strask

Hey there, I hope you are doing well. I don't even know what city you are in, I had this vague feeling you were travelling but I don't know where/when. Anyway, I'm having a bit of an existential crisis, but I really really really don't want to go to the hospital. Because it wouldn't help, and because I hate it there, and because it would actually impair my ability to do things that /would/ help. But my ability to do things that would help is already essentially zero so if I'm to avoid a hospital trip, I feel like I'm going to need some help. Things that need doing include a phone call to set up a therapist (the number has been on a card on the fridge for weeks, but I've been unable to call it), medicine refills from the pharmacy (I have two more days of antidepressants remaining), and trying to figure out some way I can spend my time because I've been unable to play my games or read or do anything aside from sleeping and sitting around feeling sad. Please let me know if you will be available for a few hours some time in the next couple of days; if not that's ok I can try to get help from a-specific-other-person or just go to the hospital.

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But also I just wanted to write a self-reminder in the form of a note to you about why it is so important that I see a therapist. I have been depressed and suicidal for the better part of my life. And I've done a lot of self-study about that, and learned a lot of things about depression and suicidal ideation/impulses/desires, and I've had a ton of therapy before that focused on the symptoms I have and how to mitigate them. But I think I am realizing that that's doing everything backwards. It's like learning to do some basic maths task like, division or factoring or something. But the teacher just shows the answers to like, a few complicated problems, without working them out in detail, then starts quizzing you and just tells you that your answers are wrong. They won't show you how to solve the problem, they just keep explaining that the wrong answers are wrong, and the only way to get them to leave you alone is to memorize all the wrong answers and produce a correct one based on elimination, or imitation if you've watched someone else answer correctly. The point is: I don't understand how ANYONE can be NOT suicidally depressed. I don't want further lessons in how to be marginally less depressed by criticizing my self-critical thoughts (circular much?). I want to analyse the thought processes that healthy people use until I can understand how to do it myself.

I think I'm too rational-minded in this way, to benefit from the more typical kinds of therapy. To me, my suicidality is completely rational, and consistent with the facts of my existence. But I also recognize that the facts of my existence are mostly synonymous with the facts of everyone else's existence, and while suicide is the 10th leading cause of death world wide, that's still way lower than it would be if the population of the world were all me.

So it would be stupid of me to think that I'm right and most other people are wrong. That's why I acknowledge that I'm mentally ill and consent to treatment.

But for me to get better, I need to find a way to analyse HOW non-mentally-ill people think, WHY they are not depressed and miserable like me. I need to understand the process from start to finish and learn how to do it myself.

I think most therapy and stuff is geared towards people who have been happy in the past and get to a really difficult situation. They just need to get past the difficulties somehow, and once they get happy again they can regain their balance and be ok/stable. But me, I don't think I've ever been happy in any normal way. I've had happy experiences, but I don't think I've ever had, for example, a month during which my happiness outweighed my sadness.

I just need some kind of explanation on how to not want to die. But it has to be a rational explanation. I've attempted to fool myself into being religious, that doesn't work. I've attempted to just ignore all the shit that makes me want to die, that can work temporarily but there are too many reminders so it's short lived. I feel like (and this is the feeling I need to kill by learning what I want to learn) the only ways to not be suicidal are to be wilfully ignorant, selfish, stupid, etc. And that's not a criticism of people who use those methods, because if a little ignorance or an imaginary sky-god or whatever helps a person get through the day and be productive and HELP PEOPLE somehow, that's a great trade-off! But I've attempted those things and can't fool myself in those ways, so I sit here like a potato being useless which is a TERRIBLE TRADE-OFF.

So while I'm sure that religion and wearing blinders of various sorts (essentially, just confirmation bias towards "life is good") are how /some/ people cope, I feel like there must be methods used by some /other/ people which would be more agreeable to me. I'm just trying to find those, understand them, and replicate the process.