• 0 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

help-circle






  • This isn’t really an answer to your question, but psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman came up with 8 assessment questions for asking patients to describe their conditions. The questions are designed to allow for cultural or spiritual explanations outside of the typical Western medical model.

    • What do you call your problem? What name does it have?
    • What do you think caused your problem?
    • Why do you think it started when it did?
    • What does your sickness do to you? How does it work?
    • How severe is your sickness? How long do you expect it to last?
    • What do you fear most about your illness?
    • What are the biggest problems that your illness has caused for you?
    • What kind of treatment do you think you should receive? What are the most important results you hope to receive from treatment?


  • I’m with you. It’s like going to college after being homeschooled your whole life. Of course you need to know logistical things like how to submit homework, but those are easy answers to find. You also need to know how the other kids talk and what they’re talking about. It’s hard being out of the loop in regular conversations.


  • I’d like to strongly challenge your third point. As others have said, there are many reasons people don’t provide emotional support besides “they’re not your friends.” They might not know how to be supportive, they might be afraid of saying the wrong things and causing more hurt, they might have an avoidant attachment style with a deep fear of having others depend on them. We all have moments when we fail to show up for people we care about, and if we respond by ending those relationships, we’ll be left without any at all.

    I’m not saying it’s wrong for OP to end those friendships, and I think making new friends is usually a good move. I am saying that - when both parties are willing - being able to name and repair those hurts is part of having healthy relationships.



  • That’s where medical and psychological diagnoses are different. Diabetes has biological markers that we can measure, and DSM disorders mostly* rely on matching behavior patterns to predetermined labels. One clinician might call it narcissistic personality disorder, and another might call it a fear-driven obsession with social acceptance. Which one is correct?

    A major issue with the “mental health industrial complex” is that it quickly becomes tautological while appearing objective and empirical. What do we call someone who can’t empathize with others and constantly seeks admiration? NPD. What is NPD? It’s when someone can’t empathize with others and constantly seeks admiration.

    I could make up a diagnosis of “greeting disorder” for people who feel compelled to smile and make eye contact when they meet someone. Then I could insist that people who meet these criteria “have” this disorder, but how is that useful?

    *I say “mostly” because recent editions of the DSM include, for some reason, diagnoses like narcolepsy which can’t be diagnosed by psychological evaluation, but they can be diagnosed by medical testing.






  • I learned about torchiere style lamps a few years ago and I really like them. You’ve seen them before. They’re usually floor lamps and they point upwards to bounce the light off the ceiling. Unless you have a dark ceiling, they do a great job of spreading the light around the room without being too bright.

    Smart bulbs are, of course, more customizable, but recently I’ve gone back to analog lights I can just turn on and off.




  • I frequently hear this stereotype from people who haven’t been to France. I specifically hear that the French are rude to anyone who doesn’t speak French. My experience was that they can be rude to Americans who assume everyone will speak English. I would do my best to have a conversation in French, and the locals would usually take pity on me and switch to English.

    I’m not denying there are unfriendly French people, but I would expect anyone to get tired of tourists who don’t make any effort to speak the local language.