• 1 Post
  • 450 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle
  • My first GP phonecall to get an in-person appointment resulted in a tiny piece of paper with suicide/help hotlines, and an ADHD form.
    I was worried about ADHD and Bipolar. I wasn’t myself. At all. It got pretty bad.

    After an in person appointment and me failing to fill in my form (edit: or not filling it in correctly, I guess?), a referral to a psychiatrist wasn’t justified and I heard no more.

    I eventually seeked private healthcare for this.
    And proper private healthcare, not that fucking “better health” or whatever that YouTube ad is. From actual doctors from an actual clinic.
    After a 1 hour consultation and £300, I felt listened to.
    The psychiatrist identified both ADHD and Bipolar traits, but said they were not significant enough compared to the depression. Treat the depression first, then circle back to the other possible issues.

    6 months on SNRIs, and I can’t believe the difference.
    I don’t feel like I’m struggling with memory loss. The traits I thought could be ADHD (hyperfocus sessions and yet easily distracted - exclusively) became manageable. The every day tasks suddenly were accomplishable. I haven’t tracked my mood very closely, but I’m either on a 2 month hypomania streak or this is actually just what I’m normally like and I can’t remember what feeling normal actually is. So maybe any bipolar I do have isn’t impacting my life so much.

    It took 6 months between the GP disappointment and seeking private care for it.
    It’s the best fucking £300 I’ve ever spent.
    The reason I got there, as opposed to accepting the GPs diagnosis, was a colleague talked about their experience. They talked about their depression, a failed visit to a GP, seeking a 2nd opinion, getting meds, and turning their life around.
    They said “don’t stop until you feel heard. Don’t stop until you agree with the doctor”.




  • Yeh, mental health issues are just health issues.
    It took me a while to realise that. A broken brain (whether Alzheimer’s, chronic depression or whatever) is just like a broken leg (or broken arm, or chronic back pain or whatever).

    You don’t ask someone with a broken leg or chronic back pain to help you move house.
    I guess it’s easier to tell when someone has a physical injury, which probably removes some of the stigma around talking about it.














  • 4 years ago (best number I can find, considering IAs blog pages are down) IA used about 50 petabytes on servers that have 250 terabytes of storage and 2gbps network.
    From this, we can conclude that 1 TB of storage requires 8mbps of network speed.
    Let’s just say that average/all residential broadband has spare bandwidth for 8mbps symmetrical.
    We would need 50,000 volunteers to cover the absolute minimum.
    Probably 100k to 200k to have any sort of reliability, considering it’s all residential networking and commodity hardware.

    In the last 4 years, I imagine IA has increased their storage requirements significantly.
    And all of that would need to be coordinated, so some shards don’t get over-replicated