Can someone help out a dead man please?

[maryelyn]

you're not dead, you're only sleeping...

you will wake up one day. until then, while you're sleeping - look at the things that please you. if you look, you will find them. maybe just a sunset or a squirrel or a singing bird. maybe someone smiles at you. maybe the weather is just right for one day. whatever it is, think about it.

keep thinking about what pleases you. imagine. when the dark thoughts intervene, be a dog! bark, attack, throw those thoughts aside, they do not serve you! think only of what pleases...

when you wake, it will be to a better world.

[Logodae]

You definitely sound like you're depressed. You need to get to a doctor now, before it gets worse. I am extremely skeptical of the advice you're getting to just "decide to feel better," "do the things you love," etc. When I was depressed, I certainly couldn't "decide" to feel better, and the things I used to love held no appeal.

You're also getting a lot of advice that amounts to: "Don't see a doctor, they'll just give you drugs." As far as I can tell, very few of these people have actually taken anti-depressants themselves. I have, so let me tell you my story:

I was depressed throughout college, although, like you, I didn't really think I was. After college, it slowly got worse. Eventually I was spending hours in bed, and it took all the energy I had just to shower, eat, and do a token amount of work. I was crying almost every day, and nothing made me any happier. I wasn't quite suicidal, but I wished I could just stop living, because my life was miserable.

I eventually managed to make an appointment with a psychiatrist, and yes, he gave me drugs. Prozac made me feel jittery and weird, and didn't seem to improve my mood much, either. So I tried Celexa next.

It worked. I'm not depressed. I have the energy to do the things I need to do and the things I want to do... and there are things I want to do, now. In fact, I'm in the process of changing jobs to something that I think I'm going to really love doing. My only regret is that I didn't see a doctor back when I was in college, because I spent years being depressed when I could have been happy.

Learn from my mistake. Find out how your school handles health care, because you're probably covered, and make an appointment with a doctor ASAP.

[yasi_joy]

ur answer is soooo simple

just choose to be happy and you will be ,,believe me


you can learn choosing to be happy be reading the book 'ask and it is given'

[KittyG]

It doesn't take any courage to commit suicide.

I would recommend a therapist who may refer you to a psychiatrist, maybe not.
I have had great success with my current therapist through just talking.

I do know that when one is depressed, it chemically changes the brain, the dopamine and serotonin levels and in conjunction with therapy medicine can be of aid.

In my experience, now that I'm sober 7 months and not medicating with shopping and pulling hair, I, too feel depressed. I feel feelings, now, too, some of them are not comfortable.
Sometimes I'm up ("Yay!I cooked something, yay!Life is great!I love everybody!")
Other times, I'm down . . ("I don't want to get out of bed. What's the point? So I can clean?I'm going back to sleep.")

But, that's part of my recovery. At some point, I may need meds.

Sometimes, at the end of a long day, I force myself to name some blessings, some "positives."
Even if it's I paid my bill on time and the lady who took my payment was polite.
Or, I'm thankful for how it felt to wish that person at the store a Happy Thanksgiving.


Kat

[moltar]

Dude, all I can say is find a hobby and a woman. Then "Follow your bliss" --Joseph Campbell

I am sure there are tons of things you want to do in life, so figure them out, figure out how to do them, and then do it. Very simple

The reason you have no interest in life is probably because you are not doing anything, just sitting around and waiting for "life" to bring you the joy. You need to be active not passive.

[ImOpen]

Originally Posted by moltar

Dude, all I can say is find a hobby and a woman. Then "Follow your bliss" --Joseph Campbell

I am sure there are tons of things you want to do in life, so figure them out, figure out how to do them, and then do it. Very simple

The reason you have no interest in life is probably because you are not doing anything, just sitting around and waiting for "life" to bring you the joy. You need to be active not passive.

Originally Posted by yasi_joy

ur answer is soooo simple

just choose to be happy and you will be ,,believe me

Oh My God. Just stop it. I know you don' know this but you are really just making things worse for him.
Listen to the only guy in this thread whose been there, and been cured - Logodae

For crying out loud... Your ignorance is scary. While you guys have been preaching "decide to be happy" the rest of us has understood that this is real and developed a whole science to cover it. We call it (pathological) psychology. You may have heard of it. One of its first goal was to be able to cure depressed people. They tried that for 100 years and now they can do it. Of course none of all these scientists have ever thought of telling their patients: "hey, you know what, decide to be happy!" I think you should go tell them and every nation will save millions of dollars every year.

[ImOpen]

.....................

[geekchic9]

ImOpen,

I really appreciate your efforts to educate people about depression and other mood disorders, but they just don't get it. And unless they go through a major depression themselves, they never will. I'm not trying to discourage you, but I'm just stating a fact that I had to accept myself.

Some people can beat depression without medication, some have to have medication, some have to have medication and ECT (shock therapy). Some never quite get over it and die as a result of it. Just because someone doesn't have to have medication doesn't mean that they are a better person. Nor is the suicide any less of a person because they felt they had suffered enough. They are all worthy of integrity and respect, simply because they are all human beings. I know you understand this. Maybe one day, the rest of the world will, too.

[Dimitry]

You said you wanted to be a teacher but couldn't do it anymore. If, like mentioned above, you still see it as a passion in life but "technicalities" or other issues stop you from doing that (i.e financial), try to think about it a different way. What is a teacher? You're seeing a teacher in the typical mindset, a person who helps students learn in a physical building in a physical location. But I ask you...is Steve Pavlina not a teacher? Does he not get the means to support himself from teaching?

Don't get stuck on one alternative. If somethign doesnt' work over and over, switch to something else and try that for a while.

I won't pretend to sit here and understand what you're going through because I've never been there. Sure I did have my low moments and even short temporary periods of depression but never like this. All I want to do is just feed you another idea, because hopefully something here will provoke you to change and "snap out of it".

[Mitja]

Lol, you call yourself The Beast and greet with "Cheers"? I think you're far from depressed.

If you think you should see a doctor and take medication as a consequence, then do that, but you said you don't smoke, drink, or take drugs, so your body must be in a pretty healthy state, why mess it up any further?

I think you should get inspired by something, anything. Here's one way to do it. Can you think of people who talk very fast and are very passionate about what they do and talk about? (Steve comes to mind, but there are many others.) (They are usually very successful in what they do as a side effect.) Do a little research and find a person like that among the ones you know already, friends, relatives, anybody. Then tell them the truth (doesn't have to be everything, just say you lost motivation in life) and ask them to talk about their passion and about what they love to do. It doesn't matter what it is, because you probably won't be interested in what they do anyway. The main thing is to notice how they approach the subject and why they feel about it the way they feel about it.

If you can't find anyone like that near you, start searching for them on TV, books, internet and get their material. I don't want to advertise it, but Randy Gage made me laugh quite a few times.

Finally, when you hear a few talks like that, you still have to find a thing that interests you the most. What boggles your mind? What are you curious about? How would you like to help people?

There's a lot of fuel in you, you just have to find someone to make a spark.

[Megan]

...when I get really flat emotionally and lose interest in everything, that is paradoxically (or maybe not so paradoxically) also the time I start having thoughts of wanting to die, or just disappear.

The surface of my life is a desert, but underground, there is a whole lot going on.

The lack of any meaningful interface between the underground and the surface leads to feelings of futility and hopelessness, and to invalidating my thoughts and feelings before they even have a chance to surface to consciousness.

Most attempts to interface with the outside world end up less than satisfactorily, and so the cumulative effect is to gradually extinguish the attempts. It's a self-referring loop of diminishing desire due to "learned helplessness."

I'm a lot older than you, "B," and I don't begin to have the answer to this. I do, however, have a deep respect for the profound darkness and alienation we humans can fall into, and I've experienced how the remarks of people who haven't been there come across, well-meaning though they undoubtedly are.

"Just get help" is a very ironic statement to me, as if one could buy help for the human condition in the psychological marketplace, even with unlimited money.

If you are not self-medicating, even with coffee, right now, that speaks of quite a bit of inner strength to work with, it seems to me.

Sometimes this kind of strength works against us, because if we start on a healthier path (for us!) and begin to thaw some of the frozen feelings, those around us think we're falling apart, and anxiously try to get the genie back in the bottle.

I'm not so sure psychiatry isn't doing the same thing with medication, many times. And how many friends are up to the challenge? They have their own stuff!

We live in a culture that just flat doesn't accept the human condition--even normal ageing, much less depression, grief, and feelings of not wanting to exist.

I think finding the courage to process hellish feelings is the only way out of the empty feeling, because under the empty feeling is a whole universe of real, personal feeling, buried in a vault, in my experience.

If you can find someone emotionally debugged enough to sit with you when you're in the middle of your stuff, bless your lucky stars.

If you can't, it can still be done. It just hurts like hell for a real long time. It takes faith in life to ride it out. Nobody can give you faith in life, but fortunately, the darkness itself is the stuff light is made of, when you stay with the feeling. Learning that is the key, but it's pretty hard to remember, at least for me!

All best wishes,

Megan