• 1 Post
  • 13 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
  • Apytele@sh.itjust.workstoLefty Memes@lemmy.dbzer0.com•ParasitesEnglish
    12·
    19 hours ago

    Also most of those newer treatments treat either type 2 (diet / metabolism related) or are an adjunct therapy for a type 1 (genetic) who has also developed insulin resistance over time. With or without insulin resistance a type 1 isn’t making any insulin in their pancreas at ALL and is going to need to take manufactured insulin, whether by a syringe or with an artificial pancreas that needs to be filled with an insulin cartridge. For them a metabolism altering medication isn’t going to make their pancreas start producing insulin again, it’s just going to help their cells respond better to the insulin they still have to inject.

    People have gotten so used to conceptualizing diabetes as a “fat people” disease that they completely ignore the type 1 genetic diabetics who are actually the main users of insulin. Oh and most children with diabetes have type 1 (since it’s genetic) vs type 2 which can be managed with the fancier newer drugs is the “fat people” / diet related type, and most people don’t get that until they’re at least middle aged and have been eating garbage for decades. When people talk about insulin they act like they’re talking about adults who made a choice when most of your exclusively insulin dependent diabetics are gonna be type 1s who got it from genetics and have had it since childhood.

    We should absolutely be caring about people regardless of these moralistic fat shaming arguments but the kind of people saying it’s not a big deal that a month of insulin costs $500 are also usually the same people crying “think of the children!” and the raw hypocrisy of that just drives me fucking bonkers.

  • Apytele@sh.itjust.workstoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•What's the deal with male loneliness?
    21·
    5 days ago

    As someone who works in mental health I’m actually with you but first I need to clarify that therapists don’t prescribe meds, psychiatrists do. Therapists usually have at least a bachelor’s usually a masters in one of a couple non-medical (or better stated, medical-adjacent) fields. A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who completed full medical school and a residency specializing in psychiatry. Even a doctorate in psychology is not a medical doctor. A therapist is going to talk to you and provide one of two basic functions: allowing you to vent / express your emotions to a completely supportive person, and teach social skills and emotional intelligence. Psychology = talking, psychiatry = drugs. This is an important distinction because while talk therapy is often more helpful than medications for certain disorders, it’s a lot more expensive to pay for an hour human emotional presence than having a doctor (even with their more specialized knowledge) listen for fifteen minutes then decide which neurotransmitters are maybe involved the most and picking a chemical from a list to throw at the problem and see what sticks.

    Now even with therapy being more helpful for certain things, I don’t think it’s actually a good solution (or again, better-stated, a good long term solution). It’s definitely going to help with this kind of problem because the core issue is largely behavioral, not neurochemical, but first of all it’s putting our emotional wellness in the hands of capitalism which is… terrible. I cannot express how much that idea terrifies me. But second of all, as someone who’s actually had 300h of therapy for a personality disorder, it starts to lose efficacy over time due to a lack of true emotional intimacy.

    Once you know the DBT manual front to back plus 100h of general psycheducation on pavlov and maslow, they’re not really doing skills teaching anymore, they’re just listening to you bitch. And listening to you bitch is… fine, especially if you wouldn’t have a safe place to do that at all otherwise. But even that starts to lose efficacy when you start feeling like they have no idea what you’re actually talking about. I realized this recently when I had an extremely stressful experience at work and the therapist was like,“yeah that sucks” but my work friends were all like,“oh yeah she was waaay out of line you did exactly the right thing” because my therapist knew my account, but my coworkers knew more sides of the story and still sided with me and that just… meant a lot more. Bitching also never actually solves the core issue if there is one, a bigger part of that situation was some underlying problems with my workload that my boss was refusing to address, and at a certain point even my coworkers listening to me bitch wasn’t cutting it either because whether they listened or not I knew I was going to get my head shoved right back under the water the second I walked back out on my unit and until that issue is actually fixed nothing will ever truly even touch the dread that is constantly hovering over you.

    And finally the other core issue is that true emotional connection, the kind humans truly crave, is reciprocal. A therapist has boundaries to maintain that are actually pretty critical to the function of the therapeutic process. The relationship being a completely one-sided support is the whole point. It prevents the abuse of the relationship by someone who knows both more about the person and more about human behavior in general to a person who is emotionally vulnerable for one reason or another. Having those boundaries preserves what therapy does the most good for. But that also means it’s going to feel hollow after a while because in the long term what people truly need is reciprocity so they can feel the satisfaction of also helping the other person (in more ways than a monetary transaction). Therapy can help you learn more about how to build those relationships, but it can’t replace those relationships, not in the long term anyway. I even see this in my own patients, I’m having to constantly reinforce boundaries that they’re pushing not out of malice but just because they’re instinctually craving a deeper connection than I can safely offer for either of our sakes.

    As a tangential note, another problem we run into in men’s mental health in particular, is the lack of men working in mental health. I’m kinda sorta trans but I was raised female which means I often lack the life experience to truly speak to a lot of men’s issues. We really need a lot more men who have successfully navigated some of these problems to take the lead towards better men’s mental health because they know what really needs to happen and what skills need to be taught. I got into my field in an effort to improve care for personality disorders because I saw what was lacking and felt it was important to provide my inside perspective on a poorly understood issue and something similar needs to happen for men. Another problem with that though is that men’s difficulty connecting with other men can often keep them from seeking support from a male professional. I’ve had lots of men say they’re more comfortable opening up to me but then they start asking about romantic and sexual topics which a) can be a huuuge boundary issue and b) I often just don’t have the information they REALLY need on the topic, which is how to approach the issues specifically as a man. But a lot of that could also (again) be alleviated by having more men working in mental health to increase the odds that someone will happen to create the necessary rapport (/professionally vibe with) with the patient.

    Anyway I think you’re right, especially about the thirdspaces, but I do worry that people will be somewhat negatively reactive to the way you’ve expressed it here. When I’ve stated as much with this little background, even stating that my perspective is informed by extensive personal AND professional experience, I’ve had pretty much every layperson getting out their pitchforks.

  • Apytele@sh.itjust.workstolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•The best Unix
    146·
    9 days ago

    The lack of non proprietary art tools is a big reason I didn’t go into digital art / graphic design. GIMP just cannot keep pace and I did not want to shell out $500 a year or more in subscriptions just to be able to do a job with no security that pays pennies.

    Its also a big part of why I’m “pro” AI art (I’m actually pretty neutral, I’m not liking that they’re burning down the Amazon to make shitty ads with). I think it’s gonna be a decent tool for artists to automate repetitive tasks like cutting backgrounds out of photos for collages, upscaling / enlarging images, adding background textures to landscapes, touching up acne in portraits, and animating repetitive shots like walking. but right now we’re unethically sourcing the training data and shoving it into anything and everything with 0 regard for how many resources it’s costing to make content that’s shitty anyway.

    The other half of my argument “in favor” is that the only thing worse than AI existing is AI only existing in the hands of the bourgeoisie and is plebs not even knowing how it works in addition to them using it to gain an unfair advantage over us. I think we have an opportunity to make sure that the open source tools are decent to begin with instead of letting them have complete control over even more of the creative world.

  • Apytele@sh.itjust.workstoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What's a word you wish you could unlearn?
    3·
    12 days ago

    Idk they didn’t say much more and most of my psych patients have lots of minor medical conditions but are at least ambulatory. When I was a phlebotomist I did go to the ICU occasionally and one time I flicked the back of a persons hand to get the veins to pop up and they just blew right there and then. Like I’d busted a fragile vein on accident with too big of a needle or pulling back too hard on the syringe before so I know what it looks like the blood sort of pools under the skin (which later becomes a bruise). I was not expecting that I hadn’t even stuck yet I was literally just flicking / tapping the veins to get them to pop up and just that alone busted them.

    I wound up filling a microtainer from a fingerstick and it was the easiest fingerstick I’d ever collected. It came back hemolyzed meaning the individual blood cells had burst at some point and it counts as a collection error but I’m pretty sure those cells were already hemolyzed inside the patient. Anyway the patient was bright yellow like practically glowing so definitely some kinda liver problem. Could’ve been alcohol related but not necessarily.

  • Apytele@sh.itjust.workstoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What's a word you wish you could unlearn?
    13·
    12 days ago

    Fun fact: it’s also a medical term referring to a specific type of injury / trauma! One of my instructors said she was caring for an ICU patient who had been clinging to life so long that their body was basically just disintegrating and she accidentally degloved their hand while trying to reposition them. Like she picked up the patients’ arm and the arm just slipped out of its skin. She panicked and tried to put it back and her preceptor (she was a new grad) stopped her because that’s just kinda not how that works like even if they were gonna somehow put it back on they’d probably be calling a surgeon but if the patient is so sick it’s just slipping off it’s almost definitely not reattachable. Another instructor had a similar story of trying to turn a patient on their side and her hand just going through the patients thigh which she described disintegrating in her hand in a similar manner so apparently it’s not even all that uncommon when medical science has kept your body alive past its expiration date.