Lol the left subs on Reddit have tons of people dropping into threads to argue, and it’s - no exaggeration - the worst attempts at liberals and conservatives appearing like they know what they’re talking about I’ve ever seen.

Have you talked with anyone about our positions? I ask because if you were to reduce our position down to one simple aspect of it, it would be “America bad,” with no trace of “Russia good.” Some people actually do try to make fun of us by saying all we care about is “America bad,” and that does, at least, show some indication of having basic familiarity with our takes.

Communists want the war to end and blame NATO for provoking and prolonging it. Naturally, this is not from a place of cheerleading for another oligarchical government, like Russia. There is a lot of background to explain, if you just popped in and are unfamiliar.

Good point. Could be totally wrong, but I wouldn’t be surprised if OP was unfortunate like me and stumbled upon some threads. The official r/nyc discussion thread on this story was extremely depressing.

https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significantly-higher-after-covid-19-infection-vs-after-a-covid-19-vaccine

https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/myocarditis-seven-times-more-likely-covid-19-vaccines/

No

My headcanon is that it’s an Elon Musk fan who thinks the marketplace of ideas is hampered by the lack of slurs, or one of those weird dudes who violently hates a teenage girl for wanting the world not to burn. Actually, the venn diagram between the two is basically a circle anyway.

I disagree with Elon. The expectation is that most of them will find a better job after Twitter implodes

It absolutely doesn’t have to be forever. Don’t forget that you got to where you are for reasons. You make sense, and your choices make sense, even when there were more productive choices you could have made. I can definitely recall (like literally all last year and the year before) a time when I felt unhinged and said some of the most embarrassing and destructive things of my life to people I love. I am now out of that, and I do have regrets, but I know why it happened. I know that I’m not to blame for every factor that led me there.

In terms of that shame, just know that that’s a completely normal response to addiction, and it’s not something you need to feel forever either. Judging others based on who they were while consistently using is deeply unfair. It is nearly impossible to not engage in out-of-character selfishness in some circumstances, and being in a period of drug abuse is one of those. And I’d love it for you if you could ease up on yourself. You’re not the things you’ve said, nor are you what you’ve done in the past. We are all always becoming, not static. You are not what you’ve done, but instead are becoming what you do, and what you are doing now by recognizing all this is very very good. Most people would not be strong enough.

You’ve got this, comrade. We all believe in you.

Edit: Whoever downvoted OP and almost everyone else in here seems to have done so immediately around when a lot of the recent threads seemed to randomly get one downvote per comment. So, almost certainly not directed at you, OP.

Well color me newly educated! Thanks!

That’s incredibly hard to read. Like, for real. I’m so sorry. Have you already asked for a generous discount from your sensei until you get back on your feet? Many teachers don’t want to lose a passionate student over money, and times are hard.

Loving what you’re saying, and it’s so cool to me to have a Shaolin blackbelt in here. Obviously no disagreement here, just wanna bring your attention back to the beginning of your post where you defined karate (I am thinking you meant to say Japanese?) Though I think the original meaning of karate was “the Chinese hand,” or something like that, as much of it was derived from Kung Fu!

And to Muad’Dibber, as thetables said, yeah, tons of styles! I hear really great things about Kyokoshin. Most places have a few shotokon places, and those can range from incredible to McDojo. A karate dojo is definitely worth checking out first, if that interests you. However, it’s worth saying, my bias is toward traditional arts, like karate and Kung Fu, because it’s what I’m into. Many on the internet are leaning toward MMA, Muay Thai, Kickboxing, wrestling, boxing, judo and BJJ, because UFC generally presents those as the most effective. A trip to the main martial arts sub on Reddit will show how popular this opinion is now. I won’t try to sway you either way, except to say, check out what interests you and find out if it’s good. People online can’t know what specific schools actually offer, and they make broad generalizations. Even I did it just above with the Kyokoshin mention.

Edit: See thetablesareorange’s response below. Looks like my first paragraph was off. Leaving it for context.

Another Kung Fu person checking in. Not nearly a black belt, like the other commenter is. Started at the beginning of this year and adore it. I think a community would be great.

It was personally important to me to find a school that pressure tests techniques and spars. I think the number one piece of self defense advice I have is to spar. If your school doesn’t spar, but you love it for your own reasons (no shade; there are many completely legitimate reasons to love a school, style or teacher), just get permission to find some other students or people in the area willing to spar with you. I’m nothing special, and have no cool anecdotes about beating anyone up, but the confidence boost from knowing you can compose yourself and give it back when you have strikes coming at you is invaluable.

And one specific word that only applies for those not practicing and not planning to: if someone attacks you, kicks should not be a go-to. Lifting your leg to fake them out, low kicks to their legs, groin kicks with a clear opening, and kicking them from a felled position on the ground are totally on the table. But unless you’ve trained kicks, and specifically with sparring, going for an actual, above the waste kick, is more likely to get you screwed than to obliterate your opponent in one blow. First try running away (as practitioners should too), then punch them. Bite them. Use any grappling you feel confident in. Just don’t take the kick risk. Kicking is hard. Kicking effectively is way harder. This is one thing about starting out that I think a beginner like myself may remember better than someone who is excellent.

Sorry for the rant! I’m just super into this stuff and loving the thread. Got quite a cool variety of martial artists on this site.

This is just upsetting. It’s as simple as a person not wanting to be hit being hit. That’s an act of violence now committed against the kid and modelled for them as a way to solve problems

I’ve been owned by that jab about my time management, and I’m not even being ironic. I’ve been got

I think you might be mixing me and another poster together (RE: calling someone young?)

I’m not sure when I attacked character (aside from maybe what I’ve already apologized for and edited out?) or purposefully attempted to stress someone out.

Regardless, the histories of both fields are filled with really upsetting and shameful stories and practices. You’re totally right about that. However, I would disagree with the notion that that’s the entire story of their historical development and function. The development of ethics as well as discussion of how both psychiatry and psychology have attempted to model various aspects of themselves off of the medical field are also important in understanding their historical developments. Yes, these histories are taught in psychology programs (can’t speak for psychiatry, but I’d imagine they’re taught their field’s history), but no doubt, you’re right that a historically informed way of viewing the field could be more intensely encouraged. There’s certainly learning the history but then there’s learning how to think about history, and use history to understand current conditions, which is unfortunately often something people are left to do on their own.

That ASD medications fail to do their job is a somewhat fair assessment of that article, yeah. But that’s not a scandal, it’s something known. It’s a scandal if the potential benefits of the drugs are misrepresented to people, absolutely.

Hugely variable means that some drugs really helped some individuals on some measure, but did absolutely nothing (and likely caused side effects) for others on that same measure, and the average of those came out to a modest benefit.

Where my brief summary wasn’t accurate though is there aren’t really “ASD medications,” in that studies have always found they’re only occasionally helpful with symptoms associated with ASD, not the core criteria.

And yes, critical thinking being emphasized more in our education could do so much to prevent bad science in the social sciences!

As for your point about psychosis not always being schizophrenia or a psychotic disorder per se, that’s absolutely true. I am not advocating that anyone with hallucinations automatically be put on antipsychotics, with no other investigation! The people I was speaking of anecdotally usually had already suffered from psychosis for years, often along with low affect, a disorganized cognitive style and social difficulties that looked different depending on the person. These weren’t people with a thyroid problem their doctors were missing. Of course mistakes like that have been made before, by therapists and psychiatrists alike. We should always attempt to rule out potential medical explanations.

How so? We barely even know how the brain works;we don’t know if schizophrenia even works like psychiatric models describe it.

This was actually the point of the quote you’re responding to, precisely that we can’t know the details what mental health will look like under communism. My argument was that it’s not useful to people right now to speculate about, given that we do live under capitalism and people do have mental health issues they require help with.

As for your arguments, yes, there are cases where people are put on meds where the side effects are worse for them than what the medication was intended to treat. However, this should absolutely not be news to anyone being offered medication. By that I mean that it is standard practice to be very honest about the potential side effects and weigh potential costs and benefits. Then, as with any other medication, it should be monitored and either changed or altered according to observations and self-report of the individual. I’ve never heard anyone speak of psychoactive drugs as though they should be taken lightly, with no consideration of potential side effects. To take your example of dyskinesia, we must first understand the suffering of psychosis to understand why someone might risk tardive dyskinesia from an antipsychotic. I have sat with individual on antipsychotics and heard their complaints - they can be heartbreaking. “I want to be a cool guy like Jim Morrison, but I can’t even get it up.” However, these individuals also remember what life was like before the antipsychotic. Maybe they still have hallucinations, but they’re more able to handle them. Maybe they experience some delusional thinking, but they’re more able to identify it. Most people on antipsychotics take them willingly, and they can openly tell you both the pros and cons of it.

A meta-analysis on antipsychotic efficacy with schizophrenia: https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736(19)31135-3

A meta-analysis on antipsychotic efficacy with bipolar: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(19)31135-3/fulltext

I think you’ll be glad to see the honesty with which authors discuss limitations and side effects, as well as future hopes for improvement. I’ll also include some on the heritability of schizophrenia and bipolar, since I discussed that in my original post:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28987712/ (You may have to pay to access more than the abstract. It’s the biggest twin study on schizophrenia heritability)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3637882/

Mental disorders are often divorced from reality and the DSM-5 seems to try to coerce science into supporting psychiatry; when it should be the other way around (psychiatry should support science, not go against it).

Many psychiatrists do recognize the limitations of the DSM and a categorical approach! You’re totally right that the DSM and capitalism have led to problems in the field, and I can help explain a large portion of that: insurance. This is a problem for both therapists and psychiatrists, but it becomes more of a problem for psychiatrists. For therapists, if you aren’t self-pay, we have to have a diagnosis in the system soon after meeting a client for the first time. Ridiculous right? It absolutely is. We call these “preliminary diagnoses” to feel better about it, but many of us choose not to discuss the diagnosis at all unless the client desires to, feeling that DSM categories aren’t particularly helpful in forming case conceptualizations. This is especially true of some more recent therapeutic orientations, which consider themselves “transdiagnostic,” such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

However, the psychiatrist has to have a diagnosis to give meds. This means that if he wants to treat someone for symptoms, but they don’t fully meet criteria of a disorder, he has to provide a diagnosis anyway if insurance is to pay for the patient’s medication. Perhaps you can begin to see how systemic factors that aren’t inherent to psychiatry itself have shaped psychiatry in its current state.

There is a ton of erroneous studies on psychiatric topics; but this is likely the result of capitalism and the mental illness model. A study even reported on this topic.[1]

I don’t disagree with this statement, as the replication crisis was a thing that affected psychology and then multiple other fields. I couldn’t see how your review of medications for autism evidenced this though. I’m wondering if you meant to link something else, or I just totally missed what you were saying. My short summary of that article would be “ASD medications are inadequate in treating core symptoms of ASD, but there are hugely variable outcomes (that unfortunately amount to a modest average) for individuals on symptoms related to their ASD.”

As for the replication crisis itself, I think it’s worth noting that they studied if experts and laypeople could predict the replicability of a study, and both groups were able to do so significantly better than chance, with the experts getting it right the vast majority of the time: 1. https://joachimvosgerau.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/camerer-et-al-2018-nature-hb.pdf 2. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2515245920919667

This is because there are identifiable markers of plausibility in studies. For laypeople, this is more difficult to put to words, but for academics, it comes down to number of participants, effect size, and method. Good science can be done in social sciences; it just requires rigor, which all too often is admittedly not applied.

Interestingly though, you don’t seem to have a major problem with psychology, the primary social science to come under fire during the replication crisis, but just psychiatry. I assumed you were against both because I had seen that people have previously tried to discuss this distinction on your posts in the sub, to little effect. My mistake with that assumption. Glad you cleared it up here!

Edit: I meant to include this article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4592647/ I thought you might appreciate the different perspective on SSRIs. It also provides a generally unique approach to explaining why people take psychoactive medications that don’t perfectly address their primary presenting problem.

Sure thing. I’ll respond some more after the work day. Thanks for engaging

Nor I toward you. Another user mentioned feeling that you were being unfairly lambasted, and I’m sorry if that’s how it feels. For real, I think you’re a person with more dimensions than just your anti-psychiatry posts, and you’re probably extremely insightful. Hopefully we can get along if we cross paths in other subs.

That is absolutely absurd. Stories like that make my blood boil. I’m really sorry that happened to you and totally respect your skepticism toward the field.

Point taken! I didn’t look through your comment history, I was just responding to your earlier remark about not having developed much past lobotomies as well as the more recent one about people’s rejecting anti-psychiatry, not bc of facts, but because of the emotional desire to help people in need.

And absolutely, tons of therapists are completely useless and I hope I’m not one, but it is a real problem. I’ve always warned my friends that finding a good therapist is a lot harder than finding a therapist.