Well, it’s easy to check whether this is an effect of your curriculum. Is everyone else experiencing these same symptoms? You said, yourself, that this line of thought was sacrificing your mental health and making you feel like a crazy person. Does everyone else in your program feel the same way?

stuff like talking briefly about the career of more notoreous chemists like Fritz Haber, the case of Thalidomide, how the most valuable chemicals on earth are anticholesterol pills and opioids, or just different catastrophic chemical spills where someone fucked up or didn't do their job correctly. It's probably all meant to be a general sobering lesson that chemists are charged with the safety of a lot of people, surpassing even doctors a lot of the time, and enforcing a duty of care. Also I assume as people in that career they're equally spooked as I am, and hope drilling this into as many minds as possible might yield solutions.

I appreciate that you care deeply enough to try to “drill” this idea (what idea?) into people’s minds. But let’s chart the path of where your thoughts are going: 1. Your mental health 2. Your program of study: lab work and poisons 3. Fritz Haber 4. Thalidomide 5. Anticholigenerics and opiates 6. “Just different catastrophic chemical spills” 7. Chemists > doctors 8. Drilling into people’s minds

Just take a moment to consider how far from the original topic you strayed in this comment, and whether any of those examples about thalidomide or opiates were necessary to the conversation.

Linguists talk about the “maxim of quantity” — the laws of conversation dictate that a speaker must the information necessary to advance the conversation, and no more. By the end of your comment you’ve just looped in “different catastrophic chemical spills.” As if you are, quite literally, catastrophizing: searching about for the most catastrophic end of this train of thought, whether it’s likely, or relevant, or not; any catastrophe will do.

I’m not trying to diagnose you with OCD, or the “flight of ideas” which is a hallmark of mania. If you’re in a doctor’s care that seems unnecessary. I just want you to recognize that the pattern of your thoughts is not rational, even if the thoughts themselves are true. I think recognizing that will be key to breaking out of these thought patterns that have made you feel so stressed and mentally precarious. Does that make sense?