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Mental health support / discussion thread.
it's apparently been awhile since we had a proper one of these on tildes (we've had a few mental health related topics but nothing direct like this), and seeing as the site has grown a bit (to say the least) since the last one there's probably some utility in a new one of these. share your experiences/whatever you've found helps/etc. i think this is pretty straightforward.
i normally do not have much to contribute to personal threads like this, but luckily i have plenty of fun experiences on this particular topic, so i can break the ice i guess.
i live the wonderful reality of not being able to afford a diagnosis, therapy, or really medication of any kind under the glorious hellworld of a system that is american healthcare despite almost certainly having undiagnosed borderline personality disorder (in addition to diganosed generalized anxiety disorder, diagnosed autism spectrum disorder, and potentially some other stuff flying under the radar to the beautiful thing known as comorbidity). as you can no doubt ascertain already, this is fun to live, especially given that borderline is fairly severe if left untreated and has something like a 10% suicide rate.
nonetheless, this is (and has been for the year and change now where symptoms have manifested themselves quite clearly) normally "manageable" insofar as nothing bad usually comes of it. actually for the past few weeks it's been... pretty quiet, relatively speaking? which is nice, because this semester is a clusterfuck and if i had to deal with this on top of what i already deal with it'd probably be cataclysmic since i'm already a gigantic trainwreck internally for a bunch of reasons that are complicated.
enter today (technically yesterday, as of writing, since it's currently a little past midnight)! i don't think i have ever wanted to violently maim myself internally quite as much as today, and the best part is that i have no fucking idea what the trigger for any of this was. i've mentioned previously that i am capable of conjuring up quite violent images--and in this case, that really does not help because as it happens, one of the ways my feelings manifest themselves when they are wildly out of control is in gory or particularly painful acts of self harm. extremely fun. i'm pretty good about not acting self harm out because i am very averse to pain, but not acting the thoughts out doesn't exactly help that much when the thoughts themselves take forever to go away.
at this point i'm fairly used to this, which is probably not good--but again, monetary concerns really constrain my ability to actually address any of this with the sorts of treatment you're supposed to get, so at least for the time being i'm basically just banking on things not going to total shit. we'll see how that goes, because the dice have not historically rolled in my favor on this one!
as an aside to that, i increasingly find that i could probably just die and nobody would be particularly affected by that, which is weird. i know that's a oarticularly cliche line, but in my particular case my justification is that pretty much every friend group i exist in i have either left, been kicked out of, or seen disintegrate except one which has like, six people in it. most of the people i used to talk to on discord for example and have added? haven't talked to them in months, probably never will again. i slip in and out of groups so easily that it's laughable. i barely know any of the people i interact with and i have no connections with any of them. for all intents and purposes, just about every relationship i have is a parasocial one. i have zero actual friends outside of the internet and am a part of a whopping zero social groups in real life. i never had very many friends to begin with, but the few i did have pretty much aren't friendships anymore. insofar as it's possible, were i to die tomorrow, next to nobody would notice or particularly care--that's just the way the dice fall. if i was more susceptible to any kind of suicidal ideation, this might be problematic, but honestly i just find it sorta... strange? i almost have a detached view of it, honestly. it's complicated.
on a more upbeat note: at least i'm not having panic attacks in the shower anymore! that used to happen a lot, and it was super fucking annoying. now it doesn't happen at all for whatever reason.
People often say that, but rarely is it ever remotely true, in my experience. Having been to the funerals of several close friends in the last few years, I think the vast majority of people (especially those of us with mental illness), would be blown away by just how big an effect their existence has had on other people. And if I could add a personal anecdote related to this, as well... one of the most breakthrough moments I have ever had in a group therapy setting was an exercise in which everyone wrote something positive about everyone else in the group and read them aloud. The fact that people wrote nice things about me was not what broke me down into a blubbering mess and made me thoroughly question my perceptions... it was the fact that the way others saw me, and the things they genuinely seemed to appreciate about me, were almost the exact opposite of the way I, in my low-self-esteem, mentally ill head, saw myself. It made me realize how distorted the picture I had of myself was, and how totally shit I am at estimating what other people think of me.
Rarely, as people age, will they still have large numbers of friends like they may have had in high school. But that fact aside, IMO what really counts is the quality of your friends, not their number or their location... and at least in my case, I feel like while the number has diminished greatly, the quality has increased greatly as well. Those who I consider my friends now, even the ones I only know entirely online, are ones I can actually trust and who I don't need to hide who I am (or my problems) from.
Fuck me, that hits close to home... isn't that the worst? The shower used to be my one safe place in the entire world where I didn't have panic attacks... but about 8 years ago that changed when I had my first full blown panic attack while having one. I don't get many in the shower, but showers have never felt the same for me since. :(
p.s. If you ever need someone to talk to, let me know. :)
I think what a lot of normals don't understand is how fucking exhausting having a mental illness is. You are either too tired, or too active, or strangely both at the same time, a lot of the time. Simultaneously, you have the thoughts about how much your current state is not normal, which makes you think less of yourself, adding the oil into the fire. And don't even get me started on the process of finding the right medication. It's literally throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. I'm still thankful I have the meds that people in the 50s could only dream of, but there is definitely room for improvement. Where is the Elon Musk of psychiatry?
my general take on treating mental health is that we will never have a truly complete mental health system in this world until it becomes easier to effectively treat people for their problems than it is for them to complain about them to strangers on the internet--which is a lofty bar, because it's an order of magnitude easier to just toss some shit up here than it is to seek out a psychiatrist for literally anything, but that's also kinda the point. people who are already fucked up or in a bad spot really shouldn't need to constantly have to worry about where to find someone who can treat their problems, how to find someone like that, whether they can afford someone like that, what sort of commitments are required for that, what it means in general, how they're going to be medically treated, and whatever else on top of the problems they already have.
I think both your point and @ainar-g's are crucially important. Access to care is a necessity, no question about it - without that, everything else is moot. More than that, to be meaningful, "access" has to cover not just the basic availability, but the affordability, the stress, the potential repercussions, the complexity of seeking help. It's a lot to deal with, and it all needs to be addressed to have a functioning mental healthcare system.
I've been comparatively fortunate in terms of finding care. It hasn't been a perfect process, far far from it, but I have been able to see a variety of qualified specialists over the last decade or so. And I've had a wide variety of conflicting, and sometimes flat out contradictory, diagnoses and treatment plans. These people weren't incompetent, it's just that the state of the art, even the very best of human understanding when it comes to mental health, has a long way to go yet. I think of it like cancer treatment 50-60 years ago: we know there's something wrong, we can figure out only the broad strokes of what it is, but our best bet for treatment is still choosing a drug almost at random and hoping the benefits outweigh the risks.
The last thing I want to do is discourage anyone from seeking treatment - like I said, I've been at it for over a decade and I'm still going - but I do think it's very important to remember a couple of things: firstly, the simple fact that we absolutely need to be funnelling resources into research. Lots of resources. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, that while seeking help is always, always worth doing where possible, it's a different experience for everybody and it may well not be what you hoped for.
Some of my absolute lowest points have been realising that the people I needed to help me, the people who in turn wanted to help me, didn't have the ability to do so. Times when I had just enough left in me to force myself out of bed, and force myself to the doctor, only to have that last tiny glimmer of hope go out when the new drug, the new therapist, the new recommendation didn't do anything to help.
I steel myself for that now, I know that failure is part of the attempt and the only thing to do is keep trying. It scares the hell out of me that every time I cross something off the list, the pool of things that might work gets smaller.
I keep trying. I just wish more people spoke about how hard that part is, and how far we still have to go.
The above turned into a bit of a vent. I didn't intend it to when I started typing, I was going for a quick comment that access and research are both important.
I do worry about posting this - I really don't want to scare anyone away from taking that first step - but I think it's in keeping with the thread and honestly I believe it's something that needs to be said.
casually dropping into this thread again because i'm in a weird mood emotionally today and it occurs to me that some people might be interested in getting to read the emotional experiences of someone who is mildly fucked up. there is, of course, no better way to do this than to drop some expository piece entirely centered on emotions that i wrote like four months ago having just rebounded from a suicidal experience (and which still basically describes how i feel most of the time, but which i largely just suppress because i can't exactly get treatment for it currently). who knows, maybe this will also help people understand the fun time that is living with mental illness? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. anyways:
May I ask how old you are?
The amount of cognitive dissonances in this post is really large. You are obviously depressed and have GAD. What steps have you taken to improve the situation?
19. most of the ones that don't involve medication or therapy (which naturally are probably the only things that would help here for a couple of reasons).
Have you already tried building a set of habits that have already proven to help depression/anxiety, such as:
And have you taken any nootropics? Stuff like Ashwagandha may help.
i should probably clarify that, among other things, i am probably an undiagnosed borderline person (and this is more responsible for how i conduct myself than any sort of anxiety disorder or depression) and that most of what you're suggesting here might help with the other stuff, but either doesn't or probably won't help with that since pretty much the only effective borderline treatment is therapy sometimes supplemented with medicine (neither of which i can currently afford).
i have not bothered with this because in general, i'm somewhat restless and in any case clarity of mind doesn't help me very much other than making me existential, which has a nasty tendency in my case to trigger anxiety attacks or panic attacks. in showering this got bad enough that as a matter of habit, i've taken to playing videos just so i can think about something else. maybe it's different with meditation.
already do that on and off as a separate matter of weight loss. hasn't really helped with any of my problems, and will probably continue to not do so, unfortunately.
also done this on and off. varies in effectiveness, but in general i'd call it something of a wash with my case.
kinda doesn't work with my situation. beyond the fact that dieting is mostly a meme, my family isn't really in a financial position where dieting of any kind is a viable option anyways because as a collective we make like, less than 20k/yr (and both of my parents have either allergies or health constraints that have to be accounted for). we pretty much buy what we can afford when we can afford it, and that obviously doesn't exactly lend itself to any kind of diet plan or particularly balanced nutritional regimen.
Are you American? If so, do you have health insurance? If so, you can look for Behavioral Health Treatment Services here:
https://findtreatment.samhsa.gov/
If you currently don't have insurance, given your family's financial situation, have you looked into if you are eligible for Medicaid?
https://www.hhs.gov/answers/medicare-and-medicaid/who-is-eligible-for-medicaid/index.html
p.s. If you are not American, I would be more than happy to try and help you look for treatment options in whichever country you are from.
aware of the options (i mean at this point i've had like a year and a half to figure this all out). i would categorize it more as a logistical, "i have basically no ability to be even partially independent about this" problem than it is a lack of knowing what to do, really. my parents aren't the best about this sort of thing (and honestly they mostly just exacerbate the problems right now), and in any case a lot of the things wrapped up in all of this just aren't thing i want them involved in, if that makes sense.
I totally understand. I am agoraphobic and suffer from debilitating panic attacks, so I imagine we might have quite similar limitations. But I would still strongly recommend trying to get yourself to a psychiatrist at all costs, even if it means involving your parents to do so, since getting a professional diagnosis is undeniably the first step you need to take if you want to get better IMO. Without a professional diagnosis you can't really be certain what you're actually suffering from or what the effective treatment options are for you, which makes even helping yourself that much more difficult, if not impossible.
In any case, I wish you luck and genuinely hope you find the help you require. And sorry I couldn't be of more assistance.
Meditation is much more than clarity of mind. I don't think playing video-games to "quiet" your mind is a good solution. You should become comfortable with your thoughts and notice that they are just that, thoughts. Meditation helps with that.
Also, how is diet a meme?
I forgot to mention to ask 2 important things:
i think you're misunderstanding what i said, so i'll just emphasize the part i think you missed.
i'm far, far too poor to actually engage in most gaming, lmao. 60 dollars is basically a fortune to me. the last time i bought a video game with my own money instead of having one gifted to me was literally in like, 2011.
as far as meditation goes the restlessness still stands and, in any case, the thoughts for me sometimes are not just thoughts, which is problematic.
i mean, i don't think something like dieting, even if it were practical in any way for me, is really going to help with the thoughts of self-harm or external harm, or the constant depersonalization and significant social issues that i have, no offense. it might make me feel better on the depression or anxiety side, but feeling better isn't super-duper helpful when i also can't regulate emotions like a normal person and so "feeling better" is still going to be tethered to extreme emotional volatility and mood swings, lol.
bounces between "roughly average" and "no idea how i am able to function like this". i have never slept much according to my parents.
nope. tied to therapy, mostly, that i cannot afford.
IIRC, you do not need to see a therapist to have good results from CBT. Applying/Learning CBT on your own is also very effective.
Regardless, I don't know anything about depersonalization and self-harm. What I do know is that you are clearly not ok and so I ask. What are you currently doing to counter that?
https://www.ulster.ac.uk/studentsupport/services/disability/needs-assessment-centre/what-is-needs-assessment
As for how to book one, that would probably depend entirely on your particular Uni. They should probably have a support page similar to the Ulster University one with information on that.
Only tangentially related to mental health, but through some combination of working at a call center, and screwing around on my phone, I think I got some sort of RSI deal. I go see a chiropractor, they have a massage therapist, I get poked and prodded and I guess since I can feel again it's better but damn if it hurts all weekend. Worse is that my insurance doesn't cover it. I can cover what I committed to, and I'm changing from temp employee to direct hire, so I can probably sort out something there, but it still kinda stinks.
EDIT: Checked, have to go to a probationary period... again. Might be a touch more mental health related now.