Depression and what it's really like

Once again I find myself in that state of agitation and restlessness and wondering if I shouldn't maybe consult an exorcist instead of a therapist. Wouldn't it be nice if I could be doused with holy water and relieved of all these worries and lusts and appetites?

^ yep

best wishes to you and yours at this time, calzino.

unemployment has crushed my confidence and compounded the depression. I've started going to a work resource center Monday to Friday to get out of the house and be around other job seekers. The upside is i'm no longer drinking during the day and that cuts my problems down quite a bit. I'm deeply aware of the triggers in my life, what I'm worried about is that even if I can navigate them, I will still have that empty feeling.

The only thing I want now is a peaceful, dignified death of my own choosing. For all the things I survived and lived through, for all the work I've put into my life, it's led up to nothing. The way our society is these days, there's no chance of me ever getting a life worth living... it requires significant help from other people, and nobody's willing to do that shit unless there's something in it for them. You gotta have money to make money, they say. I've got nothing of anything. I'm just some sad sack fuck born into an awful life who "survived".

Doesn't matter. Life isn't one of those inspirational movies or posters you see in a guidance counselor's office. Sometimes there's just a bad ending, caused by random misfortune, and that's it. The end.

It'd be nice if we could have legalized euthanasia, because I really don't want to cause any harm to people. People care so little that they don't understand or care to know how horrifying the world can be, and they mock you and dismiss you when you desperately try to reach out for help. Living through tragedy really is a fate worse than death, at least in my case.

My god damn family really did succeed in murdering me, in a truly brilliant, underhanded way. Hats off to those pieces of dog shit.

hang in there carpet_kaiser - can relate

Thanks. There are horrifying things in this world that happen, and people laugh in your face when you try to tell them. I went to a PTSD support group, and the leader did this obnoxious Jim Carrey expression at me when I tried to share my story. People can be real pieces of shit.

It's like you're desperately fighting for your life to claw to safety from a genuine threat of death, and you get your hands stomped on. What a fucking world, man. No wonder nobody tried to help me when I was a kid. What the hell is the human race.

Fuck it, I'm not going to kill myself. I'm going to go back to my old way of doing things, farting in the face of the world, and doing what I want, when I want.

That was a lot more fun. My project in becoming a decent, humane person was an utter failure. I've discovered that's an impossible goal in America, beyond pretending to be that for show.

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion".

Fuck em carpet kaiser, be you :)

Thanks. I'm going to make this my new theme song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oMNWGZ-qSs

I know I don't suffer from clinical depression, but I am on massive downer right now. And under normal circumstances I am brilliant at batting off the general twattery of other people. But i'm pretty weak at the moment and I've let two little incidents upset my mood: an arsehole security guard at Asda when Alex was having a meltdown in the car park, and some drunken thuggish arsehole in the local Onestop queue, mimicking me because my accent went from Yorkshire to posh for some unexplained reason when I said "thank You". My theory is if there were less arseholes in the world, even people suffering from clinical depression would at least have a sporting chance of coping with the condition.

Just catching up calz, chin up man. You do great.

I'm lucky that no matter bad I feel, I always reset after a night's sleep. I feel sorry for people live feeling like that all the time.

who live

My missus gets out of hospital tomorrow and is paranoid about her new suicidal status. I think she has a sense of disbelief that she actually went for it. She wanted to bail out tonight, but I persuaded her to stay because now she has been assigned a social worker and is under observation, I think she needs to be careful. I'm paranoid that they might try and section her if she doesn't play ball.

yeah you're right calzino about the less arseholes thing, would be much easier.

One thing I find difficult though is mentally ill people who act like abusive arseholes. This guy on the bus had hit someone and people waved it away because he's mentally ill. Just re-inforced the gulf of understanding between the "norms" and those with mental illness. I think if you're outwardly abusive, there's no excuse - go get help seriously.

Anyways hope things go alright cal

Can definitely relate in regards to carelessly malicious people, obviously.

I'm actually at a point where, through my isolation, I'm unsure if everyone around me is the ass that I perceive them to be or if I have become the impatient, self-obsessed ass, on account of my barometer for normal social interaction being so out of calibration.

Veering between a crushing weight of unfounded grief on my chest, and blood-boiling fury at nothing.

Have you recently change your meds? Or is this typical of you? Just asking, in case it's something that arose via a med change.

Sending best wishes just1n3, and to all in this thread x

The good news is I feel remarkably cheerful and energetic today. The bad news is that I'm afraid it's a manic episode. (I've never been diagnosed with a bipolar disorder.)

My friend's new show with Matt Silver may fit in here...he has ongoing fights with mental illness issues and counters them with performance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi8tFBpc6XA

XPs I tapered off my meds a few weeks ago

Yesterday was such a shitshow and today I feel pretty much totally normal (relative to how bad I've been feeling the last few weeks).

I've been sleeping like a champ the past couple of weeks, pretty bummed it doesn't seem to have made any difference to my moods or energy levels :/

Dear lord how I wish I could get more sleep

So k3vin, why do you think I should see a psychiatrist? I'm curious if there's something out there that I don't already know.

Anti-anxiety medication is a very, very bad idea for me. One of my main problems is that I don't feel enough anxiety. One of my co-workers at one of my old jobs was mystified at my reactions to horrible ways I was being abused there. "You just go with the flow! Wow!" And I was like, "what are you talking about?"

Being tortured is just normal to me, and it's dangerous! I'm currently in a dangerous living, job, and life situation, and I could really use MORE anxiety, not less. Is there anxiety-inducing medication out there?

I'm not depressed right now. I'm holding on for my dear life and currently trying to pull myself up once again. If I were depressed, I'd be dead or homeless.

Not sure what other issues there are here. As far as I know, there are currently no medications for experiential trauma, except experimental palliative care like marijuana, which is the last thing I need right now.

Adderall would probably be the only useful medication since the only solution I have is to work my fucking ass off to find a new job, a new apartment, and rebuild a new life for myself.

The problem is that stimulants make me really mean and sadistic, and I don't want to go down that road.

What are your thoughts?

I could really use MORE anxiety, not less.

Emotions are crude, but generally very effective signals for motivating action. In your case, if your emotional signals are as blunted, numbed and ineffective as you say, then you will have to substitute rational analysis to the furthest extent you can, unless or until you can find some method for retraining your emotions to resume their intended function. I would not try self-medicating.

I do notice in your writings about your situation that the language you use is highly emotionally charged, so it is a bit confusing to me that you claim to be insufficiently emotionally sensitive. If anything, you come across as one huge raw exposed nerve.

Your situation, to the extent you sketch it, sounds much more like PTSD than anything else. You repeatedly claim that therapists know nothing about your needs, but if PTSD truly is your underlying condition, then this claim doesn't fit reality. A therapist need not have encountered others suffering from the particular trauma you experienced from your parents in order to pursue treatment. PTSD should not be a complete mystery to them.

Among other things, you might want to go back and review your earlier posts in this thread and the answers you got. As I recall, they were not condescending, but offered as much help and sympathy as it was possible to convey on a message board.

It's PTSD + an uprbinging designed to get me killed. Right now I'm neck-deep in bad shit, man. Before I can get help, I've got to help myself out of this quicksand I'm almost drowning in, and I have nobody and nothing to help me except myself.

It's just so fucking much. Whatever got me this far, I've got to tap into that again. Like propagandizing myself into heroic personal action, because that's what it's gonna take. And that's before I can see help.

Thank you.

larry, it's not appropriate for me to attempt to diagnose you from afar like this. all i can say is that from my perspective, what you're describing is concerning to me and i think you would benefit from formal evaluation by a physician. this advice still holds even if you've tried this in the past and felt frustrated with the result

I've already had formal evaluation, several of them. They didn't notice anything special, except I had a shit life.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder. That's what I got. It'd probably be PTSD if I were a little more forthcoming. But my anxiety was turned into a tool designed to get me hurt, so there's no normal course of treatment for it.

That's the work I've been doing on my own, and I've developed a solution for it. But there's no solution for how much this hurts.

I know this is crazy, but the people in my family are ridiculously smart and inventive, and are sadistic psychopaths. My mom, who was one of the main engineers here, graduated high school and went to college when she was 14. She was like a former child prodigy or something.

These people treated abusing me like a fun hobby ever since I was a little kid. "Secrets and Lies" they call it through their blood soaked teeth.

There's literally nothing out there designed for this, because it's a new design. I've had to do this on my own, and I'm so fucking close to it, it's just the pain. And the magnitude of it.

The magnitude of realizing you've been living in a fake reality your whole life, a reality that was designed to get you killed, a reality that got me kidnapped, tortured, and almost murdered! And they just laughed in my face, and my brother brought my kidnapper home and he got rewarded for it.

And I got molested, and my brother convinced everyone in high school I was gay, and had to spend my entire high school career with everyone convinced I was gay, and that was compounded by all these intricate details that connects into this complex, brilliantly-engineered act of abuse done to me.

If A fails, B kicks in, and if that fails, C kicks in, and if C succeeds it connects to A and B, and it goes all the way to Z, each piece interlocking and supporting the other pieces, and if some fail, others kick in to support it. It's really hard to describe; I've had to write about 1,000 pages of journal entries to suss out the complexities of this.

I'm only here saying this now because of what I did to survive. I was like my mom, but with a conscience, and I had to wage my own counter campaign against them. Like I taught myself how to read, trained myself in Franciscan Catholic ethics and compassion for about 6 or 7 years to mitigate their influence on me. And so much more.

There are no therapists out there who have any fucking clue about this shit. Being born to my family is a fate worse than death, unless you end up like a psychopath like one of them, which is really common. That condition has to have a genetic component.

I'm not sure there is a real solution that doesn't involve some nebulous sense of coming to terms with yrself but as far as that's concerned I wish you well dude

Thanks. That's what I'm doing now, and that's the hardest part of it all. Throwing out your entire history of memories and emotions, your whole concept of yourself, your behaviors, attitudes, and ideas, realizing they were all some malicious act from your only family, and rebuilding yourself from scratch.

It's not all bad, because I did develop my own life in secret, and that's the one I'm going with (secret here, me being heterosexual and masculine, interested in music and art, all the things I like, etc). If you ever wanted the Rosetta Stone to burt_stanton's hilarity, this is it.

The immensity of this, though, is impossible to describe. It's like ... no words can describe it.

Reminds me of a scene from Caligula 2: The Real Story where the poet whose a witness to Caligula's atrocities gets his tongue ripped out and his fingers removed so he can never communicate his own experiences of it.

I have thoughts about this - not necessarily positive ones - but I' m in the pub and I'll try and churn them out later

I mean, I get the contradiction in this “I wish I had more anxiety” contradiction with also recognizing something like General Anxiety Disorder could be the case. Anxiety, especially the general kind, is a churning monster you feed with new worries or, barring anything wrong in life right now, dwelling on the smallest details or something that happened years ago. PTSD is definitely an enabler for the latter category, since anything could pop something from the past into your mind and send you back into that churn.

I don’t think the self-diagosis is a good plan, although yeah, both ADHD medication and anti-anxiety medication can be prescribed for GAD, which (and I think I’m remembering this correctly) can be very obsessive-compulsive in nature. I’m an anxious guy, and I honestly have read some of your cynical posts as the sort of lashing out I was more prone to in years past. (Pure O, I think, is the OCD that manifests more in a focused obsessive thought that’s not acted out in behaviors). This is where someone who understands these things, like a therapist, can be really useful because they can give you a framework for understanding why and how you’re locking into these thought patterns, and can help differentiate between these types of diagnosis. We’re just people on ilx, we don’t have the ability to talk through these things in depth, even if it seems like it.

The idea that a coworker would think you’re “going with the flow” also lines up with my experiences — I seemed very laid back to some people, but it was because I was anxious every moment of the day. That kind of distant look in my eye wasn’t me just being chill with the current situation, it was my mind going a million directions and not being able to relate to things as just “stuff that’s going on” but as some sort of input to this churn that’d be recycled into a false narrative in my mind later. And I’d have conversations that made no sense to others, because I’d say something, hear what they said, and assume they were speaking from one of the handful of reactions to what I’d said... that I’d already walked through in my head.

It can be better, I swear. But sometimes the self-guided thing, especially if it’s “making yourself a better person,” is working from a false premise. Because you’re just feeding that new information into a faulty processing mechanism in your head. It takes someone else who understands the tools, whether it’s structured therapy, medication, a combination of both, to help you rewire your ability to self-evaluate.

The thought that no one else is going to get it is also one of those narratives people tell themselves, especially if they’ve been around people (read: family) that screwed up your idea about what normal is. My parents were loving, nurturing people and functional in their own lives, so it took years for it to occur to me that not everyone impulsively checks the locks twice before leaving the office, or being anxious about work to the point where you puke every morning when you get out of bed are things that aren’t just a thing that people do. But those are the kind of things that I saw, and it was just the way things were.

I agree with what k3vin k said upthread.

Also, it sounds like you're saying that much of your historical issue with therapists/doctors is that they either didn't believe you when you told them the horrible the things you've been through ... or ... that you actually didn't tell them these awful things. I can't see how under these circumstances that the relationship would have worked out very well.

cosign

it reminds me of the sub-plot in Mr. Robot with Elliot and his therapist.

If A fails, B kicks in, and if that fails, C kicks in, and if C succeeds it connects to A and B, and it goes all the way to Z, each piece interlocking and supporting the other pieces, and if some fail, others kick in to support it. It's really hard to describe; I've had to write about 1,000 pages of journal entries to suss out the complexities of this.

fwiw this is the churn I’m talking about, the idea there’s a mathematics or grand narrative to things, that you have to make the pieces fit and figure things out

all of these things affected you, and are things no one should have to live through, but that’s what therapy gives you: this is some shit that happened. when your mind locks in on one thing, you don’t solve it by moving on to thinking about the other horrible thing, you get the framework to just stop and dismiss all this shit and concentrate on the now

the hardest part of all of this, is that there's (usually) a brain chemical aspect to the dysfunction as well as a cognitive behavioral one. And you have to fight on both fronts. If you just do one, and not the other, you (at least me) don't end up getting much "better"

Thanks for the words and advice, everyone.

I grew up in a family filled with people like Macaulay Culkin's character in The Good Son. And they're all really smart, and work together,

For example, my older brother raped somebody in high school, and chuckled about it. My other brother helped smear the woman he raped by spreading a rumor that she raped him; he also spread another rumor that a guy who had just graduated also got raped by a woman in college, thereby making the scenario seem normal. It worked, the rumors stuck, and my brother got out of it with his reputation untarnished. The rumor spreading brother's the one who convinced everyone I was gay, naturally.

fwiw this is the churn I’m talking about, the idea there’s a mathematics or grand narrative to things, that you have to make the pieces fit and figure things out

The churning I'm talking about is something different. I'll give you an example. When I was in 3rd grade someone broke into our classroom, stole our daily journals, and also opened up a package of cookies the teacher had and took a whole bunch of them. Throughout the entire day the teacher kept repeating, "he took the cookies!" and she'd hold up the opened package. She just couldn't wrap her head around it.

As I've been figuring this out, I realized it was probably my dad who did that. I used those journals to threaten them about the things they were doing to me. Also, stealing cookies while doing that is totally a signature dad move. A few years ago he told me this story about how he trapped a co-worker in a closet at work over the weekend, got kicked out of the union, and went to prison for it. And he told that story with a twinkle in his eye, like it was one of his best memories ever! 20 years later, he still thinks that's hilarious.

Ya know? One part of the churning is me trying to wrap my head around this, just like my teacher with the cookies. It's just impossible for me to get on the level of how these people think and act, to try and understand how these things could possibly be. My parents, through underhanded means, ended up getting me kidnapped and almost murdered, and they chuckled in my face, my mom told me to hang out with them again, and my brother brings the guy who kidnapped me into the house a few months later!

Then they used the trauma for that as a tool to do all sorts of really creative types of abuse to me. And since they isolated me in a complex set of ways (causing trauma, exacerbating trauma, using that trauma as developmental weapon, setting me up with "friends" who tortured me, giving me really bad advice, convincing everyone I was gay so I couldn't have a normal social life...)

And on and on and on. The churning is both the complexity of what they did, the unthinkable ways they behave, act and think, and the next level is their coordinated con artistry. They have fake personas they use to get by in the world: fun, funny, charming, I have everything in common with you, humanitarians, etc. Despite the fact that they think raping people is awesome.

Growing up, people would tell me how lucky I was to have such an awesome and loving family, and I was always like, "!?!!?"

I grew up in a very, very demented world, and I'm still trying to figure it out.

The issue with the therapists is that 1) because of my upbringing, I chose really scary therapists, 2) the sheer complexity and mind-bending nature of this stuff makes it really hard for me to function at all, let alone communicate it, because it's taken about 1,000 pages of journal entries to cover the basics of it, and 3) when I tried again and shared my story, most of them said they couldn't help me. It'd take a few months to just lay the groundwork for treatment.

I grew up with people who treated me as their little torture pet, playing a game with my life they amusingly call "Secrets and Lies" (from an obscure Simpsons episode, they're really funny people). Their favorite thing is psychological abuse, basically driving people insane or getting them hurt through underhanded means. My girlfriend in college dropped out of her PhD program and ended up in a mental hospital because of my mom; she got preyed on, and before we broke up, my girlfriend said, "I think your mom's fucking me up." Oh yeah. This is the same mom who dragged a tree onto the highway to watch cars crash into it.

So yeah. I have no idea how I made it out of that. I have no idea how I survived. But I didn't survive well, and I'm about to not survive for good this time. My life's a disaster. I can't afford therapy, I have to find a new job, fast, and I'm in royally shit condition to do it. After I graduated from law school they reappeared and tortured the living shit out of me, and they were able to do it because my brother's "change of heart" was a years-long scam that I fell for. "HUHUUHUHUH you thought we were bonding?" when the curtain dropped. Years of acting like a changed person. What a piece of shit. Yup. That's what they're like.

I think they finally did it this time.

Woah, that was way longer than I thought it'd be.

get some help, man

you can figure out the causes and course of recovery later, but your recent posts sound a lot like the equivalent of someone with heart disease saying “I am having a heart attack, right now”

there are people to help those people figure out if they need more medical intervention, set up healthier ways of living, and regular check-ups. but a mental health crisis can be just as bad for your health as a heart attack. feel like we’re standing around asking if you ate some donuts lately while you’re falling over

Damn. My friends who have totally cut ties with their families (I have a bunch of them, where I live is one of those places people go to get away from shitty families) -- have really sad, awful stories involving physical abuse, sexual abuse, drug use, intolerant religious backgrounds ... but this really takes the cake!

Is your feeling that "this is the end" mostly an emotional one, or is it mainly due to logistical circumstances (money, housing, etc.)?

I'll get some help when I'm in the position. The biggest barrier, beyond money, is being able to communicate it properly. It's like trying to communicate the contents of a dictionary in a single word, but in some weird 4 dimensional way. Even thinking about it is making my eyes daze over, it's almost Zen like.

My main issue in feeling hopeless is logistical. I'm working for an awful company right now; got tricked into taking a marketing job for a failing product, so it's not stable at all, and the work I'm doing is total dogshit stuff I can't even use in my portfolio. I'm not even getting paid enough to eat. I'm holding onto a rope that's about to break.

So I have to find a new, better paying job fast, and I haven't had a full-time one in a year and a half, and I'm in bad health. I've got no support or family out here.

This really feels like it's it this time.

Ya know? They finally got me.

Like, how the hell am I going to do this? If I become homeless, then I'm going to kill myself, because I just don't have it in me to deal with that. And I'll become a sitting duck for predators due to my uprbinging.

I did my best, and I made it way further than I should have. Even though my life's been a pile of shit, I fought a good fight.

I'm probably going to have to do my patented crazy bullshit again, aren't I. I'm sick of this fucking shit.

Anyway, I'm done thread sitting about this. Thanks everyone for listening to my way out there issues and giving advice.

Please don't kill yourself is all I can say right now

I'm not going to kill myself now. I'm going to try and pull my shit together and find a new job. If I can't do that, and I lose this job, then I'm going to do it. But that hasn't happened yet.