I was just talking to someone a few hours ago about how sex ed in the US is so bad that a huuuge number of my psychosis patients will tell me they know someone came in to their room and sexually assaulted them overnight because they woke up with a boner or wet vagina. In nursing school they also told us that the average learning level of a US adult (particularly in terms of reading level) is about the fifth grade. My school did sex ed in 6th, so that checks out. In the US its just normal to not know how your genitals work. Especially about the opposite sex and especially when it comes to women’s anatomy, but also just in general. I’ve had multiple men tell me their morning wood is proof of a sexual assault. And you always get shit from police having to file these reports because like yeah obviously we have cameras proving no one did more than poke their head in the room for routine safety checks and this is clearly just a hallucination / delusion but also it’s their right to report it and it’s your job to write it down so like???

You know this is the recommended stance when deescalating violent psych patient because it keeps your hands visible (as in, not hiding something) and in front of your body / face in case they start swinging. I’ve never really felt comfortable doing it though and this kind of explains a possible reason why. I actually had a guy the other night who asked why everyone else was scared of him and I didn’t seem to be. There were probably a couple other reasons though (I’ve dealt with waaay wilder men, and also he mostly struck me as young, dumb, and loud, and dumb in the young sense not in the cognitively not there sense). But as far as this pose idk it just always seemed really patronizing to me. I usually stand more like One of these where at least one hand is on the neck or side of the head. Usually with my hands overlapping but my fingers not intertwined so they’re easy to separate and throw up in front of my face but not overtly defensive.

It probably doesn’t help that I’m incredibly irreverent of pretty much everything. I got really into western esoteric spirituality this past year (its really been helping me with introspection and integrating my personality in ways that neither secular therapy or my fundie upbringing ever quite fully did on their own) but at the same time I refuse to take any religion seriously, especially not my own.

Anyway someone in a related community got upset at me for having my irreverent attitude because I was “culturally appropriating” tarot cards from PoC and like dude. Look up where that shit is from its Northern Italy where my family is from just two generations ago they were fresh off the boat when the War was starting. You’re appropriating tarot from me. And if you want to get into the specific spiritual / divinatory usage that’s even fucking whiter. The closest you’re gonna get to claiming cultural appropriation is if you go all the way back before the tarot to the mummy dust the hermetic order of the golden dawn were probably mixing into the coke they were snorting while making that shit the fuck up based on their judeo-christian / classical mythology crossover fanfiction.

People just wanna be mad about shit and at this point I really don’t have the energy to spend appeasing people who have already decided to be mad at me. Imma just be over here using these cards to let my subconscious tell me which level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs I fucked up this week.

Removal of gendered aspects without any additions.

I’m pretty apathetic to gender in general but I’ve had gender confirming surgery to be NB which I guess technically makes me trans and to be prefectly honest I’ve never felt more judged for it than by the lemmy LGBTQ+ community. The 50y/o southern man that was my nursing supervisor back when I was a new graduate was more respectful of my gender and lived experiences than these people. Honestly the thing they seem to hate most is specifically me expressing apathy for gender; I’ve mentioned that my transness expresses itself by not caring about the whole pronoun thing or needing to have any specific pronouns for myself personally, but that I understand it’s a matter of respect for others and I’ve literally gotten banned for saying that. Like almost exactly that. They’re absolutely hateful bastards for no reason other than that they’re upset and need everybody else to be upset too. I’m lucky I have a handful of supportive people irl because I sure asf wasn’t gonna find it here!

Psyllium Husk. Wonderful colon cleasner. It literally does this to your colon.

Mental health crisis -> housing

Anybody working in inpatient mental health right now can tell you that at any one time around 3/4 of our units are occupied by homeless people. Many of them will even fake or exaggerate symptoms of mental illness (usually psychosis or suicidal ideation) to avoid living on the street. Personally I don’t even blame them, I’d probably do the same thing. And it really highlights that housing is the primary driver of the modern mental health crisis.

I’ve talked here before about how delusions self-reinforce by:

• contextualizing everything (even new information that at face value seems contradictory) as part of the delusional belief system.
• driving the person away from non-delusional social supports through repeated conflicts.

So the solution is to get them out of the cult bubble and into diverse reality based interests / hobbies that connect them with people who don’t have those beliefs. You specifically want plenty of variety to increase the odds that they will both:

• find one they like enough to pay attention to outside of the context of the delusional belief system
• find people that are willing to look past the toxicity long enough for them to reintegrate.

I often feel the same working in mental health, especially with medically complex patients who have lost their own legal-medical decision making rights.

There’s the obvious high stakes ethical debates like if someone has a gangrenous limb that will kill them should you force them to have it removed. But there’s a lot more common / lower stakes examples I run into more often. Say someone has a dietary restriction that not following will likely cause great harm. Say they can’t swallow effectively (more common than you think, especially with strokes). This person is demanding a burger. It’s more likely than not that they will choke and die on that burger. Do you let them have the burger? You could argue that a sane person would obviously choose life over a burger but I might argue that American culture in particular makes the ability to consume burgers enjoy life more important than lengthening it (not entirely true, OP is probably one of the few people here who wouldn’t be shocked what people put elders through in the name of extending life). In the end its a complex debate with a huge amount of individual nuance that I don’t claim to have all the answers to.

I can tell you that I kinda wanna go work hospice where I don’t even have to ask any of those questions and can just give them the fucking burger.

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?

I feel like this is something I knew but didn’t know was something that had actually been studied. I’ll tell a lot of science concepts and stories from history and mythology that normally bore people but I’ve always had a habit of telling them “drunk history” style so I’ll be telling people shit like,“And they didn’t invite discord to the party because why the fuck would you but you also can’t just not invite her because that’s how you piss a bitch off.” and “and Paris, being a dumbfuck who doesn’t know how to think with his upstairs brain-” and honestly I was already somewhat like that but spending a bunch of my formative years on tumblr really honed it.

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).

Honestly this discussion also highlights the issue that what’s considered inappropriate varies widely and often changes both in terms of prejudice and in terms of context. Most people would agree that an image of a penis entering or inside of a vagina is pornographic unless it’s a medical diagram laying out the anatomical and physiological aspects like the one in the anatomy book my otherwise puritanical parents let me read at the age of six. Most people would agree that nudity is sexual except for, again, anatomical diagrams, but also many classical artistic depictions such as paintings and statues. Hand holding isn’t generally considered sexual except to some people if the people happen to be of the same sex but not if you come from a culture where hand holding is a normal level of intimacy for non sexual friends. Breasts are for some reason considered sexual in most of the areas heavily colonized by people from the places where lactose tolerance past childhood evolved but not most other places which is super handy if you like being able to feed infants. Most people agree that kissing for an extended period while rubbing areas close to the genitals is sexual, but often not enough to restrict it from being viewed by teenagers.

TLDR; what’s even considered “sexual” or “porn” can vary wildly and has historically been used to suppress education, various minorities, and general freedom of expression.

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.

deleted by creator

That was the whole purpose of tumblr so yeah. I kid, as I did get started on there at like 14 as a part of various Fandoms, but by the time I was 18 I had been using it for porn for quite some time, largely because fandom is also mostly for porn.