The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
Reposting because I dropped this in the last Wednesday thread on a Tuesday like a dummy.
Could anyone direct me to some good posts about antidepressants? Effortposts about their efficacy, personal experience, I'm not picky. I tried to find some but Google wasn't much use and I can't figure out how to search the site specifically (permanent lurker here, sorry).
I was on Bupropion for 2 years about a decade ago. For the first year it was helpful in managing a depression that manifested with lots of fatigue. It gave me the energy to make lifestyle changes that improved it long term. During the second year it began causing unmanageable anger issues and I eventually stopped. Ever since then my lifestyle changes and talk therapy have managed it reasonably well.
Lately it's been getting worse and I'm considering going back on antidepressants. The main issue is that unambiguously good events exacerbate my depression and that has historically led to me sabotaging myself. I have some major life events coming up in the next couple years and would like some emotional stability. I have a psych eval tomorrow and I was hoping for some advice, feedback, pointed questions to ask the psychiatrist, stories, anything really. Even some google-fu advice to find better scientific information about this instead of feel-good self help articles made by AI or journalists who are about as smart as current AI without the work ethic. Do I even need antidepressants, or is this some weird Pavlovian issue that I can work on without them?
You need a psychiatrist. I am only two-thirds of one, but fortunately for you, I've got exams and that means actually reading some of the papers.
(Please see an actual psychiatrist)
The choice of initial antidepressant is often a tossup between adherence to official guidelines, clinical judgements based on activity profile and potential side effects, and a dialogue with the patient.
In short? It is usually not very helpful to worry too hard about the first drug. They're roughly equally effective (and where one is superior, it's by a very slim margin) But in certain situations:
(But before the meds, a physical checkup is mandatory, as are investigations to rule out medical causes. You're going to feel depressed if your thyroid isn't working, or if you've got Cushing's.)
Unfortunately, you haven't given me enough information to make an informed choice. I'd need to know about the severity of your depression, graded based on symptoms, lifestyle, overall health and a bunch of other things. Hopefully your actual doctor will do their due diligence.
Man you are either an irredeemable slopmonger or spending so much time immersed in slop that your own writing is becoming indistinguishable.
People should be able to write comments in an orderly list format without being accused of using LLMs. I can assure you that the long comment that I posted today did not involve AI use despite including several lists.
If it makes you feel better, you have a very different writing voice than ChatGTP or other LLMs. Not in a bad way! I come to the forum to interact with real people, if they all sounded like chatting with ChatGTP there wouldn't be a point.
Our Dear Doktor on the other hand. Very compelling posts sometimes. Very well articulated. Very well formated. But I prompted ChatGTP yesterday, and got a response so similar to his tone and style I did a double take. I'm actually not accusing him of using more LLM than he has let on. My reaction to the experience was "I have to be sure this doesn't happen to me, what if I'm vulnerable to letting ChatGTP gradually replace my voice"
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Like I said, it's entirely plausible that he's just picked up the tics through hours of reading the output of these things (and thinking that it's good) -- which in a way is even more horrifying than the idea that he'd use one for a pretty simple question about a topic upon which he's somewhere in the ballpark of an SME.
It's not (only) about the lists tho...
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