241–250 of 388 posts
Try replacing 'depression' with 'high blood pressure' and see if you feel the same way about the pills?
Except high blood pressure is a lot easier to measure and there's a lot less subjectivity involved in the decision. Whether or not someone is depressed is nowhere near as easy to measure
When this comes up among friends I always ask, "If you had diabetes you'd take insulin right? Why is mental health any different?" Find a psychiatrist and see them regularly so they can monitor your mood and response to the drugs. And stick with the therapy while doing this. The combination is key, the meds will make getting through the day easier, and the therapy will help you find coping mechanisms and be more self…
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You have an unhealthy relationship to medicine if you refuse to even read the advice of other people. I've been treated by hundreds of medical professionals and worked with dozens and I can assure you they do not hold any secret undying truth about human health. Modern medicine is primitive and brutal, we are fumbling buffoons when it comes to the human body and its ills, especially in the realm of mental health. If…
There's a lot of dangerous advice in these comments.
I think the increasingly common practice of forbidding medical advice in online forums is deleterious. For a lot of people professional medical care provides no solutions, hearing other people's personal experiences is helpful and comforting.
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Sorry, you are very very wrong about this. Have you ever talked to a _medical_ professional about depression or any mental health issue? They generally don't know what they're doing. Medical professionals only have one tool in their arsenal for depression: antidepressants. So a medical doctor will likely prescribe them, whether that's appropriate or not. Antidepressants are no joke. Sometimes they can help, but they…
You're a frontend engineer, not a doctor. You're not qualified to give advice on medicine.
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That makes no sense to me, if you're trying to deal with mental health problems and struggling you're going to be looking for new ideas from any source. Doctors are good at giving garden-variety medical advice that's validated by studies, but there's so many other ideas out there that they're not going to know about. Their background gives them expertise on what medicine says about mental health, not about the human…
Strangers on the internet are usually pretty good at helping you self-justify whatever it is you want to do, because no matter what position you take, whether it is a really good idea or not, there is always someone on the internet who agrees with you.
Anyway in discussions like this I feel like what it lost is that you will actually respond to how compelling the thing someone else is saying is. Like, it's not "oh a bunch of opinions, I'll get influenced by one randomly and it's probably wrong". It's "oh, a bunch of opinions, which explain why they think they're right and how well it worked for them, I'll incorporate that into my own understanding".
I went through mild (and not professionally diagnosed) depression a few years back. No suicidal thoughts, no pit in the stomach, just a complete lack of desire to do anything at all. Crystallized apathy. Before seeing my doctor, I figured I would anticipate his questions: he would ask, "Do you get any exercise?" And I would say, "No, I walk up two flights of stairs and back down those flights of stairs each day and t…
If you look for the 'solution " to most chronic ailments, exercise is usually at the top of the list.
So OP, if you dont exercise at least 40 mins every day, start with that. If you already do that, then your condition might require antidepressants
These are all things I would ask myself, and try to tweak them in a better direction. This can be really hard though if you're already dealing with excessive procrastination. Maybe it won't work, but at least your body will be healthier for the effort.
You're right that antidepressants can be serious business, but you could say that about a lot of drugs. Their use is when the good effects outweigh the bad effects. My advice is to optimize the above things, and also find a trusted doctor and at least give them a braindump and let them practice their expertise upon you. You don't need to take a prescription if you don't want to.
PLEASE do not read any of these people's advice. Talk to a MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL, preferably a DOCTOR. DO NOT trust your mental health to strangers on the internet, be it reddit, or hacker news, or whatever. If you are based in the US and live nearby a university they usually have good counseling services and the infrastructure to refer people even if you're not attending the school. Search "{school} counseling servic…
I found strangers online to be more effective than doctors, simply because they read to much on the matter, then they interact too much with you. I basically got diagnosed online by 2 different people about 2 different issues, one is biological, and the other is mental. And they were right. This is nerds out there who read about topics constantly, way more than the average doctor, not even close. So a stranger can he…