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Mental health support & discussion thread (June 2019 edition)
also going to toss this one up before i go to sleep this morning. this is pretty straightforward, i think: vent your experiences or things you need to get off your chest/share whatever you've found helps you mentally/etc.
resources that might also be of some benefit to people:
- there is, as always, the invaluable list of country hotlines maintained by /r/SuicideWatch
- https://findtreatment.samhsa.gov/ ("an online source of information for persons seeking treatment facilities in the United States or U.S. Territories for substance abuse/addiction and/or mental health problems")
- https://therapists.psychologytoday.com/rms/ (probably one of the best resources for finding a therapist)
- https://psychiatrists.psychologytoday.com/rms (ditto, with finding a psychiatrist)
- https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/index.shtml (covers some of the major mental disorders, their symptoms and treatments, and general topics like that)
- https://www.mentalhealth.gov/what-to-look-for (what symptoms to look for for major mental disorders)
- https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/help-yourself/ (US specific, but also covers ways you can help yourself and a bunch of ways to seek treatment or support)
- there's also some stuff over at /r/SWResources that might be worth checking out which is consistently updated.
and here is the may thread if you'd like to reference/update us on something you mentioned there.
i mentioned in the "What are you doing this weekend?" thread that i had been involved in a gigantic twitter clusterfuck, which folks in the UTC discord have been privy to since they've basically had a front row seat to the shit since it started on may 28. for those of you who are not members, of course, let me recount to you this awful, simplified (and yet still long) version of a tale and a half and why the past few days have been fucking trash.
our story begins with one of my "friends" on discord, a person who i have known since about 2013 in various contexts. we have had an extensive, rocky relationship from the beginning which we mostly made up over in 2017. i dated this person for about a month in late 2017 and then they broke up with me, and after that point we've been friends--although increasingly, rather estranged friends up until february of this year, when we basically broke all contact over some really stupid drama that's not worth getting into.
anyways, this person (we'll call them Z for short although UTC people nominally know who this is already) decides to pick a fight with a bunch of anime avatars for some reason over vic mignogna. Z takes an ardent anti-vic line (despite having literally argued to me for vic's innocence not even two months earlier) against these anime avatars late on may 28 or so. this goes poorly, and Z of course get dogpileds because they're going up against half of anime twitter, including someone with like 5,000 followers. this leads to anime avatars finding a few screencaps of Z being a shithead and basically telling me to kill myself and taunting me over suicide scares they considered fake which i had released on twitter in january of this year. cue a clusterfuck, of course, and Z trying to paint me as an abuser to these anime avatars for the remainder of the night because when they broke up with me in late 2017 i casually expressed a desire to kill them. they pretty much completely fail to bring up a number of factors which might make this more understandable: namely, the parts where i probably have a disorder which makes regulating emotions inpossible, where Z broke up with me on my birthday, and the parts where i apologized for that.
we enter day 2. i wake up on may 29 with Z messaging me on discord to delete the screencaps, which never happens because they decide it's too late anyways. i, having no involvement in this and having no clue what's going on, ask them what the fuck is going on. they don't answer so i ask someone else, get up to speed (or at least, what i figure is up to speed) and tell them politely to fuck off because they've given me no reason to retract the screencaps. they go stew some more on twitter against the anime avatar tide, for some reason decide to accuse me of 'leaking' screenshots to the anime avatars, and then have to retract this statement when i point out that i have no idea what the fuck is going on. shit promptly hits the fan, as people who hate Z apparently start leaking other bad shit they've said and done.
among other things, this includes a conversation where Z plays "devil's advocate" to hypothetical 9-year-olds consenting to sexual interactions with people older than them; Z supporting euthanasia to someone's face in response to their heavily disabled brother; and more instances of Z just kinda being a dick, honestly. this leads to, in the span of a few hours, Z trying to defend all of these positions, in addition to others like saying someone who literally was almost beat to death by and nearly had their mother killed by their father wasn't subject to abuse. in the course of this, people start asking around for ways to get into contact with me. not optimal! again, this is something i was not involved in at all until they dragged me into it. i end up having to tell my side of this gigantic shitshow of a situation to some anime avatars as a consequence. Z at some point tries to block them all in the course of this.
things really only intensify from here. the shitflinging continues, and eventually by the end of may 29 i have people hitting me up who are nominally friends with Z who are so fed up with this argument they're having to vent to me. i, of course, having my own problems with Z because of that drama i mentioned that isn't worth getting into from february, pretty much erupt myself at these people because Z has gotten me involved in no less than 3 or 4 twitter dramas by refusing to shut the fuck up about me. this eventually itself spirals, because then i basically end up explaining to several of Z's friends that they have abusive tendencies, and to put it shortly this leads to a number of them distancing themselves from Z considerably.
by day 3 (may 30), though, many people who did not distance themselves really started to. so, overnight, Z's meltdown became like, a big thing? and fucking mister metokur got pinged into it and paid attention to it. this is fucking defcon 1 for me, of course, when i wake up, because that is a huge fucking barrel pointed at people. i go barnstorming around to some of my friends telling them to just distance themselves because otherwise shit will get nasty; the shitflinging on twitter continues, of course. by this point, Z has so thoroughly fucked themselves that they nuke their twitter account in the middle of the day after trying to stave off even more anime avatars. they briefly reinstate their account, but delete it again later that afternoon.
i've spent most of what is now yesterday (may 31) trying to fix the complete shitshow this absolute shithead made for me and a bunch of other people in doing this, which has thankfully gone pretty well. so many people bought the bullshit about me being "abusive" that this person painted about me and are now suddenly realizing they were basically manipulated. i hopefully will restore most of my connections with these people, but nothing will ever be exactly as it was before all of this went down and before i got portrayed as something i'm not.
needless to say, this has all been intensely emotionally draining and fucking awful! i've literally felt like dogshit for three straight days and this all has plunged me into moods involving wanting to self harm and suicidal ideation at several points because i have been so fucking hopeless about how this has progressed. what is now yesterday was eventually a reprieve from feeling like total shit, but i'm still not exactly over this and i probably won't be for at least another few days because there are so, so many things i have to fix because of one fucking person. really irritating, folks, lmao. i guess it could be worse, though.
I don’t know you or what you do, but Twitter or any of these online communities are not your whole life. There is so much more to it, just step away from your machine and go do something nice outside, it’s the first day of summer after all.
Take care
Indeed. And involvement in those communities also sounds incredibly detrimental to your mental health, @alyaza. So why subject yourself to that? Do the benefits of being involved in them really outweigh these very clear (and potentially fatal) negatives?
As I mentioned to you on Discord a few days (weeks?) ago, I would still highly recommend you learn to meditate. It only takes 5 min to learn, and a few weeks/months to get good at it with a 15-20min/day commitment. Zazen meditation also has no religious overtones, unless you go out of your way to include an aspect of that... so why not give it a try?
And as for why I keep recommending it: I suffered from intense suicidal ideation for a very long time. It's one of the reasons I got so heavily into hard drug use in my teens, since being high tended to shut that repetitive, negative internal voice up... at least temporarily. I still have bouts of ideation occasionally, but they're much more infrequent and manageable/controllable now thanks to regular, daily meditation. So learning how to meditate very likely saved my life and has absolutely increased my quality of life significantly... and I suspect it could yours as well.
p.s. I would be glad to answer any questions you may have on meditation. I am by no means an expert, but I have been meditating daily now for ~20 years.
i mean, yeah? i pretty much never have issues with social media honestly, lol. it's not like i slum it with shitty people or like all of my friends are gigantic drama whores or some other thing. the people i hang out with are nice people and i pretty extensively curate what little social media i do use (i only follow like... 70 people on twitter? and they're almost all bird accounts or my friends; i don't have things like facebook or instagram or snapchat). it's honestly just the one person in nearly all of the negative interactions which i have either been roped into or had to answer to, and they don't seem like they'll be a factor in the future given that this has all blown up spectacularly for them.
i have to get back into the routine of doing shit anyways because i keep forgetting to restart my exercising that i haven't had time to do over the school year, so i'll probably pick this up at some point yeah.
Ah, so it's just a particularly toxic person, not a toxic community... gotcha.
Meditating can be a bit strange/awkward to start out, so let me if you need any help, encounter any problems or have any questions.
I dont understand over 50% of what you said, maybe it's the jargon? But good luck mate and remember just walk away from the nonsensical stuff if u can.
This thread definitely isn't the place to be a condescending asshole to people. I mean, nowhere on Tildes is, but especially here.
I used strong language, but I didn't call this person stupid, or tell them to go off themselves or anything. I said it like that maybe to force them to look at their problem from a different perspective. Sometimes seeing your situation from the eyes of someone who thinks it's absurd makes you reconsider things. I guess I just forgot that Tildes is basically reddit now and I was replying closer to how I might on another forum or imageboard or something. My mistake.
That's true, but it's not like I just think this person is an idiot and that's that. of course there are things behind everything, that doesn't change what I really meant.
not necessarily. You can understand where someone is coming from while still realizing that the whole thing is a bit strange. For example I can understand the human need for validation and such but it doesn't change the fact that I think the rise of all of these narcissistic online personalities on social media is absurd and that I don't like it.
you're right, but you probably haven't considered where I'm coming from either. Just because I made a caustic comment doesn't mean I want this person to go die in a hole or something. Why would I want that? more likely, I'm frustrated at what I see too often online, and sometimes I get heated about it. I've had my share of problems in my life and I still struggle with mental issues daily. Maybe it's not the healthiest way to deal with it but when I realize I'm wasting my life away and making bad choices I try to look at myself through a stranger's eyes. and when I realize how stupid I'm being, or what a waste of time I'm making, I sort of jolt back into reality a bit, and it helps. So that's what my aim was.
I have no idea what you're trying to imply with that statement... but I think you may have the completely wrong impression of this site and suggest you take a look at Tildes Overall Goals and Code of Conduct:
https://docs.tildes.net/overall-goals#the-golden-rule
https://docs.tildes.net/code-of-conduct
I'm just tired of people making the internet such a huge and central part of their lives to the point where it consumes them. I'll admit to using rude language but my idea behind it is something I really stand behind. the person I replied to obviously has issues, and I can tell in part because I've had similar problems. When I realized that my life isn't just this one little thing I was able to feel better about it and let things go.
There is nothing wrong with holding a strong opinion, but mental health threads are not the appropriate place for being hostile towards people while expressing that opinion... especially when the person you're directing that hostility to has recently had a really rough couple days, admitted to having suffered from a bout of suicidal ideation as a result, and has also had previous suicide scares.
/r/suicidewatch, which I used to moderate, had (and still has) very strict rules against abuse, guilt-tripping and "tough love" style comments for exactly that reason. People in crisis need kindness and support, not berating.
yeah you're right, I didn't really consider the thread... sorry. I still wanted to help though. relating to how you mentioned the golden rule I personally wouldn't mind a good yelling at if it would help me. I often forget that people are different from me because I often use my own experiences as a template for understanding other people.
No worries. Lesson learned. And yes, some people can take tough love and may benefit from it, but for others it just makes them feel worse and may push them over the edge... so IMO it's always better to err on the side of caution, unless you actually know the person, know they can handle it, and you can actually be there to help support them through it afterwards.
that makes sense to me now. thanks for not flaming me.
Okay let's give this a go. Sorry if my English is a bit rusty.
Last year I moved to a city completely on my own to start College, I've always lived with my parents, family and friends in a small town for all my life, so as you can imagine it was a pretty big change.
Most of the first year went alright, I wasn't completely alone because some of my old friends ended up moving to the same city as well, but distances aren't short like in my hometown anymore, and we all are super-busy now, so I barely get to see them now. I also visited my parents every few months, although we were never that close so that's really not an issue.
However ever since approximately October of last year, I've been feeling more lonely each day that goes by. I go to class, come back to my apartment, study, procrastinate for a bit, sleep and then repeat. Sure, I get to talk to people in college but that's about it, it never goes beyond that.
This is probably the 4th weekend in a row or so that I spend the entire weekend in my apartment, maybe going out for groceries but that's it. No one has invited me to anything in all this time, and I tried to invite some people from college in several times but we always had to cancel because they were busy (they were receptive to the idea though).
And I'm beginning to hate it, I don't know what to do. I feel ultra lonely, I've got no one to share a meal with and converse about how our days went. I message friends and family every now and then sure, but that's it. No pizza and videogames with friends on friday nights, no parties on saturdays, no meals with family on sundays. Nothing. I've never been huge on social life but this is too much.
I've been told to get a hobby or something but it's quite impossible for me, I go to class for 5hs a day, I obviously have to study and do coursework on top of that, add to that commute time, having to buy groceries, cook, etc. and you'll probably get more than 18 hours or so, and everyone at college is more or less the same. Besides, a hobby does not guarantee a social life, what if I end up in the same situation?
All of this was relatively bearable because I was crushing my classes so far. But right now I started doing worse, I got super demoralized, I procrastinate a lot and I'm probably going to fail all of the classes I'm taking at the moment. My parents have already told me it's not a big deal and that happens to everyone (Education is free here, I guess in the US this would be bad), and I accept that; however it just adds to how shitty I'm feeling. I no longer have my good grades as a consolation prize.
I'm thinking that maybe I should take less classes next semester and chill-out a bit more? The problem is that reducing my occupations also mean more time to look at the ceiling doing nothing and think about how alone I feel. However I also feel stressed by all the coursework and I want to try and find something to do.
Oh also this week I came into a possible job offer (for context, I'm in CS), I've already interviewed twice and it seems to be going alright but I'm not entirely sure I want to start working yet. I think this might be a good solution to what I explained in the last paragraph, however, it also may add to my stress. Hopefully it might improve my social life but what if it doesn't? It'll surely reduce my available free time. I've pictured myself at the office, finally having a real job, doing what I love, having money, etc. and it sounds all too nice, but at the same time many of my peers and family are telling me not to take a job until I really need it economically.
So I don't know really why I'm posting here. Anyone here who had a similar situation?
Thanks for reading.
i don't have diagnosed ADHD but i share a lot of overlap with inattentive ADHD symptoms at times and with respect to those i've found it pretty useful to try and carve out flexible-but-clear blocks of time for things that i know i have to do so that gives me time to fuck around and be useless but also stay on track with things. (calendar notifications are especially useful in this regard since they're impossible to ignore, and things like notepad and sticky notes also tend to be useful for details.) and YMMV, but with blanking out when sitting down to do things (because that happens a lot to me, too), in lieu of anything else i've found it worthwhile to try and give myself as much time as is possible to try and work through things or revisit those things when i don't feel like that's gonna happen. i basically try to come at it like i do with writer's block, which is that having something, no matter how bad it is, is better than nothing because i can go back and improve on it. like i said though, YMMV might vary on that, and i'm of course not going to pretend it's a great experience to try and work through, because it's really not, lol.
Dr Russell Barkley is great. I've seen a few of his talks over the years.
I've got high ADHD, but I don't take anything. In the late 90s I went to a 'Psychoneurophysiologist' -- which was crazy. Basically, the first part was some sort of weird light therapy -- most likely stimulating my brain in some way. It was totally fine to sleep through this part.
The second half of each appointment had a setup similar to an EEG -- sensors on your ears, head, etc, and then you sat in front of a screen with a silo and a hot air balloon. Once you got into 'the zone' (the right rhythm of focus or whatever) the hot air balloon went up and over the silo, then came back to the start.
The first session and a bit was frustrating because I just sat there -- but before long I got some movement. In my last session I was cranking that hot air balloon with little to no effort.
I was 20 when I did this 'psychoneurophysiology', and it really did help my ADHD. A lot of the traits like lack of focus, fidgeting, etc didn't go away, but I'm definitely in a zone where I can focus when I need to and unfocus when I really need to (I'm prone to hyperfocus.)
I've tried several drugs over the years, but I seem to be the type of person that gets all of the side effects without any of the benefits.
The other major piece to cracking this ADHD puzzle for me was making lists of tasks and then breaking down those tasks into one-level-deep tasks, then rewriting the list so its in a proper, structured order. I think this second list helps to prepare my brain to attack the tasks at hand.
The clinical stuff sounds like snake oil -- and I was really skeptical while I was going through it, but as I saw results, I figured it was legit.
The doctor I saw wrote a book, Biofeedback for the Brain: How Neurotherapy Effectively Treats Depression, ADHD, Autism, and More
Here's a video talking a little more about it.
My new antidepressant has been working well for the past couple of weeks. But now I feel like I'm “submerging” again. Every train of thought almost immediately goes into the “Everything Is Awful And It Will Be Worse” territory. The physical loneliness doesn't help. Besides that, a couple of “internet friends” seem to have ghosted me in the last couple of months, and I am still bitter about it. (Seriously, just have the courage to say that you're tired of me and my shit already.)
On the flip side, the work has been getting less stressful (fucking finally), the weather has been mostly sunny, my diet became less of a fast-food-cluster-fuck. I am also really looking forward to my upcoming vacation.
I just really don't want to feel like shit for no reason again. Or, really, for a reason as well.