My mom was bipolar, but since she grew up in the 60s and 70s her experience probably isn’t going to match your son’s much. Especially since she didn’t even get a diagnosis until her mid/late 20s, after having symptoms for years.

So, the not sugar coated version of what I experienced: she was a drug addict, alcoholic, and would alternate between abuse and neglect. I’m sure part of that was no/wrong meds for a while, plus it culturally just being more okay to smack your kids back then. I saw a lot of screaming and arguing and crying that I thought was normal. She and my dad lost custody of one of my siblings for a while.

So that’s what poorly treated bipolar disorder can look like. That’s the bad place it can go if he decides he doesn’t need his meds anymore and there’s nothing wrong with him, which is made worse by the fact the meds are supposed to make you feel ‘normal,’ and some people prefer the mania to ‘normal.’

It’s absolutely manageable for many people, especially if he stays on top of his meds. It may not mean that he never has symptoms or that they don’t change, or that they never temporarily get worse or better. If he isn’t already in therapy that’s something you should really encourage, because meds are just one tool in the box, not the whole set. You mention a psychiatrist, but they manage meds rather than the emotional aspect, and it’s important to see a psychologist or therapist at least for a while on top of that.

Before the first verified individual migrating birds in the 1800s (via finding storks with spears still in them after migrating to and from Africa) people had a lot of weird ideas about why birds weren’t there in the winter. “They fly so far it’s literally off any map you’ve seen” probably made as much sense to the average person as them flying to the moon, or burrowing into the mud at the bottom of ponds to hibernate.

The latter probably made the most sense to many people who lived rurally, because bank swallows (sand martins elsewhere) actually do nest in tunnels they’ve dug into the sand near bodies of water. To anyone who went without seeing one all winter and then suddenly saw one leaving a burrow in the spring, ‘it slept there all winter’ is a lot less of a leap than ‘it flew thousands of miles round trip and got back when you weren’t looking.’

Thanks for admitting you read nothing but the headline.

2 looks delicious. Am I a beaver?

At any point while typing this comment you could have realized you were talking about an 11 year old child killed in a genocide and instead simply stopped. In fact, it’s not too late to delete it!

Someone is very mad all their posts kept getting naughty notes!

I always wonder if the people silently downvoting helpful comments like that know their downvotes are technically public, like anything you post on lemmy, if you’re using the right tool to look at a post.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to do callouts over it or even block people over a single downvote; god knows I fat finger upvotes all the time, and the only reason I don’t do the same for downvotes is Blahaj has them turned off. But boy does it validate my blocking instincts when I peek and it’s someone I’ve already blocked.

Maybe you have a name in cat that you don’t know.

In some airport I’ve had transfers in a few times (I want to say Detroit?) they have a smoking lounge that’s just four glass walls hooked up to a filtration system, and it cracks my shit up every single time to see the smoker terrarium.

My stupid is 100% organic. Can’t have the AI make you dumber if you don’t use it.

Good to hear that’s changing!

Remember being able to walk people to their gate, hug them goodbye, and watch the plane leave? Now you can only do this if you’re taking an unaccompanied minor to their gate.

“Nonsmoking section” that wasn’t even a separate room, just a half wall divider 🫠

How can anyone watch this and not want to drag the people responsible into the street? The repeated bombing of safe zones, over and over and over, is maddeningly inhumane.

People will say it doesn’t make a difference, but it apparently made enough of a difference that they still can’t find the guy that was putting pipe bombs around the US capitol. I think at least a portion of the “they can still identify you under your mask with computers” claims are based on very niche situations (high quality footage of someone wearing a thin, fabric mask) and exaggeration or allowing people to incorrectly draw their own conclusions.

Gonna be honest, I somehow missed all the dates on this post because I zeroed in on freecupholder.exe, lmao. Late 90s was when I saw it first, but it’s totally believable to me that people were doing this in 2006.

It was a more innocent time. I was introduced to cupholder.exe from my mom, who got it from a coworker’s chain email, as all things spread in those days. I think it might have specifically been called a coke can holder in the email because we were in the south, lol.

Base 10 means when you count it goes: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Base 4 means when you count it goes: 1 2 3 10. 10 would still be equivalent to 4, 11 would be 5, 12 would be 6, and 20 would be 8.

To an alien that counted in base 4, base 4 would be base 10, because 4 is where they start adding 0s to numbers and they don’t have a concept of what 4 is. Probably not really if they were a mathematician alien, but it made me laugh.

Putting the ‘strange’ in ‘getting some strange.’

Don’t forget it’s never too late to start masking.