Mental Health

I feel like everyone eventually gets annoyed with me, and I just always end up alone. I loose all my friends, and Ive never really had a healthy loving partnership. I just feel hopeless

Title says it, apparently i've been "too much" for them to handle (and i recognize i was quite the bag of rocks in 2021).

But these last two years everything had been just fine (i apologized for my misbehavior, i finally got a job), everything was going great.

But now they suddenly felt they've "changed and matured" (their words, not mine) and that somehow does not allow us to be friends any longer.

Any advice?

I feel i'm losing my head over this.

Technological development can destroy our sense of ourselves as rational, coherent subjects, leading to widespread suffering and destruction. But tools can also provide us with a new sense of what it means to be human, leading to new modes of expression and cultural practices.

Technology, for better or worse, affects every aspect of our lives. Our very sense of who we are is shaped and reshaped by the tools we have at our disposal.

The problem, for Stiegler, is that when we pay too much attention to our tools, rather than how they are developed and deployed, we fail to understand our reality. We become trapped, merely describing the technological world on its own terms and making it even harder to untangle the effects of digital technologies and our everyday experiences.

By encouraging us to pay closer attention to this world-making capacity, with its potential to harm and heal, Stiegler is showing us what else is possible.

archive.org

ghostarchive.org

archive.today

;tldr

Find something you enjoy and try and capture it in a way that you can look at it and appreciate what you do, I mean you might not appreciate it but it can be something that gets all that built thoughts out into the open so it is easy to see with one's own eyes.

I know and understand it will not work for everyone but I still hope it can be a positive contribution from my own experiences and I can only hope it can be useful for someone

End tldr;

So I have posted a lot and it felt a bit selfish always using the service but not really contributing.

I don't know how long I can keep it up, but over the past 2 weeks I have been trying to blog a video game article every day on my personal blog. I mean I should space things out so that I don't burn out of course, but so far just doing the writing has helped me not be overwhelmed with thought.

Perhaps it is a distraction, but I do feel less social anxiety as I am branching out more on Lemmy and try to engage with people more and I think for that is good thing.

I don't know if it is good advice or not, but for me it feels being able to express something one really enjoys in what ever way that one is most comfortable with and then being able to reflect on it - in my case writing and then going over it and then being able to say I completed something when I publish it - has created to me a, I can only assume, a postive feedback loop.

I write this as I am someone that enjoys being social but is incredibly socially insular, and in writing the video games blogs it is making me feel more comfortable trying to branch out as I "empty my head" so to speak.

I made contact with the friends I felt ashamed of being a detriment to the group and explained my situation, stating I would communicate every now then via posting but be unable to communicate via voice

I even made a Mastodon account, and although I spent most of the day trying to figure out how to write and learn about correct # usage while stil building up the courage to use because I have never been big on social media before, I finally got around to post to share my blog online and I built that courage by myself, which I however small is an achievement to me considering I have always felt I cannot do things without someone else's help.

The help I did get from going to a blogging group is to just not care what other people say and write for myself, create something I want and over time I can make it better and refine. Just so long as I am doing something that is a good thing. If nothing else writing can be for its own benefit and that has a reassuring comfort for someone like me that is incredibly harsh on myself as well.

There is probably a name for this, but I guess in absence of other choices, this is almost like therapy for me in a sense. I still do strongly recommend that those that can should seek professional help though

Tldr:

Seeing lemmy posts about Disco Elysium reminded me of something that resonanted with me and its been bubbling wanting to get out and the other topic feeling lonely and isolated from friends due to hardware failure and a growing sense of low self worth and loneliness with some introspection.

: End tldr

First off I want to preface that I am going to be using a game and I guess how it emotionally resonated with me when I tried empathasing with the main character.

The game in question being Disco Elysium.

Although I myself cannot directly place myself in the shoes of the protaganist the game did catch me in a lot of moments where I am in a situation and just think "damn, that sounds like me" at times.

From the commentary of being a "Sorry Cop", that I have tried to move past in my life ( being someone that used to say "sorry" a lot)

To the many different examples of falling into a line of thought or idealogy and being exposed to the idea that maybe I might be inclined to ideas because I have been hurt and in that hurt I have lashed out mentally clawed onto these ideas less from thinking clearly to maybe it just makes me feel better to identify with something to try forget about the pain.

A part in particullar resonanted with me in the first run through the game where the protaganist talks to their ex-wife, it resonated with me from a moment in my life where I mentally fell blindly in love, was rejected and come to the realisation I was being used.

It isn't an exact situation from any stretch but the emotion of wanting someone and wanting to get an answer and seeing that he felt he was not good enough, really hit home in a different way from how I usually have ruminated - mainly because I expressed but never had anyone to empathise with being felt betrayed and abandoned.

In a weird way, I could empathise with the longing the character had and how painful it coukd feel, at the anger I have carried in me and how I could feel that anger in the character. It was like "I know this, and I know how you feel" and the game explores this with the destructive( and the potentially destructive) behaviour the character goes through in the game.

When I played it a second time I really went pretty hard into the worst emotions I felt during those times and it was I guess eye-opening to see the self-destructive behaviour from the outside where the character was a philosophical mess embracing many different philosophies falling in with facists and communists, the uncomfortableness of almost making a little girl cry, catching that in myself in that moment and really feeling bad exposing a child to the ugliness of the world when they express a world view with their child-like innocence.

And what really sealed the deal in making take a step back and think on things is when the protagonist has genuine heart to heart with other broken people and then just hitting right through to a root cause that

"Hey, that person really messed you up didn't they. It's okay and maybe your life is a mess because you cannot forgive yourself and you doing all these wild things, believing all these ideologies because you feel hurt and you do all these things to try replace that pain with something, anything that can make you feel better"

It just hit differently feeling personally called out but not in the way that they reprimand and ridicule you but just in a way that says "hey the world is fucked up, people will do fucked up things, things will not always work out and we all carry baggage."

Isolating yourself and trying to carry the weight of the perceived world on your shoulders can lead to self destruction and ruin, but when people genuinely listen and, even though their situation can be similar or worse, listen with sympathy and understanding that one can start to take steps to heal oneself.

I guess seeing news of Disco Elysium around Lemmy sparked the memory, but yeah even though things are not great for me and I feel myself falling back into my isolation as events that was planned to improve fell through and my personal situation not getting better with things I also planned to use breaking down as well.

In regards to the breaking down of things was my computer which one could argue was the thing that was keeping my sanity in check somewhat probably in the same vein I suppose an addict uses substances to deal with issues if I try be honest with myself.

On the other hand it was a lot easier to communicate with people but when it died, I tried communicating with the mobile device and unfortunately the earpieces are kind of trash with it having degraded audio or static while communicating also on top of the charger cable breaking and having to playing round robin in the household with a single working charger.

With the events just piling on in a negative momentum, I think I feel incredibly lonely and low value because that is how I feel around my peers when I cannot engage with them when I feel I bring nothing to the table and feel like I actually make the experience worse

When the pc was working I attempted to make videos, however every time I tried I would be bitterly disappointed with my own voice and it would demotivate me from further editing and attempting to create.

I suppose with the forceful break from it I guess deep down I really just wanted to make videos to be recognised and acknowledged, however I hated the content I was trying to make because it felt lifeless and phoned in. I guess I was so focussed on trying to be "perfect" that I just made myself more unhappy when I couldn't do something I really do enjoy doing but feel incompetent in trying to get that across.

This was all very loaded again, but it has been building up inside of me for awhile and I really needed to just write something otherwise I feel I would stubble down into the "madness" pit.

To all who previously replied thank you - your encouragement and letting me know I'm not alone meant a lot.

I would also like to mention one individual offered to send a few dollars my way, and that's more than I could've ever hoped for. It helped me get some groceries and gas, so THANK YOU.

In reference to applying at 2000+ jobs and not being employed, I didn't mean to indicate I had NO response. I had many false starts, jobs where I went through multiple interview rounds, or jobs that just weren't feasible (i.e 100+ miles away on-site). Particularly, I keep finding situations where I'm contacted by a company, asked to do a phone interview, then when I reply (usually within a few hours if not immediately) to schedule a time they just ghost me.

I did take up the offers to look over my resume via DM, but no one replied funny enough.

On to mental health - I'm better than I was. I still feel utterly hopeless, but maybe a bit less so ya know? My thoughts are... Difficult at times, but I keep moving forward as best I can.

All this to say thank you. I got more response than I ever expected, and I appreciated every one and I read them all. I hope you all have a good day, and keep pushing forward.

I have been taking Cymbalta 60mg and I have noticed its benefits wearing off both physically and mentally. It used to be that when I missed a dose, I would feel "fuzzy," almost like lightheadedness but without the headache, more like a rush of blood that makes me feel that way. Now even when I take the proper dosage, I feel this way. Is there a better term for this symptom than "fuzzy?" In more detail, I will have this kind of rushing heaviness for only a second; it goes through my whole body, mostly my head down through my torso. I will have times when I experience microscopic blackouts, where I will very briefly not remember what happened merely a couple of minutes ago. Thank you for cooperating with this very vague description.

Hey Everybody. I am using capital letters For Titles In case you want to skip something.

A LITTLE INTRODUCTION OF ME:

I started feeling depressed 13 years ago, I was underaged with [difficult] parents so I didn't receive any help. Now I am an adult and for the last year and a half I am going to therapy. I tried lots of different therapists until I found the one I work with carently, she is really good and has helped me a lot plus I found the strength to leave everyone behind and start over (actually I live with my brother and I still have contact with my best friend, but my brother has changed a lot and my best friend was always an angel).

I can't say that I am not depressed anymore. I know better than that. BUT I can say that I am dramatically better and that I have large periods of time between my episodes.

I WOULD LIKE TO TELL YOU SOME THINGS I HAVE REALIZED IN MY JOURNEY:

Things seemed to start to get better when my environment got better. But I still was deep in my depression.

Things seemed to start to really get better when I felt that my environment was safe and supportive.

I had a terrible childhood so I needed to feel safe so I could start thinking straight.

Things fell in place when I started rebuilding from the start. I realized nothing I ever had done was for me. I never had the chance to think what I liked. All my childhood I was hearing that my dreams are stupid and not sustainable so at some time I stopped dreaming, thinking and feeling all at once. So when I started searching what I wanted, life just clicked, okey I admit that's a little dramatic, let me explain it better.

At first I couldn't understand the meaning of the phrase "what you want" and why my answers was wrong. When I finally understood, I started to wonder what "I wanted" (I haven't found out yet, but I am learning a lot of things in the process).

Now I can understand that when I understood what "I Want" meant there was a huge step for my mental health, from then and going forwards I am making lots of progress. It took me about a year to understand what "I Want" means and in the next 6 months I have worked on at least 8 different things.

I read a lot of stories from others with depression and I am starting to feel like they may not know what "wanting something" really means. I hope the knowledge I got from my experience help someone get through this easier and faster.

For whoever needs it! HOW I UNDERSTOOD WHAT THE PHRASE "WHAT I WANT" MEANS:

1. I asked as many people as I could what they thought it meant.

2. I processed the answers (did they make sense to me?)

The answers that kind of made sense for me was:

My best friend told me "It's something you think of regularly and makes you feel good"

Someone else said "It's something you do without thinking of the outcome, for example you want to paint cause you like the process not because you want to have a painting to hang on your wall"

My brother told me "do you want chocolate? Why?"

3. I made my own definition

Which is " Wanting something means to constantly think of it with a positive feeling that doesn't involve the expectation of an outcome" (I am not sure it makes lots of sense in English)

Let me preface this with, yes, I probably am depressive, I have been diagnosed with depression when I was very young and while things have been okay since then, it's probably important to recognize that. I consider myself in a very good state of mind in my life at this moment.

So what do I mean? Well, I don't feel like I'm depressed, not the way that I understand depression. I do however have these very intense moments of ennui; dissatisfaction from lack of interest. This is basically I find life very unfulfilling because I don't see much point in anything, things don't seem fun. This isn't my normal state, but certain triggers will intensely put me in this state of mind for an hour or more.

I also have episodes where I feel very melancholic for a certain vibe, there's a certain type of music where if I listen to it, I get very very sad because I imagine a life I used to want to live but never was able, even though I'm only 29. My girlfriend says I should stop listening to this music but it's a very bittersweet feeling for me and I get enjoyment out of this specific flavor of sadness.

Sometimes these states are influenced by stress, other times by boredom. They almost always only last an hour and cause me no real concern. I don't really know what to think of them, I think the only reason I'm mentioning it is I feel introspective. What do you guys think?

haventgotten answers from doctors or any ever, but i cry to like any inconvenience, nearly any small insult, being even moderately spooked, sm1 not liking me; even if i just slightly feel like one dislikes me a little. i did try medication.. but it made me feel like a zombie and i didn't like it :c didn't feel right. like, even if im extremely happy and all, i may suddenly just start to cry about someeven if i feel long-term happiness during it.

Let me start. I previously resided in a north eastern US state, I had a good job, a good partner, a nice place to live. I thought I'd made it.

I started having medical problems, discovered I carry certain genes and such. Was having trouble getting them diagnosed, but such is life.

Then my good partner left me, I lost my job of a year and a half, and I thought a fresh start near family would be good. I decided to move cross country. Which I regret, I want to leave but now I don't have the resources so here I am.

I just can't seem to get a job, I've applied at over 2000 jobs in the last 6 months. My previous job was managing the entire technology infrastructure for an IT company. The one before that was the IT Manager for a small company. I have the experience, but I can't get a job.

Last night I swerved to avoid deer in the road, got stuck in the mud and had to get towed out. I'm flat broke, I can't get a job, I have nothing. I lost everything. And I don't see myself ever recovering it. I have the experience and skill to do at least mid and some high level IT work.

I desperately want a remote job because my car is not reliable, my partner got the good car sadly. I've certainly made mistakes, I've certainly failed. But I don't think I deserve this much pain and suffering. I have nothing, I've lost it all. I can't find a job. I don't dare look for a partner while I'm a dead broke loser, so I have no one to share with.

Anyways, I apologize for whining and crying, I know we're all going through things. But I have nowhere to vent and it just keeps getting worse and I honestly don't think I'll ever get out.

Love you all. Thanks for reading. Please think of me when you get a chance and send good vibes my way.

Mental health is a crisis for learners globally, and digital support is increasingly seen as a critical resource. Concurrently, Intelligent Social Agents receive exponentially more engagement than other conversational systems, but their use in digital therapy provision is nascent. A survey of 1006 student users of the Intelligent Social Agent, Replika, investigated participants’ loneliness, perceived social support, use patterns, and beliefs about Replika. We found participants were more lonely than typical student populations but still perceived high social support. Many used Replika in multiple, overlapping ways—as a friend, a therapist, and an intellectual mirror. Many also held overlapping and often conflicting beliefs about Replika—calling it a machine, an intelligence, and a human. Critically, 3% reported that Replika halted their suicidal ideation. A comparative analysis of this group with the wider participant population is provided.

I looked at this blog post and it mentions a UN report which seems to be quite critical of modern psychiatry.

The doctor who made the report seems to be saying that drugging people is not a great approach, and really we should recognise that poor mental health is a result of social and psychological pressures:

Public policies continue to neglect the importance of the preconditions of poor mental health, such as violence, disempowerment, social exclusion and isolation and the breakdown of communities, systemic socioeconomic disadvantage and harmful conditions at work and in schools... Reductive biomedical approaches to treatment that do not adequately address contexts and relationships can no longer be considered compliant with the right to health.

Thoughts on this? Is the medical model of psychiatry just created by money-hungry pharma companies? Of course some people think they cannot function without their meds, and I sympathise with that view. But perhaps this belief is reinforced by strong withdrawal effects of these drugs, which are well-known. So somebody who has been on the drug for a while tries coming off, they have strong withdrawal symptoms, and they think "I can't cope without this drug, I must go back on it". Perhaps this is where tapering can help, because it helps people come off drugs (if they choose to do so) while reducing withdrawal effects.

Edit: The report was from 2017 but I still find it interesting. More info about it can be seen here: https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/ahrc3521-report-special-rapporteur-right-everyone-enjoyment-highest

I found this article interesting.

The website is known for its critical view of psychiatry, which I think is good. Any field with as much power as psychiatry (being allowed to lock people up and drug them) should be approached from a critical perspective.

Psychiatrists would argue that their methods are well-intentioned, but are their methods helpful? The author of the article thinks some of the methods are not helpful.

I haven’t watched the other videos in the series, but I found this one pretty interesting about anxiety and trauma / adverse experiences can lead to “only seeing the bad things.”

Let me know what you all think of it.

I've gotten so fed up arguing about mental illness and violence, I wrote a blog post setting the record straight.

I have ads turned off and I am not benefitting in any way from my blog. Just want to compile and share information.

TL;DR: Only 3-5% of violent acts can be attributed to those with SMI [20], co-occurring substance use plays the most pivotal role [24], many psychosocial contextual factors influence violent acts [11], and while individuals with SMI are potentially 2.1% more likely than those without a mental illness to be violent [4], they are 10 times more likely to be victims of violence themselves. [20]

There does not exist a strong association between severe mental illness and violent behavior in general. ...the notion that mentally ill individuals are violent is a harmful myth that only serves to further stigmatize an already disadvantaged population.

This behavior is detrimental to the 26% of our (U.S.) population suffering from a diagnosed mental illness. [10] The false claims that individuals with SMI are dangerous and responsible for mass shootings and acts of extremism need to be called out for the harmful lies that they are.

It's been almost 8 months since I graduated Uni. No one wants to hire a student with no experience. Been living in my parents basement for all that time. Been working nearly every single day trying to better myself for a job to no avail. Been drowning in debt for nearly 10 years. Mom hasn't been able to work due to health problems. Dad just diagnosed with the worst possible disease you can think about so he can't work. It all falls to me to work. Family had to resort to a social assistance to pay the basics requirement for bills. Owe Sister and aunts money. All my friends have moved away or too busy to talk or do anything. Last meaningful relationship, which entails just talking and doing nothing more, was about 5 years ago. And no matter what I do, who I turn to for help, how much I kill myself trying to get a job, how much I try to better this situation, it all ends up with another rejection email, another message left on read, another email with no response, and more debt that I can never repay back.

Yeah, I get why villains want to destroy the world in movies. The world sucks, everyone sucks, there's no good people in this world. Miracles don't exist, dreams are just imaginary, everyone doesn't care about you or what you're going through.

And like everything else I've tried doing to help, this won't get any attention. It seems like the universe forgot I existed or just made me to torment me. Because it just seems that I'm just a shadow in a dark place.

Forgotten and alone.

Defined as a preoccupation with one’s perceived lack of muscularity, muscle dysmorphia is becoming increasingly prevalent, causing what experts are calling a ‘silent crisis’ in men’s mental health

I’m looking for websites or books or anything like that with mental health recourses for high school and college students thanks!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/8180477

Why this is significant: There is no currently known treatment to stop suicidal thoughts when they happen. Antidepressants take 4-6 weeks to start working, and they don't work for everyone. Therapy also takes time. Our best option for acutely suicidal people is to lock them up in a psychiatric facility until they are no longer a threat to themselves.

Intravenous ketamine offers a glimpse of hope. A single dose appears able to alleviate suicidal ideation immediately after administration and for up to a week afterwards.