Brown Bread, Toast, Pegged It, Checked Out, etc

Thanks all. It’s not someone I was close to, we hadn’t spoke in years (pre-Covid). But a lot of my close mates are feeling pain right now as they were still in contact and when I see pics of his family on FB it makes me very sad as with the right help, it may have all been avoided.

A few years ago I self referred myself to CBT, and it helped me enormously. I was suffering after a good mate had passed away and I needed a bit of help. You can very quickly find yourself in a spiral where the dark thoughts creep in and fester.

It’s a damn sight harder to get on these therapy schemes since Covid and the Tories have fucked things up, but the first step of asking for help/reaching out is often the hardest. Even if it’s just a quiet chat with a mate, sometimes a bit of perspective helps. Bottling up helps no-one.

The change in attitude to mental health, even amongst men, has been a real success story of the last decade.

You’re right there. I work with a few lads in their twenties/early thirties and they’re much more in tune with MH than I ever was/am. Glad to see some of it flow upwards into middle-aged fuckers like us.

Yes and no. You're absolutely right that making it acceptable and normal to talk about things that are challenging you is healthy, but it has also become a lazy crutch for many. I'm fucking sick of hearing things like "I can't do X because of my social anxiety" (fuck you, you're shy, everyone's shy sometimes, suck it up and deal with it) or "I need to medicate for my ADHD" (fuck you, you're a lazy asshole who can't be bothered making an effort, I'm not making accommodations for your personal failures and weaknesses).

Overuse of invented mental health conditions as an excuse for not bothering to make an effort will just cause important things to be disregarded.

Anxiety and ADHD are not made up. Mental health things tend to exist on spectrums.. are there problems of over-diagnosis and over-medication etc? Yeah, probably.. but you’re not qualified to identify where that’s the case so I hope that’s not an attitude you routinely bring to your interactions with individuals.

I think that we’re learning more about brain and personality types and where aspects of ‘the way the world works’ are pretty hostile to a lot of people. Introverts vs extroverts, people with traditional morning-biased sleep patterns vs people with later sleep phases, confidence vs shyness etc etc. As people come to understand themselves better they become more aware of how often they are expected to ‘conform’, or ‘suck it up’ in ways that can be exhausting or even damaging. That leads to a tendency to have the issue medicalised, if possible, because others are more likely to take it seriously. Maybe that’s something you’re seeing. Maybe people don’t want to do certain things because they struggle to do them in ways that you just don’t really understand… and they find that having a doctors note is more likely to get people to listen.

I’m shy/introverted. I can slap on a confident face and go make small talk with the clients at a conference or whatever. I’ll put in the effort. But it will destroy me so I’ll do it reluctantly. I’m nowhere near as far along any given spectrum as a lot of people though. It pisses me off that I am expected to to stuff like that, but nobody ever says to the people who love that shit, that they should go spend a week quietly delivering on a solo deep-work project. There is a default way to be in society and I can see why the more people see it, the more they look for ways to avoid it. And these things that might seem trivial in themselves tend to stack. On an ordinary morning maybe I have to get up earlier than my body/brain wants to, get on a tram that’s overcrowded and a bit of a sensory overload, go into an office that’s too brightly lit, make small talk with three colleagues I barely know, and go right into a 9am meeting. Small things, but things that accumulate. I detest phone calls so if my phone rings after I walk out of that meeting I am absolutely not going to answer it. Am I not making an effort? Or am I taking a break because I’ve been making an effort for three hours solid already? I’m not going to blame anxiety, even though phone calls give me anxiety, because I do think that my doing so devalues the far more serious impacts other people feel. I’m not going to think badly of someone who does, though.

That's an interesting take, which I recognise.

I do worry about well-meaning parents and schools over compensating, and there's clearly a lot of DIY diagnosis going on. I hear a lot about kids being excused schoolwork, or refusing to do things, or not being punished because of their x,y,z issues.

Not sure how these kids will find a route through life when they leave the protection of home and school because employers won't care about an internet ADD diagnosis.

Overall though, it's got be good to recognise that everyone is different, and to give people the benefit of the doubt if conflict occurs. Hopefully a higher level of tolerance will be legacy of this current wave of interest.

A lot of parents are diagnosing their kids because there are enormous waiting lists for it do be done by professionals. I have an 8 year old grandson who in my amateur view is a fair way along the spectrum. His parents have been waiting 18 months so far and no sign of an appointment anytime soon.

It was a few years ago now, and I suspect the situation is even worse, but we had to go private to get a diagnosis so my son could get the help he needed at School.

Lots of kids doing exams with mine get extra time due to dyslexia and other things.

When we were at school I think they would have just been the thicker kids who got shit grades.

Now that get A grades, which I think is good as they clearly have capacity to understand things.

But in a work environment would I rather have an A grade person who gets stuff done in an hour or an A grade p rain who takes 3 hours to do the same. Probably the former, but no way to tell until they've been hired.

Th counter is for some jobs the more time folks may be better and time doesn't matter so much.

My son gets extra time in his A levels because his handwriting is piss poor. We'll take it, but I find it very strange.

It’s not so long ago that people with physical disabilities had to TUP or just deal with the ‘real world’ even as it made no accomodations to assist them. We’ve come a fair way since then and most people are broadly on board with the idea that if we can have the world refitted so that, say, wheelchair users can access the same things and places as the rest of us, we probably should.

People with all these trendy mental things going on can generally contribute just fine, but accomodations and adjustments can help a lot and maybe help them contribute even more. S’funny, for as long as I can remember I’ve seen companies make a lot of allowances for the fact that software developers can often come from certain points along some spectrums. Their being relatively hard to find and valuable has a lot to do with that, of course, but it does show that people used to the traditional way of doing thing are capable of looking for modifications to those ways when it suits them. I’ve never heard someone complain about a developer being too quiet or not joining in the office bants… but Ms Noodle got that all time time working in animation (partly why she’ll probably never do that again, despite being extremely good at it.)

Many people have mental health things that mean certain jobs probably aren’t for them. Same for people with physical things… but where we don’t tend to expect people in wheelchairs to work the counter at McDonalds, we do still ask (say) autistic people work in call centres. The whole ‘yeah but how will they do in the real world’ thing presupposes that the real world is done right. It isn’t. It never will be, but the more we grapple with this stuff, the more we have a hope to progress. Is a job a bad fit for someone because their brain makes them a bad for for the work, or is it because, say, the work environment is a bad fit? If so, can that environment be changed?

Lots of text there. Broadly I'm in line with Lessred; my point is not that mental health conditions don't exist, or that more recently identified conditions aren't legitimate, but that I am mistrustful of much of the non-medical diagnosis that very clearly and obviously exists to excuse aberrant behaviours rather than rectifying them.

I particularly take issue with the jobs argument. The idea that we should make allowances for people's deficiencies in order to enable them to do jobs for which they are not suited is bullshit, IMO. I can't be a professional footballer or a fireman because I'm a stunted dwarf who's shit at football. Do you want to pay thirty quid every Saturday to watch me stumble around the pitch, or worse, do you want me turning up to carry your 6'3" 220lb unconscious body from a smoke filled building, because it's unfair that lack of suitability should prevent me from doing the job I want to do?

Everyone has their physical and mental failings. 35 years ago I'd probably have been diagnosed with ADHD, as it was I was diagnosed as being a little cunt who didn't know when to shut up so I ended up going into a career which particularly prizes little cunts who don't know when to shut up. At the risk of sounding like a full gammon, so much of this seems to derive from the "you can be anything you want to be my precious darling" culture which puts the onus on the world to ensure that said darling is given every opportunity they wish for, and then excuses darling when they don't get it. People with actual mental health concerns would I'm very sure benefit, as would the wider world, from doctors not blithely prescribing Adderall and Vyvanse to mollify entitled parents unwilling to accept that maybe it's their fault that their offspring is a lazy useless cunt.

Now back to your usual programming:

The Gone Show

The phone is an interesting one to raise as most kids out of school are shit scared of it and it has always been thus, but now enabled to say no, you can't help but think this will hold them back.

That said I'm bored of being shitballed by everyone under 30 telling me everything they can't do rather than what they can.

Weren’t you a lazy bugger when you were younger? I guess it goes with the territory.

As For RC, usually the funniest ones have the darkest thoughts so I get it. And yes that is a compliment Fuck Nut. My chaotic and exhausting life is so busy I guess it stops me from having time to think. So I guess that’s a coping mechanism.

Anyway back to Charlie and the death factory…

Chicago: Pocket psychiatrist.

This is categorically, 100% incorrect. You are choosing to view the world exclusively through your own personal lens, and assuming that everyone who has the abilities that you perceive yourself not to have is at a huge advantage because they are allowed to operate solely on their own strengths while you are not.

We are all at times required, in both our jobs and our personal lives, to do things that are outside of our comfort zones. I am, as we have already well established, entirely comfortable standing in front of a room of people talking. I am also though required to build in depth documents, spreadsheets, reports and so on, something that my lack of attention span does not lend itself to well. I have had to teach myself techniques to accomplish these things, with varying degrees of success. Having done so, sections of my personal life - organising finances, completing taxes, fixing shit around the house - periodically go by the wayside because I can't face yet more time focused on single tasks requiring long periods of concentration when I've just had to spend several hours, days or even weeks doing similar things for my job.

This is not a condition. It does not require recognition or medication or accommodation. It is part of being a flawed human being just like everyone else, and dealing with it is part of being an adult.