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 -
Is "schizoid personality disorder" a real thing that the medical industry can help me with? I did some psychometric testing a while ago and was told I might have that -- I suspect primarily based on some questionnaire responses where I indicated that I was content with not really having any friends or engaging in any social activities. (I still mostly feel that way, but it's a bit of a panic whenever I need to scrounge up an emergency contact or a personal reference for something, and I sometimes wonder if it's like one of those Mr. Beast videos where a guy sees color for the first time and can finally appreciate the full richness and beauty of human existence.)
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.
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