Shit just keeps getting worse. Feels like the western world has lost its mind. :sadness: Scared of being forced to drink cool-aid with the capitalist death cult.
Shit just keeps getting worse. Feels like the western world has lost its mind. :sadness: Scared of being forced to drink cool-aid with the capitalist death cult.
I'm really weird in that I have no problem functioning semi normally (have a job, college, exercise regularly) but I'm just deeply negative and like...for lack of a better term really numb and prone to borderline antisocial behaviors. I used to think I could just "think" my way out of depression but looking back over my life I think I may have just developed (given that I have a pretty decent amount of trauma) a brain that straight up just doesn't work. I've heard that lots of early childhood trauma can literally wire your brain in such a way that you lack the ability for optimism. I've had a few people tell me that I always, always seem to assume the worst possible outcome to the point of being nearly delusional/paranoid. I don't even know. I'm kind of scared of fucking with my brain chemistry because it seems like it's always a wild card.
I know the Scottish comedian Limmy talks about his depression and suicidality a lot and I have really never heard anyone so candidly describe their experiences and he said that when he went on antidepressants things would no longer send him into a spiral. Like, he described having his car keyed and he said before antidepressants it would ruin his entire month and he would just ruminate in all sorts of paranoid, negative ways after the fact and I was like "holy shit that's me". He said he thought that was just how he was but he said that before and after antidepressants he really saw just how fucked in the head he was...like stuff would bum him out but it wouldn't go like cut off in traffic -> I'm going to fucking kill him -> what if he did it just to fuck with me -> what if everyone hates me -> if everyone hates me, why don't I just kill myself?
Cw: suicidal ideation
in my 20s I actually held a loaded Glock 19 to my temple. Like I wasn’t planning on killing myself but I wanted to know what it would feel like. I’ve never told anyone that.
Three years ago I went as far as having a plan, again, not necessarily going to act on it, but knowing how I would do it. Down to knowing what I would buy, where I would buy it from, where I would do it so my family wouldn’t find me… like deep fucking ideation. When I made the first post in my Wellbutrin series I wasn’t that deep in the hole, but I was thinking about suicide daily, and not in a passing way. Depression is a lethal illness and I am confident that without treatment it would have claimed my life, shattering my family in the process. So I decided to seek help.
Within 5 days of starting treatment it was like that part of my brain was shut off. Like even if I wanted to go there, I would open the door and find the entrance bricked off. To the extent it happens at all now if I get an intrusive thought (has happened maybe three times in 3 months) my gut reaction is to go woah, that’s crazy, you don’t want to do that and immediately switch it off. My energy levels are drastically improved, I am a better member to my family, more productive. It’s amazing how much energy being miserable steals from you. It’s like walking in peanut butter.
I know altering your brain chemistry is scary, I was scared of it too. But I am very much still me. With treatment I’m by no means a chipper optimist, am as acerbic as ever, but the best way to describe it is a shedding of emotional weight.
Here’s my log if you’re interested turns out I only did 9 days:
https://hexbear.net/post/162221
CW:Talk of deep suicidal ideation
spoiler
Yeah, I remember as a ten year old I had suicidal thoughts. I realize now it was a lot of the trauma I had growing up that made me FUCKING psychotic. Like I remember lying in bed thinking that I wanted to sleep forever, or go to heaven (I still believed as a Catholic then before mental illness completely shattered whatever faith I had in any kind of supernatural anything)
Then as a teenager the real suicidal thoughts came in, like at 15 I remember thinking how cool it would be to slit my wrists right in the middle of class or jump off a fucking bridge or jump in front of a bus. I thought shit like this everyday. I remember when I was like 17 I opened the door to my dad's car and threatened to jump out while it was moving. I remember on a particularly bad day standing at a really high balcony at my highschool and looking over the edge and seriously thought about jumping. For me it was always and has always been about jumping. I remember looking over that balcony every passing period and thinking "jump, jump, jump" almost every single day I was there. I told a teacher in summer school I wanted to jump in front of a bus and I got immediately sent to the counselor who was like "yo dude WTF" and I was taken out of the class. Every time I went to bed I prayed that I would just not wake up anymore.
I pretty much thought about killing myself almost every single fucking day of my life from the ages of 15 to like....now. It got a little less bad when I started exercising a lot and doing a lot of self reflection. Therapy actually made me worse for a little while. I went to therapy when I was like 21ish and had a breakdown in front of the therapist when I had a flashback (never had one before) and spent like a year or two really deeply dissociated and having almost like PTSD symptoms. I don't really think about what I would do these days, except for pretty recently where I'm like damn this shit fucking suuuucks.
I think the strangest thing though is looking back and realizing how just deeply not normal all that is. I've casually made jokes about suicide (with me specifically) to people pretty recently and they all become extremely uncomfortable (the older people usually visibly wince) and it has been slowly dawning on me that normal people really DO NOT think about killing themselves, and that lifetime incidence of suicidality for people without a diagnosable mental illness/severe trauma/both is close to nothing. My shit sadly just does not work right :agony-soviet:
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Yeah comrade you are 100% right it is not normal to have suicidal thoughts and it’s not normal to feel like shit
The way I think of it is that depression is a terminal illness that might be curable with meds. For me it definitely was. I should also note that I found specifically a prescriber for medication, I don’t fuck with therapy. Sure there’s benefits to it or whatever but I don’t feel like sitting there talking about deep intimate details of my life with someone I don’t know. It’s literally answering one of those depression questionnaires which you’ve done a million times online im sure in person, they ask you a few questions, and they give you a prescription. First call takes an hour, follow ups are much faster if it’s working (15 mins). And like I said before now with telemedicine it’s easier than ever.
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:heart-sickle: