As an FYI, as someone who has been there before your intense self hatred is going to unconsciously attract people to you who indulge your self hatred. That is going to make your life miserable. You are going to be an asshole magnet until you work on your self loathing.
Depression and self hatred hurt pretty bad. However with time they can improve. I don’t know about ‘cure’, but you can improve them.
Why don’t you try to make a commitment that no matter what has been done to you in your life, or what you’ve done to other people, that you will try only to be supportive to yourself. Life can be painful, hard and fucked up, and avoiding that fact until you become filled with self hate is only making it harder and more fucked up. Make an effort to be compassionate and forgiving towards yourself no matter how badly you have failed in whatever area you think you were supposed to succed in and be normal in.
Facing and sitting with emotional pain rather than burying it through addictions, internalizing it until it becomes self hatred, denial, etc either by yourself or with someone (preferably both) is the only way to heal from emotional trauma.
mookie, you may have clinical depression. It’s a real live condition, not a conspiracy invented by Big Pharma. A combination of therapy and drug treatment can actually help you. It helps millions of people, so why wouldn’t it help you?
Or maybe you’re experiencing what’s called “existential depression”, where you can’t stop looking back on your life and noticing how crappy it seems compared to others, but otherwise your brain chemistry is fine. Maybe a change of scenery or an injection of hobbies/projects into your life can shake things up a bit and make you see that you aren’t worthless. Talking to someone and sharing your sadness with them openly and frankly can help as well.
Whatever it is, you are delusional and need to stop posting stuff like this on the internet. No one is as horrible as you’re painting yourself to be, and writing posts in a public forum implying you want to off yourself is just not wise. I don’t know what else to say. It’s like you’re playing with fire. One day an asshole is going to reply to you in a provocative manner and really try to do a number on your psyche. Do you really want to expose yourself to that?
Go to the damn doctor and stop deluding yourself. Deep down, I think you know that’s exactly what you’re doing. So it’s time to stop.
Speaking as someone who’s dealt with severe depression and feeling like I was worthless, I think you’re “idling” in your current crappy state because you’re too depressed to do anything else. Actually getting something done - whether it be a trip to the doctor or entering therapy - takes effort and is scary, and may well dig up worse feelings before you get better. Dealing with that takes guts, and it takes the determination to face up to the shit in your life, whether you caused it or stuff outside you caused it. You will also have to work on changing yourself and how you react to situations.
So yeah, I can get where you’re coming from. You’re not going to get better unless you can take one tiny step at a time. Maybe one little thing better per day.
Posting here? Apparently that’s worthless for you, or even counter-productive. You keep making these big posts about how your life is shit and you brush off or turn down help. So stop it. Quit digging that hole for yourself; you’re burying yourself in your own bad feelings. Eventually you’ll get sick of that and make a tiny effort to work on this, and a tiny effort the next day, until you drag yourself out of that hole and into feeling better. Or, you won’t.
The above is a text book CASE of depression. Yikes – you couldn’t describe it better if you tried.
For some reason, you seem to think that all of your problems will go away if you get a girlfriend, but that’s not true. You need to want to get help – FOR YOU. There are free clinics you can go to for counseling. But the SDMB can’t be your therapy.
You aren’t a “useless sack of shit” – but if you really want to convince yourself that, you need to care enough about yourself to go out and GET HELP.
If drugs are really your stumbling block, there are ways for some people to without them. Especially at your age, it’s possible that you have slipped into a cycle of repetitive thoughts and bad coping mechanisms that actually can be resolved without drugs. But you have to want to get better, and you have to develop the bravery to face the future without your current coping mechanisms.
I was somewhat like you at that age, and got pretty much the same response on the Dope. I, too, was resistant to the idea that medication was my only option. Eventually, I got so bored of thinking about myself all the damn time that I decided to devote all the energy I was spending cultivating my misery into getting better. It was the toughest thing I’ve ever done, because I’d grown so invested in being “depressed” that I’d wrapped up my identity in it, and so “getting better” was like stepping out into a new world without any of the defenses I’d relied on for so long. But I did it and my life has changed dramatically since. It takes some vigilance- I’ve learned that me and sorrow are like an alcoholic and a bottle of whiskey…I can’t indulge in it even a little bit, because it’ll get out of control. But I taught myself other ways to deal with my emotions and I’m certain I’ve beat it, and developed a much more fulfilling way of interpreting the world.
Good luck to you on your journey. I can’t make you trust in the future…you are going to have to take that step on your own.
Ugh, I don’t know if Melon has ever heard this, so I’ll do it one more time:
Depression causes the symptoms we see from mookie. To hold the person in contempt for a symptoms of their illness would be no different from me holding you in contempt for running a fever.
Or, my favorite metaphor is that the mentally ill no more choose to have their condition than a gay person chooses to be gay. We don’t condemn the latter, why is it less bigoted to condemn the former?
The only thing that is helpful is to try to convince the person to seek help. Talking bad about them only makes them feel worse. Either don’t say anything at all, or feel the guilt of force feeding a diabetic sugar because you can’t have sympathy for someone who eats high carbs.
For once, the old adage is not just good advice, but is essential: If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.
Because a gay person doesn’t go out wearing a t-shirt saying “I hate gays!” then come here and whine about the fact he can’t get laid.
Unless Mookie stops being so hostile to anything that might actually improve his life, nothing is going to change. He has only two choices: start seeking treatment for his depression right now; or start fixing the things he doesn’t like about his life right now.
I’ve got to disagree with this. The OP obviously came here looking for something - sympathy, advice, I’m not sure. Would it be better if nobody responded to him? Or if people only responded to say “there, there - you’re great!”?
People have offered very reasonable advice - see a therapist, try the drugs because they can work, etc. Others have pointed out that self-pity is not a useful tool in combating negative thoughts. Nobody has been showing ‘anti-mentally ill bigotry’ - nobody has said depression is not a real disease except for the OP. There is nothing wrong with someone who’s advice does not involve feeding into the OPs self-destructive melancholy.
I say all this as someone who has been through depression myself. In that situation the cycle of self-indulgent pity is very tempting, but ultimately useless. Someone else who feeds that cycle is doing you no favours. What you really need is to face the issues and seek treatment for them.
I came on the Dope years ago with a bunch of self-pitying BS. People told me the exact same thing…to get the hell over myself. Oh boy, was I resistant. I was just soooo upset about why people were not sympathetic to how excruciatingly fascinating my inner angst was. I had gotten so focused on myself, so personally identified with my sadness, and so in love with melancholy that I’d lost a lot of perspective.
Eventually, after many threads, I got the message. The Dope was actually a big part of the kick in the ass that I needed to start looking for solutions rather than wallowing. I desperately needed someone to tell that what I was going through was not particularly special or romantic. It was stupid, it’d gone on too long, and it was time to give it up and learn something new. I confronted and resolved my demons rather than indulging them, and I got “better” surprisingly quickly. Within a couple months of me deciding to get better, I did.
Depression is a complicated disease, and the raw truth is that we don’t have a complete understanding. For at least some people, in some ways, some of it actually is under conscious control. Nor is everyone who gets caught in a cycle of self-pity necessarily “have depression.” Some people really do just need a reality check and a better emotional toolbox. If someone in their early 20s is coming up with this stuff, I’d venture that is rather likely- they are in a time of difficult transition, and if they didn’t develop good ways of dealing with their emotions, it’s the time when that will come to a head.
This doesn’t mean they are bad people, or otherwise need to lead to any blame. Nor does that mean that depression drugs don’t help millions. But to pretend like it’s as straightforward as a broken arm is no more than a handy fiction. It’s complicated, it’s different for different people, and nobody has any one single answer.
I have suffered clinical depression for many years, I mostly keep it to myself because I feel embarassed, even ashamed about it.
If you suffer from depression (and it can get very bad sometimes ) you don’t feel sorry for yourself , and you don’t look for sympathy from others: because both do nothing to alleviate the depression, indeed they’re irrelevant in practical terms from your own depressed standpoint.
Too many people indulge themselves in self pity and then go around telling everyone that they suffer from depression.
They often denigrate themselves to others as a means of fishing for compliments.
(Oh no no you’re NOT a worthless pack of shit you’re a wonderful human being and everyone likes you etc)
When you’re depressed the whole world is a pointless, worthless place where the minutes and seconds are ticking away until your inevitable death and the death of everyone that you’ve liked or loved.
There are no achievements that are worthwhile because they die with you.
If a doctor saves a life he/she is only staving off the inevitable, if you see a beautyiful woman you know that she’s going to age and wither, and so on…
You don’t go around thinking poor little me, or if only such and such had happened in the past.
Its not all about you, its all about the universe as it is.
Once again I emphasise that this is from your own depressed viewpoint.
I’ve posted this specifically to allow non sufferers to differentiate between genuine depression and those looking for some sort of surrogate mother love/attention
I often tell my own doc that sometimes hating one’s life is not completely unwarranted and not necessarily the result of a chemical imbalance. For someone to foist drugs on that person and label them automatically as having clinical depression doesn’t make sense. They don’t need “tough love” or anything like that. They just need someone to help them change certain aspects of their life so that they can fill the emptiness currently occupied by self-hating thoughts. That’s why it’s essential mookie finds a good practioner. Perhaps going to a psychologist or a licensed social worker would be his best bet, rather than jumping right into the hands of a psychiatrist.
You know what’s really challenging? Dealing with clinical depression AND existential angst simultaneously. You treat the chemical imbalance and see some improvement, but the sadness is still there because one can’t help but see how empty their lives are, having lived a life while being “insane in the membrane”. Schizophrenics go through this. They have the dysphoria characteristic of the disease, and then the dysphoria characteristic of someone who’s unemployed, friendless, estranged from family, dealing with horrible side-effects from medication (massive weight gain being one of them), while also carrying the burden of being labeled with a stigmitizing mental illness. It would be nutso to think that this person doesn’t need ongoing help. Sometimes life really is hard and it’s not an illusion created by chemical imbalances or self-absorption. mookie needs someone to help him figure out what’s at the root of his problems.
But this isn’t to say drugs should be villfied. I was resistent to taking drugs myself…thinking I could be strong enough to fix myself on my own. But I eventually surrendered when I realized I couldn’t go another day having visions of hanging myself. I had indulged in those thoughts. I needed those thoughts to give me hope. But I realized that if I wasn’t brave enough to follow through with it, what was the point in having them? I tried a bunch of stuff until I found something that worked (Wellbutrin). I’m not a totally different person (which I was afraid would happen), but I am a more peaceful, accepting-of-myself person.
For the record, my comment about not taking drugs now was not meant to denigrate drugs in any way. I have used them and found them to be helpful. I just don’t need them if I keep up with my other techniques now, and since the OP was particularly vocal against drug companies, I wanted to reassure him that you can get treatment without *having *to take medication. (Though the research shows that people on meds and therapy do the best.)
Depression is tricky because it really is a disease, but it also really is amenable to changes in thought patterns. It also can make you act like a self-pitying jerk and make you resist treatment. Where does responsibility for that stop and disease-induced behavior you’re not responsible for begin? Who knows? I kind of wish my family had just committed me, or at least made the appointment and driven me there, whether I wanted to do it or not. That was when I was at my worst. I eventually sought help when I was depressed, but not at my worst, so I could get it together a bit to help myself.
Maybe you can start here: you seem upset that you are “worthless,” rather than just accepting that you’re worthless as an OK state of things. So even if you feel you don’t deserve to be happy or anything, perhaps you can go get some treatment to help you be worthwhile and helpful to others.
I know a lot of diabetics who are able to manage their diabetes through watching their food and getting regular exercise. Most I know have worked with a nutritionist to learn to eat - much like a depressed person works with a therapist to learn behavior modification. Some of them do pride themselves on managing their diabetes without medication - as they should because its often a lot of work to manage through diet and exercise (and often not possible regardless of how you eat and exercise).
In both cases, the situation can be bad enough to require medication. In both cases it may be possible to self manage without medication. In both cases, medication alone is probably not going to be sufficient long term - you need to modify the behavior.
(I’ve had dysthymia for years - I medicate off and on for it. My father is a diabetic who self manages through diet and exercise. I self manage my 'my father is a diabetic, his father was a diabetic, his mother was a diabetic, her mother was a diabetic statistical chance through diet and exercise. I figure the less soda I drink now - and the more exercise I get - the longer I can postpone the diagnosis - and maybe it will never come).