Batshit Crazy & Medicated for your Protection

• How they strive to enforce politically correct speech.I'm supposed to be "a person with mental illness" not "batshit crazy."
• How they devolved from being the National Association of the Mentally Ill to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
• How their board of directors is now loaded with professionals, retaining only the one token consumer (mentally interesting person) as required by their bylaws, when it used to be all family members and consumers.
• How their idea of fighting the stereotypes of, and stigma associated with mental illness is by issuing press releases, and urging members to write to their local newspapers, complaining about TV commercials and sitcoms that supposedly mock us nutjobs.
• No, really.That's the sort of thing theywaste their time and money on.
• Yet when it comes to fighting one of the main causes of stigma, the mistaken belief that the mentally interesting are more likely to commit violent crime, NAMI is strangely silent.

• What’s old is still new. I’ve converted and updated Bryan’s article on How to Apply For SSDI/SSI When You’re Mentally Interesting. As the article was originally published in 2004, and written and edited by a couple of guys who went through the process of getting disability benefits in 2002, the page with all the links to other sites is probably the most useful.

• More new old content. The Adderall page is up. That leaves only the lithium orotate page, which I may or may not convert to the new format.
• And a page on medications used to treat ADD/ADHD in adults.
• Also a page on Sleep Disorders, which is actual new content.

• Another rave from the grave of the non-wiki version of the site is back: site statistics. I’m sure that means a lot to both of the people who are interesting in that sort of thing.

• Back on 23 July I enabled the right sidebar. In addition to providing space for links to other sites, and the replacement for the support group & more information pages, I also have given you, yes you the opportunity to change the color scheme, typeface, and size of wiki. At least on your screen. If you’re on a real computer and not a smart or not-so-smart phone. Why I made the announcement for this in all the usual places except this page is beyond me.
• What I have done today is something long overdue: a guide on how to actually use this site. Theory of mind is very different for those of us in the Asperger’s spectrum, which is why you’ll often hear us yell, “Isn’t it fucking obvious?” a lot. It also explains why we hate to write [l]user manuals. Many, if not most of us assume anyone who can grasp certain basic concepts must automatically know how to use our elegantly and efficiently designed and executed piece of crap. So I’ve expanded the old How to Read Our Drug Guides pages to now be the How to Navigate this Site, Use its Features & Read the Drug Guides pages.

• I’ve converted the Depacon and valproate pages to the new format.
• That leaves only the Adderall page and a page on stimulants/ADD meds left to convert from the old to new formats. Or not, if I don’t think there’s anything worth salvaging on the stimulants page.
  
  • Duh - and the lithium orotate page. That’s a low priority, but I’ll leave the html version around. I don’t know if I’ll ever convert it, but I won’t delete it.
• Except for those three pages, everything from the old site should redirect to the new wiki. Including pages I don’t plan on updating, such as links to various support group sites. What I plan on having is one massive page of links to other sites that may or may not be categorized.
• There are still a couple other things I might still convert. Eventually. For now their HTML equivalents are going away.

• List of changes to medication pages
• List of changes to medication class/category pages. AEDs, antidepressants, etc.
• List of changes to medication information pages. Various articles about meds.
• List of changes to pages about the Crazy Meds site. Our bibliography, who we are, etc. This also includes stuff like copyright information and the big-ass disclaimer at the bottom of each page.
• List of changes to reader comments. And any pages associated with reader comment maintenance.

In response to the worsening shortage of prescription medicines, a coalition of more than 30 groups representing physicians, medical centers, hospitals, pharmacists and a large generic drugmaker has written Congress asking for incentives to be created to staunch a crisis that is jeopardizing patient safety across the US.

[...]

Specifically, the coalition suggests that the FDA could offer reduced application fees for medicines in short supply or discounted fees if a drugmaker demonstrates that its contingency plans are sufficient to reduce the risk of a shortage if production is halted.

• Several books and a couple of screenplays
• Encryption software for social media
• Learning Japanese
• Numerous articles for Crazy Meds (since 2004)

• Visit the Grand Canyon, preferably off-season and after the air has been cleared by a good storm.
• While I'm in the neighborhood, see the Arizona Meteor Crater.
• Live somewhere between 53° and 60° north latitude for at least two years. I'd also like to be at least 3,000 feet above sea level and have a clear view to the horizon facing north, east, or west. A completely unobstructed northern view would be difficult, but east or west is certainly possible. As it's never going to happen I may as well dream about living on a fucking Scandinavian mountain top.
• There were more, but since I read this article in The Atlantic, I'm not caring all that much about, well, anything. I go into too much detail about it all on my Crazy Meds-based health blog.

• I'm a true child of the Space Age, as I was born the day John Glenn made his historic space flight. My mother isn't exaggerating all that much when she says I popped out the same time he emerged from his capsule. As a kid I built lots of shitty model rockets.
• 1976 - The one time it snows in Stockton during the entire time I lived there is on my birthday. When I'm sick.
• 1980 - The tradition of the birthday nervous breakdown begins. It takes me about two years to fully recover from this one.
• Before we get married, my (now ex) wife moved in to my apartment. At some point after that (this happened about 30 years ago) her former roommate's boyfriend moved in with the former roommate. Said boyfriend was an abusive douchebag and I spent my birthday supervising his eviction and helping to prevent the former roommate from changing her mind. While those activities were essentially positive, learning about what had been happening was the suckass part.
• 1986 - Second nervous breakdown begins. It started a week or so before my birthday, but close enough. I'm over this one in a little over a year.
• 1989 - Saw Laibach at the SF I-Beam. They didn't get on stage until long after midnight, and were drunk as fuck when they did. I smuggled in a tape recorder, which managed to not record anything.
• 1999 - Three days after being hit by a car, it's pretty obvious that one of the cats isn't going to recover.
• 2002 - Most recent, and worst of all birthday breakdowns. I have yet to fully recover from this one, and I don't know if I ever will.
• I've spent a lot of birthdays in hospital waiting rooms and doctors' offices. Sometimes driving for hours to get to specialists. I wasn't always the patient.
• 2005 - Hunter S. Thompson dies, Robot Chicken premieres. I have no idea how to rate this one.