Stephanie Erwin

[Naomi Fisher @naomicfisher]

So much damage is done by the idea that there is a majority of people for whom life is straightforward. The world was designed for them, they effortlessly comply with societal demands and get over their life stresses easily. They never wonder whether there is something different about them, or criticise themselves for minor failings. They sail through school and work. They have meaningful relationships with only transient conflict. Their emotions are manageable and in proportion. They are round pegs in round holes.

The neurotypical

Some people look like this from the outside. Hardly anyone reports being like this from the inside. Yet more and more books and training programmes promote the idea that if you’re not like this, you must be neurodivergent. Wired differently.

We have pathologised the human condition.

[Melissa the Hopeful🏠Homemaker @BiblicalBeauty]

Me, blocking every Samuel Sey hater tonight

[Dr. Jonathan N. Stea @jonathanstea]

In a study of 1 901 815 cancer patients, those who chose alternative medicine had a 2-fold greater risk of death compared with patients who had no alternative medicine use.

And it’s probably because they refused conventional care: https://t.co/2EgdvBez0i

[Sarah Phillimore @SVPhillimore]

This is really good

[Allie Beth Stuckey @conservmillen]

I’m not at liberty to share all the details, but suffice it to say that many people rejoicing over this have given a completely incorrect rendering of what occurred and why.

ICE did not come to his home. This whole thing is a paperwork issue that they’re working to resolve.

Samuel Sey is a good man. As you can imagine, his wife, who’s at home with their 3 babies, is devastated and also trusting the Lord to help them find a resolution quickly. Please pray for all of the Seys. Pray for wisdom and provision.

Those celebrating because they don’t like something Sam said are slanderous backbiters and gossips. Pay them no mind

[Ivana Greco @IvanaDGreco]

Again I say:

The work of the home in 2026 is not making sourdough (although that can be fun). It’s dealing with medical billing.

[“paula” @paularambles]

i love her

[Nick Batzig @Nick_Batzig]

I praise God for godly and wise elders. They sacrifice enormous time and energy caring for the needs of the saints. They sacrifice their lives caring for the flock. They are the unsung heroes of the church. Thank them, pray for them, and follow them as they follow Christ.

[Allie ✞ @allie__voss]

I'm realizing a lot of people still seem to believe "Extroverts recharge by being around people, introverts recharge by being alone!"

....there's zero evidence for this, in fact, the evidence pretty heavily debunks this framing!

1) Socializing lifts mood for basically everyone

Experience-sampling studies (Fleeson, Malanos and Achille, 2002) find that people felt better in moments when they were acting extroverted, including introverts

2) Lucas and colleagues (2008) found introverts AND extroverts both reported more happiness in social situations

AKA extroverts’ higher baseline happiness wasn’t explained by their spending more time around people

3) Introverts mispredict how they’ll feel

Zelenski, Santoro and Whelan (2012) found introverts expected acting extraverted to feel worse than it actually did.

4) Social fatigue is universal!

Leikas and Ilmarinen (2017) found extraverted behavior produced an immediate mood boost and then more fatigue about three hours later, regardless of a person’s trait level

Getting tired after a party is normal for everyone, it doesn’t mean you're an introvert

Bottom line is, most people feel better after interacting with people AND most people need some downtime afterwards

Introverts and extroverts mostly just differ in the amount of socialization they each seek and prefer - but this doesn't predict whether they'll enjoy it or whether it will benefit them

[Jesse Singal @jessesingal]

All the available evidence is that this is fake. The one real group listed on the pamphlet issued a C&D about similar text messages and has flatly denied sending this out. You can't complain about trans activist misinfo while being credulous about stuff like this.

[Stephanie Erwin @StephanieE85454]

@StatlerMatthew On step 3 there, you could add "not reformed." 🙃

[Matthew Statler @StatlerMatthew]

I appreciated @jryandavidson article, here is my contribution to the discussion on what he wrote.
👇🔗

[David French @DavidAFrench]

Lots of folks in the pro-life movement browbeat and shamed people for not supporting Trump, and now we have more abortions, the generic abortion pill, a completely watered-down GOP plank on abortion, and public executions. Absolutely pathetic and very, very sad.

[Jonathon Van Maren @JVanMaren]

The execution of Nidal Hassan feels like a microcosm of Trump II policies in many ways. It goes something like this:
1. Take a popular action/policy (executing a terrorist who murdered servicemen, deporting illegal immigrants).
2. Carry out the action/policy in a manner tailor-made to appeal to online MAGA anons, for whom the performative cruelty of the process is as important as the policy.
3. Manage to lose public support while implementing a very popular action/policy.

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

I've stayed far away from the radioactive Cornell discourse, but I do want to make one meta-observation.

I spend a lot of time in different corners of the internet, and the two 'sides' of the Cornell story are living in separate universes. Entirely different facts, wildly separate narratives. Spend time in different social media spaces and it's like they're describing two totally distinct incidents.

There's almost no shared reality whatsoever, and that strikes me as really dangerous.

[Naomi Fisher @naomicfisher]

Sometime before 2016, a psychiatrist started asking their late-diagnosed adult patients with ADHD whether they thought they were more sensitive to rejection and failure than other people.

They said that they were. He didn’t (as far as I can tell) do any comparison with people with mental health problems, or with those with social anxiety. He didn’t look at children or those diagnosed in childhood. He just asked his patients to self-compare with others.

There were no attempts to test out whether this was specific to ADHD, nor universal in those with ADHD.

In 2016, the psychiatrist, William Dodson, gave this a name - rejection sensitivity dysphoria - and started writing about it. It resonated with influencers who created content talking about their RSD. It quickly multiplied. Articles were written about it on official sounding websites. Qualitative research was done, asking people who had heard about RSD whether they experienced it and what it was like.

By 2024, Dodson was saying that RSD was neurological and genetic, not related to trauma and wouldn’t respond to psychotherapy.

By 2026, bestselling author Alex Partridge wrote a whole book about his RSD, pinning it squarely to ADHD and saying that RSD ‘explained my entire life’. He gave a convincing sounding brain-based explanation about ‘glitches’ in how the ADHD brain processes dopamine and nor-epinephrine, and how these lead to rejection feeling far more brutal than for people without ADHD. There is no evidence of this that I have found.

And in this way a psychological and emotional reaction was framed as a neurobiological symptom. Millions started to think that perhaps they had ADHD, because they were sensitive to rejection and failure. RSD spread, and soon people started saying it was part of autism too.

Why does that matter? Because when people think something is due to how their brains work, they think that it is set in stone and won’t change. They think that medication is their only option, and that psychotherapy has nothing to offer. Emotional sensitivity is a really common psychological symptom, and it hasn’t been shown that it’s uniquely part of ADHD. RSD is an example of how neurodivergence is expanding to incorporate emotional reactions, and in the process turning psychology into neurology.

With RSD, the most basic scientific questions haven’t been answered, but you’d never know that from what you see online. There, it all seems so certain and clear.
It’s not.

[Jake Scott, MD @jakescottMD]

CDC is reviving a trial delaying hepatitis B birth doses for 7,000 babies in Guinea-Bissau where 1 in 5 adults is infected.

Infection at birth becomes chronic ~90% of the time and can cause liver cancer.

We have 4 decades of safety data on this vaccine. The trial risks lifelong infections in babies to look for harms that data never found. You don't test whether a proven vaccine is safe by delaying it in the babies most likely to be infected.

Great reporting from @KatherineEban for @RollingStone

[Naomi Fisher @naomicfisher]

People have been messaging me telling me about autism assessments.

Some have received copy and pasted reports, with another child’s name on it. Others have been assessed in a single online session, while the child mostly refused to cooperate and the assessor said it didn’t matter, they’d diagnose anyway. Some have paid for assessments by private ‘specialist autism assessors’ only to find that they have no qualifications or professional background, and so their diagnoses are called ‘non-clinical’ and have no formal status. Someone said their assessment was meant to be ‘multi-disciplinary’ as the NICE guidelines recommend - but was by one speech and language therapist and an unqualified assistant.

And many people have talked of a lack of curiosity - once the label of autism is given, it’s used to explain everything, and curiosity about why a child might be behaving this way ends. They seek a diagnosis hoping it will be the start of something better, but in fact the diagnosis is used as the end of enquiries.

Clinicians have been in touch too, telling me that they are expected to assess three children a day, and that this leaves no time to think or to consider alternative explanations. Assessment becomes a tick box exercise, and almost everyone received a diagnosis. Once families have waited for years, it’s very hard to say no.  If they don’t give the diagnosis, then they risk a complaint and no one wants that. I know myself of the pressure to diagnose in a single session, with no time for follow ups.

These are lifelong diagnoses of disability, which will undoubtably change lives.  They are permanent and will change their way that children understand themselves and are understood by others. Services are under intense pressure and so corners are cut.

I know that there are many examples that aren’t like this and where autism diagnoses are done carefully and thoroughly. But we have no way of telling how many autism assessments are being done poorly and under pressure.

From the outside, every diagnosis looks the same, but from the inside, they are very different.

[Stephanie Erwin @StephanieE85454]

@danae_hudlow Ew I'm so bored already