Ask HN: How do you manage your mental health?

Mental health is an issue I live with on a day-to-day basis. I struggled for the first 42 years of my life, always finding it difficult. I experienced great short term successes but they never lasted. Finally, two years ago, after losing my wife and family, I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder (Type 1) and began treatment. These days I take regular medication, speak with a psychiatrist monthly and a psychologist every two weeks.

Life is easier but it's difficult knowing that I lost everything and it could have been prevented. Now, I have a startup of eight people and it's challenging but I'm doing it for my children. They're also the reason I stay on treatment.

It's easier to influence your mind by exercise your physics than vice versa.

Apart from "generally trying to stay healthy", I have trained myself to go through this process if I "Feel bad and don't know why":

Did you eat well? Sleep well? Exercise properly? Have a meaningful conversation today? Articulate and share an emotion? Listen to someone you care about? Do something intrinsically satisfying today? Enjoy yourself today?

If you can't answer yes to all of the above (add your own prompts), then blame that rather than Random Problem X and come back when you can answer yes and if you still feel bad and don't know why then tell someone, possibly a professional.

Usually once I can answer yes to the above I'm fine.

It may seem odd, but I took up flying. It's just been one of those hobbies that has made everything else in my life (the problems/complaints/etc.) seem so ridiculous and trivial. I spend the week thinking: "I got into a plane... and fucking took off and flew it.... by myself." It's been over a year and hasn't gotten old yet. It has just helped me put a lot of other things in life in perspective, mostly by making me realize that my life can't be all that bad if this is what I get to do for fun and with the support of friends and family.

I'm sure that works for many. A mental health professional helped me a lot.

I saw an LCSW not a Psychiatrist. First thing he suggested, supplementing B vitamins and magnesium, along with exercise and diet. He said our other work would have limited effect otherwise. The healing therapies we engaged included directed breathing exercises, meditation, inventorying love relationships, and just talking through my limiting beliefs and my assumptions/misconceptions about myself and others. Most of the limiting beliefs were manifestations of survival skills developed in response to childhood trauma. Seeing it that way made it simple (not easy) to leave all that shit in the past and write a new future for myself.

That said, when it comes to medication, it's kind of like Russian Roulette. The documented side effects of SSRI-based antidepressants of suicide and homicide are catastrophic when the subject has a co-morbid disorder or perhaps genetic distinctiveness making them susceptible those side effects. There's no way to screen if a subject is prone to those effects, and basically there is no screening at all (similar to your own experience -- it was a "No Brainer") to determine if someone is clinically depressed. Such a diagnosis is achieved through non-invasive, casual observation, and is far from perfect.