PTSD,Depression and Anxiety. I hate myself, i am very aloof, and have trust issues. I have taken so many meds, spent hours in therapy and nothing helps. Now I have had a disease for two years that will kill me. I hope to have five more years but it’s probably not going to happen. That is just one more thing to mess me up mentally, but I will muddle through.
^ I relate to this extremely, other than i go out of my way to avoid doctors, so i have no idea how far i am along my death spiral. Seems to have picked up in the last couple of months: bruise way more easily, skin getting thinner, hungry often but can’t get enough food in me because of historic surgery scarring in my intestines + ongoing inflammation… which affects the brain and mood and my depression/anxiety/trauma/etc. issues.
Then again, i was supposed to have been dead a decade or so ago until i stopped paying as much attention to orthodox medicine and more to fundamentals of nutrition and lifestyle from how humans evolved.
Each of our paths differ, and i’m grateful most of us have options from which to choose.
I think about a man who was told he had 4 months to live, verified with second and maybe third opinions. In his late 40s i think (would have to look it up). Quit his job and figured that there had to be
some way to deal with things, so plunged super-deep into personal research to find his own path. It’s now at least a decade and a half if not two later, and he’s still very much alive and healthier than he had been prior to the time of diagnosis.
None of us know. Many things i’m doing not by choice but by circumstance are supposed to help keep people alive longer, so i might live for decades. On average genetic males in my family die around 80, so on that basis there’s about 17 years left. Given my intense un-health history, very realistically i might not make it into 2023.
Over the years I've seen more psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurses, counselors, and LCSWs than I can count. I had a stint in-patient once, which was helpful.
I'm a mess.
Haven’t done in-patient myself, but the rest of that matches. Kinda gave up at a certain point, moving towards other unexplored avenues of healing. Cranio-sacral therapy with somato-emotional release was helping. I’m currently in somewhat self-imposed limbo with that, related to minimal $ and marginal transportation, along with being at a point where i have to force myself out of my recluse shell and
LIVE, even if it terrifies me and might fail spectacularly.
I disagree. All the proper nutrition, exercise, fresh air and even talk therapy in the world will not cure chemical imbalances in the brain. And again, to suggest otherwise is to negate the struggles of those who deal with mental illness. "Feeling good" is not the cure for depression, anxiety, PTSD, etc. Please note, I am NOT saying all of these things you mention won't help, but they are not the remedy.
Unfortunately there is no one remedy/system of remedies. My personal experience is that both SSBHM and Donna are correct: i’ve improved
dramatically from where i had been
primarily from changes to nutrition and lifestyle, but those alone have in no way solved my fleet of issues.
I have to wonder how humans made it as many millennia as we have without having to focus on biochemical imbalances in the brain.
What changed? What might need adjustment from how societies function now, whether “back” to older healthier practices or forward some one or more new directions? Or am i ignorant (very possible), and centuries and beyond ago people were doing biochemical adjustment with other substances? I know alcoholic beverages and maybe peyote have been used for that, but that’s the limit of my limited knowledge.
Great topic, Donna. It’s a nice space to be able to get real about our related-yet-individual struggles.