bloody miserable

[noel emits]

Maybe get one of these:

 

[gek-opel]

My ex is one of the heads of CBT in the country, and I was around him when he was training for six years so I know a fair bit about this stuff - in my opinion, CBT is brilliantly effective if you've got something SPECIFIC you want to treat - i.e fear of spiders, some forms of obsessive compulsive disorder, some manifestations of what people now called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but I would approach it with something specific in mind. As with anything else, it depends on who you get as well.

Like Gek says it's pretty straightforward, it wouldn't hurt or fuck you up to do it, but like I said I think it's only effective for things that are compartmentable.

I'd absolutely go along with this (on the specificity thing). I don't think its great for depression/anger etc. My therapist worked with private clients and professional athletes (obviously on very specific issues- "why can't I score goals anymore!?" presumably).

The fact she said "stop making it so complicated" said it all really...

 

[noel emits]

Ketamine for depression.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9696

Sounds interesting. Haven't tried using it in that way myself.

 

[noel emits]

As swears alludes to I think a big part of feeling OK is having the life you want, or doing something you feel good about.

Also drinking enough water.

But it's a stupid thing to try and offer advice about unless it's specific. Clinical depression might be one thing but otherwise it's going to be down to very individual issues.

 

[mistersloane]

I'd absolutely go along with this (on the specificity thing). I don't think its great for depression/anger etc. My therapist worked with private clients and professional athletes (obviously on very specific issues- "why can't I score goals anymore!?" presumably).

The fact she said "stop making it so complicated" said it all really...

OCD for professional athletes I think, Beckham being the most prominent example. Very common in army people as well, the need for ritual cathected, and PTSD for trauma victims, works very well in all those cases. But yeah it can come across as blindingly simplistic sometimes. It's mainly being spread everywhere now because it's a relatively quick way to get people off of sickness benefit, the old idea of behaviourism being fascism not 100 miles away from the truth. BE MORE EFFICIENT AND PRODUCTIVE AND HAPPY.

I'd give it a go if I were you swears, you've nothing to lose. Might even be fun.

 

[UFO over easy]

blown away by the amount of people saying "chill out people have it much worse than you, be thankful for what you have." I'd've thought it obvious that that feeling of worthlessness that accompanies an awareness of your relative priviledge and comfort is one of the things that contributes so heavily to feeling miserable all the time. Feeling awful is one thing, but not feeling like you even have a right to feel that way is even worse.

 

[baboon2004]

blown away by the amount of people saying "chill out people have it much worse than you, be thankful for what you have." I'd've thought it obvious that that feeling of worthlessness that accompanies an awareness of your relative priviledge and comfort is one of the things that contributes so heavily to feeling miserable all the time. Feeling awful is one thing, but not feeling like you even have a right to feel that way is even worse.

Absolutely. Asking people to obsessively question their own privilege is too much. You surely can only reasonably relativise your life to the lives of those immediately around you. if you feel they're all doing much better than you, you'll often be miserable.

 

[UFO over easy]

Asking people to obsessively question their own privilege is too much. You surely can only reasonably relativise your life to the lives of those immediately around you

I don't even think that's particularly helpful. I think a lot of people's misery stems from a state of disconnection that renders them incapable of being able to relativise their lives to anything. That kind of feeling is surely pretty common amongst the lonely and depressed.

 

[swears]

It's nothing to do with money or privilege. It's feeling alienated and awkward around other people, not being able to have a normal conversation without feeling like a complete fake, feeling like you could never make new friends or have another partner, having no optimism for life at all and knowing this is all stupid adolesent bullshit you should have got over years ago. I was a lot happier when I was a broke 18-19 year old living at home working part time jobs, because I had at least had friends who I could relate to, have little adventures with.

Howard Hughes wasn't happy, I'm pretty sure Michael Jackson isn't. Money never did them any good.

 

[nomadologist]

But Swears, it does sometimes seem like your attitude or reaction toward your own depression is a sort of effort to detach from it and tell yourself to buck up, "it could be worse", I'm just thinking too much about myself, etc.

Sounds kind of like the tough love of my grandparents generation. I understand being hestitant to go and jump into the whole cycle of self-overanalyzing and then medicating the resulting misery. But at the same time, you do "deserve" to feel and acknowledge your own depression if only in the sense that it doesn't at all reflect on your character. Depression is the result of extremely complex biochemical mechanisms in the brain and elsewhere.

If you can find a way to get yours back into some sort of less depressed working order, I say go for it without hesitation.

 

[nomadologist]

My friend/ex/whatever says she has no bad side effects from withdrawing and begs me on a regular basis to go on them. But then again she hasn't actually tried to come off them properly and has been on them for ten years now. I literally trust big Pharma on things like this less than I'd trust a neighbourhood smack dealer (ie- not at all).

But Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy is pretty much useless, as far as I could tell, and after a year my therapist told me it had only made me worse and said I had to stop.

Depends on what you take, but withdrawal from certain SSRIs and MAOIs can be pretty hellish in its own right. I've tried taking SSRIs and couldn't hack it (this means I never found the "right one" medically)--they give you this edgy feeling of electricity coursing through your veins and a strange buzzing feeling in the back of your head. Lots of visual disturbances like light seems extra bright and you see light trail-y type phenomena. Withdrawal from even just a couple of weeks in my experience was kind of like a milder, longer, slower version of the post-e serotonin crash.

I'd trust the neighborhood dealer to give me something that worked, and worked exceedingly well. In a totally different way of course.

 

[swears]

As a teenager, I always thought I could live by my own standards: I didn't have to be "hard" or academic or trendy or whatever. I didn't have to join some little group of people, I could really just do my own thing. Whereas now I'm miserable because, shit, I can't just play by my own rules, I don't have the flair or the guts to do that. I do have to prove myself to other people, and because I never really bothered learning how to, I'm fucked now. That's at the heart of the problem. I feel like I have to go to Human Being School or something, lol.

 

[nomadologist]

Yeah, I know it might be like that, but my problem is that I am constantly negative about everything to a ridiculous extreme. [/URL]

This I can certainly relate to, and I would say go ahead and give CBT a try for a while. As a constantly recovering addict, I wrestle with my own intense negativity always.

I'll be honest--it can feel like a constant, uphill, losing battle. But it took me a very very long time to even see the way my own negativity and negative thought patterns 1) lead me down the road to addiction, and 2) fed the addiction/s and really reinforced the whole problem on the most basical psychological level. Part of my recovery involves having to very actively crush thoughts that fall into the old patterns before they start the negative chain reaction. One thing that's lucky for you, and that reflects well on your character, is that you've started to see how your negative thinking affects your life, and you're obviously thinking about taking steps to stop it before you completely destroy your body and brain chemistry like I did.

Let that be a comfort to you, if nothing else is--I have another 4 years and 7 months before my brain chemistry returns to a "normal" person's equilibrium and my pleasure centers work so that I can enjoy everyday activities. If you play your cards right, you can feasibly get yours back well within 6 months or a year.

 

[nomadologist]

As a teenager, I always thought I could live by my own standards: I didn't have to be "hard" or academic or trendy or whatever. I didn't have to join some little group of people, I could really just do my own thing. Whereas now I'm miserable because, shit, I can't just play by my own rules, I don't have the flair or the guts to do that. I do have to prove myself to other people, and because I never really bothered learning how to, I'm fucked now. That's at the heart of the problem. I feel like I have to go to Human Being School or something, lol.

Hmm. Sounds almost like you have the old quarter-life crisis that plagues our generation. It's hard these days, despite all of the emphasis placed on "self-discovery" and "talking it out" and "being real", to really know what your role is in life, or what it should be, who you should be, etc. At this age, our parents were mostly already married and had mortgages and one or two kids. We have some vague feeling of obligation to know "who we really are", but no real direction. At the same time, we were raised with extremely high expectations for adult life and our own futures.

People who were smart in our generation and somehow avoided being part of the lemming herd in high school suddenly hit the "real world" and realize that, far from what the media told us, individuality and intelligence are not rewarded over ass-kissing and bowing to convention. It's the lemmings who end up getting promotions and find partners and mortgages and all of that earlier. But they're miserable too, you know.

I think the feeling you're having is quite common, but not at all unfounded.

 

[zhao]

feeling like you could never ... have another partner

after a long dry spell the trick is to under acheive and go below your standards -- nothing like a couple of 5's or 6's to get you back in the game. sorry terribly sensitive post i know

 

[gek-opel]

This I can certainly relate to, and I would say go ahead and give CBT a try for a while. As a constantly recovering addict, I wrestle with my own intense negativity always.

I'll be honest--it can feel like a constant, uphill, losing battle. But it took me a very very long time to even see the way my own negativity and negative thought patterns 1) lead me down the road to addiction, and 2) fed the addiction/s and really reinforced the whole problem on the most basical psychological level. Part of my recovery involves having to very actively crush thoughts that fall into the old patterns before they start the negative chain reaction. One thing that's lucky for you, and that reflects well on your character, is that you've started to see how your negative thinking affects your life, and you're obviously thinking about taking steps to stop it before you completely destroy your body and brain chemistry like I did.

Let that be a comfort to you, if nothing else is--I have another 4 years and 7 months before my brain chemistry returns to a "normal" person's equilibrium and my pleasure centers work so that I can enjoy everyday activities. If you play your cards right, you can feasibly get yours back well within 6 months or a year.

This sounds similar to my ex who went from depression to serious hard drug addiction-- however she claimed that DESPITE that the SSRIs did actually work. Despite the fact that even though they "were working" she slipped into a near oblivion of chemical self-abuse. To my mind the key is to EXTERNALISE the negativity. Destroy something other than your self. Take your own negativity as a metaphor from which can extend an entire universe of dialectical negativity. Negativity is only a problem in a universe which requires a productive relation (in spite of the fact that a depersonalized negativity can be highly productive)... Why de-politicise your own mental state- it does NOT exist in a vacuum, (although neither is it entirely other to your own activities)... The only problem is that we are not negative enough, that we do not externalise this moment...

Speaking as an individual in permanent misery, of course...

 

[mistersloane]

I would try and get a job volunteering for a local radio station - broadcast, pirate, internet, any, there's loads around. I really would.

 

[nomadologist]

This sounds similar to my ex who went from depression to serious hard drug addiction-- however she claimed that DESPITE that the SSRIs did actually work. Despite the fact that even though they "were working" she slipped into a near oblivion of chemical self-abuse. To my mind the key is to EXTERNALISE the negativity. Destroy something other than your self. Take your own negativity as a metaphor from which can extend an entire universe of dialectical negativity. Negativity is only a problem in a universe which requires a productive relation (in spite of the fact that a depersonalized negativity can be highly productive)... Why de-politicise your own mental state- it does NOT exist in a vacuum, (although neither is it entirely other to your own activities)... The only problem is that we are not negative enough, that we do not externalise this moment...

Speaking as an individual in permanent misery, of course...

I agree, I don't think you can/should completely "internalize" your own depressive disorders. That is unhealthy in and of itself. Sometimes substance addiction is simply a function of the natural progression of substance abuse that goes overboard. There's no moment of clarity before you go from being "in control" to very out of control--this is why addiction is so insidious. You really are in control until you aren't, then it's too late.

For me, there is a family history of bipolar disorder (never diagnosed, but textbook all the same), so I have never been very good at externalizing completely. When I was on topamax I was really doing well, and I think I experienced what "normal" people feel on a daily basis (i.e., could wake up and get things done without feeling intense agony every moment, etc). It was after I went off that things went south fast--I think that happens a lot for people who have found the proper medication and go off it. Thing is, I really hated getting kidney stones every other week I'm thinking about going back on when the time is right and I have health insurance again.

PS I agree Sloane, volunteering doing anything you enjoy or gives you a sense of personal satisfaction is a really good idea. As soon as I'm able I'm going to volunteer at needle exchanges or clinics in the Bronx or Brooklyn...

 

[mistersloane]

As soon as I'm able I'm going to volunteer at needle exchanges or clinics in the Bronx or Brooklyn...

lol. I've been thinking alot about the social function of radio - why it still exists, and just how many forms it's taken, it's like the ultimate medium, and benefits huge amounts of people, both as transmittors and receivers. But specifically for you, swears, I think it would be great. And I'm fucking psychic so don't ask questions, just do it.

 

[Immryr]

ive been doing a local radio show recently with some friends, it is definitely fun! i'm in a fairly similar position to swears mentally, although perhaps not so much so, i dunno how much the radio show has helped this (not at all i suspect). it is fun, though.

having said that i do lots of fun things that i am, or should be, interested in quite often (djing places, playing percussion etc), yet i dont seem to derive any pleasure from them... quite the quandary!