There are so many things to say here but ultimately the whole Centrelink system is not built to provide payments, it is built to deny them, so it is definitely going to be hard. That said, once you are approved it is fairly stable and my partner who has been on it for about 8 years has never had a blip or glitch or even hint of a problem. I was also able to eventually get Carer payment and provide care full time, though now with the progress we have made I am working part time and moving towards full time.

Depending on what you are diagnosed with the oath can be really variable. If it is something like bipolar (rapid cycling especially) there is no reasonable way you can maintain employment without significant support and accomodations.

That said, a reasonable doctor should be able to see the impact in your life and should be willing to handle the form, regardless of your age. Saying because you are young you are not disabled is just pure nonsense and would definitely be a good reason to move on and if possible make a complaint. It is literally discrimination to deny someone services based on age and this person is aware of that. Saying that you don’t need DSP because you are in your 30s is like saying you don’t need insulin in your 30s, maybe statistically it is less common but medical decisions are driven by statistics and implemented on an individual basis.

Anyway, switching psychiatrist is probably the best move if you think they are unlikely to change their mind. Trying one more time to get them to process the paperwork may be worthwhile depending on your circumstances.

If you do try I would recommend making a list you take with you of the areas of your life that are impacted. Can you perform your activities of daily living? Do you currently receive support from other people? How many jobs have you had and for how long over the last 10 years? How many units have you failed? Have you had a large variance in grades between units because of this issue? What about relationships? What about non work non education things like friends and hobbies? What about physical health, including diet, exercise, and drug use?

Lastly, I would consider being cautious about which drugs you are recommended. My partner developed mild twitching as a result of one medication and now 3 years later the symptoms are starting to lessen, but some of the meds can have big side effects and may also not do all that much to help. An incorrect diagnosis can lead to significant harm, so making sure you are personally well informed about what is happening, what you have been diagosed with, and what medications you are on will help protect you from harm. Also consider that non medical interventions can be a good adjunct to medical interventions, so managing your diet, getting good social connection time, exercising, and engaging with things you enjoy can make a significant difference.

My partner was diagnosed with extremely rapid cycling bipolar 1 and was on lots of meds for it, after a lot of work we have figured out that they are actually autistic and have ADHD along with a buttload of childhood trauma resulting in CPTSD. Work on the CPTSD has made a massive difference to life and making appropriate accomodations for the autism and ADHD have led to tonnes of other improvements. Medical support for ADHD is not practical where we are living but in another year we will be moving to somewhere that has actual support for that and meds look likely, specifically a stimulant, but apart from that the entire current treatment plan for the last 3 years has been diet (strict keto moving towards carnivore), reduction and eventual removal of almost all dairy (caesin specifically), and a buttload of trauma work as the interventions and then supportive modification of the environment including changing lighting, removing loud electronics (some wall chargers scream all day), managing clothing, and removing sensory stimulation that is unpleasant like terracotta and smelly deodorant. All of these things have done more than the meds ever did, but those meds were for the wrong issue and so may be perfectly good for other issues without being right for my partner, no shade on meds.

Good luck, and DM if you have questions

Yeah, I like DITMM but my partner and I keep an eye on each other, so if I take my meds and mark it off in Telegram they can see it immediately and that log is permenant, rather than being stuck on one device and only for me. Still, handy if you don’t have a helping hand like I do.

I have a large cardboard box with arduinos, raspberry pis, and various other electronics. Will they ever get used? If they stay in the box definitely no, but I don’t have a good system for getting them out while not having them just become clutter. That said, Ritalin helps a lot, so maybe with a good sleep and some good meds on board I have a chance.

I can genuinely point to Jupiter, any time, day or night. I may need to get my bearings for NSEW but assuming I have any point of reference I can just point at Jupiter. It is my favourite planet and since I was a kid I was a little obsessed and figured it out, now it just runs in the background like a little JPS (Jupiter Positioning System) all the time.

A truck driver in Australia has to have a higher grade license than a car license. In IT I had a bunch of certifications and so on but that never changed my earning potential much. I think the lack of a university degree was the big thing, but in truck driving that won’t be an issue.

I’m 17 years without alcohol, 16 without “le drugs”, and 15 without smoking. I still have issues in my life and challenges to solve but wow, all of those would be harder and more numerous if I still behaved like I used to. I had a fairly short period of massive excess and had a few lucky moments of clarity which resulted in me quitting it all one after another. My partner and I have been together since just after I quit drinking and I am really glad they never had to see me being my worst self.

My biggest takeaway is it really does get easier with time. The hardest times were within a short time of quitting. The longer I sustained the more ingrained the change became and now I would be stubborn and resist any sort of backslide.

The a fanfic author drops a new chapter my partner is at least as excited as I am when a new video game drops. There is nothing cringe about fanfiction, it is creative writing just as valid as writing a new piece from scratch, just with more context built right in. If you like fanfic then maybe writing it is a good idea for you

That said, when it comes to writing, reading is the key. Read lots and lots and lots, then write whatever takes your fancy, but never stop intaking new works. All writing is some sort of remixing and that is OK, you just want to have a lot to draw from and then write a lot of bad stuff to learn how to write well.

Oh of course, I just find that having some weird needs gas made me seek weird solutions and I like to share them around. I definitely didn’t get anything malicious from your post? Not sure if my tone came across poorly, I was going for a cheerful and helpful response, not any sort of critical or nasty, sorry if I sounded harsh or anything like that, definitely not my intention.

A simple but honestly kinda brute force way around it is to replace the TTF or equivalent font file for their font with a copy of Comic Sans on your system. It will show as Comic Sans on your system but will actually be Arial or Times New Roman or whatever in the document, so it will be what they expect on the other end.

That said, it is a simple accomidation, it should be manageable for them.

Nebula has been quite successful as far as I can tell. A whole bunch of educational YouTubers have moved over or were part of establishing it and honestly it works well. Videos can download to your device, the quality is the same, the app is a tiny bit janky but nowhere near as bad as all the ads etc on the YouTube app, and the cost is actually reasonable and goes in a reasonable share to the creators. I strongly prefer direct access to creators like this and also like on Patreon. Direct support means there is no advertiser in between to demonetise a video or have it taken down because it is controversial. You can’t even have a WW2 documentary on YouTube but you can have actual Nazis, but on Nebula you get analysis and history without Nike or Surfshark being reticent to sponsor a video.

Lol, absolutely! Bigots gonna bigot, best we can do is not fall for it and be kind to each other.

I just love how utterly obtuse the TERFs sound when they say “Trans women are not a subset of women, and cis is just a slur, women are women and trans women are not” or similar, like honestly, the terms are all very simple, tall women are a subset of women, brown women are a subset of women, infertile women are a subset of women, and they are all women. They are just bigots who don’t want trans women to be part of that group, they want to exclude them. It is just hatred and bigotry, the symantics are just a cover.

This reminds me of the Big Mac decision. I can’t remember where but there was a burger place that had a Big Mac burger but the name was not a copy of the McDonalds one, it was iirc because the owner’s name was Mac. Anyway, they lost the case and therefore lost copyright protection on Big Mac, so Hungry Jacks/Burger King started renaming all their burgers to something something big Mac, just to mess with them. Maybe Apple will bite of more than they can chew and end up losing protection for the Apple logo or similar things.

My hope is that federation will end up having a halfway setting, where content can come across but engagement is limited in some way. For example, you may see a post from lemmy.ml but you would only see comments from beehaw and the upvotes you give it will be calculated locally. This would allow content to be visible from everywhere but would keep the communities separated to some degree. Also having personal opt-in federation may work, just like with NSFW, you could on your account allow a particular instance to come through while someone else would not select that, leaving you with a fairly personalised experience.

I don’t know about Caddy, but if they aren’t using Varnish or similar they should consider it. A caching server can be helpful for frequently repeating fairly stable parts of websites and has a fairly significant performance benefit.

That sucks, it seems to be a fairly consistently awful experience over there in USA land.

Here in Australia it is really very different. I went to a GP and got a referral to a local psychiatrist who dealt with ADHD. The GP appointment cost $0, the referral cost $0. I have an appointment with a psychiatrist and the initial appointment was about $500. I got a script and took it to a random pharmacy and got a month of meds for $5.30. I tried that first set and it was obviously useful and a massive upgrade in my function. I went back after the first month to my second appointment and had my dose doubled. The second appointment cost about $350, the meds cost $5.30 again. This happened two more times and I ended up on a high dose of Concerta with supplemental Ritalin.

Currently every 6 months I have an appointment with my psychiatrist which costs me about $150 and my meds cost about $15 per month ($6.30 per script, but two monthly Concerta and one 2 monthly Ritalin). So for about $250 per 6 months or about $500 per year I manage my ADHD. I don’t have any health insurance at all, I am on the standard government system called Medicare.

Also, we don’t have the same restrictions as you, but if you have multiple repeats of a script then they all have to be dispensed through the same pharmacist, you can’t have it from one pharmacist one month and another the next.

Honestly I love the Australian Medicare system. There are problems with it but I really appreciate it and I would not be on these meds without it.

It think we have cycles because people remember things that happen in their lifetime but fail to adequately instil that knowledge in the next and subsequent generations. The wealth inequality of the 1920s was the catylist for much of the economic turmoil of the great depression and laid some of the context for the New Deal era. The strong rules for antitrust and managing monopolies were put in place to prevent a repeat and while the generations who lived through the great depression were dominant they survived. As those older generations died out and as the following generations grew in influence those protections were weakened and eventually mostly dismantled, resulting in massive changes from the 70s onwards. Those protections were eroded and wealth and income inequality grew until we reached and surpassed the levels of the 1920s.

I think the same happens for other things like the idea that Nazis are bad or must be resisted, or that religious ideologies should ve kept seperate from the government, or healthcare is something we can help each other to gain, or that workers can have power by working together. What I find hopeful is hearing discussion of all of these ideas in fairly accessible places and people do seem to be studying history in order to avoid repeating it.

I have had similar experiences here in Australia. People seem to be very distracted and stressed to the point where they have no time to consider ideas like privacy, security, and societal improvement. Maybe I am an idealist but I would hope to leave a better world for those that will follow us and allowing another rise of authoritarianism seems like it is a very bad idea.

I have ADHD and find that I either have very early rising or very late rising. I can’t do getting up a 7am very well, I feel sick and don’t really wake for many hours if I try to do so. But getting up at 430am? Sure, POP, I’m up, no worries. Or go to sleep at 9am? Sure, no worries, I will pop up at 5pm and be ready to go, no issues.

I used to work a shift work job in IT and it was pretty awful because the roster rotated over 11 weeks. You would start at 7am for a week or two, then shift forward into a mix of 8am to 11am for a while, then shift forward to 12pm to 2pm, then everyone on 3pm, and finally the rotation back to 7am with a small subset of the team doing the 11pm to 7am shift. Just as you would get used to one sleep pattern you would have to shift forward so you could never really get used to anything. I also lived 2-2.5 hours away depending on the transport, so an 8 hour shift was a 12-13 hour day, along with me frequently taking overtime up to 65 hours a week.

Now I work a more manual job driving a truck and doing multi-drop deliveries and I have found that much better. I start at around 530am, load a truck, drive around my town dropping off stuff, and finish around lunch time. The exercise is great for my ADHD, I have packed on muscle, and I have way fewer sensory issues with a supposedly loud truck (earplugs) than I did with an office environment (headset).

A note here about the context from near the end of the article, which is very worth reading.

“This case is a trial for the Ministry of Interior, which aims to normalise this framing for repressive purposes. During a Senate hearing that followed the violent repression of protests in Sainte-Soline [environmental protests severely repressed that happened in France in 2023], Gérald Darmanin, the French Minister of Interior, implored the legislature to change the law so that it would be possible to hack into demonstrators’ mobile phones, especially those using “Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram”: “Give us the same means for extreme violence as for terrorism”. His justification was that “there is a very strong, advanced paranoia in ultra-left circles […] who use encrypted messaging”, which can be explained by a “clandestine culture”. In an attempt to demonstrate the supposed violence of Sainte-Soline activists, he also cited the 8 December affair as an example of a “foiled attack” by the “ultra-left”, in defiance of any presumption of innocence23.”

This is not just about use of technology signalling terrorism, it is about repression of dissent from the current government. Environmental protests, protests against the changes to pensions, and really any other protests are a target. This is antidemocratic at it’s core and will be expanded unless resisted. This kind of authoritarian behaviour clearly shows the need for the very thing they are repressing, technology to maintain privacy and security for those the state disagrees with.