HidoinoHito

your average human comes pre-installed with instincts to:

Befriend

Tell story

Make Thing

Investigate

Share knowledge

Laugh

Sing

Dance

Empathize with

Create

we are chalk full of survival instincts that revolve around connecting to others (dog-shaped others, robot-shaped, sometimes even plant-shaped) and making things with our hands

a plain white image, with two lines of text reading ““easier said than done”” in dark grey, and “reminders about helping someone through a particularly depressed time or a panic attack” in a horizontal gradient of light blue, pink, and green

This post is part two of easier said than done, part six: empathy and helping and understanding others. Please make sure to read that post as well as this one for more reminders and tips.

A lot of things, especially when it comes to recovery, are easier said than done. That thought alone can discourage those who are struggling into not trying at all. However, a better way to look at the phrase “easier said than done”, is that being able to say those things is a very good start on the journey towards getting it done. This small series of resources is going to explore that idea.

Specifically helping someone through a particularly depressed time or a panic attack can be difficult, especially if you have not experienced those things yourself. These are some very general and simple tips that may be able to help you, help others.

don’t just tell someone to ‘not worry about it’ or to ‘cheer up’

it may be meant in good spirits, but if the person could do those things right now, they most certainly would. in a hard time, they don’t need to be reminded of how simple it should be – that could lead to their mental health getting worse instead of better.

take them slowly through a simple breathing exercise (written exercise) / (breathing along with a gif), or ask them to count down from 100 with you

remind them that you’re here to help, and that you care

make sure that they are comfortable in the place that they are right now – if not, try your best to get them into a position or a place that they are

listen to what they have to say, and reassure them that things are going to be okay

please be patient – alongside listening, this is the most important thing that you can do

please understand that they might not want to talk right now, and might rather have some space to calm down on their own – in those times, just remind them that you are there for them, and remember to check in on them to see if they are okay later

think about the things that make the person you care for happy – or maybe get them to list them themselves

let them just let it all out, and remind them that it’s completely okay for them to cry

during a panic attack or depressive episode, someone can experience a lot of different emotions – including irritability – it may not just be crying or sadness; please try your best to not let that frustrate you, or to not respond in the same way to them

keep a calm and caring tone of voice

ask the person if they have experienced a panic attack before, and what they think might help them

reassure them that this specific attack or time will go away, and things will be okay

understand that these depressed times or panic attacks can come at any moment, and for sometimes no reason at all

make sure to remind the person that they are not a burden, and that you want to help them

I understand that the things above are “easier said than done”, but it is still important to say them, because that’s a start.

If you have any tips or reminders you would like to share about helping someone through a particularly depressed time or a panic attack, feel free to share them in your reblogs or replies. Thank you so much to one of the network’s community members for suggesting this easier said than done topic. 

I hope this could help, and I hope you have a lovely day today. :)

“easier said than done” reminder and tips series 

And sometimes I think, “Well, two hundred is technically less than four hundred.” And I have to stop myself, because - I am writing half as much as Terry Pratchett. Terry fucking Pratchett, who not only published regularly up until his death, but published books that were consistently good. 

And this has also been an immense help as a writer with ADHD, because I don’t feel bad when I take a break from writing - two hundred words works up quick, after all. If I take a break at 150, I have a whole day to write 50 more words, and I’ve rarely written less than 200 words and not felt the need to keep writing because I need to tie up a loose end anyways. 

1. Don’t keep doing things you hate.

2. Stop terrorizing yourself with your negative thoughts.

3. Choose to enjoy the simple pleasures of life.

4. Watch what you say; don’t put yourself or others down.

5. Take care of your body, and love and care for it.

6. Develop a life-style that helps develop self-esteem.

7. Don’t compare yourself with others; note where you have grown and changed.

8. Stop trying to change others; keep the focus on yourself.

9. Laugh a lot; enjoy yourself; and don’t take life too seriously.

The religion of Jesus’s people has no concept of a permanent hell and instructed its priests on how to induce miscarriages.  Jesus explicitly rejected the concept of disability as a divine punishment.  He spoke out against religious hypocrites.  He had enough respect for women to let his mother choose the time of his first miracle.  He blessed a same sex couple.  He told a rich man that he must give up his wealth to get to heaven, and also told a parable about a rich man suffering in agony in presumably Gehinnom (basically Purgatory) just to hammer the point home.  He told people to pay their taxes.  He declared “love your neighbor” to be one of the two commandments on which all laws hang.  He commanded his followers to help the poor.  He commanded them to help the sick and the needy.  He spent time with social outcasts.  He healed the servant of a high priest during his arrest rather than fighting back.  He was put to death by the occupying government because he was a political radical.

While there are things in his teaching that are inconsistent with Jewish teaching and thought (“I am the way, the truth, and the life” is the first one coming to my mind), his teaching was indisputably based in Torah and Jewish tradition; for example, the famous “the most important commandment is to love G-d, the second is to love your neighbor as yourself” can be traced DIRECTLY to Torah, in which the commandment “be kind to the stranger among you, as you were once strangers in Egypt” is repeated not once, not twice, but THIRTY-SIX times. This specific number, along with the fact that it’s repeated more than any other commandment in Torah, would in fact seem to mark it as the most important—and there’s even a midrash in which the famous rabbi Hillel agrees, stating: “that which is displeasing to you, do not do to others. The rest [of Torah] is all commentary. Now go and learn.”

Vaginal Thrush

Menorrhagia

Polycystic Ovary Syndrome

Fibroids

Add in fibromylgia, which affects 8x as many women as men, as well as lupus (and almost any other autoimmune condition), systemic exertion intolerance disorder (SEID), iron deficiency anæmia (all of which affect more women than men), and you have well over 25% of childbearing-age women globally living with chronic pain and tiredness.

Chronic pain is overwhelmingly experienced by women, and women are less likely to be taken seriously or given treatment by medical professionals. I went through two years of diagnostics to finally find out I had occipital neuralgia; I felt doubted when I described my pain at every step of the way, but was lucky to have a partner who was persistent in helping me get treatment.

This is why if you get pregnant your doctor will take you off basically any and all medication you’re taking (including mental health medication, can’t imagine any implications/dire consequences there), not because they know it will have an adverse affect on the foetus but because they have no idea. How wonderfully kind of them to prioritise the health and life of an unborn foetus over that of a living person, let’s just hope they don’t become ill whilst pregnant. How charmingly logical it is that they wouldn’t even bother to test drugs in people with a uterus because it’s all too difficult and gosh, darn what an ethical conundrum we’ve been faced with, let’s just not! Which is so in the spirit of capital S, Science!  

Take menstrual cramps, for example. Everybody knows that cramps are a normal part of menstruation, and that virtually all people who menstruate experience them throughout their lives, right?

Except that’s not right at all.

Yes, it’s true that about two-thirds of individuals who menstruate begin to experience menstrual pain during adolescence, but it’s basically a side effect of puberty, and normally subsides by your late teens. Only about 20-40% of menstruating adults experience menstrual pain on a regular basis - and according to some estimates, as much as 80% of that figure is due to undiagnosed endometriosis or some other underlying medical condition.

Yeah, roll those numbers around in your head: if you’re an adult who experiences menstrual cramps, it’s overwhelmingly likely that your pain is a symptom of some potentially serious medical condition.

The first misunderstanding has to do with the term “targeted advertising”. This doesn’t mean targeted based on the nature of the video it’s being run on. It means targeted based on the identity of the person watching the video. Basically, Google wants to show ads tailored as precisely as possible to your specific interests in order to maximise the odds that you’ll buy what they’re selling. They do this by analysing your online activity and building a profile – and here’s the trick: you do not need a Google account for them to do this.

How does that work? Well, every piece of hardware that’s directly connected to an Internet service provider – like, say, your home’s wireless router – has a uniquely identifiable network address assigned to it. This network address is exposed to every content provider you interact with, so that they know where to send the data you’ve requested. So when you view a YouTube video, Google may not have a name to put to that data, but they know the physical network location of the wireless router that was used to access it, and that’s enough to start building a profile.

And this doesn’t just apply to activity on YouTube. Google is also operates the world’s largest ad network. Whenever you visit a site that’s running ads, there’s a very good chance those ads are being served by Google’s ad network – which means that even if the site itself has nothing to do with Google, Google knows what pages on that site you visited and when, based on which ad slots you triggered as you navigated about. And again, even if you don’t have a Google account, they can still build a profile based on recognising your router’s network address in their activity logs.

Oh, but you block your ads? Too bad – Google is also the world’s largest web analytics provider, which means that literally millions of sites are just straight up handing their activity logs over to Google, so that Google can crunch numbers and generate statistics about their visitors for them. Did you visit a site that’s using Google’s analytics services? Google is gonna recognise your router’s network address in that site’s logs, and into the profile your activity goes.

In this way, Google is able to build a profile of your online activity without you ever having to sign up or opt in to anything. Certainly, having a Google account makes it easier for them, because now they can snoop your inbox for keywords and such, but that’s all supplementary: your network activity alone is enough to guess at most facets of your identity with startling accuracy, even to the point of cleanly identifying specific individuals in a home whose router has more than one regular user. When you watch a YouTube video, Google thus has a pretty good idea whose eyes are on that content, and can advertise accordingly.

So, here’s the trouble: collecting this sort of identifying information about minors (strictly speaking, kids under 13) is against the law. This isn’t a new law – it’s been on the books for over twenty years. It’s historically been the position of content networks like Google that it’s impossible not to build profiles on minors, because unless they register for an account with that specific network and voluntarily disclose their ages, there’s no way to know for sure that they’re actually minors. For the last couple of decades, the FTC has been inclined to accept this rationale; however, this is no longer the case. Google’s basically been told that now the onus is on them to put forth a reasonable effort to ensure that they’re not building detailed profiles of minors – which, one must bear in mind, is how it should have been to start with.

(Of course, in a perfect world, this sort of profile-based targeting would be prohibited for everyone who hasn’t explicitly opted into it, regardless of age, but that’s neither here not there.)

From a technical standpoint, full compliance would be trivial: Google would simply have to ensure that they only build profiles for individuals who’ve signed up for a Google account, voluntarily disclosed their ages, and explicitly opted in to have their online activity tracked. Running targeted ads on child-friendly content would pose no compliance problems as long as the targeted ads themselves were only displayed to verified adults. Of course, Google’s never actually going to do that, because it would torpedo their advertising empire. Instead, they’ve dreamed up a frankly bizarre argument:

1. That it’s okay for them to build detailed profiles of individuals who are probably minors as long as they never actually use those profiles to serve targeted ads to a child; and

2. It’s the responsibility of individual YouTube content producers to ensure that inappropriate use of targeted advertising does not occur, by voluntarily opting out of participating in targeted advertising if they have reason to believe that their videos are likely to be viewed by minors.