Random Thought Thread

[Renegade7]

Don't do lithium.

It works, it can help, but it's

Just not worth it. Don't.

 

[Chew]

19 minutes ago, AlvinWaltonIsMyBoy said:

I got so drunk last night I thought Hot Tub Time Machine 2 was pretty funny. 

At least Robinson & Corddry gave us this gem:

 

 

[Elessar78]

 

this is the one that KILLS me 

57 minutes ago, The Evil Genius said:

Kylie Jenner is the youngest self-made* billionaire ever. 

 

 

*By self-made I meant her fame is directly tied to her half sister spreading her legs to a no name rapper on tape 15+ years ago.

 

That said, she's used that ill gotten fame to make crazy dollars. Good for her. But let's not pretend...Kylie wouldn't have a millionth of that money had Kim K not made that tape.

This church-going lady in her 70s that I worked with asked a few years ago how the Kim Kardashian got famous.  She really didn't know. So in vivid detail, I described the video and what Ray-J did to her. Not really. I didn't have the heart to tell her the truth. 

[The Evil Genius]

TBH...the Kardashians/Jenner's weren't middle class as they were likely millionaires pre KK tape anyways. But they definitely were not on the path of billionaires ever...

[Riggo-toni]

[Renegade7]

Kardashian's talent is they are a marketing empire and have their hands in several successful business ventures while most people don't own a single one.  Devil's advocate here, but they are not the first group of pretty folk we ever seen, so limiting this to a single sex tape really doesn't do what they've accomplished justice.  Credit where credit is due at this point.

[Kosher Ham]

Agreed. They are way past a sex tape. It is a lot more than that. They are hustlers. They work all the time for what they have. 

[The Evil Genius]

1 hour ago, Renegade7 said:

Kardashian's talent is they are a marketing empire and have their hands in several successful business ventures while most people don't own a single one.  Devil's advocate here, but they are not the first group of pretty folk we ever seen, so limiting this to a single sex tape really doesn't do what they've accomplished justice.  Credit where credit is due at this point.

 

51 minutes ago, Kosher Ham said:

Agreed. They are way past a sex tape. It is a lot more than that. They are hustlers. They work all the time for what they have. 

 

That wasn't my point. My point is they benefitted from the crazy attention of it. Without it, they'd likely be nowhere close to what they are now.

[skinsmarydu]

Hey @Mr. Sinister...was that your first time watching American Beauty? 

[TradeTheBeal!]

#dank

 

 

[Mr. Sinister]

10 minutes ago, skinsmarydu said:

Hey @Mr. Sinister...was that your first time watching American Beauty? 

 

Nope. It's one of my favorite movies ever. It was the first time I had seen it (or anything else Spacey) since everything broke.

[skinsmarydu]

1 minute ago, Mr. Sinister said:

 

Nope. It's one of my favorite movies ever. It was the first time I had seen it (or anything else Spacey) since everything broke.

Great flick, equal humor & drama. 

The scene when the wife & the realtor dude pulled up to the DT window is one of THE  GREATEST EVER. 

Now I wanna watch it again.

[China]

2 hours ago, Renegade7 said:

Don't do lithium.

I works, it can help, but it's

Just not worth it. Don't.

 

 

Should We All Take a Bit of Lithium?

 

THE idea of putting a mind-altering drug in the drinking water is the stuff of sci-fi, terrorist plots and totalitarian governments. Considering the outcry that occurred when putting fluoride in the water was first proposed, one can only imagine the furor that would ensue if such a thing were ever suggested.

 

The debate, however, is moot. It’s a done deal. Mother Nature has already put a psychotropic drug in the drinking water, and that drug is lithium. Although this fact has been largely ignored for over half a century, it appears to have important medical implications.

 

Yet despite the studies demonstrating the benefits of relatively high natural lithium levels present in the drinking water of certain communities, few seem to be aware of its potential. Intermittently, stories appear in the scientific journals and media, but they seem to have little traction in the medical community or with the general public.

 

When I recently attended a psychopharmacology course in which these lithium studies were reviewed, virtually none of the psychiatrists present had been aware of them.

 

...

 

Researchers began to ask whether low levels of lithium might correlate with poor behavioral outcomes in humans. In 1990, a study was published looking at 27 Texas counties with a variety of lithium levels in their water. The authors discovered that people whose water had the least amount of lithium had significantly greater levels of suicide, homicide and rape than the people whose water had the higher levels of lithium. The group whose water had the highest lithium level had nearly 40 percent fewer suicides than that with the lowest lithium level.

 

Almost 20 years later, a Japanese study that looked at 18 municipalities with more than a million inhabitants over a five-year period confirmed the earlier study’s finding: Suicide rates were inversely correlated with the lithium content in the local water supply.

 

Click on the link for more

 

------------------------------------------------

 

Do antidepressants work?

 

The best evidence about the effectiveness of antidepressants comes from randomised trials and meta-analyses of these trials. The vast majority of these studies are funded and controlled by the manufacturers of antidepressants, which is an obvious conflict of interest. These trials often last only weeks – far less than the duration that most people are on antidepressants. The subjects in these trials are selected carefully, typically excluding patients who are elderly, who have other diseases, or who are on several other drugs – in other words, the very kinds of people who are often prescribed antidepressants – which means that extrapolating the evidence from these trials to real patients is unreliable. The trials that generate evidence seeming to support antidepressants get published, while trials that generate evidence suggesting that antidepressants are ineffective often remain unpublished (this widespread phenomenon is called ‘publication bias’). To give one prominent example, in 2012 the UK pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline pleaded guilty to criminal charges for promoting the use of its antidepressant Paxil in children (there was no evidence that it was effective in children), and for misreporting trial data.

 

Every trial on antidepressants uses a scale to measure the severity of depression of subjects before and after the trial. These scales are deeply flawed, and they bias the research toward overestimating the effectiveness of antidepressants. 

 

...

 

In meta-analyses that include as much of the evidence as possible, the severity of depression among subjects who receive antidepressants goes down by approximately two points compared with subjects who receive a placebo. Two points. Remember, a depression score can go down by double that amount simply if a subject stops fidgeting. This result, found by both champions and critics of antidepressants, has been replicated year after year for more than a decade (see, for example, the meta-analyses led by Irving Kirsch in 2008, by J C Fournier in 2010, and by Janus Christian Jakobsen in 2017). The phenomena of blind-breaking, the placebo effect and unresolved publication bias could easily account for this trivial two-point reduction in severity scores.

 

We saw above how clinical guidelines have held that drugs must lower severity-depression scores by three points to be deemed effective. On this standard, antidepressants do not pass. Worse, some psychiatrists have argued that this standard is too low – they say that, for an antidepressant to be clinically significant, it must lower depression severity by at least seven points, compared with a placebo. No drug does this.

 

In short, we have plenty of reasons to think that antidepressants have no clinically meaningful benefits for those suffering from depression. Conversely, we know that these drugs cause many harmful side-effects, including weight gain, sexual problems, fatigue and insomnia. Some studies have demonstrated a link between antidepressants and the risk of violence, suicide, childhood and teenage aggression, and psychotic events in women.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Renegade7]

34 minutes ago, The Evil Genius said:

 

 

That wasn't my point. My point is they benefitted from the crazy attention of it. Without it, they'd likely be nowhere close to what they are now.

 

At this point i disagree.

[Renegade7]

19 minutes ago, China said:

 

Should We All Take a Bit of Lithium?

 

THE idea of putting a mind-altering drug in the drinking water is the stuff of sci-fi, terrorist plots and totalitarian governments. Considering the outcry that occurred when putting fluoride in the water was first proposed, one can only imagine the furor that would ensue if such a thing were ever suggested.

 

The debate, however, is moot. It’s a done deal. Mother Nature has already put a psychotropic drug in the drinking water, and that drug is lithium. Although this fact has been largely ignored for over half a century, it appears to have important medical implications.

 

Yet despite the studies demonstrating the benefits of relatively high natural lithium levels present in the drinking water of certain communities, few seem to be aware of its potential. Intermittently, stories appear in the scientific journals and media, but they seem to have little traction in the medical community or with the general public.

 

When I recently attended a psychopharmacology course in which these lithium studies were reviewed, virtually none of the psychiatrists present had been aware of them.

 

...

 

Researchers began to ask whether low levels of lithium might correlate with poor behavioral outcomes in humans. In 1990, a study was published looking at 27 Texas counties with a variety of lithium levels in their water. The authors discovered that people whose water had the least amount of lithium had significantly greater levels of suicide, homicide and rape than the people whose water had the higher levels of lithium. The group whose water had the highest lithium level had nearly 40 percent fewer suicides than that with the lowest lithium level.

 

Almost 20 years later, a Japanese study that looked at 18 municipalities with more than a million inhabitants over a five-year period confirmed the earlier study’s finding: Suicide rates were inversely correlated with the lithium content in the local water supply.

 

Click on the link for more

4

5

 

I kept waking up in the middle of the night with borderline panic attacks while trying to build it up in my system, completly dehydrated and my mouth tasting like metal.  The brain is not a toy, and we should not be intentionally adding something like that to our water supply when we admit we have no idea why it does what it does inside our bodies and brains.  I needed to confirm that level of mode stabalizer would work the way I need it, it does, I just can't do that one because of the side effects, there's no telling how much worse that could be on someone else.

 

Quote

------------------------------------------------

 

Do antidepressants work?

 

The best evidence about the effectiveness of antidepressants comes from randomised trials and meta-analyses of these trials. The vast majority of these studies are funded and controlled by the manufacturers of antidepressants, which is an obvious conflict of interest. These trials often last only weeks – far less than the duration that most people are on antidepressants. The subjects in these trials are selected carefully, typically excluding patients who are elderly, who have other diseases, or who are on several other drugs – in other words, the very kinds of people who are often prescribed antidepressants – which means that extrapolating the evidence from these trials to real patients is unreliable. The trials that generate evidence seeming to support antidepressants get published, while trials that generate evidence suggesting that antidepressants are ineffective often remain unpublished (this widespread phenomenon is called ‘publication bias’). To give one prominent example, in 2012 the UK pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline pleaded guilty to criminal charges for promoting the use of its antidepressant Paxil in children (there was no evidence that it was effective in children), and for misreporting trial data.

 

Every trial on antidepressants uses a scale to measure the severity of depression of subjects before and after the trial. These scales are deeply flawed, and they bias the research toward overestimating the effectiveness of antidepressants. 

 

...

 

In meta-analyses that include as much of the evidence as possible, the severity of depression among subjects who receive antidepressants goes down by approximately two points compared with subjects who receive a placebo. Two points. Remember, a depression score can go down by double that amount simply if a subject stops fidgeting. This result, found by both champions and critics of antidepressants, has been replicated year after year for more than a decade (see, for example, the meta-analyses led by Irving Kirsch in 2008, by J C Fournier in 2010, and by Janus Christian Jakobsen in 2017). The phenomena of blind-breaking, the placebo effect and unresolved publication bias could easily account for this trivial two-point reduction in severity scores.

 

We saw above how clinical guidelines have held that drugs must lower severity-depression scores by three points to be deemed effective. On this standard, antidepressants do not pass. Worse, some psychiatrists have argued that this standard is too low – they say that, for an antidepressant to be clinically significant, it must lower depression severity by at least seven points, compared with a placebo. No drug does this.

 

In short, we have plenty of reasons to think that antidepressants have no clinically meaningful benefits for those suffering from depression. Conversely, we know that these drugs cause many harmful side-effects, including weight gain, sexual problems, fatigue and insomnia. Some studies have demonstrated a link between antidepressants and the risk of violence, suicide, childhood and teenage aggression, and psychotic events in women.

 

Click on the link for the full article

2

2

 

It's not perfect, no, there's an argument some anti-depressants lift up the inhibitions in place to prevent suicide, some ADHD meds are like that.  I can tell the difference when an antidepressant, antipsychotic, or mood stabilizer is missing or not working and it doesn't take long.  The industry needs help because we're talking about trying to troubleshoot the most powerful computer in the known universe with an encyplopedia of substances that don't like each other and can be very difficult to diagnose.  Once cannabinoids can be introduced to the discussion, different convo, because at least we can be dealing with medications that from what we know don't have the same range of side-effects or bad interactions with each other (I'm not limiting this statement to THC, beyond it).  

 

Again, I'm not a scientist, but I know how I feel from one day to the next, I'm taking a mental health day tommorrow as I come down from the Lithium levels in my system (you have to build it up and let it down safely, you can't just stop taking lithium).  I don't like any insinuation I'm taking pills just to take them when I already don't want to take them.

[China]

36 minutes ago, Renegade7 said:

 

 

Again, I'm not a scientist, but I know how I feel from one day to the next, I'm taking a mental health day tommorrow as I come down from the Lithium levels in my system (you have to build it up and let it down safely, you can't just stop taking lithium).  I don't like any insinuation I'm taking pills just to take them when I already don't want to take them.

 

The takeaway that I got is that each person is different and they know best how they feel and whether a particular medication seems to work for them.  Having worked in the pharmaceutical industry I also understand that while there are good people looking to help, there is a commercial push to get drugs approved to help the bottom line, which is why many of the studies are flawed.

[Renegade7]

2 minutes ago, China said:

 

The takeaway that I got is that each person is different and they know best how they feel and whether a particular medication seems to work for them.  Having worked in the pharmaceutical industry I also understand that while there are good people looking to help, there is a commercial push to get drugs approved to help the bottom line, which is why many of the studies are flawed.

 

Fair, ill admit i didn't really know where you was going with that post.  I told my physiciatriat i didn't like the lithium idea at all, but would trust her to try and figure out what path to take.  Her resistance to natural measures lead me to decide if she didn't get back to me on my request to stop lithium i would go to another doctor.  She called back and I'm seeing her two days later, but my first doctor i stopped going to and they never called to fins out why except when i would pay for services rendered.

[China]

Just now, Renegade7 said:

 

Fair, ill admit i didn't really know where you was going with that post.  I told my physiciatriat i didn't like the lithium idea at all, but would trust her to try and figure out what path to take.  Her resistance to natural measures lead me to decide if she didn't get back to me on my request to stop lithium i would go to another doctor.  She called back and I'm seeing her two days later, but my first doctor i stopped going to and they never called to fins out why except when i would pay for services rendered.

 

I thought those were both interesting takes and go to show that we really don't fully understand how the brain works and what to do if the wiring or chemistry is awry, despite many studies.  I find it interesting that low (subclinical levels) of lithium may have a positive effect, similar to how low doses of lead have a negative effect.

[Renegade7]

11 minutes ago, China said:

 

I thought those were both interesting takes and go to show that we really don't fully understand how the brain works and what to do if the wiring or chemistry is awry, despite many studies.  I find it interesting that low (subclinical levels) of lithium may have a positive effect, similar to how low doses of lead have a negative effect.

 

I can dig it.  I can understand finding both interesting, i found both takes dangerous.  But that's just my opinion.

[CRobi21]

Growing up, I thought that x-ray sniper rifle from Eraser was the coolest ****ing thing ever..

 

 

[China]

2 minutes ago, Renegade7 said:

 

I can dig it.  I can understand finding both interesting, i found both takes dangerous.  But that's just my opinion.

 

Interesting and dangerous not being mutually exclusive.

[Elessar78]

3 hours ago, The Evil Genius said:

TBH...the Kardashians/Jenner's weren't middle class as they were likely millionaires pre KK tape anyways. But they definitely were not on the path of billionaires ever...

But they had zero notoriety either outside of being OJ's lawyer. And they really don't get a reality show without the sex tape. 

[Renegade7]

9 minutes ago, Elessar78 said:

But they had zero notoriety either outside of being OJ's lawyer. And they really don't get a reality show without the sex tape. 

 

Reality Stars come out of nowhere all the time for no reason or logic, these ones were jus smart enough to invest and market properly for staying power.  Does Kanye still court Kim K without the sex tape? 

 

Most likely, and that's still a reality power couple people have shown they would pay attention to = $$$$$.  This isn't so much defending their actions as it is acknowledging their hustle.

[Mr. Sinister]

Nothing sells like sex.

[TheGreatBuzz]

Is lithium anything like valium?  I both like and hate the affects of the latter.  Always keeping my eyes out for something better.