That said, there can be signs. You may find them normalized from exposure. Or, perhaps: hidden, your cousin maintained appearances. With time and circumstance, everyone slips. Sometimes it's seen.
My (much older) brother managed his addiction, and appearances, well at work for decades. Now clean, thank goodness.
Wikipedia:
> There is no confirmed evidence, either historical or archaeological, of coffee as a [missing word?] being consumed before the 15th century.
(Also, an unknown point in the 15th century could be less than 600 years ago.)
sugar, wheat, barley, egg, soybean oil, starch, whey, salt, tallow
These go back before the beginning of history. Quite a long time before.
There are also quite a few additives and preservatives in a Twinkie.† If you're making a point about ultraprocessed food, you're definitely correct. If you're trying to make a point about basic foodstuffs, you aren't.
Soon after I thought I'd try to kick the caffeine habit. Went from 4 cups, to 1 over a month, then just green tea, then just water. I only lasted about 6 weeks on water only.
My god. I couldn't believe how unmotivated, soulless, and empty I felt. Judging by the reddit sub for kicking caffeine, this can last for over a year. It's terrifying
Sugar? For snobs anyway. Corn starch for the masses.
His roommate’s klepto friend sure seemed abnormal.
Also, my understanding from folk who do use is that heroin doesn’t exist in meaningful quantity in today’s market. It’s all fent. Even the stuff that claims to be h is cut with fent, and maybe xylazine if you are especially unlucky.
I truly believe that there would be fewer addicts and fewer overdoses if you could buy regulated heroin.
This has a dual effect - addicts get clean drugs and take them under medical supervision, reducing deaths, helping funnel some towards programs that will eventually get them clean etc. With this sort of support it turns out that people no longer steal to get their fix either, and can usually even hold down employment pretty well.
But also the young folk get to see these tired, worn out, older people queuing outside the clinic in the morning to get their fix and realise hey, maybe that isn't so cool and edgy after all...
Seems like a good plan to me, the problem is (as ever) puritans and their politicians, it's an easy thing to screech about. All it would take to kill it dead in a lot of countries would be someone standing up to shout "The opposition party want to spend YOUR tax money giving DRUGS to filthy JUNKIES!"
IME most people dont want to be addicted, theyre just in a rut or life took them a certain way and just need support to get through the other side.
People who dont use drugs are way to hysterical about drug use though to ever see real improvement.
Also we didn’t just try that with gambling (48 states have had some legal form of it forever) we just tried it with online sports books, which turn out to be a particularly virulent form of gambling. And we haven’t really begun to sensibly regulate that, a lot of harm may be reduced in the near future as we do.
Perhaps it's because they weren't experiencing enough pain at the time. I think most people fall into drugs circumstantially, I'm not sure it often presents as a conscious lifestyle decision.
> I truly believe that there would be fewer addicts and fewer overdoses if you could buy regulated heroin.
I believe that there would be less drug use overall if our economic system wasn't as rapacious as it currently is.
This idea raises many questions about the reproducibility of certain cultures outside of specific locales, Silicon Valley being an obvious example.
Then I met a wonderful woman who wouldn’t give up on me. We went to the doctor over and over again until I was diagnosed with dystonia, a disease which alcohol relieves the painful symptoms of. Once I knew that I wasn’t simply cured, but I had the hope and the knowledge to see though my pain.
Many other drugs are the same way. It’s easier to get these classes of drug illegally rather than legally. People who do these drugs know there’s something wrong with them, but they remain defiant and strong in the face of a society projecting its own decadence onto them.
If you do drugs or alcohol and you know it hurts you and want to stop, there is always hope for you as long as you can accept help. I know from experience.
And to all you who need drugs, but reject a diagnosis. As Big L said “If that’s what you need to maintain, go ahead and do your thang.”
Most people do drugs or alcohol for kicks or to put the pain away, as in general, but there are a lot of people who are self medicating symptoms they are well aware and they know this "medicine" works for them.
Breaking out of that habit is extremly hard.
At the beginning of covid I found myself in a really dark place and opted to seek help with psychotherapy.
I had a long story of health and legal issues and I often told my peers that second opinion is key, no one is omnipotent and with hard legal or medical case it's worth seeking out opinion of at least two professionals (and if their opinions are contradicting - keep seeking).
I met eleven certified experts.
At the beginning of my journey one of them, guy with stellar reviews, upon hearing that I haven't been properly diagnosed, but I suspect I might be on the spectrum looked at me and said "no... I'm looking at you look perfectly healthy". One after five sessions when I said I'm not getting any feedback, like anything, I was the only one talking during the sessions, told me it take years to get to the core.
Long story short - just before someone advertise as an expert doesn't mean they know anything, or they care. Even in highly regulated circuit.
That’s the grift — healing sold as a subscription. The incentive for therapists to behave this way can’t be regulated away because the regulation itself acts as a cover for this behavior: credentials, ethics boards, continuing-ed checkboxes — all window dressing to sanctify creating a dependency in the patient. The system launders manipulation through professionalism and calls it care.
You can have bad experiences with therapy.
It will put patients off entirely from further therapy.
It sucks if this is you. It really does - because on the flip side, if therapy has worked for you, then you know how your life has improved.
You have your whole life to ingrain thoughts, behaviors, and emotional responses into your being. If you anre unlucky, you might be surrounded by other people who reinforce maladaptive ways of thinking and being, such that they seem 100% normal. Expecting those deeply carved neural pathways to change quickly through any intervention is ridiculous.
Think about how cult deprogramming is a specialized skill with a high failure rate. Except this cult only has a single member, your inner monologue. It can take a lot of time for a therapist to figure out what the cult is even about, and it all comes from you talking (and talking and talking…)
I mean, I drove a Mustang in EU, shipped from US before Ford started selling them here. Local Ford didn't even had "mustang" in their system. I kept trolling them when they were offering free service for Ford drivers. My first 6 car mechanics were either a total scam or they were genuine but had absolutely no clue what they were doing.
What was I thinking? Maybe that the trade is regulated, and people with a title are more professional? Hell no.
It's more like working with a physical trainer. You won't accomplish your fitness goals by just showing up. Rather, you need be engaged, learn how to actually use the tools they give you, strive to improve yourself and put in the effort to do so.
I met a gal who kept silent for five visits.
Five paid visits and I got no feedback at all. Silent treatment is what you call it.
And when I finally confronted her about that she told me that I'm making a scene, because normally people are seeing a change only after couple of years.
It's no different with mental health. We are perpetual works in progress. Any changes take not only effort to accomplish, but effort to maintain. That's just how humans work.
You can feel and see the effects of exercise very soon after starting. It's cumulative and predictable. Therapy is nothing like that.
This therapist might've been, but often problems that require psychotherapy can't be done quickly, no matter how qualified they are and how expediently they're trying to help you. What they said wasn't wrong, but that description certainly makes it sound like they weren't trying to help at all which would've moved that healing timeline from "years" to "never".
Are you saying that psychological issues could be healed quickly if they just tried harder and didn't have the profit motive, or that they don't need to be healed at all?
But anytime I looked for instructions or objectives on how to improve my life they would basically say “I can’t tell you exactly what to do, you need to come to that conclusion for yourself.” The problem was I genuinely didn’t know what to do. They always tried to see things from my side, but never really believed that spending my night in a drunken stupor watching TV until I passed out was actually contributing to my happiness more than being in agony every night slowly building my contempt for humanity. Even though it’s against their training, they can’t help but judge you lifestyle and unusually that manifests as silence on important issues instead of disagreement.
That is the problem, yes.
I think a lot of the confusion from people just beginning their psychotherapeutic journey is that they think the point of therapy is to make them happier. No. The point of therapy is to make them happier, and sadder, and angrier, and more driven, and aware of their fear, and connected to their shame and guilt, and able to love. In short, it's to give you perspective on emotions, so that you can feel them on a minute-to-minute basis and decide what you want to do, and realize that "because you want to do it" is just as valid as any other reason, if not more.
> spending my night in a drunken stupor watching TV until I passed out was actually contributing to my happiness more than being in agony every night slowly building my contempt for humanity
A therapist would be naturally conflicted about this, because spending your night in a drunker stupor watching TV will make you happier, but being in agony every night slowly building your contempt for humanity is the work that needs to be done. The point of therapy is to help your understand a.) that you are in agony every night and b.) why are you building your contempt for humanity? It's to help you feel the emotions, and to feel them as emotions, and then to eventually integrate them into your life in a way that is constructive.
So FWIW, that part is true. I started therapy in 2012. I got to the core in 2020, after going through 4 different therapists. Along the way I founded about 15 startups, missed out on roughly $2M in lost wages, almost divorced my wife and walked out on my kid, thought seriously about killing myself, and needed a global pandemic to finally get my life in order. But I did eventually get my life back. And I didn't even get involved with any drugs or chemical dependencies; video games were my worst addiction.
The reason it takes so long is because a therapist will never tell you the problem, they need you to experience it for yourself. That is part of the point. As one of the better therapists I saw (the last one, actually, the one that got me through the breakthrough) said: "One of the ways to make feelings go away is to, well, feel them." Until your brain has the capacity to distinguish your feelings from existence, separate them out, and then push through some often very unpleasant, potentially life-ending feelings and actually feel them, you'll usually tend to end up deflecting or coping with them.
Much of the process of therapy involves stripping away these coping mechanisms and seeing what the feelings are beneath them. And that takes years, and has to be done in parallel with your life, because living your life is the point of therapy. That's why my first therapist encouraged me to try getting involved in my first relationship, even though I suspected I would end up hurt by it. (I ended up marrying and having three kids with her - the youngest is currently sleeping with his foot draped over me. And yes, I gave up nearly all my dreams and everything I thought was my identity for her.) That's why my therapist encouraged me to quit my highly-paid but soul-sucking FANG job to follow my startup dreams. Until you're actually in those situations, where you are risking your ego and living with vulnerability, you're not in a position to process the feelings that arise from them.
Possibly the best advice I got - from a random stranger on Reddit, not a therapist - was to think of your therapist as a guide, not a fixer or even an expert. You do the work of figuring out yourself, and it takes years, perhaps a lifetime. The therapist is there to make sure you don't hurt yourself and to keep the focus on your real issues, because when it comes to unpleasant feelings, the natural inclination is to avoid them. It almost doesn't matter if they're any good, as long as they adhere to a basic code of ethics and professional conduct, because all of the heavy lifting and all the major discoveries are made by you yourself.
Add to the above the subtle notion of the onus on improvement lying with oneself as the patient, and it becomes all the easier for a therapist to fail because they don't know what they're doing, and then claim their patient failed because they didn't "try hard enough" or do the right things.
I've seen cases of therapy working, and know there's a lot of good exploration in related psychological fields, but it's definitely an area in which to tread carefully as someone seeking help.
> as long as you can accept help
What help? Society simple does not care about 49% of people, like at all! There are no shelters for abuse and violence victims, no support groups...
If you speak up or seek help, there is good chance society or abuser retaliates aganst you! You may endup in prison, homeless, or out of job. Or lose your kids!
> but reject a diagnosis
often that means months on strong medication, that makes things much worse. And if that does not work, oopsie, lets "try" another diagnosis. No compensation for the hell, from doctor who caused it, of course!
But it isn’t reasonable, partly because there are so many opioid addicts that don’t show up in measures of homelessness etc. These laws would involve putting 10,000 kids into foster care so that maybe 10 deaths are prevented - and this would overwhelm the foster system entirely, tripling the size in an instant, so you’d almost certainly see ten children die because they were put into the system.
[0] As an example of the level of thought and knowledge going into these attempts, one legislator wrote a bill that said any opioid use meant CPS should remove your child. Don’t know if they didn’t know it could be a prescribed medication or what.
Later it became the illegal substance it is today.
I imagine patients seemed perfectly normal at the time it was released, otherwise it would never have been released for widespread medical use.
But, like fentanyl, a subset of the population exhibits the extreme behaviors that become stereotypical.
Waterluvian•4h ago