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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Sorry, you said insurance and I missed it somehow. I agree that laymen and insurance companies treat it as a bible, but I also think that’s how the APA presents it. If the goal is to compile “symptoms that tend to present together” the DSM does a poor job of making that clear.

    I have several problems with the DSM. This isn’t an exhaustive list but off the top of my head:

    -It’s based on the idea that there’s a clear line between “normal” and “disordered” mental functioning, and that we can quantify all of a person’s experiences to land on either side of that line. There are a handful of diagnoses that are discrete enough for me to say “you either have it or you don’t” but the majority of them are so arbitrary that they’re not useful. Mood disorders are especially vague.

    -Inter-rater reliability is notoriously poor. I can diagnose anyone with a disorder to argue medical necessity for therapy.

    -It includes conditions that cannot and should not be diagnosed by mental health professionals, like narcolepsy. It’s good for providers to know what narcolepsy is, but unless they’re going to include every other medical condition, I don’t know why they include the ones they do.

    -DSM-5 broadened the criteria for several disorders, possibly to increase access to insurance coverage, but it’s edging ever closer to categorizing every human experience as a disorder. According to DSM-5, if you’re having depressive symptoms for more than 2 weeks after a loved one dies, it’s no longer grief and it’s considered a major depressive episode. When people criticized that bereavement clause, DSM-5-TR included “prolonged grief disorder” which extends the time you can grieve the loss without a MDD diagnosis. But grief is absolutely a normal response to loss, and sometimes it can be really disruptive and long-lasting. Why are we pretending that’s disordered?

    -The majority of every DSM task force has been older white men, and we should be very skeptical of what they consider normal or not.




  • Aside from revenge against Walz… one theory is that we’re a functioning community that’s ethnically diverse, relatively progressive, union strong, and very friendly to queer folks. Fox News would have you believe that any one of those features creates a godless hellscape, but we’re doing pretty good. Minnesota grew a huge budget surplus under Walz, and then we invested it in schools and social programs. The Republican tradition is to destroy something (see: the federal government) and say, “See? Told you it was broken!”







  • I know someone who just got hired at an unfinished Meta data center, ostensibly to do some low-level hardware monitoring and maintenance. His boss admitted that he accidentally hired people a couple months too early, so the first couple weeks have consisted of sitting around, eating free food and playing mobile games. Next week they’re being flown to an active data center out of state, but they won’t have much of their own work to do for another 4-6 weeks.

    So these guys are being paid $25/hr, 40hrs a week, with a free lunch, and making no money for the company. I would expect any other company to find this unacceptable, but it’s just a drop in the bucket for Meta.




  • I’m a therapist who works almost exclusively with men. Here one pattern I’ve seen often:

    • Man is conditioned from a young age not to identify, process or express his feelings
    • Man doesn’t share his feelings with anyone - friends, family, partners - for years
    • Man sees woman as safe, caring and validating
    • Man confides in woman only and continues not sharing feelings with others
    • Woman becomes overwhelmed, resentful, dismissive
    • Man gets the message that he never should have opened up in the first place

    It can be true both that men need to open up more and should not treat their partners as therapists. We all need support systems because no one person can always be available to give us everything we need. It’s not wrong to confide in a partner, but if that partner is the only confidant it’s precarious for both. And I want to emphasize this is not the fault of a man, or men as a community. This is the result of generations of conditioning from both men and women, and both men and women play a part in the solution. I also want to recognize that many of us don’t have a network of people we could open up to even if we wanted to, and many more can’t afford therapy.

    If anyone reading this can afford therapy, I highly recommend it. It’s a place to undo some of that conditioning, to sit with someone who’s committed to listening, caring, and not judging.


  • young people feeling depressed and isolated is the least of your problems.

    Children are the future of EVERY country. The future is looking bleak for young people in the US. Where do you live? Are young people unaffected by social media or what?

    Out here in actual civilization though, tik tok youth drama is not representative of reality whatsoever.

    That’s the thing though. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around sometimes, but for lots of young people, social media IS their reality. This became even more true during the pandemic. We asked young people to go to school on a screen and pretend it was the same as doing it in person. Why wouldn’t they have the same mindset about chatting, hanging out, flirting, dating, etc.? They don’t see it as simulated socializing, it’s just how they socialize.


  • You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Tautology doesn’t mean obvious or predictable, and you’re basing your argument on faulty premises. The study measured how many politically-aligned couples separated in a 1-year period compared to how many politically-opposed couples did so.

    people separate because they have irreconcilable differences

    Yes, sometimes that’s a reason people separate.

    opposing political views is an irreconcilable difference

    It’s sometimes irreconcilable, and sometimes not. Couples with opposing political views are more likely (but not guaranteed) to separate than couples who agree.

    the conclusion of the research is that couples with irreconcilable differences are more likely to suffer from the problems associated with irreconcilable differences

    Nowhere in the study do they declare political heterogamy an irreconcilable difference, nor could they without 100 years of data. You keep referring to “the proposition” and “the research subject” and “the conclusion” and then inserting your own phrases and concepts that were literally not a part of the study. And this is all in defense of your original comment in which you cast an aspersion on the value of the study and then claimed that you didn’t. You’ve made previous comments with the same low-effort “study finds that water is wet” so I don’t believe we’re both speaking in good faith here.


  • No one is casting aspersions on the scientific method or the value of research

    In your original comment, it seemed like you were questioning why the study was funded, then compared it to another obvious cause-effect about kicking a dog. Did I misunderstand?

    the conclusion simply follows naturally from the hypothesis

    The conclusion might have confirmed your personal hypothesis, but we don’t assume that any conclusion “naturally follows” a hypothesis without measuring it.

    The proposition here is that people who have opposing political views are more likely to be antagonistic to each other, that is a tautology.

    The way you phrased it is a tautology, but the study didn’t measure antagonism. It measured whether couples broke up or not.




  • Oh I don’t at all support what Meta has done, and I don’t trust any company not to harm and exploit users. I was responding to your comment by saying that talking to a chatbot doesn’t necessarily indicate that someone has “bigger problems.” If they’re not in a crisis, and they have reasonable expectations for the chatbot, I can see how it could be a helpful tool. If someone doesn’t have access to a real therapist, and a chatbot helps them feel better in the meantime, I’m not going to gatekeep that experience.