#anyway the ADHD meds are never kicking in because we live in a society!!

[iteh3xael]

@dukeofankh Hey! Queer “man” here (I’m NB but still largely pass and I like dick so… yeah?)

I have literally been the “intersectional YT man” at a private yet not PWI ~business~ (American education system is corrupt at FUCK) and discovered that, at the root of it, it’s about comfortability through palatable identity politics and

If your vision for the deradicalization of right-wing men begins and ends with "other men telling them that that's gross and to stop it" then I'm sorry, you do not understand how masculinity works.

"Men who hold patriarchal status" and "men who are feminists" are two groups who overlap less than you want them to. I'm sorry. That's not solely because men are so happy with patriarchal status that they don't want to risk it by policing misogyny/queerphobia/racism, It's because being misogynistic, queerphobic, and racist, end expressing other forms of toxic masculinity(and often abusively so) are part of how people establish and maintain patriarchal status. The men who have the ability to stop this via nothing but peer pressure are the very people who are doing it. That's by design. And engaging in feminist intervention is, in and of itself, usually the abrupt end of that status and its associated power to persuade misogynistic men.

Like, I have worked in blue collar jobs as a notably queer person. It was pretty much a constant deluge of verbal abuse. In my experience, most blue collar work environments are exploitative, abusive, and bigoted, and very gleefully so. On the occasions I have spoken up about someone saying something that was super fucking out of line (asking me which of the girls walking by was hottest. We were installing a portable classroom at a middle school), believe it or not, they completely failed to be shamed! Because nobody else on the crew gave a fuck. *I* was the weird one. They ghosted me. A full blown company ghosted me. I suddenly didn't have a job anymore because they just straightforwardly stopped telling me where the next job site was.

Like, this doesn't mean that it's your job to do it, but this vision you have of these big groups of men where everyone is on the fence and there is precisely one shit stirrer who can be shut down by a brave feminist man who can single handedly set the example for all these other guys...you are high. You are describing an "everybody clapped" level absurd scenario. Most of these truly virulent misogynistic guys either have zero friends, because, you know, our society is atomized to fuck, or they are in a group where the feminist guy is actually the weirdo who can be shut down and ostracized much, much easier than the misogynists, because there is no such thing as a man misogynists respect who stands up for women.

You might be saying "well, we're talking about longstanding personal relationships, actually. Like, they need to have to want to spend time with you and then, as a side effect, you can mind control them out of being a threat to us."

Problem with that being:

1: Many feminist men also have no friends, see the atomized society above.

2: Feminist men already stopped hanging out with men who make rape jokes because why the fuck would we want to spend time with them.

3: That isn't just because we respect women so hard. We are in many cases talking about men who are also deeply queerphobic, heirarchical, violent and abusive to other men. What initially drew me to feminism and women was a lack of heirarchical squabbling and constant bullying, and the ability to be openly queer. A lot of men who came to feminism did so because they knew that the patriarchy was not a place they would find success or acceptance. These are not the men who are gonna be able to change right wing minds.

4. Men do not view themselves as a monolith. There is no universal brotherhood of men. The actual meaning of the term "Fragile masculinity" is that men are constantly expected to prove that they are deserving of the status of being a member of their own gender. There are large swathes of men--including most of the men who you'd look to as examples of good, feminist men who you want to undertake this project--who are considered failed men, sissies, f****ts, soyboys, ect. They are. Not. Going. To. Convince. These. Men. Of. Jack. Shit. Much less successfully *shame* them. Jesus.

I know all of this sucks. I know it would be cool to be able to just point at a group and have them be responsible for the work. But nah. It's gonna have to be a societal project, one that will probably outlast all of us. Sorry. The thing you want these men to do is, absolutely, the morally correct thing to do. But presuming that it would be effective is, and once again I am so sorry about this, just ignorance of how these social groups function.

[motherfuckerunleashed]

I wasn’t gonna participate in No Nuance November but I just had a hot take: Can we stop “justifying” mental illnesses by dreaming up their “evolutionary benefits” during prehistory? This is a long one, so TL;DR it feels really invalidating for me, who has ADHD and other disorders. Sorry for the essay.

I’m seeing this a lot for ADHD, like saying our different circadian rhythm would be good for guarding encampments during the night or our different attention span would be good for spotting dangers.

But we know that society today brings out ADHD symptoms in ways that they never would have appeared 200+ years ago — late stage capitalism is a prison for a lot of illnesses, and prior to this era, we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to study them under such scrutiny. Putting people with mental illnesses in extremely stressful environments creates adaptations (ie symptoms) that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. (This is what I think, anyway; I’m not a doctor, just very mentally ill.)

Don’t get me wrong — I am SO happy that I’m seeing more ADHD awareness and acceptance in my social media! More of my friends are getting diagnosed and seeking help because of it! Overcoming stigmas and stereotypes is so important! Maybe these kinds of interpretations are inspiring to some. Maybe they’re geared towards people who still have negative views of this disorder, and it helps frame it in a positive light.

But... Something about this feels bad to me. ADHD (and BPD) have caused me a lot of struggling and suffering since I was very young, and dubbing my symptoms as “superpowers” — symptoms that made living very difficult and painful — seems fake. It tells me that my disorder serves a purpose. And what about other disorders? Does my depression have a benefit that I’m not using correctly? Or my BPD? I think highlighting ADHD as an underrated evolutionary strength is invalidating to people who have other incapacitating mental illnesses. Humans are born with defects, deficiencies, tendencies, and genetic strengths & weaknesses and that’s OKAY. There doesn’t have to be a purpose.

We’re essentially setting ourselves apart and saying, “We’re built different.” I’ve seen the words, “ADHD isn’t actually a disorder,” which implies, “I’m not REALLY mental ill like you guys.” Something in that is elitist and ableist. I don’t know enough about medicine, so maybe this is out of line...but maybe a lot of disorders aren’t “actually” disorders, and they’re entirely appropriate behaviours outside of late-stage capitalism. But how we diagnose and treat them today makes them disorders. It doesn’t matter how it “could be” in a different place and a different time — it matters how it affects us here and now.

It gives me “everything happens for a reason” vibes, like I was designed to fail from birth because I’m not a hunter-gatherer anymore. It also gives me “I’m an empath” vibes — the “evolutionary benefits” of ADHD are purely speculation without concrete, scientific proof.

I don’t know if this makes a whole of lot sense — my meds are kicking in — but I hope that someone can read this and put it into better words. Maybe this whole trend is just a fun, creative exercise to put a positive spin on symptoms that I’ve taken way out of context, but I think lots of people are taking it seriously, so I wanted to make a serious post.

[altheterrible]

I can't believe I'm writing this.

I've been suspended from work pending an investigation. They are 100% going to fire me. There's a very real chance I'm going to jail. And it's because I am TOO compassionate and I couldn't let people go without needed medications.

They are saying I stole a bottle of 90 generic adderall 20mg tablets for personal use (ingesting or selling). They believe this because I used the cash register to change the price of the meds from $60 to $0. They have me on camera putting the bottle in my bag.

I know this looks bad. But here is the story as it actually happened.

This kid came through drive thru to drop off a prescription for adderall at about 8:50. I figured he'd just come back tomorrow because we were closing in 10 minutes, but he begged me to let him pick up that night. This set of red flags, so I asked why he needed it.

And kid course it was a fucking tragedy. He was 19 years old per his profile. His parents had kicked him out at 10 because they were stuck off watching him fail at integrating in to society, so he'd been couch surfing. He'd been on Medicaid, so that head gotten cut off at 18 and he had no health insurance. He'd tried various jobs but his ADHD always fucked it up for him. He'd gotten a loan from a buddy so he could afford to see a doctor, and that doctor understood this patient was basically going to disappear from the medical system so a follow up appointment wasn't going to happen. He prescribed adderall on the spot. Sounds shady, but I know this doctor and he's totally legit.

There is one kind of patient I am guaranteed to lock onto forever, and those are kids with no help who are attempting to manage their health anyway. That's exactly what my very early adult life was like. 18, diabetic, no insurance, literally dying as I'm trying to find work. I will not let another kid go through that if I can help it.

I sighed and said, "I'm going to be here until 10. Be back then. I don't want you on camera picking up stuff at ten, so I'll bring it to you in the parking lot." He agreed.

So I took his script. I filled it. I rang it up, and changed the price to 0. I tucked it my bag. I left.

This is the main incident they're investigating, but they said they were going to look into every transaction I made, and any that had price changes, even if the price wasn't 0, they were going to consider stealing.

I've done several price changes for patients who were desperate. People who recently loss their insurance, people who could never even dream of having insurance. Because I could not turn them away. These people had already been fucked over my doctors and dentists and therapists. They'd been fucked over by pharmacies before. The way they approached me was like they were waiting for the humiliation.

I have lived that life. I've been looked down on for being on the assistance program, I've been prescribed medication I needed but could never afford, I had a dentist tell me that fixing my teeth would be $10,000 without insurance and no, they don't ever give reduced rates.

I cannot make a person feel like that. So I'd do what was in my power to do. I knew it was against company policy but I thought I'd get a written correction at worst. Not arrested.

I can't even really talk about the actual meeting. It was fucking traumatic. There was a cop. He read me my miranda rights. I literally couldn't breathe with my one functional lung.

So, yeah. I'm possibly going to jail because I'm too compassionate, basically. Robbing from the rich and giving it to the poor. It never occurred to me to consider it stealing, btw. There were valid patients with valid prescriptions who paid the price that the person in charge of the pharmacy asked. The problem is that I defied the insurance companies and I defied the corporation and now I'm gonna get fucked.

That's life I guess.