they’re called hypertension and anxiety bruh just because a drug has benefits doesn’t mean it has no side effects

ADHD protip: commit to only setting up the digital workspace as soon as you get the assignment. Set up a cloud storage folder with google drive or one drive or whatever you use with:

• a copy of the assignment outline
• an empty document in the paper format, complete with title and reference pages
• a folder for reference PDFs or diagrams or quotes or whatever

Not only have I written numerous fabulously scoring assignments on my phone while taking horrifying IBS shits but also–

–one time I set this up for a group project and sent the folder out to the members. A few days later I logged in and one of the other members who also had ADHD had basically completed the entire assignment. Cannot say whether she was shitting while writing it but it’s certainly not impossible. A day after that another group member edited it and it was ready for submission five days ahead of schedule.

The neurochemistry isn’t actually averse to work, you just gotta catch it at the right angle.

Yup. Psychiatric nurse. I think the field needs a lot of advancements and a lot of the tools I have are barbaric but I’m doing the best I can with what I have and trying to contribute to my field by teaching and pushing for advancements.

!DIYMentalHealth@lemmy.dbzer0.com

I’m not done with it but…

(And if you know how to write me a bot that would be the biggest help. Keeping up with the weekly skill post was one of the things that made me give up. If I could automate those I think I could handle interactions with people on them.

is this? (is it just psych?)

Not at all, it originated in medical iirc

System for writing thank you notes to a nurse. They give you a little enamel pin to put on your badge that I’m not comfortable possibly accidentally losing on an acute psych unit so they’re just scattered around my house. Then about every quarter each hospital gives an award to one of the nominees (although usually an employee with better optics than one of the night shift psychiatry goblins). So like, objectively, at least a few of my patients feel cared for. It’s just hard to feel that way sometimes. I’m more protective of the actual written messages than the pins. I have one from a patient I received from the outgoing shift in restraints that I keep in the frame with my license (and it’s not like I let them out right away either, most of what they were happy with was me catching their dystonia but I had the advantage of having had it myself before).

☝️

Yeah 10 total years and a dozen Daisy noms in and I still feel like my foot is constantly in my mouth. You also have to walk this horrible tightrope of remembering this is the worst day of someone’s life then emotionally file it under your 400th Tuesday. The cognitive dissonance of that alone is enough to drive you bonkers.

It doesn’t help that in psych a lot of the time there’s no solution for keeping the person safe that’s not going to horribly traumatize them. I’ve had to do things to people to keep them alive and as unharmed as possible that are still probably gonna feature in their nightmares. I try not to but sometimes they’re already so traumatized that they just won’t be able to see what I’m doing as beneficial. We’ve got people with past sexual assault traumas who are so out of it they don’t realize that urine has been sitting on their skin for days and the acid is dissolving their genitals. They can’t put the steps in order to clean themselves but they also can’t safely accept me touching them to help. The other day I did something as simple as trying to help someone dial the phone and when we finally got through they got it into their head that I’d replaced their loved one on the other end with an imposter.

Some days you just Will Not Win but the fact that human bodies and social interactions have so many uncontrolled variables (and infinitely more when combined) will leave you wondering every time you think about it that maybe there was some right answer you just couldn’t find. Maybe I should have waited longer. Maybe I took too long. Maybe I should’ve played music. Maybe the environment was too loud. Maybe I should’ve been kinder. Maybe I wasn’t straightforward enough. The list just keeps going.

Yeah I feel like it’s one of those things that sounds completely insane unless you’ve been through something similar. A lot of it was learning how to respond to crazy but I did actually learn a few positive behaviors directly from them. You’d be surprised how much please / thank you and sir / ma’am they use. I also learned to stand a lot taller, swagger a little, and speak from my chest. Like people will comment on how much confidence I display which is wild to me being actually in my own head. There are also a few really poignant lessons I learned from some very specific patients but those are much longer stories of their own.

I also always said I wanted to be someone worth listening to and I will say I never seem to have a problem with that now. When I took my instructor classes to start teaching violence deescalation and physical management classes they told me it was going to be hard to get people to stay engaged and pay attention but I rarely have trouble with that. Organization and staying on topic are hard but my ratings on how much is learned and enjoyability are consistently high.

You know I heard a quote one time that said if you’re the smartest person in the room you’re in the wrong room. But at the same time my parents always told me whatever I did I needed to be the best at it. Like they put me in tutoring because my math skills were only one year ahead. My family is all engineers, computer scientists etc. Everybody’s a bachelor’s or above except my one sister who’s specifically disabled.

When I decided on nursing school I was like OK I’m just going to aim for something achievable for me. The content should be right at my level, at least I’ll be able to excel at that like they’re expecting. And the coursework itself was super easy. I had all the chem physics and bio I needed for the conceptual groundwork. I had all the Greek and Latin roots I needed for the terminology. Even the math was actually right on my level (basic algebra, ratio and proportion, PEMDAS equations), I just needed to up my accuracy when I had previously optimized for speed. And even now my computer skills alone are basically unmatched among clinical professionals. I had to call IT for something they needed to remote into the workstation for and they were shocked that I just gave them the IP address.

But my instructors and preceptors absolutely humbled me in people skills and emotional resiliency. I actually flunked out the first time for being too emotionally immature. They made me cry on the regular and I just couldn’t get a grip on what they wanted from me interaction wise. It was actually my first shitty job at a psych hospital + going through therapy simultaneously that fixed me. It’s wild to say but I feel like the literally criminally insane men I was working with taught me better people skills than my parents did. I learned so much about respect and what it really meant to uphold a promise through adversity and how to keep my stupid mouth shut.

So. I thought I was aiming low, and I still wound up being the dumbest person in the room. Did get the degree though; it’s been 6 years now.

Reminds me of Dr. Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck. She did her thesis on uncommon black names.

Literally everything I’ve vibe coded the #1 security feature is local only storage. I trust it naught with security LOL.

Yeah I use it to break up my ADHD monosentence paragraphs. I’ll tell it to avoid changing my wording (it can add definitions if it thinks the word is super niche or archaic) but mostly break things up into more readable sentences and group / reorder sentences as needed for better conceptual flow. It’s actually a pretty good low level editor.

Was just talking about something very similar in another community LOL

I would assume you dispose of the parts that frequently touched your bodily fluids and list the “frame” and where to purchase replacement parts in the eBay listing. Somebody out there wants a sex doll and only has $500. Or contact the manufacturer.

Loving the diagram. Keep up the good educational work.

Oh it’s a good one. Like I might use that. Like damn. Say “grow up” but utterly roast the person while you do it!

it’s the only social media I have that still has my real name attached. I use it to keep in contact with old coworkers, keep and host my resume, and I like their daily games. It also makes it easier to spitefully apply to other jobs at 2am but then those jobs actually call me and I realize I don’t want to have to learn 30 new people’s names and a new set of nightly charting requirements all over again. Doesn’t mean I don’t threaten my boss occasionally anyway.

Fun fact from a psych nurse: you can usually estimate how many years a person has spent abusing substances by how many years behind they seem in their emotional development. A 30y/o who still acts 20ish has probably spent ~10 years using. It’s not necessarily contiguous, they might have started at fifteen, used for 3, got sober for two, used for 7 more then been sober for the last 3, but they’ve probably spent about ten years using in total. Abusing substances lets people avoid the psychological crises they would normally need to confront to grow as a person. When they stop using they don’t get to skip ahead, they have to pick up maturing from where they left off. It can also happen with non-substance behavioral addictions (like gambling) but it has to be real bad.