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Does anyone suffer from mental illness on here?

glasgowspur said:
I've never really spoken about it outside of my wife and a few trusted colleagues, but I suffer with depression and anxiety.
About two years ago I started going for a massage at least once a month and it works wonders for me.
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It's nice to hear a story with a happy finish.


















Are toss jokes inappropriate here?
 
milo said:
It's nice to hear a story with a happy finish.

I wouldn't say its a happy finish, just a big help. Does it ever really go away? It's always there, you just deal with better some days.

And toss jokes are never out place.

















Are toss jokes inappropriate here?
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Had a pretty atrocious five days.
My energy levels are completely sapped.
Been crying and feeling so anxious and shaking. Bit of the black dog returned (although plus side, it gave me a new appreciation for the Manic album This is my truth....)

Trigger was sharing how I feel (via a stupid meme on bloody Facebook!) about needing to be there for people constantly and sometimes I just need a few switch off days.
Girlfriend decided it was actually a personal attack on her need for daily contact and flips out.
Brought me crashing down. Trying to build my energy back up.
It's a slow journey.
 
monkeybarry said:
Had a pretty atrocious five days.
My energy levels are completely sapped.
Been crying and feeling so anxious and shaking. Bit of the black dog returned (although plus side, it gave me a new appreciation for the Manic album This is my truth....)

Trigger was sharing how I feel (via a stupid meme on bloody Facebook!) about needing to be there for people constantly and sometimes I just need a few switch off days.
Girlfriend decided it was actually a personal attack on her need for daily contact and flips out.
Brought me crashing down. Trying to build my energy back up.
It's a slow journey.
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Goddamn, man, harsh from the girlfriend! Sorry to hear that. :( my life became so much better once I deleted my old Facebook account. Made life a lot less stressful. I recommend it! Hang in there pal. :)
 
monkeybarry said:
Had a pretty atrocious five days.
My energy levels are completely sapped.
Been crying and feeling so anxious and shaking. Bit of the black dog returned (although plus side, it gave me a new appreciation for the Manic album This is my truth....)

Trigger was sharing how I feel (via a stupid meme on bloody Facebook!) about needing to be there for people constantly and sometimes I just need a few switch off days.
Girlfriend decided it was actually a personal attack on her need for daily contact and flips out.
Brought me crashing down. Trying to build my energy back up.
It's a slow journey.
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Sorry to hear that mate.

Ultimately, everything is transient. Remember this mood/feeling isnt permanent, itll pass. And keep this in mind, dont let it take hold.

Ive seen with others, an almost self fulfilling prophecy of "I feel a low mood coming on, this makes me feel low already, and Ill never feel better, which makes me feel low for longer..."

It will pass, dont forget, and stay open to anything that helps you feel better. Clear the air with the girlfriend, listen to some uplifting music, go get some air... just do something. Lack of doing anything feeds the black dog.
 
Think I really just have a big call to make re; the girlfriend.
It's been 8 months together.
I think we are just on very different pages in our emotional needs from eachother.
 
monkeybarry said:
Think I really just have a big call to make re; the girlfriend.
It's been 8 months together.
I think we are just on very different pages in our emotional needs from eachother.
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First things first, get your own view straight on that. Do you want a girlfriend? If so, do you want her? Sounds selfish, but its completely valid - you need to know your own wants/needs first.

Second, that being done, you speak to her. Be honest, and what will be will be.

It could be its just not right, and it ends. Sad but fair. It could be that sort of conviction is what clarifies things for you both and it works out.

Either way, honesty - with yourself first - is always key.
 
monkeybarry said:
Think I really just have a big call to make re; the girlfriend.
It's been 8 months together.
I think we are just on very different pages in our emotional needs from eachother.
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Hard choice to make mate ( been there done it), at the end of the day you have to do what is right ( and best)for you. Unless the people you surround yourself with understand the problems/feelings you face ( and lets be honest unless they suffer the same feelings its hard for them to fully understand) then you have to move on.

Everyone wants to help/understand what we go through at times but unless they have been there it can not be done fully, you may laugh at this ( many do) but every night before i close my eyes i say " goodbye cruel world' and give the finger' and every morning i say " hello cruel world" i am still here".

My ups and downs are always there with me but at least i am still here, and IF you have someone around you who can not understand/accept that you struggle some times then all i can say is they are not going to help you and you are probably better off without them.
 
parklane1 said:
Hard choice to make mate ( been there done it), at the end of the day you have to do what is right ( and best)for you. Unless the people you surround yourself with understand the problems/feelings you face ( and lets be honest unless they suffer the same feelings its hard for them to fully understand) then you have to move on.

Everyone wants to help/understand what we go through at times but unless they have been there it can not be done fully, you may laugh at this ( many do) but every night before i close my eyes i say " goodbye cruel world' and give the finger' and every morning i say " hello cruel world" i am still here".

My ups and downs are always there with me but at least i am still here, and IF you have someone around you who can not understand/accept that you struggle some times then all i can say is they are not going to help you and you are probably better off without them.
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Therein lies the problem, she suffers from her own issues with depression and low self esteem - so needs daily reassurance and lots of emotional support.
I have told her plenty of times that I need switch off time and sometimes just to be left alone for a couple of days.
I find the need to talk anyone everyday exhausting.
Sadly that message never got through.
Or, perhaps, cannot get through.

Totally agree re; anyone who hasn't been through it won't understand. My mum really struggled to understand, then her reading group read Reasons to stay Alive by Matt Haig - and it opened up a whole new view for her. Partly because that book did keep me alive.

Your night/morning routine seems perfectly logical to me. I do similar, when I get to end of the day I say "I won this one. I'd quite like not to wake up, but I know I will. I need TP for my bunghole, I'll win again. And I'll enjoy it."
 
nayimfromthehalfwayline said:
First things first, get your own view straight on that. Do you want a girlfriend? If so, do you want her? Sounds selfish, but its completely valid - you need to know your own wants/needs first.

Second, that being done, you speak to her. Be honest, and what will be will be.

It could be its just not right, and it ends. Sad but fair. It could be that sort of conviction is what clarifies things for you both and it works out.

Either way, honesty - with yourself first - is always key.
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I'd like to add to this with wait until your mood lifts to analyse the pros and cons of big decisions.

I've had to watch my wife leave two jobs she loved before I learned to get her to pause and think properly once the cloud's lifted.
 
Just want to reiterate Milo and Scara’s points, about avoiding analysis when feeling down and recognising it will pass. A friend who had £1000s of private therapy told me this is the #1 thing she took away from it. And I’ve experienced this myself - I’ll be in a low mood for one reason or another, and start to think all these negative things about my past, present and future; but a couple of days later my mood lifts, and I wonder what the fudge I was thinking about before!

I think the hard thing is knowing how to fill your time when you’re in a low mood, to avoid falling into negative thoughts. But I think there’s something for everyone, with the main thing being to help get out of your head or distract it.

EDIT: Apologies it was Nayim's point, not Milo's.
 
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Just writing this in here as a sort of reminder to myself, and hopefully it could be of use to others as well. I always forget this. Whenever I'm very depressed I always tend to think in extremely black and white/absolute terms. It's always broad dark strokes across everything, and quite often it can help quite a bit to remind myself that in every aspect of life, there are NUANCES, bloody freaking liberatingly delicious nuances. Shades of gray, so to speak. I'm not necessarily a terrible person, or a hopeless fudge up - I fudged up this one thing (and maybe not even half as bad as I think myself), but I succeeded with all these other things that my depression discounts. I think I suck at social relations in general, yet over the course of the past week I've had meaningful conversations about life with at least 5 people I don't actually know that well. There's a massive tendency to think in black and white terms and discount the positives. I've always found David Burns's list of 10 common distorted thoughts to be really helpful. Here they are.

1. All-or-nothing thinking (a.k.a. my brain and the Vatican’s): You look at things in absolute, black-and-white categories.
2. Overgeneralization (also a favorite): You view a negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
3. Mental filter: You dwell on the negatives and ignore the positives.
4. Discounting the positives: You insist that your accomplishments or positive qualities don’t count (my college diploma was stroke of luck…really, it was).
5. Jumping to conclusions (loves alcoholic families): You conclude things are bad without any definite evidence. These include mind-reading (assuming that people are reacting negatively to you) and fortune-telling (predicting that things will turn out badly).
6. Magnification or minimization: You blow things way out of proportion or you shrink their importance.
7. Emotional reasoning: You reason from how you feel: “I feel like an idiot, so I must be one.”
8. “Should” statements (every other word for me): You criticize yourself or other people with “shoulds,” “shouldn’ts,” “musts,” “oughts,” and “have-tos.”
9. Labeling: Instead of saying, “I made a mistake,” you tell yourself, “I’m a jerk” or “I’m a loser.”
10. Blame: You blame yourself for something you weren’t entirely responsible for, or you blame other people and overlook ways that you contributed to a problem.

A great exercise, I've found, if I'm in a thought spin and can't get out of the depressive thoughts - are to write them down either on a piece of paper or in a Word document - then recognize the thought distortions (A thought like "I'm a total loser" is a very obviously distorted thought, for instance, but isn't necessarily easily spotted as such by the depressed), write down which distortions apply to them - and then, imagine that a friend of yours had these thoughts - what would you say to him? Chances are you'd be a lot more rational with a friend than with yourself. So next to a thought like "I'm a total loser and a fudge up" you could write down all the distortions first, then having looked at the distortions, write down a more realistic thought that puts a lie to the original thought, and be very specific, and also, imagining you're talking to a friend could be useful - "you're obviously not a complete loser, you just messed up this one thing, you don't always do that, you've succeeded with this and this, and these and these times weren't complete successes, but they weren't failures either - and no one succeeds all the time at everything, you were just having a bad day, and some other time, it will work" etc.

This brick really does work if you stick to it and work with it.

Although the title is extremely cheesy, I can wholeheartedly recommend this book - it's basically about self practising cognitive therapy, and it works if you do the work (the exercises in it). It's got some great success rates explained in the intro to the book. I'm working through it these days, and it's a great great tool. Spending a few hours reading this book has made a drastical difference here. I'm still recovering, obviously, but I can notice it working, my mind is clearer and more nuanced (there's that great word again).

 
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