they think won’t return as much profit.
As for everything else staying shitty, why would corporations spend money on lobbying and campaign contributions if they didn’t expect it to make them a profit? Obviously those corporations want less taxes, less regulations that might cost them money to comply with, and the more of the economy that is privatized, the more opportunities capitalists have for making more profits.
That’s not a conspiracy theory, that’s a basic understanding of economics and political economy plus some history.
Literally Brave New World
Where's my orgy porgy ffs
Yes and its totally reasonable to excpect that from a mental health professional. Literally everyone else but you has to be responsible for your mental health right?
It would have been nice if my school provided therapists didn't sabotage my education when it was free.
maybe your problem is that you think that's what the medication is for.
is there a special kind of therapy for being a dumbass
This is what we call a practical solution. The person in the lounge could be a NAZI for all you know.
"Oh no, a deadly pandemic. Best I can do is inject dead virus to trick your body to improve its immune system"
That's what you sound like... 🙄
(A treatment that works is a good treatment method.)
I don't think that's a fair comparison.
You seem not to know that there's such a thing as "situational depression".
You can literally be depressed because of circumstances. Guess what the treatment is.
Go back to your cave you fucking troll. You are the perfect example of why we should bring back public shaming.
Ugh, conspiracy theorists should probably live in caves.
