cowpewter

SSRIs are notoriously NOT safe. In younger people, they often increase suicidal ideation. Even in adults, there is a very dangerous period when you first start taking them where suddenly you have more energy, but you are still massively depressed. People die because before they were so depressed they couldn't even take action to suicide, and the drugs give them just enough of a lift that they can.

Apart from that, there's the massive list of side-effects, many of them extremely common.

Complete loss of libido, erectile dysfunction, or worse, your libido is unchanged but you completely lose the ability to orgasm.

Insomnia, cause that's what a depressed person needs, even less sleep and more time for rumination in bed.

Akathisia, which is an uncontrollable need to move your body, think restless leg syndrome but it's your entire body. You literally cannot sit still.

Less life-destroying but still very obnoxious: increased sweating, dry mouth (which can ruin your teeth if you don't manage it with biotene or gum or something), blurred vision, headaches, the list goes on.

This is without even mentioning the risk of serotonin syndrome yet, which can straight up literally kill you if you don't make it to a hospital. It happens when your serotonin level is too high, and can cause seizures, fever, arrhythmia, or death.

I love this idea, but I think it needs a little work... maybe something that helps it avoid combining foods that are too similar into the same meal?

For breakfast, it keeps suggesting I eat a "high protein omelet" and 4 hard boiled eggs. That's a lot of egg in one meal. I don't want an omelet AND boiled eggs at the same time.

Coating regular gum would probably not work. The nicotine is embedded in the gum base itself. That's why the instructions for using nicotine gum say to chew just long enough for you to feel the tingle that nicotine creates against your oral mucosa, then tuck it between your gum and cheek for 30ish minutes or until the tingling stops. Then you give it another couple chews, just enough to expose more of the nicotine to the surface, and place it between gum and cheek again.

The nicotine is slowly absorbed through the oral mucosa. Coating the gum would give you an initial burst of nicotine, but would not have the sustained drip of nicotine that the traditional nic gum does.

I suppose one could melt down gum base, add a vaping nicotine solution, stir it together, let it set and then cut into pieces... but I would worry about the PG or VG that the nicotine is contained in doing something weird to the gum base. And you would have to be careful to stir it quite thoroughly to prevent nicotine "hot spots" in your gum.

Making a homemade lozenge or mint would be much easier, and I believe some people do, in fact, do just that. It would be similar to making hard candies, only at some point you would mix in the nicotine liquid. Since many of the flavorings used in vape juice were originally designed for use in baking and hard candies (and usually have a PG or sometimes VG base), I'm pretty certain the PG or VG of the nicotine won't screw up the texture of the candy.

It does. A very fun hobby, with lots of cool toys. I already mix my own juice. Originally that was just to save money, but now mixing is its own hobby. What do I feel like this week? My usual apple-flavored juice? Do I want to throw a little cranberry in this week just for fun? Or maybe I'm in the mood for something minty, my wife likes mints so we've always got an array to choose from.

I haven't even gotten into the world of rebuildables or anything like that. I use a basic Smok sub-ohm box (a T-priv), that I'm probably going to upgrade to the latest model in a few months, but I know there's an entire world of vape devices out there I've barely even glimpsed over the horizon, let alone explored. Luckily it's not too hard to talk myself out of fancy new hardware ($$) when my current mod gets the job done.

But flavors? I went and spent around $70 on flavors a couple weeks ago. Sounds crazy, but it's still cheaper than spending $100/month on commercial juices. And now I have a vast array of cool flavors to play with, and design my own recipes from.

Vaping can absolutely become a dangerous hobby.

I mix my own juice. I did the math a few months ago, and I can make 60ml of juice (which lasts me about a week) for about $1.50. Coils usually last me about a month to a month and a half, and I usually pay $5ish a piece. So yeah... my monthly vaping costs are about $11/month at the most.

So, doing the math, as I use 3mg/ml juice, I vape about 720 mg of nicotine a month. If I bought the cheapest Wal-mart generic brand gum, in the 2mg pieces (because to replace my vape, I'd want a low dose per piece), 720 mg of nicotine in gum form would cost $81/month.

That is a huge difference. Even accounting for the fact that my vape device cost me originally $70, it's still cheaper, potentially as soon as the first month, to vape over chewing gum.

Oh geez, yeah, I'm definitely not endorsing self-medicating with nicotine, just saying, that I did, and that if nicotine helps you concentrate, you might wanna get evaluated for ADHD.

I was never a smoker, and I vape the lightest dose nicotine available (3mg/ml). I have definitely developed a light addiction over the years, but I can go all day without needing my vape. The worst my cravings get are a feeling of "Man, vaping would be really nice right now." I even went on a week-long vacation last year, left my vape at home, and didn't even think about the nicotine I was missing until I got home.

But please! Don't take my anecdotal evidence and think it means you should pick up vaping! I know it's not the best for my health, and you may become far more addicted than I am.

Do you have (or suspect you might have, but be undiagnosed) ADHD?

Nicotine is a stimulant. It improves concentration for individuals with ADHD, for much the same reasons that prescription stimulant drugs do. I picked up nicotine gum, and eventually switched to vaping myself, as a form of self-medication for my ADHD. If it really helps you block out distracting noises and sights from a busy office, that might be part of why.

"Dip" is chewing tobacco. You put it between your cheek and gums, and the nicotine is absorbed through your oral mucosa.

Yeah, I make my own juice as well, though I do flavor mine, usually with fruit or mint flavors.

A 60ml bottle of commercial juice easily costs $15-20.

I buy my nic, PG, and VG from Liquid Barn and my flavors from a variety of sources (though mostly through Nicotine River). My materials cost for 60ml of homemade juice is only around $1.53 per bottle (not including the bottle itself, which you can recycle from commercial juice, or you can buy some, which only costs like $1/bottle). That's one hell of a cost savings!

That's made up of approx $0.33 of nicotine base, $0.09 of PG, $0.33 of VG, and $0.78 of flavoring. I buy PG/VG in 1000ml bottles and flavors I use a lot of in 2oz bottles, so I'm saving a bit by buying in bulk, but it still should only cost around $35 for the ingredients to get started in DIY ejuice - the cost of around 2 bottles of commercial juice. Grab yourself 500ml each of PG/VG, 125ml of nic base, and a handful of flavors and you have enough materials for at least 10 60ml bottles of ejuice (and you'll probably have PG, nic, and flavor leftover, the VG is by far the most used ingredient).

When I bought an Instant Pot from Amazon, the first one I got was obviously used (it smelled of food, and some of the accessories were missing). I had to exchange it for an actually new one.

Yes, I coasted through school until college. Never studied, never had to, even in the gifted, honors, and AP classes. I especially did well on tests. Graduated 3rd in my class, only .001 GPA points from 2nd, with a handful of 5s (and a couple 4s) on my AP tests. Had undiagnosed ADHD (inattentive type) the whole time. Always procrastinated heavily, usually wrote papers/did projects the night before they were due. The closest I got to "studying" was re-reading the chapter I was going to be tested on the morning before the test, and even that was only for social studies classes where you had to remember names and dates. I did not need to study at all for math, science, or English courses. I got very lucky with a handful of exceptional teachers in high school. Teachers that actually cared about me and my success. I wanted to do well in school, because I got praised for it - both by my mom and by teachers. I craved that praise like nothing else as a child so I always did just enough to make sure my grades stayed high.

Life fell apart in college. Huge class sizes with no personal connection to the teacher and being solely responsible for meeting deadlines and studying eventually ruined school for me. Your lecturer with over 3000 students doesn't give a shit about you or your performance in school. I lost the immediate feedback and praise that I used to get in grade/high school, and with it, my hyperfocus on doing well in school was gone.

I fell into a deep depression, took a year off, took anti-depressants, tried school again but still just couldn't make myself go to classes anymore. Dropped out. Spent a few years working a dead-end call center tech support job. Wound up getting into software anyway (my failed degree was going to be in CISE) and I do well enough for myself now (especially after getting an ADHD diagnosis and getting medicated for it), but college/young adulthood was a disaster for me. I also had to declare bankruptcy in my mid-twenties - another consequence of depression and undiagnosed ADHD. Impulse purchases and the guilt/shame/avoidance spiral turned my credit into a mess.

Most of my peers actually did far better than me (like, they actually finished their bachelors (some went as far as PhDs) and went on to good jobs in the fields they studied for), but I don't think any of them had ADHD. That was the other thing that kept me focused in high school. I was part of a decently sized group of "smart kids" - we would compete with each other on grades, and that competition helped keep me on track. Lost that in college too.

Basically, yeah, giftedness and ADHD are a terrible combo. With ADHD, you need a lot of structure and work ethic to succeed in life, but if you're smart enough, you don't have to develop any of those skills to excel in grade/high school. Then you hit adulthood and everything falls apart.

It really is! There's so much I couldn't do without her. We both have our own mental and physical health struggles (Me: depression, ADHD, fibromylgia, and T2 diabetes, Her: Sensory Processing Disorder, anxiety, and bipolar 2), and we like to joke that between the two of us, we make up one whole neurotypical person.

When one of us is struggling, the other helps pick up the pieces. When both of us are struggling, we work together to prioritize what actually has to be done (ex: we have to acquire something for dinner tonight, but we can do the dishes tomorrow), and do the necessary things together.

Well, true. I have not disclosed to my job that I was diagnosed with ADHD, and I don't particularly plan to (I wouldn't deny it if it came up, but I'm not going to volunteer the information either). There are more downsides than upsides to disclosure. It's generally recommended to not disclose, especially during the hiring process, unless you truly cannot cope in your job without some sort of ADA accommodation, in which case you must disclose for the ADA to kick in.

Plenty of people with ADHD choose not to take medication though, and I'm having trouble coming up with a situation in which a judge would order you to take it. As long as you're not blaming your ADHD as a reason you broke the law (which you shouldn't, ADHDers may have poor impulse control and bad executive function, but we still need to hold ourselves accountable for our actions), I don't see where it's the law's business if you have it or don't, or medicate it or don't. There are plenty of non-medication coping strategies, including therapy and coaching.

I don't think that you can or should try to armchair-diagnose or armchair-undiagnose someone with from a single blog post. You can't know what the author has struggled with in their life.

Don't consider it an incurable mental illness. It's not a sickness, it's just a genetic variation in how the brain is wired. Having a certain percentage of the population with ADHD was probably an advantage in our evolutionary past. There are a lot of good things that come alongside it, like hyperfocus, greater creative thinking, and an increased ability to multitask. It's only really a big problem in our modern society, that values people's abilities to be super-productive cogs in a machine and values consistent output over anything else (like creative solutions), that ADHD becomes a huge problem.

One of the ways that stimulants treat ADHD is by raising dopamine and norepinephrine levels. Also, one of the big problems with ADHD is time-blindness. Basically, to the ADHD person, there are only two times: Now and Not Now.

Video games are highly stimulating and full of immediate feedback when you do well or poorly. This gives you the dopamine hit that your brain is searching for. And the immediate feedback means that the results of your doing well or poorly are felt right away, instead of in a nebulous future.

So you can focus during the game because you're getting a constant stream of dopamine and you always know how well you're doing. Get to the blog post though and... where'd the dopamine go? If you don't write this blog post right now when will you feel the pain? If it's not for a while, then it's too far away for the ADHD brain to put it into perspective because of the time-blindness. It's one of the reasons ADHDers are famous for procrastinating til the last moment, then suddenly cranking out that paper the night before. Once you finally get that sense of urgency of the impending deadline, you can focus.

After my diagnosis with ADHD, we wondered if my wife might also have it, albeit milder than mine, as she struggled with a lot of the same things I do. She went for the full neuropsych eval, and was actually diagnosed with Sensory Processing Disorder, not ADHD. So I'm not surprised to see some overlap there.

Interestingly, I find that medication does not affect my hyperfocus in a negative way. If anything, it's even easier for me to achieve hyperfocus on a task when my Adderall is "on". I find that what medication helps me most with is the initial hurdle of starting a task. Once I actually get going, I'll usually hyperfocus on it (if it's the type of task I hyperfocus on, which includes programming, but sadly does not include housework). I procrastinate at work far far less when I'm medicated. Without medication, I struggle hard with starting new tasks.

I was just diagnosed about a year ago, at age 38. I'd suspected for years, but was mired too deep in depression to do anything about it. Finally I had my depression under control, and with the help of my wife (I'm terrible at making appointments!), made an appointment to see a psychologist who specialized in ADHD.

He interviewed me about my symptom history for an hour. Pro tip! Make yourself a list of all the things you want to mention to the psych. I wish I had brought a list, because after I left I thought of so many more examples I had wanted to bring up.

Despite my not bringing a list, he said near the end of the hour that if he had to make an immediate diagnosis, then yes, he would say I had ADHD. I took home a test (it was around 350 true/false questions) that he wanted me to take to rule out any other diagnoses that might be an issue.

I took the test and returned to him in a week. We went over the test results (nothing unexpected) and he diagnosed me with moderate ADHD-PI (primarily inattentive). He wrote me a letter to take back to my GP to try medication, and my GP handles my Adderall prescription now.

ADHD is a lifetime condition, and having symptoms since childhood is part of the diagnostic criteria, so when you're making your list, make sure you're including your childhood. I was very smart, and coasted through grade school with excellent grades, but there were still signs even then. Like when in 5th grade I just stopped doing any work for an entire semester. They threatened to hold me back from 6th grade, and I made up all the work in a single afternoon, sitting in the teacher's office while the rest of my class was on a field trip. Or all the times I would get in trouble for "not listening to the teacher" because I was hyperfocused on reading a book and literally was not even aware that I was being spoken to.

Water tanks filled from outside and a composting toilet maybe?

Probably about as legal as setting up office in a street-side parking space...

That makes me wonder what else you could repurpose as an office in places where offices are disproportionally expensive. What about a climate-controlled storage unit? A quick Googling tells me you can get a small (but large enough for a desk) climate controlled storage unit in San Fran for about $100-150/month. That's vastly cheaper than a co-working space. I know you can get storage units with power, they're pretty popular as practice spaces for bands around where I live. You'd need a mobile hotspot for internet, and no windows might be a bit depressing, but for the price...

Yeah, eating less carbs is great for T2s like me (I don't take insulin, I control my blood sugar with a keto diet and metformin).

For T1s, eating less carbs might reduce the amount of insulin they need, and make swings in blood sugar less likely, but they're still going to need some insulin.

I've always loved Gorey's art style, ever since I was introduced to it as a little girl, watching Mystery on PBS with my mom.

Very nice. I had fun with it. Maybe a little description of the goals on the page underneath the play area would be good? Took me a while to realize picking up the red squares was actually reducing my score. I initially thought they were just meant to be more challenging to pick up since they moved.

IIRC, Dreamwidth was forked off LJ after one of LJ's great fandom purges (probably either Strikethrough or Boldthrough). Basically, they cracked down on ton of fandom communities for adult content, and the fandom communities said, fine, we'll just make our own then, and did.

You should go get screened! I just finally got diagnosed at age 38, and it's shed so much insight into my life. Plus, medication can really make a real difference.

Do you have ADHD? I do, and I can drink caffeine and go straight to bed, and it does help a little bit with focus (Adderall helps a lot more, of course).

Stimulants tend to calm the ADHD mind, and can stop racing thoughts that make it harder to sleep.

The salts are to reduce irritation. Plain water is extremely uncomfortable in your sinuses, but saline is fine. As far as I know they do nothing to reduce contaminants in your water or harm bacteria.

Whenever I use a neti pot, I use distilled water and heat it for a brief time in the microwave, adding additional room temp distilled afterward if it comes out too hot.