On today’s episode of Walt Right Perspectives I interview my shrink—a Gen X woman certified as a Nurse Practitioner who’s recently become a successful entrepreneur in the digital mental health space—about the state of mental healthcare in America.
Topics include:
Her own professional background
The mass prescription of amphetamines for ADHD
How does she discern between people who earnestly worry about having ADHD versus people cynically trying to get drugs?
How amphetamines work neurochemically
Is the mass prescription of amphetamines just a necessary armor against agency-shredding dopamine traps, mass marijuana use, etc.?
The arms race of hyperreal stimulation technology vs. hyper-optimized monotony
Holistic alternatives to Adderall a la neuro-cognitive peptides
Her experience working with people who have personality disorders
Why BPD patients are the hardest to treat
The influence of socio-environmental factors on personality disorders
The reasons why so many young girls think they have BPD these days
Why everyone thinks they’re autistic—do modern young people legitimately have more issues parsing social cues or maintaining theory of mind?
How the death of the monoculture undermines cognitive empathy
How constant stimulation hurts youth emotional regulation
Millennials guys would be seriously bothered by not getting laid, whereas lots of Gen Z guys seem to not even care
Why young women are opting out of the dating market
How she would compare women of her own generation at ages 23-25 to the struggling Zoomette professionals she works with today
Young men are significantly more likely these days to discuss their own emotional vulnerability—is this a good thing or a bad thing for society?
Why she feels modern young people are significantly less capable of emotional regulation than young people several decades ago
Should we look at maladaptive individual behavior more in terms of individual free will or in terms of societal incentive structures?
Are young kids inciting drama because we’ve disenchanted the world?
Where do you even draw the line between a behavioral issue and a medical issue?
How do you accurately assess—let alone effectively police—the bad behavior of charismatic and attractive people with severe personality disorders?
Why lots of psychiatrists don’t assign normative import to the DSM
You can’t really control the tendency of high functioning mentally ill people to romanticize their own mental illness because it often makes you feel your best
Why so many attorneys have bipolar disorder
It’s existentially horrifying to doubt your own impression of reality
How do we adjudicate the extent to which an individual has real agency?
In a low trust hypermodern social ecology young men are socially incentivized to perform as NPD and women are incentivized to perform as BPD
Does she think Walt has NPD?
What message would she give to modern young people struggling with chronic mental health issues?
Is it inauthentic to actively curate your own emotions, or MORE authentic because it reflects a more intentional and less animalistic approach to life?
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