Hi, I'm Al. I'm 28, and trying to do something productive with my Mechanical Engineering degree. This blog is essentially a collection of things I like, occasionally interrupted by my thoughts and experiences. Check out my comics here!
Gonna being your post to the ts fandom I hope you have a horrible day!
(Not really i just am very autistic and consider this white woman to be my special interest. I realize she's not everyone's thing but she'll never see those posts but the people who actively enjoy her and do so to cope with trauma will. So like. What's the harm in liking popular white lady lol)
I hope you have a lovely evening and you see something pretty
This is fucking embarrassing ‘journalism’ from the BBC.
Guy goes to an NHS doctor, flat-out states the nature of his investigation and gets behind the scenes information on assessments.
Then he hits up three private clinics actively looking for an ADHD diagnosis, has his friends fill out witness forms, and is shocked when he receives a diagnosis.
An utter disgrace.
Turns out, if you go and lie about your symptoms, they’ll diagnose you.
Consider me fucking shocked.
thank you, random white man, for this insight on the condition known to be underdiagnosed in women and people of color
I’m not sure what the point of this was. Like, the article doesn’t really even touch on what his methodology was—it doesn’t actually state whether he was filling out the forms honestly, and knowing how an evaluation works and going into the evaluation with the goal of “demonstrating” something about an evaluation infuses inherent bias into everything
this is just yet another thing that serves to create paranoia about people getting prescribed stimulant meds. Something that, in the USA, is difficult to the point that it blocks people from obtaining the care that they need all the time, and i know in many other countries it’s even harder
Like, why did he feel the need to do this to begin with. I’m sure that if he went to several different doctors trying to get a diagnosis of chronic constipation, he would get one, because listening to a patient when they bring a concern up to you is Your Job as a doctor
@headspace-hotel uk person checking in! when you go public for an adhd assessment, waiting lists are YEARS long with often no indication of when you’ll finally be seen. thus, many people – who are desperate for care – will pay money (which you don’t have to do for public healthcare) to go private.
so basically it’s stigmatising people who were so desperate that they were willing to find £1,000 to get help.
So this asshole was actively taking precious opportunities and resources away from people who need them?
Is your conclusion “he tried to prove that private clinics are bad, something something, less people will be able to go to private clinics for these resources as a result” or “he took 3 diagnoses in private clinics which could have been 3 other people’s diagnoses and resources”?
He seems to have bypassed the atrociously long waiting list for the NHS appointment - which he biased anyway by disclosing his investigation to the NHS doctor.
He then fabricated symptoms to three private clinics which require two other people to validate his symptoms - all in a bid to frame them as predatory.
This could have been an investigation into underfunding of the NHS and absurd waiting lines forcing people to use private clinics. Instead the story became ‘ADHD is a fun trend and you can just pay to get a diagnosis’.
It’s malicious journalism that casts doubt in the public’s mind. Some people are now not going to believe other people’s ADHD diagnosis on the back of it.
we also want to challenge his assumption that private clinics apparently taking less time to diagnose obvious adhd is a reflection on their lack of diligence - it’s much more a reflection on how much more gatekeepy the nhs is encouraged to be, especially when it’s about “invisible” or mental health or neurodivergent conditions (we had 11 hours of meetings before getting diagnosed autistic by the nhs at 55 - a diagnosis six different other autistic people had spotted right away)
you see this with gender care too, nhs gender care (assuming you ever make it to the top of a six year waiting list) is like “yes come and see us for a year before we’ll consider hrt for you - but not if you’re fat or have mental health conditions because fuck you” while private clinics are like “yes we confirm that you are trans, why on earth would we make you wait?”
Yeah, I wonder if the NHS considers the entire time from the start of assessment. Their ‘thorough assessment’ is someone else’s frequent misdiagnosis and the doctor even not believing them at face value.
I have a story that’s topical; I’ve told it before on tumblr, but it’s topical to this and thus worth repeating.
Back around 2005, I ran into a Baptist missionary who spotted my kippah and basically took that as permission to attempt to missionize at me.
I defended myself, using the basics of the knowledge I have of Christian theology and texts that I learned specifically to fend off missionaries.
We went back and forth and back and forth, and he wouldn’t leave me alone for… oh, probably the better part of an hour.
And then…
Then this part is seared into my memory. I have nightmares about it.
He smiled at me and said that, with my knowledge of the Gospels, I am sure to be one of the Elect when the time comes.
I asked what the hell that meant.
And he told me. He told me in a tone of utmost sincerity–even envy, because to his belief system, it was a good and enviable thing…
Because to be one of the “Elect” is to be one of the 144,000 Jews who accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior at the Apocalypse. This will happen when all of the Children of Israel have been Gathered in the Land of Israel; war will break out, the Assembled Jews will have the Gospels preached to us, and 144,000 Thousand–Twelve Tribes times Twelve Apostles times One Thousand–Jews will spontaneously convert to Christianity.
Once that occurs, all of the Jews die in the Apocalypse, but the Elect ascend to Heaven to be Jesus Christ’s personal escorts down to Earth for his Second Coming (the rest of the Jews go to hell for eternity, in case you’re wondering).
In short…
He told me that I existed to be a human blood sacrifice to bring back his god. I was not a person to him. I was nothing more than a means to that end.
And he was jealous. Jealous of the fact that he viewed my knowledge of his religion, something that I had learned specifically to fend him and his kind off, as proof that his religion was right and correct and inevitable. That in learning it, I had made myself more valuable to his worldview.
Jealous that, because I was more valuable, because I existed to die for his god, I would meet that god before him.
It was terrifying, to be told that I was to die… and he thought that it was a good thing.
This is how Evangelicals view death. Not as something to be avoided, but something to seek, something that is a positive, and not just for themselves… but for everybody.
They are the closest thing to a full-fledged Religion of Evil on the planet, and I say that without hyperbole.
When you guys say the US is being controlled by a death cult, you werent kidding!
It’s also worth noting that a significant number of premillenial dispensationalists (aka people who believe in the rapture - actually a pretty small minority of christians found almost exclusively in the USA) not only think the end of the world is good, they think they can rules lawyer their way into making it happen.
when I was a little kid I used to build nests out of sticks and leave them in trees, because I thought we’d get more birds that way. If I created the conditions in which I knew birds to exist, that would cause birds to appear. That is how a lot of evangelicals think armageddon works.
they’re surprisingly pro-israel, even by american standards in general, which seems off given how virulently anti-semitic they all are. until you remember that they think the twelve tribes gathering in israel is one of the conditions for triggering the end times. they don’t just hate palestinians because they’re islamophobic, they literally think them living in jerusalem is stopping jesus from coming back. (This is also how they justify the fact that most of them want all jews removed from america - they want to send them back to their ancestral homeland *cough*to be a human sacrifice for jesus*cough* so how could you ever think they’re antisemitic?!)
this also creates their extremely weird attitudes to the UN, which most of them think will be responsible for the antichrist (the apocalype of john says he will unite all nations - and never mind that we know who he was and he’s been dead nearly 2000 years now, and uniting all nations meant bringing them under the rule of the roman empire, which provably didn’t happen), which they want to happen because it’s a precursor to Jesus, but also don’t want to happen because wanting it would mean supporting satan and if they do that then they won’t be part of the group who get saved during the rapture.
(Also satan is definitely real guys, he’s really really real and 100% in the bible and not primarily a product of medieval pop-culture at all!)
and hand in hand with the ‘we can make the world end’ thing comes the belief that this is going to happen soon, any day now, so why worry about stuff like depleting resources or climate change or loss of species, because it’s all going to be destroyed within 1 generation maximum, probably next year, so who cares?
oh, and don’t forget that america is overwhealmingly calvinist, voted mainstream protestant theology most likely to fuck up your brain 471 years running! Basically Calvinism is founded on the idea that God knows in advance who’s going to be saved, and most people are actually on earth not to excercise their free will to attain grace, but just to suffer, because they were born inherently bad and god knows it and is basically fucking with them. You can never become one of God’s elect, you can only prove that you already were. On an individual level this is bad, but not that much worse than other christian denominations, you prove you’re one of gods elect by doing good christian things like prayer and charity, if you sin you might go to hell. It encourages more pettiness and rules-lawyering when considering sins, but overall, pretty standard stuff.
Where it gets really fucked, and the reason why John Calvin is number 2 on my list of Christian theologians to punch in the face if there turns out to be an afterlife (right after augustine of hippo), is that it encourages you to think of everyone who isn’t you as either good or inherently evil with hope of redemption. and since everyone wants to think they’re a good person, the criteria for inherently evil with no hope of redemption basically becomes ‘not like me’, or at least ‘not like the ideal my religious community holds up as an example’.
I would posit this is also why they evangelise in the way they do - they’re not actually trying to “save” anyone else, they’re trying to prove to their community that they’ve already been saved
so yeah, they don’t just look forward to death, they’re literally trying to end the world, and fuck everyone else, because anyone who isn’t exactly like them was born evil and can never actually be saved. and these people are in government in the most powerful nation on earth.
Horray!
No for real tho, evangelical shit fucks a kid up. While I was TERRIFIED of a shooter coming to my school after the Columbine shooting in ‘99 (I was 13), I also was ground zero for all the propaganda about Cassie Bernall.
For context, Cassie Bernall was a student at Columbine who purportedly was accosted by one of the shooters, asked if she believed in god, and was fatally shot when she said yes. (ftr this has since been found to be untrue - the exchange was overheard by a student who misidentified Valeen Schnurr, who survived the shooting, as Bernall, but the myth had spread super far by the time this fact was known and it’s a whole thing.)
Cassie’s mother wrote a book about Cassie and her faith in god and her martyrdom called “She Said Yes”, and someone bought it for me (probably a parent? I have no idea) and I devoured it. I wanted to live a life like Cassie’s, and Rachel Scott’s (another Christian student who was killed), and if that meant being a martyr then I would surely be brave at the moment of truth and face my death bravely.
Because yeah, they called these girls martyrs. These children who were senselessly murdered, had their memories used by their own families as essentially martyrdom inspiration porn. And let me tell you, a LOT of evangelical kids my age bought into it, at least for a while. Like please try to imagine being thirteen years old and actively hoping that you would get a chance to be murdered for your god.
Like, yeah a little bit of that was probably the slowly growing depression but mostly it was just… I was taught that was one of the best ways I could serve god, was by being an example and refusing to deny him even in the face of death. Because people would be moved by my testimony and feel the holy spirit and come to god or w/e.
I literally cannot explain what it was like to be that kid to someone who didn’t live through that too. There are no words. Evangelical premillenial dispensationalist Christianity is a death cult, and it is terrifying.
parents are so crazy because they can say the most fucked up shit to you when your brain is forming and it sets the tone for your whole adult mind set and then they forget about it the next day
The town of Hay River and the Kátł'odeeche First Nation (KFN) in Canada’s Northwest Territories are under evacuation due to an out-of-control wildfire that began on Sunday (May 14, 2023) and has already destroyed homes.
Tempted to think of this merely as another stage of “What Fresh Hell Is This.”
The glass cliff, on the other hand, refers to the phenomenon by which women are more likely to be appointed to senior executive positions during times of organizational crisis, making them less likely to succeed. These newly appointed executives may confront internal board resistance, operate with less time flexibility, and ultimately receive shorter tenure than their male counterparts. And, when a woman CEO is terminated from her position, she is more likely than not to be replaced by a male (the “savior effect”).