Can confirm that cultural messaging around drugs made me delay useful mental health treatment.
(Some) left straw-view: Meds are a way for The System to enslave you and destroy your creativity/individuality/humanity.
(Some) libertarian straw-view: You’re a strong smart Galt-like ubermensch already, why would you need drugs as a crutch?
Conservative depressingly-common view: All this is fake, mental health is fake, you’re just a whiny pussy who can’t handle real life, bootstrap yourself.
All these views intersected into a rarely-explicit “I don’t need medicine for my brain!” that hampered my life trajectory.
Then again, drug effects can have complex interactions with one’s thinking, so who knows? Maybe I would’ve been more productive in high school and gotten into a better college… and then proceeded to work on the wrong things! (This is what some rationalists think happened with rats/EA as a whole, or OpenPhil, or therabouts something something moderation vs extremism yadda yadda)
Can confirm that cultural messaging around drugs made me delay useful mental health treatment.
(Some) left straw-view: Meds are a way for The System to enslave you and destroy your creativity/individuality/humanity.
(Some) libertarian straw-view: You’re a strong smart Galt-like ubermensch already, why would you need drugs as a crutch?
Conservative depressingly-common view: All this is fake, mental health is fake, you’re just a whiny pussy who can’t handle real life, bootstrap yourself.
All these views intersected into a rarely-explicit “I don’t need medicine for my brain!” that hampered my life trajectory.
Then again, drug effects can have complex interactions with one’s thinking, so who knows? Maybe I would’ve been more productive in high school and gotten into a better college… and then proceeded to work on the wrong things! (This is what some rationalists think happened with rats/EA as a whole, or OpenPhil, or therabouts something something moderation vs extremism yadda yadda)