Mental Health Information

Last edited Tue Aug 19, 2025, 09:56 AM - Edit history (1)

I was thinking this morning about the stark contrast between the good shrinks I met and the types of shrinks I caricatured in the post above. Actually far from being anti-psychiatry, it’s a tribute to the good shrinks.
Though psychiatry is the only area of medicine where I ever had any complaints with doctors. Usually I find doctors some of the sanest people around. But in psychiatry, it was 50-50, 57% (good)-43% (ugh) as far as shrinks I spoke to much went.

I had a job in 2011 at a school which I..consider a tumor on humanity/earth’s
anus ;-/.

On the whole and possibly not entirely surprisingly the school seemed to disagree with this assessment. My mentor was a nice man and a good scientist, but he watches TED
tech talks and presumably non-ironically so there may have been a communication issue
or two or a thousand.

No ..that’s unfair..he was cool and I honestly wouldn’t mock him (TED tech talks
aside..though if you watch Ted tech talks at least don’t tell people..). I never mock anyone
whose work is of good quality (even if they not just watch TED tech talks, but openly admit
to it).

That was the main difference between him and my main mentor. They were both good scientists, but my main mentor wouldn’t watch TED tech talks. Or maybe he secretly watches TED tech talks all the time - at which point I would give up and become a hermit. Sometimes you wonder if you know anyone. I was horrified when my best friend told me reads The Atlantic. You think you know someone and then they admit to stuff like that..

I wouldn’t like to call watching TED tech talks a character flaw precisely, but it is a sign of
buying into Si valley bs which Si Valley is tok stupid to be aware is bs ..I don’t think they are evil. It’s worse. I think they are actually that stupid. well it was 2011..so anyone who is not a tech creep can be forgiven I guess for buying into that crap then.

To meander back to the original point, I sent him some ill-advised emails (always had a
short temper - am trying to get it under control) and he had me see their hideous shrinks
who asked me questions off of this checklist which was so hoary, moronic and generally
insulting to pretty much every form of human intelligence that I concluded that they must
in fact not be that right in the head.
I found this insistence on “the stigma” confusing. This was an example of how interaction with people who are wayyyyyyy more conservative than you is puzzling. I had never thought about mental illness it is true. But it seemed absurd to me that a scientist would think there was a stigma associated with illness. I stigmatize things
like watching TED tech talks. Cultural differences.

I am from podunk in the Global South. In a way when you break conventions in your neck
of the woods casually, you don’t consider how conservative people from supposedly more
developed countries could turn out to be..it turns out to be a different style of conservative idiocy.
My family was always eccentric I suppose, but entirely functional. We don’t watch TED tech talk adjacent drivel (at least not without mocking the attendees, the participants
and anyone who takes them seriously). But that’s Si Valley. I always thought it was a
ridiculous place.

There is something insidious about basically forcing a notion of stigma that way. If such
an idea had never occurred to someone, now you are forcing it. It’s also a way to insist
that a person is lying. Rather than passive aggressively saying “there is no stigma-admit
you are ill”, a more sincere way would be to say “I don’t see how anyone could see any stigma in something like illness in 2025”. That bashes anyone regressive enough to think that way
without insisting that someone who had a bad day or 20 in a notoriously unstable and
difficult job like the postdoc is ill. At any rate I was startled by how regressive it all was.

I swear those people have such narrow imaginations. They all sound alike for one thing.
Maybe that’s the public face and the private one is too ghastly to put out there.

The other thing was constantly asking one “do you want to hurt yourself”. After a while I
wanted to ask “are these suggestions by any chance? As I understand it, apparently there
is a huge stigma associated with something I am and clearly it must make me want to off
myself.”

Well anyway. I was furious that now people that stupid had power over my life. And then
they tried to put me on bloody Abilify and Seroquel. I protested and got out. But that did
leave a mark.

I can joke about it now. But at the time it made me feel like shit. I am pretty sure that was
not what my mentor had in mind. He had just had a baby and besides I think half the
brains of the team was out of action. His wife was really nice. She had no Si Valley
girlbossiness.

The thing is I always hated Si Valley. I didn’t mention it when I applied for a job because I
didn’t think that would be as pervasive a force as it turned out to be.

I would hate to be the token dimwitted fake protester/secret fan of Si Valley. I loved
Lina Khan. Though I feel a sense of hopelessness when I see that a creepy little company called complexity or something is about to buy a tacky but common browser from that super creepy giant that makes important contributions to society like calendars or something. Big creep/little creep..sometimes you wonder..

Anyway I thought of the shrink they had me see outside this morning. He was cool as was the therapist. Had they sent me to the type of dead-eyed tech enthusiast shill common in those parts I really would have felt crazy. But they were both cool men. In fact the therapist was kind enough to ask after my health even after I left..he was a nice man. As was the one shrink I went to of my own accord earlier who had prescribed a common add med (which I at least found useful at a low dose).

But I was less mature then even than I am now so that’s pretty immature and I did overdo it. It
wasn’t addiction. It was just being an ass…a problem I have at times.

I am not proud of these things. But well..

Not everything is a pathology. At least that was useful in a field i was struggling in.
Do I have ADHD? I don’t know. I do know that life in this society is really hard and if a
med helps you and isn’t too bad for you, fine by me. The chronic stress of all the crap I
described was way worse than maybe overdoing it a bit now and then.

Human life is messy and imperfect. I know China is a surveillance state. But that’s a
hollow excuse for Si valley and its analogs to barge in everywhere using “open science”, “health” and“safety/security” as issues.

Due to a combination of poor media literacy, poorer tech literacy and really poor critical thinking skills, as a society we seem to struggle to parse concepts except in very black and white ways or to find honest
thresholds. A lot of what I was mocking is the ott nature of that sort of thinking.

Of course there’s also too damn many of us and crafting “safe”, bland messaging that
ensures that no one of any random subset of the 3 billion people online who may stumble
on something you write is ever offended means not saying anything that sounds
indistinguishable from the volume of drivel out there. It’s why I delete so many of my
posts. They sound crazy or trite. Trite and derivative is worse imo. But crazy seems ill-advised.

Maybe i am wrong here..but I have a hunch that when a society cannot parse satire, it tends
to turn into one that kills satire by the very fact that reality starts to look like an ott
caricature.
I have never associated humorlessness with insight. And it’s depressing and alarming to see the skill with which the alt right has managed to exploit that.

I find my field hard. I switched fields a lot too. I started out in EE because I liked physics in
HS. But I didn’t like EE and wandered into a more interesting interdisciplinary science and
found it even harder since my basics in biology , chemistry were worse even than in
physics and math and I am not good at physics or math!

I think sardonically sometimes how easy I would be to caricature if you saw me plodding away on my computer. Or being a general pain to my friends and family and colleagues.
I became far worse that way with the rise of the cool and awesome surveillance state and
its creepy cool offshoots. I like them ;-/. Or at any rate I probably better right ? ha ha..

My last employer might win a popularity contest if UHC was the only other contestant I
suppose. I certainly don’t know what they mean by liberal academia. Seemed like hardcore
tech libertarians.

None of this is a slam on my mentor. I should have been a better scientist, but I wasn’t.

Anyway I thought I would dedicate my ugly web art to those 2 shrinks and therapist and one
shrink (an older lady) I met locally who was not a good fit, but she was a good shrink and
could see there was nothing wrong with me -attitude problems aside ;-/.
I didn’t always have attitude problems..
The cool thing was that none of them thought there was anything particularly wrong with me. That was quite accurate.

I am not anti psychiatry. In fact it is dejecting to see wellness influencers and other charlatans exploit problems with psychiatry. Why is everything a tumor these days? That’s the worst reaction to the problem. Something like Mad in America can occasionally make good points, but they are too extreme in my book.
And I distrust the libertarian style of anti-psychiatry since most libertarians aren’t really actually civil libertarians wrt other people’s rights. They want their creepy little companies to pollute and take over spaces sans consent public debate. I can’t see how that’s different from old fashioned robbery.

I also would have thought it would be obvious that psychiatry should be combined with
other areas (neuroscience, molecular psychiatry) to improve and that it is obviously a science with far to go.

But without this tech creep/military contracting
contingent blatantly ripping people off..weaponized pseudosciences

I am less anti big pharma than many other industries, but this peddling of chatbots, VR etc
I really dislike. It’s so obviously that 12-step, religion banging “everything is an addiction”
crew of douchebags exploiting all sorts of prejudices and bs to sell the “new thing”.

A medication free fix?! No! Go away! Meds are fine! You are creeps! Fuck off! Do my biases
show ;-/ ? I hate that moralizing sobriety bs.

Now I have to spend all this time on this overpopulated, polluted planet struggling with work and life and do it with this annoying sobriety shill type forcing unwanted therapies that I would obviously reject as awful?

There is too much bs..Conservatism packaged as care is still just conservatism.

Oh well..


Edit: I feel I am getting my temper under control since I don’t blow my top over Moriba Jah/Brian Verelli etc. who go around saying this or that awful thing is inevitable thereby ensuring it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s the classic gambit of that type of person who for reasons I cannot fathom is described as a space environmentalist or conservation biologist. No …Kirsten Staade of Population Balance or Madhav Gadgil are conservation biologists. These guys are probably shills for some industrial lobby or other. A TED fellow..yeah that tracks..
These are not the kinds of guys I have in mind when I think of oversight. For instance, I do self-supervised harm reduction. I am not selling that as a scientific treatise disproving Reefer Madness. It’s just something I have to do and I admit to it so you know..Boom! oopsie! etc are less likely. Machine error!

There’s conspiratorial thinking and there is the cynical noting of the stealthy promotion of some biases (generally favoring creeps (men’s rights are human rights! ) and uncritical embrace of data mining/war profiteering/polluting/ intrusive Industries) and painting people who are skeptical of deregulation/conflicts of interest/male creeps (male creep? Is that like Bigfoot? False allegations! Paranoid much?) as conspiracy oriented. This is why no one should ever watch TED tech talks. They make people stupider. I don’t get it-should no one but girlbosses and passive doormats exist anymore? My last employer may not even win a popularity contest if UHC was the sole other contestant.

Of course I was remembering today how my one experience with real world activism showed how lame this “change the world with a social network or computer/phone is”. Thats more like any regular effortful work. Collecting signatures irl and boots on the ground. I think Yasha Levine and Kenny Torelli have pointed out in their columns how info on Gaza/factory farming respectively do not do much. Not that awareness has no place in stuff. But it’s one relatively small part. The rest is stuff in the real world without some fucking awful creepiverse or “mixed reality! Physical AI streams!” piling on.

The way to destroy nuisances is irl.

The trick is tuning out nuisances and not getting riled up. You really can’t trust that conglomerate of special interests and people who are gullible about them while attacking peope like me as crazy and paranoid. But you can’t prove it with web posts. The thing is to get on with work and then destroy their fugly toys irl.
There are 8 billion people on this planet. These creeps who encroach can go and do all their “inevitable!” “Definitely happening!” crap elsewhere.
I think they are too stupid for even mockery.

In fact I get it finally. You can’t establish credibility with people who always act in bad faith and will never change. One should instead ignore all of that and try to find new, neutral parties so as the awesome Lina Khan and the MeToo movement, the Humane League etc had real world impacts, you can fight your way though anonymously and stick it to them (I mean peacefully and legally etc).

My greasy former employer was this liability obsessed creep of a school that assumes everyone is like them and that any woman who hates them would go the Ellen Pao route and sue for compensation for their negligence.

That’s categorically wrong. Ellen Pao actually wanted to work for Kleiner Perkins.
I never wanted to work at that shithole after I saw they were nothing like my previous employers.
My previous employer which was this dull and inoffensive hospital. The nicest thing about them was they were barely noticeable as was I when I worked there. This place on the other hand I took an immediate and strong dislike to since it clearly was everything wrong with the world in the form of one creepy school. I tried to quit in the first month. Instead I ended up staying, getting saddled with a completely bogus history of mental illness.

What always made me so angry about those ugly fucks is that in their creepy kayfabe-there “ecosystem” of repellent human beings that no halfway sane person could want to know, either :1) like all the honest scientists I met there you go around obviously hating work and life and I guess accept misery as “inevitable” or 2) go to the worst shrinks on the planet and say you have a horrible complication of mental ills since you know it’s stigmatizing mental illness to not claim to be a depressed, borderline, addicted schizophrenic with chatbot psychosis and histrionic personality disorder and for good measure DID. It’s so lame. Just because you can data mine and manipulate people dissecting normal goofy behaviours in paranoid ways. Someone should do a rigorous version of the Sokal Hoax or Rosenhan Expt. Following which presumably you get institutionalized for life/effectively pushed out of society or 3a) lead some sort of horrifying existence shilling for various dubious VR therapies or health chatbots and sobriety and the bleakest damn notion of community and turn into some sort of nightmarish inside the system influencer shill or 3b) “fight the system!” ie be very much a part of the same tumor except as an outside the system influencer wellness hack..ie pick between a dialed down Elizabeth Holmes or a Laura Delano.
That school is so daft.
Some sort of entirely atrocious online existence or traipsing through various manipulated realities accepting as “inevitable” all sorts of pollution and pseudoscience that’s forced even on people like me who never even had any social media except DU and I never posted this disinhibitedly on DU, but I just hate my former employer (the school not my TED tech talk addicted mentor). I am not saying a hope that a form of guerilla warfare would percolate and puncture their fatuous, smug self-regard..
I hope I can always stay anon.

I never got this stuff about associating your actual irl life with an online persona. Two different worlds that can never meet. Unless you work in unpleasant fields like media or politics where you simply cannot avoid being a public figure, why would anyone fall for a con like Social media.

Online anonymity allows screwed over employees to skewer an awful system filled with these noxious and corrupt ideas that cool people with jobs cannot attack even if they want to. To at least pushback against this drivel about all the shit these guys do being inevitable.
Or you find out more exactly and there is an NDA or something so you can’t argue with along with a systemic policy of deregulation, destruction of environmental, labor laws and privacy rights.
The downside is that paranoid conspiracy mongering is really not my thing. But the labeling of all pushback as paranoid..
I mean it wasn’t as if my first two employers were hippie communes and besides I don’t like hippie communes.
It’s that these guys are the types who focus on frivolous drivel and call any serious wish for regulatory oversight a Stalinist conspiracy or if it’s the corrupt communists here, an anti-worker thing, These are all dishonest people.



They assume that getting away with stuff is how people think or ascribe it to some group or other rather than ever think like any halfway rational person. No. Most people whom abyone would know -so not my former employer-want a fair deal in exchange for sane..

I do think if you are regressive these guys are a good fit. But I think irl is the only way to break their ugly crap and quietly.

Ffs I just wanted a routine job and to not have drivel creep into my house and street. There are so many people of their exact ilk. What a bone headed error to go and drag in people who obviously don’t consider that MIT Media Lab or Stanford/MIT type a part of the scientific community..They do science.
But by scientific community I mean humans who have certain codes of conduct that are unsaid. And this doesn’t cut it and no.wtf..
I don’t consider that the medical and scientific community. They are business people and politicians and defense contractors and that’s not in my book the scientific community..I guess that’s the point.