elon being worth $1 trillion does not mean elon has $1 trillion in the bank. most of the people i see arguing for a 5% annual wealth tax appear to be willfully misunderstanding this.

Some Predictions About the Future of “Withdrawal Studies” What we talk about when we talk about antidepressant withdrawal psychiatrymargins.com/p/some…

Dear anti-psychiatry, this "mental illness isn't real" narrative is making us look bad. SSRIs can cause permanent neurological injuries that destroy lives via mechanisms we don't understand, and those experiences are not canceled out by the lives they 'save'. That fact doesn't mean that mental illness isn't real, or is just a simple result of not enough sunshine or human connection. There are many forms of severe idiopathic mental illness that people suffer from, and those diseases are also deserving of legitimate treatment. Has psychiatry exploited this and gone too far in some instances? Yes. Absolutely. Diagnosing every kid who can't sit still or focus with ADHD and medicating them is a criminal example of this. However, there are many people who chronically struggle with severe mental illness that cannot easily be cured by natural remedies, and those people are desperate for help. The problem is that those people are just as vulnerable to SSRI neurological injury as those who 'didn't need' them. The mechanisms behind these injuries need to be fully understood, predictable and preventable before they continue to be carelessly given, period. In the meantime, psychiatrists need to stop writing SSRIs off as merely "less than perfect", and the anti-psychiatry movement needs to stop promoting the idea that the mental illness that MI sufferers sought relief from isn't real in the first place. The way forward is to simultaneously acknowledge that mental illness is real, and med harm is not just a necessary and unfortunate byproduct of trying to fix it. Med harm is real and a crime against humanity, and the suffering that leads people to become med harmed in the first place is equally real. To reconcile these two outcomes by saying "they save lives, but they're not perfect" is not good enough. Neither is saying "all mental illness isn't real, you just need more sunshine and meaning". Psychiatry and anti-psychiatry needs to do better if we ever want this situation to progress.

Pessimists sound smart.  Optimists build the world.

While certain psychiatrists on X, argue definitions, time frames and each other's word salads, there's real people suffering through real long-term withdrawal as a necessity to prevent the seizures and other destabilizing WD from irresponsible Rx rapid tapers. I've been tapering for 66 months in total. I'm off 11 psych meds (yes, my ex GP was Big Pharma's best sales woman). I'm down to 6.25mg Seroquel with another year or so to go and then I've still got to taper another 2 psych meds. Not rare! Just rarely acknowledged by those profiting off the harm.

Yes, I had a very severe reaction to my second Moderna shot. But part of being a responsible scientist with a large platform is not extrapolating my personal experience to the entire population. I also have a rare autoimmune condition called Parsonage-Turner syndrome (diagnosed in 2013), so I may have been particularly vulnerable to side effects. Given my bad experience with the first mRNA vaccine I've ever taken, I have made the personal decision to avoid them in the future. However, it would have been incredibly unscientific and highly irresponsible of me to take this personal experience of mine and start telling millions of people online to not get vaccinated for COVID. There's a reason quack alternative medicine practitioners plaster personal testimonies all over their websites. They sound convincing to a lot of people. But it's purely manipulation. Personal testimony, even a large collection of them, isn't a substitute for real, population-level data. I am not an expert on vaccines, the COVID vaccine, or epidemiology in general. So when I experience a serious side effect taking something with a non-zero rate of serious side effects, I understand that my personal experience likely isn't an indication that we're all being lied to about safety. You should understand that as well. The impulse to extrapolate a very negative personal experience to the entire population is very strong. But responsible scientists, and especially those with large public platforms, should resist that impulse.

More insults from Mark Horowitz. He doesn’t like that I think he’s quite wrong about the prevalence of “incapacitating” withdrawal or that there isn’t actual evidence for his tapering theories but so be it.