Maybe if the medical industrial complex surrounding mental health wasn’t so profit-hungry and dehumanising, then she might not think that death is an option that she needs to take.

Yes this makes sense to me. I definitely think we should look for better ways to deal with mental health problems. And yes you’re probably right that we should have a better standard than simply “you can now slave at a job, therefore you’re healthy”.

I think one good solution for mental health problems (maybe not always, but it can work) is talking to somebody who is willing to listen. This can be hard to find. But there are mental health charities out there who do great work in talking to people who are having problems. There are support phone lines and things like that.

The article was written by a person who says “I have spent several years of my life in various psychiatric institutions”. So it is a person with experience of this system, and what helped them. I don’t see at all how they can be seen as fear mongering. They seem to be giving their honest account of their experiences as a patient in the mental health system.

As for reality and data, there is a lot of reality and data showing that psych drugs are not perfect. There is evidence that antipsychotics cause movement disorders (restlessness, involuntary movements), metabolic effects (changing blood sugar levels), effects on heart function, weight gain, etc. And there is evidence of negative effects from antidepressants too, like sexual dysfunction, and a small increase in the risk of birth defects, just as an example:

There is evidence that taking SSRIs early in pregnancy slightly increases the risk of your baby developing heart defects, spina bifida or cleft lip.

I support patient choice. If a person wants to take psych meds, okay. But I think they should be informed by reputable authorities (CDC in the US, national health organisations in other countries, including regulatory bodies of psychiatry) about the positives and negatives of these drugs. That is the only way to make an informed choice.

Ultimately I hope for non-drug approaches to mental issues. Approaches that recognise the real issues in people’s lives that cause them distress, rather than approaches that label the patient as “ill” and dismiss them with a powerful and sometimes unpleasant drug.

I have seen stats about genetic dispositions, yes. Wikipedia says 40% of a person’s risk of having major depression comes from genes.

Still. One thing is that you don’t know what your genes are. Your genes might have less of a risk than you think. But also, maybe an increased risk can be dealt with through lifestyle choices. I’m not saying people shouldn’t take meds if they want to take them, and I think personal choice is extremely important. But the meds do have annoying and somewhat harmful side effects… so I suppose that has to be weighed up in a decision to take the meds or not.

Politicians want to improve our worsening mental health with big psychiatric initiatives. The problem with this model, says historian of neuroscience Danielle Carr, is that it ignores the social and structural forces causing widespread mental suffering.

I actually think this is true for everybody diagnosed with a “mental illness”. Society wants to push you to a psychiatrist as an easy fix. But in reality, there are social and emotional pressures that have caused the patient to become distressed. It could be bullying, or financial worries, or the loss of a relative, or other big worries. Psychiatry invents “diagnoses” so that the true social and environmental pressures get swept under the rug. Because they don’t care about you, they just believe that you might turn dangerous (even if you have no history of doing anything wrong), so they’ll drug you to reduce what they think is a risk.

Edit: Thinking about it more, maybe we should get rid of the biopsychosocial model that doctors love to talk about. Just have a psychosocial model instead (getting rid of the bio bit, where they drug the patient). Because nearly all of the time, they never prove any biological fault with the patient’s brain. And yet they’re still happy to drug the patient.

It’s great until the cow gets bored and walks off.

I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.

But he is a bad person. He’s being a fucking idiot and being insulting to the person who made the software for him in the first place.

People like that don’t deserve patience and understanding. Perhaps a good response would be “this software is free for you to use, if you don’t like it then fuck off and make your own”.

Iran probably wants this, because they can say “look, the West cares more about money from shipping, than it does about the lives of human beings in Gaza”.

I haven’t been on Lemmy in a while and only just saw this reply.

I don’t think I missed the point. You said that Putin can’t hurt people, and I’m saying that’s untrue. He has ordered the murders of political opponents. He ordered an invasion of Ukraine that has killed many innocent Ukrainians, and is also sending young Russians to their deaths, pointlessly.

And no, I obviously don’t think I’m on the front line. I’m lucky enough to not be in a warzone, but there are people who aren’t that lucky, and their lives are in danger due to the selfish barbarity of Putin and his regime.

Is Putin in the room with us right now? Don’t worry, he can’t hurt you.

This is completely wrong, because of course Putin absolutely does hurt people. He ordered the invasion of Ukraine and the killing of Ukrainians. His forces deliberately target civilians, or massacre them, like in Bucha. His actions have also killed innocent people from other countries, such as those on board flight MH17, who were killed by a Russian missile. He also orders the murders of people he doesn’t like, such as Alexander Litvinenko and Alexei Navalny (the latter’s murder being unsuccessful, but nevertheless ordered by the Kremlin). And one such assassination attempt, on Sergei Skripal, killed an innocent British woman, Dawn Sturgess. So no, it is clearly untrue to say that Putin can’t hurt someone, unfortunately.

I think it would be pretty difficult for Lemmy/Mastodon/Kbin to become bigger than for-profit counterparts. For-profit businesses can raise loads of funding and spend all that money on lots of engineers to refine their platforms.

But I do think the fediverse is pushing big tech to alter their platforms. E.g. Meta planning to support ActivityPub in Threads.