Not just pigeons. Pigeons with diarrhea who have been shitting all over the pieces for years.

Of course they have, it’s not election season. Only the especially crazy crazies will continue tondisplay these signs indefinitely, but there are plenty of slightly kess crazy crazies who had them up during election season and voted for the mango-colored child rapist.

Putting your faith in something and doing it because it’s all you can do at this point are two different things. I don’t currently live in the USA. I can’t go to protests. I’m not likely to be allowed to vote in the next election, if there is one. All I can do is pressure, weakly and indirectly, and this is one way of doing it.

I’d rather engage in gestures that may turn out to be a total waste than not doing anything, because that is guaranteed to be a total waste.

Personally, it’s because I haven’t seen anybody post about the ballroom.

Mate, the release of the unredacted Epstein files is pretty much the only thing left with a nonzero chance of turning MAGA against Trump. They don’t care about the erosion of democracy, the illegal arrest and deportation of innocents, the economy, the USA becoming an international laughing stock, inflation, the cuts to government services, the wars, they don’t even care that he was convicted of raping adults! Uncontrovertible evidence that he likes to put his deformed micropenis inside children is the only thing that might still reach them.

Welcome to the USA! We already had the world’s largest rates of obesity, depression and mass shootings, but now we also have a pedophile President, and - finally, amirite? - THOUGHTCRIME!

Yeah, I used to fool myself with that line too. Look, I know you don’t believe anything I said, but nonetheless you seem like a great person going through an awful time and I wish you the best. It does get better. Don’t give up.

So you still think life is worth living, even though you claim that it isn’t. Well aren’t you a happy little hypocrite? Welcome to the club.

The fact that you can’t see a difference is very telling. You drink to numb your mind. You take medicine to sharpen it and face your problems head on so you can solve them instead of avoiding them. If both approaches are the same to you, I really wonder why you choose to continue living every day.

And what advantages does your deeply flawed perspective bring you? Does it make you suffer less, or is it just an easy way to lie to yourself?

Gracias por el link. Mi español no es muy bueno, pero creo que comprendí la letra. ¿De dónde eres? Yo soy brasileño pero vivi un rato en Perú hace muchos años.

What I said isn’t “objectively” true or untrue, as I’m talking about a purely subjective phenomenon: happiness. Your choice of language betrays the radicalization of thought caused by your coping mechanism. You are incapable of seeing reality for what it is - this is the main symptom of every mental illness.

Antipsychotics aren’t just for people who hear voices. They’re for anyone with a dopamine imbalance. The name just comes from what they were first used for. Likewise, antidepressants aren’t just for depression, but for serotonin imbalances. They can also help with anxiety, panic attacks, etc. Bipolar disorder does not respond to antidepressants (because it isn’t caused by a serotonin imbalance) but responds to antipsychotics (because it is caused by a dopamine imbalance). As I said, type 2 bipolar can present just like depression, but antidepressants just make it worse while antipsychotics make it better.

There is also a very important difference between “coping with drugs” and using medicine to fix a malfunction in your brain. Let’s take diabetes as an example. If someone’s pancreas doesn’t produce insulin and so they take insulin shots, is that “coping with drugs” and just a way to distract themselves from the reality of diabetes, or are they effectively fixing the problem (no insulin) the best way available (getting insulin from outside)? Furthermore, if they were trying to escape from the reality of having diabetes, they wouldn’t take insulin, because only people who admit they have diabetes voluntarily take insulin. I assume this point is not controversial… But suddenly if we replace the pancreas with the brain, “solving a problem” becomes “coping with drugs”. It’s still the same logic. Problem = dopamine imbalance. Solution = dopamine balancer (antipsychotic).

Three things are obvious to me from this conversation.

• One, you’re quite an intelligent fellow. You’re well articulated, stay on topic and your comments are structured in a logical way.

• Two, you’re desperately ill-informed about mental health, probably a result of going to a less-than-competent psychiatrist. Or two. Or five.

• Three, your disease has advanced to the point where you see no hope for yourself or others and flat out ignore any evidence against your hopelessness by claiming without proof that it’s all fake - an extremely irrational position that is incompatible with the intelligence you’ve shown.

Oh, there’s also a fourth thing. It’s obvious that you’re alive or you wouldn’t be replying to me. This means you haven’t killed yourself. And that means that you’re absolutely, completely full of shit. If you actually believed in all this ridiculous nonsense about how happiness doesn’t really exist, you’d have offed yourself by now. You wouldn’t even bother talking to me like this. Now, since you’re still alive, that means you still have hope. But you’re lying to me and to yourself that you don’t. This lie is more proof of your disease.

I went through many psychiatrists that misdiagnosed me with depression and treated me with drugs that just made me worse before finding one who finally put me on antipsychotics. I get that you’ve had your share of failed treatments as well, but if you haven’t tried this approach yet, why not give it a shot? What do you have to lose? Why the fuck are you so attached to being miserable?

I was treated with antidepressants for a few years. They didn’t help, I couldn’t cum either, and also I gained a lot of weight and I slept ten hours a day and still felt groggy when I was awake. Then I went to a new psychiatrist who thought I might have bipolar depression rather than “normal” depression. It’s BPD except you don’t have the euphoric mania, so it presents like depression. But since it’s BPD, it’s treated with antipsychotics rather than antidepressants. I got on lithium and brexpriprazol. I did a few ECT sessions. I went to an ayahuasca ceremony. Lo and behold, I got better. The treatment gave me enough energy to change my habits. I started exercising, meditating, I took up old hobbies I had abandoned because I couldn’t be bothered. Every small change I made synergized with the others to give me more energy and lessen my burdens. And before I knew it, I was happy and looking forward to tomorrow.

Believing that everyone who is happy is actually faking it is a coping mechanism, and a very bad one at that. It makes you feel slightly less horrible to think that everyone else feels just as shitty as you do. But fortunately, it isn’t true. Most people are happy. That’s why the people who share your view that it’d be better if we all died off are so few and far between. That’s why we laugh and sing and dance and make art and celebrate. The evidence for the existence of actual happiness is overwhelming, and the fact that you still think it’s bullshit is undeniable proof that you’re ill.

This is a very good thing, because it means it can be fixed. Forget SSRIs, they obviously won’t help you. Try antipsychotics, try ketamine, try ECT, try fucking tricyclics or MAOIs or a heroic dose of magic mushrooms if you have to. Worst case scenario, it doesn’t work and you stop taking them again. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. If you refuse to try getting better because you believe there’s no such thing, that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you’re going to feel like shit forever anyway, why not feel like shit while trying not to instead of just rolling over and taking it like something that already died but forgot to stop moving?

I AM a disabled person, sweetie. I have only partial vision in one eye. When my mother left and Dad killed himself as a result, I spent years as a depressed NEET with so little energy to spare that every day I would weigh the pros and cons of shitting the bed so I didn’t have to go to the effort to get up and drag my sorry ass to the toilet. I attempted suicide twice, and obviously failed both times, which just made me feel worse - on top of all the shit that made me want to kill myself in the first place, add “too incompetent to even die right” to the list. Great, huh? Then I got proper treatment and slowly shifted my perspective. I’m not “coping”, I’m sharing my experience.

One of the main symptoms of depression is being absolutely certain that things will either never change or will only get worse. 10,000 years of human history show this to be a categorically false belief. I’m telling you that it can and does get better, if you do right by yourself.

Like I said, do you really think that out of eight billion humans, everyone thinks and feels exactly like you? That’s just absurd. I can’t fathom the level of arrogance and narcissism it would take for a healthy person to seriously believe that.

Life can be wonderful and precious. If your life in particular happens to be “shit, crap and nothing”, are you really so self-centered that you think everyone’s life is just like yours and we’re all only pretending it isn’t?

Life is what you make of it. There are happy people in slums living under awful conditions, and then there are people like Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and obviously miserable. Anybody can be happy and enjoy life with a simple shift of perspective, and work to improve whatever bothers them.

If your life sucks so much that you’d rather all life become extinct, have you considered the possibility that you might have unipolar or bipolar depression? This is not at all a normal way of seeing things, and medication might help you immensely. And if that is the case, then I take back what I said about you being a bad person. Mental illness takes a large toll on our worldview and often renders us incapable of expending the energy to care about anyone other than ourselves. We behave and think just like a bad persom, but it’s not actually our fault. We just aren’t capable of being any different. I’ve been there. Thankfully I’m not there anymore.

You have a very limited view of what life is. I pity you deeply.

Then you’re a bad person. It’s quite simple.

Whatever quality of life you have enjoyed beyond living naked in a cave eating bugs and berries you owe to the people who came before you. Not just your ancestors, but the people who invented tools and discovered natural laws and organized societies and legal systems, the people who built the cities with their sewage systems and hospitals and electricity, the people who developed fertilizers and antibiotics and undergarnments that don’t itch like a thousand angry fleas are having a rave in your crotch. And now, after enjoying the fruits of 10,000 years of civilization, you decide that you’re the be-all and end-all of people and everybody who comes after you can go fuck themselves? Bad person. Plain and simple.