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).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
A few things moving in parallel here:
The explanation as to what a personality disorder or personality is is a long lecture at absolute minimum. It's a complicated concept with very specific (and for some dimensions debated) meanings. Takeaway: It may be reasonable to go "meh" in response to labels.
Schizoid personality disorder is one of the most poorly understood diagnostic entities in medicine. Patients essentially never present for psychiatric care because they don't see the need (and unlike say anti-social PD, they don't otherwise live their lives in a way that gets them attention). To my understanding the only reason why we know anything at all about this diagnosis is for historical reasons (it was thought to be a pre-morbid state for schizophrenia and was therefore very heavily explored, once we figured out that wasn't the case we stopped expending excess resources on trying to spot it and it went away*). Non-psychiatric medical providers see these patients far more than psychiatrists (since they do still require medical care). Takeaway: I'm not sure really this label means anything or requires anything.
The internal and external expression of the self is heavily impacted by culture and environment. Takeaway: I'm not sure a diagnosis that primarily served to describe behaviors in a wildly different social milieu totally applies to modern heavily atomized culture.
Asking this question is suggestive of the diagnosis not being relevant - satisfaction with the state of affairs is hallmark of the diagnosis.
Regardless of any of the above and anything related to the diagnosis - it is totally reasonable to have questions about your self, your preferences. Some people are fine with being solitary. Some people are being solitary as a defense mechanism. Some people are fine with being solitary as a defense mechanism. It is hard to explore these things by yourself, and in a situation where you don't have a lot of external entities to help you, a therapist or other professional way to organize and explore yourself is totally reasonable.
*not 100% sure on this.
I really appreciate the insight here. Personally I think that I am genuinely good with how things are, but people sometimes express mild concern about my lifestyle, in a "you really should get that mole checked out" kind of way.
To your point about culture, I do think part of it might be that society sees Internet activity as not really being "real" social interaction, even though hanging out on a forum is probably filling the same psychological need that hanging out at a pub would've done.
Absolutely, any para-social or other unconventional socialization is still socialization. Assessments aren't really updated to reflect this (well, for the most part).
If you are the kind of person who is posting here you may appreciate and benefit from interrogating your own personality in an organized way - maybe figure out why you are this way, maybe to see if it's what you truly want. If that's the case...chase the thread.
Not doing so is perfectly cromulent however, especially because learning about yourself can be an info hazard that can't be put back in the bottle.
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