5 packets of lifesaver candy sounds a lot more suitable than the Nazi German emergency rations ngl

It’s going to depend on your use case.

Are you just looking to do walking? If so it might be worth considering a walking pad - they’re more portable and stowable, you can set it up in front of a TV or a desk with your tablet on it with a stand. Good if you just want to get some steps in or to use at a standing desk and that sort of thing.

If you’re looking for the option to jog or run or you want to have incline settings then a treadmill is the way to go. The most important considerations here are tread length and horsepower (generally speaking the higher the horsepower, the longer your treadmill will last.)

Also try to stick to regular recommended maintenance, especially if you’re using either regularly.

It’s wild that I’ve seen a multiple once-in-a-lifetime financial crises in the US and now it’s all kinda blurring into one rolling economic crisis that just waxes and wanes depending on different factors.

Even if the Mossad aren’t implicated in this which, y’know, wouldn’t be the first time they’ve gone and sabotaged shit in Iran, there’s absolutely zero chance that they aren’t going to get the blame for this.

[Continuing]

I never really thought of PTSD affecting normal people like me because its all about the troops and shit when people talk about it. I have been in denial with what was happening to me when people would relate their experiences of it in group about it. That is why I never really looked into it seriously before and did not internalized it when they told me before about it when I started the program.

Yeah, that’s understandable. I don’t know your story but one thing that has been useful for me with framing this sort of experience is recognising that because it’s something that has always been there in my life, or it’s something that feels that way, then it can be really hard to identify it because that’s just your baseline.

This famous bit by David Foster Wallace comes to mind.

I just assumed I was bipolar but my episodes are not psychotic in nature. The things happening to me are reactions to real events, and the emotions are rooted in my past, and my body shows it to people who can see these things in people I think. I am not really reliving the moments as much as I just get raw emotions that override anything I am feeling. I need to map my triggers now which is gonna take time because I have no idea what is doing it when I think back on situations like this. I need to be able to make it though a 60 min therapy session without using 30 of it to cry that is for sure. The meds they say will help stabilize me for that. I am just glad I was around people who could spot PTSD episodes and know how to deal with them.

Yeah this is really typical for what you have described.

It can be easy to think that staying up all night because you’re hyperfocused or the ADHD impulse purchasing is actually a symptom of (hypo)mania and stuff like that.

The emotional swings that come with being ADHD and having PTSD can really come off as bipolar-esque mood swings, especially because you aren’t necessarily able to identify how or why your mood just plummets or why you suddenly feel a surge of overwhelming aggression or whatever else bubbles up to the surface in response to what you experience.

I’m not saying that you aren’t bipolar, or that you are, but when it comes to complex and comorbid conditions like autism, ADHD, and PTSD together then it’s super important to approach this very carefully and to take inventory of all the assumptions and things that you might be taking for granted. Being very diligent and taking a scientific approach of “Observation > Hypothesis > Experiment > Collect Data & Analyse Results” to rule things in/out is extremely important imo.

I have a new thing for my list too and that is my silly ruminations I do on the type of events that happened at the PHP building. I will be up for 2-3 hours just ruminating on events and cant really stop unless I totally shut down the thing in me that wants to rehash shit. Like flat out saying out loud we are not going to talk about this. I hate it because it will toss things at me like comments from a peanut gallery. It stops me from sleeping and if I wake up getting back to sleep is impossible.

That does sound a lot like the intersection of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria and being autistic, where you take hard knocks from the RSD and being autistic you just run into social rejection more often and you have the tendency to experience perseveration. On top of that I think that it’s common for autistic people to sort of decompress and analyse their interactions from the day or the week to scour it for any missed details or faux pas and similar stuff. This can also include determining how certain things made you feel in the moment as well. Part of this is a deeper aspect of masking imo but I think there are other facets to it as well.

If it’s causing you distress then yeah, use those strategies to manage it. But I also think that doing this can be fairly neutral too - I know that sometimes I’m experiencing a difficult emotion and I can’t pinpoint the what or the why but by replaying the events from the day I can glean insight and often things fall into place for me (e.g. upon reflection I suddenly realise that I have been carrying a lot of frustration because earlier in the day someone had misinterpreted what I was saying and so I can deconstruct that by reminding myself that I put a lot of effort into communicating, I was being clear in my communication at that point in time, and that I don’t need to take on the blame for them not listening or seeking clarification from me before jumping to conclusions.)

I think it depends on whether or not it’s “pathological”; is it causing you distress? Does it interfere with your ability to enjoy things? Does it serve a purpose? etc. etc.

One thing I have noticed is how much my body reacts to these episodes… I also have some other symptoms that are really allergy like that intensify after episodes. I get a sore throat where I can also feel some swelling that might be my uvula, I sweat a lot, I get itchy, and my nose goes all runny. Its like my body is attacking itself when episodes like this happen.

This is getting a bit into the weeds but autistic people are more likely to experience auto-immune diseases and similar. It’s pretty well known, although it’s not necessarily established in scientific literature, that chronic stress aggravates this stuff, and we know that autistic people experience really high levels of stress compared to their allistic counterparts.

I really want to get off this Abilify at one point but I think that might be years away. I live on my own and really do not have anyone that looks after me physically and so my place is a hoarders hell.

Experiencing serious trauma, experiencing executive dysfunction, neurodivergent burnout… these things are a recipe for hoarding. And that’s without even mentioning the socioeconomic factors because hoarding is very often a response to poverty or significant experiences of deprivation (e.g. childhood neglect, even if poverty itself wasn’t a factor) and neurodivergent people are so often overrepresented in poverty stats as well as often experiencing deprivation due to stuff like being too burnt out or too overwhelmed to make food so you just don’t end up eating, that sort of thing.

Once I clean up my life I was thinking about getting one those psychiatric service dogs. I have a friend who is a DID system and they have one that helps them with their problems. They do tasks for them so they can remain independent which is what I want to be. I know the dogs take years to train but I also have years to train myself on how my body actually deals with things.

Sounds like it would be a wonderful thing to have!

A service dog can be trained to respond to your emotional state and to alert you to it or to take actions to intervene (e.g. laying their body on your torso to provide deep pressure stimulation to help calm you down). It might be really handy to have a dog who helps you with identifying and managing this stuff rather than trying to do it all by yourself.

Thanks for listening to me again. It helps me a lot.

Any time! I hope that things improve for you.

(Also apologies for rambling and apologies if I have lectured you about stuff that you’re already aware of - my intention isn’t to make myself out to be some sort of expert who knows better than you do, I just try to resource people and often it’s sorta like dropping PSAs for other people who might be reading this and notice that certain things are resonating with their own experience.)

I think my BP is so high because of my anxiety and stress. But I will talk about that in a another part. I am going to talk about this Guanfacine to my psychiatrist and see what they say. It sounds like it fits my profile.

Oh my bad, I misinterpreted what you said and thought you were dealing with hypertension as a separate health condition.

Given this clarification, personally I’d be scrambling to get my hands on guanfacine (or clonidine) if I were in your situation because it has a lot of potential to help.

I ended up having a PTSD episode in front of staff because of a confrontation I had with someone between groups. I got agitated by some comments someone made and communicated it to the person who did it, and they reacted badly back to me even tho it was a reasonable request. I really could not handle his response which would require me to escalating things and instead I grabbed my bag and walked out.

Sorry to hear that you’re having a stressful time. It sounds like you’re managing it well though.

I never really have been able to figure out what is happening to cause me to go all emotional during events like this because normally I am a rational person.

So I’m going to reiterate that I don’t hold a qualification or anything but there are a few things that I can recommend looking into or considering with regards to this:

• Overstimulation

When you’re overstimulated, especially if you’ve had to deal with a lot of “bad” stimuli, it’s very common to have a meltdown or a shutdown. You can also experience the same thing by being emotionally overwhelmed too. So if you’re having a big outburst of emotion it can be that your nervous system is just overwhelmed, either in an acute episode or a more chronic build-up that occurs over the course of a day or longer.

In this situation it can be helpful to tune into how you’re managing your sensory input and to adjust so you have more of the positive sensory input and less of the negative. Stimming can really help with regulating your nervous system too.

Another thing that is helpful in this situation is to try to take little sensory breaks if possible. Even 5 or 10 mins with sunglasses on, headphones in, and disconnecting from the outside world to make yourself comfy can help you manage when you do re-engage with the world.

• Poor interoception

Autistic people often face significant difficulty in identifying their emotional state. I know for me my interoception isn’t great so I often feel like I’m working downstream, like my awareness works on a delay and I’m always trying to catch up - when things are good and I’m taking care of my needs that delay can be very short and maybe only a few seconds but if I’m overwhelmed and I’m not attending to my internal experience then that delay can be hours or even days, meaning I won’t realise that something irritated or upset me until much later on.

There’s a lot out there on autism and interoception so if this feels like it might apply to you then I’d recommend watching a few videos about it and stuff like that to better understand it.

• Masking

This is my own opinion but I think that masking dovetails into interoception issues because masking requires you to put a lot of energy out into the world and to really attune yourself to the emotional state of others and to work hard to do things like modulating your tone and carefully selecting your words to avoid unintended implication and doing eye contact “right” and displaying the “correct” body language and facial expressions etc. etc.

All of that is pretty damn exhausting but moreover if you’re doing all of that then it’s really hard to be connected to what’s going on internally for you.

There is tons out there about autistic masking and I guess in short if this feels like it might be applicable then the next step would be to work on becoming a bit more conscious and purposeful in how you mask and to what extent you mask, as well as giving yourself permission or setting your intention to reduce your masking somewhat. Also taking regular breaks so that you can catch your breath, drop the mask, and check in on yourself is very useful too.

• Trauma response

ADHDers, especially ones who aren’t appropriately medicated (this varies between individuals and it’s not a value judgement - appropriately medicated might look like being unmedicated for one person and it might look like multiple medications for another person), tend to be much more emotionally reactive because that’s just what comes with the territory.

When you throw in PTSD and a proper trauma trigger then you have a sort of perfect storm where it gets amplified but there’s this thing where ADHDers tend not to have that half second or longer where their emotional state begins to shift and they can choose to deploy strategies to manage this emotional shift in the way that their neurotypical peers do.

For ADHDers who have PTSD the emotional response can be like a hair trigger and it dials up to 11 seemingly instantaneously and you’re left trying to manage the fallout. It was a bit of an eye-opener for me taking stimulants, to a lesser extent, and definitely with clonidine because I found that I suddenly had more ability to direct where my emotional state was heading; if I were to put it metaphorically, it used to feel like these big emotional shifts were a stampede and I was caught under it but with the right meds for me it felt more like I was riding a horse - sure the horse has a mind of its own and it will respond to situations but being on top of it means that I can direct where it goes and I have a lot more influence over it. Or maybe it’s like the difference between being caught as a wave crashes down on your head vs surfing that wave - you can’t control the tide but you can adjust how you navigate the wave you happen to be riding at that moment.

Anyway I’m rambling again. I guess one thing that’s tricky is knowing that it can be a combination of some or all of these things so yeah. My best advice is to do a bit of research, try adjusting things, and see if it makes any positive impact.

Honestly the worst case scenario is pretty much this: you take more breaks, you put in more effort to make yourself feel comfortable, and you put less energy into masking or appeasing others and you redirect that energy into connecting with your own emotional state. Seems like even if this doesn’t address the underlying cause you’re still going to benefit from it anyway.

[Continued]

It’s actually a really useful set of tools on that site. I bought the app, which is just a web frontend for this site, to support the developer. I should probably make a PSA post about it.

And how come capybaras get excluded from this prohibition btw?

Meanwhile autistic people are literally using AI tools to determine and adjust the tone of their emails in order to provide the requisite level of warmth that allistic people demand from emails.

This would be my response:

Biden and the DNC need to do more to prevent another Trump presidency.

They ran Hillary despite her being deeply unpopular. They almost ran her on a “It’s Her Turn” campaign.

As far as I’m concerned they let Trump win.

And now they’re doing it again while scolding people because they are convinced of the notion that Democratic Party cannot fail, it can only be failed and that they are entitled to votes rather than showing a true commitment to representative democracy by literally representing the politics that is most popular based on a democratic consensus.

They are a parody of liberal democracy.

Demanding that people hold their nose and vote didn’t work the last time Trump was elected. Instead of yelling at people to vote against their interests, you should be yelling at the Democratic Party to start representing the people’s interests.

(I would possibly throw in a jab about how they might be a rank political opportunist of such a degree that they can vote on the basis of someone who they do not believe in and have zero faith in but you need more than that.

Elsewhere I have outlined an argument to get them to discuss how Biden hasn’t been able to address any of your concerns, in as much detail as they are willing to go into, before telling them that you have no faith in Biden and you cannot in good conscience vote for him because they have just convinced you that he is completely incapable of achieving anything and this would mean voting for him would be throwing your vote away - it’s very hard for someone to backpedal after they’ve just spent the last 15+ minutes excusing all of Biden’s inaction, even moreso when you understand that the only way they can about-face is by implicitly arguing that Biden can in fact achieve change for the things that are important to you but he simply chooses not to act.)

Right?

Seems like some goofy thing that you’d only hear about in a D&D game but when you see it in action you realise that it’s actually just a little handheld catapult and you get the idea that it’s actually kinda deadly.

How they made such a goofy sport/minigame the centrepiece of FFX, which inarguably takes itself very seriously, is a baffling choice that you’d only expect to see from a non-western game studio.

How they mostly managed to stick the landing on it is even more baffling to me. And that’s speaking as someone who has played enough blitzball that if I had dedicated enough time to actually playing a legitimate sport I’d be an expert.

For the Final Fantasies of that era, 7 had pretty incongruous goofy contrasts which felt very much like shifting gears and you sorta get primed for the transition when it comes to the casino or crossdressing and going to a love hotel and so on, whereas 8 was almost entirely devoid of anything genuinely goofy because it is uncharacteristically dour for the series, and then you have 9 which went in completely the opposite way and was routinely goofy to the point that it was notable for being downright whimsical a lot of the time.

Oh yeah, another candidate that might be worth considering if Abilify doesn’t work for you is cariprazine - it works as a partial agonist at the dopamine receptors.

It’s kinda tricky to explain exactly how a partial agonist works because I would only expect it’d be useful for ADHD symptoms if the underlying cause is one of the three main mechanisms that affect dopamine in the brain. So it’s definitely not a surefire thing but it’s possible that it might be just what you’re looking for.

Cariprazine is good for a lot of mood-disorder and adjacent conditions while not being sedating like lots of the other antipsychotics.

Brexpiprazole is similar to Abilify but I believe it’s newer and, due to Abilify being prescribed for autism, I believe they’re either doing studies on its effects on autistic symptoms or they’ve recently completed them so that would be another one that might be worth trying, and it’s another one with a particularly long half-life, if Abilify doesn’t work out for you.

So despite amantadine hitting a lot of different things at once, it has a really low side effect profile. There have only been a few preliminary studies that have trialled it with different mental illnesses and neurodevelopmental disorders but generally it’s surprisingly well tolerated and I haven’t heard any reports about brain fog on it and I definitely haven’t experienced any myself either.

Had a friend on topiramate that basically could not get their brain going while taking it.

Yeah, the ol’ Dopamax™ effect lol.

I’m probably not a good measure of this because I am pretty resistant to brain fog, at least when I haven’t collapsed into executive dysfunction or catatonia. But as for medications inducing it in me it just doesn’t seem to be something that I’m prone to.

It’s not uncommon at all to have brain fog with topiramate. Sometimes it’s just a problem with increasing the dose too quickly but sometimes it just wreaks havoc with people too.

This isn’t medical advice but amantadine can be discontinued pretty rapidly and it doesn’t seem to cause any real withdrawal effects like what you’d get with, say, antidepressants. So if you or someone you know is considering trying it out then I wouldn’t be too concerned because you should be alright to cut the dose back pretty quickly if it’s causing bad side effects. But yeah, that’s one to talk to the doctors about since I’m not qualified.

Another one of my meds is a BP med because all this stuff drives me into hypertension stage 2 and a few times when I got it taken where they were surprised I was not hypertesive shock.

Oh cool! Well, not cool but clonidine and guanfacine are both second-line/non-stimulant treatments for ADHD and they are also hypotensive agents so there might be room to use them to assist with ADHD traits and to address your hypertension at the same time.

Guanfacine tends to be better for ADHD, especially with regards to being able to focus. Not so useful for motivation though. I would expect it to work pretty well for rejection sensitive dysphoria and potentially for depressive-like symptoms that come from RSD which may be going unrecognised if it’s just your baseline and you have a tendency to internalise things (more common in combined-type or inattentive type ADHD, in auDHD, late-diagnosis, trauma survivors [esp. childhood trauma] and people socialised as women). No promises though so don’t get your hopes too high, and from anecdotal reports it seems that it either works for people or they hate it.

With regards to guanfacine, if you tolerate it well, you might not notice much but if you’re dealing with a lot (and tbh it sounds like you are - which is a compliment because it means you must be a resilient person) then it might be a subtle thing that others around you notice more than you do yourself or you might find that it takes a bit of the edge off of things and brings the lows up enough that recovery is easier over a longer time frame.

Clonidine is going to have less positive cognitive effects, although it will still work well for RSD and if you’re scatterbrained or depressed due to the impacts of RSD or constantly trying to rein in your impulsivity you might find it has a secondary benefit for your cognitive ability because it will just free up some resources. Same goes for PTSD symptoms too, if you find yourself regularly experiencing trauma triggers. Clonidine works well for sleep as well so if insomnia is a big issue in your life (and insomnia is just terrible for making mental illness worse but it seems to effect ADHDers particularly badly) then it could be useful here.

I’ve been on clonidine and guanfacine at the same time, which is pretty unusual, and tbh I couldn’t identify any real effects of the guanfacine so I discontinued it. You’d have to prise the clonidine from my cold, dead hands though. If your prescribing doctor feels comfortable with it, this might be something that could be used to manage your hypertension and some ADHD traits. Clonidine is particularly nice because it kicks in quickly and, within reason, you can take an extra 50 or 100mcg if you’re particularly anxious or something has just triggered you (e.g. someone yelling and being aggressive on public transport where it hits your PTSD just right and it really rattles your nervous system). Obviously I’m not a doctor and I’m not supervising you or monitoring your conditions so you’d need to get actual medical advice and approval to do this yourself. Also careful with increasing hypotensive agents at any point beyond your daily dose because you don’t want to drop your blood pressure low enough that you go fainting or anything like that.

For adults, I’ve heard a couple of reports that very high doses of guanfacine really work well for ADHD traits - in the vicinity of 8mg a day - but this is off the beaten path for treating ADHD so you’d need a prescribing doctor who is comfortable working outside the standard recommendations.

With regards to clonidine and adjusting the dose upwards, you’ll know that you’ve hit too high a dose when you feel really kinda zapped. Not in the sense that you’re completely exhausted but more like all of your motivation is just completely non-existent. That would be your brain struggling under the lack of norepinephrine. There’s no risk of anything big from this by itself, except if there’s like a house fire and you take a few minutes before the urgency to do something kicks in I guess? (Lol, just kidding but it really can feel like it’d require a house fire to get out of bed when you’ve taken too much clonidine.)

Whatever happens, I’d be very interested in hearing how things pan out for you if you feel comfortable with sharing so don’t be afraid to update me. I think there’s a lot of good options available to you.

I feel like when things have been stabilised and you’re doing better overall it might be worth considering modafinil as an alternative to the typical stimulants that would probably be too risky due to the hypertension - modafinil doesn’t really have those same effects but it can help with motivation and focus etc. especially in ADHD but yeah, that’s one for down the track and with approval from the right doctors before it would be a candidate for consideration. But just because Adderall and Ritalin are off the menu doesn’t mean that there aren’t other options available, so stay positive!

Cry harder, fragile little nepo-baby who would decry cancel culture and defend the use of racial caricatures for mascots as “honouring” the people they are supposed to represent.

You’re just being honoured, sweetie. Let people honour you okay?

Also she’s a perfect case of the “garbage-out” side of the garbage-in, garbage-out equitation. [CW: for some really egregious racism] This is the person who raised her speaking candidly in a time that exists within living memory for a lot of people. This entire family needs to be abolished, along with Australia, asap.

If we’re talking about legit catatonia or if you are uncertain about the symptoms of catatonia (there’s a lot of misconceptions around about it) then I’d really strongly urge you to try a lorazepam challenge or, if benzos are restricted closely in your country or you aren’t keen on benzos for the obvious reasons, then zolpidem or zopiclone is a good alternative for this purpose.

With regards to longer-term catatonia prevention, I would recommend NMDA antagonists but with a caution not to use them to stave off catatonic episodes only to push through under the conditions that are causing or aggravating your catatonia because that will be counterproductive and you risk causing things to get worse for yourself. But this must be weighed against the risks of being stuck in catatonia and the effects of this condition too - catatonia thar goes unmanaged is extremely troublesome.

As someone who is diagnosed with ADHD, autism, and C-PTSD I have found that I’m really sensitive to norepinephrinergic meds, like ridiculously so. This is not the case for everyone and especially with ADHD in the mix, it would be safer to presume that boosting your norepinephrine will aid you with anxiety and panic attacks, if you happen to experience them. That being said, don’t just presume that this is the case and if you do happen to be sensitive to norepinephrinergic meds then Wellbutrin may not be ideal for you or you may need something else in the mix to mellow out that aspect of Wellbutrin. I’d be reaching for clonidine in this situation because it can be particularly useful for ADHDers.

Obviously people respond differently to different meds and there’s no guarantees with psychiatric meds but Abilify is really not too big of a deal in my experience. I personally found that I was less inclined to experience agitation due to negative stimuli, which is mostly an autistic thing but it can be an ADHD thing too, which was nice but as a person who is (was?) high-masking and high-dissociating, I suspect that I was using that benefit of Abilify to push through negative stimuli which, if my assumption is correct, would have been counterproductive. So I guess I’d say that it’s important to consider your “sensory diet” on Abilify but that it can make things better.

As an anti-psychotic it’s pretty mild tbh. Also don’t let the category of anti-psychotic spoök you - there are some medications that are OTC which happen to be anti-psychotics so it’s not like something big and scary; Abilify is not thorazine or clozapine. No shade to anyone who is on those meds though - I’m just trying to point at the fact that anti-psychotics span a very broad spectrum of “strength”.

But yeah, I wouldn’t issue any major cautions with Abilify.

I have been flying the flag for amantadine as a really overlooked psychiatric medication for a fair while now and, thankfully, my well-connected psychiatrist has started integrating it into his practice since I essentially prescribed it to myself and got him to sign off on it. I’ll spare you the details but he has gone on to have success with other patients of his - it is very well tolerated with no reported side effects from his patients (including me) and he is beginning to prescribe it to people with OCD to see how they respond. Next time I see him I need to speak with him to consider it as an alternative to prescribing topiramate, which can have negative effects on appetite. But yeah, amantadine is a worth considering as an adjunct med both for mental illness but also it has an added benefit in that it works as a dopamine reuptake inhibitors which is ideal for ADHDers, especially given that it doesn’t have norepinephrinergic effect. If your prescribing doctor is uncertain about it (mine was lol) then I can provide an email contact to a psychiatrist who would be able to liaise with your doctor and provide advice.

Anyway I’m rambling on again. Good luck with it, check in if you need more info or advice and I’ll probably see your post or just comment below one of my comments and you’ll wring some more exposition out of me; drugs? Autism? ADHD? These subjects feel like they are my wheelhouse nowadays.

Edited because I was using the non-slur based verb “spoök”, not the slang noun, so I’m circumventing the filter

Malicious compliance is more strategy than tactics but there are lots of ways to play within the rules while subverting them provided that you are creative.

The other option is to get more serious about things and start hitting operations with strikes and stuff like coordinated sabotage.

Slingshots are good.

If you live in a place that regulates them tightly because they are deemed as a weapon then I would recommend putting some practice in with a sling instead since it’s much more stealthy. Obviously it’s a trade off so a sling is a compromise.

Slings were the deadliest long-range weapon until the advent of the bow and arrow.

If you want to go for a real short range/long range sleeper build in a country that restricts weapons then it’s hard to imagine surpassing a staff or self-defence walking cane and a sling, especially because if you know what you’re doing you can turn that into a staff sling for even more force.