He looks like an emo twink and his daddy dom just told him he’s been a very naughty boy.

Honestly just paying people $25/h to literally just do this would actually do some great things for the mental health crisis. The most you would need to do is maybe throw in an 8hr “mental health first aid” class and give them a line to refer out to if the person expresses anything more severe than a passive death wish. I would totally support my tax dollars paying for this on a WIDE scale.

Edit/btw: the official term is a “warm line” as opposed to a “suicide hotline” for people who aren’t in crisis but just need to talk to another human for a bit, possibly to even help avoid a crisis developing in the first place.

The version of “leave room for Jesus” we can all get behind.

Nothing directly for any individual, but you can host, moderate, and / or participate in more apolitical hobby spaces.

One of the biggest ways delusions keep a hold of people is by disconnecting them from supportive / positive social relationships. The deeper down the rabbit hole they go, the more people they argue with, and the less non-delusional friends they have. Try to figure out what those beliefs and social groups replaced, then get them back into supportive social groups around that. Often it’s a hobby like gardening, book clubs, cars, sports, hiking, etc.

That’s why all of this took off so hard during COVID, people got ripped away through all of those things and Russian disinformation bots were right there and ready to replace that sense of connection with a sense of being part of a larger movement. Sometimes it’s spiritual or religious groups which has been difficult because so many of those groups have just become completely overtaken and become vehicles for the delusions, so we also need to work on ways for people to express their religion and spirituality in non-delusional ways, but that’s a whole other discussion.

The short version is: make the delusional stuff subtly less accessible (encourage them to get away from the computer and TV) and try to get them into other positive activities that connect them with other people and help them move their focus away from the delusions without directly confronting them.

When confronted directly delusions tend to integrate the new information into the existing belief system so two examples here would be that maybe the study was flawed or only referring to a specific type of signal or specific type of brain cancer but the more likely option is just deciding that this is more proof that the system as a whole aims to deceive them.

Source: am psych nurse and was trained long ago to never try to talk someone out of a delusion for the exact reason that it tends to just make them stronger (I answered somebody’s question about what to do instead down below if you’re curious).

Yes that’s ideal. I would argue most of the “lost causes” you’re describing are victims of the current system and we owe then something akin to long-term secure units until they’re sick enough of the restrictiveness of even a non-abusive containment system to put in the work to recover, but that’s semantics. At the end of the day everywhere should be doing it like that and housing and rehabbing these people, emphasis on the housing since it’s a prerequisite to the rehab.

Yeah. And they’re volunteering to risk something that’s at least horribly traumatic and at worst just a straight up human rights violation because they don’t have any better places to go and that’s by design.

No that’s 100% exactly what I’m talking about because no one should be going to psych hospitals for any of those things, and the fact that we’ve not allocated the resources to treat those things in the community (which would actually be cheaper) is the entire failing of that “deinstitutionalization” movement. It was supposedly going to be a whole movement where we shifted to community care models but they never actually allocated proper funding for that so it became just another way to fuel the prison industrial complex.

I’ve never even worked a psych hospital that did proper 1:1 talk therapy on the regular. I as a nurse working a 12h shift with 6-8 patients and also being responsible for equipment checks, groups, checking on all my patients at least hourly etc am often the closest thing some of these people get to a therapist. At the absolute MOST most of those things should be being treated at a CSU which is a type of voluntary stepdown unit that usually has 1 nurse on-site continuously and that does a cursory belongings search and NO body searches. Most of them function like rehabs but do other mental health services as well as detox. I shouldn’t be being asked to strip search depressed people, but I also can’t risk one of them being dumb enough to bring a proper sharp or ligature onto my secure unit for people who genuinely can’t be trusted not to shank or garotte a bitch. Ffs one time the ER just didn’t even check at all and an actively psychotic pt rolled onto the unit with a loaded fucking gun in their bag that my tech just happened to find during a routine belongings search and I’ve found all kinds of other weapons on people. My unit is tightly controlled for a reason and most people receiving psychiatric care don’t need it and therefore should never gave to experience it.

Almost none of the people you’re describing should be setting foot on even the classier units I’ve worked, and they wouldn’t have to if proper community resources like medication management, talk therapy, and even CSUs were more available. I remember reading at one point that there was like one psychiatrists office serving like half of Montana at one point. The lack of those services (and particularly the lack of adequate insurance reimbursement for those services - those professionals still need to feed and house themselves and their families) are a very intentional component of this fucked up orphan crushing machine.

Doesn’t shock me tbh. The “deinstitutionalization movement” was a fucking joke all they did was dump people out on the street so they could use their 0 community living skills to go get their mental Healthcare from prison instead, and now that people are getting sick of being screamed at on the street by homeless schizophrenics on drugs (not like there’s anything better for them to do) they want them locked up again so they can make health insurance companies money instead of doing literally anything to actually heal their communities. I have an entire nursing theory and set of practices just for this specific population because we’ve just completely fucked so many of them up, probably most of them permanently. And I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face but housing is the #1 driver of the American mental health crisis. They joke about “what radicalized you” and it’s 8 fucking years of working in psych hospitals even when I’m proud of the care I’m giving just watching the system as a whole is killing me. What I do should be considered ICU level psych care for that handful of people who are actually actively psychotically tweaking so why are all of the units I work mostly full of not even depressed but just understandably sad homeless people?

Actually several people asked me how to plarn in my first progress post. I’m really finding my stride and even if this isn’t your specific jam I highly encourage you to engage in more constructive and enjoyable activities …at least as much as you’re able to.

Update: got laid. Back to plarning.

…I missed something again didn’t I? Anyway I’m gonna go try to get laid then probably get back to watching cartoons while crocheting plastic bags into a reusable shopping bag it’s pretty fun you just cut up all the bags you stuffed into another bag because you feel wasteful throwing them away with scissors like this then all you need is a crochet hook.

No, they were nice like that to the male students. I was female presenting at the time so it was just a fucking tank of piranhas. The sexism for the men doesn’t really seem to start until you’re working ortho, psych, or ER and everybody starts looking at you like you’re a damn hoyer that transforms into a battle mech optimus prime style.

I’m never sure if my difficulty integrating with those communities is because they are by nature diffuse or because after having to go to FCA camps as a kid and sing hymns off projector screens that were just re-written country songs about Jesus instead of ford pickup trucks I not only can’t take any religion seriously but specifically and actively refuse to. My higher power commands that I shitpost. I actually got into an argument online with someone insisting that I was doing it wrong (also they were accusing me of being transphobic which is another community I don’t get on with because the surgery is and forever will be the only part of my gender I have ever taken seriously).

I flunked out of nursing school despite the content itself being fairly easy because I didn’t know how to deal with mean girl shit yet. I passed the second time by just doing whatever they told me to until I graduated. In particular, I remembered some advice from years earlier from an older roommate who had just gotten back from their coast guard training. They said their goal had been to go as long as possible before the instructor even knew their name. Honestly that’s been a pretty great strategy for me when I’ve needed to escape abuses of power ever since; keep your head down, do whatever they tell you to, don’t draw attention to yourself, then book it the first chance you get.

Christian esotericism has been a really relaxing segue into a healthy spirituality for me. There’s no people demanding I pray the “correct” way or give them money they won’t tell me what they’re doing with or telling me that saying a dead guy’s name will keep me from going to an eternity no one can prove exists. Just me and the dead guy’s words that tell me to party hard and chase rich people with whips. And tarot cards; I’ve honestly gotten more out of them than therapy lately because I’m a lot more honest with myself but I still get something similar to a third party opinion on things by sort of bouncing the thoughts outward then back in.

Psych specializing in charges

Can’t find any height comparison photos but her proportions in the photos I do see scaled up to this stated height are positively Amazonian. She looks like she could crush my head with her thighs.

In addition to my above comment I’ll add specifically on response to this question: I’ve noticed that in addition to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, people specifically need to feel as though they are in control of getting those needs met in some way. And this can be different for each individual depending at the very least on what they’re physically capable of, but also what they can cognitively and emotionally manage. I suspect this is because if you didn’t cause it to happen, then that means it’s being controlled by some outside force, which means it can just as easily stop happening.

So in addition to having food, a house, etc, you have to feel as though you, at least in some small way, caused yourself to have food and a house. And this can even manifest in someone causing unsafe situations, especially if that need has consistently been unattainable, because they still won’t have whatever it is, but at least they then feel as though they have control over it. You see this all the time with personality disorders (I should know, I’ve got one that took 3 years of therapy to get under control), but the level of dysfunction described here is… extreme to say the least.

This particular type of problem in this article is usually caused by dysfunction the esteem/respect level of needs. When you can’t cause yourself to be respected, you cause yourself to be feared. And because being feared is a fundamentally unstable system (most victims will start standing up for themselves eventually and at least in some small way), it can escalate very quickly and often even before the people directly involved realize what’s happening. It also tends to be very difficult to undo and return to a place of positive esteem because the person has lost the trust of those around them.

And fundamentally, as with any problem of this nature, the person themselves has to take a leading role in their own recovery, and by the time you’re this deep in, that’s very unlikely to happen. I was just cutting myself to get people’s pity and yelling / bucking up at people who upset me as a young adult and it still took me three years of wholeheartedly engaging in literally the most intensive therapy that exists to get to the level of functioning I’m at now; this is… a little farther down the rabbit-hole.