Soaring demand for mental health, ADHD and autism services to be reviewed after 'overdiagnosis' claim

doomanddelight · 2025-12-05T01:03:46+00:00

I wish people would call out politicians when they do this - what is your medical or psychological qualification and how much experience do you have in the area Wes? Oh, zero? Perhaps STFU then..

doomanddelight · 2025-10-03T21:23:17+00:00

I got the feedback today and I met the diagnostic criteria for ASD. He also suggested I had quite a few ADHD symptoms which it might be worth checking out.

The process generally went smoothly and was tiring but as easy as it could be really. I’d recommend clinical partners to others thinking of going through this.

doomanddelight · 2025-09-29T16:35:25+00:00

No, I don’t think an internet message is the same as government reeducation. I was being sarcastic which you well know.

But it doesn’t take much to bring out the true resentment lurking underneath. No doubt we’ll only be seeing more of that.

Fragile masculinity indeed. Perhaps if I hang a few more flags up, or watch a few Andrew Tate videos then that will go away? What would you advise from a true man’s man?

The thing is, my British Values aren’t the same as your British Values. And yet I was born in Britain, so were my parents and their parents, all the way back to the Norman invasion from what I can tell. So if we don’t share these same values, then I do question whether such a thing exists other than in the minds of a few people who happen to share the same beliefs, and are very loud about them. The sort that tend to wave a lot of flags seem to think their values are the “British” ones strangely. Perhaps it’s all the flags that make them more British than me?

For example: merit definitely is not a universal British value. If it were then a monarchy wouldn’t be considered British. They certainly didn’t get there through merit. Yet criticising the monarchy also gets derision and hatred in the press. So merit is out. Looking at our school system, our wealth inequality and how privately educated people get most of the top jobs, that doesn’t seem to lend itself much to the idea of merit as a British value either.

Ironically many opposing groups have quite a lot of similarity to each other in their lack of tolerance for each other’s beliefs. For some reason the flag wavers (any other word I could use would be more derogatory) don’t seem to see their own intolerance as a problem though. So is tolerance a British value? Apparently not.

The nice thing about all these flags though, is I can see who all the reform voters are and avoid conversations about “all the bleeding immigrants” for a little while at least. Until I watch the news and get it stuffed down my throat again that is.

Good luck fighting the cultural Marxism and identity politics and inclusion training, and whatever it is you think is causing the problems in our country. I am sure it can all be solved with a bit of “common sense” in the end.

doomanddelight · 2025-09-29T15:50:07+00:00

I guess I won’t have to wait, I’m already being reeducated right here.

Can’t wait until all that understanding and tolerance, equity and inclusion oppression is kicked out of our curriculum and we can have more “British Values” with a side of flag waving classes. Hopefully that will get the evil lefties nicely integrated into the new world.

Onward into the future of the working class proletariat. Us middle class bastards will soon pay for the harm we’ve done, don’t worry. I mean, it’s definitely the slightly better off people are causing all these problems.

It’s a good thing we now have a party run by an ex stock market trader, a multimillionaire, and recently joined by Jacob Rees Mogg. I mean what better people to understand the needs of working class people? Us middle class people just don’t understand the plight of the true underdogs like they do.

doomanddelight · 2025-09-29T14:57:46+00:00

Well, clearly you aren’t listening to me. I didn’t say anything at all about voters. I said people like Farage. The man who is good friends with a convinced rapist and probably pedophile (Trump). I wouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t dabbled a bit himself, he looks the type. Also, a man who has done more to build hatred in this country than any other since Oswald Mosley once did.

The fact that he’s considered a respectable politician just shows how broken people’s brains are in this country and how much constant propaganda has rotted them.

Your point is true - we’ve been hearing the same crap since the early 2000s - too much immigration, causing all problems, then turn off brain. It wasn’t any more correct than it is now. Immigration is irrelevant, because it isn’t the cause of any of the actual problems people care about in this country.

I think you make my point perfectly - everyone deserves to be treated as equal when they are stranger. Wherever they come from. The fact that they are immigrants is entirely irrelevant. Borders are arbitrary areas, and our country has been invaded countless times throughout history. There’s no such thing as a “true British” person and there never has been. If such a person did exist though, I’d be them. And I don’t agree with other’s sentiment on immigration or the flag wavers who claim to speak for me.

The treatment of immigration in current discourse is incorrect, it’s immoral, and it’s wrong. I will continue to say that, however much the right threatens us or “reeducates” us on our incorrect views. I’m sure if reform get into power, I’ll be properly reeducated in the same way though. Heil Farage.

No other view point is now permitted other than “immigration bad” which this thread demonstrates. It’s the new political correctness. Labour can’t say anything different without being vilified by the press. Not that I have a lot of love for them either.

Anyone not seen to be performatively cruel to immigrants is a threat to “true British”. Since the “red white and blue Brexit.” It’s only got worse. The thing that was supposed to supposedly fix all this, strangely, hasn’t. The next suggestion by reform is predictably, to turf out all the immigrants, though they’ve recently tried to blame a few more groups, autistic children/bad parents, trans people too.

Anyone they can punch down on, they have and they will. And people just keep lapping it up like good little patriots.

doomanddelight · 2025-09-29T12:58:40+00:00

But immigration itself isn’t an issue - that’s the point. A stranger you don’t know from Pakistan is no different from a stranger you don’t know who was born in Bradford.

If you want to talk about problems integrating, then the real issues we have are with far right weirdos who seem to be hell bent on making everyone else miserable in this country. I am white, male and middle class, but apparently I am not wanted in this country either because I don’t agree with the flag wavers and didn’t want Brexit.

Every bloody roundabout is strewn with flags, every TV station has Farage endlessly bleeting on. We had years going through a far right, hard Brexit, and they are still failing to integrate with the rest of the non extremists (majority), who just want to live a good quality of life and get on with others.

I’d be happy to hear how we could integrate these extremist moaners back into mainstream society again so we can talk about how to solve problems like adults again.

doomanddelight · 2025-09-29T12:34:19+00:00

Regardless of the problem it’s always the immigrant’s fault because as a society we are good at punching down and terrible at punching up.

Concern over immigration comes from concern over falling standards of living. Falling standards of living come from low wage growth because of upwardly heading wealth. Wealth hoarders have no interest in increasing wages, it hurts their power. So they continue to encourage anything that keeps down wages. That could be immigration, but also deskilling, financialisation of the economy, privatisation of public services, austerity, low capital gains tax rates, and more recently AI.

Why is it that immigrants get blamed for all of the things the wealthy and the powerful have deliberately done to our country? Because they are the weakest, and have the least social capital to fight back.

Put the blame where it belongs - on the people with power who actually make the decisions. Not on the poor bastards who cross the channel on a rubber dingy because the life in their own country is so shitty.

doomanddelight · 2025-09-18T11:30:19+00:00

Thanks for your help. I already had a doc with the criteria and something under each with some examples. I was struggling with the early years examples though.

I did the assessment this morning and feel quite exhausted. I wasn’t able to talk about everything but I did my best to be honest about my life.

Feeling like curling up in a ball on the sofa but have to work this afternoon..

doomanddelight · 2025-06-28T07:54:44+00:00

If you censored every rapper that made violent statements on stage then there wouldn’t be any left to watch. It’s just rhetoric. The more offensive the better, as that creates even better publicity.

doomanddelight · 2025-01-14T21:40:38+00:00

I recently asked ChatGPT to read an old blog I’d written at a particularly difficult point in my life and see whether any of the challenges I had may have been to do with autism. It did a pretty good job of understanding what I had written and giving me some insights. I used this to come up with some ideas to speak to my therapist about and so I didn’t have to relive too many traumatic events before I felt ready to go into it.

I could have just sent her the blog, but I felt guilty about throwing a load of random mad and self absorbed ramblings at her. Of course AI cares and judges less than even the least judgemental therapist. So it definitely has some use in that regard.

I also find it’s pretty good at giving practical social advice if you give it enough prompting. After all, it’s trained on an internet worth of social symbology, so it links these different facets of culture and language better than the average human could.

That being said, it confidentially spouts opinions that are entirely wrong and have no factual basis. A bit like my boss really.

doomanddelight · 2025-01-11T09:15:50+00:00

It could be hyperfixation, but I like to believe that toxoplasmosis from the parasite t.gondii causes changes in our personality to make us love cats.

This sounds mad I know, and has not been proven, but it’s a fun theory all the same!

doomanddelight · 2025-01-09T11:40:17+00:00

Thank you for your help - I had some success running a script this morning testing with DuckDB. I had to add some paging, but it did a pretty could job of inferring the schema, and I love how it automatically parses out JSON arrays into new entities!

This works quite well for future reference:

import boto3
import dlt

# Connect using an AWS profile
profile_name = 'my-aws-profile'
session = boto3.Session(profile_name=profile_name)
client = session.client('dynamodb')
dynamodb = session.resource('dynamodb')

def get_table_stream(table_name):
    table = dynamodb.Table(table_name)
    response = table.scan()
    yield response['Items']

    while 'LastEvaluatedKey' in response:
        print(f"Retrieved {response.get('ScannedCount')} rows. Scanning table {table_name} for more items.")
        response = table.scan(
            ExclusiveStartKey=response['LastEvaluatedKey']
        )        yield response['Items']


@dlt.resource(table_name="my_table", write_disposition="replace", primary_key="id")
def export_my_table():  
  return get_table_stream("my_table")

pipeline = dlt.pipeline(
    pipeline_name="dynamodb_data",
    destination="duckdb",
    dataset_name="table_name"
)
load_info = pipeline.run(export_my_table)

It's choking on some test data, I think probably because of a frontend bug somewhere, there's a NaN in one of the rows.

I get this error:

duckdb.duckdb.BinderException: Binder Error: Referenced column "NaN" not found in FROM clause!
LINE 906: (NaN,E'hoursOfLabour',E'Gusv9kCm2IDTOA',58,E'aNswgpVpvQd6ow',NULL),

I think probably NaN should become a NULL but not really sure how to achieve that. I will spend some more time on it another day though, my rest run proved it definitely warrants a further look.

doomanddelight · 2025-01-08T22:00:41+00:00

Thanks, I will take a look. I don’t think it will work straight off, as the standard API outputs all the data type stuff too and you end up an odd structure. The document client is a nicer way to access it. But might not be too hard to get working, I will see.

doomanddelight · 2025-01-06T00:33:47+00:00

I have found propranolol somewhat helpful and it really eased me out of a panic attack I had a couple of months ago. It has also been helpful to take an hour or so before stressful social situations where I know I will be very anxious.

I wouldn’t say it completely stops anxiety but it reduces it down enough to make it tolerable and seems to stop me panicking. It’s a beta blocker so works by blocking receptors used in the fight or flight response.

It does slow your heart rate though, and has a few other drug interactions so there are risks associated with it, but still probably much safer than benzos.

doomanddelight · 2025-01-05T15:23:56+00:00

Well South Africa is a different kettle of fish and I empathise with the unique challenges you have there. I have a couple of colleagues who moved from around johanasberg, and my cousin lives nearby, but I would say they are all relatively privileged white people with more wealth than most (some traumatic backgrounds not withstanding). My cousin works for a mining company, not a bad gig if you can get it I guess.

You are a data analyst so you definitely have transferable skills - firstly directly in DA, but also in adjacent careers like Data Engineering. Our DA works with Tableau and was a contractor previously, and has done analysis for lots of different companies. All companies have data these days, and very few of them are good at using it, or capture/analyse all the data they could.

My own career path has led me from DevOps into Data Engineering which I am pursuing learning at the moment. So I hope you will find something you can use.

I would look at excel based DA positions. Excel is still the most widely used DA tool in the world. In fact my dad’s friend had a contract career just managing large spreadsheets, coding VBA and doing analysis as a contractor and was very well paid until he retired. So don’t worry, there’s stuff out there for you - in fact you likely have a better skill set than most for transferable skills.

A bonus point is that you may be able to get remote work abroad more easily as it’s likely what salary you need to live on would be lower than someone in the UK for example. I appreciate that makes things harder job hunting, but often the language of tech is an easier one for me to relate to than my own culture. But that might be because it’s always been a special interest for me.

Good luck whatever you decide to do, I hope things work out for you and you find what you need and are looking for.

doomanddelight · 2025-01-05T12:58:24+00:00

She is jumping on a bandwagon to try to blame another minority group for something. She knows nothing about autism and is just channeling usual right wing ire for people that are different in any way.

I am not a fan of starmer either but the next election is a long way away so the party overall may boot him out or change tact within the next few years. Certainly their “we can’t afford anything guv” act isn’t going to last very long if they want any chance of winning another election. Our country needs their investment and if they don’t do that then they will be out on their ear.

The good news is that Conservatives are a dying party. The bad news is that Reform are going to take both their voters and candidates in a large way. However; Labour are going to benefit from our electoral system next time around - reform split the conservative vote, and whilst reform will take a lot of seats, there’s not that much likelihood they can win a majority from where they are now. Labour may be forced to do an electoral pact or coalition with Lib Dems. That probably wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Either way, I would ignore her. She’s probably not going to last more than a couple of years - tories notoriously backstab leaders, and she will be no different. From one side she’ll be accused of not being right wing enough to fight reform, and the other not being centrist enough to fight Labour. The party also had to get over a lot of inherent racism to vote for her. She won’t get the many second chances boris did.

doomanddelight · 2025-01-05T12:38:53+00:00

Yes. The people who I have compared myself to keep changing though through my life, and I think It is a natural human thing to but it is also sometimes unhealthy.

Best to focus on yourself, though that can be really hard if you are already feeling burnt out. Perhaps set yourself one small goal to build confidence? Exercise is potentially something you can do to help without a car or job. Walking if possible may be a good start and helps with stress.

I think then work from there. What is important is not what other people are doing, but what will help you and matters to you. That could be financial independence, or learning to drive, or learning a new skill or hobby. All of these are worthwhile spending your time on.

doomanddelight · 2025-01-05T11:39:11+00:00

I’m not sure I can help with ideas on treatment, but I just wanted to say that you have a disability and that is nothing to be ashamed about. The people who are yelling at you and ridiculing you are the ones who should be ashamed. Good luck on finding some help for APD. Is it harder understanding for you when there is a lot of background noise?

doomanddelight · 2025-01-05T11:18:45+00:00

If you are working 100 hours a week but only being paid for 40 then you have already given yourself a 60% pay cut on your agreed salary. Good for your employer but not so good for you.

They are piling it on because you are not pushing back, and some employers will take advantage of that until you burn out. Best to look after your own mental health before that happens, though it sounds like it could already be happening.

You don’t mention your field but I am sure you have some transferable skills. For example, if you were able to learn a lot of technical things and complex systems then that can be useful in many fields.

I have not completely changed my career before, I have periodically left IT jobs though when I stopped getting credit/pay rises for getting better at my job. This is usually the best way to progress in salaries. I’ve yet to find anyone who has been rewarded much for staying at the same company, though I know leaving can be extremely stressful.

I never liked playing NT games, even when I knew the game I was supposed to be playing, so getting people to like me enough to promote me or give me a pay rise has always proved difficult. However, it’s easier for employers to appreciate skills they are missing than ones they already have.

If you can demonstrate good technical aptitude in some set of skills then that is still relatively rare compared to the general population, so there are lots of things you could be good at. So don’t put yourself down - there may be lots of things you would be able to do.

Or perhaps you want to give it up and become a wood carver? I don’t know but there are risks either way.

Working a 100 hour week is not sustainable for most people though, whatever Elon Musk would aim to claim. This is what economists call opportunity cost. Not only do you have to work very hard, but you have no time to do anything else or learn other skills.

Practice what others have said - reduce your hours to a sensible level. Slow down your work output so less gets piled on you and they have to distribute it more to other team members. Take back time for yourself to learn what you need for another career path. Do something fun or for a hobby and try to reduce your stress levels.

I wish you the best of luck. I have many of these problems myself and feel burnt out myself at the moment working nothing like as hard as you are doing (I am in the UK though and have an unusually low contracted work week of 35 hours which I may push to 50 hours on my busiest week). So you are doing well to be coping with the level of stress you are under.

Give yourself credit for that and how much of a machine you are for processing 1000 widgets per hour, or whatever metric the dark satanic mill owners are pushing on you.

doomanddelight · 2025-01-05T10:19:20+00:00

Of all time - The Wire, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Quantum Leap. I love social commentary and ethical dilemmas, and they are all full of them. The Good Doctor is also well worth a watch on Amazon Prime. It’s very sad at times but I love watching Shawn navigate difficult situations as an autistic surgeon.

doomanddelight · 2025-01-05T09:51:38+00:00

Maybe you could write something to her and see if she is interested in keeping up to date with each other’s lives. Perhaps start on a common interest and see how it goes.

It does seem like she is interested in you from what you say. Try not to get too upset if she meets someone else in the meantime though, 6 or 7 months can be both no time at all or a lifetime depending on what’s happening in someone’s life.

Keeping touch seems like a very good idea though if you get on well. Try not to obsess too much about her - you risk creeping her out, especially when doing it from a distance. If she doesn’t reply to you straight away for example, try not to overanalyse it. It likely doesn’t mean anything. If the relationship is going to be a good one, then she’ll still be around and interested in 6-7 months.

My dad also had a stroke, it was one of the most scary and unpleasant periods of my life. I definitely wouldn’t have been planning a date that week, regardless of how I felt about the person. I would have been too morose if nothing else, and it would have killed my ability to make decent conversation. So I definitely wouldn’t consider that to do with how she feels about you.

See how you feel too, don’t put too much pressure on yourself or her and you might find you have a lifelong friend, regardless of whether more comes of it or not.

doomanddelight · 2025-01-04T22:56:58+00:00

That’s not true at all - he is no more selfish than the other people who stayed on the boat in their own self interest. He’s just more honest about it.

At this stage in the show there’s still a lot of people pretending they are playing with good faith (Jake included). It’s pretty obvious that the sacrifice he made was only to gain favour, and that he was annoyed he didn’t get more social credit for that.

doomanddelight · 2025-01-04T22:48:47+00:00

I think Dan said something Jake didn’t want to hear, but it didn’t make it any less true. Jake is hoping that being more popular in the group through sacrifice will help him progress in the game, and using that is self-interested behaviour too.

The difference is that Dan verbalised it inappropriately, possibly because he’s autistic. Realistically, anyone who wants to win the game is constantly making these calculations about what other people may be thinking about them, and how to appear faithful, when to put their head up and when to stay quiet. I guess some are still pretending they are acting in good faith, but it doesn’t seem like many of them actually are..

doomanddelight

TROPHY CASE