Mental Health Declining (Anxiety, Depression, Agitation)

Off Topic
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my mental health has declined and has got worse year after year. i would have to say the anxiety and agitation is the worst with very low patience and a bunch of intrusive what if thoughts that legit have lead to many hispital visits.

my vision is even distorted i have a ton of light senstivity, constant hyperventalation all day long from anxiety. i use to have luck with an ssri celexa but no longer is it working. i have cleaned out all the ssri snri medications with no luck.

i feel like im in a constant dream like state from all this mental distress ( derealization and depersonalization) any people have similar stories that acutally found treatment to help them? mines a more serious case of mental health not just feeling a little down

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Sorry to hear that. I think the best advice we are able to give is to eat well, get plenty of sleep, stay as active as possible (walks, workouts, yoga, etc…), and seek help from a mental health professional. In terms of a strategy to address these issues with drugs, supplements, or other means, it would be unwise for any of us to give advice, and equally unwise of you to take it from an internet friend even with the best of intents.

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How big of a footprint does social media have in your day-to-day (how much time)?

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I think you should go to a medical professional to sort this out. I wrote a long post explaining shit I went through and how I got out of it without know that I was actually using some variation of a psychological method (?). Not sure what term you use for these. @EmilyQ @EyeDentist .

But I’m sorry, I deleted it.

I didn’t want to add any suggestions which may cause you or anyone with problems to go try solving their issues themselves. You should not be getting advice online from non-qualified medical professionals.

Let’s put it this way. CBT, which is a pretty highly regarded thing (I still have no idea what the term for these things are lol) was what FUCKED ME UP. Which isn’t me dissing CBT. I’m saying everyone is different and I am an outliar. I humbly request that you take my word for it wrt to the previous statement. I am a fucking outlier when it comes to a shitload of things.

And the mind, as in brain, not an abstract concept, is really fucking complex as you have also found out what I did too:

The brain can cause real fucked up physical symptoms.

After some shit happened and I was right at the bottom of hell, I suddenly lost the ability to SWALLOW anything that wasn’t in liquid form. And when I started medication, which was pretty little and I refused any form of benzos, my intermuscular coordination would suddenly fail. I’d wake up in the night to take a piss. While walking to the bathroom, my body just gave way and I literally ended up falling like Leonardo DiCaprio in Wolf of Wall Street, only difference being I got back up after the fall.

Alright, I’m trying my best not to continue. Please just seek help from qualified medical practitioners and make sure you pick ones whom are educated in the form of psychological problems you have.

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Cognitive behavioural therapy didn’t help for me either. For others it’s a godsend.

I believe I have enough EQ to have a decent amount of insight into myself.

I’m well aware of my strengths and limitations . However I recall years back CBT was trialled to help me with chronic pain

The therapy more or less entailed trying to have me accept limitations, and work around them.

I wasn’t, and will never be willing to accomodate progressive debilitation by fundamentally altering my lifestyle to revolve around those limitations when I can use medication to push through those limitations and life a relatively normal life for short bursts at a time.

Doing so would be the equivalent of giving up… why would I want to do that when I know I CAN be happy, I just have to live a certain way

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This sounds more like a functional neurological disorder mediated by life stressors. This is a very real phenomena.

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Thats interesting. I’ve been doing quite a bit of that myself for the past couple of years but without specific theraputic guidance.

Ex. : Jumps in with tree crew. Almost takes a header through a chipper.

Review: “That didnt go so well. Lets not do that again.”.

Ex #2: Takes up the repair & fabrication of equipment and machinery.

Review: “This is freakin great! Lets keep doing this!”.

Which is a gross oversimplification of 3 years of trial, error, and internal struggle to accept that the current me is not capable of the physicality of the previous me, but the current me is certainly capable of meeting other challenges, being usefull, productive, and happy.

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This absolutely jives with what i’ve seen. CBT is absolutely gold for some people, absolute trash for others.

Source: 15-20 colleagues or family members who’ve engaged with it.

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Shrink says it’s a combination of the drug he had to give me and stress. He gave me that drug only because I refused benzos and my sleep is pretty fucked up even when I’m normal and happy.

Old dude, has a nice wall of qualifications**, including one for CBT**. For people in his generation, to become a doctor, you either had to be really smart, or a rich kid. He was the former. My doc and gym buddy was the one who dragged me to him as kind of an “intervention” since, well, you know what I’m like lol.

And my gym buddy knew I’d like him. First thing he did when I told him my history and trying CBT, he basically called me an idiot in the most polite way possible. The dude said people like me have too high of self-awareness, that’s why it didn’t work for me and it fucked me up completely.

And he said one thing that I didn’t really get because I refused to go look up anything to do with psychotherapy for the time being. I had already “CBT-ed” myself over 2 decades lol. After speaking with my wife alone, he literally said that I WAS THE OPTIMAL RESULT for people who needed CBT.

Wonderful isn’t it LMAO? 20+ years of constant (unconscious) mental remodeling in response to adverse triggers and it’s ALL GONE in 2 months.

While I’m not going to act like I knew what he said was true, I fucking got myself out of the rut through some variation of CBT after I started finding a way to cram a course that was absurdly out of my league, but I got accepted anyway. The irony is that my wife was asking me to do a government sponsored course instead of offering cash or vouchers for people losing their jobs due to COVID. So they offered “upskilling courses” for free so people would be more employable. I didn’t want to do shit lol.

This course nearly killed me. Since I still work from home and got one of my guys to represent me and update me on site if there are jobs outdoors, I literally slept on my recliner with my laptop on my lap for 4 months at least E.O.D lol. Fucking 16+ hrs a day. Fucking recliner caved and I had to repair it lol.

BUT, here’s the thing:

I found a wonderful note taking app that’s free or like 5 bucks a month for small teams of students since I’m using that plan as I feel bad using their free tier which would suit all my needs and I really don’t think it is not suitable for startups unless such startups are tech savvy enough to use their API for integration with other ecosystems. However, security is still an issue since that’s available at an acceptable level for shit like this using their Enterprise plan. They earn their real income from Enterprises anyway.

And then I found some methods of studying that I won’t go in details since I’ve posted them in the Flame Free Thread. It was critical. There was no fucking way I would have passed the course in that timeframe without some “productivity method”. Fucking lucky as fuck I found one that was not only 80% the same way I studied in school, it solved the problem I had before because all this shit is online now, which was organizing notes for quick retrieval.

But the most important thing using this notebook is the damn thing MAKES YOU WANT TO WRITE. Fuck, one sub-reason why I left the industry I studied for was because I HATE WRITING. Which is why I’m grateful enough to pay, even if it’s a tiny amount. I can use OneNote for the way I write stuff and it’d take maybe 70% of the time but I don’t feel like writing when using it. There’s always a tradeoff. The “quick notes” function" along with the ability to write atomic notes while keeping them in separate “boxes” with the link attached if copied and pasted from somewhere is pretty amazing, though.

And then I somehow started doing some variation of CBT (this was verified by my shrink) but without the part involving exchanging thoughts with other people. It was mainly with “myself” through writing, which got me out of this rut. Motherfucker even said he knew I would have done something like this given my character lol. I wanted to call bullshit but I thought, “alright let the old fart have his ego boost”.

Zettelkasten - Wikipedia

You still studying or on a hiatus and having fun abroad haha? If it’s the former, this may be useful.

I did a backup just yesterday and realized I have personally WRITTEN fuckin almost 600 notes in 4 months lol.

Which is why I do not want to bring up personal experience. This is the way I’m wired. My brain kinda subconsciously knows how to adapt to shit when given the right direction.

Please note that I’m not saying I’m some kind of “higher being” or anything like that. I’m just describing how my brain is wired, which may indicate some kind of heightened self-preservation mechanism which spawned from my upbringing and never showing my emotions to anyone.

Some people are good at DIY and Craftsmanship. Someone like me LITTERALLY cannot change a fucking old school ceiling lamp bulb and I can’t even use a fucking measuring tape properly and had to pay double the price for something I ordered which required that I provide the measurements and that shit wasn’t cheap lol.

So, again, I’ve kept the stuff I did discrete although I did explain shit I did.

I gave this much thought before writing the stuff here down and figured it would be really hard and expensive to find a good psychiatrist, even ONLINE ones, so I wrote these things for people who need a solution wrt to what to ask their potential therapists regarding treatment. Level of self-awareness, what part of therapy suits you (dialectical stuff through writing or group interaction? CBT? Writing? Ability of your brain to “self-regulate” given enough time and space?) and whether they suit you with their answers as well as weigh the pros and cons.

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Hey @yojimbojones, maybe start by answering questions within your posted threads before making new threads about the same thing.

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While I’ve done a shit ton of personal research about the HPTA and know it pretty much affects pretty much everything at varying degrees, I’m really not sure low testosterone would cause derealization. But I’m not a doctor. BUT NEITHER ARE THE FUCKERS IN THE TRT THREAD.

OP, go get some fucking medical advice FROM A LEGIT MEDICAL PRACTICIONER. If you think it’s a hormonal issue, see an endocrinologist. A good shrink would have told you to check your thyroid hormones first anyway.

And doctors who aren’t specialists in their respective areas of medicine still did go through medical school, you know. Fucking ask your shrink first at least.

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OP is going to jump on TRT whether it’s going to help or not.

Not trying to insult the dude, but many people claiming the shit he claims only get relief in temporary bouts because the placebo effect. When the sugar pills wear off, the issues come back only somehow worse… because 90% of this shit is in his head.

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Exactly. And I mean, ok, if the dude is really hypogonadal and is going to do it under his doc’s advisement, getting on TRT isn’t a bad thing. But without at least seeing an endo, how the fuck is he going to know if his problems are causing low test or its low test causing his problems? Fuck, psychiatric drugs can lower T-levels indirectly through causing over production of prolactin and shit. You put me on an SSRI and it’s “bye bye sex drive” for 2 weeks after maybe 4 days of taking it.

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i already listed my blood results tsh is fine and prolactin is low.

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@yojimbojones

Professional therapy and even meds are your best bets here.

I do so much better when I am on antidepressants.

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did you have to try a bunch of antidepressants until you found the right one? ive gone through all the SNRI’s no luck and ive tried all the SSRI’s accept luvox … really hard times

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No, that’s rough. I had good luck with lexapro right off the bat.

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