brookside

As somebody who also takes legally prescribed Adderall myself (begrudgingly...I've been on a years-long hunt for practical counseling/coaching help w/ focus), I think it's important not to kid ourselves - we are consuming amphetamines. Uppers. Speed. Greenies. Apart from the assurance of purity, the drug isn't magically safe or without other pleasurable/terrible effects because prescribed by a doctor.

Also would like to add: the "brain biochemical deficiency" theory has been called into question for ADD (and other mental health diagnoses).

http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/11/02/chemical-imbalance-i...

Because making things like his post is how you great university.

This isn't a large technological feat, but the curiosity and writing ability on display would certainly have me ticking the [yes] box were I in admissions. (Though I am not.)

(Seems ripe for a Augmented Reality / Pokemon Go integration.)

You may not care for negotiation, but that doesn't mean it is dishonest. Items and services don't have a "real" price, they are only worth what people will pay for them.

There is a real chance of Donald Trump or similar taking power in the white house. "Mature" or not, every democracy is a despot away from crumbling.

HOWEVER, I would argue that your humblebrag about the age of your cars, right after your friend talks proudly about his new Porsches, is the far more odious of the two boasts.

Conspicuous asceticism carries with it projected moral superiority, and it seems clear you are opening judging your friend's buying choices as inferior. It's his money, and his happiness. And I notice you can't help but add a final coda/dig that you are much richer than your friend.

I'm only sensitive to the pitfalls of your mentality because I was raised to handle money in the same way as you, and have to fight the urge to be obnoxiously gleeful about, for example, my low housing costs when conversations about rent come around.

  class="they-say-its-never-too-late-to-change"

We (of course) need better drugs. Or other forms of real treatment.

We wouldn't send somebody with an equally real disease like cancer to go talk about about how they are suffering and expect this talking to help the actual, biologically based, condition. Sure, they might feel better having somebody listen. But that isn't going to cure them, or help them not die.

Because Schizophrenia is ostensibly a "mental health" disorder its easy for us to fall into a treating it with with some variant of a the freudian model, which may or may not work for overcoming childhood trauma, but is a completely inappropriate tool for combatting an (still little understood) biological condition.

What, in the physical world, causes this disease? The fungus, gene, or environmental factor - this is what we can hopefully one day discover.

Could the resources devoted to this study have been better used to explore what is creating the problem?

The problem is that i've found therapy to be of little practical value, and its rituals often absurd. My hope is that as much good science as possible is introduced to this shadowy freudian realm.

20% more effective with other treatments.

Not what the article says. (It is most unclearly worded.) You have a 20% greater chance of improvement with therapy above talking to a doctor (Note there no pharmaceutical course of action mentioned) not "with other treatment".

My comparison of therapy to untrained listeners is not drawn from the article. There have been several studies done on this. Link to the one of first on google:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.469...

The most generous interpretation of figures in this article is that NNTT for depression and therapy is 5. Meaning one out of every five people treated by therapy will show some improvement due to effects of therapy itself.

We can certainly call this effective in that there is an effect for some people who try therapy. But not for 80% of them.

Therapy is a 10 billion dollar/year industry in the United States, with its practitioners often charging desperately unhappy people high rates (beyond what most of us lucky software devs make), with no advantage to show for their various methodologies beyond what one gets from talking to an untrained stranger.

Financially successful yet largely bogus businesses and industries are never going to put themselves out of business and have little impetus to change the status quo.

Awareness of the current poor options for mental health treatment is important. However uncomfortable or against an established narrative of "help is out there' it is to address these realities, it will be easier to marshall efforts to finding real mental health solutions if we aren't pretending the current paradigms are working when the numbers show otherwise.

That effect, however, happens to be about equivalent to placebo.