headaches/mental disorder

[coLLege kid07]

hi,

I've been going through alot lately and I have a question for everyone. Recently I've been noticing that I've been having mild to slightly severe headaches from time to time. Occasionally these things will pop up and cause me alot of distress when it's not warranted. Also it has affected me in many areas of my life; I've had little contact with friends, my social lifes pretty much non-existant, and I'm struggling to find work. Also recently I've been diagnosed with mild depression. My parents took me to see a psychologist after they noticed my behavior isn't exactly normal. I have also noticed this too but I am still pretty dumbfounded. Internally I'm doing great but intellectually I'm a mess and am suffering pretty bad. I don't understand how I could do all this work on myself and yet still be a huge mess. I'm not really sure what's going on and any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Patpre]

are you alway alone? make your self busy, if we came busy we cannot think of problems and depression in our minds. make friends or join community dont let your self alone.

[Mark Lapierre]

Depression is something that you can deal with and many people who experience it, especially in a mild form, are able to improve their situation as long as they're committed to a treatment plan (which doesn't necessarily mean medication) and have people to support them.

You psychologist has probably told you that many of the things that are bothering you can be caused by depression, so it's important to figure out which came first, the depression or the headaches etc., since that could mean approaching treatment from different angles.

It's also important to figure out if anything in particular brings on the headaches. I used to get them all the time, sometimes just a distracting pain, but sometimes full-blown migraines including nausea and sensitivity to light and sound. When I paid attention to how I felt before the headaches and what I was doing, I figured out that a) poor sleep, b) allergies, c) stress, d) working at a computer for too long, and e) forcing myself to concentrate on something I wasn't interested in all contributed to my headaches in some way. I also used to experience some depression, and that would lead to poor sleep and stress, and both would make my allergies worse and would mean that *anything* that I had to do was less interesting. So you can see it's one huge vicious cycle.

But the point of telling you all that is not to scare you, but to show you that it's possible to work out what contributes to feeling bad. The good news is that by figuring that out you can work to change the situation. I've been doing that for a while and have far less issues than I used to have.

So keep up the personal development, and work with your psychologist to identify and deal with the things causing you trouble. Hell, maybe your psychologist can help you combine the PD and therapy. Bring up these concerns you've posted here with your psychologist too. That's what they're there for

And as Patpre said, friends are important. I'd be in a really bad state if it weren't for the help of my friends over the years. It might be tough to build up your friendships again at first, but most people are understanding and will be glad to help, so give them a chance. And it's fine to start off small, just hanging out and doing things that you're comfortable with. No need to go out partying if that's not your thing (though if it was your thing, go for it!)

Good luck with it all!