At 22 years old, after months long assessments, I have been diagnosed with severe ADHD, depression and moderate anxiety. Here is a quick timeline of my experience:

• May - August :
  • I started CBT therapy and Sertraline 50mg
  • Gradually I was upped to the a dose of 75mg.
  • In this whole period I did not experience any improvements or side effects, except a loss of appetite in the first few days.
• September:
  • I started taking Methylphenidate 18mg and went back to just 50mg of Sertraline.
  • From the first day I had felt a sentiment of calmness and control. But it slowly faded away and I still felt I could not concentrate on things or act productive.
  • I also stopped going to therapy as I saw that CBT was not effective for me.
• October - November:
  • This was a completely different month. I wasn't fully in control of my attention span but it was much better than I've ever been. What was more shocking was how internally I felt at peace and something that I'd describe now as euphoric (as I assume this was just a side effect of the medication). U
  • Until mid november I was actually going around telling people I think I might not be depressed anymore, as I had felt for the first time in a way that I haven't felt since early childhood. I was able to accomplish incredible feats related to discipline and I saw my academic results improving greatly. Unfortunately this sentiment slowly faded away and I was back to my old self by the end of November.
• December - Now I was upped to 36mg of Methylphenidate and I noticed a much better control of my attention but unfortunately I have not felt that feeling of relief again. And as it seems the effectiveness of the dose diminished from the first few days to now.
  Since December I've had numerous breakdowns, feeling completely exhausted and burnt out. I suffered from classic problems of procrastination starting to work on difficult projects only a couple of days before the deadline and it was all crashing down. I submitted multiple disgustingly low quality pieces of work because I just did not work in time enough but the few days I did work I did incredible amounts of effort and I do feel like the pills helped me stay focused. After this deadline period though I was just met with my normal depression symptoms where I had a long streak of days that I could not even get out of bed or brush my teeth.

I don't know what more to do. I always knew I was broken and needed help. And for all my life I thought that seeing a psychiatrist is a last resort in case "I can't fix myself" on my own. Now it's been almost a whole year and I am in a critical time period where I need to excel and put in the work but I find myself succumbing to my symptoms while jumping up and down with the doses of some pills that barely seem to have an effect.

I didn't have many people around me from the start, and many of them would not understand my condition at all (nobody from my family does). But now it seems that even the few that were empathetic I have unfortunately tired out. I've heard my fair share of bad remarks that have gradually demoralised me (ADHD is not real. I'm just lazy. I just like to complain. etc) and due to the fact that I also have codependency problems this has greatly hurt me and made me feel like I am completely alone and nobody cares for my troubles or has my wellbeing in their best interest. Right now I just wish I'd know what to do. I wish there was some clear step by step goal oriented way to "happiness" or at least normality. I don't even know what more to tell my psychiatrist other than how I don't feel well, which is what I've been telling him since the start.

If you've been through a similar journey, I'd love to hear your experience and any advice you wish you had received earlier.

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

Second Martin Scorsese movie is Gangs of New York from 2002.

IMDb
Letterboxd
Wikipedia

Besides any thoughts any thoughts on this movie, now that we have done this little comparison between Scorsese and superhero movies, what do you think sets these types of movies apart and are they really as opposites as it is sometimes made out to be?

The schedule for March is:

• 4th: There Will Be Blood
• 11th: Life is beautiful
• 18th: High Noon
• 25th: Saving Private Ryan

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Hey y'all! I'm finishing up a work (academic) project, and, to my delight in the near future I will have time to read for fun again! In talking with a friend, I realized that many people have at least one or two favorite books no one's ever heard of before.

Fiction, nonfiction, weird, old, whatever! What're your favorites?

I'll start: Karl Kerenyi's book on Hermes, and Ex Libris, by Anne Fadiman. The Kerenyi text is lovely because he dwells in this between-place of pure academic and personal experience, and it reads almost like a memoir of a man who is still very much in the midst of his love affair with his research. The Fadiman book is a lovely (if tiny!) volume of essays that I've come back to time and time again about what books mean to a reader, and how they have shaped her life.

I like that music app algorithms are able to suggest similar songs to add to my playlist, but I wish there were a way to specify bpm for the song suggestions. I get extra motivation from a playlist with a specific and consistent bpm when I'm doing jump rope or using the treadmill.

Is there an easy way to search for songs based on both "vibes" and bpm?

Or alternatively, music playing app that can auto adjust songs in a playlist to all play at the same bpm.

Follow up to this post

I did my first ever platelet donation!

This one was a bit more intimidating than the blood donation. For platelets, the donation takes around two hours not counting the onboarding time. Additionally, during the donation, you can’t move either of your arms, as you have needles in both. The blood draws from one arm, goes into a centrifuge where they separate out the platelets, and then your blood gets returned to you in your other arm.

I was a little worried about how it was going to go leading up to the appointment, but I’m very happy to report that everything went fine! All of the needles went in easily and it was a nearly painless process. After that it was actually kind of boring! They had a screen with Netflix on it, so I watched three episodes of a TV show.

My least favorite part of the whole thing was not being able to scratch an itch when one arose, which is not so much a complaint as it is an endorsement. If the worst I can say is that I couldn’t scratch my nose once or twice during a multi-hour process involving multiple needles and my blood leaving and re-entering my body, then I’d say it went really well!

The staff kept checking in to see if I needed a blanket because most people feel cold when donating platelets, but, weirdly, I actually liked the chilled sensation I got? It wasn’t like a regular “cold” feeling; I found it genuinely pleasant.

Also, the whole experience was an interesting experiment in forced attention. I couldn’t check my phone, so I just watched a show, uninterrupted. I can’t remember the last time I did that? I got home and tried to continue watching it and, sure enough, now that my arms were free I was looking at my email and checking messages and the news instead of paying attention to what I had on. The whole donation session had a genuinely nice, calm, almost meditative quality to it. It was a nice way to start out a Saturday.

You can donate platelets separately from blood, and platelets have a much lower “donation cooldown” (you can donate them every seven days). I don’t think I’ll be keeping to that rapid of a turnaround, but I’m going to start doing it once a month. One thing I learned from this is that, unlike blood which can be stored for up to a year (edit: turns out it’s only 42 days), platelets have to be used within five days, so they’re pretty much constantly in demand because they can’t be stockpiled.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my little mini-milestone with everyone here. The novelty of being able to donate as a gay guy still hasn’t worn off for me. I love the idea of being able to do it regularly and support people over time!

Hello, I'm looking for books written by professionals that would further my language and understanding of emotions, in order to connect with my emotions on a deeper level. An example would be "Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect", but it doesn't have to be about neglect. I just want to understand and experience the emotional spectrum better, so any book (written by a mental health professional) that would help with that is good. If possible, I prefer shorter books, around 100-250 pages, but it's not a hard requirement.