Part of my problem with accepting the “it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of you” idea is that it is so counter to all my experiences. In academia, for one, what others think of you is the most important thing; that’s how you get a paper past reviewers, who are your peers. If they like you, you tend to get more papers passed through. That’s why a lot of up-and-coming academics seek to have big names on their papers. Being a pariah is death.
And besides that, we have to live in society. Suppose my idea of fun is walking around naked swinging a baseball bat. Hey, it doesn’t matter what other people think, right? Wrong. I’d be arrested. I also can’t tell jerks that I wish they’d die in a car fire, unless I want to live under a bridge. Getting people to like us is required to live in society.
I’m sure we’d all like to live the life of the guy in “Office Space” who tells everyone to fuck off if they bother him, but the reality is, living in a world with >1 person means we have to compromise. Part of that is getting influential people to like you.
But if nobody was willing to teach, then the next generation would never learn anything. And since somebody needs to be doing the teaching, shouldn’t it be someone who enjoys it?
Actually, I think the need for good teachers is overstated. You can go online and learn any type of math you want at your own pace. You don’t need a teacher. Go to Wikipedia and check out the references and you can learn about any topic under the sun. No teacher required.
Johnny has good advice. I’d forgo the lovely alliteration and call them, “those nattering habits of negativity.” Talk therapy takes you only so far; a therapist who can help you with CBT will give you active methods for improving your ways of thinking about yourself and your life.
Tell me something, statsman - you seem like a very smart guy. Do you get less out of your therapy because you’re smarter than your therapists, and they’re not always able to call you on your deflections properly?
A good teacher can kindle your enthusiasm for a subject, and keep you up to the mark if you slack off, and untangle the bits of a subject you find confusing (different bits for different people). I’ve had some kick-ass teachers at various points in time, and most definitely appreciated them.
My therapist right now seems very smart, and she does ask me pointed questions, which I think does help. But I find it hard to ask myself these questions because I don’t trust my own mind.
What is odd, though, is that I often feel that I know all the solutions she’s going to present. I know about thought challenging, about the well-documented negativity bias in the psychology literature ( I wrote a paper on it!), and that I am actually being very egotistical when I’m depressed, thinking only of myself and how unhappy I am, instead of the things I can do for others. I feel that the more I know about the solutions she will present, the more I think they won’t work, because I know about them. I feel like the only way I can be treated is to be “surprised,” because then I won’t have a chance to come up with ideas about why it won’t work.
One thing that I will say about myself, and that has been said of my by my therapists, is that I have good insights into the problems I have. I can tell you, intellectually, exactly what my problems are and what likely caused them. I can even tell you some ideas about how I might overcome these problems. I just don’t believe any of it. I guess I feel as if I’m just a “broken person” who knows his problems but who can’t overcome them.
ETA: And I can foresee that a logical response to the last sentence there is to say, “Well, for CBT or any kind of therapy to work, the patient must take an active role. That means, statsman, that you need to want to get better. Then you can begin to develop new thinking patterns.”
How did I do there? Was that response pretty on target?
If you enjoy teaching you should want to be at a community college. You will do more teaching and have more student interaction there than at a large uni.
also as a PHD, you will be a big fish in a small pond. Instant respect.
as far as the value of teachers, I spent 15 years as a training instructor. I was quite often amazed at how little learning my students did if not forced by an outside influence.
I was an outside influence. They learned when they came to class. I used to say that I guaranteed that everyone learned 1 thing every day. sometimes I would even make a joke out of it (OK, Fred, Jim and George all learned one thing today, 4 more and I can go home early)
You too will be an outside influence.
Hang in there, if you need to talk we are here to listen.
Rick
Actually, my response is, “There comes a point where you have to leave the intellectual knowledge behind and just go on faith - that you don’t have the special anxiety or depression that won’t respond to the treatment that everyone else’s anxiety and depression respond to.”
Do you want to get better? I rather assume you do since if you didn’t you would never have posted this thread. Go ahead and call the hotline if you think it will help. I suspect that they’ll have a suggestion or two even for you. You aren’t alone and especially not in this era of connectivity.
Yup, that’s academia. You only validate their choices if you make the same choices. However, if you go somewhere else, you’ll find yourself surrounded by people who made the other choice, and validate your decision as well. Small teaching colleges are awesome places to work, and the people who don’t think so - would soon become ‘people from whom you don’t hear so much anymore’.
You’re a smart guy in a stressful situation. Cut yourself a bit of slack.
In the long run, do what you want to do. Do what you like. Do what makes you happy.
You have more or less stated in your OP you hate where you are, and are uninspired by what you are doing, and you would like to teach. Dissatisfaction and general anomie was stressing you so hard your thoughts were suicidal. OK, fair enough, I took you at your word and told you that you can reject specific stressors. Now you’re aggressively defending these stressors as being necessary to your motivation and happiness.
Being aggressive about your dissatisfaction and relatively passive about taking charge of your life, which is the vibe I’m getting at this point, is naturally going to set up intolerable psychological stresses which could easily drive you to suicidal thoughts. Meds are not going to solve this problem. If you really hate what you are doing, or what the future holds, stop re-assess, re-direct, and redefine your goals. Either buckle down to get your degree, or make a different life decision to remove the life threatening stressors you complain about. Nothing is going to change if you’re not willing to make some hard decisions about your own choices.
You’re old enough to make up your own mind. Doing research at a big school is great, but the attitude that’s it’s the only intellectually worthwhile pursuit comes from people who are doing just that. You’re in an echo chamber. There’s a whole world out there beyond academic research where intelligent people make their way quite nicely.
The funny thing is, if you go out into the private sector you’ll hear plenty of sneering about “ivory tower academics” who can’t make it in the “real world”, applied to anyone at all in academia.
So… Big University=Good - only from the POV of the specific people working in the Big University!
Your (hopefully now ex?) psychiatrist sounds like an idiot. To be polite. Telling someone who can’t stop thinking about suicide just to stop it, and meds won’t help? How helpful and encouraging. Yes, lots of people think about suicide occasionally. People who think about it all the time, or who have made (short) lists of the reasons why they aren’t going to go through with it are not in the same category. You should mention this to your new therapist, and ask them to make time for it early in the sessions - this is not a minor little symptom that’s unimportant and you wasting their time for mentioning it.
I can’t help with advice on your PhD - my education stopped before then, so to me anyone doing any doctoral studies is awesome and achieving big things. (There you go, at least one person thinks you rock for your studies, even if you don’t.)
The main point of my reply, though, was to say that I think the suicide hotline people are not just for people about to kill themselves right now. They also exist for people who need to talk before they get to the point of no return. You could try emailing someone like The Samaritans (they’re based in the UK, but presumably email is email…) - they’re not solely for people about to kill themselves, but for people thinking about it too. jo [at] samaritans.org is the email address to use, if you want to.
I hope things settle down for you soon - it’s horrible not being able to rely on your mind to function properly. Just remember that bits of it are broken at the moment, so when it tells you things are shit, and you’re shit and all the rest of it, that’s only the broken bits talking. It’s not real.
Well, you know, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Sounds like you’re suffering from being in an echo chamber, and nothing is wierder, louder, and, well, wronger* than a higher-academia echo chamber.
= yeah, grammar, suck it.
My last meeting with my College Advisor went like this:
Advisor: So, You’re getting your CE? (Civil Engineering)
Me: Yup.
Advisor: So, you getting into anything exciting? Like Waste remediation or Structural Design?
Me: Nope. I kinda like transportation. I like the computational stuff in queuing theory
Advisor: <downbeat>Oh. Well have you thought about getting your PHD?
Me: Nope. I’ve had enough.
Advisor: <Rubberstamp> Okay, don’t let the door hit you on the way out!
In short, if I weren’t doing anything that brought prestige to the University, they didn’t want anything to do with me…but they sure were happy to mail me twice a year begging for alumni funds.
Not really. CBT is MUCH simpler than you’d think, and doesn’t need any kind of ‘Rah Rah’ to work.
In my case, I had a great deal of dread that my wife was being unfaithful to me. The therapist told me to keep a journal when I was feeling this dread…what was I thinking when I was feeling it. Turns out I WASN’T thinking of my wife during ANY of the times I was feeling dread. I was retroactively attaching the feelings to what I thought was the big problem in my life. Took two journal entries to determine that. CBT works WELL for educated people. You sound pretty educated.
I then got a small additional prescription of Xanax to handle the panic attacks…THEN discovered that, hey, they never last more than 20 minutes, don’t hurt you in the long term, and if you just ignore what you’re thinking when you recognize a panic attack, they start to diminish in power and tend to go away.
This is something I see in my support group all the time; people come to us in bad shape, panicking every day, feeling lousy, and have about 15 different life stressors all going on at the same time. They want their life to change, for their anxiety to go away, but they really don’t want to make any changes in how they’re living their lives. It’s the life they’re living that got them into the state they’re in now - you don’t live in constant stress for years without it affecting you. Sometimes we can’t even get them to make the smallest changes, like stopping drinking coffee. Look, you’re having panic every day, and you’re drinking two pots of coffee a day. How about you cut out the caffeine, then see where you are? Maybe you have a caffeine disorder, not a panic disorder.
I also tell people that their anxiety is actually a good thing; it’s like a gauge on your body telling you that you’re red-lining. Your anxiety is grabbing you by the collar, shaking you up, and yelling in your face, “THIS ISN’T WORKING! DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT!”
statsman, I’m not gonna lie, depression sucks. I realize this feels like it’s going to last forever, but it won’t–take it from someone who spent six excruciatingly long years severely depressed. At my worst, I was unable to hold down a job or attend undergraduate school. I spent days in bed moaning about how badly I wanted to die, didn’t bathe, didn’t brush my teeth, and had to be fed my medications. I had so much anxiety that on a good day I could walk down the block to the corner store, if someone came with me.
And yet… I got better. Through CBT. Eventually I just decided I didn’t want my fear to rule my life any more. I did the grueling work necessary to get back on my feet–and it worked. And now every day seems like a kind of miracle. It’s a kind of gift when you can feel gratitude for something as simple as the ability to leave the house or sit in a classroom.
This isn’t something that just happens overnight. It’s something you have to work at every day, maybe even for the rest of your life. It’s not fair, but that’s just the way it is. If you’re unhappy, the only thing you can do is change what you can and accept the rest.
I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but people who suffer from depression are at the highest risk for suicide during the recovery period, because after getting a taste of happiness they interpret every little symptom as a sign of regression and proof they will never get better. When I first began recovery, I went through the same thing, so I had the word ‘‘impermanent’’ (in Sanskrit, the language of the Zen Buddhist Diamond Sutra) tattooed on my wrist, to remind myself that just because I feel like shit now doesn’t mean I have always felt like shit and will always feel like shit for eternity. That’s the way I live my life now–with respect for the idea that change is not only possible, it is *inevitable. *I still have chronic mild to moderate depression, but I can look at that tattoo and remind myself that it’s not forever. I also have a ‘‘no important decisions while neurotic’’ rule. It’s not that I don’t still have irrational and self-downing thoughts, it’s that I’ve learned not to trust them or allow them to shape my behavior.
You mentioned you’ve been on meds for years, but how long have you actually been doing CBT? It takes time and consistency to work, you know.
I think there’s a difference between complacency and contentment, as well as necessity vs dissatisfaction. Plus, what about good ole curiosity?
And as far as people to talk to, have you had any sort of diagnosis other than depression, such as a personality disorder? If so, they have a bazillion online and probably local communities for fellow sufferers of many psychiatric conditions. There’s a wealth of information here:
Well, I’m just getting going again with a therapist, as my previous one got reassigned. The new one is still getting to know me. The problem is, we’ve gotten sidetracked on some other issues that I think are a symptom of my depression, not the cause. In trying to work through those, we don’t have time to work on the other things. I have had a few homework assignments, but I have no idea if they count as CBT. One assignment was to write a letter to someone (just to get the ideas out, not to send) explaining my frustrations with them. Another is to work in “I” statements when asserting myself (I think I’m pathalogically passive)
(I should have said ‘negativism’, though.)
