soul_of_sidartha said:When I was just a little kid, they were shooting at me—they actually tried to kill me. They leveled my house with tanks and tried to take out my elderly parents. They tore my entire town apart and half my street ended up occupied. And now, fifteen years later, you all refuse to celebrate the way I want to, insisting instead on celebrating their way. Honestly, I'm starting to have serious doubts about who even won that damn war. Thanks a lot.
In my book, this will always be one of the best explanations for why someone might despise Mexican music—there’s really no argument to be made when soul_of_sidartha puts it so profoundly. 👍
That said, I wouldn't necessarily agree with the whole social background theory regarding the psychology of listening to this stuff.
Personally, the war left such a deep psychological scar on me that I feel physically sick whenever I hear Mexican music. So, what is someone going to say to me? Maybe I am mentally unstable because I can't stand Mexican music—I don't know, maybe that's true—but nobody can tell me that celebrities like Zoran Mamić, Ivica Todorić, Čobanković, or Milan Bandić are the standard for people from certain social backgrounds... you know, the kind of people who, based on their economic status, probably should be listening to Mozart.
You certainly aren't going to run into anyone like Ivo Sanders or Ivica Račan at some local American diner where they blast this trash.
Why is that!!??
Because their psyches are just fundamentally, genetically different—so all those theories about social standing, peer pressure, or environment just fall flat here.
I'm not talking about the intelligence of the listener, mind you, but rather a genetic predisposition; these habits aren't learned, they're innate. 😎
And my hatred for this music? Well, it's both innate and learned. 😁
Jon said:OK, let me be brief, but look—underneath all that, "reality" as some objective truth just doesn't exist. Not as something convenient, not as something inconvenient... it simply doesn't. Reality is always subjective, which means everyone is essentially living in their own private little universe.
Now, I consider myself a perfectly sane individual, and I truly believe that schizophrenia isn't a "disease" in the way we usually define them—and frankly, I don't think it should even be treated like one..
Maybe briskgull27 can tell us what happens when she stops taking her meds, Jon. And while we're at it, I'll tell you about what happened with a colleague's father—about 20 years ago now—who lived with schizophrenia.
So, this guy—his father—goes over to visit some friends with his wife. They’re having a nice dinner, everything is fine, except he hasn't taken his medication for a few days because he was feeling "fine," you know? Then, the man heads to the restroom. On his way, he hears these suspicious voices—that's how he described it later—coming from one of the rooms. He walks into the room, and there's this tiny, strange little creature laughing and talking to him--I'm going to kill you all, I've been watching you for months and finally the end has come.
The man—this schizophrenic patient, I mean—just absolutely lost it. He grabbed this "creature" right out of the bed, threw open the window, and tossed him straight out.
Thankfully, this "strange creature" landed in some bushes next to the house (thank God it wasn't a high floor), so he was okay, just some scrapes and bruises. 😎 That EVIL CREATURE was actually a two-and-a-half-year-old child.
I honestly don't know how you could view that as anything other than a disease that needs medical intervention. You just have to hope that science eventually finds an effective way to suppress schizophrenia completely, so these sudden, violent shifts in behavior stop happening.
Look, I get what you're saying, but your post keeps pushing this idea—this weird notion—that just by refusing to eat meat, someone somehow evolves into a better version of themselves.
So, the logic is: you eat meat, you stay stagnant, but skip the meat and suddenly you've evolved into some superior human being? You know, I really can't stand that part of the narrative—this whole comparison where you jump from cannibalism and carnivory to vegetarianism, then veganism, macrobiotics, and finally, the absolute absurdity of "living off sunlight" being some kind of ultimate ZEN state.
That’s exactly my point! It always circles back to the same condescending trope—the idea that people who don't eat meat are inherently more intellectually advanced, or more socially conscious, or just more "in tune" with nature and the environment than everyone else.
Honestly, I’d probably devour Milton’s meal in one sitting—but then again, I’d happily polish off yours too, because your cooking looks pretty incredible. 😬 😬
Hmm... I don't know. I have an aquarium at home and I'm really into my little fish, so the idea of killing them just to eat them? Yeah, that's a hard pass for me.
I mean, how does anyone even go about fishing, killing a fish, and then actually eating it? 😎
Look, you’re a sane individual, and because of that, I actually respect your take. 👍
Honestly, it just drives me absolutely crazy—the sheer amount of extremism out there—where people try to force vegetarianism down everyone's throat like it’s some kind of divine, enlightened, superior way to live... blah, blah, blah 👎
Do vegetarians actually live longer than meat-eaters? NO. Are they any happier? NO. Is their sex life better? Absolutely NOT. Do they have more money in the bank? NO. Do they enjoy a higher social status? NO. Do they love animals more? Not necessarily. Are they superior athletes? No way. Are they "greater" artists? I don't think so.
Look, I have zero interest in going vegetarian—honestly, I just don't see the point. I knew two women back in the day, one was strictly vegan and the other followed a macrobiotic diet, and both of them passed away from cancer just a few years ago—one from breast cancer and the other from ovarian cancer.
Brenda Cook4 said:The treatment being discussed here feels more like pure biochemistry than actual psychiatry! It’s basically just 'keep popping those pills'!
Well, here’s my take on why psychotherapy often fails when dealing with schizophrenia: We actually have solid evidence now regarding genetic predisposition—meaning, there's a biological leaning toward developing schizophrenia. Basically, an individual carries a specific gene that, for reasons we don't fully grasp yet, can be triggered and lead to full-blown illness. It tends to run in families, too. I mean, the risk is statistically higher if one or both parents have it, though—and I should emphasize this—it doesn't guarantee that every child of an affected parent will develop the condition. When looking at schizophrenia, we might be talking about a fundamental breakdown in the connection between the temporal and frontal lobes, or perhaps even atrophy—that's the wasting away of brain cells—within the frontal lobe itself. Another hallmark finding in patients is reduced metabolic activity in certain parts of the frontal region, what they call hypofrontality. According to biochemical theories, this disorder is linked to a massive imbalance of chemical messengers in the brain known as neurotransmitters. Their whole job is to shuttle signals—information, really—from one nerve cell to the next, which we call neurons. Some research suggests that a schizophrenic brain simply isn't wired to process information correctly or filter out the noise based on importance. Consequently, patients get totally overwhelmed by a flood of trivial external stimuli, often clinging to useless details while missing the big picture entirely. This failure in information processing stems from a combination of chemical issues and structural brain abnormalities. Nowadays, the neurodevelopmental hypothesis is a very prominent way to look at the causes of schizophrenia. The idea is that it's essentially a developmental brain disorder. During fetal development—before birth, actually—faulty connections start forming between neurons. These glitches stay hidden, totally unnoticed, until adolescence hits. We're talking about incredibly subtle changes, but once the disease manifests, those tiny shifts show up across all sorts of behavioral patterns. The older theories suggesting viral or autoimmune causes aren't quite as central to the conversation in modern medicine anymore.
To build on the points made in this article, about 90% of patients with schizophrenia show enlarged latent ventricles on an MRI scan. 🙂
Have you ever actually sat through a brain MRI? I mean, most likely you have. What did the results show—any issues with the latency chambers, or maybe some visible damage that popped up on the scan??
Look, if you ask a hundred random people on the street and ninety of them tell you that you're both dim-witted and unattractive—well, I guess the math just points to a 90% chance that they're actually right. 😁
Those teenage years are long gone now—you’re changing, you’re maturing, and you start to actually notice how much people's behavior shifts over time. It's... well, it's a lot to process. You change, they change—it's all connected. And honestly, maybe you were even an annoyance to someone back in the day because of how you acted—who knows? Maybe people were whispering about you behind your back, or maybe they weren't... I guess we can never really be sure, right? ????
As time goes on, I feel like we really ought to stop obsessing over how we judge others—and more importantly, how we worry about how they see us. Because, let's be real, maybe we *are* those people sometimes. Maybe our own self-image is just... I don't know, skewed? A little bit distorted? It happens. 😉
Look, let’s be real here—there isn't a single piece of software on this planet that can just pluck a vocal track away from the rest of the music in a standard WAV file, especially when you're talking about those final studio masters you buy on an audio CD.
The best you can hope for is to maybe muffle it or turn the volume down a bit, but that's about it.
A finished studio recording is basically just dumping every single instrument onto TWO channels—left and right. That's it.
In most cases, the vocals are panned right down the center, or maybe shifted just a hair to the left or right, but they're baked in there. You could technically strip out a vocal if you were working with MIDI sequencers, but that only works if the entire composition was built using the MIDI standard to begin with.
So, none of the usual suspects like Adobe Audition, Cubase, WaveLab, Cool Edit Pro, or Sound Forge are going to save you here.
I remember about fifteen years ago, you could actually get your hands on these multiplexed WAV CD recordings imported from the USA where the master was done on something like 36 or 48 channels. Back then, you could actually "switch off" individual instruments or the vocals one by one. But, because of the pirates even back then, they stopped making them. People would take high-quality recordings, overlay their own voices, tweak the melody just enough, and boom—you had a cheap imitation of a studio master.😁
Well, look—if this isn't some deep-seated internal issue but more about just... I don't know, struggling to navigate certain situations, there are actual techniques out there used by Gestalt psychologists and whatnot. And honestly? The common thread for everyone is simply changing how you act. The whole idea of therapy is basically learning how to shift those flawed perspectives that keep landing you in unnecessary conflicts in the first place.
If you want to dive deeper into that, you should probably talk to @Neli on Twitter; she’s really the one here who actually deals with those kinds of therapeutic methods.
There’s also that other route—just don't take the meds at all 🙂
Look, these drugs aren't nearly as terrifying as you've made them out to be in your head. There really isn't any reason to be scared.
I mean, honestly, I know plenty of people who have been on multiple psychotropic medications their entire lives and still live to be ninety.
I personally know quite a few of them.
Maybe you should look into psychoanalysis or some actual psychotherapy, though—but here in the US, you won't find much of that through the public system unless you're actually hospitalized; otherwise, you're looking at private practice.
As for the medication, you just keep taking it for as long as your psychiatrist tells you to. You stop when they say you're ready to stop.
Tyler Ortiz6 said:I started psychotherapy a few weeks ago (after fighting anxiety for two and a half years now) and I'm taking 0.25 mg of Lexapro once a day (split—half at noon and half in the evening). My psychiatrist prescribed Zoloft and I gave it a shot, but man, I felt absolutely terrible that day—just restless all day long, like I was waiting for a panic attack to hit at any second—so I didn't take it the next day. I called my doctor and she told me to try taking just a half dose instead, saying it’s a normal reaction while the body adjusts to Zoloft, and that this feeling might last up to two weeks until things settle down. Is that actually how it works? It confuses me a bit because Zoloft is an antidepressant, but I'm not depressed.😕
Well, anxiety and depression are often tangled up together—it can be really hard to tell if someone is purely anxious or if there's some underlying depression masking itself as anxiety. Zoloft, Paxil, and those other modern SSRIs are used all the time for situations where anxiety and depression show up together.
The medication takes time to "kick in"—meaning its full effect usually doesn't start for about 15 days—and in the meantime, you were given an anxiolytic like Lexapro, which your doctor will likely phase out soon enough since it's generally contraindicated to use it alongside that group of antidepressants. Maybe Zoloft just isn't your thing. Maybe you'll need something else entirely. There are so many questions and so few answers, and I know you're feeling impatient. 😎
William Williams27 said:Being a vegetarian isn't just a diet for me—it’s who I am. It’s how I think, how I feel, and honestly, I couldn't be anything else even if I tried. I've been called stupid and self-righteous so many times because of it... and now, seeing this study pop up and fuel these kinds of debates, I’m certain people who aren't vegetarians are just going to use it as more ammunition to call us all pretentious fools. Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions here, but fine—go ahead, try to change my mind.
Why on earth would you be "stupid" or "self-righteous" when actual "studies" seem to suggest otherwise? 😎
Look, I don't have a problem with vegetarians—really, I don't mock anyone—but from my experience, some of you can be incredibly exhausting when you start preaching about your "healthy" lifestyle. And frankly, based on what we know about nutrition, there are massive amounts of omega-3 fatty acids that are proven to help with anxiety, depression, and all that other stuff. 😎
There is absolutely zero scientific proof that vegetarians are inherently smarter, healthier, or even live longer than non-vegetarians who actually eat balanced meals and maintain a healthy weight.
A single study is one thing, but actual scientific evidence is something else entirely. 😛
Just take a look at Mike Tyson, our very own legend 😛
He just steamrolls through these soft, greasy little nobodies and crushes them all the same—meanwhile, poor George Foreman, well, he let himself go because of some woman and now, as soon as he runs into anyone with an actual punch, he gets absolutely wrecked 😁
But hey, if George actually had a brain in his head, maybe things would be different, but let's be real, he doesn't 😁