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Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

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Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#191

Post by wafflemaker »

budsniffer952 wrote: post #185
smugglerFlynn wrote: post #99

> My goals for the end of 2027 are as follows: > Stop making stupid mistakes. I want to be able to finish a task fully without missing or skipping a step. One way to do this is to make a plan for everything you do, and only do that thing. Nothing else. If you are neurodivergent or have other things influencing you mentally, you are _NOT_ going to snap out of it. You are not going to just build a better planning syste…

What does neurodivergent mean? If there's a spectrum, what is considered normal, and how is that measured?

IANAD, Clinically, the measurement for diagnosis is if symptoms disturb your day to day life. In some countries they need to disturb multiple (1Then you'd have people with symptoms, but who's life is not affected by them.

I wonder myself if it's just the first group that is classified as neurodivergent or both.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#192

Post by Paracompact »

No one else has mentioned it here, so on account of my own experiences I feel the obligation to say: Be aware of this developing into suicidal ideation, if it hasn't already.

I get the impression (again, mostly my own experiences, projected onto you) from your intense "the problem has to be me" convictions that you're simultaneously dealing with a lot of self-loathing, and that this self-loathing fills a void of answers to existential questions that no other source in your life can. In other words, your depression has become a maladaptive coping strategy. And if that's so, then it's not a long shot until your maladaptive coping strategies evolve from, "the problem is me" into "the solution would be/will be/should be/is my own death."

I derive these warnings from these whiffs of absolute, impossible-to-change miseries you mention: "my mind is exploding, I'm not aware of what I'm doing anymore"; "tomorrow it'll be something else I screwed up"; "I'm the only one with these problems."

So, if you have a dark voice inside your head that promises change or absolution only in return for your own physical or emotional injury (perhaps dressed up as "discipline"), be forewarned: This voice is a cognitive illusion. It does not care about you. It will hold your head underwater until you drown, and still be unhappy.

On another note: I would agree with others that you would be a strong candidate for an autism assessment. Like you say with ADD, autism would not a root cause of anything, but it might help you understand your situation more intuitively if it is involved.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#193

Post by Aurornis »

graysnow86 wrote: post #63
fwlr wrote: post #29

This could be due to ADD, I am still getting tested. Granted, that's a diagnosis, not a root cause. No, it’s a diagnosis of the root cause - in fact, it is plausibly the root cause of everything else described in the post. Inability to complete work, procrastination/distraction by focusing on nearby tasks, the pervasive sense that you struggle with things that other people do not, even the depression (untreated ADD c…

> The treatment for ADD is one of two medications, methylphenidate or dexamphetamine. You can try other things in addition to these, but not instead of these, and you should try both - there really is just no substitute. No, not quite - there's a variety of different ADHD medications and I'd argue there's more popular ones like Vyvanse (lisdexamfetamine). Non-stimulants like Strattera or Intuniv absolutely can and ar…

Intuniv gets a bad reputation because the patient has to be titrated up to the final dose and it takes a long time to see the full effects. It's the opposite pattern of stimulants where the patient feels great (unnaturally so, due to stimulant euphoria at the start) and the effects wane over time.

The internet is really, really bad at pushing everyone toward ADHD diagnoses and then pushing them further toward stimulants. There's a darker part of some of the communities then pushes people to keep pressuring their doctors for higher and higher doses and also discourages people from trying therapy.

Outside of the internet I know several people who did the rounds with medications and ended up on the non-stimulant options and preferred them. This is an unthinkable conclusion if your primary source of information is Reddit, X, or TikTok ADHD influencers, but it's pretty common in the real world.

Stimulants have a habit of being enjoyable at first (meaning people like taking them, beyond their attention effects) and then the effects wane over the years, to the point that there are studies showing that the effects of stimulants taken long term in children are minimal to unmeasurable after several years. This is confusing to anyone who has been taking them for years and notices a difference on days when they don't take them, but that's explainable by the fact that it takes months (or longer) for the brain to adapt to not having them in the body. For some reason this same effect is not debated as much when you talk about people who drink 5 cups of coffee per day but then crash hard when they miss their coffee, but it gets protested and argued a lot when we talk about literal amphetamines.

Anyway, please don't listen too much to internet ADHD forums. They're just so, so bad these days with bad advice and poor psychology/therapy takes. You really need to engage with professionals with an open mind and not be single minded about acquiring and taking stimulants if you want to address this problem as a whole. The way the internet treats ADHD as a simple "low dopamine" state (which is wrong on many levels) and then points to stimulants as a "raise your dopamine" drug to neatly cancel it out sounds nice, but it's wrong on so many levels.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#194

Post by grvdrm »

jrowen wrote: post #162
smugglerFlynn wrote: post #99

> My goals for the end of 2027 are as follows: > Stop making stupid mistakes. I want to be able to finish a task fully without missing or skipping a step. One way to do this is to make a plan for everything you do, and only do that thing. Nothing else. If you are neurodivergent or have other things influencing you mentally, you are _NOT_ going to snap out of it. You are not going to just build a better planning syste…

> HN comments are _NOT_ going to help debugging your mental state. Nice paradox you've created there. > People here have trouble agreeing on engineering, product and business practices they specialise in. They are _NOT_ going to guide you in the right direction on mental health topics. I don't know that that follows logically. Whatever people they might reach out to in the real world -- be they friends, relatives, th…

Thank you for this reply. I thought the parent comment was blunt, and perhaps honest. But perhaps it could have added some positive and constructive commentary rather than saying what not to do. I hardly think these things are so binary anyways.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#195

Post by Aurornis »

fwlr wrote: post #29

This could be due to ADD, I am still getting tested. Granted, that's a diagnosis, not a root cause. No, it’s a diagnosis of the root cause - in fact, it is plausibly the root cause of everything else described in the post. Inability to complete work, procrastination/distraction by focusing on nearby tasks, the pervasive sense that you struggle with things that other people do not, even the depression (untreated ADD c…

> (untreated ADD causing repeated failures, repeated failures causing depression)

Really important to understand that depression can also manifest as poor concentration.

There's a huge problem right now with people getting locked into diagnoses found on the internet and then resisting advice of their doctors that doesn't match. It's scarily common for depressed patients to become convinced that they have ADHD and that ADHD explains everything, then to refuse depression treatment. They can jump from doctor to doctor until they find someone who doesn't care and just writes the prescription, but years can pass before they realize that stimulants aren't fixing their depression.

If you have depression, with or without ADHD, you need to address it. Don't get sucked into the "ADHD explains everything about you" mentality that gets spread on the internet.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#196

Post by wafflemaker »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #99

> My goals for the end of 2027 are as follows: > Stop making stupid mistakes. I want to be able to finish a task fully without missing or skipping a step. One way to do this is to make a plan for everything you do, and only do that thing. Nothing else. If you are neurodivergent or have other things influencing you mentally, you are _NOT_ going to snap out of it. You are not going to just build a better planning syste…

OTOH, reading some wise comments on hn can help you get out of your biases.

It was initially some hn comment that convinced me that ADHD is not lazy people's excuse, but an actual thing (even if overhyped on some hn alternatives -- social media). And that led to a diagnosis after some time.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#198

Post by jrowen »

thewebguyd wrote: post #124
hirvi74 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone that is "neurodivergent," I agree. A lot of advice, especially surrounding executive dysfunction, could be boiled down into a single step -- step 1: do not have executive dysfunction. Now, I am not trying to say there is nothing anyone can do to improve themselves or their situation, but I do find a lot of advice falls short. Common advice is to set reminders, make lists, etc.. However, none of that is hel…

> I need lots of forced, external structure Me as well, which is a really "fun" time when my specific blend of neurodivergence also causes me to immediately resent said authority and external structure and view it as removing my agency. What I've learned as I've gotten older is just how much of our struggle comes down to our social model of disability. A lot of these "symptoms" are only disorders because we've built…

It's a lot harder to change the shape of the hole. But I do agree that there is too much emphasis on the pathology of it. I think therapy needs a major rebranding and it shouldn't be seen as something that we do to "fix" "broken" people.

It should just be about more deeply understanding ourselves as individuals, and understanding the world around us (particularly other people), so that we may navigate it better.

I saw a video of a comedian (a woman) doing crowd work, and kind of playfully bullying someone (a man), asking them about their therapy. I thought it was funny, but a lot of the comments were along the lines of "that's not cool, how dare you."

But that audience member was at a comedy club, where comics do that kind of thing. Going to therapy isn't about collectively making sure the world babysits and coddles everyones needs. It's about giving you the tools to handle what you can't change.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#199

Post by tsoukase »

Depression is for many people the animal in the room, for some a fox and for others an elephant. You cannot avoid, ignore or hack a chemical imbalance in your brain with societal or personal measures. If you find yourself hopeless and helpless, irrespective if you have attended any form of psychotherapy, take an antidepressant. Don't hesitate and if you are in trouble, contact me, seriously. The author takes Fluoxetine which is the less potent A-D drug among all. If he is really in a heavy depression, he should be on Escitalopram.

Re: Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

#200

Post by ftpPoster »

travelalberta wrote: post #64
yondys wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish it was this easy. But mental health is as complex and multifaceted as our brain is. There can be more than one reason why a once happy engineer is now struggling to complete basic tasks, and they are often hard to find and explain or to relate to simple explanations like these (which is why more and more people are turning to therapy for answers). You raise good questions, but thousands more could be asked: Ar…

I think mental health is way over blown in terms of complexity. >My point is that there are rarely easy answers to easy questions such as these I'd argue these are all binary questions and pretty easy to answer: >Eating nutritious food? : Yes/No >Sleeping enough?: Yes/No >Are you taking care of your foundations? Yes/No based on above plus Yes/No to "Sufficient Exercise?" >Do you have any bad habits or trauma that you…

While I do agree with the majority of your post and it's very close to what I've been trying to do on my own, I wouldn't call it easy. It's a simple formula and I think the majority of people would benefit from trying to attempt the formula or a version of it before seeking professional help.

When you're in a negative mental state, none of these things are easy. Eating right, for example, assumes you know what right is, you can afford it, you have access to it and you have the energy to get it. All of those points have their own unique "prerequisites".

A bad mental state can keep you from completing those prerequisites.

A bad mental state can prevent the formula from working even if strictly followed.

There's still value in doing them because it keeps things from being worse. If there's something worse than being depressed, it's being depressed and hungry, or depressed and scared, or depressed and tired.

A bad mental state also messes with your perception. Good becomes bad, bad becomes worse, and worse becomes worst. Keeping a daily track of things ensures that you'll always have an objective source of truth. So that even if things feel hopeless, you can look back and pinpoint the few good moments.

I've been steadily working on my version of the formula for ~4y and the majority of the time I feel content but there are days where its still a challenge to do the right thing and days where I have to force myself to even get out of bed. But I can always look back and see that things aren't that bad. They just feel that way right now.

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