About how to live best

Don’t know what to tell you dude. Psychology simply *is* political. Ignoring that simple fact doesn’t render it untrue. Quite the contrary, historically ignoring it has made life significantly more difficult to navigate for the objects of psychological investigation, as any trans, disabled, or neurodivergent person could tell you.
I don't see it that way. I see psychology as a very individual thing.
 
psychology is deeply entrenched in a number of historical institutions that, for better or worse, still have their descendants present today. part of public funding, public policy, both legislative and judicary, assortedly reflected in stuff like policing, housing, and of course, healthcare. i'm not sure exactly how psychology can be seen as individual. every kind of treatment is entrenched in politics, and every ailment as per being an issue of healthcare is political because, well, healthcare. : ) and it being an academic field... funded, regardless of funding origin. political.

if you can define what you mean by psychology being individual, maybe we can understand where you're coming from?
 
I don't see it that way. I see psychology as a very individual thing.
I see individuals as a very political thing. Politics as a very psychological things. Psychology as a very political thing. Politics as a very individual thing. And of course what you said you see too.
 
psychology is deeply entrenched in a number of historical institutions that, for better or worse, still have their descendants present today. part of public funding, public policy, both legislative and judicary, assortedly reflected in stuff like policing, housing, and of course, healthcare. i'm not sure exactly how psychology can be seen as individual. every kind of treatment is entrenched in politics, and every ailment as per being an issue of healthcare is political because, well, healthcare. : ) and it being an academic field... funded, regardless of funding origin. political.

if you can define what you mean by psychology being individual, maybe we can understand where you're coming from?
Study of the mind (however one defines that). All minds are different. We can look for patterns but every person is different.
 
You clearly have never dealt with a seriously mentally ill person.
Such a ignoramus as usual. I've been hospitalized four times between ages 15 & 20 (total of almost six months in psych wards). My best friend committed suicide in his early 20's. I've been to multiple 'alternative' schools where kids were on handfuls of meds. And I've had my own emotional difficulties medicalized from age 6 to around 23 when I decided to get off the bandwagon. (edit : decided makes it sound easy, it was certainly not easy)

Oh yeah and my elder daughter's mother is on mental health disability, she has 'borderline personality disorder', basically she's a quiet narcissist. Another ex has depression and my current gf had a bad eating disorder as a teenager (she's doing way better now and is more well functiong w food than me)

The clinical definition of a disorder (at least as I understand it) is that it is something that disrupts your ability to function as *you* (the person with the disorder) wants to.
Maybe in an ideal world but many people are diagnosed as children where the diagnosis is mostly because the child's behavior creates challenges for parents/teachers. When someone's giving you amphetamines @ age six so you can be a good boy this has nothing to do w being more "me" and everything to do w behavior modification to make authoritiy figures lives easier (putting every slightly hyper boy on meth was a huge issue back when I was a kid, hopefully less so now). As an adolescent w depression & 'bi-polar' it was more complicated but I still got the overall impression that therapy & drugs were about fitting in rather than feeling like myself.
There is certainly something to be said for the way capitalist society imposes conditions on living that exacerbate the disorder as-defined or being certain types of inhibited functioning into sharper focus.

But, I mean at the end of the day my brain is less able to produce, keep, and effectively utilize the compounds that drive focus, which makes it harder for me to start, and to maintain focus, even on things I really really want to do. Yeah the capitalist insistence on punctuality, and the tying of self-worth to continuous value-producing activity certainly don’t help, and create or exacerbate additional downstream disorders. But even in a communist utopia, that fundamental deficiency would still be there, and it would still be inhibiting my ability to function internally and interpersonally.
I can focus like a mofo when I really want to. I had a very isolated existence as a kid, a poor diet & a home life I didn't enjoy much. Who I would be in some 'ideal environment' I have no idea. But overall I like my brain, it doesn't always function the way I'd like, I succumb to bad habits & get into unhealthy relationships. If I found some therapeutic treatment that was helpful I'd certainly try it but I have no health insurance, no money so best I can do is to try & do better for myself everyday.

Obviously I cannot speak to your experience. If you feel your focus issue is more intrinsic I can't say otherwise. Unfortunately life is not something you can go back & replay so we can never know how we would be in different situations.

I like this quote : “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Anyway, I'm not very good @ adapting myself to please others. I have no goal to smooth out my rough edges so I can meet some criteria of 'mental health' (not sure if there even is such a criteria, just an ever expanding list of 'disorders') but to create a life which maximizes my strengths & minimizes the damage my weaknesses can cause.

I see individuals as a very political thing. Politics as a very psychological things. Psychology as a very political thing. Politics as a very individual thing. And of course what you said you see too.
@ the end of the day psychiatry is a business. The people who created the ad of a happy bouncing ball to sell you Zoloft on the tele are not concerned w your well being anymore than coco-cola is concerned w your dental or metabolic health.

Even on TV shows the pressure to shut up & take your meds is everywhere. Deny that this model works for everyone and... well, you can see the results in this thread. Now that's psychological power over people!
 
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That's an interesting comparison as I imagine you added the twist to make the point. Coca-Cola promises to be refreshing, tasty, and energizing. It doesn't promise dental health. Zoloft promises to be anti-depressing for your wellbeing. It doesn't promise to not be.

I am certain the people who make Zoloft want it to work.
 
Maybe in an ideal world but many people are diagnosed as children where the diagnosis is mostly because the child's behavior creates challenges for parents/teachers.
And many people aren't because a diagnosis involves efforts the parents or guardians can't be bothered to go to, or the medical diagnosis is flawed because the professional in question believes kids can't suffer from these things, etc, et al.

There are a bunch of problems throughout the medical system both in the US and the UK (to give two examples, I'm sure there are many more), but over-diagnosing is a claim that needs to be evidenced, much like under-diagnosing.

We don't, and shouldn't, use cases where people aren't diagnosed (when they should be) to undercut valid accounts of people being falsely diagnosed. But the reverse applies as well.
 
That's an interesting comparison as I imagine you added the twist to make the point. Coca-Cola promises to be refreshing, tasty, and energizing. It doesn't promise dental health. Zoloft promises to be anti-depressing for your wellbeing. It doesn't promise to not be.

I am certain the people who make Zoloft want it to work.
I am certain the people in control of making Zoloft want it to make them money.
 
Such a ignoramus as usual. I've been hospitalized four times between ages 15 & 20 (total of almost six months in psych wards). My best friend committed suicide in his early 20's. I've been to multiple 'alternative' schools where kids were on handfuls of meds. And I've had my own emotional difficulties medicalized from age 6 to around 23 when I decided to get off the bandwagon. (edit : decided makes it sound easy, it was certainly not easy)

Your friend killed himself and you think he was just quirky and not sick ("unhealthy"?) What the hell is wrong with you?
 
There are a bunch of problems throughout the medical system both in the US and the UK (to give two examples, I'm sure there are many more), but over-diagnosing is a claim that needs to be evidenced, much like under-diagnosing.
As drug makers create new drugs and treatments, we get more diagnosis. I've watched the transition from "take two aspirin and call me in the morning" to "6 new drug ads an hour" during the news. The trend has been steady over 60 years. Dealing with physical and mental illness is not a simple thing. It has become and industry and like most big industries, it is not wholly benign.
 
No idea where i could draw the line between mentally unstable and sick..some things are prolly not meant to be defined, humans are such complex beings.
Some suicides happen for reasons that look irrational to almost everyone else. Depression can be defined, but not every overreaction results from it (and depression builds up over many years).
 
As drug makers create new drugs and treatments, we get more diagnosis. I've watched the transition from "take two aspirin and call me in the morning" to "6 new drug ads an hour" during the news. The trend has been steady over 60 years. Dealing with physical and mental illness is not a simple thing. It has become and industry and like most big industries, it is not wholly benign.
And as we learn more about the state of us and the world's impact on us, others refuse to keep up with advances - professionals included. This leads to more under-diagnosing until what is new becomes commonly-accepted.

Make no bones about it, diagnoses in service to capitalism is a big problem. But nobody's pretending it isn't a problem (as far as I can see). The issue (or problem, if we want to get repetitive) is using the existing of over-diagnosing to suggest that diagnoses are implicitly too trigger-happy, as supposed to identifying when over-diagnosing is a problem, and when under-diagnosing is.
 
And as we learn more about the state of us and the world's impact on us, others refuse to keep up with advances - professionals included. This leads to more under-diagnosing until what is new becomes commonly-accepted.
What do you see as being underdiagnosed?
 
What do you see as being underdiagnosed?
Plenty of things depending on the situation. Trans folk, for example, fight hostile professionals as a matter of course, despite the evidence (and indeed, established procedure).

But to take an easy personal example, my wife has a rare bone condition that she has literally been accused of making up because the doctor(s) in question hadn't heard of it before. This has happened multiple times, in different places.

And this is before I get onto cultural pressures r.e. gender expectations (see: women reporting pain related to pregnancy, men seeking help over mental health, and so on). These are as relevant as the impact of capitalism on our societies (and how it's turned things like public health into a for-profit enterprise).
 
What do you see as being underdiagnosed?

Women for most disorders? But especially for autism and adhd. One serious flaw in the research clinical psychologists and slp’s have been coming to grips with over the last decade or so, is that the populations they select for their autism and language development studies have overwhelmingly been male college students, and it turns out that gender affects speech patterns and word use quite heavily before accounting for TD/ASD, and the criteria for ASD diagnosis doesn’t really account for that gendered divergence. This creates a positive feedback loop where autism diagnostic criteria are patterned after male socialization paradigms, which makes women less likely to get flagged by peers or doctors for autism assessment, which in turn has driven the perception among researchers that ASD is primarily a male phenomenon, etc.

This is on top of inherent biases against recognizing or providing commensurate levels of care or attention to girls, and the fact that girls are taught from a very young age to quietly endure any discomfort and not communicate their problems to adults as readily as boys might, as well as structural issues around funding (as my partner would readily tell you, there’s gobs and gobs and gobs of funding and grant money for research into autism among male populations, and significantly less for any examination of how autism presents among female populations).

Oh fun fact: trans women in the research have been found to typically display the speech use patterns of female speakers (specifically, high word count but lower unique words - i.e. a lot more repeating words for emphasis), and trans men display the use patterns of male speakers.
 
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Transgender issues are recent news and now "hot button" issues that one would expect to be controversial and out of the mainstream for many doctors, PAs and medical facilities. Rare diseases are commonly not diagnosed because they are rare and for many, unknown. I am also familiar with such situations.

Women have been underserved by doctors/medical providers for a very long time but that has been changing and improving since the women's movement took off in the 1970s. More women doctors has been a huge push in the right direction.
 
As noted earlier, clinical depression will screw you over no matter what choices you make intellectually. It's something a professional needs to evaluate. It's worth doing, if you haven't. I had something that resembled depression, but was actually an endocrine issue that killed my energy and made tasks that were easy before/after it was addressed seem like massive undertakings. It's a lot easier to overcome "laziness" when your body functions properly, and I speak from first hand experience!

Similarly, depression can have physiological sources which you can't will away, and the best/only *good* way to make sure you don't have something like this screwing with your life is to have someone who knows what they're doing go through the process of evaluating it. It's no different from checking for cancer, having an ortho specialist look at a joint injury, or having a dentist fill a cavity as a matter of process. Those are also things that individuals can't do themselves...in some cases even if they're trained in the field they still need someone else.

Yes, people can develop coping methods that allow them to function in broader society. So can addicts -- ever heard of a functioning alcoholic?
Even so, it's best to have professionals evaluate what's real, along with the person in question evaluating the process to see if it's helping. People really do have physiological causes/problems, but it's not always so, or not always the sole cause of discomfort/unhappiness/etc. When it comes to some medical conditions, you're also stuck with a nasty reality of making a tradeoff between being a "functional X" vs the side effects of the medication for that condition. Those side effects can be brutal too, to the point where it's not clear which is the better answer. That's something the patient has to decide.

---

Aside from the medical stuff, there's no objective meaning in life, best I can tell. Nobody can define another person's utility function for them, so to speak. There's not even a realistic way to know if our own choices optimized our own happiness, because those shape us too and it's hard to say what would have happened given other paths. There are a few general pieces of advice I can give:
  1. Maybe there are things in reach, once identified. Basically, what is a "worthwhile" life? That answer will look different for each person, but to the extent that it bothers you, this shouldn't be something ill-defined. Answer that by defining objective, observable world state in which your life is "worthwhile". If you want to play in the NFL as a 30 year old woman, you're probably screwed. But that's probably not what the world state envisioned will look like.
  2. I recommend strongly against depending on external validation as a primary source of self worth. It's a path of destruction. Yes, we live with other people and depend on each other, to varying degrees. Those connections are important. But this aspect of validation should come from within.
  3. Do not think mind can overcome matter in a literal sense. The brain is a finite organ, like any other. Nobody has infinite willpower, and even the most happy and successful people don't have comic book superpowers; their minds will go to a dark place as surely as anybody else if subjected to enough damage or trauma. You, me, anybody, no exceptions. If you have a chemical imbalance, you can no more will that away than you can will yourself to leg press an entire building or regenerate a limb. It's not a thing the human body can do. But there ARE things that can be done, to at least help.
 
As noted earlier, clinical depression will screw you over no matter what choices you make intellectually. It's something a professional needs to evaluate. It's worth doing, if you haven't. I had something that resembled depression, but was actually an endocrine issue that killed my energy and made tasks that were easy before/after it was addressed seem like massive undertakings. It's a lot easier to overcome "laziness" when your body functions properly, and I speak from first hand experience!

Similarly, depression can have physiological sources which you can't will away, and the best/only *good* way to make sure you don't have something like this screwing with your life is to have someone who knows what they're doing go through the process of evaluating it. It's no different from checking for cancer, having an ortho specialist look at a joint injury, or having a dentist fill a cavity as a matter of process. Those are also things that individuals can't do themselves...in some cases even if they're trained in the field they still need someone else.


Even so, it's best to have professionals evaluate what's real, along with the person in question evaluating the process to see if it's helping. People really do have physiological causes/problems, but it's not always so, or not always the sole cause of discomfort/unhappiness/etc. When it comes to some medical conditions, you're also stuck with a nasty reality of making a tradeoff between being a "functional X" vs the side effects of the medication for that condition. Those side effects can be brutal too, to the point where it's not clear which is the better answer. That's something the patient has to decide.

---

Aside from the medical stuff, there's no objective meaning in life, best I can tell. Nobody can define another person's utility function for them, so to speak. There's not even a realistic way to know if our own choices optimized our own happiness, because those shape us too and it's hard to say what would have happened given other paths. There are a few general pieces of advice I can give:
  1. Maybe there are things in reach, once identified. Basically, what is a "worthwhile" life? That answer will look different for each person, but to the extent that it bothers you, this shouldn't be something ill-defined. Answer that by defining objective, observable world state in which your life is "worthwhile". If you want to play in the NFL as a 30 year old woman, you're probably screwed. But that's probably not what the world state envisioned will look like.
  2. I recommend strongly against depending on external validation as a primary source of self worth. It's a path of destruction. Yes, we live with other people and depend on each other, to varying degrees. Those connections are important. But this aspect of validation should come from within.
  3. Do not think mind can overcome matter in a literal sense. The brain is a finite organ, like any other. Nobody has infinite willpower, and even the most happy and successful people don't have comic book superpowers; their minds will go to a dark place as surely as anybody else if subjected to enough damage or trauma. You, me, anybody, no exceptions. If you have a chemical imbalance, you can no more will that away than you can will yourself to leg press an entire building or regenerate a limb. It's not a thing the human body can do. But there ARE things that can be done, to at least help.
I was not advocating that people should not seek treatment if they can function despite the challenges they face. I also suggested people who are concerned about their mental or physical heath should start with their primary physician to determine if it is a physical or mental condition. Sometimes it's both.
 
Transgender issues are recent news and now "hot button" issues that one would expect to be controversial and out of the mainstream for many doctors, PAs and medical facilities. Rare diseases are commonly not diagnosed because they are rare and for many, unknown. I am also familiar with such situations.

Women have been underserved by doctors/medical providers for a very long time but that has been changing and improving since the women's movement took off in the 1970s. More women doctors has been a huge push in the right direction.
You asked for examples, and I gave them. I can rationalise the things you were noting here. I chose not to, because they're still things that deserve mentioning. The same as the things I mentioned.
 
Women for most disorders? But especially for autism and adhd. One serious flaw in the research clinical psychologists and slp’s have been coming to grips with over the last decade or so, is that the populations they select for their autism and language development studies have overwhelmingly been male college students, and it turns out that gender affects speech patterns and word use quite heavily before accounting for TD/ASD, and the criteria for ASD diagnosis doesn’t really account for that gendered divergence. This creates a positive feedback loop where autism diagnostic criteria are patterned after male socialization paradigms, which makes women less likely to get flagged by peers or doctors for autism assessment, which in turn has driven the perception among researchers that ASD is primarily a male phenomenon, etc.

This is on top of inherent biases against recognizing or providing commensurate levels of care or attention to girls, and the fact that girls are taught from a very young age to quietly endure any discomfort and not communicate their problems to adults as readily as boys might, as well as structural issues around funding (as my partner would readily tell you, there’s gobs and gobs and gobs of funding and grant money for research into autism among male populations, and significantly less for any examination of how autism presents among female populations).

Oh fun fact: trans women in the research have been found to typically display the speech use patterns of female speakers (specifically, high word count but lower unique words - i.e. a lot more repeating words for emphasis), and trans men display the use patterns of male speakers.
Oh snap I repeat the same word in the same sentence even all the time for emphasis.
 
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