Apologies if this veered too much off topic. I’ve been kicking this around for a week or two, and felt the need to add recent events and post.
It’s 5am, I haven’t eaten in 12 hours, had anything substantial to drink in about 8, have been sitting on the toilet for over an hour, and instead of doing something about any of those things I’m editing a comment to fix a typo.
I can’t remember who said it, but the quote “it is no sign of mental health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick world” was being thrown around when I was a kid in the nineties, and it’s not like things have improved much since then.
iirc there’s something called ‘depressive realism’ where depressed or otherwise overly pessimistic people tend to be more accurate at predicting outcomes. The implication being that to function as human beings we have to be at least slightly deluded at all times.
That “slightly” there is putting in a ton of work.
I looked that one up a bit ago. The source is Jiddu Krishnamurti, but it doesn’t look like the common quote is accurate:
It sure is more concise, though.
I remember that, and I have to say that this attitude contributed to me not thinking there was any point in pursuing help for my MDD.
Don’t let the world being shit demoralize you into not trying to improve your lot, ladies, gentlemen and citizens.
Spot on with the “I’d really like to get the depression under control before I let you function at your job.”
Because fixing the unfixable is somehow more important than making sure I keep my job so I can like…eat. And live indoors. And afford the healthcare that is paying them.
As someone else said upthread (and I’ve told a lot of people myself) if you’re depressed but know you can focus and accomplish things, the first thing you accomplish might be suicide.
This is one of the few places where I agree with standard practice. Depression first, then ADHD.
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Why do that though? It’s not like not having the mental bandwidth to do basic things or your job would cause you to have less mental bandwidth to do stuff overall.
Lol, like I have ever had mental bandwidth. Childhood trauma represent!
Also, the Adderall does wonders for my depression in addition to unlocking my superpowers
Oh sweet! What super powers did you get?
All I got was the ability to mostly choose what to focus my attention on.
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Getting a dog has helped me in ways I never expected. I just figured “cute, cuddle, good for brain chemicals”. But they HAVE to be walked at a certain time. They HAVE to be fed at a certain time. Regardless of any of your internal issues, you love them and you have to provide for their needs.
So when you are in the kitchen filling their bowl, you make yourself some toast or grab a banana. When you are taking them for a walk, maybe you go a little farther because they like it and it’s good for you. If you struggle to get up in the morning, they look to you pleading to be taken out to pee and you get yourself up and dressed. They need training and that requires being consistent, so you do it for them. It’s so much easier to do it for them than for yourself.
To add: they’re extremely good at noticing when you’re feeling down and will try to help.
To quote Aesop Rock:
Fifteen years taking prescriptions then a shrink’s like “I dunno, maybe get a kitten?”
This worked for me, still dealing with a lot of issues but there is atleast a hint of schedule. And one of of my two dogs is extremely finicky about time. She has to be out the door even if there no poop to be shat.
yeah.
that’s all i’ve got to say, but i have a strong urge to say it.
…yeah.
yeah :(
yeah
Yeah!
Agree
My general mental state can be described as that one picture of the horse on the beach that says MAN
Fwiw severe depression with ADHD is a shitty combo because if they give you Adderall without getting the depression taken care of you might just have enough energy to off yourself now.
In my experience Adderall also gave me depression++ when I would come down at night.
Adderall gave me panic attacks during routine problems at work. I pretty much went through all of the stimulants ~20 years ago before I said “no mas” to the pharma-go-round. I’d been rawdogging reality for 25 years, how bad could it get?
Narrator: Yes.
Oof that sounds a lot like what my experience was. None of the meds worked, some worked at making me a goddamn zombie, but not being able to function at work just makes life even more difficult.
Then life goes: here buddy, have the Trump era and a smidge of climate catastrophe, that’ll help.
That’s what sleep is for, staggering your doses, or just taking something that also tends to have sleepy affects at night like Nortryptiline.
When I told my last PCP that I was having enormous trouble at work she said, “Maybe you don’t have ADD, maybe this just isn’t the job for you.”
This right here is why so many people with ADHD end up changing jobs so frequently.
Also why I am currently searching for a new PCP
I wish this had been me. Instead I stayed at one cushy but low paying job for a decade, then a progressively more and more toxic and stressful one for another decade before I limped away. AuDHD/anxiety/depression is a bitch of a bear trap.
They do tell their anxiety patients to just not worry about it. And people wonder why marijuana is so popular…
Can confirm. When I got diagnosed with GAD, SzPD and rediagnosed with ADHD, my therapist asked me why I was so anxious all the time. After giving them the rundown of everything going on around me, they told me to not think about it.
Like, I get it. Would be cool. But, it’s around me. Would be easier to avoid the ground beneath my feet. They did end up helping me fine-tune my routine to unfuck myself when spiraling into a panic attack though.
When people say “touch grass” it usually means that the internet shouldn’t influence your mental health. Unless any of the states decisions directly impact you, you can think about what you can do to influence it, but if you find yourself spiraling about it, its time to log off. Maybe start knitting idk
Yup, I’m guessing that’ll do it all right. Knit a few pairs of socks, and just normalize the world away!
This is why we are doomed. People take a look at the dumpster fire that’s life now and say, “Have you tried knotting socks and not being sad?”
Myself, I reply with what I hope is understanding and compassion, and say, “Yes indeed, things look bleak. You, unknown internet person, are not alone in feeling this way”
That’s why I say do what you can, but if you spiral you’re not gonna help anyone anyway.
Good call. I like that.
Yeah the ‘idk’ part is the important one because as a generation we’ve been so dependent on devices for everything from entertainment to productivity that we have no fucking clue what to do AFK. This has been a bitter struggle for me lately. I feel my life slipping away from me click by click but whenever I try to go offline my dopamine system SCREAMS at me to dig up the tablet I buried in my car’s trunk.
Yep, this has absolutely been what I’ve had to do.
No single one of us is the protagonist in some story where we’ll be the ones to tip the scales in what’s wrong with the world. Do what you can, where you can, and focus on the world around you. What directly effects you and those you care about.
There is not enough energy in any single person to be able to care about everything, and you’ll just burn yourself out for trying. This is true even in neurotypicals. It’s why people aren’t running around screaming constantly about the shit situations going on. It’s why people don’t seem to care, they can’t possibly care about absolutely everything.
So you, like them, have to at least try to exert some control over what you spend your time and mental energy on. It’s sure as fuck not easy and it doesn’t help improve shit in the grander world, but spiraling isn’t easy on you either and it also doesn’t help. It just makes you feel worse about everything.
I know this sounds just like someone telling you to “just focus more”, “just don’t be sad”, “just don’t worry”. But that’s not it. It’s not that simple. Never will be.
Even though it will likely be astronomically harder for you, you can exert some will and effort against the roiling storm of your own internal state. Anyone saying that it is literally impossible is letting the bad inside them win. Sometimes it is truly too much amd you have to, but you shouldn’t live in that space forever, and you need to remind yourself that it isn’t impossible whenever other people who are in a bad place are letting it win.
That internal bad is the bad you most need to try and fight, not the bad effecting the whole world.
The bad inside you may win. It may win most of the time, sometimes you might have to let it win because it’s too mich at the moment, but you need to try to fight it as much as you are able to. You don’t have to win, you just have to keep trying, as much and as often as you can.
Like if you haven’t eaten in 8 hours, and there’s food in your house, just eat some of it. Doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s appealing (is it ever when you feel like this?), if you don’t think it will help (do you ever think it will before you eat when you feel like this?), if you don’t want to (again, do you ever want to do anything when you’re spiraling like this?) Go shove some fucking slop into your goblin mouth. Something’s better than nothing. Hold onto whatever tiny bits of progress you can grasp by the edge of your fingertips and try to keep moving forward.
The secret is that you can do this. It sucks. It’s not easy. It may take years and external help. But it is possible. And it has been the most worthwhile thing I’ve ever done in my life to just keep trying.
Just wanted to say thank you for this reply. Trying to un-knot and maybe get something accomplished today so I need the in-depth reply spoons elsewhere. But it’s appreciated.
Good news, during wartime and periods of intense crisis, some people experience a temporary paradoxical increase in mental health. So, I’ve got that going for me.
Waiting for one of the various global crises to change in such a way as to become individually actionable, so that the famed ADHD crisis mode superpowers can finally kick in:
this is a PTSD thing right?
self diagnosed adhd undiagnosed scitzophrenia memes
Hey friend. All you can do is get medicated as best you can and learn to say the right words to get what you want out of therapy and make them take you seriously. But make your continued existence your rebellion.
Edit: and granola bars, nutrient drinks, some fruit, few nuts. Learn what your body wants/needs day to day and eating can become a relatively easy chore when you don’t have the spoons for food prep. But remember starving fucks with your head.
But make your continued existence your rebellion.
I know I’ve been fucked in the head literally forever because I remember at 12 years old I gave the sky the finger saying “I know something wants me to just kill myself but you can go fuck yourself.”
That’s changed now lol I’m tired of being a rebel, but at least I have a family that cares about me so I won’t be doing anything final to myself.
I have adhd and all if these problems that go with it. I also found that my anxiety disorder causes me to get extremely stressed when my work gives me too much to do and expects me to move mountains. That’s when I start feeling like this and I start not sleeping.
Turns out sleep is really important. Right now work is in a bit of a lull for me, and I’m sleeping fine again, and I don’t feel depressed, or have any of these issues at the moment, except the usual, adhd issues of staying on task, going to bed at a normal time, etc.
I will say, getting enough sleep makes the world issues you’ve mentioned easier to deal with. Can’t say I have any advice for how to get it under control considering everyone is different when it comes to how to help their adhd symptoms. I’m super sensitive to medications for example, so a lot of them haven’t helped me much. Hope you start getting on the right track at least.
Edit: I would say definitely try to minimize the doom scrolling tho, cut out some of the news if you can. I find life easier to deal with if I’m not always worried about how bad the world is outside.
I would say definitely try to minimize the doom scrolling tho, cut out some of the news if you can. I find life easier to deal with if I’m not always worried about how bad the world is outside.
When I was young I was a news junkie. Like, watching the local network news for an hour, then the world news. Every weeknight. This turned to news radio as an adult, especially since it was the only way to get traffic info at the time (yes, I am old). I cut this out save sports for many years, before there even was doomscrolling lol. Never had any social media to speak of for the longest time. Even when I joined Reddit about 10 years ago, I was just there for the niche hobby subs and avoided /all and /top like the plague.
Speaking of… when Covid hit it became fairly imperative to keep up with events. And it came right on the heels of getting screwed on a house purchase, and precipitated the work situation going from bad to worse. Felt like every time I tried to take a step forward I got a baseball bat to the kidneys, while the outside world made me question if the boneheaded decisions made in horror movies were really all that unrealistic.
The ironic part is that I had serious trouble finding decent mental health treatment while paying out the ass for insurance, since all it seemed to cover was pill mills and unqualified social workers (which I then had to further cough up dough for). So when I had a breakdown this past winter I was pretty much hopeless. But somehow, the Evil Socialist Freeloader Plan (aka Medicaid) let me hit the freaking lottery for both group and individual therapy (unhelpful PHP detour notwithstanding). I feel like I’m making actual progress.
The catch: in a month or two I’m either going to be homeless, or spending all of the spoons doing something I’ll hate in exchange for maybe enough little slips of paper that prove I’m allowed to exist (or, ya know, sleep). Either way, the clock is ticking, and the doc is slow-walking my meds. Meanwhile I’m selling off personal items to pay bills, and come November there may not be a functioning SSA to process my disability claim that that I still haven’t fully filled out because of executive dysfunction and the work questions being triggering.
Tick tock, tick tock.
paralysis intensifies
That sucks that you’re dealing with all of that. It must be really tough. I wish you the best of luck finding decent mental health treatment, and I really really hope your situation improves.
Thanks, I appreciate it.
That tumblr screenshot on the top hits so close, it’s really dejecting
Disco Elysium but with ADHD
when I am feeling that bad I hear this in my head and somehow feel worse
