Posted by fxckfeelings on August 30, 2010
Someday, people with psychiatric problems will get safe, effective treatment without having to make difficult choices, and Thanksgiving dinner will come in a pill, and jetpacks will be available cheaply for every man, woman and child. For now, the state of the art is much better than it’s ever been, but it’s still primitive, and it certainly isn’t inexpensive. Until the silver bullet for curing mental illness is found, patients have to make innumerable tough decisions for themselves, weighing everything from side effects to costs. Or they can just bide their time until their jetpacks arrive to make everything better.
–Dr. Lastname
I decided recently to listen to my friends and family and see a psychiatrist about my depression, but I don’t know whether I’ve made the wrong decision, or whether I’ve just chosen the wrong doctor. Basically, I decided to get help because I feel helpless, but my doctor wants me to do a lot of the work myself and doesn’t really help that much. It’s not just he wants me to ask myself a lot of questions (and answer them—if I had the answers, would I really be paying him?—but also deal with my insurance company and read up on the medication he suggests (he tells me about them, sure, but he says I owe it to myself to read up on them on my own, and that doesn’t make sense to me since he’s a doctor, knows everything about the pills, and he could just tell me himself). My goal is to figure out whether therapy is worth it, or whether I’m just getting help from the wrong source.
I hate to sound like your psychiatrist, but ask yourself what you have a right to expect from treatment, given what you know about its limits and your resources for paying for it.
If you want, you can spin things positively by saying that you’ve heard about good new treatments that can really help and that you’ve got great insurance that you pay a ton of money for. Of course, you’d probably be full of shit.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on August 9, 2010
Whether it’s wishful thinking, fear, or a powerful sales pitch from the church of Scientology, we have lots of emotional reasons for shutting down our logical minds when we have to make medication decisions about psychiatric illness. The good news is that, while those decisions should be made carefully, they’re not rocket science. The bad news is that it requires more courage than brains (or Thetans) to be a good manager of your own health.
–Dr. Lastname
I recently started going to a doctor for my depression. She thinks I should take pills, I’ve seen lots of articles about how antidepressants don’t work and the main reason they’re prescribed is because of the huge investment that big pharmaceutical companies have made in producing and marketing them. It makes sense to me that there are better natural, holistic solutions that get played down by the medical establishment because they can’t make money for anyone and threaten the profits made by those companies. My goal is to find treatments that work best, not the treatments that server the corporate interests.
The problem with most criticism of current drug treatments is its hopefulness; it implies that there are good, effective, cheap and low-side-effect treatments for depression (that are being suppressed). If only principal clause of that statement were true.
Sure, a magic bullet, holistic or otherwise, would be great (there are lots of other unsolved and incurable problems I can work on, so I’m not worried by the hit my business will take).
The truth is, however, that current treatments are time-consuming, weak, often costly, sometimes risky, and not guaranteed to work
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Posted by fxckfeelings on July 8, 2010
Hate makes us feel particularly alive; Sox fans may hate the Yankees (and the Rays, for the matter), but that rivalry is a big part of what keeps those fans coming back. At the same time, however, indulging in hate excessively is dangerous, because it pushes us to wreak destruction. Once hate takes over, levity leaves; you’re not for one team, you’re just against another. You can’t stop feeling hate, but you can learn to manage it. Otherwise, the season’s as good as over.
–Dr. Lastname
I hate life. What is the most reliable and painless way to commit suicide?
You hate life, and I hate the kind of dangerous, self-lacerating whining that makes a painful life seem meaningless, when it isn’t.
Hating life is an understandable feeling, whether the problem is a hateful life or your own, reflexive intolerance of life’s general hatefulness. There’s no doubt that life is sometimes hateful, some people’s lives are more hateful than most, and some good people are more sensitive to its hatefulness.
There’s more than enough hate to go around, and you can’t help how you feel.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on May 13, 2010
Some people think self-improvement begins with first finding your faults and then hating the crap out of them and yourself. In reality, hating your faults is a perverse feel-good, like chewing on a canker sore. Attacking yourself, or even those close to you, just kicks someone when when they’re down and makes self-improvement that much more difficult. If you want to improve yourself, improve your tactics, because there are better ways to get better.
–Dr. Lastname
I’ve been a complete, stinking failure since I graduated from college. My job pays well, but I hate it with a passion because I’m treated like shit. Then again, I don’t have the skills to find anything better, though I’ve tried. My drinking has kept my girlfriend from moving in, and, since I’ve never loved anyone else, that means I’ve never had a relationship that works. I don’t really have friends because I’m too nervous to let anyone really know me and I work too hard to meet anyone (at that job that sucks). Now I wonder whether I’m being honest with you, or just whining and slinging bullshit. My goal is to be someone else.
It never ceases to amaze me how people who launch into the most brutal monologues of self-criticism would never allow their friends to talk such shit about themselves in their presence. The only thing they truly fail at is holding themselves to the same standards they hold others.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on April 12, 2010
Discovery Channel always does well with its sharks, so this week, we’re going to try cases that are variations of the theme of “Shut up!” In many ways, sharks and “shut up” have the same effect on people, be they swimming in actual water or metaphorical self-pity; it’s painful and humbling, but if you come through your confrontation intact, you feel indestructable. Now, if you please, shut up and read.
–Dr. Lastname
I’m a 58-year-old gay man and it’s a long time since life has been any fun. I’ve been single for some time (with no real prospects of a relationship), my friends don’t seem to have time for me, and at the end of a hard day’s work running my own business, I’ve barely broken even and have nothing to look forward to but spending the evening alone. That’s when the depression closes in and I can’t stand living. I write all this because I know that I’m a miserable failure, and that facts, not depression or any other mental illness, are behind my reasoning. I mean, when I tell my few close friends how I feel, they tell me I’m being too hard on myself, but if you’re almost 60, alone, and a financial mess, doesn’t that mean you’re a loser? My goal is to be real about myself.
Sounds like your goal isn’t to be real about yourself, it’s to be mean to yourself because you’re in a bad mood. If you were to reread the above paragraph when your mood wasn’t so shitty, you’d see your treating “facts” with the same care as Bill O’Reilly.
So, to quote Bill, Shut up, I don’t want to hear it. You wouldn’t talk like that to a friend, or even probably your worst enemy, so don’t do it to yourself.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on March 29, 2010
For our 100th post, we address a problem that causes loads of people useless worry, and that is…useless worry. Just because horrible things may happen to you or someone you love (or because of someone you love), life shouldn’t end. Prepare yourself the best you can for whatever trouble you think you see coming, and then continue your regularly scheduled, useful life.
–Dr. Lastname
Living with my mentally ill 30-year-old daughter is wearing me out. My wife and I can never leave her alone, but we also can’t take her with us because she gets uncomfortable when she’s around people she doesn’t know and says inappropriate things in a loud voice and has to get up and leave. The problem isn’t her, though, it’s my wife, who is so worried about what will happen if we put her in a half-way house with other sick people that she can’t think clearly about it. We’ve got some money, but if we paid for my daughter to have her own condo and a nurse to keep an eye on her, the money wouldn’t last long. Then again, if she continues to live with us, we won’t last long. My goal is to get my wife to see that we have to get her into a state-supported program, for her sake and ours.
You hope to get your wife to see that your mentally ill daughter needs to live independently, but if you were making any progress in that direction, you wouldn’t be writing.
Let’s assume then, at least for the moment, that your hopes are false and your wife can’t let go, and if she can’t let go, she’ll always be thinking of new ways to make your daughter feel more comfortable and better understood. Which makes your goal a more and more distant dream.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on March 15, 2010
Part of being a kid is testing your limits with your parents-how late can you stay up, how many times can you hit your sister, how frequently can you have keggers in the garage-but what’s discussed less frequently is how parents have to test their own limits with their kids. While you might not want to be too forceful with your kid, part of being a parent is making choices and enforcing them. On the other hand, you don’t have to be so pushy that you go from parent to endless nag. It’s a careful balance, but the family buck stops with you, so you’ve got to make the call. Besides, if you don’t get it right, then those keggers will be the least of your problems.
–Dr. Lastname
My son was diagnosed with severe depression when he was a freshman in high school. I know it’s supposed to be a hereditary disease, but neither I nor my husband have any history of it; we both come from stiff-upper-lip backgrounds, and when our son attempted suicide, we were completely taken by surprise. He was also doing drugs, and we didn’t know it. He’s doing much better now, seeing a therapist weekly, but I still worry about his going off to college next year. He doesn’t share much with us, but I know he wants to do what’s “normal.” I don’t want to intrude on his relationship with his therapist or undermine his confidence or make him feel pressured, but we need to decide whether he’s ready to go. My goal is to make the right decision without hurting him in the process.
You can’t protect your son from of having an illness and all the trauma that goes with it, so for your own sake, and against all your instincts, don’t try.
On the other hand, if you try too hard to avoid all potentially painful issues with your son and stick to being stoic and reserved, you’ll be helping him avoid the hard choices he has to make, instead of doing your job.
Life is hard, precisely because it includes illness and drug abuse on top of the usual high stresses of being adolescent and finding a way to be independent. It’s a clusterfuck, and you’re the motherclusterfucker; you’re all in this together.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on February 4, 2010
If someone’s related to you, there’s no guarantee they’re going to be honest with you, or even honest about you to anyone else. You can try to get them to own up to their problems with anger, eloquence, and/or the help of the court system, but the smarter choice is to stop pushing them towards the truth and hold onto the facts yourself. As long as you’re calm and factual, people can draw whatever conclusions they want and your relatives can stick to their version, but your part in the family affair is settled.
–Dr. Lastname
I’m fine now (I’m 14), but I’m trying to figure out how to deal with a crazy father who physically abused me until a couple of years ago—that’s when my mother finally figured out what was happening and had me come live with her. The trouble is, I guess you could say my father doesn’t see reality the way other people do and he never remembers hitting me. In his mind, when he’d hit me, it was because I was trying to destroy him, so what he tells the judge is that he loves me and that my mother is a raging alcoholic who has brainwashed me to hate him (my mother stopped drinking after the divorce, years ago) and he really believes what he says. My goal is to get him to stay away from me and convince others that his version of reality isn’t real.
Kids aren’t the only ones who have trouble accepting the fact that we often can’t protect ourselves from scary crazy boogeymen, particularly when the craziness isn’t obvious, and the boogeymen are family.
We’ve said it here before: certain crazy people are not obviously crazy and are particularly good at persuading other people to see them as injured victims because they truly, truly believe they are, no matter what really happened. It’s a kind of sickness for which no one has the cure, and nobody feels sicker than the victims in the wake of these sickos, who don’t necessarily feel sick at all.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on January 25, 2010
If you hate someone or something for reasons beyond your control, then those feelings are, in essence, beyond your control, so resistence is essentially futile. Hating something is one thing, but then feeling guilty for hating, then angry for feeling guilty, depressed for feeling angry…so it goes down the feelings spiral, down the emotional toilet.
–Dr. Lastname
When I broke up with my girlfriend, I felt like I didn’t have a choice; she was smothering me, she made me feel guilty and like a bad person all the time, and I just couldn’t take care of her anymore. We’d been together for a relatively long time and I had reached the end of my rope (she’d even started hitting me and breaking things in our apartment). The problem is now that I feel even worse because, in the months since I ended it and she moved out, she’s started getting high a lot and has threatened to kill herself more than once. If she goes through with it, I don’t know what I’ll do with myself. My goal is to feel less awful about breaking up with her (which I did to feel less awful).
As a not-sociopath, you can’t feel less than awful about your ex-girlfriend’s drugging, depression, and self-destruction.
It’s the feeling responsible, as well as awful, that will not only do nothing to help her recovery, but will also turn your sorrow into well-entrenched, call-the-doctor depression. So…Dr. Lastname here, how can I help you?
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Posted by fxckfeelings on January 18, 2010
People get demoralized when they feel they’re not getting what they deserve, be it pain relief or respect. It’s natural to go on strike and either A, start raging against the machine of injustice, or B, go the other way and surrender to a life on the couch in sweatpants and a snuggie. Of course, the resulting fall-out will feel like a side-effect of the original injustice, not a direct result of your tantrum, but you’ll be too high on rage/comforted by your snuggie to understand. Understand this now, before you protest; better to suffer the original injustice in peace than the further demoralization of unemployment, stiff drinks and a blanket with sleeves.
–Dr. Lastname
I have a dedicated husband, three teenagers, a nice house, a well-behaved dog—it’s not a bad life—but I’ve had a nagging sadness my entire life, and I still do, despite all the good things I’ve got. I deal with it, admittedly, by drinking a bit. I wouldn’t say I’m a drunk, and my drinking doesn’t interfere with my parenting or my marriage anymore than my mood does, but I know that what I’m doing is self-medicating. My husband wants me to see a shrink because he thinks I should take real medication for depression, but if my drinking doesn’t mess up my life, and if, despite all I have, I can’t be happy, anyway, then I don’t understand what makes one medication better than the other. My goal isn’t to be happy, just to withstand my misery, my way, right or wrong.
I understand that chronic depression, which is what we call “nagging sadness” in the biz, isn’t fun. It can make you grumpy, negative, unmotivated, scattered, and lousy at whatever you’re trying to accomplish.
All that’s excluding the pain, so no wonder it can demoralize you into seeing a negative future for yourself. It’s enough to make you want to turn “what the fuck” into words to live by.
If there was some way to relieve your pain that was risk-free and didn’t affect your other life priorities, that would be wonderful (for you—the aforementioned biz would probably dry up).
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