I believe you mentioned in a past post that your favourite squirrel has a short tail. Is that that squirrel? Did you reconnect with your favourite squirrel after the 3-ish month absence?

Pharmacists ordering lab tests (bloodwork) is a pretty radical expansion of their practice

Most pharmacists I’m pretty sure work for private, mostly corporate companies. This is another effort to further privatize healthcare

I think I might have mistakenly sounded like a Conservative talking point. My point was supposed to be that I think many people who vote left of the Conservatives see Justin Trudeau as the lesser of two evils at best, someone who has not delivered on their promises, and someone who seems increasingly out of touch with the needs of working Canadians.

I vote NDP and am fortunate to have almost always have lived in NDP ridings. I mean to lament how disappointing it is to have the most realistic alternative to PP be so unappealing, especially against the incredible showings of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz who’ve shown how momentous progressive politics can be.

I, personally, don’t think Trudeau has a chance against PP but that any decent replacement candidate for the LPC would probably have a slight advantage against PP to begin.

More than anything, my concern is the detrimental effects of a Conservative government. And JT staying on the ticket seems like most influential factor at this point

Technically, it’s probably the government providing too little funding to school boards to cover hiring enough qualified teachers. But you’re right; this is clearly a structural problem:

More frustrating, she says, was learning that schools in the anglophone system are still short by 32 teachers — and three districts of the four are relying on 132 people on local permit contracts.

The Cons want to accelerate inequity among Canadians in health, wealth, and everything else. That’s a huge problem. I think it’s safe to say Canadians are sick of Justin Trudeau and his out of touch with everyday Canadians approach. His ego is going to keep him on the election ballot and the only question about the government that forms will be Conservative minority or majority. I feel like we’re all hostage to Justin Trudeau’s ego right now. Looking south of the border, Biden and camp waited until the decision was made for them. I don’t see the same forces converging in JT’s case. I think things are going to have to get very very loud for JT to wake up to do the right thing. I don’t know how helpful the mainstream media will be in acknowledging popular interest in left-of-centre politics yet staunch opposition to JT at this point

If you’re in Ontario, this is a good tool for finding resources: https://connexontario.ca/

Yeah, Lemmy’s still pretty small, unfortunately. That sounds like a good idea though! Maybe some kind of group for people with mild schizophrenia (and are around the same age perhaps). Asking your psychiatrist is a good idea. You might also want to do a little online searching to see if you find anything of interest locally, so you can ask for a referral to that specifically - just an idea. There might also be mild schizophrenia forums online outside of Lemmy that you might find with an online search. You might be able to check posts out without creating an account

You’re welcome :) If I may, it sounds like you want and/or need to be able to socialize more comfortably (to live a meaningful life), and your current meds may be helping to some extent but clearly aren’t achieving that desired result on their own.

You could ask your doctor to try a different med (or more), and/or ask for something for anxiety specifically. Maybe you could access some kind of psychotherapy to discuss talking to people and that paranoia or access another kind of individual or group support. You may also want to hear more about living with schizophrenia from people who are themselves living with schizophrenia. I think the experience of controlling ‘hallucinations’ with medication yet having persistent uncorrected social deficits (ie, unmet needs) is unfortunately pretty common for people with schizophrenia (in large part due to a lack of adequate healthcare). Some of those perspectives might help normalize some of what you’re experiencing and/or provide some applicable wisdom or advice (eg, for socializing). Some people with schizophrenia are thriving socially and otherwise despite living in a sane-ist society that unfortuantely has a long way to go in terms of inclusion and acceptance.

Meds may be one piece of the puzzle for being able to socialize comfortably and leading a meaningful life. My advice would be to focus on the whole puzzle - however you define wellness and whatever is meaningful to you. Loneliness can broadly mean "not getting one’s social needs met’ - which are basic human nature. Depending on how lonely you’re feeling and how long you’ve been feeling this way, you may want to try one or more strategies. Again, people with lived experience might have some of the best recommendations there, at least to get started. I don’t know if any of this is helpful, but I’ve appreciated the interaction, I wish you well, and you’re welcome to reply or message me

It sure would be useful if Trudeau believed that passing proportional representation was the one thing he could do for a viable bid for re-election at this point

So long as we only compare ourselves to the US, we look great on many fronts, and that’s what most Canadian politicians and mainstream media do - which is absurd and serves an agenda. Compare us to all OECD countries (same as or similar to wealthy peers), and we look middling or abhorrent on many fronts. For example, I know we’re almost at the back of the pack of ~40 countries in terms of disability services. I realize the article is probably about economic indicators more so than health and quality of living. My comment is really “who we compare ourselves to matters a lot to the evaluation” and comparisons exclusively to the US are self-serving and of little value

over 10% of an Alberta town’s population signed a petition

Democracy in action, all voices carry equal weight, majority rules, etc. /s

If you don’t think you have schizophrenia, then that’s something you may want to think about and/or discuss with a healthcare professional (same one or different). But I’d like to bring up some other things that might be relevant: psychological adjustment to a diagnosis, there should be patient benefits to a diagnosis, and that daily functioning may be more important than a diagnostic label.

Something I hear in your post is that you’re not very happy about being diagnosed with schizophrenia. As a separate issue from the validity of the diagnosis, maybe you’re having difficulty accepting and/or adjusting to the diagnosis. There is some stigma unfortunately around mental illness and schizophrenia.

How else is the diagnosis impacting you? Maybe you’re receiving meds, maybe you have community or disability support or resources (eg, work program, support group). For a doctor, a diagnosis helps them with billing and clinical decision-making (eg, prescribing meds). There should be some benefit to you. Like, I have an asthma diagnosis, and that allows me to get puffers so I can breathe better.

Diagnosis doesn’t define any one of course, and daily functioning may be more important. E.g., Are you working? Do you want to be?

Your symptoms don’t sound very severe but on aggregate they do sound quite specific to schizophrenia. As someone else said, you do have a lot of insight into your symptoms. Unfortunately, I don’t think that matters much in terms of whether you meet diagnostic criteria. The evidence of you having other symptoms is based on your own self-report and therefore kind of weak. But if you’re losing focus having a serious conversation about your health due to thoughts in your head that grab your attention in front of a psychiatrist, that is something that I think might lead many Western healthcare providers to diagnose as schizophrenia or something pretty quickly. So, if you can exert more control in those situations, you might want to, at least in some settings. At the same time, Western psychiatry is not the only source of perspectives on the meaning of our inner monologues. You may want to explore other schools of thought that regard those thoughts as less pathological. You might get personal significance from less pathologizing perspectives.

Finally, check out Daniel Mackler, a former psychotherapist with a large swath of videos on youtube, who has a very different understanding of schizophrenia than mainstream psychiatry.

Obligatory @#$% Doug Ford. There’s not too much to this, imo. Back when it was just the LCBO and Beer Store selling alcohol - a special product if you will - the price on the sales tag included HST and bottle deposit, which is unlike most products, like a bag of chips (price on sales tag doesn’t include HST). I think this price labeling thing is just a bit of house-keeping after Ford changed the alcohol sales framework in Ontario (which will definitely reduce provincial revenue and good jobs and probably contribute to a significant uptick in drunk driving–that’s the real story). If alcohol is now sold in convenience stores alongside chips, why should its price be advertised differently (eg, include HST). So, this is probably to make alcohol more consistent with other products (e.g., there’s a fee added to battery sales that aren’t on price tags) in terms of product price labelling.

More important to me is how long the bottle deposit remains and how long the Beer Store continues to accept bottle and can returns now that they’re essentially another convenience or grocery store

I saw a white walker mobility device by a road in Toronto today, to mark where someone with a walker would have been struck by a car and killed. I’ve seen multiple white bikes before but not a walker

International coffee chains moving away from their role as third places highlights the enduring value of libraries and their essential function in healthy communities. That’s what makes the library so special: they are there to serve the public. Whether you want to work on your laptop, use the computers to watch fight videos on TikTok, or conceivably even borrow a book, it is the one place that anyone can go for as long as they like, so long as they don’t cause trouble.

Premier Doug Ford, when he was a Toronto city councillor, once notoriously said that he would close a library “in a heartbeat” within his Etobicoke North ward, which he inaccurately claimed had more libraries than Tim Hortons. The province of Ontario has 921 libraries and 1,824 Tim Hortons. The threat to those libraries remains: In 2019, the Southern Ontario Library Service budget was cut by 50 per cent. Following budget shortfalls this year, London is considering closing two libraries; it has already suspended Sunday service for the remainder of the year. We are witnessing the erosion of an irreplaceable resource that the private sector cannot and should not be expected to provide.

Great shot, and I really like the wood and white combination

Definitely not colonial genocide! /s

Wow, this is big news that I’m a little surprised to see in the US media because it undermines the narrative we’re fed in the US and Canada that every Israeli in Israel supports Netanyahu’s war crimes and genocide when from what I’ve read (from Israeli and other Mid-East papers) Israelis are much more diverse in opinion.

This is written as if it is bad news, but it’s good news right?

It’s mixed news. Less money into fossil fuels is good but little investment in renewables so far is bad

Because Doug Ford is trying to privatize healthcare, like Smith is in Alberta. They’re trying to break it up bit by bit. Ford is giving money that would have gone to publicly operated hospitals and employees to private ones instead. And patients are forced to use these often because the public option has already been eliminated or is underfunded, and they’re told it’s the only place their OHIP applies. These private companies are then going to bill both the province and patients and deliver worse service and worse jobs - because they are profiteers. And down the road, it’ll be hard to back out of privatization when we no longer have any public infrastructure (which is when the private clinics can start gouging the province even more ;)