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Start doing long walks at the park.
Keep the house clean and tidy.
Learn how to cook complex and tasty dishes.
Take long hot showers before going to bed and not use your pc/phone/TV right before bedtime.
Do some volunteering in the weekend.
Take a pet.
Get some hobby.
Start random conversations with people.
Chat with coworkers.
Anyone doing all this has won life in my book. I can't do half this shit.
The trick is to stop thinking what a pain it is to do the thing and just doing it with an empty head.
Also, fuck critical thinking. If you've done the thing, then it's good enough. Fix will come later, if any.
I hate to comment but, exactly as the other person has said: you've already won life, congrats.
"Just don't think about anything bro, just get up and do stuff, be normal, enjoy life bro."
"Sir, I don't have any limbs, everything around me is on fire, there are people constantly screaming, threatening, and screeching at me over things I have no control over, I'm actively drowning in shitwater in a barrel that I've been forcefully shoved into without my consent, my brain is completely rotted and numb and full of worms eating away at me, I feel nothing but misery and pain, and the entire fucking world refuses to let me exist in peace and wants me to rot for all of eternity for not being born specifically white, cis-male, and wealthy. Kindly explain how the fuck I'm supposed to do any of what you've just said from here??"
"Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps, go take a walk or something, stop thinking bro." Proceeds to leave with no further elaborations.
This wise holy wisdom has fully cured all the mentally ill on the planet instantaneously, thank you mentally stable and well off model citizen, very cool, being completely tone deaf at everything will surely help us all and not contribute to the problem in anyway.
"Why are you homeless? Just go get a house stupid" type of energy. If only it were actually that simple and straightforward, none of us would be struggling with anything. Just go and enjoy your life man.
I think that my last comment may have been a bit misinterpreted. The meaning was.
1 - Don't be discouraged by the idea of "HAVE TO DO" something. Just start somewhere and go on bit at the time without thinking too much about it.
2 - Don't force yourself to run behind great ideals of perfection and let the idea of failing block you.
Now, that said. Did I think to know how hard may be for another person to work their problems out? Absolutely not.
"be normal, enjoy life"
"Normal" is a Fucking weird concept who changes all the time. Just be you.
The "enjoy" part is something that should gradually come along as you find things you like to do. At least, this is my opinion on it.
"Now, that said. Did I think to know how hard may be for another person to work their problems out? Absolutely not."
Then why are you here?
Bro, we all have our problems and circumstances. What i was saying was, that i don't underestimate yours. What I have given you was some honest suggestions. Some of which i have tried myself in the past, and that I honestly think may help.
"I'm asking a question on the internet but will flame you for giving an honest answer"
Then why are you here?
It got a lot better when I got on adhd medication, even though the medication doesn't do much else for me yet.
I think a certain reframing of depression has helped me too: It doesn't just make you sad and tired, it also makes you cynical and very critical of any ideas that might actually help you out of it. So I went to people I mostly trust, asked them how to get out of the depressive slump, and just did whatever they suggested instead of following the urge to talk down their ideas and reason out why they won't work for me. And honestly, it probably didn't even matter what exactly their suggestions were, because just doing anything is enough to get some positive change started.
Goal setting and moving the goalpost.
I just have to make it until next month to get the thing over with. I just have to make it until Saturday so I can do the thing.
That and the fact that giving in would devastate some people in my life. I live for them not for me.
A cocktail of prescriptions (Venlafaxine, Olanzapine, Myrtazapine) and self-medication (weed mostly). Mindlessly spending my paycheck because there's nothing to really look forward to long-term.
If you don't have access to therapy, reach out to as many like-minded people as possible. A burden shared is a burden halved. I mean it, better to trauma dump on Lemmy than to let it ferment inside you.
Besides that, keep asking yourself what you need, and do it honestly, openly and with grace. I mean in the here-and-now, immediate things which you could do for yourself. There is no wrong answer to this question, anything which gives you something concrete which to grip for a while is good enough, even if it's binging a comfort show or stewing in a warm bath. Plus asking yourself what you need will bring you closer to yourself over time, which may mitigate things a bit.
And that's all these are, to be clear, they're mitigation tactics, but I've found that depression is one of those illnesses which need to have both their core cause and the symptoms kept in check at the same time. We do need to push through depression a bit, yes, but I've found that just means presenting some opposition to the incoming tide of ennui, not giving ourselves anxiety attacks over unreasonable standards and goals.
And try to join a community when you feel that you can, even if you don't feel that you have the motivation. I've started looking into volunteer work and civic action groups, and even just seeing that there still are people who're trying to do some rational damage control and to improve things has lifted my spirits a bit. I imagine actually joining in would remunerate tenfold, and the work never hurts, either.
To be clear, I don't think I'm depressed right now, but I most certainly have been through what you're describing, and these are the things I now wish I knew to do back then.
Society would like to have a word with you.
Jokes aside, from personal experience serious venting - let alone trauma dumping - is an instant way of getting outcasted and isolated from everyone, most (normal) people would rather you just bottle everything up and rot forever, nobody really cares.
Somebody finally seemed to acknowledge that, that is unexpected. It's definitely easier said then done though, not sure what one can do if their depression is from how hellish and unbearable life is, or how awful or cruel everyone around you is, you can't control any of that, there's only so much you can do to get by or have small enjoyments to distract yourself with with all that going on, and gaslighting yourself into thinking everything is fine anyways is sorta impossible if you aren't a literal NPC that can ignore the fact that everything around them is on fire - including themselves - so. Not sure how much "mitigations" can help before they inevitably wear out with the crushing weight of the world still pressing against someone relentlessly and refusing to stop.
Community and volunteering is nice and all, but yeah it's not an option sometimes, not every place has any of that, and not every society is caring enough to bother with it or foster it to begin with, and it's only getting worse with time it seems.
So care to elaborate a bit more on your experiences? Where exactly do you even find "like minded people" in the first place? Let alone ones that'd be willing to hear all the fucked up shit you go through on a daily basis and give you a hug?
Yeah I feel like volunteering and community action is a few steps down the line. As for how to find people who can hear you out - they do exist. To be honest I answered a local reddit post looking for friends. I think her post mentioned she was struggling with mental health issues. It's important to be open about that from the start. Maybe I got lucky, but we turned out to have so much in common. We started taking long walks once a week. Not too much of a commitment, but I had something to look forward to every week. And yeah, there was some trauma dumping from both of us at times. It's far less embarrassing when there's a back and forth, and we found we could relate to a lot of each other's experiences.
It may seem counterintuitive that you need to find someone who is also struggling. It's much easier for us to have compassion for someone else, even if our situations are the same. But eventually you'll realize that if your depressed friend deserves your compassion then so do you.
And so what if you have to try this a few times to find the right person or it doesn't pan out? At least you tried something and got some fresh air.
A couple of things particularly help me, though I'm in a slightly different boat mental health wise.
The first is simple, your mind can't be trusted, it's lying to you. The looming monster is far more of a paper tiger than it seems. The feeling nothing good happens? That's mostly it forgetting all the positives and just focusing on every negative it can find. The lack of support? It's often there, if you reach out. Your own mind is telling you it's not.
None of this makes it easier to fight far from it. It's all in your head is also where you are stuck. It does however give you a target. This leads on to the second point.
Anchoring. If you can't trust your mind, you need something to hang on to. Something to reference. Anchors are that. They are stakes you drive into your own mind. Some will act as lighthouses. They let me tell how I'm drifting. Others are more concrete. I have a set of actions and habits that exist mostly to keep me stable. They are like pinions in rock climbing, when I fall, they stop me tumbling too far. They give me lines to pull on to climb back up.
Anchors can take many forms. The simplest are logical decisions you have taken that you KNOW to be true. You make them through logic and decision, and know to trust them ahead of time. E.g. When the insidious voice tells me I'm worthless, I KNOW I have value. I can deny the voice and cling to the truth. Its almost weaponised denial. It is true, discussion over, end of.
The other form is habit sets. These are the most powerful, but harder. I've set up social expectations I don't want to drop. I have decided that I will go, even when I don't want to. The events, in turn, can break me out of funks and put me back on familiar ground. They can be as simple as "I will make the bed each morning" or "I will keep the kitchen clean". They can be more complex like "I will attend the club every Wednesday" or "I will call my cousin once a week".
If you were a cloth, anchors are the spikes used to hold you in shape. We can't hold the cloth down with just 2 hands, not in gale force winds. The more pegs we have, the better we can control the shape, and so ourselves. You will slip, you will lose anchors, but other will catch you. They let you make progress and KEEP it.
It's daunting, but start simple, put down a few mental pegs things you logically know to be true, but often don't believe. Build slowly from there.
As I said, my mental health issues are a slightly different path. It does share a lot of commonalities with yours, so hopefully my ramblings can help.
drugs.
and me not wanting to fuck over the people who depend on me outweighs most attempts to kill myself
I am lucky to have welfare and family to turn to. However, my answer would be drugs and walks in or near nature
I've got cats that depend on me, and I care more about their well-being than I care about mine. Also weed really helps to mellow me out, especially when the depression is really bad. It's not perfect, it mellows out the good feelings along with the bad ones, but hey it's better than nothing.
I wouldn’t say I have/had crippling depression, but getting meds for anxiety really opened my eyes in how much depression was affecting my life.
I’m in Canada, but my meds cost $40 for 3 months, the generics are fairly affordable.
If you’re able start a conversation with your doctor and say exactly what you posted here.