My brain is just fervently crying out “help help I need help” but honestly what am I expecting others to do?? There is nothing anyone can do for me. It’s like I desperately want someone to give me a purpose for living. Not a reason. I have plenty of reasons to live. I need PURPOSE. Something to DO with my life. I have no PURPOSE. I have a rough idea of what I’d like to do with my life that I don’t even know if I’ll be good at or enjoy and that is going to take me years to achieve. I just need someone to tell me that it’s worth it for me to stay alive, that I’m going to contribute something important to the world because I don’t believe I’m going to anymore, this illness has made it so I can barely function at minimal level much less actually achieve anything. But a person can’t just walk out of the sky and tell me what I’m supposed to be doing.
Today I fantasized about making everyone hate me so if I killed myself they could be happy and not hurt.
Do not kill yourself and if you have a serious tendency go to the hospital. Beyond that maybe you need to know what makes you happy, and pursue that. Usually people do it in their career. Or it could be severe anhedonia. Anna, have you put more thought in going back on antidepressants? I know you said it scares you but wouldn’t it be worth it if they could help you with this?
I’ll try I guess but I can’t start them until 2 weeks from now when I see my prescriber. So my current dilemma is getting through the next two weeks without progressing in my depression to the point where I start actively wanting to harm myself.
Try making a list of things you can do other than feel sad. I do things like watch TV, go on Facebook, look up vacation locations, go for walks. You can also make a sensory kit. It’s a collection of things that appeal to each of your five senses.
And even then I know very well antidepressants don’t just magically snap you out of it. I’ve been off Zoloft for like 2 months now. I’m gonna have to get an antidepressant in my system all over again. It may take weeks before I see any improvement in my depression. And I think what made Zoloft so effective was because I had Abilify boosting it? And I won’t have that now because Abilify gave me terrible side effects and I quit it.
Yes that seems to be the best thing. Perhaps I go about dealing with my depression the wrong way. I always try to look for a solution, a way to resolve it. But perhaps I instead need to focus on living with it and distracting myself from it when it happens. Though to me it seems a very sad life, based around trying to deny and ignore how awful you feel all the time.
I do the same thing. I try to solve my sadness. Recently I wanted to get a job using my degree again because I thought it would make me feel productive. My wife pointed out that I’m not ready for that. I trust her opinion. She’s right, I’m too anxious for that. So now what? I’m getting by.
It seems like you put a lot of pressure on yourself @Anna. I know I don’t have as many stressors now that I’m on my own and still can find myself in dysphoric states and they’re a bitch to come out of. Maybe just get that work/life balance back, okay.
Based upon what you have posted the last several weeks, it appears to me as if you’re currently spiralling out of control. I’d suggest that you go inpatient until you’ve stabilized and are not so suicidal. If you’re having hallucinations and delusions, then you NEED to be on AP’s, even if you don’t like the side effects. There’s no way around it. The alternative is to have no friends and be a total failure in life. You’ll likely end up homeless if you’re an untreated bipolar or SZ that refuses to take medication.
I can relate to this. I’m in the same boat. Based upon what you typed here I don’t believe traditional antidepressants will be of any help to you (they were not of any help to me). I’ve been on a whole different cocktail of medications and the only thing that seems to help me from feeling suicidal is the mood stabilizers lamictal and lithium.
If what is causing your depression is lack of purpose, then the act of finding your purpose will be the only thing that bring you out of depression in my opinion. While I had my old job working at a defense contractor, I had purpose in my life and went through a five year period where I tended to be “hypomanic” instead of depressed. After losing that job, I had a couple years of unemployment in which I was severely depressed. Recently, I realized exactly where I want to go in my life and feel as if I’m finally exiting the vicious cycle of depression that I had been stuck in for several years. The act of trying to obtain my life goals IS the antidepressant for me. Unfortunately, ONLY YOU can determine what the purpose of your life will be and nobody else can tell you.
If nothing else helps you, then perhaps consider ECT or treatment with ketamine (if it’s available where you live). I have a bipolar friend that lost his job and became depressed for several years. Eventually, he tried to commit suicide and they forced him to take ECT. He believes that it helped turn his life around. But I’ve heard other people say that they thought that it caused brain damage. For ECT people seem to love it or hate it, with no in between. It’s risky in my opinion, but if you’ve tried all the other options, what do you have to lose?
Ketamine has shown to help people with treatment resistant depression rapidly recover. Unfortunately it’s illegal to use for human consumption in most of the USA, so you’ll only be able to obtain this treatment if you happen to live near a university that is offering clinical trials to the public. Attempting to obtain illicit ketamine would be no help for you either, since you have to take it intravenously at a very high dosage for it to work as a treatment for depression. At these high dosages, it’s much too risky to administer to yourself, so don’t consider trying to obtain ketamine illicitly for this purpose, otherwise you’ll end up ODing.
I was actually thinking of participating in a ketamine study, NIMH is running several of them right now. But the studies are so far away ;_; ECT scares me too much.
I do think that if I was independent working a job I felt very valued and needed at then my emotional state would be much better. But every other time I say if X happens I’d feel better it doesn’t work…
Anyways hospitalization would be a very short term solution that would screw me over long term because of how it would interfere with my classes. I am almost done with school, at this point I’d have to be on the brink of offing myself before I agreed to be hospitalized. I mean like knife or pill bottle in hand close. I’m not at that level currently, just fantasies.
Anyways thanks for reminding me about the ketamine, I should call NIMH tomorrow and ask.
Focus on finishing up your degree and then you’ll be free to discover what you want to do with your life. Nobody can take that accomplishment from you and it could possibly save you time in the future if you plan on obtaining a graduate degree once you’ve stabllized.
I completed an engineering degree in a subject that I’m uninterested in and found it very depressing going to class knowing that I had no interest in gaining employment in the field that I studied. After some introspection though, I’ve decided that I enjoy programming and hope to become a software engineer, so the degree ended up not being totally useless after all. Now I’m studying on my own to improve my programming skills in hopes of obtaining an entry level job in the field which will hopefully help motivate me to do well in graduate courses about software engineering in a couple years once my mental health has fully stabilized.
I’m glad you feel you can speak freely here for the sake of your recovery, but your fantasies are very jarring. I hope they are not so inviting because they sound so scary.
Yes I majored in neuroscience not realizing that it is a huge field largely comprised of things I am not interested in. Sadly it took me a while to discover this and that was years of very difficult classes that were very boring to me and mental torture to go through, not to mention blows to morale and self esteem as I continuously either failed or barely passed these classes.
Good riddens to all this. I want to go into psychology and no one can stop me. I just hope the years of nursing school I have to go through to be a psych APN are actually interesting and not the same kind of drudgery or I really question my ability to make it through the next decade.
Hahaha yes very jarring is a nice way to put the things that happen in my head…bah…
When you’re stuck with bad things like that for so long you normalize them. Then I mention them to mental health care workers and get surprised when they’re shocked and concerned.
Exactly. I was a mostly a straight A student in high school, so going to university and barely getting by with C’s was devastating for my self esteem.
You’ll find your purpose and you’ll excel at something. You simply have to discover what you’re passionate about. I found the book “Mastery” by Robert Greene to be helpful in guiding me to my life’s purpose. It focuses on various people that have obtained total mastery in their fields and observes what these people have in common that led to their success. The first portion of the book focuses on finding your live’s purpose.
Sad thing about killing yourself is that you hurt those that loved you for the rest of their lives, and those that hate you will forget about you after a day or two.
Having a purpose can make you feel more valuable, but only as long as your doing whatever it was that gave you it, and even then, you have to be able to accept it.
I like to tell myself to “stand up from where I fell down”. Is there loan that you haven’t settle? Then I would make it my purpose to settle the loan in full. Likewise, I would make it my purpose to fix a bad relationship, change a bad habit and so on.
In short, personally I feel there is a need for completion.
Anna, have you tried CBT? I’m planning on trying it in the future. The goal would be to accept symptoms and live a better life with them. Not deny experiences and argue about what reality is.
I remember you saying once that you would like a relationship in your life, I’m sure you will meet someone and maybe that could make you feel better so it’s something to look forward to.
As for the concern for Anna not being on meds, I’m sure she will be fine, she’s been doing this a long time. She’s more high functioning than most people who are on meds.
Maybe Anna it would help you if you met people like yourself, or through the internet who have unusual experiences and you could share with each other. We have an unsual experiences group near where i live but i’ve never been. All the best Anna, I like you as you live with symptoms and I think it’s something to add to make you more of an interesting person.
Maybe it’s a bit less about wanting to contribute to the world than wanting to feel that you’re here for a reason and filling that reason? I suggest falling in love. I’m being serious. Good luck, though.
