Fandom Medical

Avolition (difficulty with starting and staying on tasks, usually because of apathy or executive dysfunction) is a "negative" symptom of schizophrenia (as well as being a symptom of a lot of other disorders such as depression and ADHD) and can affect up to 60% of people with the disorder. People with avolition can have trouble with hobbies, participating in school or work, engaging in hygiene tasks like showering and brushing teeth, maintaining their living space, and even sleeping.

Here are a few things that can help:

If the thing is too much, try to break it down into smaller parts. For example, if washing the dishes is too much, make the first step gathering the dishes, the second step soaking them, the third step washing them, etc... and do those steps in one-step intervals.

If actually starting the thing is too much, consider bargaining with yourself: you'll do 3 minutes of the thing, but if you don't like it you can stop after that. Most people will keep doing the thing for longer once they start, but it gives you an out if you really hate it, and at least 3 minutes of the thing got done, and that's better than nothing.

If the number of tasks in a day is too much, plan things in three step chunks. Have only a vague idea of what you'll do after the first three steps are up and make the next three steps up once you've completed the first three. For example, if you're going to the store, plan to gather what you need to leave the house, get on the bus, and arrive at the store. Then from there you plan the next three steps, like planning what you'll buy, collecting it, and checking out.

If you have a hard time figuring out what to do, sit down with someone and plan out a schedule for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly tasks. You may not care about what you're doing, but knowing what you have to do without having to put thought into it can be helpful.

In conjunction with checklists and schedule, giving yourself permission not to care about a task. Apathy is real, but you don't have to care about yourself to take a shower. You don't have to like showers to take a shower. You just have to do it.

Play pretend with yourself- you're not taking care of you when you shower or brush your hair, you're taking care of yourself as a child or an animal in your responsible care.

If tasks take a lot of energy and starting them feels overwhelming because of that, figure out what you're willing to "pay" for a given task and stick to your "budget". Some tasks are going to give you a certain number of spoons and some are going to take away spoons. Some are going to do both. Pay attention to what tasks are draining and what are giving you spoons. Then you can make a mental spoon bank that allows you to figure out in advance what a task will cost you.

If starting a specific task is challenging, but you can do other things, try doing a little of something you want to do (or that brings you pleasure) first. This builds up some motivation for other tasks. Every time you feel like you can't do a needed task anymore, do a little more of what brings you pleasure.

Establish and meet small goals. Goals can be something like "stood out of bed for 5 minutes." You don't have to write them down, but do something to establish them as something you want to do today, like saying them out loud. Once you do it, try to intentionally feel a sense of accomplishment. The goal of this exercise is that (sometimes artificial) sense of accomplishment that you can build on.

There are a lot of medications in use today whose chemicals can be found in plants/minerals (or which were originally derived from plants/minerals). Note that most of these, while originally derived directly from plant material, are currently made in a lab.

Acetaminophen comes from chemically changing acetanilide, a chemical found in coal tar.

Aspirin comes from chemically changing salicin, a chemical found in a number of plants (willow, poplar, meadowsweet, black haw, cramp bark, among others).

Atropine (used in emergency medicine to increase heart rate and treat certain poisonings, among other things) is found in a number of plants in the nightshade family.

Caffeine is present in a lot of plants (it's a natural insecticide) including tea, coffee, cocoa, and yaupon holly.

Cocaine (both the local anesthetic and the illicit substance) is from the coca plant.

Colchicine is used to treat gout and comes from autumn crocus.

Digoxin (a medication used to treat heart failure) comes from the foxglove plant.

L-Dopa, used to treat Parkinson's disease, comes from Mucuna species (cowage, velvetbean).

Nicotine, a stimulant, comes from tobacco.

Opium is the dried sap of poppy pods. From it can be isolated morphine and codeine. Processing morphine further produces heroin.

Pseudoephedrine and ephedrine, medications used as decongestants (among other things), come from ma huang and ephedra.

Quinine is an antipyretic (fever reducer) that used to work against malaria (malaria is now resistant to quinine). it also comes from the cinchona tree.

Quinidine is an antiarrhythmic drug used to treat bad heart rhythms. it comes from the cinchona tree.

Reserpine is a drug used to treat high blood pressure (among other things). It comes from Indian snakeroot.

Scopolamine, used to treat nausea and motions sickness, comes from black henbane, stinking nightshade, and henpin.

Which may not seem like much, but I haven't written this much in one week since 2022. I haven't written more than about 1,500 words of fiction in the last year.

And like, man, it's a rough rough draft. I'm really just focusing on getting words on a page right now. But it feels really good to write again.

I would offer three products for sale on Etsy:

Product 1: Unflavored electrolyte powder per the WHO 2002 ORS recipe (sodium, chloride, potassium, citrate, and glucose). Rice syrup solids would provide the glucose instead of corn- or wheat-based glucose powder for allergy/MCAS purposes.

Product 2: Saltea: Sweet tea flavored electrolyte powder according to the WHO 2002 ORS recipe (basically the same as above but with instant black tea added).

Product 3: For those of you just looking to up your sodium chloride intake, I would have a POTS special- a lower potassium and no citrate version of Product 1 (or potentially Product 2 if there was interest).

If you are a nurse and you're feeling like you can't work on a floor anymore and clinic/education jobs are really competitive/not for you, consider methadone clinics.

They're literally always hiring and it's a very low spoons (physical and mental) job. I work at a methadone clinic and we used to have a nurse who used a wheelchair that worked there. I have a significant psychiatric disability that makes working on a floor impossible, but I can easily make it through a day working where I work.

You get there really early in the morning so by the time you leave it's like 1300 and you have the rest of your day free. I am literally in full time school right now. I have the time and energy to do that and work 32 hr/week. And I wouldn't consider myself particularly flush with mental spoons.

You get to see people doing their best every day. And you really do get to see people get better over time in this job in a way you rarely do with floor nursing. It's a surprisingly rewarding field of nursing.

The job is repetitive and task-oriented. Once you learn how to do all the tasks there's not a lot of deviation that isn't going to come from a doctor's order. The biggest decision you have to make-LPN or RN- is "is this person safe to take methadone today?" and you have a lot of tools to determine that.

I already have his best friend (not a medical professional) trying to talk him through it, keep his spirits up, give him sips of water, and help him to the bathroom. I have another character (a doctor) administer treatments and painful wound care. The whole thing takes place in a low-resource 35-year-post-apocalypse setting in the summer in Ohio (hot, buggy, and humid).

I am happy to entertain the possibility other characters, but generally I want the friend character to be worried and feeling out of her depth, and the doctor character to be kind of jaded, grizzled, and sad because he thinks there's a good chance the main will die.