Suicide rates are absolutely going to continue to climb in the USA as long as our concept of “Mental Health” remains separated from material conditions.
Antidepressants can’t cure poverty and alienation. They can’t cure the crushing pressure that comes with watching climate changing in real time, but feeling powerless because the government is too corrupt to care. They can’t cure the many chronic physical health conditions people go without treatment for because the US physical health system is bullshit.
Always turning toward psychiatry for an answer is a perfect example of American style individualism killing people, because the problem is always said to exist in the individual’s brain chemicals, and society is always innocent.
As the famous quote goes “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.“
This post has gained a lot of traction outside of tumblr due to being reposted by several facebook groups. A large number of people subsequently read this as a criticism of all therapy or medicine within the mental health field.
I want to just state very clearly – that my criticism here is very explicitly about using psychiatry as a bandage for physical health, socio-economic stress, environmental alienation, and other fundamentally non-psychiatric problems.
I’m not saying “Joe who suffers from chronic depression, actually just needs to get some fresh air.”
What I am saying is “Felix the pain management doctor who refuses to give medicine to patients with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, but will instead send them to psychiatry with the accusation that their pain is imaginary or caused by depression or trauma (Despite literally dislocating their bones on a daily basis) is a complete asshole.”
Or even… “Julia the trans woman who ended up on the street after being disowned by family and friends, should not have her oppressors actions ignored in favour of a narrative in which her suffering is exclusively the result of abnormal brain chemicals or genetics. That we should recognize that suffering is a normal and healthy response to social isolation, and that holding bigotry accountable and building real support networks needs to fucking happen for society to grow.”
Describing screenshots, twitter threads, etc, that contain a lot of text can be one of the most time-consuming kinds of descriptions to write. But luckily there are lots of programs that will do this for you! By all means, these are not the only tools out there. They’re just two that I personally use.
[image description note: all images are screenshots of what’s being described in the text.]
On a computer
Online OCR is a great free site to convert images into plain text. You need to save the image onto your computer, and then choose the language you want and the output method. I recommend selecting “Text Plain”, then click “Convert” and you’re done!
The text will generate below the toolbar, and there you have it.
The tweet that I used for this example was by Janet Mock. As you can see, you’ll likely need to do a little bit of editing to the text that generates. For example, the generated text in this case was:
F Tweet
Janet Mock 0 @janetmock q N., Sex work is work. We must be free to make choices about our bodies, our lives. We must respect one another’s agency. Period. 430 PM 17 Jan 17 102 RETWEETS 234 LIKES 41 Any 11 p
But fixing it up is easy enough to do, and worth it for super long blocks of text.
On a smart phone
There are several different apps you can use for this, but my favorite one is the Google Translate app. Again, you’ll need to save the photo onto your device beforehand.
This is what the app looks like when you open it. You’ll want to click on the camera icon, as indicated in red.
Next you’ll want to click on the photo icon, as indicated, and select the screenshot you want to generate text for.
You can then manually highlight the text, or click “Select All” to automatically select all the text that the app recognizes. The text will populate in the bar marked with a star, which you can then copy and paste. (It’ll also generate in whatever language you selected, which is fun, but you can ignore that part!)
So then this image…
easily becomes “abolish ice abolish prisons abolish police abolish borders” in plain text. Obviously for such a short amount of text, it may be easier to type it out. And again, you’ll likely need to do a bit of editing to format the text correctly. But it’s super useful for long tweets and screenshots of tumblr posts.
So there you have it! Go forth and describe those screenshots like a champion.
Time blindness is the weirdest aspect of executive dysfunction and so weird as an experience to live with.
It’s like you see the clock, the clock says 3pm, you look at the clock again and it’s 3:02, then 3:05, and then you look again and it’s 8pm and WHAT THE FUCK.
You don’t even need hyperfocus. But hyperfocus is like the Warp Speed:tm: version cause when that hits, it’s 3pm and then it’s the next day and why is the sun rising and when did i last eat and oh god i need to use the bathroom. And oh, also, you’re EXHAUSTED. The act of your brain tunnel visioning on something drains you (but that’s another topic).
Time blindness is…. having the general knowledge that today is Wednesday, and you need to do something on Thursday. Thursday is logically tomorrow, but the mysterious void of time is like ‘that’s like next week or something.’
It’s knowing you have to do something in three weeks on the 21st. And as the days creep closer, the 21st is stuck in a constant state of still being 3 weeks away, despite the fact it’s now tomorrow.
It’s wild. ADHD is literally living in a constant state of “There is Now. And there is Later.” and there’s no in between; no dates, no times; no hours, weeks, or months. It’s just Now and Later, and oh god why is is X o’clock already!?
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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