Bay 12 Games Forum
Finally... => Life Advice => Topic started by: deathpunch578 on March 13, 2018, 12:42:32 pm
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I feel fine, it's just when ever something doesn't go right or I make a mistake I feel depressed. Sometimes I'm fine after a bit, but most of the time I feel awful through the rest of the day.
I also have aspergers, I don't know how it effects me, I just know I've diagnosed with it.
I just need help.
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ever something doesn't go right or I make a mistake I feel depressed
Sounds like self-esteem issues to me. I also have the problem where when I've screwed up or something didn't go right in the day that was important to me, it will stay with me a while. I don't think it's unnatural. But I do think it comes from a place of guilt, of feeling the need to beat one's self up. I mentally consider it as trying to always be better and having consequences when I suck, even though it causes me pain and depression. But it's often things that are out of your control that screw stuff up, and in lieu of being able to blame life and moving on...you blame yourself. Either reasonably (I could have done better and didn't) or unreasonably (taking responsibility for stuff you don't have any control over.)
Letting go isn't easy, especially when it's something important. There will always be some period of time when you have to mentally process something that happened. Rationalizing and finding an explanation you can live with does take time. The trick is to not sweat the small stuff, like bad social interactions. Don't ignore them! But don't carry them around with you all day, all week. Pick which hill you really should be dying on. I had to learn this at work the hard way. I'd get really worked up over small things that made the big things seem even more intimidating. My bosses had to tell me "let the small stuff go. Save your angst for the big things." And it really did help. To me it was like "bwah, you mean deliberately don't care as much about the low level stuff that goes like crap?! It's like you're telling me to slack off and not get invested!" Truth is there is some stuff out there that isn't worthy of your pain. Finding out which is which is a life skill.
Can't help you much with the Aspergers though.
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Feeling bad for failing at something is not depressed. If you were really depressed, you would probably not even have tried in the first place.
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Feeling bad for failing at something is not depressed. If you were really depressed, you would probably not even have tried in the first place.
Feeling bad for failing at something is being disappointed (https://youtu.be/cdEQmpVIE4A)
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Thanks for the advice, I'm going to try my best to actually follow it.
Feeling bad for failing at something is not depressed. If you were really depressed, you would probably not even have tried in the first place.
I do want to give up and stop trying, but I end up forcing myself to do things (it makes me want to bash my head against a wall until I knock myself unconscious, but at least I'm trying to work through it)
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Feeling bad for failing at something is not depressed. If you were really depressed, you would probably not even have tried in the first place.
I do want to give up and stop trying, but I end up forcing myself to do things (it makes me want to bash my head against a wall until I knock myself unconscious, but at least I'm trying to work through it)
That's still not really depression, if you were despressed like martinuz said you wouldn't of tried. You usually wouldn't even think of trying. Depression is waking up and seeing the pile of work before you, then shrugging and going back to bed/reading a book/staring at the wall before you go to lay down for the night so you can get up and barely even exist the next day.
Depression is also a constant, there isn't something that makes your days bad, they just are bad. Sometimes they are worse sure but usually they are just bad.
That said I'd love to offer positive advice on what's making you feel sad and the bad feelings you do have but as someone struggling with depression so bad I haven't properly cleaned my room in a year I don't think I have any advice to give.
If all this makes you angry at me though and want to tell me how you do have depression, go talk to your doctor. Depending on where you live anti-depressants are pretty standard stuff.
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Feeling bad for failing at something is not depressed. If you were really depressed, you would probably not even have tried in the first place.
I do want to give up and stop trying, but I end up forcing myself to do things (it makes me want to bash my head against a wall until I knock myself unconscious, but at least I'm trying to work through it)
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I get that, just explaining a bit more of my situation. When posting this I kinda half forgot what depression is (all I remembered was it made you unmotivated and made have suicidal thoughts/thoughts of self harm)
As someone with mental illnesses I am not going to be the person that fakes having a mental illness/disorder for attention (I fucking hate these people)
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Aspergers is not a mental illness, if that's what you are referring to.
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Aspergers is not a mental illness, if that's what you are referring to.
Er, yes it is. (https://www.psychiatry.org/File%20Library/Psychiatrists/Practice/DSM/APA_DSM-5-Autism-Spectrum-Disorder.pdf)
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I do want to give up and stop trying, but I end up forcing myself to do things (it makes me want to bash my head against a wall until I knock myself unconscious, but at least I'm trying to work through it)
That's still not really depression, if you were despressed like martinuz said you wouldn't of tried.
Oh cheers, so because I manage to at least get out of bed most days and try to improve my life despite the inherent pointlessness of it all and the inevitability of failure, I'm not actually depressed at all.
Good to know, thanks! :))
I know how you feel, Deathpunch. Once I start beating myself up over even the smallest of failures it can be awfully hard to stop.
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That sounds more like neurosis than depression.
*Has suffered depression. It sucks.
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Aspergers is not a mental illness, if that's what you are referring to.
Er, yes it is. (https://www.psychiatry.org/File%20Library/Psychiatrists/Practice/DSM/APA_DSM-5-Autism-Spectrum-Disorder.pdf)
Over here it is called a personality disorder, but not an illness. Calling someone with aspergers mentally ill is considered an insult, not just by those with asperger's, but also by psychologists and psychiatrists alike.
Also, DSM is often treated like it's some kind of holy scripture. It's not. It's a compromise between diagnosis and cost-effectiveness of treatment for health insurance and pharmaceutics' sake.
I daresay it even hurts medical progress, for it does not encourage out-of-the-box thinking at all.
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The radiostation at work has been talking about depressions the whole week (some silly social engagement) and it is appaling to me how often the conversation drives to platitudes, even when they interview the so called experts. When to me it seems so apparant; I'm not pretending to have eaten wisdom by the spoonful, but you will be hard pressed to find an instance of depression that can not be resumed to the following logic:
The cause for depressions stems from expectations (to others, yourself or the world in general) that go unsatisfied, and somebody who suffers depression knows, or has persuaded oneself that that expectation will forever remain unmet.
This is not just inaccurate but dangerously so. Depression is an actual chemical disorder (albeit one that, like most brain problems, is hard to provide an etiology for with certainty); it's not something you can philosophize yourself into or out of, but a physiological problem with the brain. Part of the reason we try to raise awareness of it as a disorder is because it is one, and one that's often responsive to pharmaceutical intervention in concert with therapy. Yes, coping strategies are important. Yes, depressive people in particular should be encouraged to take an active role in managing their problems. But to try to blandly lump it all together as "you believe your expectations will go unmet so suck it up" is to ignore the actual medical problems at play, which is dangerous -- and to dismiss the blanket statements of experts as "platitudes" is to mistake medical caution for ignorance.
In short, there is a legitimate medical problem with a roster of legitimate medical solutions at play here, and we should be encouraging those with depression to explore them rather than dismissing the "so called experts." Resilience is all well and good. Resilience combined with a respect for the magnitude and nature of the problem is unequivocally better.
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This is not just inaccurate but dangerously so. Depression is an actual chemical disorder (albeit one that, like most brain problems, is hard to provide an etiology for with certainty); it's not something you can philosophize yourself into or out of, but a physiological problem with the brain.
This is a category error. Everything that happens in the brain is an actual chemical disorder, because the brain is an actual chemical object. Love is an actual chemical disorder. (Or order, for the optimist.) Your political views, and the opposition's, are actual chemical disorders. Philosophising yourself into or out of something is also an actual chemical process in the brain that can have real effects on brain chemistry; so is learning, or even just looking at things. Studies continue to show that philosophising yourself out of depression works about as often as medication does, and that the major source of variation seems to be that different approaches work for different people. Telling people they can't philosophise themselves out of depression without even letting them try first just worsens the problem.
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And to be perfectly clear: what annoys me so much about the public discourse it's that it's only relevant to relatives, they never talk about the needs of the affected. Unless you dig really deep and actually listen to talks and lectures of actual experts. This mainstream radio had a whole week and it wasted it on symptom description and a list of things the affected DON'T want to hear.
Oh, I'm with you there, although part of that is just that radio interviews are a poor medium for conveying the intricacies of psychology.
Note that I never said that psychotherapy is useless; far from it. I'm specifically advocating for antidepressants in concert with therapy, which an analysis of available studies would suggest work better in concert than either alone, and better than placebo or nothing (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3408478/pdf/pone.0041778.pdf). Sure the dosages and specific therapies are time-consuming to work out, in part because we don't have an objective gauge of their effectiveness the way we do for something like blood pressure, but regardless, "I am not responding to emotional stimuli as I think I should be" is a problem we have at least a good idea of how to solve, whether it's by pharmaceutically affecting brain chemistry (which isn't just flooding the brain with neurotransmitters) or psychotherapy.
Yes, every brain is different. Some will respond to antidepressants; some will not. Therapy must of course be carefully tuned to the individual patient. My point is simply that your chances are better with a trained therapist than with a depressed person, which is all you've got for therapy when you try to treat yourself, so we should be careful to emphasize that depression is more treatable than it often seems to a depressed person.
EDIT: Incidentally, it's also entirely possible that the best therapy for a given person is self-guided, but again, there are better-qualified people to make that determination than someone who is by definition dissatisfied with their current reactions to things.
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Eat more produce, find a hobby that involves dedicating multiple days to the activity, meditate and relax.
The world's in a bad place right now. Probably looks like the worst it's been in a long time. Probably going to get a little darker too.
Night's always darkest before dawn. Keep your chin up, just a few more years. Just have to keep the faith; hold onto the hope in the future.