Remembering names and faces. I’ve got a huuuuuuge variety of valuable knowledge and skills and I’m ALWAYS getting tripped up on people’s names. I’ve jumped between a physical aggressor and their victim before (I work in that kind of field) for coworkers whose names I cannot remember. What the fuck is wrong with me? My brain isn’t even any bigger than anyone else’s it’s just stuffed with knowing how to spell and pronounce N-acetylcysteine instead of anything actually useful.
Honestly (not that this is right) but a lot of that is that there’s a lot of pill-pushing in the rest of medicine to account for our own labor shortages. Pills are the easy way out for us with our insane patient loads and acuities, and they’re the easy way out for the patient eating fast food on their way between two jobs who don’t know what OSHA is that they don’t get breaks at and 9 total hours of sleep THIS WEEK because they also have three kids.
Take pictures of yourself; it will help illustrate the point much better. You could also make them a short video or pay for stock photos. Most stock photography is in one of a few very specific styles because they best show objects and actions, so they should be relatively visually consistent but you could also use gimp to help keep the colors consistent. Gimp does also have some cartoon filters, but they take a lot of editing to look good. Might still be easier than trying to draw it yourself or commission something.
The message to me was just that sometimes you have to sing and dance to entertain the people who have power over you. That doesn’t make the situation right, but I’ve gotten a lot more done since that realization.
I’m an inpatient psych nurse. We do need more facilities and clinicians, but the muuuch bigger issue is affordable housing. I would say about 33% of our unit census at any one time, especially in the winter, often boils down to people staying for what I like to call “3H1C” treatment, or “three hots and a cot.” They’re homeless and come to the Emergency Room and say they’re suicidal (the good ones fake or exaggerate psychosis) so they won’t freeze to death or otherwise die of exposure. I don’t blame the doctors for not taking any chances, and I don’t blame the patients for lying. I also honestly just don’t want to live in a world or work in a system where I have to try and figure out if someone is lying about wanting to die.
Honestly I don’t even really want more homeless shelters; we need to make housing affordable again. We can’t be keeping people in shelters, especially not when they also have mental health concerns, and there’s still a pretty big overlap in those populations. Just because they’re not suicidal and don’t need to be cared for at my very invasive and expensive level of care, doesn’t mean they’re mentally healthy enough to not shank their bunkie because they have PTSD from some kind of institutional or homeless experience. Some of these people jump up out of bed in a full rage if you’re not reeeeaaaallly careful about how you do it, imagine them sleeping in bunk beds! The only way to keep people safely packed in like that is an immense amount of supervision. It’s honestly probably cheaper to just give them more personal space. Many of them will still need significant assistance to safely live independently due to the psychological effects of chronic institutionalization, but coming by once a week to teach them how to cook or do their own laundry is a much cheaper, less invasive, and more humanizing approach.
Edits: sorry I just keep adding shit and fine tuning I’m way too ADD.
Unironically what I learned from DBT. “If you want people to be impressed with you, think up something really impressive that you could do and go do that.”
I feel like whether this is true or not, the fact that all these words are starting to show up together again means that we’re probably about to all start killing each other again. Edit: well, we already have. But like a lot again. Like idk if there’s gonna be any people left, a lot. Humans have been shown to be pretty tenacious, so I’m really hoping this is just part of the process. But it seems like every time we do this it’s so much more widespread and so many more people die. I just wish everybody would stop caring about who’s wrong and who’s right and just breathe and ask themselves how we’re going to get out of the next few decades with the least people dead before their time.
You made the mistake of getting me to talk about something I love teaching. The cool part, to me, isn’t that it works with dogs too, it’s that it also works with people. The only difference is people, for the most part, get to decide what they want to be trained to do. Cats and dogs tend to react more directly to the environment. This is a pretty critical part of DBT Theory which is one of the core theories I use whether I’m dealing with a substance use patient or some one who’s chronically self-injurious.
Behavioral Chain Analysis is also pretty cool and fun! It doesn’t even have to be about anything serious. The example given in the class I took was “I want to remember to drink more water,” and the easiest link to break in the chain (iirc) turned out to be proximity to the water, so the solution was to keep the water bottle at the work desk. Here’s a good worksheet if you ever wanna try it but need a good way to write it down.
This took me a few months and I’m fairly skilled at both training animals and working with people to change complex behavior patterns. So this is gonna be heavy on the behaviorism side and somewhat show how little I know about cats in particular. Repeat each step a couple times. if you have trouble with a step, try going back to the previous step and repeat it a few times again.
Make sure the cat knows how to take treats out of your fingertips safely. This is a trick that is actually usually easier to teach an older animal because it requires patience. Start a fun new game where you literally just give them treats from your fingers for doing nothing and the only rule is to not hurt you. Give them up to a normal maximum of maybe 5 in a row depending on the size of the treat. But if they get too excited and hurt you trying to get the treat, yell OW and stop immediately, AND do everything to prevent them from eating the treat you just offered. Eventually they will learn to walk up calmly and gently take it. This is very helpful considering you are about to put the treat near your face.
Give cat treat near your face
Give cat treat in front or your nose.
Swap the treat for your nose at the last second and boop their nose with your nose.
Decide on a word or sound to correspond to their nose touching your nose. I make a noise somewhere between clicking my tongue and kissy noies.
Stop using the treat to directly lead them into the motion and just hold it off to the side so they know it’s there, but instead try to get them to boop your nose just by using your verbal signal.
Hide the treat, but still give it for a successful snoot boop.
Quality Control Moment! It was important to me to get a good firm snoot boop, or no treat. This communicated to the cat that I did really want a full snoot boop, not just face proximity. So I didn’t reward snoot boops I wasn’t sure I felt. Almost always with people and animals you’ll get whatever behavior out of them that you reward (although sometimes with both people and animals it can sometimes be difficult to tell exactly what they’re getting out of it, but I digress), so if there’s a way you do NOT want to be snoot booped, this is the part where you communicate that to the cat. Do not give treats for snoot boops you do not enjoy.
Introduce intermittent reward to fully solidify the behavior. This isn’t actually about your comfort, intermittent rewards are actually more powerful than consistent one (it’s one of the key things that makes negative consequences so hard to successfully implement; any inconsistency is just a highly powerful reward). I usually start with every other, but if you have a particularly clever or stubborn cat you could even skip only every third or fourth treat at first. You then wanna move from there to every other, then start giving a treat only every third time and so on. You’ll never taper the animal all the way off the reward, but you can definitely get it much closer to a “when I feel like it” schedule.
These last two are just cuteness fluff on top of the core trick.
Cross-taper the command into a slow blink. Do this by doing the command and the slow blink one after the other, or by using a verbal command to get the animal’s attention, then utilize the slow blink. After a while, try the slow blink alone. If it’s not working to back to strengthening the behavior, maybe by increasing the treats at least for a bit.
For this last one it’s ideal to have a cat that really likes attention from humans. The more of a human attention whore they are the less repetitions you will need since they will be excited to get pets in place of food. It helps for the other steps to have a cat that is comfortable with humans, but anyone can be a ho for treats. To accept love as payment you have to actually like the person.
Transition from treats to pets. You should already be intermittently rewarding. Keep giving the same amount of treats, but occasionally pet them in their very favorite bestest scritches spot. The one that makes them go bonkers. It’s usually on the head or neck, or somewhere on the spine. My cats is her cheeks, as stated. If they’re a super human attention ho cat sometimes you can even give less treats or even just discontinue giving treats entirely.
Now my cat is like "damn all you wanted was snoot boops and I could’ve been getting prime cheek rubs this whole time???
Translating across entirely different types of cognition (as between separate species) is exhausting.
I used treats to show her I like it when she boops my nose with her nose. Now she just does it when I slow blink at her and she comes over and boops my snoot then I take a single finger and gently stroke her cheeks. Then she just loafs on my chest and purrs.