I learned this the hard way when I was homeless at 17-18 years old in the middle of Wyoming winters. I had at least had my old Grand Cherokee to sleep in the trunk space, but not enough money for gas to run the heater. I'd pile all my clothes on top of me, but there were always patches where the cold got through and I'd spend so many nights just shaking from the cold. Spent the Christmas of 2004 this way. You are also correct that when it would be sunny (but still cold) the next day, it was an awesome experience. Almost like a ray of hope, as cliche as that sounds. It's crazy what having sunlight can do to improve your mood. That's one reason I loved living in SF later on, there were so many sunny days and I also wasn't homeless lol.
My brother has had life-long, serious mental health issues, and it's only been because of both medication AND life-long therapy that he has been able to reach a baseline of normalcy and being able to function. I think if you have a serious underlying mental health issue, that it often takes both the meds and therapy. I also don't think most psychiatrists feel they are "playing God." I think most genuinely want to help patients get better, to the extent they can.
> I am pretty sure if I went straight to a psychiatrist instead of investing into long term therapy with a psychologist (that eventually suspected me having ADHD), I would have probably been given an SSRI and sent on my way.
That's probably true, but a lot of hospitals try to push this dynamic onto doctors/psychiatrists. When my dad (was psychiatrist for 43 years) took a job as medical director at a hospital in Wyoming, they told him when he first got there that they only wanted his role to be prescribing medication, and that they would have psychologists evaluate the patient first, and then determine what medication is needed and then his job would be to write them. I assume the previous psychiatrist was fine with this (he was an unusual guy in general but that's another story), but my dad told them he would not operate this way.
But at the end of the day, the "roles" usually end up being the therapists and psychologists doing the more therapy-focused work, while the psychiatrist makes diagnoses and determinations of which medications may work, and prescribes them because of his M.D.
My brother has been bipolar his whole life, major depressive for large parts of it as well, and generally has had a rough time with mental health. It's taken both medication and life-long therapy to get him to a sort of manageable/live-able baseline.
Lol, it seems like everyone on this website has “ADHD” and “needs” a daily supply of amphetamine just to function.
I think the reality is that everyone benefits from amphetamines whether they have ADHD or not, so working backwards, if you feel better on Adderall, that doesn’t mean you have ADHD.
Haven't there been studies that people without ADHD do not benefit from amphetamines? Not to mention, there are meds that aren't amphetamine- Ritalin isn't one!
While not an amphetamine, Ritalin is a stimulant that neurotypical might use and abuse exactly like amphetamine.
That said, GP is talking out of their arse and is perpetuating one of the biggest reasons I waited until I was 35 to get diagnosed: I too thought ADHD was bullshit until I was in a position at looking at my life, my difficulties and how other people were living, and it was pretty obvious I was missing something.
This ignorance surrounding ADHD is widespread, and people think we take amphetamines to write code 80 hours a week without taking a break.
I take amphetamines to have the energy to work 4 hours a day and pick the trash off the floor while not hating myself, so comments like that one feel quite ignorant, yet you can find them in every HN thread offering their misinformed 2 cents.
Not sure how you got that from what they wrote. They said their psychologist suspected ADHD based on their symptoms and then prescribed medication for it.
That is mostly correct: psychologist do not prescribe, psychiatrists do, as they are in fact medical doctors.
In my case psychologist made the suggestion I had ADHD after 2 years of therapy, so they knew me pretty well by that point. It all made sense to me, and I went to a psychiatrist to get diagnosed and medicated.
Had I gone to a psychiatrist directly, they probably would have prescribed an antidepressant without spending 2 years getting to know me.
Out of curiosity, which test/company did you go with? A quick search reveals a lot of options, and I'm hoping you may have done some of the legwork already to determine if one is better than others for privacy reasons etc.?
The printout I have in front of me says "Medical Diagnostic Laboratories". Their website gives no info about the "pharmacodynamics" test other than one PDF about how to swab the saliva for it.
I had read about it and discussed it with my physician. She ordered it.
DNA privacy has already been defeated. In North America it’s pretty easy to find first cousin level relatives by DNA which really shrinks the target pool especially if you find first cousins from different sides of the family.
Doesn't the NSA represent a huge portion of our signals intelligence capabilities as a country? How would that role be filled otherwise? Wouldn't the best people to do many of those new jobs still be the people who used to work at the (now defunct) NSA?
The internal security is doing fine without NSA and when their biggest "achievement" was making everyone less secure via encryption backdoors you gotta wonder about purpose of existence.
Private industries seem to do just fine when it comes to security and nearly none of the progress in security is due to NSA, unless you count "looking real hard whether NSA didn't try to backdoor new security primitive" as progress
I may be terribly naive, but I just don't feel any safer b/c the NSA exists. I also don't believe this country has been under any serious threats since the NSA was created, from which it protected us.
I assume that storage has gotten so cheap now that storing everything forever is feasible for companies? I always knew they had to retain content for X period of time, to comply with laws about data retention for criminal investigations, but I always assumed (from reading about it 10+ years ago) that because of how much extra storage space all the "deleted" content would take up, that it wouldn't be feasible for them to do it long-term for everything. I knew that would become a moot point eventually, and I suppose that is now.
It is. I recall seeing some documentary about Facebook for the exact same thing - that it was cheaper to buy new hard drives and inactivate old content than it is to try to permanently scrub old content, and that was probably 10 years ago.
> I am thankful to HN's existence for this reason. It is among the last outlets where I can get quality content.
Hopefully this doesn't make me some kind of elitist or something, but I specifically never link to Hacker News or mention it on my social media accounts because I don't want HN to become "watered down" like so many previously high-value content sites/forums have been over the decades. I'll just share the linked article if I want to share something I found here.
It does not seem unusual that an organization (NATO) created solely to defend/protect against one particular country would not allow that country to join forces with them.
If the German successor state to the Third Reich could join the western alliance after WW2, why can't the successor state to the Soviet Union join? Russia as a white-majority christian country shares many values and culture with the others.
The western alliance has not only rebuffed Russia, it has expanded eastwards against promises made and thus provoked the current situation in Ukraine.
What would the US do if the soviets were to expand into Mexiko? Or... Cuba? We know how that went. If the mission of NATO was to secure peace, why would they reject Russia? It makes no sense from that perspective.
The answer is that there are other reasons NATO exists and what it is being used for.
> The western alliance has not only rebuffed Russia, it has expanded eastwards against promises made and thus provoked the current situation in Ukraine.
Every country is free to join NATO if they want, Russia has no say in it. And the reason why most Russia neighbors want to is because Russia is a bully, and NATO can protect them from being bullied.
> What would the US do if the soviets were to expand into Mexiko? Or... Cuba? We know how that went.
Well, for one the US did not attack Cuba... Also, Soviet Union was aggressor side for the whole duration of Cold War, that move was just prelude to further aggression against the West.
> If the mission of NATO was to secure peace, why would they reject Russia
Because the best way to secure peace is to keep Russia at bay.
> Russia as a white-majority christian country shares many values and culture with the others.
LOL, no. Russia does not share western values, such as democracy, freedom of speech or other human rights. They do not belong in Europe, they belong in Asia.
I think there was more of a "break" in the decades since with Germany and Nazism, where in Russia, there wasn't as much of a break from the old Soviet systems and ways of thinking. Many years ago, I read this book, "The Limits of Partnership" by Angela Stent, one of the foremost US-Russia relations experts. She lays out in detail how an entire generation of Russians came up believing that the Soviet Union collapsed almost solely due to outside influence -- i.e. the United States -- and that it otherwise would not have failed without that undue influence. They want to see Russia restored to its former Soviet-era glory, encompassing all of its former territories. This is how pretty much the entire leadership in Russia thinks/believes. Putin 100% feels this way.
"If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”
-- Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
I read somewhere a long time ago (so I could be wrong.) The origin of Switzerland happened when the bully state later joined the alliance that was explicitly formed to fight against it.
Let me start by saying I do not condone the destruction of government buildings in any way. Full stop.
If there are separate parts of a system -- but all part of the same underlying system -- do you really see them as completely different things? For example, I've heard cops, while arresting someone for marijuana, just "pass the buck" and say, "We don't write the laws, we are just enforcing them."
If you are part of maintaining, propagating, and continuing a system, are you not an equal part of that system and the things done in its name?
> If you are part of maintaining, propagating, and continuing a system, are you not an equal part of that system and the things done in its name?
Yes, I think you can make this case. However, it isn't appropriate someone charged to execute enforcement of the law to ignore the laws they don't like. The only valid exception would be laws that aren't legal and therefore invalid.
>” If you are part of maintaining, propagating, and continuing a system, are you not an equal part of that system and the things done in its name?”
Absolutely not, with a key emphasis on the “equal part”. It is totally wrong to assume that I, as a citizen and taxpayer who is just living my life normally, is equally as culpable as a lawmaker or a trigger happy police officer is a fallacy.
I see the three separate branches of government as almost completely different things. While I think drugs should be legalized (or at least decriminalized), the police aren't violating any fundamental human rights by arresting someone for marijuana possession. We need to lobby the legislature to fix the laws.
The fundamental human right to be free and their pursuit of hapiness is most definitely being violated when being detained. A police officer can choose to not detain someone or they can choose to detain someone. It is within their purview.
