throwaway078315

I also personally know the waste, stupidity, and cruelty of these situations. But I’ve come to the conclusion that the voters know what they want, and preventing these terrible outcomes is not worth the cost to them.

If you take the average person who doesn’t have a mental illness and has no relationship with anyone who does, the system we have is pretty well optimized for their needs.

We balance many difficult and inherently conflicting goals, such as:

1) minimizing treatment, which is expensive and does have bad side effects

2) sufficiently good access to treatment where it’s economical for prevention

3) fear of being wrongly hospitalized (error, political motivation, etc.)

4) sufficient ability to lock other people up for frightening or violent behavior in public

It’s a tough problem, but I think the tradeoffs are managed near optimally, granting that the rights and interests of the mentally ill don’t matter at all to most public officials or voters.

i keep up exercise for health reasons and because i do have a higher energy level if i'm in better shape.

however, both during and for two or three hours after exercising, the emotional effect is very negative. i feel much more anxious, prone to negative thoughts, self-critical, pessimistic, sometimes angry.

the benefits are definitely real but I feel like I am paying a very large cost to get them. i've tried lots of different forms of exercise and they all have this effect if i push to a reasonable level of intensity.

i'm wondering if anyone else has had this experience and managed to find a place where exercising makes them feel happy.