I am not talking about someone going through a breakup reacting on impulse, I mean people who have been mentally ill for years. People with chronic conditions. People who are in pain.
And very politely assumed I’m not one of those people, not presumptuous at all.
I’ve been tossed out of an ER after I told the psychiatrist I was afraid I might hurt myself or others. Literally, verbatim (albeit in Finnish.) He said, “don’t try to make that my responsibility”. Like, fuck, that’s literally in his job description. He got a guard to escort me out. I rang a crisis holine. They hang up on me, saying I didn’t have a crisis. All this after I had waited in an empty room without food for 7 hours, waiting for that pick of a psychiatrist on call to laze back to work. And they didn’t even tell me “he won’t be in for hours”, when they knew perfectly well.
Then another time I was denied my prescription medication while in police custody. I was kept in a cell for three days without them telling me what’s going on, how long, why, and even fucking cutting off my water at one point. A literal crime against humanity. Ate my finger open and wrote >300 words in my own blood on the walls. I got a picture of the cell somewhere. They accused me of vandalising the cell. I tried getting the video material from my time in the cell to prove their gross negligence. They “lost it”.
My family doesn’t even contact me. Haven’t worked in several years. Had to move from school to school as a kid because of my mom, never had time to form long term relationships even though I make friends rather easily.
A few years ago, I would’ve definitely agreed with you. I’m a stubborn person, and it FELT like I had exhausted all my options and no-one was willing to help. That’s an exaggeration of course, as is your absolute. And true, the doctors didn’t help shit, family and friends nonexistent, the one friend who I had who could’ve helped lost a daughter, so can’t really blame him for not being able to help others.
I was genuinely considering suicide everyday, and had there been an easy way to do it, I probably would’ve. If not for nothing else, then to make every single fuck of those “not my problem” fucks feel at least a little guilty for not doing more. Like my mom. I would’ve loved to see her face when she heard I killed myself. Might sound uncaring, because you don’t understand how uncaring my mother is, and that lack of care is what I’ve been talking to her about and she just represses and outright ignores it. So having screamed about suicidal ideation to her probably would’ve made her feel at least a little bit guilty for not simply calling me to prevent me from killing myself.
But I don’t feel like that now. Because I’m a stubborn as fuck person and didn’t kill myself out of spite, because I wouldn’t get to see what happens. So after years of being convinced my illness has a physical basis, I found one. A rather small thing, non-celiac gluten sensitivity.
But it’s not well understood, and has weird connections to behaviour.
All I know is while I used to laugh at all the “gluten free is a fad” jokes, I now don’t find them funny after understanding just how much influence a simple fucking protein in my diet can have on the functioning of my nervous system. That being the system that houses this consciousness that’s writing to you and not wishing that badly to kill themselves amymore.
Like did I get help from the systems and people who were supposed to care and help? No. Did they actively act against my best interests by ignoring my pleas for help? Yes they did. Did that make me want to kill myself even more? Yes, it did.
But did it mean there was no help to be had, anywhere, as an absolute? Seeing how I now feel less like killing myself, seems it doesn’t follow that no help was available. I just had to find it myself, on accident, after literally several decades of complaining about that issue.
I also chose a therapist who’s not Finnish on purpose, so they understand how the entire culture is affecting me, and I feel validated by them. So while it hasn’t been a huge help, it’s definitely a help going there weekly.
But perhaps I still don’t belong to those “people in pain” who you speak about who FEEL like there is no help.
Presumptuous? I’m not sure how you got that from my message but I don’t blame you because apparently I am r* when it comes to communicating online, many people accuse me of things I did not mean or say and then I get downvoted because no one cares what I have to say.
I am sorry what you went through. You said you knew from experience what it was like so I assumed you also had some sort of mental illness and some sort of suicidal component but that you got better. That was my assumption. I just don’t believe everyone can get better.
I’m not sure how much to reveal about myself without potentially doxxing myself. But I am from the US. I have been suicidal since a child since before I could identify the suicidal feeling as being suicidal because of a combo of a very abusive home and an abusive school environment. My abusive upbringing gave me PTSD, anxiety, and depression. It did not get better once I became an adult and I developed chronic pain in middle school. I had abusive relationships one after the other (my therapist said since I’ve never seen a healthy relationship modeled before this is why it kept happening), but one ex in particular really abused me badly and added on to the PTSD. I had tried killing myself growing up a few times, eventually it led to me taking a more drastic measure as an adult that landed me in the mental ward. I didn’t do it for revenge or attention, I did it because my life is full of too much suffering. The mental ward was extremely horrible for me and added on to my PTSD, it felt like a prison and like I was in constant danger. I’ve lost friends who can’t handle my suicidal attempts, I no longer talk about it to anyone except my therapist now. My therapist encouraged me to go to the mental ward a few times, I tried it but my PTSD and anxiety would heighten during the wait from the ER to the mental ward that I usually just left (after all they would leave me in a bed in the hallway with no visitors for six hours to tell me 99% of the time there is no room in the mental ward for me and 1% of the time they could transfer me many hours away to a different hospital one-way so I’m on my own to get back). I went so often they told me I couldn’t keep going back every time I had a bad day. Thing is, I feel in crisis every day. So I gave up on the ER and the mental ward. I’ve even been kicked out of the ER before during a pretty bad day, the staff just don’t know how to deal with people like me who aren’t violent but just can’t follow directions during an episode because I completely shut down. I also tried crisis lines but found they were very short and rude with me. I have promised myself I will wait for my dogs to pass on of natural causes before catching the bus. I can’t trust anyone to take good care of them if I am gone. That is the only reason I am still alive. When I am suicidal I lookup the methods for exiting, visit the forums, and it calms me down enough to stick to my resolve for my dogs.
I am glad you were able to find relief. I don’t want people to die if they can be helped, I really don’t, but not everyone can be helped. It is not going to be the same for me. I have debilitating chronic pain that forces me to mostly stay in bed all day and my health insurance cannot pay for what I need, assuming it would even help my pain. I am on SSI but it is not enough money to cover for these extra medical expenses. There are hardly any doctors in my area who accept my insurance, I’ve flown to other nearby areas before but it is still the same with many doctors not wanting to accept my insurance. I find my therapist is the one person I can really talk to, but I’ve been warned I can’t say how suicidal I really am or I will be forced into the mental ward so I dance around the subject. Friends? No, not really. I do have an SO but they are not enough of a reason to stay, sometimes they are the reason I want to leave.
I know someone with lupus that has similar pain to me and I have watched them decay: being able to walk about, then needing a cane, and now needing a wheelchair and their legs have atrophied. They are in so much pain and also spend their days in bed and I can’t help but feel that this is where I am headed and I do not want to go there. I already can’t sit or stand for very long let alone walk about very far. I have a service dog to help me walk longer distances but he can’t go everywhere with me, for instance places like the mental ward. My doctor said I just need exercise and sent me to physical therapy, but when I didn’t improve enough my insurance cut me off. My pain is still the same. Over the years my doctors have been very unhelpful dealing with my pain. One doctor even said it was because of my weight, but my pain started when I was very skinny and I got overweight because it became too hard to move around. I have to stick to a diet of 1050 calories to lose weight since I am very short, my doctors don’t recommend this and instead want me to somehow exercise more but I’ve lost 30 lbs this way without having to exercise. My pain did not get better weighing less. It is also obviously very hard to stick to a diet this strict for very long. There is also something very wrong with my uterus. I have had horrible periods since they first started that put me in so much pain I would miss days at school every month and then work every month and now I have been told it may be endometriosis but the only way to confirm is through surgery which my doctor doesn’t approve of. Intercourse is so goddamn painful. I need constant birth control (skip placebo) to help ease my periods, but they do not help with the mood swings and intense suicidal ideation during them.
There is a society component to my issues. I don’t deny that. But when you spend your days trapped in a body that feels near constant pain where you have days you can’t use your arms or legs very much and a mind that still has PTSD flashbacks and have to act neurotic around certain things because of anxiety and skip eating meals and showers because of depression and did I mention I reached the age where schizophrenia is rearing its head and making me feel even more crazy like I hear voices and see hallucinations and I can’t even trust my memory anymore so it is far too easy to gaslight me and I have IBS which no diet I’ve tried has been able to ease (including gluten-free) … I mean my life is pain. To me. I want out. And I don’t even think my story is that bad compared to what I’ve read on the forums. A lot of people on the forums didn’t respond well to therapy or medication at all. At least I have a therapist I can talk to since no one else wants to talk to me.
I acknowledge you have pain and you were able to work through it, able to manage it. But I am not going to be able to work through mine. Maybe I’m too weak. I just hate being alive. You probably hate me judging by your tone and I don’t know if you will read this but there is no help for me.
I haven’t actually worked through anything. My life is equally as shit as it was when I was wanting to kill myself. But I don’t feel like killing myself. I still have the issues, they just… don’t affect me as negatively. I’m not as sensitive to them as I was. My nervous system is clearly stronger, fortified. So I have to deduce there was something wrong with it, as I always suspected (and had evidence of as well.)
Now I won’t get too into anything and understand opinions differ, so please keep that in mind as I might assert some of my opinions and I do realise they’re opinions, but I want to share mine. Not asserting any facts or suggesting any behaviours (even when I suggest things), as it will just be my opinion, and I offer it because I understand that even if I suggest something, you’ll still reflect on it yourself before doing it. I’m just saying this for a disclaimer because I usually come off as a dick (it’s not just your interpretation, it’s a problem I have, being sort of too neutral which often comes of as straight up aggressive or offensive.)
So, first off, I’m not a healthcare professional, let’s acknowledge that. These are opinions I hold, even when some are arguably on facts, these are still my opinions from those facts. I am however trained as a supply core non-commissioned officer by the Finnish army. This essentially means we’re trained to uphold the fighters capability to fight, outside of medical problems. Ie water, food, supplies. Well, nutrition is a big big part of this. Basically, I am expected to know how a person who doesn’t have any medical problems should be able to keep up their physical capability for a fight that lasts two weeks, with a final escalation of a big fight that lasts 72 hours (during which rest is extremely limited.). Anyway, I don’t think people realise how big of a deal nutrition is. Have you been to a nutrition therapist? Like an actual, proper one, not someone just calling themselves a therapist for Facebook. When you tried gluten-free, did you keep it up for at least 2-3 months? And if you did, I would then suggest doing either GFCF or low FODMAPS if the former doesn’t work. It takes patience, and money, but it can help. Not everyone, obviously, I’m not saying you don’t have something like lupus, what do I know, but at least from what you write, your body is running on reserves, ie on a deficiency, which is why you’re losing weight. Now unless you’re an expert in nutrition (which I’m not either, but I do have some idea) it’s highly unlikely you’re getting all the required vitamins you need from your restricted diet. And even if you are, running on reserves makes the body go into a “powersaving” mode, which also limits pleasure, because the brain is highly energy intensive. Your brain isn’t getting enough energy to feel good, so… you won’t. I really wouldn’t worry about being overweight as much as being extremely depressed. It’s not like even if you had an objectively perfect body you’d do anything with it with major depression, right? So might as well have a little less perfect body, which actually is preferred by most people, by the way, unlike the culture would have you understand. Average-looking people honestly fuck more than very good looking people, who get into their heads, or who average looking people don’t hit on, because “they’re probably out of my class anyway.”
Anyway, everything I’m saying is on the assumption that you don’t have some underlying disease none of this would help with. But I would point out that lupus is an autoimmune disease. And relating to autoimmune symptoms was something I had as well. What I did was to pretty much exclude everything, just in case. So I ate rice and gluten free fish sticks, had a vegan gluten free protein drink and some gluten free candy. The candy because the brain needs energy to function. I always had this weird desperate need for candy when I woke up. I tried describing it several times to doctors, but they never listened or took me seriously. Since I was a kid. Now since I did the exclusion diet, I’ve not really had it, unless I’ve exposed myself to gluten, after a few days of which it feels like my body just can not absorb nutrients properly. I understand we are very different and I’m not trying to say you have the same thing or would be aided by the same thing. But I’m saying I was so desperate as well that I just went full exclusion diet, because I felt it was an autoimmune issue, and I felt strongly it was related to diet, or at least my sugar metabolism, (with the hankering in the mornings and other such things), so I excluded tomatoes, anything with allium (onion, garlic, leek, etc), gluten, dairy, and even beef and other meat proteins at one point, even when a beef protein allergy is very unlikely.
After weeks of that shitty simple diet, but definitely giving my body more than enough as calories and making sure I also get a good variety of vitamins with either supplements or drinks like the protein (which have added vitamins), getting all the vital macros and micros, but making sure to avoid pretty much anything that could be an allergen, I started feeling better. I never knew you’re actually supposed to want to eat three times a day. I didn’t know you’re not supposed to be able to burp three hours after eating a meal to still taste the meal.
Anyway, your problem does sound different, but if it’s something to do with autoimmune or nutrition, it might help to try that. When our dog had allergies, the vets just went “rice, potatoes, chicken and fish, that’s all you’ll give him, he should be fine”. The point being it’s so hard to chase after an allergen that it’s easier to give a simple exclusion diet. For dogs it’s obviously easier as they don’t spice their food or whatnot, but can you say you’ve ever went even a few days of avoiding the allergens I just listed? It’s essentially the low FODMAPS diet for IBS. Here’s some quickly googled John Hopkins article on it.
From my very objective and masculine solution focused emotion ignoring Finnish moronical mechanical point of view, I would say that you do that diet for a few weeks and have a caloric surplus (yes you might gain weight, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make) but I don’t excpect that you to make you necessarily feel better at all. I expect it to prime your body to be able to feel better. If you do that, and then the next thing, and you don’t feel good, I would be surprised. I’m not saying I don’t think it could happen, but I would put money against it. So what is the next thing? During that few weeks, or a few weeks following the first one, whatever you feel like, if you can, light exercise. If you can’t, it’s fine.
But then, a serotonergic substance, but with set&setting in mind. It’s a complex issue, because doing ecstasy at home doesn’t necessarily feel good, and you’re not probably ready to go to a rave or anything. So maybe… LSD and movies? That would be my suggestion. If you want even more introspection, mushrooms. But if you’ve never done any serotonergic substances, I would go with LSD, as I feel like it’s much… “easier”… than mushrooms. Mushrooms feels like conversing with a deity older and larger than the galaxy, whereas taking LSD is sort of like being visited by a mischievous demigod.
Anyway, that’s because despite fixing your body to be able to feel good, you also need to prompt it to feel good, and that’s just something a depressed person might literally be incapable of doing. You know how memory is contextual? Like how a certain smell can just… unlock a memory you know you knew you had, but you just didn’t sort of have… access to? Well, memory is contextual not just in regards to external stimuli, but also internal stimuli. In a certain mood, we more easily recall other times when we were in that mood, and it’s harder to remember things which you experienced in a wildly different mood. This can get so bad that you’re essentially depressed for so long that the default setting gets so far from happy that you literally can not access happy memories anymore, so you don’t experience happiness, and because you don’t, you can’t, ad infinitum.
That’s why the importance of the serotonergic substances. SSRI’s work with the same assumption; “increasing serotonin levels should help”. But serotonin isn’t happiness. Happiness is very much just the other side of the coin from anxiety. So SSRI’s just don’t work, because the idea behind them is flawed. They never get you to unlock those happy memories. Which is why ecstasy, LSD, shrooms, anything serotonergic (ie working on the serotonin system) taken at a sufficient dose will crank up your brain to a very anxious/happy (sometimes it’s hard to differentiate which, which is where the “bad trip” ‘myth’ comes from. not exactly a myth, but it’s not a “bad trip” as much as it’s “too big of a dose for that specific person in that setting causing too intense an experience they don’t have the experience to handle”), which then unlocks all the memories of times when you experienced happy (and possibly also anxious) states of mind.
Once that intense experience of a night or a night and day is over, then you’ll have the capability to remember those things, which is assumed to be the reason why shroom therapy can yield benefits of warding off depression in the terminally ill for up to months.
And the benefits are that if you do actually still want to kill yourself, you’ll basically have peace of mind over it, and if you really did come out of a trip explaining how you’ve just seen it all and don’t need to exist anymore, I’d be way more likely to believe you than now when I know you have a caloric deficienc
Guess I found the limit of a lemmy comment, huh? ~10k chars. Kk.
Anyway, to sum it up, it’s just my opinion based on what I know and believe, but I do believe you should try and exclusion diet for a few weeks with some light exercise if you’re capable, then do LSD, ecstasy or shrooms and then look at this again. You’ve clearly tried the more traditional cares, which are usually pretty ineffective. If you try those as well and still want to kill yourself, well, then I can’t help you further. But I still refuse to straight out assert that no help is possible. Because it’s hard to assert something is NOT possible. Things might be extraordinarily unlikely, but not… impossible.
That’s what kept me alive at least.
As a kid I got help from a few times at a raves or a few times slightly tripping at home with friends or solo. A few times a year, at the most. Found it quite helpful at times. But it didn’t take away my body’s feeling of sort of being “overclocked”. That went away with my exclusion diet mostly. I don’t assume it will work for you, but it definitely wouldn’t harm you.
I mean, what have you to lose by trying? I mean I know I had to lose was just being annoyed at doing something I didn’t find that pleasurable. But that’s why I got the candy. And chicken. And anything remotely pleasurable, while still remaining within the limits of the low fodmaps. It took a few weeks, but I started feeling better. Now I do still get symptoms if I expose myself to gluten or whatnot, but not like bad, not instantly. A few hours in I might notice some tiny symptoms, but nothing clinically significant. But several days in and then I start noticing the same things again.
One major thing I always notice is this weird feeling of like mouth feeling different. It’s weird never really knew how to explain it. Different ph in the mouth? Idk. It’s just like… slightly off.
I’m still depressed and in a shit life situation, but I had developed pretty significant coping strategies throughout my years, and now all of those are just… so much more effective.
But also you did mention being around “the age where schizophrenia is the worst” and I think you’re talking about 27 and yeah I had my worst years then as well. I’m still reeling and it’s been almost a decade.
Anyway, you do what you think is right, but that’s my 20000000000000000000000000000 cents.
And very politely assumed I’m not one of those people, not presumptuous at all.
I’ve been tossed out of an ER after I told the psychiatrist I was afraid I might hurt myself or others. Literally, verbatim (albeit in Finnish.) He said, “don’t try to make that my responsibility”. Like, fuck, that’s literally in his job description. He got a guard to escort me out. I rang a crisis holine. They hang up on me, saying I didn’t have a crisis. All this after I had waited in an empty room without food for 7 hours, waiting for that pick of a psychiatrist on call to laze back to work. And they didn’t even tell me “he won’t be in for hours”, when they knew perfectly well.
Then another time I was denied my prescription medication while in police custody. I was kept in a cell for three days without them telling me what’s going on, how long, why, and even fucking cutting off my water at one point. A literal crime against humanity. Ate my finger open and wrote >300 words in my own blood on the walls. I got a picture of the cell somewhere. They accused me of vandalising the cell. I tried getting the video material from my time in the cell to prove their gross negligence. They “lost it”.
My family doesn’t even contact me. Haven’t worked in several years. Had to move from school to school as a kid because of my mom, never had time to form long term relationships even though I make friends rather easily.
A few years ago, I would’ve definitely agreed with you. I’m a stubborn person, and it FELT like I had exhausted all my options and no-one was willing to help. That’s an exaggeration of course, as is your absolute. And true, the doctors didn’t help shit, family and friends nonexistent, the one friend who I had who could’ve helped lost a daughter, so can’t really blame him for not being able to help others.
I was genuinely considering suicide everyday, and had there been an easy way to do it, I probably would’ve. If not for nothing else, then to make every single fuck of those “not my problem” fucks feel at least a little guilty for not doing more. Like my mom. I would’ve loved to see her face when she heard I killed myself. Might sound uncaring, because you don’t understand how uncaring my mother is, and that lack of care is what I’ve been talking to her about and she just represses and outright ignores it. So having screamed about suicidal ideation to her probably would’ve made her feel at least a little bit guilty for not simply calling me to prevent me from killing myself.
But I don’t feel like that now. Because I’m a stubborn as fuck person and didn’t kill myself out of spite, because I wouldn’t get to see what happens. So after years of being convinced my illness has a physical basis, I found one. A rather small thing, non-celiac gluten sensitivity.
But it’s not well understood, and has weird connections to behaviour.
All I know is while I used to laugh at all the “gluten free is a fad” jokes, I now don’t find them funny after understanding just how much influence a simple fucking protein in my diet can have on the functioning of my nervous system. That being the system that houses this consciousness that’s writing to you and not wishing that badly to kill themselves amymore.
Like did I get help from the systems and people who were supposed to care and help? No. Did they actively act against my best interests by ignoring my pleas for help? Yes they did. Did that make me want to kill myself even more? Yes, it did.
But did it mean there was no help to be had, anywhere, as an absolute? Seeing how I now feel less like killing myself, seems it doesn’t follow that no help was available. I just had to find it myself, on accident, after literally several decades of complaining about that issue.
I also chose a therapist who’s not Finnish on purpose, so they understand how the entire culture is affecting me, and I feel validated by them. So while it hasn’t been a huge help, it’s definitely a help going there weekly.
But perhaps I still don’t belong to those “people in pain” who you speak about who FEEL like there is no help.
Presumptuous? I’m not sure how you got that from my message but I don’t blame you because apparently I am r* when it comes to communicating online, many people accuse me of things I did not mean or say and then I get downvoted because no one cares what I have to say.
I am sorry what you went through. You said you knew from experience what it was like so I assumed you also had some sort of mental illness and some sort of suicidal component but that you got better. That was my assumption. I just don’t believe everyone can get better.
I’m not sure how much to reveal about myself without potentially doxxing myself. But I am from the US. I have been suicidal since a child since before I could identify the suicidal feeling as being suicidal because of a combo of a very abusive home and an abusive school environment. My abusive upbringing gave me PTSD, anxiety, and depression. It did not get better once I became an adult and I developed chronic pain in middle school. I had abusive relationships one after the other (my therapist said since I’ve never seen a healthy relationship modeled before this is why it kept happening), but one ex in particular really abused me badly and added on to the PTSD. I had tried killing myself growing up a few times, eventually it led to me taking a more drastic measure as an adult that landed me in the mental ward. I didn’t do it for revenge or attention, I did it because my life is full of too much suffering. The mental ward was extremely horrible for me and added on to my PTSD, it felt like a prison and like I was in constant danger. I’ve lost friends who can’t handle my suicidal attempts, I no longer talk about it to anyone except my therapist now. My therapist encouraged me to go to the mental ward a few times, I tried it but my PTSD and anxiety would heighten during the wait from the ER to the mental ward that I usually just left (after all they would leave me in a bed in the hallway with no visitors for six hours to tell me 99% of the time there is no room in the mental ward for me and 1% of the time they could transfer me many hours away to a different hospital one-way so I’m on my own to get back). I went so often they told me I couldn’t keep going back every time I had a bad day. Thing is, I feel in crisis every day. So I gave up on the ER and the mental ward. I’ve even been kicked out of the ER before during a pretty bad day, the staff just don’t know how to deal with people like me who aren’t violent but just can’t follow directions during an episode because I completely shut down. I also tried crisis lines but found they were very short and rude with me. I have promised myself I will wait for my dogs to pass on of natural causes before catching the bus. I can’t trust anyone to take good care of them if I am gone. That is the only reason I am still alive. When I am suicidal I lookup the methods for exiting, visit the forums, and it calms me down enough to stick to my resolve for my dogs.
I am glad you were able to find relief. I don’t want people to die if they can be helped, I really don’t, but not everyone can be helped. It is not going to be the same for me. I have debilitating chronic pain that forces me to mostly stay in bed all day and my health insurance cannot pay for what I need, assuming it would even help my pain. I am on SSI but it is not enough money to cover for these extra medical expenses. There are hardly any doctors in my area who accept my insurance, I’ve flown to other nearby areas before but it is still the same with many doctors not wanting to accept my insurance. I find my therapist is the one person I can really talk to, but I’ve been warned I can’t say how suicidal I really am or I will be forced into the mental ward so I dance around the subject. Friends? No, not really. I do have an SO but they are not enough of a reason to stay, sometimes they are the reason I want to leave.
I know someone with lupus that has similar pain to me and I have watched them decay: being able to walk about, then needing a cane, and now needing a wheelchair and their legs have atrophied. They are in so much pain and also spend their days in bed and I can’t help but feel that this is where I am headed and I do not want to go there. I already can’t sit or stand for very long let alone walk about very far. I have a service dog to help me walk longer distances but he can’t go everywhere with me, for instance places like the mental ward. My doctor said I just need exercise and sent me to physical therapy, but when I didn’t improve enough my insurance cut me off. My pain is still the same. Over the years my doctors have been very unhelpful dealing with my pain. One doctor even said it was because of my weight, but my pain started when I was very skinny and I got overweight because it became too hard to move around. I have to stick to a diet of 1050 calories to lose weight since I am very short, my doctors don’t recommend this and instead want me to somehow exercise more but I’ve lost 30 lbs this way without having to exercise. My pain did not get better weighing less. It is also obviously very hard to stick to a diet this strict for very long. There is also something very wrong with my uterus. I have had horrible periods since they first started that put me in so much pain I would miss days at school every month and then work every month and now I have been told it may be endometriosis but the only way to confirm is through surgery which my doctor doesn’t approve of. Intercourse is so goddamn painful. I need constant birth control (skip placebo) to help ease my periods, but they do not help with the mood swings and intense suicidal ideation during them.
There is a society component to my issues. I don’t deny that. But when you spend your days trapped in a body that feels near constant pain where you have days you can’t use your arms or legs very much and a mind that still has PTSD flashbacks and have to act neurotic around certain things because of anxiety and skip eating meals and showers because of depression and did I mention I reached the age where schizophrenia is rearing its head and making me feel even more crazy like I hear voices and see hallucinations and I can’t even trust my memory anymore so it is far too easy to gaslight me and I have IBS which no diet I’ve tried has been able to ease (including gluten-free) … I mean my life is pain. To me. I want out. And I don’t even think my story is that bad compared to what I’ve read on the forums. A lot of people on the forums didn’t respond well to therapy or medication at all. At least I have a therapist I can talk to since no one else wants to talk to me.
I acknowledge you have pain and you were able to work through it, able to manage it. But I am not going to be able to work through mine. Maybe I’m too weak. I just hate being alive. You probably hate me judging by your tone and I don’t know if you will read this but there is no help for me.
I haven’t actually worked through anything. My life is equally as shit as it was when I was wanting to kill myself. But I don’t feel like killing myself. I still have the issues, they just… don’t affect me as negatively. I’m not as sensitive to them as I was. My nervous system is clearly stronger, fortified. So I have to deduce there was something wrong with it, as I always suspected (and had evidence of as well.)
Now I won’t get too into anything and understand opinions differ, so please keep that in mind as I might assert some of my opinions and I do realise they’re opinions, but I want to share mine. Not asserting any facts or suggesting any behaviours (even when I suggest things), as it will just be my opinion, and I offer it because I understand that even if I suggest something, you’ll still reflect on it yourself before doing it. I’m just saying this for a disclaimer because I usually come off as a dick (it’s not just your interpretation, it’s a problem I have, being sort of too neutral which often comes of as straight up aggressive or offensive.)
So, first off, I’m not a healthcare professional, let’s acknowledge that. These are opinions I hold, even when some are arguably on facts, these are still my opinions from those facts. I am however trained as a supply core non-commissioned officer by the Finnish army. This essentially means we’re trained to uphold the fighters capability to fight, outside of medical problems. Ie water, food, supplies. Well, nutrition is a big big part of this. Basically, I am expected to know how a person who doesn’t have any medical problems should be able to keep up their physical capability for a fight that lasts two weeks, with a final escalation of a big fight that lasts 72 hours (during which rest is extremely limited.). Anyway, I don’t think people realise how big of a deal nutrition is. Have you been to a nutrition therapist? Like an actual, proper one, not someone just calling themselves a therapist for Facebook. When you tried gluten-free, did you keep it up for at least 2-3 months? And if you did, I would then suggest doing either GFCF or low FODMAPS if the former doesn’t work. It takes patience, and money, but it can help. Not everyone, obviously, I’m not saying you don’t have something like lupus, what do I know, but at least from what you write, your body is running on reserves, ie on a deficiency, which is why you’re losing weight. Now unless you’re an expert in nutrition (which I’m not either, but I do have some idea) it’s highly unlikely you’re getting all the required vitamins you need from your restricted diet. And even if you are, running on reserves makes the body go into a “powersaving” mode, which also limits pleasure, because the brain is highly energy intensive. Your brain isn’t getting enough energy to feel good, so… you won’t. I really wouldn’t worry about being overweight as much as being extremely depressed. It’s not like even if you had an objectively perfect body you’d do anything with it with major depression, right? So might as well have a little less perfect body, which actually is preferred by most people, by the way, unlike the culture would have you understand. Average-looking people honestly fuck more than very good looking people, who get into their heads, or who average looking people don’t hit on, because “they’re probably out of my class anyway.”
Anyway, everything I’m saying is on the assumption that you don’t have some underlying disease none of this would help with. But I would point out that lupus is an autoimmune disease. And relating to autoimmune symptoms was something I had as well. What I did was to pretty much exclude everything, just in case. So I ate rice and gluten free fish sticks, had a vegan gluten free protein drink and some gluten free candy. The candy because the brain needs energy to function. I always had this weird desperate need for candy when I woke up. I tried describing it several times to doctors, but they never listened or took me seriously. Since I was a kid. Now since I did the exclusion diet, I’ve not really had it, unless I’ve exposed myself to gluten, after a few days of which it feels like my body just can not absorb nutrients properly. I understand we are very different and I’m not trying to say you have the same thing or would be aided by the same thing. But I’m saying I was so desperate as well that I just went full exclusion diet, because I felt it was an autoimmune issue, and I felt strongly it was related to diet, or at least my sugar metabolism, (with the hankering in the mornings and other such things), so I excluded tomatoes, anything with allium (onion, garlic, leek, etc), gluten, dairy, and even beef and other meat proteins at one point, even when a beef protein allergy is very unlikely.
After weeks of that shitty simple diet, but definitely giving my body more than enough as calories and making sure I also get a good variety of vitamins with either supplements or drinks like the protein (which have added vitamins), getting all the vital macros and micros, but making sure to avoid pretty much anything that could be an allergen, I started feeling better. I never knew you’re actually supposed to want to eat three times a day. I didn’t know you’re not supposed to be able to burp three hours after eating a meal to still taste the meal.
Anyway, your problem does sound different, but if it’s something to do with autoimmune or nutrition, it might help to try that. When our dog had allergies, the vets just went “rice, potatoes, chicken and fish, that’s all you’ll give him, he should be fine”. The point being it’s so hard to chase after an allergen that it’s easier to give a simple exclusion diet. For dogs it’s obviously easier as they don’t spice their food or whatnot, but can you say you’ve ever went even a few days of avoiding the allergens I just listed? It’s essentially the low FODMAPS diet for IBS. Here’s some quickly googled John Hopkins article on it.
From my very objective and masculine solution focused emotion ignoring Finnish moronical mechanical point of view, I would say that you do that diet for a few weeks and have a caloric surplus (yes you might gain weight, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make) but I don’t excpect that you to make you necessarily feel better at all. I expect it to prime your body to be able to feel better. If you do that, and then the next thing, and you don’t feel good, I would be surprised. I’m not saying I don’t think it could happen, but I would put money against it. So what is the next thing? During that few weeks, or a few weeks following the first one, whatever you feel like, if you can, light exercise. If you can’t, it’s fine.
But then, a serotonergic substance, but with set&setting in mind. It’s a complex issue, because doing ecstasy at home doesn’t necessarily feel good, and you’re not probably ready to go to a rave or anything. So maybe… LSD and movies? That would be my suggestion. If you want even more introspection, mushrooms. But if you’ve never done any serotonergic substances, I would go with LSD, as I feel like it’s much… “easier”… than mushrooms. Mushrooms feels like conversing with a deity older and larger than the galaxy, whereas taking LSD is sort of like being visited by a mischievous demigod.
Anyway, that’s because despite fixing your body to be able to feel good, you also need to prompt it to feel good, and that’s just something a depressed person might literally be incapable of doing. You know how memory is contextual? Like how a certain smell can just… unlock a memory you know you knew you had, but you just didn’t sort of have… access to? Well, memory is contextual not just in regards to external stimuli, but also internal stimuli. In a certain mood, we more easily recall other times when we were in that mood, and it’s harder to remember things which you experienced in a wildly different mood. This can get so bad that you’re essentially depressed for so long that the default setting gets so far from happy that you literally can not access happy memories anymore, so you don’t experience happiness, and because you don’t, you can’t, ad infinitum.
That’s why the importance of the serotonergic substances. SSRI’s work with the same assumption; “increasing serotonin levels should help”. But serotonin isn’t happiness. Happiness is very much just the other side of the coin from anxiety. So SSRI’s just don’t work, because the idea behind them is flawed. They never get you to unlock those happy memories. Which is why ecstasy, LSD, shrooms, anything serotonergic (ie working on the serotonin system) taken at a sufficient dose will crank up your brain to a very anxious/happy (sometimes it’s hard to differentiate which, which is where the “bad trip” ‘myth’ comes from. not exactly a myth, but it’s not a “bad trip” as much as it’s “too big of a dose for that specific person in that setting causing too intense an experience they don’t have the experience to handle”), which then unlocks all the memories of times when you experienced happy (and possibly also anxious) states of mind.
Once that intense experience of a night or a night and day is over, then you’ll have the capability to remember those things, which is assumed to be the reason why shroom therapy can yield benefits of warding off depression in the terminally ill for up to months.
https://broadview.org/magic-mushrooms-are-helping-terminally-ill-patients-go-out-on-a-high/
And the benefits are that if you do actually still want to kill yourself, you’ll basically have peace of mind over it, and if you really did come out of a trip explaining how you’ve just seen it all and don’t need to exist anymore, I’d be way more likely to believe you than now when I know you have a caloric deficienc
caloric deficiency.
Guess I found the limit of a lemmy comment, huh? ~10k chars. Kk.
Anyway, to sum it up, it’s just my opinion based on what I know and believe, but I do believe you should try and exclusion diet for a few weeks with some light exercise if you’re capable, then do LSD, ecstasy or shrooms and then look at this again. You’ve clearly tried the more traditional cares, which are usually pretty ineffective. If you try those as well and still want to kill yourself, well, then I can’t help you further. But I still refuse to straight out assert that no help is possible. Because it’s hard to assert something is NOT possible. Things might be extraordinarily unlikely, but not… impossible.
That’s what kept me alive at least.
As a kid I got help from a few times at a raves or a few times slightly tripping at home with friends or solo. A few times a year, at the most. Found it quite helpful at times. But it didn’t take away my body’s feeling of sort of being “overclocked”. That went away with my exclusion diet mostly. I don’t assume it will work for you, but it definitely wouldn’t harm you.
I mean, what have you to lose by trying? I mean I know I had to lose was just being annoyed at doing something I didn’t find that pleasurable. But that’s why I got the candy. And chicken. And anything remotely pleasurable, while still remaining within the limits of the low fodmaps. It took a few weeks, but I started feeling better. Now I do still get symptoms if I expose myself to gluten or whatnot, but not like bad, not instantly. A few hours in I might notice some tiny symptoms, but nothing clinically significant. But several days in and then I start noticing the same things again.
One major thing I always notice is this weird feeling of like mouth feeling different. It’s weird never really knew how to explain it. Different ph in the mouth? Idk. It’s just like… slightly off.
I’m still depressed and in a shit life situation, but I had developed pretty significant coping strategies throughout my years, and now all of those are just… so much more effective.
But also you did mention being around “the age where schizophrenia is the worst” and I think you’re talking about 27 and yeah I had my worst years then as well. I’m still reeling and it’s been almost a decade.
Anyway, you do what you think is right, but that’s my 20000000000000000000000000000 cents.