Depression and what it's really like

happy people do a variety of activities and don't spend weekends staring at the wall

if you're unhappy, it's been shown that getting up and doing things will make you feel better than staring at the wall

"facing your unhappiness" - i have no idea what this means tbh

c sharp major otm upthread

the idea is not that you're adding six new things - though you might be if you're doing nothing right now - but that you're using a checklist to make sure you're engaging yourself in all the components of a happy life

"social" can be as simple as a phone call or an email to a friend (though personally i try to schedule things to get off the computer)

"relaxation" can be a fifteen minute stretch

"accomplishment" can be picking up your clothes off the floor, or doing the dishes, or getting something done at work, etc

it's possible to do activity scheduling and still be depressed, that's for sure. doing a variety of things with your time is a necessary but not sufficient condition for happiness

but i wonder about the extent to which "solving big life problems" is a component of happiness. everyone has "big life problems" that they procrastinate on. i don't think most "happy" people have it all figured out either. i think attaining happiness has more to do with lots of small shifts in attitude and lots of small, daily accomplishments

your third eye opens up, you cross off the big life problems of your list and you're never depressed again -> has happened to exactly zero people

it sounds sort of dumb, but my therapist had me write up a list of my Big Life Problems a while back (not including self-negating shit like "i am a loser and everyone hates me"). then i was to break each of those problems into the individual tasks that would be required to resolve them, or at least to begin resolving them.

turned out that they weren't all that big after all. i'd spent so long avoiding really thinking about them that my sense of their scale had ballooned out of all proportian.

^

that advice cannot be said enough.

i feel like i need to get serious about my phyiscal fitness to keep working on my depression; unfortunately it's tied up with some heavy emotional stuff. every time i make progress it's like the nazguls start chasing after me or something.

If nazgul were chasing me I reckon I'd be exercising pretty hard, it's when they catch up you have to hide under a rock. Install Zombies, Run!?

they never catch up, it's just shit from the past. but oh lordy is it not fun: imagine spending every day in abject terror and feeling excruciating, gut wrenching pain so bad you disassociate from everything. and everyone gives you a hard time why you're not smiling and bouncing around like everyone else, and you feel you're disappointing everyone, and yourself, etc. etc. not a good scene. at least I "get it" now, so there's some positive light here.

contend, that's not a bad way to think about things probably

Yeah it's really good advice, not dumb at all. I was following it for a while, and I need to again.

my big life problem is mostly that I opt to worry about all the small problems and do nothing about them. if I actually did them, I'd be able to tackle important things.

worrying about how I need to vacuum and do the dishes keep me comfortably insane

hey spacecadet I can only do stuff when I feel OK and that takes work. I had this on the cover of one of my notebooks so I had to look at it everyday. it is a bit silly but maybe I don't know.. it might help you.

http://theicarusproject.net/files/basics_poster_letter_web.pdf

geez, i'm like the left guy on all those categories, except for the crusty punk thing.

There something that's helped me with binge eating that might possibly be worth exploring here: thinking of, say, doing the thing you're procrastinating about as choosing to live with the discomfort of not doing what your brain wants you to do. The idea is that you do this without pretending the discomfort isn't there or wishing it away or pretending it's less uncomfortable than it is - just choosing to experience it, because of the upsides. The idea is that it retrains you/your brain not to do X (binging, procrastination) in certain circumstances, but it doesn't put you in the box of 'I must or must not do X' so that you've got nothing to rebel against. It works for me some of the time. I'm not depressed so this may not hit the spot for anyone.

Good advice! I have also had some luck in thinking consciously about what I'm doing, at times when I'm not completely incapacitated. "I am _choosing_ to sit and listen to music for an hour" or "I am _choosing_ to watch two hours of this tv drama" which makes me feel ok about doing something that might otherwise seem like so-called wasted time.

how is mental illness a gift (re: that image linked)

it allows you to see the world as it really is

I wanted to post the poster without the text but that is not cool. Icarus Project is some sort of radical mental health thing, you can read about them in the website. I don't remember the texts except the part where I would LOVE to be part of a real-world radical MH support group. I tried to find one but none around here, seems like only Christians do stuff like that.

you can be part of my support group

eh, too much effort to find a suicide cult

thanks for calling me radical, too

they never catch up, it's just shit from the past. but oh lordy is it not fun: imagine spending every day in abject terror and feeling excruciating, gut wrenching pain so bad you disassociate from everything. and everyone gives you a hard time why you're not smiling and bouncing around like everyone else, and you feel you're disappointing everyone, and yourself, etc. etc. not a good scene. at least I "get it" now, so there's some positive light here.

― Spectrum, Tuesday, July 23, 2013 5:06 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I was trying to make a joke, nvm. I don't have to imagine that feeling btw, I have been there.

yeah i know, you were just trying to keep things light and i feel bad about pissing all over it. i was in the middle of an attack or flashback or whatever you call this stuff. (feeling better now, btw).

don't feel bad. I'm glad you're feeling better. x

spectrum: 'the vapors'

I like the GRAPES thing. xp and interrupty solipsism

irl mind GRAPES!

GRAPES is what's up

it can be PAGERS if u feelin nostalgic

RAGE, P.S.

As in, the postscript to anger is resolution and contentment.

heyo!

this is probably a ridiculous question, but why do people like each other? like, why would a person like or accept another person? what makes somebody a "valid" human being?

i cannot fathom a single reason why i belong to the human race. as in, why i'm acceptable enough to even be acknowledged in someone's mind. it's mystifying. i feel like i'm slipping on thin ice when it comes to being shunned by humanity, and I have zero idea why or how somebody could accept me being a person. or even like me! anyone else ever feel this way?

spectrum, i think i have felt that way, but i guess i would ask you: why do you frame the question in such a way that it's only about why people might like or accept you?

if the question is, "why do people like (or accept) each other?" shouldn't that question then be turned into, (sub-question # 1) "why do i like others" just as much as (sub-question # 2) "why do (or would) others like me"? the first sub-question seems at least to be an easier place to begin thinking about this, and may have some bearing on how one thinks about the second.

yes, sub-question 1 is what i've gotten to. honestly, though, I have no clue why I would even like someone else!! it makes utterly no sense to me. i've never gotten around to liking others because I never thought I'd ever be considered a valid person to anyone. it's like a loop that keeps running over and over again.

my idea of why people would like me goes like ... they can use me however they want for whatever they want whenever they want and i have to let them. that's really all i know. personally i have zero interest in being like that to others, and since i don't know anything else, i'm at a loss. i guess this is a little beyond just depression.

"valid" doesn't make any sense as a modifier of "person."

so you don't have to do anything special to be considered a person? cuz that's what i think. my natural state is somehow critically deficient to be deemed worthy of observing as "existing". some real basic shit like that.

do people actually care about each other? that's the kinda crap i have no clue about!!!

this line of thinking to me has always been short circuited by the thought that nickleback has no qualms about being liked.
and if nickleback can help alleviate the need to justify ones own worth, then they also have proven their value

"how you remind me" ain't so bad

c'mon guys, isn't this thread depressing enough

so you don't have to do anything special to be considered a person?

imo you have to have been born? like a fetus isn't a person to me, though i guess this remains philosophically controversial.

i'm reading this book about parents who have kids who are radically different from them, often because of conditions that are usually understood as illnesses. i just began the chapter on disability, and the author, who's a lecturer in psychiatry, describes kids with severe multiple disabilities as "inexorably human" even though they may never speak, feed themselves, express emotion in a way that is legible to their parents, etc.

i'm really sorry you had experiences that made you feel like your value as a person was transactional, it sounds like at a pretty young age and by people who should have been taking care of you. but you're valuable even if nobody likes you! i like and dislike a lot of people; it never occurred to me that i was in a position to render them valid or invalid. i'm not!

i agree man; you shouldn't feel like you're not valid or unworthy of someone else's time. frankly, it's just too much work to do that with every relationship! we all have those thoughts with friends and loved ones, but ultimately everybody is clawing away at time until we finally die, with the hope that until it's finally over things might be not quite so torturous

the man who wrote the book i'm reading, andrew solomon, also wrote a book about depression, which he suffers from: the noonday demon. i haven't read that one, but he seems great. if you haven't already read it, maybe it would be worth checking out? (sorry if this is a presumptuous post!)

i'm really sorry you had experiences that made you feel like your value as a person was transactional, it sounds like at a pretty young age and by people who should have been taking care of you. but you're valuable even if nobody likes you! i like and dislike a lot of people; it never occurred to me that i was in a position to render them valid or invalid. i'm not!

this x 1000!

my parents were basically sociopaths, so i didn't have a great start i guess. my family, including my brothers and relatives, still think they can treat me like a piece of garbage... and guilt me and manipulate me into going along with it! like it's the natural order of things. there are real people who treat me like how I'm talking here, and they're my family... and i still let them do it! my parents invented memories for me when i was a kid to explain why i was so fucked up, and still maintain this constructed reality where I'm some inhuman monster... but they were just lying to me. they're the ones who are completely sick. jesus christ.

I keep forgetting this, it's like it all melts into this fabric of reality that's actually just fucked up. and i blame myself for it all, like there is something fundamentally wrong with me. ugh. thanks for the good words all, i guess this proves that i'm wrong.

are you in a position where you can cut your family off? maybe you should consider it? it doesn't have to be forever if it seems like a scary thing to do.

not "should," but "could," rather.

i'm in the position, i have a career so it's not like i need 'em anymore. i think i might have to cut them off, not only for myself, but for other people who i bring into my life.

i dated a girl for three years and she and my mom got really close, like weird secret relationship close. near the end of my relationship my girlfriend said she was afraid my mom was giving her an eating disorder. cue a few years later and she dropped out of her ph.d. program and entered a mental hospital for, you guessed it, an eating disorder!

my mom destroys people. i almost think she takes pleasure in it. my dad will just scam you or threaten you with a baseball bat (or some cartoonishly violent/fucked up thing) if he doesn't get what he wants out of you. the rest of my family just treats me like i'm a festering pile of trash, like they can somehow make all the fucked up family shit go away by putting it on me. i don't need that anymore.