I'm honestly shocked his brain hasn't been devoured by syphilis yet, I guess he's listening to the experts around him juuust enough to take the abx, but if he's got sodium or other diet restrictions no way he's following them.

I was trying to figure out how to fit in everything I love about the male love interest without making it sound weird but lbr after putting up with female love interests in movies like this for years we all earned Channing Tatum as a dog consort-boyfriend.

Jupiter Ascending. It was a low writing effort but big budget high fantasy with a slightly too perfect protagonist, "science" that makes absolutely 0 sense, and a cartoonishly evil villain just absolutely chewing the scenery which is pretty common, except most most of the time the protagonist is male. I loved seeing the equivalent of my 13 y/o mary sue fanfiction on a movie screen with a massive budget (edit: and channing tatum as her loyal dog consort-boyfriend). Just this once. More than that would get as tired just as quickly as the male equivalent. But just this once it was delicious. I have the poster framed actually, the real poster from the theater, my friend who worked there saved it for me.

As someone who works in mental health I'm actually with you but first I need to clarify that therapists don't prescribe meds, psychiatrists do. Therapists usually have at least a bachelor's usually a masters in one of a couple non-medical (or better stated, medical-adjacent) fields. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who completed full medical school and a residency specializing in psychiatry. Even a doctorate in psychology is not a medical doctor. A therapist is going to talk to you and provide one of two basic functions: allowing you to vent / express your emotions to a completely supportive person, and teach social skills and emotional intelligence. Psychology = talking, psychiatry = drugs. This is an important distinction because while talk therapy is often more helpful than medications for certain disorders, it's a lot more expensive to pay for an hour human emotional presence than having a doctor (even with their more specialized knowledge) listen for fifteen minutes then decide which neurotransmitters are maybe involved the most and picking a chemical from a list to throw at the problem and see what sticks.

Now even with therapy being more helpful for certain things, I don't think it's actually a good solution (or again, better-stated, a good long term solution). It's definitely going to help with this kind of problem because the core issue is largely behavioral, not neurochemical, but first of all it's putting our emotional wellness in the hands of capitalism which is... terrible. I cannot express how much that idea terrifies me. But second of all, as someone who's actually had 300h of therapy for a personality disorder, it starts to lose efficacy over time due to a lack of true emotional intimacy.

Once you know the DBT manual front to back plus 100h of general psycheducation on pavlov and maslow, they're not really doing skills teaching anymore, they're just listening to you bitch. And listening to you bitch is... fine, especially if you wouldn't have a safe place to do that at all otherwise. But even that starts to lose efficacy when you start feeling like they have no idea what you're actually talking about. I realized this recently when I had an extremely stressful experience at work and the therapist was like,"yeah that sucks" but my work friends were all like,"oh yeah she was waaay out of line you did exactly the right thing" because my therapist knew my account, but my coworkers knew more sides of the story and still sided with me and that just... meant a lot more. Bitching also never actually solves the core issue if there is one, a bigger part of that situation was some underlying problems with my workload that my boss was refusing to address, and at a certain point even my coworkers listening to me bitch wasn't cutting it either because whether they listened or not I knew I was going to get my head shoved right back under the water the second I walked back out on my unit and until that issue is actually fixed nothing will ever truly even touch the dread that is constantly hovering over you.

And finally the other core issue is that true emotional connection, the kind humans truly crave, is reciprocal. A therapist has boundaries to maintain that are actually pretty critical to the function of the therapeutic process. The relationship being a completely one-sided support is the whole point. It prevents the abuse of the relationship by someone who knows both more about the person and more about human behavior in general to a person who is emotionally vulnerable for one reason or another. Having those boundaries preserves what therapy does the most good for. But that also means it's going to feel hollow after a while because in the long term what people truly need is reciprocity so they can feel the satisfaction of also helping the other person (in more ways than a monetary transaction). Therapy can help you learn more about how to build those relationships, but it can't replace those relationships, not in the long term anyway. I even see this in my own patients, I'm having to constantly reinforce boundaries that they're pushing not out of malice but just because they're instinctually craving a deeper connection than I can safely offer for either of our sakes.

As a tangential note, another problem we run into in men's mental health in particular, is the lack of men working in mental health. I'm kinda sorta trans but I was raised female which means I often lack the life experience to truly speak to a lot of men's issues. We really need a lot more men who have successfully navigated some of these problems to take the lead towards better men's mental health because they know what really needs to happen and what skills need to be taught. I got into my field in an effort to improve care for personality disorders because I saw what was lacking and felt it was important to provide my inside perspective on a poorly understood issue and something similar needs to happen for men. Another problem with that though is that men's difficulty connecting with other men can often keep them from seeking support from a male professional. I've had lots of men say they're more comfortable opening up to me but then they start asking about romantic and sexual topics which a) can be a huuuge boundary issue and b) I often just don't have the information they REALLY need on the topic, which is how to approach the issues specifically as a man. But a lot of that could also (again) be alleviated by having more men working in mental health to increase the odds that someone will happen to create the necessary rapport (/professionally vibe with) with the patient.

Anyway I think you're right, especially about the thirdspaces, but I do worry that people will be somewhat negatively reactive to the way you've expressed it here. When I've stated as much with this little background, even stating that my perspective is informed by extensive personal AND professional experience, I've had pretty much every layperson getting out their pitchforks.

1. Follow the instructions others have provided on searching your things, vehicles, house etc for tracking and recording devices.

2. Follow the instructions others have provided for locking down your email and socials and setting up something like Google voice to mask the new phone number you're gonna get.

3. Buy a gun or whatever is the most lethal weapon your locality allows and go to a gun range and / or get coaching how to use it and practice using it regularly.

4. Go to your local animal shelter and take home the sweetest dog they have that's over 50-60lb.

5. Develop the best social support system you can of people who will check in on you regularly and come find you if you don't respond for a while.

I think it's always important to remember who is most in control of a situation and place all of the blame there.

My psych patients say awful shit to me. Some of them do awful shit. I've seen and experienced multiple attempted sexual assaults and even a guy who cornered a pregnant staff member to kick her in the stomach. I think about those kinds of things a lot when I see news stories about people dying in psych wards from things like extended or improper restraint. I wonder what they did that the staff members were so angry about and scared of that made them fuck up that bad. I'm sure it's the same as when other authority figures like police see stories of police brutality but that brings us exactly to the point:

The next thing I think (because it's critical that I remember it) is that the staff are still the ones with the power. In addition to a moral imperative to not abuse their power, the staff members are the only ones who CAN change the situation, almost as a matter of physical possibility. The patients are gonna do what the patients are gonna do and the only changeable factor is what the staff do about it. That's just the nature of power and control. The people who have it are ultimately the most responsible for how a situation plays out. Always.

The rich have the power here. They had the option to give some of it back in exchange for peace. They chose to specifically block that avenue. They chose violence by blocking all other options. Almost every nonviolent crisis deescalation class I've attended over the last decade has included this specific quote somewhere in the curriculum:

"A riot is the language of the unheard." - Martin Luther King Jr (you know, the nonviolent protest guy?)

The rich chose this. They chose not to listen. And honestly I'm actually pretty mad at them for it. They've created murderers. Trying to project that blame back on the poor is just another of their tricks. I don't have to advocate for violence to see it as the natural progression of the path the powerful have chosen for us. In fact me advocating for it would do just as much good as me advocating against it. I am not someone with the power to have any choice in this matter. All I can do is watch and to a certain extent I'm actually a little scared; I think we're about to enter a profoundly violent era of human history and I doubt it will be comfortable for me. They have chosen to lead us towards violence and for them to turn around and complain about it is laughably and terrifyingly insane.

not if all the good people who volunteer to build houses make it in and all the people who buy them up to exploitatively rent out go to hell

edit: god this just reminds me though of how much all the metaphysical stuff ruined Christianity. I've been going through a period of re-engaging with religion and spirituality as an adult and even when I was young debates about heaven and hell and trinitarian vs non trinitarian and nicene vs non nicene seemed really dumb in comparison to the stuff Jesus said about helping people that exist here with us on earth. And now that I'm an adult if I'm going to engage with metaphysics at all I may as well admit that the gnostics have prettier placebos anyway so like. It's all just a way to align your mind and create patterns of behavior that provide comfort through consistency and I can do it with a drab puritan aesthetic or I can have pretty rocks and starry shit and to me there's an obvious winner here.

Plenty visible from sh

Some hospital royalty's grandparent needed ECT for their treatment resistant depression. Said royalty fought tooth and nail to let gamgam get her very first set of induced controlled seizures under surgical level anaesthesia done outpatient. The ECT doc said fuck no (you can do them outpatient, but you always do the first set inpatient case shit goes pear shaped). They then tried to get gamgam to spend her time in the fancy hospital rooms (yes that's a thing) instead of on the psych unit with us crazies. The ECT doc said no. This was also right after admin got mad at us for throwing out a piss soaked mattress. Don't want granny sleeping on somebody else's piss? Nobody should be sleeping on somebody else's piss. DEAL WITH IT you bourgeoisie bastards.

What I like most about this explanation is that there is very little excusing OR blame featured. You mention the sociocultural prejudices (briefly as their relevance to this specific topic is limited) and you use overall very objective language throughout to describe the sociolocultural context of rural communities. 10/10.

The lack of non proprietary art tools is a big reason I didn't go into digital art / graphic design. GIMP just cannot keep pace and I did not want to shell out $500 a year or more in subscriptions just to be able to do a job with no security that pays pennies.

Its also a big part of why I'm "pro" AI art (I'm actually pretty neutral, I'm not liking that they're burning down the Amazon to make shitty ads with). I think it's gonna be a decent tool for artists to automate repetitive tasks like cutting backgrounds out of photos for collages, upscaling / enlarging images, adding background textures to landscapes, touching up acne in portraits, and animating repetitive shots like walking. but right now we're unethically sourcing the training data and shoving it into anything and everything with 0 regard for how many resources it's costing to make content that's shitty anyway.

The other half of my argument "in favor" is that the only thing worse than AI existing is AI only existing in the hands of the bourgeoisie and is plebs not even knowing how it works in addition to them using it to gain an unfair advantage over us. I think we have an opportunity to make sure that the open source tools are decent to begin with instead of letting them have complete control over even more of the creative world.

If you go on the subreddit for nurses there's actually a pinned post reminding people that they'll be banned for advocating for murder because the very day that headline first broke their were multiple posts and numerous comments to the effect of "good" and "who do we hope they get next?" A significant portion of the compassion fatigue (read: PTSD for people with empathy) affecting nurses these days is watching our patients suffer and die due to various health problems that they cannot afford to treat. ER nurses in particular are constantly bogged down with treating chronic conditions that have only become emergencies by being grossly undertreated. They got into this to save people from heart attacks and instead they're getting wave after wave of demented nursing home residents with pressure ulcers full of maggots.

The fact that Healthcare executives are trying to lump themselves in with nurses is even more disgusting when you realize that most of the reason we get our asses beat is because we're usually physically standing the closest when the health insurance system fucks people over the hardest. They don't know what to do, they don't know who to turn to, and their life is at stake so they start swinging at whoever is closest and 9/10 times that's a nurse (or nursing assistant). Healthcare executives are hands down the #1 root cause of the physical abuse of nurses; they ARE the ones getting us hit, and they don't get to claim they're one of us now that somebody finally came after the real culprit.