Depression and what it's really like

thx folx

woah, ok, I tried out a new therapist today and it was ... interesting. this guy is brilliant and top of his field, and within an hour he did an amazing takedown of my issues, like seriously good shit.

but then something else happened: we were getting along pretty well, and he shows me a blog he's working on because I was talking about being a writer. in the meantime he shows me some pictures of this sex book he's writing. he shows me pictures of a post-op female-male tranny naked, and some pictures of erect penises... and then he keeps them up on his computer screen and we keep talking la de da about blogs with these pictures of erect dicks right next to it. then a little while later he asks me if I liked girls.

wtf was that??? was *this* guy hitting on me? why do I keep meeting these weird ass therapists?

seriously I just ditched one bizarro therapist, and I find one that's even more bizarro! who's actually way better at the psychology part, but damn I did not expect to see a nude transexual person and a wide array of boners today. strange stories seem to find me for some reason, I really need to start writing about this shit.

you know what, I give up, I'm just going to go full bizarro myself. we're all lunatics, aren't we.

Wow, he should be reported and you should keep looking. I gotta think there's a good one out there who's not a wierdo.

the vibe i got from this guy is that he just doesn't give a fuck anymore. clearly. my life is one long string of things like this stuff. i was born into a Soft Cell song, and apparently that is my fate

please don't use the word "tranny"

yeah yeah yeah, you can see my addendum in my second post

seriously, is everyone like this? cuz this is seriously the only type of shit I've seen in my life! i have never not known a time in my life where freaky stuff like this doesn't happen. everyone's out of their minds.

1. Maybe go to a mental health professional who still gives a fuck?

2. Maybe when someone asks you not to use derogatory terms, respond more considerately than "yeah, yeah, yeah." In fact, a sincere apology to your readers would not be excessive. If you don't like it, try thinking of it as supporting the mental and emotional health of others like yourself who would like to not face aggression and wrongness in their daily lives.

thanks morality police, my head's spinning, cut me some slack. or in your own words, support the mental and emotional health of someone who's posting *right here* who just faced wrongness in his life. "officer, show me some mercy, I know I was wrong." "NO!" collapsible cop baton to the head.

that's exactly what I'm talking about here. I'm done trying to be a nice dude.

is everyone like this?

There's a latent potential for this sort of stuff in pretty much everyone. It stays latent in lots of people, and for those who both recognize its presence and its wrongness, there is a pretty strong wall of inhibition (in the better sense) between the potential and any possibility of acting on it.

spectrum, it sucks that your therapists have been so unprofessional.

more than sucks. i think that guy should lose his license. i think in orbit was wrong to zero in on your language at this particular instance. what you experienced would have traumatized me. i mean, therapy puts you in a very vulnerable position, it's the therapists job to make you feel safe and comfortable.

I hear that, Aimless. If I'm going to be perfectly honest, I've been there, too. I have my own freak-ass carnal side that I've let out before, though I sure as well wouldn't do something like what this guy did. and thanks treeship, this unprofessionalism is way...way...way more common than you might think. Maybe I keep seeing this shit because I'm tempting life to give me experience, and I'm sure as hell getting it!

For now I might ease up on my own moral crusade and experience the world as it really seems to be. I clearly have some good shit going on for me, and there is so much I can do to have fun and enjoy this screwed up life we're all living... I've just been keeping it at bay out of some utterly strict morality I've been keeping. I think it's time I start showing my real potential, I'm a clever, sharp motherfucker with above average intelligence and some sweet personality shit going on (and apparently looks, too, if these nutcases have any say in it), and it might be time to take something back from the world for myself. I just have to make sure not to go too far.

I imagine when I was a kid I made a deal with a demon. He asked me what I most wanted out of life. and I told him, "I want to experience everything there is to being human. I want to know what life is." And here I am.

though that might be a little dramatic, we all experience life whether we want to or not!!

I had a psychiatrist in charge of my case one time. His specialty was Power Dynamics. He'd regularly try to insult me about my eye contact or clothing, and I'd come back with complaints about the healthiness of the food in the cafeteria. Finally he asked if I'd ever heard of Small Penis Syndrome.

The next time I was meeting with his female Indian intern who was actually in charge of my case, I went into a long explanation of my recent impotence and physical damage to my penis and why this frustrated me.

She asked me why I was telling her all this, and all I could think of to say was "I don't know, I'm getting out soon and this has been bothering me."

dn't remember anyone mentioning the depression thread is a safe space to use slurs without criticism ?

mental health is never an excuse for that

yeah, says who? you?

so let me try and pin this down. it's not OK to thoughtlessly make a slur, then realize it and correct yourself, when you're under mental distress and said slur is currently only now being recognized as a slur...

and it IS ok to criticize and harangue someone in mental distress for thoughtlessly making a slur which is quickly self-corrected, adding additional stress and bad feelings to a person you're interacting with right now, in order to assert your own personal values and ideas which are totally unnecessary due to said self-correction, making the whole thing utterly pointless except to make someone's bad situation worse.

no offense, but that's fucking stupid, man. I need a vacation.

the complaint was that you were dismissive, not that you used the language to begin with, iirc

so sure, don't be dismissive of others' concerns on the thread, that's the message

maybe it was misinterpreted. I wrote "yeah yeah yeah" to mean "yeah, I already know, you don't need to tell me."

so my dismissiveness is either a) misinterpreted b) manufactured to make me into a target for moral judgment, or c) regardless of either a) or b) and is related to the fact that I didn't welcome being lashed by the community police for an honest mistake.

all the while I just got sexually harassed by a therapist in truly bizarre fashion, two in a row, during a period where I've been bullied at my job, on top of recovering from PTSD and all sorts of other lovely things that would make most of you throw up in convulsive horror, and now I have to take a community beatdown for a mispoken word that I corrected myself on while reaching out for help after a truly weird experience related to this thread.

i'm sympathetic to transgendered people because I've seen with my own eyes how deeply it affected one of my friends, but I trip over my toes, my own pain is thrown into the garbage, and I get to be villain of the moment among some of you. identity politics can be seriously stupid.

no beatdown, it was just a reminder, dude. I'm sorry you've had a weird, rough time with therapy

yeah, I know, guess I was a little testy before. this therapist was one of Albert Ellis's right hand men, so I figured he'd be ya know ... super cool or something for some reason. That whole philosophy is intelligent and helpful, but it's based on moral nihilism and I guess that's what it looks like face to face. I don't think I'm a very good moral nihilist.

weird that a moral nihilist would want to be a therapist

Lacan was a moral nihilist.

intellectually I don't believe in any inherent morality, value, worth, etc., but that doesn't mean I want to live like a creep. maybe I'll give Buddhism another shot, it's both smart and has a heart.

why not believe in inherent morality? even squirrels have morals!

my philosophy needs some serious brushing up, but I think it's just an illusion of the mind. wipe away all conscious life, and what morality is left? if we're merely "perceiving" some type of objective moral reality, where is it coming from? a floating orb in another dimension? etc. etc.

I don't think it's a matter of philosophy but more like optimal strategy, like the fact that you should always double down on 11 in blackjack. it's an inherent property of the game.

this thread took a weird turn

Remarkably, utterly depressed these past two weeks. I wake up feeling like I'm on the crest of a sleeping pill. Heavy limbs and eyelids. In good shape physically, at the gym every day, great eating habits, still ridiculously low.

- I've recognized that the happiest moments in my day are times that I spend with my nieces and/or godkids, either in person or via FaceTime; don't know if this is good or bad, feels like some kind of transference or sublimation of "the real problem"
- I started to realize that I really miss my brothers-- I have seven of them, three with whom I'm really close-- they live way far away and I think about moving closer to them always (one of them is getting married this summer to a woman I adore and thinking about that is enough to lift the cloud most days)
- work-related shit that I won't get into here but can be boiled down to "I hate my job"

seven brothers makes me jealous i've only three

absence of good quality familial closeness can def eat away at you. I only have 1 sis & 1 bro and their company is like getting a mega boost of vitamin d....it's hard when you crave that company

i don't suppose skyping or anything is feasible? can help in the interim sometimes

my sister's dead

markers :(

wow. sorry to read that. hope you're okay.

it was five years ago. thanks tho

apparently today's national sibling's day or something? anyway

i didn't know that was a thing.

i never heard of it until today

<3 markers. the national sibling day posts fucked me up too, for different reasons.

I'm actually quite glad "national siblings day" (no help for the international, I guess) is a thing, because good sibling relationships can be a very underrated and excellent support.

Still, <3 to those with absent, or departed, or estranged siblings. It's difficult.

<3 markers and <3 all of u

<3 my dear markets

I need good sleep to function well, to handle stress well, and to not get depressio symptoms bobbing up that I have to combat - shitty lies from my own goddamn brain that take so much energy to tamp out

Less sleep means increased likelihood of my "I am just to stressed out right now" rxn which is, embarrassingly, crying

Once I've cried there is a backup army of years waiting to be sent out at the drop of a hat

I do "all the right things" - needs, therapy, exercise, social links with loved ones, obsessively distracting my bad thoughts away with hobbies, three healthy hots and plenty of time in the chot

I take an ambit and sometimes a lorazepam before bed and my brain still wakes me up at 3 or 4 am

"You thought you could get me to sip ruminating, could you?"

I feel like I don't have depression but a personal demon that wants to tell me I'm terrible, unwanted, and to give up, a demon that wants to talk to me at night when I can do nothing to distract myself

Our all the "right stuff" I'm doing would work!

i don't know why brains work differently in the middle of the night but christ when the Fear comes that's when it does its worst

a personal demon that wants to tell me I'm terrible, unwanted, and to give up, a demon that wants to talk to me at night when I can do nothing to distract myself

Yeah I have one of these. One of the problems I'm having with the CBT I'm doing at the moment is there's all this stuff about distracting yourself when you start ruminating but this is much worse at night when I'm in bed and have no way to distract myself

thanks veg, daniel, crut, bb, nv, and abbott. fwiw i wasn't even aware "national siblings day" was a thing until i saw it on instagram late in the day, and i wasn't on facebook much either, so i'm just seeing a lot of it now. i'm not sure how much it affected me, actually. not too much? idk. anyway, please return to talking about depression, because ppl need this thread and my problems are mostly really not this one right now. shoutout to those dealing with this, though, and good vibes.