Depression and what it's really like

been on meds now for 20 years, wondering if they have stopped working or if something else would be better, but kind of terrified of what might happen coming off them

guess i'm starting zoloft tomorrow.

Good luck.

Thinking good thoughts for you.

no shame in asking for sleeping pills if you need'em too imo, or whatever sleep help you need; extended periods of shitty sleep always mea depression for me no matter what
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/upshot/the-evidence-points-to-a-better-way-to-fight-insomnia.html

love patton oswalt's bit on going off his antidepressants

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZqrHw7YV3Q

btw I am sorry you are feeling depressed & I hope it is brief

i already take gabapentin, klonopin and weed for sleep (the klonopin only occasionally), and i've tried a couple of other sleep meds that didn't work out.

i just talked to a friend of mine who takes zoloft and she's had a great experience on it so that was nice to hear. i'm a little nervous about potential nausea/cramps side effects, though.

i quit taking meds* and seeing my therapist a few months back. sick of feeling fuzzy & trudging the same stupid circles month after month, year after year. have no faith either in therapy or in my own ability to give shits sufficient to effect change. resigned therefore to the ~experience~ of depression, which i supposed i've managed fine for half a century ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

* escitalopram & bupropion

zoloft worked really well for me. it was kind of like a kick start to the part of my brain that regulates motivation. i felt "driven" for the first time in ages.

starting to think it's wearing off at this point, though. :/

xp - how's that working out for you? (not meant sarcastically)

not sure, good days and bad. at the moment, i feel like complete shit, but i figure i can wait it out.

xp i was gonna ask you if it was still working for you - i was looking through this thread and the meds one for ppl who have been on zoloft and saw a few of your posts about. i could really use the motivation, so i hope it helps me like that, too!

Hope it works out for you! It also makes falling asleep easier for me. No more lying awake soaking in dread and despair

Well not nearly as much anyway

do you take it at night or morning? dr told me to take in the a.m. but pharmacist said to watch out for drowsiness and switch to taking at dinner time if it made me sleepy. it's hard for me to tell because i'm always tired anyway!

i take it nighttime but have taken it during the day in the past

i know before bed is often the ideal time for smoking weed but really it is not good for your sleep. HOWEVER, since you are already depressed i would not recommend changing your weed smoking habits unless they are actively stressing you out.

weed totally helps me relax at night! i was totally fucked when i went to nz for 2 weeks and had no weed. i barely slept the entire time. my sleeping meds don't work well enough on their own.

nb i buy medical marijuana, not street weed

does anyone here find they generally feel worse after speaking to therapists?

i saw a new one recently -- he came recommended by my psychiatrist who i think is great -- and i just left feeling pissed off. at one point he insisted that i lower my expectations for myself or something -- part of being realistic and compassionate -- and i resisted, saying that i had done a lot of work since college trying to hold myself accountable. he said "how is that working out for you?" in a way that sounded sarcastic and i very nearly punched him in the face.

i know what he meant -- it's true that, recently, after quitting my job, i have been a bit self-critical in a way that isn't helpful -- but still, i thought it was a shitty way to make his point. he talked as if i was at rock bottom and had no useful coping mechanisms, which is not the case. i get pretty embarrassed talking about this stuff, but five years ago i had a depressive crisis that i would now describe as life threatening. with medication and also just like, taking things slower, i have improved tremendously, to the point where over the past few years i was able to earn a masters degree, hold jobs, and maintain a relationship that -- while it ended recently -- was never toxic. i felt like the therapist, by taking such a high and mighty tone, devalued all of this progress. in general, therapists rarely seem responsive. they either assume you are messed up and untrustworthy or that you don't have any real problems and, despite what you are telling them, are actually fine.

i just have never had a truly good experience with a therapist and i've seen a few.

my psychiatrist is very objective about stuff. he describes the mechanisms of the drugs he prescribes and sometimes offers common sense wisdom about habits/lifestyle changes like exercise and cutting back on drinking that can be beneficial. maybe i am just resistant to someone trying to go deeper than that.

at one point it felt like this guy was trying to convert me to zen buddhism

i think the buddhist tradition has a lot of wisdom to offer btw, but it's not really how i see the world. this therapist was "pushing" a total overhaul of how i navigated the everyday.

That's too bad, Treesh—

I was seeing a really great guy for therapy before I started this job recently and it threw my whole schedule into a blender. He was very empathetic and a great listener, but also never shied away from making (not always nice or kind) suggestions or just cutting to the chase. A very nice balance of being genuinely helpful and gentle, but not a pushover either. I never left a session feeling frustrated or unfulfilled.

Back in Reno, I had a therapist who I genuinely believe meant well and did not have any negative judgements about me. But she was definitely more interested in pushing an agenda with each session than really listening to what I had to offer. I often left sessions feeling a bit discouraged and just not very good; kind of like, "What the hell did I just spend an hour doing?" So, I know how frustrating that can be.

Sometimes I wonder —after hearing so many horror stories— if there aren't more bad therapists than good ones out there. Makes me very disappointed to hear another such story.

i have never seen a therapist and part of it is fear that they'll act in the way you described. i'm sorry you had to deal with that. will you go back to them again?

glad you eventually found someone who worked out, austin. hope you can figure out the scheduling.

i am not going back to this guy, no. idk, part of my problem with therapists is def related to my own stubbornness. i've done a lot of work on my own to feel ok and part of me is afraid of rocking the boat in a way that could undo that progress. like when this guy talked about lowering expectations as a kind of compassion toward the self, all i could think of was sliding back to the way i was a few years ago when i didn't have goals and i didn't care what happened to me. probably not a fair interpretation of what he was saying, but that's how i felt and why i bristled.

There are a lot of messed up therapists out there, and it makes it especially bad when you take the power imbalance into account. A few years ago I had a therapist who tried to ensnare me in some creepy psychosexual relationship with her. Another dude showed me pictures of dicks in the first session and asked me if I was gay (no I said, are you?). Actually no, I just got the fuck out of there.

I called up a bunch in NYC today, and none of them seemed particularly qualified or professional. One or two creeps were in the mix, too. The psychotherapy industry needs a serious overhaul, the quality of counselors just plain sucks right now.

Larry, that's. . . unsettling.

I've only ever seen the two therapists, so I'm 50/50 right now on good/bad experiences. My psychiatrist back in Reno was very good, as she would work with me on my meds and give me like a hybrid session of therapy and general psych stuff. A very positive person, she was like a little radio tower, just broadcasting good vibes outwards at all times. I miss very few things about my life in Reno, but she is one of them.

Yeah, it was a little unsettling. One time the woman therapist showed up at my gym after I told her about my workout routine. She stuck out like a sore thumb -- upper middle class blonde Manhattanite in her coordinated gym outfit exercising in a schlock gym filled with dudes covered in tattoos and broke college kids. That one dude can especially go fuck himself. I think I was born under some interesting stars.

http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/perth-child-psychiatrist-caught-filming-boy-in-canadian-toilets-20160530-gp7kmn.html

it's to be expected i think that sometimes we'll struggle to form a working relationship with a therapist even if they're good at their job, and there's no reason to pursue a relationship with somebody if it's not working for you.

i did wonder tho, Treesh, have you clarified with yourself what you might want from therapy? to me it's never been a process i've entered into unless i felt something needed to radically change, but you say yourself that you're resistant to that. do you have an expectation about what you need? maybe that will guide you towards a particular kind of practice?

eh i think a good therapist should challenge you from time to time--if not, he/she's not doing their job

yeah i agree with that. i think that might be why i am not a great candidate for therapy -- i have too many defenses up.

what i wanted from therapy this time around was, like, cognitive behavioral techniques to help stop negative habits. these habits include both thought patterns and behaviors and i wanted to learn ways to push myself "back on track" when i felt myself doing things i don't want to be doing. this therapist seemed to want me to adjust my goals. he didn't want to address the behaviors right away but wanted to interrogate the underlying causes -- he thought that i needed a major paradigm shift in terms of what i expected from myself, where i found joy, etc. i just don't want to touch that stuff. it feels like a careful balance -- i got to a place, with medication, where i don't totally despise myself anymore. self-harming instincts have been replaced by an ability to set goals and look forward to things. i'm frustrated by negative habits, still, and sometimes i fall into a pit of old thought patterns, but overall i feel like i am on a stable ground at this point. part of me is afraid that if i started ripping out the floorboards and messing around with the foundations of my mental health the whole thing would fall apart again.

sounds like you're scared to go deeper. yr therapist wants to help the underlying causes, which will be a lot more work but may get you farther in the long run.

self-harming instincts have been replaced by an ability to set goals and look forward to things. i'm frustrated by negative habits, still, and sometimes i fall into a pit of old thought patterns, but overall i feel like i am on a stable ground at this point.

vs.

part of me is afraid that if i started ripping out the floorboards and messing around with the foundations of my mental health the whole thing would fall apart again

my two cents is, mental health doesn't work that way. but you're already being

still, even though my own resistance is definitely part of why i didn't respond well to the session, i think he could have bene more diplomatic in the way he communicated. "how is that working out for you?" is just so dismissive.

Well, the fact that you're unhappy suggests he misjudged you, at least. But that understandable.

"how is that working out for you?" is just so dismissive.

or, it was a challenge, to get you to consider how those decisions have affected you, which is basically the opposite of dismissive

at one point he insisted that i lower my expectations for myself or something -- part of being realistic and compassionate -- and i resisted, saying that i had done a lot of work since college trying to hold myself accountable. he said "how is that working out for you?" in a way that sounded sarcastic

it was the context of the whole thing. also it was really expensive so i wasn't really interested in being talked down to.

basically he saw my problems as being different than what i saw my problems as being and he didn't explain this in a patient way. he was like, "here is the deal with you" after talking to me for twenty minutes.

yeah, if you're having these types of concerns, you should probably find a new therapist. you're probably spending more time thinking about the problems with treatment instead of getting better because of it. total waste of time and money. could damage you more, too.

yesterday i called a therapist who was saying how she thought i wouldn't trust her, but maybe, just maybe with the right treatment. and trying to paste her interpretation of reality that superseded my own with barely anything to base it on. it's like she was creating the conditions to not trust her, and then calling my normal feelings of distrust a problem that i needed to work with her on. yeechhh.

i guess i don't understand why people would go to therapy and *not* expect a therapist to do that

there are different types of realities and perceptions a person can have. there are therapists out there, like the one i talked to yesterday, who try to take the substance of real experience and say that it was something completely different, like a manifestation of my distrust that i needed to get fixed. when it had absolutely nothing to do with that at all. i know my life a lot better than some random woman i found over the internet.

like with cbt this new perspective needs to be based on empirically-testable facts in life and the world. it's something that you can see, experience, and learn, and others can, too. it's part of the shared experience of our human and social realities.

there's a very fine line between that and between telling someone the substance of their experience is wrong, and that the therapist is the one with the answers, when the therapist has no basis of knowledge about any of that, so isn't even in the position to remark on it. it's something that they would have to take at face value due to that lack of knowledge.

it's a dicey area because what looks legitimate could be a therapist trying to take control of you... and that's an unfortunately common thing that happens. there are way worse stories out there than what i've experienced with therapists. just because someone goes into that line of work doesn't magically change the reality that there are a lot of fucked up people out there who will abuse power and do screwed up things for their benefit. therapy can be risky, especially when you're not in a great place in life, and you don't have a strong support network to make sure you don't run into one of these people.

My best outcomes with therapists have involved being frustrated and pissed off at times with their approach; and much later in the process, sometimes with a different therapist, I realize my problems and my solutions resolve around how I deal with frustrations and betrayals.

Other people can be wrong (including and especially therapists), but if I can safely address how I feel they are wrong and what I can or should do about it, I've gotten closer to handling the rest of life.

Trying to distill the idea that if you are up to it, emotionally and financially, dealing with the therapeutic relationship is ultimately part of the therapeutic relationship.

you still have to find a decent one first.

I'm going to stop posting now, because I'm not sure what my point is. Therapy for me is arguing with myself, and therapists are poor substitutes for different selves.

No I think those are good points. I should probably be more open and less defensive and probably, at some level, I am resistant to doing the work of getting really better now that I feel I have the tools to feel "good enough." (Not that i always succeed in feeling "good enough.") Maybe i'll try again at some point. Right now I am in survival mode, trying to find a job and ward off the worst demons. Definitely not the time to delve into my childhood and deep seated insecurities and shit imo.

really really bad day today. external circumstances, not going to share, but it's going to be a series of bad bad days for the foreseeable future. probably going to go on a bender soon.

xp I guess I'm coming from a different angle. I'll sell my soul to Satan at this point to feel better. I've probably invested a good 6 figures of hours into this shit, so I'm not fucking around. I've seen people have mini-meltdowns when I've talked about my own childhood, sort-of like in Bloodborne when your insight is too high and you run into one of those brain things, so I'm probably coming from a different angle.

I called a new batch of therapists and found a few who were better than the last ones, made a few appointments to check them out. One of them seemed to get it, so that's a good sign.

No matter what approach a therapist takes, I think it's weird to challenge the assumptions of the patient like what happened to Treeship BEFORE developing a rapport. It sounds like this happened pretty early in your sessions with them, right? My therapist spent the first 3-4 sessions just listening to me, trying to understand my feelings and asking me my goals for therapy and giving suggestions for things I could do. It was many sessions before he started to challenge some of my assumptions. If any person, therapist or no, is questioning what I believe to be true before I trust them, yeah I'm gonna be put off