Ask Lemmy

It's bad enough dealing with crippling depression in a small town, where everyone's going to tell you that A: your condition is a moral failure rather than an illness with physiological underpinnings, B: religion is the answer to your condition, C: (for males, anyway) your condition makes you weak and effeminate, or D: a combination of the above or more likely all of them. Adding those things on top of it is a recipe for suicide.

I hate that for you. But you speak to the lack of social services that are typically not available, which is a pro of living in a large city.

Some of these you can't do in some cities either.

I grew up in New York City, my pops is fairly well known, we're part of a large family, most people knew me as his son or one of my female cousins cousin.

Also I've seen LGBTQ folks get bullied, same with "neurodivergent" and other folks with mental and physical disabilities.

The only difference is that in a city you can find your "people" because in a small town there may be one or a few of you, in a large city there are many, but there are also many many assholes there too. Also public transportation is an absolute "plus" when it comes to a city.

Now I live in a coastal area of Florida that likes to think of itself as "small town" while being incredibly busy traffic-wise and having more population than Iceland, and that HIPAA thing is a real problem. My kid took in a friend who wanted to escape her crazy and abusive Jehovah's Witness parents, well the mother works where my kid went to the doctor a few times, she looked up my kids medical records and then showed up at our house. I gave my kid so much shit about how the mother violated HIPAA and how she should get her fired, and my daughter wouldn't, she just didn't want to get her friends mother in trouble, but that was a serious breach of trust and this woman shouldn't be working in the medical field if she can't follow the regulations governing the field, if I did similar in my career field I would be completely unhirable.