I'm starting to get back into a much better place mentally and getting more assistance with my dad's condition while also supporting my mother with her anxiety and depression dealing with her own mother. When we are born, we don't get a "life manual" to accompany our journey...
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Sometimes you will make the wrong decisions in life and sometimes you will need to reach out to others for help and that's perfectly fine. We live in a society that is woefully ill-equipped to deal with mental illness and that is very problematic for us as a society.
I wanted
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to take a moment to thank all those who have written / called to check up on me. I also want to apologize to those who felt I just dropped off the map completely over the last several months. There is no excuse I can give other than I recently faced the most intense personal
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challenges I've ever dealt with as a human being and adult and that I was lucky to have the resources and companions to help me face these challenges. I will be online much more over the next month and going through a huge backlog of comms with other researchers / friends and
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family. Thank you so much for your patience and support. I'm looking forward to an amazing 2023 and I am dedicating at least 1-2 hours each day to get back on track with previous comms, etc.
If you have any questions, please let me know. I'll try to reply as time allows.
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Replying to
I’m sorry to hear of your confluence of difficulties, but very glad that you’ve found effective support to help you through them
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Thanks Joe! I'm doing much better! I was on the fence about going public with my struggles but then I realized that if it helps other people in situations similar to my own (and there are probably a lot of people with similar stresses), it was definitely worth doing it.
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What really helped me was learning to recognize stressful events and techniques to deal with them rather than just internalizing the stress and taking a "I'm a man, I can handle anything" approach which doesn't really help with longer-term stressful situations.
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I agree with your rationale for sharing, and applaud your bravery for doing so! As someone with chronic depression, I think that it also importantly helps to lessen stigma around mental health needs. I’ve also found practices that start with recognizing or acknowledging a
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Thank you! If I had to take one thing from my experiences over the last several months, I would say that someone can easily suffer from depression without even realizing they have it. The symptoms can manifest in so many different ways starting with robbing you of energy, etc.
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I never had thoughts of self-harm while suffering symptoms -- but one day I woke up from a nightmare and realized that I was having nightmares consistently -- then I realized my energy levels when waking up were barely there. There was just a thick fog across my daily activities.
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I agree, it can really sneak up on you. Some of the best (imo) research on depression suggests that it isn’t really a single thing or a coherent condition, which can make identification, research, and treatment often sub-optimal
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