HELLO I need some help lmao I have Several Bills and no food. my car insurance is $150, my car payment is $202, and I still have $300 left on my rent,,, as you can imagine I’m v stressed rn. My checks have been smaller bc of the holidays (I’m an office temp so had a lot of days off the last month or so) and money has been hella tight <33 I’m looking for another job, but that’s uh, slow going aksk
Any help that you can offer would be super appreciated <33 my cash app is $corvidc0re and my Venmo is @/corvid-core. If PayPal’s your thing, I can give you mine thru dms
"you only deserve food and shelter if you contribute to society" says people living in countries where nobody's labor actually feeds or benefits their neighbors anymore but exclusively benefits the companies keeping the food and shelter behind the artificial paywalls
You're not nomads relying on each other to hunt and gather anymore, you're talking about stocking shelves for fucking wal marts
And even the oldest societies on earth all took care of the elderly or sick anyway
there is a very real tendency of teenagers with anxiety disorders self diagnosing with considerably more stigmatized and impairing mental illnesses (e.g. schizophrenia, DID, personality disorders), but the best response to that isn't to get angry with them for "appropriating" lol. instead you show them coping resources for the problems they're actually having and deemphasize diagnostic categories in general. if an 18 year old is claiming to have alzheimer's, they're probably making an innocent mistake and are in genuine distress. be kind.
Also I think this trend comes, at least in part, from how brushed aside anxiety disorders can be. If your parents and teachers dismiss you with 'oh everyone feels anxious', then inevitably you're going to start thinking that there must be something else going on with you
”You must feel very scared right now; let’s talk about how to help you personally, tailored to your symptoms” will always be more helpful than “stop faking (X) for attention”. If theyre that desperate for attention or an explanation, something is wrong.
And like, at least some of them are probably right. Yeah these disorders are less common than things like anxiety disorders, but they are more common than you think they are. Like, they probably shouldn't self diagnose without doing a reasonable amount of research and talking to a professional if possible, but not every single one of them is wrong, and being wrong about something is not the same thing as lying about having something you don't. Be nice to teenagers they're still learning
"I read an article that it's showing simple self-awareness" two days, mild preparation, hot and cold reading, I can get 60$ for joints laced with sacred sage
"I just spoke to an AI and I'm... rattled to say the least, come with me on this dark journey" twenty minutes. I've got to science it up for you, but I can get you to come back every week to "disentangle the psychological imprint" for 125$
Leverage had a lot of well-researched things to say about the real world, but the one I always come back to, from The Double Blind Job:
Sophie: These are not small fines. Last year, my department handled a case where the company had to pay out $2.5 billion.
Hoffman:
Oh, yeah. Everybody heard about that. But what the news didn’t tell you
is that that company made $16 billion on the same drug. That fine was
14% of the profit. 14%. That’s like tipping your waiter.
This is fucking embarrassing ‘journalism’ from the BBC.
Guy goes to an NHS doctor, flat-out states the nature of his investigation and gets behind the scenes information on assessments.
Then he hits up three private clinics actively looking for an ADHD diagnosis, has his friends fill out witness forms, and is shocked when he receives a diagnosis.
I'm not sure what the point of this was. Like, the article doesn't really even touch on what his methodology was—it doesn't actually state whether he was filling out the forms honestly, and knowing how an evaluation works and going into the evaluation with the goal of "demonstrating" something about an evaluation infuses inherent bias into everything
this is just yet another thing that serves to create paranoia about people getting prescribed stimulant meds. Something that, in the USA, is difficult to the point that it blocks people from obtaining the care that they need all the time, and i know in many other countries it's even harder
Like, why did he feel the need to do this to begin with. I'm sure that if he went to several different doctors trying to get a diagnosis of chronic constipation, he would get one, because listening to a patient when they bring a concern up to you is Your Job as a doctor
@headspace-hotel uk person checking in! when you go public for an adhd assessment, waiting lists are YEARS long with often no indication of when you'll finally be seen. thus, many people – who are desperate for care – will pay money (which you don't have to do for public healthcare) to go private.
so basically it's stigmatising people who were so desperate that they were willing to find £1,000 to get help.
Is your conclusion “he tried to prove that private clinics are bad, something something, less people will be able to go to private clinics for these resources as a result” or “he took 3 diagnoses in private clinics which could have been 3 other people’s diagnoses and resources”?
He seems to have bypassed the atrociously long waiting list for the NHS appointment - which he biased anyway by disclosing his investigation to the NHS doctor.
He then fabricated symptoms to three private clinics which require two other people to validate his symptoms - all in a bid to frame them as predatory.
This could have been an investigation into underfunding of the NHS and absurd waiting lines forcing people to use private clinics. Instead the story became ‘ADHD is a fun trend and you can just pay to get a diagnosis’.
It’s malicious journalism that casts doubt in the public’s mind. Some people are now not going to believe other people’s ADHD diagnosis on the back of it.
we also want to challenge his assumption that private clinics apparently taking less time to diagnose obvious adhd is a reflection on their lack of diligence - it's much more a reflection on how much more gatekeepy the nhs is encouraged to be, especially when it's about "invisible" or mental health or neurodivergent conditions (we had 11 hours of meetings before getting diagnosed autistic by the nhs at 55 - a diagnosis six different other autistic people had spotted right away)
you see this with gender care too, nhs gender care (assuming you ever make it to the top of a six year waiting list) is like "yes come and see us for a year before we'll consider hrt for you - but not if you're fat or have mental health conditions because fuck you" while private clinics are like "yes we confirm that you are trans, why on earth would we make you wait?"
Yeah, I wonder if the NHS considers the entire time from the start of assessment. Their ‘thorough assessment’ is someone else’s frequent misdiagnosis and the doctor even not believing them at face value.
My current favourite character in Breath of the Wild is Pikango, the incredibly shit artist who turns up around Hyrule to badly paint landscapes and hint me towards my lost memories. If you just talk to him, he seems to be this amazing and talented painter, but like if you look at the canvas