I don't know, maybe a proclivity but our family wasn't really the type for diagnosing mh disorders. I had to fight like hell to get my own diagnoses as an adult.
Quitting smoking and vaping is harder, last year was the first time in my life where, after not having a cig in a long time, I was at a thing and people were smoking and I bummed one and it was absolutely disgusting to me. Felt great to hate it tbh.
But in like 13-15 years of habitual smoking I never had a psychotic episode from it.
Granted I was an almost constant user, I maintained a "high" basically from when I woke up until I went to bed at night. It was def a form of self medication, it did help with a lot of ADHD symptoms because rather than getting lazy I would get hyped and very active. Used it that way basically from a little before covid, all through covid, until November of last year. It did affect my work performance, looking back, but I interviewed for that job high, I went to work high most of the time, still got good reviews, raises and a promotion. I was addicted or dependent or whatever term you want to use. But like high functioning I guess.
But in November I crashed hard. Had a complete psychotic break. I thought the government was using 5g to beam mind control beams, an array of numbers containing hidden brainwashing instructions, to make me believe I was this person, when really I was a fake, an android put into this life to do their bidding, they killed the real me and I was the replacement, and this happened all the time, I just happened to pick up on one of their transmissions.
I'm a rational guy, I don't know where this shit came from. I have pages in my notebook documenting it. Luckily my wife is amazing and I was kind of able to talk myself out of it enough to have her convince me and remind me of what was real. Since then I had to quit. I def got some intelligence points back. And I haven't had any more episodes. But damn that scared the shit out of me. I didn't even know it was possible.
Omg I remember having this argument with my friends. "Well there are some home remedies that work, modern medicine doesn't have a monopoly on all knowledge" OK but homeopathic medicine just means its water, plain water that remembers being able to cure a disease, its fake "Yeah but they're not all like that some of them work, my grandma would use a half of an onion to take the pain out of bee stings" jfc I'm literally not talking about that, I'm talking about water sold as medicine that is covered by most major insurance! look it up!
What I have thanks to money, what i pay for, i.e, what money can buy, that is what I, the possessor of the money, am myself. My power is as great as the power of money.
The properties of money are my- (its owner's)- properties and faculties. Thus what I am and what I am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy myself the most beautiful women. Consequently, I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its power of repulsion, is annulled by money. As an individual I am lame, but money can create twenty four feet for me; so I am not lame; I am wicked, dishonest man without conscience or intellect, but money is honored and so also is its possessor.
Money is the highest good and so its possessor is good. Money relieves me of the trouble of being dishonest, so I am presumed to be honest. I may have no intellect, but money is the true mind of all things and so how should its possessor have no intellect? Morever he can buy himself intellectuals, and is not the man who has power over intellectuals not more of [an] intellectual than they?
Don't self diagnose based on a single internet discussion but self diagnosis is crucial to getting yourself some relief. I didn't get a diagnosis until I was about 40, and even at this point the change was dramatic. I don't take stimulants but I take a few medications and it made life so much easier, I doubled my salary in 3 years, bought a house, just had a fantastic few years. But I also have a ton of trauma, I hurt a lot of people and myself from being so chaotic and depressed and incapable of processing thoughts or feelings, or being able to handle basic finances. I also lost like 15 years of good life where I could have been successful and happy instead of depressed and stuck in a shitty job with no clear way out.
If you're reading these discussions and realizing that it seems a little too familiar, take this seriously. If you decide you have it, don't take anyone's word that you don't. Its hard to get treated IMO, so if you see a therapist and they don't want to treat you for ADHD, then bye bye, find another one who will take it seriously. I went to therapists on and off for years trying to figure out why I was depressed, and they basically told me I was okay, the normal amount of unhappy with regular life stuff. I finally got on a mild antidepressant and it helped immensely. I fought and found out the antidepressant had an off label use for treating mild ADHD, and when my daughter got diagnosed I looked more into it. When I went to therapists to get treated for ADHD, they told me I was just depressed. so you gotta fight for yourself, but this world is a fuck, and it can be extremely worth while once you get what you might need.
People on Lemmy really don't like any kind of equivocation between the two parties. Also saying that the Dems are a front for Republican objectives isn't correct either. Republicans are the party of nationalist industrial old money bourgeois, Dems are the party of nouveau riche, international finance capital, tech, and labor bureaucracy.
Leftists identify Democrat politicians as a class enemy, and it's true that the bourgeois base of the republicans will join the bourgeois base of the democrats in class solidarity if their class interests are threatened. Liberals also have a nasty habit of defending private property above all else which gives lefties the Heebie jeebies, and creates a lot of inter class strife among workers. The bourgeoisie is one thing, just like the working class is one thing, and as much as I believe that workers should unite to fight against their class enemies, the working class is divided into different striae (lower class reserve army of labor vs. Middle class suburban worker for example) that compete for the scraps, so why wouldn't the ruling capitalists be divided similarly in a fight for the lion's share? Capitalism is, among other things, a system of coercive forced competition. This competitiveness takes many different historical forms across many divisions in society. As much as I'd like to unite all races, gender expressions, ethnicities, economic groupings against our shared enemies in this class war, we all know it's not that simple. Competition is how the system perpetuates, it is the driver of monopolization as well as something like an immune system against worker solidarity, the greatest threat to capitalism.
Often the first step in dialectical thinking, the mode of thought that begins to emerge with class consciousness, is an ability to take two things that seem separate and unite them into a single thing by analyzing the relationships that form them. But dialectics is a process that works forward as well as in reverse. We can use it to identify two things that are one, but we should also be able to use it to identify that one thing is also two. Many people see the synthesis between the two parties and draw a conclusion based on that, and go to the internet to proclaim this discovery, which is often met with lots of people who agree rhetorically with the conclusion, making us believe that we are correct in out new knowledge. But part of this consciousness is an ability to deal with contradictions as part of our analysis, whereas the human, or maybe just modernist, tendency is to discard contradiction for the illusion of surety, another byproduct of competitive mode of capitalist evaluation. We have to realize that each revelation is just a new facet of the truth, which is a lifelong pursuit that is shared among class conscious workers, not arrived at finally by an individual. These truths, as well as the basis for them are all historically contingent. Many things about the class struggle never changes, many of the tendencies identified by Marx for example, but many other things are constantly changing.
I would also be remiss to fail to add that there probably is a concerted effort by bad actors to false equivocate democrats and republicans in order to alter political outcomes, propagandize or maybe just breed suspicion. I don't know if its Russia or China or the democrats or the republicans, probably all of the above plus many many more to different extents. But all these people on Lemmy who detect such bad actors in their communities, I think we have to trust their ability to tell truth from falsehood. even if we don't agree completely with their conclusions, doesn't mean they are completely wrong. When working people tell us something we have to listen. We are all victims of propaganda, so dismissing the sincere fear of other workers as propagandized delusion says more about how we falsely view ourselves as part of the working class, than it does about them.
Good, remove all the weird reddit answers, leaving only the "14 year old neo-nazi" reddit answers, "cop pretending to be a leftist" reddit answers, and "39 year old pedophile" reddit answers. This should fix the problem and restore google back to its defaults
Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.
Recalling my past is like watching a cringe comedy that turns briefly into a Yorgos Lanthimos film about various mental illnesses, then a quirky Wes Anderson film, and back into a cringe comedy.