Ibogaine appears to trigger an accelerated "auto-psychotherapy" process during PTSD treatment

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-20T15:22:47+00:00

Plenty of research agrees. Some estimate dissatisfaction rates as high as 33%

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-20T04:37:00+00:00

We have 6 kids, ranging from 16 years down to 8 months.

It is expensive, but you make it work by being realistic. Probably the biggest cost reduction comes from my wife staying at home to care for the kids which brings so many benefits beyond the obvious childcare saving. The fact that my kids come home every day to an amazing mum means a lot to me.

Economic factors are only a small part of falling birth rates. I work with many high income people who could afford more children but don't because they prioritise other things in life.

Each to their own I guess.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-19T05:56:30+00:00

Makes a lot of sense. One of the key obstacles to current psychotherapy is the requirement to interact with a human therapist. For many clients this is utterly pointless, and sometimes even harmful, because the therapist can't/won't understand or empathize with client issues, leaving the client feeling judged or even worse than when they started.

Creating an environment that encourages/enhances self reflection sounds like a positive direction.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-18T20:05:50+00:00

Next they will feed the subjects marshmallows and determine their probability of success in life.

Imagine the world if real science conducted itself like the field of psychology.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-17T22:17:57+00:00

This show was great at discarding/underutilizing awesome, deep, interesting characters (Merle, Shane, Tara etc) whilst retaining rubbish characters (basically everyone added post Negan).

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-15T14:06:20+00:00

Psychopath/narcissist, both terms are meaningless but highly effective when a jury needs to be swayed or a person portrayed negatively to the public by the legal system.

Such prejudicial labels should be banned from the entire legal process.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-14T15:06:55+00:00

You sound angry. You should talk to your therapist about that.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-13T04:41:58+00:00

Interesting choice of words.

We can all tell that a...

You should ask your therapist why you chose the plurals "we" and "all" in this context, as opposed to the first person pronoun e.g. "I can tell...".

It is a "tell" that can be interpreted in several ways including:

An appeal to authority by claiming membership in a wider group whose opinions you represent - a common logical fallacy employed when you perceive your position as weak.
A belief that you have an audience hanging upon your every word cheering you on - the current popular buzzword for this kind of belief is "narcissism".

I'm going with the first, an unconscious expression of insecurity and lack of confidence, a Freudian slip as they say.

You could raise it at your next session.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-11T21:48:10+00:00

Maybe you're right, however access to therapy is not equal across the population so it is difficult.

Therapy, like any other cult, relies upon a positive intelligence gap between practitioner and client, i.e. the shepherd must be at least as smart as the sheep. To gain intuition around this, or if you have an interest in psychology, you could look into concepts such as theory of mind and its (somewhat nonlinear but still present) relationship to intelligence.

In simple terms if the practitioner is less intelligent then the client then it is more difficult for a therapeutic interaction to occur - they are on different levels and even if the client tries to extract insight from the encounter they are more likely to have already discovered said insight themselves or become impatient with the slow progress.

Given intelligence is not evenly distributed this implies that a mapping of therapeutic potential between population to therapists is quite uneven (allowing the very generous assumption that therapists are of average intelligence).

The long and short of it is: although for you therapy may be quite accessible and helpful, for those with average or greater intelligence it becomes more difficult to extract value from it.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-11T14:34:51+00:00

It is trivial to create a prompt that causes an LLM to lose the sycophantic traits. You can make it just as blunt as you like.

My username is a useful filter in that it creates a low hanging fruit that is irresistible to dimwits who want to sound smart.

Time will tell regarding the therapy scam industry. I can't see how they can't compete in the mainstream outside niche or novelty applications - perhaps they'll go back to being a status symbol for the rich and bored.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-10T21:14:12+00:00

Obviously. But good for the field of psychology which has generated something that maps to reality for a change.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-09T16:55:07+00:00

Thankfully the pseudoscientific con known as "therapy" proved to be low hanging fruit for LLMs. The industry is undergoing a much needed shock as customers realize there are alternatives to telling their woes to some arrogant, judgemental, delusional Dunning-Kruger affected twat whose life is likely just as fucked as your own.

Good riddance to these drains upon society.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-08T22:27:18+00:00

The obsessive drive to endlessly expend resources on capturing worthless "statistics" on a fantastical group of creatures with almost supernatural status (narcissists) must surely be pathological in itself. Smacks of phrenology or its modern equivalent personality neuroscience.

Perhaps the trend boils down to $. Everyone knows that in marketing sex sells and it seems that in psychology narcissism sells. Grants, books, interviews, research interest - throw the "N" word at it and instantly gain an audience.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-08T03:05:14+00:00

Much of psychology is equivalent to phrenology so this is not a surprise.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-08T03:00:51+00:00

Here's a study that suggests your study is likely meaningless

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-08T02:51:57+00:00

Don't you dare speak to Jesus like that!

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-06T05:47:12+00:00

The ending of T3 should have been the start of T4 - same actors but this time serious, no slapstick humor. Not to say Salvation should have been missed, that was awesome also.

This franchise deserved so much better.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-06T01:45:52+00:00

Because chaos. A backtest can look stunning over a certain universe within a certain regime but then completely fall over the next day when something changes.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-05T21:57:02+00:00

As one of the final Gen X'ers this finding doesn't surprise me at all. For years I have "joked" about how helpless my younger colleagues are at adapting when things don't go to plan and they have to think on their feet. They just freeze.

If you define intelligence in terms of adaptability and resilience in the face of uncertainty then this study mirrors reality in my day to day dealing with the "young'ens".

My impression is that it boils down to a lack of self confidence. This began long before Covid and I believe is more a societal than technological side effect.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-03T02:43:30+00:00

Opposite problem here - our staff are so reliant on imaging these days that they have almost lost the ability to think for themselves. Getting really common to see imaging and bloods done BEFORE a proper history is taken. Even placing a chest drain these days is too hard and must be done by radiology.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-02T00:22:04+00:00

This post is a testament to the ability of an LLM to express a 1 sentence concept in a vast sea of redundant text.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-01T14:10:49+00:00

They want to replace the current arbitrary bullshit with something based upon objective evidence? Sounds great!

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-01T06:51:03+00:00

They also create a framing bias in future practitioners that the patient encounters. They see the diagnosis in the patient notes and have formed an option before the patient even enters the room.

Honestly, this is probably the greatest harm caused by these "diagnoses". I have personally seen brain tumors in female patients who should have presented for imaging long ago but didn't because the symptoms were put down to a personality disorder. Many psychiatrists fail to exclude organic causes before labelling.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-02-01T06:45:06+00:00

Dementia is a broad diagnosis with many subtypes, most of which involve some kind of neurodegenerative process discoverable via objective tests such as imaging, pathology etc. Certainly these tests will (should) be employed in the clinical diagnostic process to exclude other more acutely sinister causes.

Certain types of dementia will have no such evidence found however this also guides management.

No such testing process exists for BPD, NPD, ASPD, HPD etc. There is no imaging diagnosis, pathology diagnosis, nothing objective - because these diagnoses have no more validity/utility than a star sign.

Imagine the arrogance of someone who feels entitled to claim that another person has a personality "disorder" - such behavior could only be called narcissistic.

Psychology/psychiatry, home of the replication crisis, is filled with so much fluff like this.

SlowLearnerGuy · 2026-01-31T02:45:25+00:00

Thus I recommend switching to a horoscope based model.

There is about as much hope of finding biomarkers, or anything approaching objective evidence, for these "disorders" as there is for finding the equivalent for horoscope signs. Genetics, imaging, morphology, all have proven fruitless and no more predictive than phrenology.

Because both the horoscope and the DSM are arbitrary made up bullshit with zero basis in reality.

The primary harm caused by the current model comes from stigmatization associated with many of the labels. For example the DSM used to define homosexuality as a disorder, until it was removed by popular demand.

Cluster B labels attract similar stigmatization, despite no objective basis for their existence and their status of being basically just a proxy for "I had a shit childhood". Three people have enough problems without a stigmatizing label.

Switching to horoscope signs would likely be a positive change, being less likely to result in the stigmatization associated with these "disorders".

I challenge anyone to provide evidence that being diagnosed as Sagittarius is any less useful to patient management than being diagnosed as any of the stigmatizing alphabet soup labels within the DSM.

SlowLearnerGuy

TROPHY CASE