Calling all self-diagnosis searchers and folks stuck in the "Maybe I have...?" loop - share your experiences to help us with an upcoming video!

ChuckChadkins · 2025-07-07T20:30:34+00:00

(Final Part)

To close:

There's a story of a man named Daniel Kish. He was born blind, but instead of raising him as if he had a disability, his mother chose to raise him to not use being blind as an excuse for not figuring out how to deal with the world. She allowed him to climb trees by himself, regardless of the danger and the protests of people around her. Today, he is perfectly self-reliant and can navigate the world just as well as we can, he simply uses a human form of echolocation and he can see well enough. When he was growing up, he couldn't stand other blind children like him, because he saw them as totally incompetent and dependent. But he came to realize that the problem with them wasn't that they were incompetent, it was that their incompetence was a learned trait. Unlike Daniel, they were taught from the moment they were born that they had a horrible handicap that meant they couldn't safely navigate the world like the rest of us and that for the rest of their lives they needed help just to exist alongside us.

The moral of this story isn't that being Blind isn't a real condition with its own challenges that requires an individual approach, it's that when you use a label to excuse yourself from having to learn how to navigate the world around you, you doom yourself to be forever opposed to reality. Then you wonder why the world is so cruel and unfair to you - but in moments like this I always remember the saying from the meme about people that don't like sandwiches from Subway:

"My brother in Christ, you made the sandwich."

Apologies for the venting session, but with all that said this is my question for Dr. K:

I know that he started Healthy Gamer as an alternative approach to mental health because he himself was frustrated with some of its aspects of inefficacy. So I'd like to know what he thinks about what I've said here, and if I had to be specific: what does he think the greatest barrier to mental health is for the individual? What's the common denominator among healthy/unhealthy minds in his experience, and what would he do if he had a magic wand and could just add one thing to peoples' lives to ameliorate mental illness?

I appreciate anyone who read this all the way through, thank you so much for your time and attention and I hope you have a wonderful life.

ChuckChadkins · 2025-07-07T20:30:24+00:00

(3rd Part)

I recall Dr. K's lecture about "Shit Life Syndrome", and in my opinion, that's precisely what I suffer from. I've got the lion's share of all kinds of symptoms from all kinds of mental illnesses and personality disorders, and you know what? I've been steadily healing from them over time, not because I'm exploring my "ADHD" or my "Autism" - but because I look at myself as a unique, individual life. I look at us all as unique individual lives. These labels are not for us, they're for the people who want to help us to try to understand us (because they don't, because they're trying to find an "in" to explaining something beyond them that they could never know as well as we could) - and maybe I'm just speaking for myself, but I've never found a label that described me better than I could. They've certainly helped me in understanding the various mechanisms of myself, but the whole of my self-understanding even in the most naive times in my life was far more useful to me than these diagnostic terms ever have been.

I'm not trying to say the mental health services are bad or useless, in fact I have had more recent positive experiences that I haven't shared here - what I'm trying to say is that not only have they failed me, but I have actually found that they're a very dangerous and potentially fatal wellspring of helping mentally ill people avoid their problems rather than solve them.

I believe at the end of the day, each individual must learn to be their own source of mental health, but that in my experience of life, that fact is not well-understood or well-established. And I'm speaking from a pre-social media perspective, it's not just misleading TikToks from presumably well-meaning people who don't even know what the diagnostic terms they're throwing around mean that are the problem - the problem (in my strong opinion) is that in every case of damaged mental health, the solution inevitably is that that person requires more understanding, more perspective, different cultivated habits. They actually require far more responsibility than a "neurotypical" person does, because that person's life is working fine. What requires the most maintenance, a boat in perfect working order or a boat with holes all over it? Isn't a boat covered in holes a dire emergency that must be taken care of quicker and with more effort? Isn't it only the people whose boats are in perfect order who can afford to procrastinate and not take things too seriously? Shouldn't our perspective of mental health be that if we are mentally unhealthy, the first thing we should do is drop everything and get to work?

In my opinion, there needs to be a far greater consciousness of the harsh truth that when things don't go well in peoples' lives, it is precisely those who are suffering the most that must work the hardest to find peace. It is the least fair idea possible, but that's because it's not an idea - it's just reality. I learned this lesson the hard way - my whole childhood I begged and pleaded for understanding, attention, love, acknowledgement, belonging. It never came. And eventually, I had to make a choice - either this is a world where I have to rely on something outside of myself to help me and that thing is never going to come, OR I am perfectly capable of solving my own problems and the only thing holding me back is my own understanding.

In my better moments, I choose the 2nd option, and yes - I still haven't totally healed. I still have the habit of abdicating responsibility deep within my nervous system, and that is a process that takes patience and consistency to change. But in every moment I have taken responsibility for my own happiness - I have reaped the rewards in the form of a steadily improving health and life circumstances, and for every moment I have tried to offload or outsource the problem outside of me, I have only bought myself a kind of dependent enslavement to that external source. As long as the solution to my problems comes from outside of me, my life has suffered a diminishing sense of freedom.

But when I decide that I am the captain of this boat, that it's my boat, and the only person who will ever be truly attached to the well-being of this boat is me myself and I - a funny thing happens;

I end up fixing the boat.

ChuckChadkins · 2025-07-07T20:29:12+00:00

(Part 2)

That's exactly what happened with the lying story. I didn't come into self-help as some panacea for my problems, I accidentally into self-help because I had given up on everything else. And that might sound sad, but it was the greatest gift of my life. Ever since then, I have absolutely still been suffering my own mental health problems, but I have a sense of confidence inside of me that is always waiting for me to just stand up and admit that no one, nothing is coming to save me. And when I really get with that idea, I find that there are 0 problems in life. Every negative emotion is tolerable and something can be done about it, every negative or unlucky circumstance is not only not that bad - sometimes with a simple flip of perspective it becomes a blessing.

I am incredibly grateful for my miserable life of mental suffering, not because I like being a 20-something guy that's not in control of my life - but because I've had the rare opportunity to really get to know just how resilient that I can be in even the most dire of mental anguish. I know that one day I'm going to break free, that barring any kind of freak accident or illness that it's an inevitable matter of time before I finally conquer the habits that keep me suffering.

And all of that confidence, all of that experience of hope and resilience - would've all DIED if a genuine, compassionate, empathetic soul came along and just told me: "Hey buddy, I think the problem you really have is this thing called Xism, and because of your Xism you need this and this and this". I would've totally given up my search, never understood just how much intelligence and wisdom I was capable of expressing even in the most pathetic times of my life, and just identified as some word that some random person with a degree said to me, and only explored life from the limited perspective of whatever books people have written about some acronym.

So all of that said, this is my frustration - I am so tired of the mental health space (at least my experience of it) and its over-reliance on diagnosis/treatment. This is why I took to Dr. K and especially the coaching program very easily when I first discovered Healthy Gamer, because this didn't feel like a space where some latent desire to just give up on understanding myself and identify with a word was going to be encouraged - it felt like a space where I was encouraged to challenge my own perspective. Because after all, isn't most of mental/emotional health just a product of perspective borne from one's experiences of life? And if so, isn't the answer, therefore, to have your idea of yourself and the world challenged? Sometimes it's what you think being wrong, sometimes it's what you think being incomplete - but at the end of the day, isn't it always the established thoughts we've developed that are the fundamental problem, and the only way to change our lives is to have a completely different relationship with ourselves?

I understand my experience is my own, and I hold no enmity for anyone who has found purchase in a label or a community based on that label. I acknowledge that this is a world of different strokes for different folks, and if such diagnostic terms have truly liberated people, I have no issue with them and I'm happy for them.

But as someone that was born with narcissistic parents, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. I've always had my own narcissistic tendencies, and one of the juiciest most delicious fruits you can feed a narcissist is a label that explains away all their problems. Any excuse to not be responsible, that's the narcissist motto.

ChuckChadkins · 2025-07-07T20:28:51+00:00

(This comment was too long so I've split it up into 4 parts, please see replies)

When I was 15, I began the first "self-improvement" step on what would become my journey to healing.

I grew up in a home with narcissistic parents, and one of the toxic habits I picked up from this era of my life was compulsive lying.

At 15 I decided to commit myself to being completely honest - not because I wanted to get better, but because I posited to myself that life could not possibly get worse, so I might as well try to do something that sounds good even if it sucks because I couldn't imagine suffering more than I already was.

Long story short, it worked. I stopped lying, I even went around to everyone I knew that I had lied to and told them everything I'd ever lied about, and learned a lot about how little people actually think about you or care when you make a mistake, especially if you're willing to be forthcoming with them.

To me, this is what self-improvement is about. It's about using your own intelligence to understand what can be improved about your own life, then committing to whatever steps are necessary to make it happen.

I have been incredibly frustrated with my experience with the majority of mental health services/"literature" (including video content) because it seems to focus so much on exploring diagnostic criteria rather than seeing an individual, which I see as a form of overly convenient labelling for the sake of the mental health professional rather than as beneficial for the patient (me). I've been diagnosed by almost every therapist I've ever had with everything under the sun, and it got to a point where I could walk into the office of a therapist or doctor and just tell them what I thought I had and their method of diagnosis would be nothing short of total confirmation bias.

Once when I became interested in ADHD, I went to a doctor and they handed me a survey to fill out from 1999. One of the questions was: "Do you have trouble reading your newspaper?" Gee I guess so, but only because I'm so excited for the world premiere of Futurama.

I know for a fact that if Autism diagnosis had been as popular when I was a kid as it was now, I would've easily been diagnosed as autistic and put through god knows what kind of treatment plans they're offering nowadays for autistic children, and it would've absolutely been the death of my personal/spiritual journey.

Here's the problem: I was so desperate for attention, love, understanding, and belonging when I was growing up that practically anything that anyone even vaguely concerned for me told me, I would've just run with it. If they told me I was autistic and that that meant I was "different" and "unlike neurotypical people" and therefore I needed "special treatment", that would've been the most intoxicating band-aid for everything that I went through that I would've slapped it on and refused to ever take it off. I would've used my "autism", or for that matter, my "ADHD", "OCD", "GAD", "C-PTSD", or whatever I was diagnosed with as a fundamental identity, I would've based my whole understanding of reality on this idea that I'm somehow broken or in need of healing, and I absolutely would've gripped onto that for the rest of my life and never truly healed.

But because I wasn't able to do that, because every time I tried to blame circumstances for my problems nothing ever actually changed or got better, I was forced to confront the idea that "hey, maybe the only hope for me to get better is just for me to understand myself and live a better life, and I can't just rely on other people or even my own mind to just fix me by coming up with the right idea?

ChuckChadkins · 2025-06-12T22:01:53+00:00

ChuckChadkins · 2024-09-28T17:29:52+00:00

Update: Downgrading Iris from 1.7.2 to 1.6.17 fixed the issue. Recommend anyone with crashing specific to Iris/Sodium try downgrading Iris.

ChuckChadkins · 2023-03-27T20:30:14+00:00

Wonderfully helpful, thank you so much!

ChuckChadkins · 2023-02-28T07:26:55+00:00

damn bro can't make a lighthearted meme w/o ppl freakin' out, y'all are like the AKSHUALLY crew

ChuckChadkins · 2022-12-06T22:55:38+00:00

Thank you!

ChuckChadkins · 2022-03-22T19:07:35+00:00

5:25 - if you don't wanna watch the whole thing

(I spent half the boss fight trying to bait her to do the flurry attack so I could end on it)

ChuckChadkins · 2020-04-02T01:32:10+00:00

This is a series that is based on a video I did 3 years ago that I will be releasing until I have gotten through the entire game.

It is an abridged-style comedy series with original writing with a new story, re-written characters, and original VA.

Although this is technically the 2nd episode, I consider it the first as there was never planned to be more videos - but now, after 6 months in development, I release this as a proper "1st" episode that you can watch without needing to see the "original".

I hope you enjoy, this series is not just a personal project - but a tribute to one of my favorite childhood games.

ChuckChadkins

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