This evening I have been visited by non-externally-prompted mental discomfort which does not seem to respond to meds. I will be skyping with Esther in a bit but consider this a general invitation to pester me on here since I don’t seem to be good for doing much else at the moment
sincerely, a person who has been on prozac for 9 years
this is in response to some shitty stuff i’ve seen on my dash recently. it’s super simplified, so if you’d like to know some more indepth stuff on how exactly it works, google it—OR BETTER YET actually talk to a mental health doctor psychiatrist person wow
Prozac has literally stopped me killing myself. I would be dead if it weren’t for antidepressants. If you spread misinformation I’ll come to your house and smack u into orbit.
I’ll join you and steamroll people
As someone who takes the highest dosage of zoloft (setraline) possible for my body in order to function as a “normal” human being, allow me to assure you that if I ever hear you talking shit about needing to take meds, I will pull your head out of your arse and smack it into the nearest wall.
This is good, the one thing I’ll point out is that sometimes antidepressants will make you numb- it’s happened to me and my sister- but that’s a sign you’re on the wrong one. So if it happens, go back to your doctor and say you want to try a new one.
signal boosting the fuck outta this SO HARD because the right medication can make all the difference
Also it takes a while to settle into your meds. They will tell you two weeks but it’s actually more like 6 weeks.This powerpoint contains information which is wrong and in some cases dangerous.
The serotonin reuptake theory of depression is not true. This is a good article about why, although it is too strong to say that depression is not a chemical imbalance. Depression is a product of an imbalance in many many chemicals, probably mostly dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine.
SSRIs are only one class of antidepressant. Other antidepressants include tricyclics, MAOIs, NSRIs, and SNRIs. To learn more about antidepressants, check out Crazymeds, which talks about them in a factual and accessible way.
Neurotypical does not mean “non-depressed”. I am not depressed but my emotions are not neurotypical.
Mood stabilizers are used to prevent swings between mania and depression, mostly in bipolar disorder, but also in other conditions like borderline and schizoaffective. Most mood stabilizers are primarily anti-mania, rather than anti-depression. Therefore, antidepressants are not mood stabilizers.
Antidepressants can cause numbness for many people. Emotional blunting and behavioral apathy are known side effects of SSRIs.
Pretty much all antidepressants have side effects. You have to find one with side effects you can live with.
It is deeply irresponsible to have an informative powerpoint about medication without including that many people recover from depression without medication. Whether you take medication is a personal decision. For many people, Prozac is a lifesaver. For many other people, recovery from depression involves lizard lamps, yoga, CBT, psychodynamic therapy, mindfulness, scheduling activities and dragging themselves off to them even if they feel like a butt, exercise, sleep hygiene, going to grad school, dropping out of grad school, getting out of a bad relationship, finding a job, making friends, or some combination of the above. Not all depressed people take meds! It is okay to decide that for you personally the tradeoffs for meds aren’t good and you would rather try other things.
also if you think there is ANY CHANCE you have manic episodes GO TO A PSYCHIATRIST AND NOT A GENERAL PRACTITIONER. GENERAL PRACTITIONERS USUALLY DON’T SCREEN FOR BIPOLAR DISORDER AND ANTIDEPRESSANTS CAN SEND BIPOLAR PEOPLE INTO MANIC EPISODES. THIS HAS BEEN A PSA.
Also, the bit about “they’re not addictive” is misleading in a way I really don’t like. Strictly speaking, no, they’re not addictive in the way that cocaine or gambling are addictive. It’s not like they cause a rush and you’ll want to take more and more.
But they do have a “discontinuation syndrome,” i.e. withdrawal, when you come off of them or reduce the dosage. This can vary in severity, but for some people it’s pretty severe, to the point where they do feel dependent on their meds. (I’ve tried to go off of Lexapro several times and every time I get below 10 mg/day, I just end up sitting around all day feeling terrible and being unable to do anything – which is not the way I was before Lexapro, so it’s clearly discontinuation syndrome, not the return of the original condition.)
The discontinuation syndromes for SNRI antidepressants (Effexor, Cymbalta, etc.) tend to be worse – Effexor in particular is notoriously hard to come off of.
SSRIs and SNRIs are very helpful for many people, but going on one is not a zero-risk choice.
(Disclaimer: I am not a doctor or even any kind of hemi-demi-semi-doctor)
I have been more easily angered in the past week than usual (cf. a few days ago when I got mad at someone on the internet over effective altruism, or today when I got mad at the design of a computer game). I don’t know what could have caused this.
I thought of at least a possible explanation: about a week ago I was regularly taking Clonazepam because of work stress, and I haven’t taken it since then, and it has a long half-life, so it’s probably been slowly working its way out of my system.
spookyrukie asked: It seems like you're trying to guess what the game will consider right instead of just doing what seems right to you.
The problem is that if I literally did what seems right to me, the game would be nearly unplayable. For instance, in that situation at the very beginning, I thought that obeying Toriel was the right decision (not necessarily because she was clearly “right,” but because I’d just met her and wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, especially as she knew more about the environment than I did) … so not only did I call her on the cell phone a bunch of times, I also paced around the room for a few minutes, thinking that the game might be keeping a timer and that Toriel might come back after some amount of time. (For all I know this might be true, and I didn’t wait around for long enough?)
The point of this example is that engaging with a game has to involve a certain amount of thinking about what the underlying mechanics are like and what sorts of mechanical consequences your actions are likely to have. This is because you can hardly import any of your intuitions about the “mechanics” of the real world and expect them to carry over. (In the real world, waiting for Toriel would obviously “work” – the real world is always “keeping a timer.” Apply this to the game unthinkingly and you will simply wait around forever.)
Attempting to think about a game as though it were real life is not a recipe for enjoying the experience, because you will constantly end up doing things that the game cannot “read” the way you intended, and may even actively “misread.”
(More spoilerful example below, although it’s still from early on)
“reducing someone’s HP to zero doesn’t necessarily mean you murdered them” is a concept the creator seems to have trouble with, yes, given the evil route is supposed to be a “deconstruction” of this trope that does not actually exist. (even though he uses it himself. heads up: the only time you should ever select the fight command is in the fight with a boss who destroys the mercy option, because that time AND ONLY THAT TIME you are able to beat someone up without murdering them)
it does make sense to call it “testing strength” to spare her repeatedly, playing off the idea that it takes moral/spiritual strength not to hurt people who are in your way, or however you want to phrase it. Violence is easy and thus doesn’t require real strength and all that.
I’d say you should post your responses/concerns/whatever to the creator, except maybe he will respond anyway since you tagged your post #undertale (he did to me though it wasn’t really helpful) and don’t know how helpful it would be to you either.
just try not to be caught up with how much it has been talked up: you didn’t expect Chrono Trigger or LttP to be springing moral gotchas on you, and I assume you you were fine playing through those. The only way this game is capable of springing a gotcha on you is if you have used the fight command to kill someone. Play through the game as though the fight command does not exist (except for the aforementioned boss who destroys the mercy button), and enjoy it as a totally linear story as satisfying as the totally linear story of whatever SNES RPG you like most.
Thanks for the advice in the last paragraph – that’s very, very helpful. In a lot of ways Undertale seems like a very appealing game, like some lost SNES classic, except it happens to be hooked up to a morality system that might as well be “Nostalgebraist’s Nightmares: The Definitive Simulator”
(To spell that out a bit – I have a strong, persistent fear of harming others unintentionally via not noticing subtleties of a situation, or other sorts of poor planning that are only apparent to me in retrospect. In particular, I tend to worry a lot about disaster scenarios in which some seemingly normal action of mine actually has terrible consequences, and afterwards everyone just acts like I should have predicted these consequences, that they should have been “obvious.” The example you give where “zero HP” may or may not mean “dead” feels like a very direct “implementation” of this kind of fear – an action is either okay or horrible, depending on specifics of the situation which are not at all clear at the time, but I am treated as though they should be clear, and morally upbraided if I make the wrong choice because I don’t understand them.)
I got curious and am playing Undertale. The art, music, puzzles, and writing are all very charming and enjoyable, and I like the bullet hell attack mechanic (it seems so natural that I’m surprised I’ve never seen it in an RPG before). On the other hand, I think the mechanics/ethics stuff is going to bother me even more than I thought it might.
(So far, the game tends to make it unclear what the consequences of any given action might be, and whether there are other alternatives you can take and still progress in the game, yet it still moralizes about some of these choices.
A relatively trivial example from the very beginning: a friendly character tells you she’ll be gone for a while and warns you to wait for her rather than to try to continue on by yourself. However [as far as I can tell] you must disobey her and continue on in order to progress in the game. I tried as hard as I could to find a way around this, thinking that the game might make a point of whether I obeyed or disobeyed. For me the game [intentionally?] induces a kind of neurotic/anxious mindset in which I am constantly worried that each game-mechanical choice is going to turn out to hurt someone, even though most of the time they don’t and are simply routine game decisions one must make to proceed. I am not too fond of this as a “message” – I already feel that way too much about real life, thank you very much.)
So it’s Scrupulosity: The Game?
You know, I literally almost tagged the OP with “#scrupulosity: the game.” Great minds think alike!
(I decided that was maybe not quite accurate, and also considered “#anxiety: the game,” which I thought was too broad, so I ended up not using either)
(via marcusseldon)
I got curious and am playing Undertale. The art, music, puzzles, and writing are all very charming and enjoyable, and I like the bullet hell attack mechanic (it seems so natural that I’m surprised I’ve never seen it in an RPG before). On the other hand, I think the mechanics/ethics stuff is going to bother me even more than I thought it might.
(So far, the game tends to make it unclear what the consequences of any given action might be, and whether there are other alternatives you can take and still progress in the game, yet it still moralizes about some of these choices.
A relatively trivial example from the very beginning: a friendly character tells you she’ll be gone for a while and warns you to wait for her rather than to try to continue on by yourself. However [as far as I can tell] you must disobey her and continue on in order to progress in the game. I tried as hard as I could to find a way around this, thinking that the game might make a point of whether I obeyed or disobeyed. For me the game [intentionally?] induces a kind of neurotic/anxious mindset in which I am constantly worried that each game-mechanical choice is going to turn out to hurt someone, even though most of the time they don’t and are simply routine game decisions one must make to proceed. I am not too fond of this as a “message” – I already feel that way too much about real life, thank you very much.)
- Me: I am a pretty chill and laid back guy
- My Doctor: You have a literal diagnosed anxiety disorder
In the last few days I’ve started thinking somewhat obsessively about leaving grad school with a Master’s instead of trying to finish my Ph.D.
Obviously, this is not the sort of thing I would actually do just on a whim, and I know I’m biased towards thinking it’s a good idea because of a (probably exaggerated) sense that I “just can’t stand” grad school anymore, but still … there might be something to it, it’s not just pure id or whatever.
I have a lot of anxiety built up around grad school, and clearly I’m not living up to my potential – I’m much less productive than I was as an undergrad, even though I feel like ideally I should be more productive. And this leads to a feeling of not belonging, not “really” being a person who should be doing research – which I know is “impostor syndrome” and something many grad students feel, but in any case it leads to more anxiety and less productivity.
And, now that I don’t think I want to go into academia, I don’t think my current research is at all relevant to anything I’d be doing after grad school. Which, again, isn’t all that unusual, but increases the feeling that I don’t belong here, that this isn’t really what I’m “supposed” to be doing. The only reason I would want a Ph.D. is for the pure credentialing value of it, and I need to look into how much that really matters (or doesn’t). I don’t want to feel like I’m wasting my time, in part because I’m much less productive and competent when I do.
This is all very premature and I wouldn’t make a decision about this one way or the other without thinking it over a lot more, looking more at the job market, etc. But I can’t shake the feeling that the idea is … at least, not nonsense.
I am glad that I exist
It’s hard to get across what I mean by this.
What I mean is that for a very long time, my default state was “I wish I didn’t exist” and it only changed in response to specific good things. Like, I would stop wishing I didn’t exist if I was kissing someone I loved, or eating really delicious food, or having some kind of great experience. But this was like looking at pretty sparks in fog. And there were moments of great anxiety or sadness, like sparks that burned you. And I assumed that there was nothing but sparks and fog and that non depressed people were experiencing many many sparks so that the fog rarely bothered them. But now there are sometimes pretty sparks, and sometimes burning sparks, but it’s mostly just clear fogless air. Like, I don’t have to be doing an especially pleasant thing to be glad I exist. I can just be buying groceries or riding on a bus or cleaning the floor at work and it’s positive utility to me to exist. I mean, I was suicidal for ages, but one thing that held me back was the sparks. Most of life was bad but I held on for the pretty sparks. But if I could have been a p zombie most of the time and then suddenly become conscious when a pretty spark happened, I would have chosen that. But now, the sparks are good, but I don’t hate existing when I am just lying in bed. I like it. I like it.
I didn’t expect this. I felt like this as a kid, but I forgot it, and I assumed for a long time that once you reached about 16 and weren’t so naive that life was just fog. But now I see that it wasn’t just the suicidal hellbrains that was mental illness, it wasn’t just the burning sparks. It was also the fog.
I am glad I exist. I am glad I exist. I am glad I exist.Is this what it’s like to be neurotypical? (Or whatever the right word is)
This is what non-depression is like, I think. I mean, I have the separate problem of lots of burning sparks, and I am less resilient to burning sparks than normals, but there is no fog now. Idk, non depressed followers, is this how being alive is?
My default is “pessimism and a bit of dread around the edges, but I am basically happy to be alive (even though I feel a bit like I am getting away with something by doing so).”
… I meant that to sound more positive than it did. What I mean is, my default state is much closer to your current one than your old one. There is often some sort of negativity, even when I’m not feeling any burning sparks, but it’s usually more like “this is okay although it won’t be forever” or “this is okay (but I might just be kidding myself to think so)” rather than “this isn’t okay.” The negativity is hypothetical or uncertain, and can be ignored.
xhxhxhx replied to your post “turboshitnerd replied to your post: turboshitnerd replied to your…”
a bias to interpret ambiguous information in a threat-related manner?
In all seriousness, yes, that may be involved. I think I have a tendency, which not everyone has, to look at any system or simplification and ask “what’s the worst way this could go wrong?” or “how could this be gamed?” And it’s hard to tell whether this is sensible or not, because to me it always feels important.
I think Scott Alexander has the same tendency – he tends to look for the potential for arms races that result in horrible outcomes, and this always feels really compelling to me, but I’m never sure how plausible the described scenario really is.
There’s an argument to be made, of course, that if a system can be gamed, the sort of people who want to game systems will be attracted to it, and if they didn’t constitute “your audience” at the outset, then soon will. But again, this is a mechanic that may or may not be plausible in any given situation (it depends on how high the cost of entry is, how well-publicized the thing is, etc.) Some people will always feel this danger intensely, and some people won’t, and in real life it’s sometimes a real risk and sometimes not so much of one.