#can't be having the time to jump through the health service's hoops either

[ssaalexblake]

tfw somebody who insults you and then calls you a liar (erroneously. Have not lied. But since I haven’t Somebody would have to admit they were wrong about something and i think they have a fatal allergy to that???) and tells you not to talk to them texts u 6 hours later asking where you bought something. 

[tewz]

I think it's such a shame that no one can get mental help in Upper Michigan, USA. I had to take "getting help" into my own hands and read into psychiatry/different therapies and teach myself how to be less depressed/anxious on my own because my survival instinct kicked in and I can't just go without help. I literally had to help myself as a last resort. It was really difficult but I somehow pulled through. I'm still not able to function like a proper adult (can't work or drive), but I'm no longer s**c*dal and planning my own death like I did between the ages of 14-28. My 30's have actually been great so far. I have a lot less episodes and they are shorter and less intense. I haven't self-harmed in about 5 years or so too. Some people can't conquer such a thing though, and I am really concerned for several of my friends. You wouldn't believe the amount of people who live in my area who come to me crying about how they can't take it anymore. A couple of them jumped through hoops to get online therapy (tele-health, but it's very pricey and inconvenient). It's pretty much all of my friends at this point. Like my advice and compassion can only do so much and it doesn't ever seem to help them. It's become a little tiring in a way.

Same with getting a dentist with cheap insurance. The greedy conservatives (which is 2/3 of the population here) won't allow it. We all have to travel downstate or to Wisconsin to get basic work done (it takes 3.5 hours of driving to get downstate and 2.5 hours to get anywhere good in Wisconsin + no one drives or can afford cars anymore so we're all doomed). I'm gonna have to start getting to the abscess stage again to have to energy/drive to seek another dentist willing to help and that is not fair. I shouldn't have to look like I do hard drugs just because no one will fix my teeth + depression never helped with that equation either.

Everyone's life up here is a disaster. I live in a corner of the world that is sickeningly resource-less. The nearest psychiatric hospital is 1.5 hours away and doesn't usually accept people unless they've committed a crime or something drastic. The 2nd closest one is a double drive down to Wisconsin, unless you have Michigan-only insurance, then you're driving 6 hours downstate.

Another thing that drives me up the wall is the lack of basic ANYTHING. My friend from New York wants to come visit, but there's little to no AirBnB's up here unless you find a cabin in the woods with no phone/internet service, T-Mobile doesn't reach up here, no Uber drivers of any kind (2 expensive taxi companies that are overbooked all the time is the only way to get anywhere), no basic stores to find anything you're looking for so we all have to order stuff off the internet, no records stores in the entire U.P. except for a couple run-down multi-media stores that have maybe a bin or two of 60's country and Christmas music on vinyl, etc, etc. Also, my town has always been living about 10-15 years in the past. You can't find online reviews or even websites for most stores because the boomers and bootlicking assholes around here don't know what the fuck computers are. And if there's a fashion trend that I find on the internet (like crop tops of example), they won't hit our stores until 5 years later when the trend slows down. The end. Rant over. I don't wanna upset myself but like... lol...

[zombiesinflannels]

Also like. At least half of those things cost a crapload of money and resources that people in poverty--much less homeless people--can not reasonably hope to ever afford without access to those resources. They're catch-22s. You can't even afford to take out a loan for educational services--be it college, trade school, or certification courses--if you don't have a proven history of excellent credit. You can't get most jobs that pay a livable wage for an adult individual without access to education and housing at the very least, and you can't sustainably work a manual labor job without access to good food (meat, vegetables, fruit) and healthcare. Even half-decent mental health and addiction recovery resources cost craploads of money that, without health insurance, will at best put you in deep medical debt for years, if not the rest of your life, unless you can get a job that pays well above a livable wage... which you can't do unless you can pass a drug test, wear nice clothes and have washed hair for an interview, and have some form of higher education/certification history to your name. Oh, and they also probably won't hire you if you have an extensive employment history and/or a college degree but a resume gap of over 6 months, so if it takes that long for you to recover from addiction or mental health problems in an inpatient facility, you're still SOL.

And the ones that AREN'T built exclusively of catch-22 loops? Either still require you to consistently jump through insane amounts of hoops to apply and qualify for, or require you to align yourself with their religious beliefs, or can be cancelled at any time due to new laws or budget cuts or new management who have decided that your sexual orientation disqualifies you from deserving a safe space in which to sleep. Which, of course, means that they are neither accessible/consistently available nor reliable.

[lazyscience]

Another tangential point re: "doctors who prescribe birth control for period pain without diagnosing the root cause should lose their licenses" - most people have NO idea how much medical insurance dictates what procedures your doctor can and can't offer for diagnosis and treatment in the US unless they're either chronically ill or involved in the healthcare industry.

On bullshit medical dramas like House, MD or whatnot, doctors blithely order zillions of tests but in practice, this is limited by both insurance guidelines and institutional capacity for testing. How it actually works is "you must first try X "cheapest option" and the patient has to not respond to that before you can even ASK to try other things. If they don't follow the insurance company's rubric for "first try X. if X doesn't work, you can try Y. If Y doesn't work, only THEN can you try Z," the patient will wind up having to pay out of pocket for all of it. And if the patient can't pay it, then the doctor will get in trouble with their healthcare system's administrators and accountants and maybe lose their job if they're costing the hospital money (and the doctor does not set the price for how much the healthcare system charges. Not even for their own time)

The rarer a condition is, usually the fewer resources are devoted to testing for it. Healthcare systems and insurance companies basically resource those on a "how often will we have a patient that will need X," not "how often will we have a patient who MIGHT need X?"

I know how (literally) painful, demoralizing and exhausting it is to have a "zebra" condition, wait months apiece for 3-4 specialists to spend 20 minutes and say "have you considered losing weight?" (it'd be a whole fucking lot easier to do that if every joint in my goddamn body didn't hate me) before you finally unlock a (maybe) useful answer. But how much worse would that process be if it cost two, three, TEN times as much on top of it?

The system is broken, especially for the people with rare and/or chronic health conditions. But the people most to blame are insurance companies and healthcare system CEOs for prioritizing profit over people. As powerful as your doctor can be in your care by knowing the system and being willing to jump through hoops and find shortcuts, many of them don't have any more control over what their job will and won't let them do than any poor bastard performing warranty service on your computer or your refrigerator.

so tl;dr the doctor prescribes birth control for period pain because the hospital and insurance say you have to try that and have it not work or they won't pay for anything else, not because they're Evil Perverts Who Want Women to Be Whores Instead of Fertile Vessels.

The post I made about conservatism made a lot of people Big Mad because of me drawing conclusions/assuming about people's ideas and motives outside of their openly stated motives, which, fair—I see this kind of thing being done completely spuriously all the time.

However, "reasoning beyond stated motives" is a necessary skill—it's even necessary to be able to do with yourself, because cognitive dissonance is a bitch.

anyway, reading right-wingers' posts and reading their media and watching the occasional sketchy youtube videos makes me notice interesting patterns in the kinds of things that consistently concern them, but for stated reasons that are inconsistent or seemingly uncontroversial.

One of the biggest ones is birth control.

Right-wingers talk a lot about the negative side effects of birth control, how birth control pills are prescribed instead of diagnosing the "root cause" of illnesses, how they or someone they know were prescribed birth control without a full explanation of the reasons and side effects, how doctors "push" birth control onto young women.

It's very often superficially presented as a concern about how "medical professionals don't listen to women, we need access to all the facts about our bodies, etc..."

But why birth control side effects. Not endometriosis, not fibromyalgia, but specifically the side effects of birth control. I don't see right-wingers constantly discussing concerns about women being dismissed as having anxiety or being "hysterical" when they have medical issues, or fat people being told to "lose weight" when they have a medical issue that may well have nothing to do with weight, or Black women being ignored and abused by medical professionals.

But birth control side effects, and doctors "pushing" birth control—that they will openly discuss and address as a problem.

Hmmmmmmmmm