Mental Health Thread • Page 468

Well, I'm honored u think I'm cam girl ad

 

r u sure?

 

No

 

Not sure what to make of this yet but A+ response lol

 

Thank god someone asked. Been the elephant in the room for years

 

Been feeling pretty isolated lately. I think the fear of parenthood is finally settling in a little bit and I don't feel like I have someone to share it with because my wife is going through enough with the pregnancy and her OCD.

 

Join us in the parenting thread

 

I'm already there lol

 

The week I don’t have therapy, shit happens that I want to talk to my therapist about. By next week I’ll prob be over it.

 

lol that’s me all the time. I panic and try to get a quick appointment which never works and then when I finally get in a few weeks later I’m already over it

 

Seeing so many videos and articles about how terrible the food is in the US and how we're all eating things that are actively poisoning us. I fucking hate it here and I'm losing my mind.

 

It's been on my mind a lot the past few years. My dad lost his life to cancer last year, in a battle that began a year and a half before, and he was the healthiest person I've ever known. Did everything "right", ate the meals we were told were best for us, etc. But it feels like if you're avoiding the unbelievably unhealthy US foods with the lack of regulation present, you're subjecting yourself to things with high cancer risks anyway and it's just so hard to "win". We're set up to fail

 

I am not handling my stress well this week. Here’s hoping things settle down soon

 

Does anyone else use the Finch app? A friend introduced me and yes it's cutesy but it's honestly done wonders for my to-do list each day and making sure I prioritize self-care

 

Seeing friends tonight we haven’t talked to in almost two years because my girlfriend and I both suck and I am so grateful they agreed to start over with us despite just going completely silent on them for that long (despite them being our closest friends). So anxious and excited that I couldn’t even sleep. We even heard through mutual friends that they have a kid now and it really sucks we missed that happen.

Speaking of anxiety, I’ve always been a hypochondriac and obviously COVID made it much worse, but the past few weeks have been as bad as it’s ever been. Even just hearing that someone’s kid has COVID has been sending me off the deep end. Anxiety and existential dread just take complete control. Very fun.

 

Yeah, I just got over what was a just a minor cold (thankfully) but COVID in extra worrisome right now with my wife expecting and her being a type 1 diabetic. I wish masks were normalized when being sick instead of politicized.

 

Does anyone have any tips for getting yourself out of a bad rut? I usually am able to recover from these low points pretty quickly. I thought I was doing well but I'm not, been crying for hours a day and can't be productive even though I need to be. I'm in therapy and know all the basics I just can't seem to fix this

 

You're absolutely right. I watched a video about our government talking about how our McDonald's fries have an anti foaming agent and all this other stuff like how our Skittles in the US are so different than in the UK because the UK doesn't allow some of the ingredients we use because it's all profits over health. It scares me to eat anything. Granted, I shouldn't be eating those things anyway. But then there's the salmonella on cucumbers and the listeria with the deli meats and I'm just losing my mind.

They genuinely in no way care if we live or die.

 

Hang in there bud. You said you're in therapy so you probably have been told this already, but great advice my therapist gave me was to stop doing free form journaling and pick up a guided journal instead. It still feels good to let out onto paper all the negative thoughts I'm having, but using a guided journal usually helps steer me into focusing on some positives I have going on.

 

Read some excellent advice the other day regarding motivation that I thought would be appreciated in here: "If 10% is all you have in the tank, 10% is 100%." So just one example would be, if you can't commit to full workout one day, go on a five-minute walk instead. Small steps are still steps in the right direction!

 

Yes! I made a post about it in here a while ago. It really helped me and my wife out with staying on tasks with goals.

 

Yeah that’s great advice and can be really hard to stick to sometimes but it is super helpful. Doing a little of something is better than doing nothing.

 

So recently my father has been on the decline and just had heart surgery this week to replace his collapsing aortic valve. Surgery was successful, but it’s certainly not a good sign and he’s been on dialysis for a good seven years or so now. My family members have been at war with each other for quite some time and I am literally caught in the middle (I’m a middle child) of their fight. Mostly everyone tends to turn to me to offload their frustrations and anger and it has always been a mental drain for me. It has been this way most of my life now. Right before the surgery, my siblings were calling me and texting me to express said frustrations about how it impacted their “sides” in light of my father’s deteriorating health. In the midst of this, my wife and I recently got a new puppy for our family and the training has been…rough to say the very least.

Now in the past I have been prone to panic attacks and I have been diagnosed with anxiety, depression, PTSD, etc. but have been working in therapy on finding ways to manage those attacks so that they don’t consume me. I’ve learned to get pretty good at meditation and breathing exercises, but my therapist warned me, repeatedly, that the human body can find a myriad of ways to deal with the stress and my body knew I was finding success in curbing an old familiar pattern.

So it came up with a new way. A couple weeks back I started feeling this insane tightness in my chest where I couldn’t breathe and everything felt like it was on fire. The next day it was worse and had spread to my back so I went to urgent care. They took a look at me and determined “well it must be a pulled muscle or something” so they gave me a shot of Toradol and prescribed me some muscle relaxers. I picked those up and took them the next day, but all that did was make me tired while the pain worsened. The next day I woke up with these red blotches all over the left side of my chest, down under my arm, and up the left side of my back. My wife took one look at me and knew right away, I had shingles. So I went back to urgent care where they told me “oh, yeah, sorry. That’s shingles.” They gave me an anti-viral and some topical cream but said there wasn’t a whole lot they could do for the pain. They wondered over how young I am to get shingles and asked if there are any stressors in my life to which I could only barely stifle a pitiful little self aware chuckle.

So a couple weeks go by and the rash is looking better, but the pain has not subsided one bit. It burns, it feels like lightning in my side, any time my shirt brushes past it I feel like I’m being stabbed, it’s hard to breathe, so on and so forth. So I meet with my therapist as I’m breaking down and telling her I don’t know what to do as my puppy is barking at me incessantly and my siblings are texting me angry, bitter things and I feel like something is breaking inside of me.

So she asks me about my meds. And I break down and cry because now I have to admit that I’ve been hiding the truth from her, as well as my wife, for months now. At the start of the year my job switched our insurance and my therapist doesn’t take this insurance so I’ve had to scale back sessions to once or twice a month so that I can afford paying out of pocket. Thing is, my psychiatrist’s office didn’t take my new insurance either. I had enough antidepressant meds to get me through to April, but I knew I’d run out by then and I was just…so tired of the fight, you know? I was afraid I’d strike out on finding a new psychiatrist and that my doctor’s office wouldn’t provide me with the medication and that I’d have to start all over again with another new person hearing about my life, so I just quietly decided to cut my losses and wean myself off the medication.

I thought I was doing okay until I just…wasn’t. I have not been okay for a while. So I sat there and spilled my guts and kept saying “I’m sorry” while she told me I had no need to be. She only wanted to see to it that I’d get the help I need. She asked me to please meet with my doctor and ask for help and to keep her apprised of the situation. She told me she was proud of me for being honest and that this was the first step to getting back on track. I called my doctor that day and set up an appointment. Then I sat down with my wife and told her what I’d done and cried my way through it while she held me and told me she loves me so much and that if I’d just said something to her then she could have been a voice of reason for me. She told me that if I felt like going it alone with the doctor was too much for me then she’d help, but I wanted to do it for myself. I’ve spent this entire year going in circles feeling like I’m self destructing and it was time to do something about it to turn it around.

I had my appointment today. They’ve renewed all my former prescriptions and also prescribed me gabapentin to help me with the pain from my shingles. He was so very sweet. He put his hand on my shoulder and said “I just want to say I know how hard it is to speak up and say “I’m not okay” and to come here is the next step and I’m so proud of you for doing that, okay?” I started to cry and he put his other hand on my arm and told me it’s okay and that they’re going to get me taken care of.

So all that to say I just hope that any of you out there feeling so terribly lost and alone right now may find some semblance of peace and hope in a dark place. Take care of yourselves. You deserve as much. I’m very appreciative of this little corner of the community and how supportive of each other everyone is in here. I’m glad you are here and if you’re thinking right now of not being anywhere, please stay.

 

Yeah about 2 years ago same thing happened to me. My Dad passed away unexpectedly and the company I assumed I was gonna retire from sold. So I got shingles from being so fucking stressed out and luckily my wife saw and had me call right away for an appointment. I always joke she’s a hypochondriac but she was right on the money that time. I’m only 33 so it’s absolutely real to just be stressed enough to get it. Doesn’t matter how old you are. Since we caught it early the antibiotics they gave me shortened my symptoms. That was absolutely terrible though. There’s some people who get it on their face or eye and have permanent nerve damage. Shits scary.

 

I’ve truly never experienced a pain like this before. The first couple days before the rashes appeared when it was just pure pain, I literally thought I was dying or having a heart attack and freaking out about having a heart attack at this age. It was at least a relief to know what it was once the rashes showed up. I was writhing in pain on the couch telling my wife I couldn’t breathe and it hurt to sit, stand, lay down, etc. and she was so scared something terrible was happening to me.

If you haven’t had the shingles before and you can manage your stress well enough until you hit 50 to get the vaccine, do that. Do whatever you can to do that. My step father told me he had it at one point around his waist and down near his crotch. That sounds like sheer hell.