Shit rolls downhill; profits roll up. Source: fellow nurse.

My psych unit is having a pretty severe pants-in-the hall deficiency tonight and I’m definitely not getting paid enough for any of it.

They did have arcs, but more in that way older star trek did where you get a blurb about it during the rest of the episodes self contained content then a dedicated episode at the beginnings and ends of the season with 1-2 dedicated episodes somewhere in the middle. Well balanced for multiple watch styles.

A better star trek than anything released in the 2010s onward. I’m not even kidding, they handled many more current sociopolitical issues and with far more wit and a frankly shocking amount of tact considering its a Seth McFarlane comedy.

I’ve been waiting for algorithm-senpai to notice me…

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The number one thing I love about Randall Munroe’s particular brand of nerd humor is how genuine he is. His fascination with the natural laws of the universe is just that. It’s not something he uses to hold himself over other people or to create in-groups and out-groups of people who know and people who don’t. Even when his content is too complex for the average person it never has that subtextual “well you just wouldn’t get it because you’re not smart enough” vibe that so much other nerd humor has (looking at you big bang theory). He’s genuinely inviting the reader to learn about whatever it is, whether they ultimately do or don’t. He doesn’t have that weird inferiority complex people get sometimes where people feel the need to defensively push others away from their interests to feel better about the fact that their interests happen to be niche in some way. He doesn’t use it as a vehicle to fuel his ego. I’ve joked before that he’s my “celebrity crush” but it’s really just that he truly, genuinely wants to show you something he thinks is cool (and at least a little humorous) and as someone who’s met a LOT of snobby nerds, I’ve always deeply respected that he isn’t one. - sincerely, a professional vibe-checker (like, actually).

Nothing directly for any individual, but you can host, moderate, and / or participate in more apolitical hobby spaces.

One of the biggest ways delusions keep a hold of people is by disconnecting them from supportive / positive social relationships. The deeper down the rabbit hole they go, the more people they argue with, and the less non-delusional friends they have. Try to figure out what those beliefs and social groups replaced, then get them back into supportive social groups around that. Often it’s a hobby like gardening, book clubs, cars, sports, hiking, etc.

That’s why all of this took off so hard during COVID, people got ripped away through all of those things and Russian disinformation bots were right there and ready to replace that sense of connection with a sense of being part of a larger movement. Sometimes it’s spiritual or religious groups which has been difficult because so many of those groups have just become completely overtaken and become vehicles for the delusions, so we also need to work on ways for people to express their religion and spirituality in non-delusional ways, but that’s a whole other discussion.

The short version is: make the delusional stuff subtly less accessible (encourage them to get away from the computer and TV) and try to get them into other positive activities that connect them with other people and help them move their focus away from the delusions without directly confronting them.

When confronted directly delusions tend to integrate the new information into the existing belief system so two examples here would be that maybe the study was flawed or only referring to a specific type of signal or specific type of brain cancer but the more likely option is just deciding that this is more proof that the system as a whole aims to deceive them.

Source: am psych nurse and was trained long ago to never try to talk someone out of a delusion for the exact reason that it tends to just make them stronger (I answered somebody’s question about what to do instead down below if you’re curious).

Yes that’s ideal. I would argue most of the “lost causes” you’re describing are victims of the current system and we owe then something akin to long-term secure units until they’re sick enough of the restrictiveness of even a non-abusive containment system to put in the work to recover, but that’s semantics. At the end of the day everywhere should be doing it like that and housing and rehabbing these people, emphasis on the housing since it’s a prerequisite to the rehab.

Yeah. And they’re volunteering to risk something that’s at least horribly traumatic and at worst just a straight up human rights violation because they don’t have any better places to go and that’s by design.

No that’s 100% exactly what I’m talking about because no one should be going to psych hospitals for any of those things, and the fact that we’ve not allocated the resources to treat those things in the community (which would actually be cheaper) is the entire failing of that “deinstitutionalization” movement. It was supposedly going to be a whole movement where we shifted to community care models but they never actually allocated proper funding for that so it became just another way to fuel the prison industrial complex.

I’ve never even worked a psych hospital that did proper 1:1 talk therapy on the regular. I as a nurse working a 12h shift with 6-8 patients and also being responsible for equipment checks, groups, checking on all my patients at least hourly etc am often the closest thing some of these people get to a therapist. At the absolute MOST most of those things should be being treated at a CSU which is a type of voluntary stepdown unit that usually has 1 nurse on-site continuously and that does a cursory belongings search and NO body searches. Most of them function like rehabs but do other mental health services as well as detox. I shouldn’t be being asked to strip search depressed people, but I also can’t risk one of them being dumb enough to bring a proper sharp or ligature onto my secure unit for people who genuinely can’t be trusted not to shank or garotte a bitch. Ffs one time the ER just didn’t even check at all and an actively psychotic pt rolled onto the unit with a loaded fucking gun in their bag that my tech just happened to find during a routine belongings search and I’ve found all kinds of other weapons on people. My unit is tightly controlled for a reason and most people receiving psychiatric care don’t need it and therefore should never gave to experience it.

Almost none of the people you’re describing should be setting foot on even the classier units I’ve worked, and they wouldn’t have to if proper community resources like medication management, talk therapy, and even CSUs were more available. I remember reading at one point that there was like one psychiatrists office serving like half of Montana at one point. The lack of those services (and particularly the lack of adequate insurance reimbursement for those services - those professionals still need to feed and house themselves and their families) are a very intentional component of this fucked up orphan crushing machine.

Doesn’t shock me tbh. The “deinstitutionalization movement” was a fucking joke all they did was dump people out on the street so they could use their 0 community living skills to go get their mental Healthcare from prison instead, and now that people are getting sick of being screamed at on the street by homeless schizophrenics on drugs (not like there’s anything better for them to do) they want them locked up again so they can make health insurance companies money instead of doing literally anything to actually heal their communities. I have an entire nursing theory and set of practices just for this specific population because we’ve just completely fucked so many of them up, probably most of them permanently. And I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face but housing is the #1 driver of the American mental health crisis. They joke about “what radicalized you” and it’s 8 fucking years of working in psych hospitals even when I’m proud of the care I’m giving just watching the system as a whole is killing me. What I do should be considered ICU level psych care for that handful of people who are actually actively psychotically tweaking so why are all of the units I work mostly full of not even depressed but just understandably sad homeless people?

I feel like this is something I knew but didn’t know was something that had actually been studied. I’ll tell a lot of science concepts and stories from history and mythology that normally bore people but I’ve always had a habit of telling them “drunk history” style so I’ll be telling people shit like,“And they didn’t invite discord to the party because why the fuck would you but you also can’t just not invite her because that’s how you piss a bitch off.” and “and Paris, being a dumbfuck who doesn’t know how to think with his upstairs brain-” and honestly I was already somewhat like that but spending a bunch of my formative years on tumblr really honed it.

No, they were nice like that to the male students. I was female presenting at the time so it was just a fucking tank of piranhas. The sexism for the men doesn’t really seem to start until you’re working ortho, psych, or ER and everybody starts looking at you like you’re a damn hoyer that transforms into a battle mech optimus prime style.

I’m never sure if my difficulty integrating with those communities is because they are by nature diffuse or because after having to go to FCA camps as a kid and sing hymns off projector screens that were just re-written country songs about Jesus instead of ford pickup trucks I not only can’t take any religion seriously but specifically and actively refuse to. My higher power commands that I shitpost. I actually got into an argument online with someone insisting that I was doing it wrong (also they were accusing me of being transphobic which is another community I don’t get on with because the surgery is and forever will be the only part of my gender I have ever taken seriously).

Honestly this discussion also highlights the issue that what’s considered inappropriate varies widely and often changes both in terms of prejudice and in terms of context. Most people would agree that an image of a penis entering or inside of a vagina is pornographic unless it’s a medical diagram laying out the anatomical and physiological aspects like the one in the anatomy book my otherwise puritanical parents let me read at the age of six. Most people would agree that nudity is sexual except for, again, anatomical diagrams, but also many classical artistic depictions such as paintings and statues. Hand holding isn’t generally considered sexual except to some people if the people happen to be of the same sex but not if you come from a culture where hand holding is a normal level of intimacy for non sexual friends. Breasts are for some reason considered sexual in most of the areas heavily colonized by people from the places where lactose tolerance past childhood evolved but not most other places which is super handy if you like being able to feed infants. Most people agree that kissing for an extended period while rubbing areas close to the genitals is sexual, but often not enough to restrict it from being viewed by teenagers.

TLDR; what’s even considered “sexual” or “porn” can vary wildly and has historically been used to suppress education, various minorities, and general freedom of expression.

I flunked out of nursing school despite the content itself being fairly easy because I didn’t know how to deal with mean girl shit yet. I passed the second time by just doing whatever they told me to until I graduated. In particular, I remembered some advice from years earlier from an older roommate who had just gotten back from their coast guard training. They said their goal had been to go as long as possible before the instructor even knew their name. Honestly that’s been a pretty great strategy for me when I’ve needed to escape abuses of power ever since; keep your head down, do whatever they tell you to, don’t draw attention to yourself, then book it the first chance you get.

Christian esotericism has been a really relaxing segue into a healthy spirituality for me. There’s no people demanding I pray the “correct” way or give them money they won’t tell me what they’re doing with or telling me that saying a dead guy’s name will keep me from going to an eternity no one can prove exists. Just me and the dead guy’s words that tell me to party hard and chase rich people with whips. And tarot cards; I’ve honestly gotten more out of them than therapy lately because I’m a lot more honest with myself but I still get something similar to a third party opinion on things by sort of bouncing the thoughts outward then back in.

That was the whole purpose of tumblr so yeah. I kid, as I did get started on there at like 14 as a part of various Fandoms, but by the time I was 18 I had been using it for porn for quite some time, largely because fandom is also mostly for porn.