10:35am June 11, 2013

➸ ramblings, musings & snippets: Does this happen too?

josiahd:

sssibilance:

burningweird:

thelamedame:

josiahd:

This is a thing that happens to autistic kids a lot:

They get put into a cognitively inaccessible environment

Their attempts to communicate are ignored or punished

They are set up to fail socially

They are told that this means they are…

A nurse in the ER told me yesterday I should be worried about becoming dependent on pain medication. I told him I’ve been dragged unwilling to a crack house and have dealt with literally tens of people close to me who are either in recovery or actively using. I’d rather be addicted than live on the couch screaming in pain - and I know what addiction looks like.

I really don’t understand attitude toward drugs.

Like, seizure medications can have life threatfening withdrawal effects if you go off them too suddenly. But it’s considered completely acceptable to go on them and become dependent.

So why is it bad for people to use addictive drugs to control pain?

Another example: certain blood pressure meds that can give you a heart attack if you go off them suddenly. (Which was a concern with my mom being uninsured and repeatedly turned down for SSDI and SSI, and the local free clinic pharmacy program keeping unpredictably running out of certain meds, when people usually didn’t even have another prescription copy even if they could pay for it elsewhere. The attitude: you’re lucky to be getting any. :/)

But, the only difference there, AFAICT? Perceived enjoyment. You can’t get high from anticonvulsants or (I want to say) ACE inhibitors. The only possible enjoyment there comes from not having seizures or a stroke. Of course, the main enjoyment I’ve known most people to get from pain meds is also relief from serious pain, but yeah. Some people really are that fucking grim, AFAICT. They’d rather have a lot of people in untreated pain if it means somebody, somewhere might be getting high when they can’t. (Often with projection thrown in, like with assuming we’re all lazy frauds playing the system; a lot of them would, if they thought they could get away with it.) Sometimes they feel a need to wrap it up in pseudo-religious nobility of suffering, which makes me want to puke even worse. But, yeah, I can’t see any other way it even makes sense without more of the same old zero-sum idea that somebody else might be getting some kind of enjoyment they’re not. :(

ETA: Yes, I’m extra-grouchy right now from another pretty bad pain day, without access to anything like adequate pain relief for a number of reasons. :/

And yeah. People confuse physical dependence (which both seizure meds and opiates give you) with addiction (which is more to do with the interaction between the medication and a persons neurology and personality, than any actual property of the medication). Addiction requires a psychological component. Physical dependence is not and never has been addiction.

Notes: