Mental Health Lived with Depression for most of my twenties.

[coolhandluke]

Hi all,

This is not a topic I talk to most people about, and when I last tried to talk to a friend about it, I just get a rant saying I have to start taking control of my life.

Anyone who has lived with this illness for a prolonged period, does seeking professional guidance end up helping?

 

[embryo923]

I have also been depressed through like 1/3 of my 20's, stil got 2 years left til 30. It's mostly from a failed relationship and multiple attempted relationships or short term hookups that ended with me missing them immensely and being alone again. Most of my friends are heavy drug users and I try to stay out of that world, except when I'm buying my own drugs to get high alone, to null the depression, and give me motivation to be productive. But the drawbacks are too much, Being sober and mentally sharp, waking up early and going to bed early, healthy diet would benefit, and has while I lasted on it.

Psychotherapy, especially CBT (Cognitive Behavoiral therapy which is group therapy, less intense than the other DBT, Dialiectic Behavioiurla THerapy which is much more intense and requires you to do homework and attend group meetints, I've heard good things about both, but they aren't a "Cure-All". They can only help, though..unless you fal for a girl in your group and find out eventually she's too crazy and just used you for a few weeks to make herself feel better, now she lives several states away and it makes me sad. I think having a partnert, a gf/bf would really improve any depression anyone has. you just have to work at it. Along with healthy diet, and combine that with some therapy. Commit to working on improving yourself daily.

 

[Eniigmatiic]

I've had depression since probably age 8, I'm 21 now.
I agree on improving yourself/your life. No matter how small, make sure that every day there is some goal towards your personal happiness you've accomplished.
Exercising and eating healthy helps of course. I find that being around nature is soothing. Having positive, supportive friends you can trust is big (especially if you don't have a warm or supportive family). Keep yourself busy if you can. Don't be around abusive, insensitive, or destructive people, if possible. I personally think a lot, and I tend to have negative thinking patterns, so the more you DO the better you may feel. Stay hydrated? Cuddle with animals? Listen to positive music? Do you have a creative outlet like writing, drawing, or painting?

Therapy can help, it hasn't helped me in the long run, but having someone to talk to who can help you sort out your feelings and determine your goals if you don't yet understand them is helpful. It's worth a shot I would say. Try more than one therapist. Talk to them before committing to seeing them if that's possible. (I was never able to do that.) Medications are worth a shot too. I'd try at least five different ones. Honestly, marijuana helps most people with relaxation and feelings of well-being. I've caught myself thinking negatively while high, and it's just like, 'woah, that's harsh,' and onto a better thought I go.

 

[paranoid android]

I have been suffering from depression or some type of mood disorder as long as i can remember. Hell i can think of being 11 years old and contemplating suicide. I am now 33 years old so i have survived despite the fact that the odds are against me but hey they say only the good die young so i think i am okay for about another 30 or 40 years . I can remember using various drugs like Alcohol, Hash, shrooms and various pills like Valium, Xanax, Codeine, Demerol (Meperidine/Pethidine) and Oxycodone from age 12 on up to numb out the depression and thoughts of suicide. I would also have mild hallucinations and irrational fears such as multi colored rain falling from the ceiling and thinking there was people lurking in the shadows in my own house in the night time right up until my late teens. And this was not a result of drugs either. When i was younger i refused to take any psych meds besides benzodiazepines because i didn't want to be a zombie like some of the kids i knew who where on Methylphenidate or anti-psychotics. Looking back on it i should have gotten treatment back then until waiting until i was 24 to get treatment. I was diagnosed with Bipolar disorder at age 24 i think and before this i was diagnosed with major depressive disorder. This led to me being given Venlafaxine which not only made me completely Manic and out of my mind altogether but it had some of the worst side effects and withdrawal sympots i have gotten from any drug and i swore that after that i would never take another SSRI/SNRI again in my life.

Later on i was given Amitriptyline (yeah i know it's a SNRI but i hardly got any bad effects from it) in anti-depressant doses of up to 150mg's a day to treat my trigeminal neuralgia. This was a wonder drug for me at first as it helped my neuropathic alot, was the best pill i have ever had for sleep and it worked well to treat my depression. However as i was still getting bad anxiety a doctor wrote me out a script for Clonazepam which did wonders for my anxiety and also helped the trigeminal neuralgia as it does help facial spasms and neuropathic pain in general.

Unfortunately i was still getting some pretty intense mood swings and i was eventually diagnosed as having Bipolar disorder. At first i was put on Quetiapine on top of the Amitriptyline and Clonazepam and this worked well enough until the Amitriptyline stopped working for my TN, depression and insomnia all at once. I was then taken off Amitriptyline and put on Divalproex (brand names Epival, Depakote) along with the Clonazepam and a higher dose of Quetiapine. I never got any side effects from the Divalproex but it didn't work either. Eventually in order to help my depression i was put on Bupropion which worked pretty well and didn't trigger any mania and the Quetiapine tended to help the depression side of things better then the mania and the Clonazepam was helping to control my anxiety along with the mania but i was still getting mood swings. Around this time i switched shrinks and in between shrinks my meds got fucked up and i ended up in a severe depression only interrupted by mood swings between mixed states and major depression. My GP at the time tried me on Risperidone to help get my mania under control and he also gave me Mirtazapine (Remeron) for the depression on top of the Clonazepam. I don't know if it was because i was not on a true mood stabilizer or perhaps the Mirtazapine just did not agree with me at all but 1 morning i damn near hung myself i was so sick of it all. I could not see the light at the end of the tunnel or any bright spot in my life at all so i figured why not do myself in? I put a rope up and even put my weight on it before a moment of sanity hit me and i thought of all the people i would be hurting by killing myself. So i pulled myself up and took the rope down and took some more Risperdal and Clonazepam to calm myself down.

I finally got to see a new shrink and was given the option of going on Lithium or Lamotrigine and as i would have had to drive a hour to get a blood test done going on Lithium was not very practical. So i dropped the Divalproex which was doing nothing and went on Lamotrigine instead along with switching the Mirtazapine to Bupropion and the Risperidone to Quetiapine. I was also on 6mg's of Clonazepam at that point to put a dent in my mania and mixed states. It took a few months to get my Lamotrigine up to a therapeutic dose (they up the dose slowly to avoid getting the dreaded Stevens-Johnson syndrome) but it started to have a anti-depressant effect around 50mg's a day. Once i got up to 200mg's a day the worst of the mania went away and the rapid cycling and mixed states stopped except for a few episodes here and there. So Lamotrigine has been a life saver for me quite literally.

Right now i am on 200mg's of Lamotrigine a day, 300-400mg's of Seroquel instant release, 6mg's of Clonazepam and i have started on the Bupropion again as i have been more depressed lately then i cared to admit due to seasonal affective disorder and Bipolar depression brought on by life events such as being bored to fuck because it's winter and i can't even work out now because my shoulder is fucked. But all in all i am doing great compared to the Bipolar wreck i was before i started on these meds. Before the Lamictal started working it was not uncommon for me to rapid cycle from horribly depressed to mania to a mixed state all in one week. these days i hardly get rapid cycling or mixed states at all which is a vast improvement over my unmedicated self.

If your depression is bad enough i would suggest seeing a doctor about it. I would also suggest trying Bupropion (brand names Wellbutrin/Zyban) before you try SSRI's as Bupropion has no real withdrawal symptoms so if it doesn't work for you the worst that will happen is you have to stop taking it.

 

[Birc0014]

Do you think seroquel on its own would be enough re:bi polar symptoms? My gp is really pushing this shit on me right now and the diagnosis I am bp...I find its an awesome sleeping pill but hardly worth the zombie state it induces next day. I am also waiting on shoulder surgery and fucking hating this endless winter shit that doesnt allow for anything other than weighlifting (which I cant do) and 24 hr lyrica, gaba, hydromorph, booze binging, followed by guilt followed by pussyhounding and then repeating over and over and over

 

[paranoid android]

Do you think seroquel on its own would be enough re:bi polar symptoms? My gp is really pushing this shit on me right now and the diagnosis I am bp...I find its an awesome sleeping pill but hardly worth the zombie state it induces next day. I am also waiting on shoulder surgery and fucking hating this endless winter shit that doesnt allow for anything other than weighlifting (which I cant do) and 24 hr lyrica, gaba, hydromorph, booze binging, followed by guilt followed by pussyhounding and then repeating over and over and over

Seroquel can help both the manic and depressive phases of bipolar but i would honestly suggest trying a mood stabilizer like Lamotrigine or Lithium first. These drugs are the only 2 true mood stabilizers as they help both the manic and depression parts of Bipolar disorder. Lamictal tends to work better for depression and rapid cycling then Lithium does and Lithium tends to help the manic episodes better then Lamictal does. These drugs also have less side effects especially when it comes to how they effect your metabolism compared to anti-psychotics. Another option is anti-manic drugs such as Divalproex (Epival, Depakote) or Carbamazepine. They usually give you a anti-depressant like Bupropion along with a anti-manic drug as these drugs do nothing for depression. Though my experience with the latter 2 drugs are they didn't work or in the case of Carbamazepine it didn't work and made me sick as a dog.

The sedation from Seroquel tends to go away pretty quickly especially when you hit the higher doses. The main metabolite of Quetiapine is NorQuetiapine which is a strong Norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor so maybe that's why higher doses don't always cause more sedation. The zombie effect from Seroquel is more due to it's sedation because of it's strong H1 antagonism where as with Risperidone you get the zombie effect at 2mg's+ usually because of the fact that it is a strong Dopamine antagonist. No other anti-psychotic i have ever tried including high dose Olanzapine and the older typicals such as Chlorpromazine (Thorazine, Largactil), Methotrimeprazine (Nozinan) or Prochlorperazine (Compazine, Stemetil) ever gave me the same type of zombie effect Risperdal does.

The Seroquel would be worth a shot imo atleast. And i am fully aware of how shitty winter is when you have nothing to do including lighting weights. I am sad to be in the same boat as you there.

 

[Nom de Plume]

I'm predominantly anxious, but my anxiety started to transmogrify into depression approximately 3 years ago (I turned 21 last month). I chat with a shrink, to no avail. I talk with a doctor, to no avail. I take anti-depressants, to no avail. So, I just up and quit the doc's drugs and the shrink's drivel, and commenced the only therapy that's ever proved effective: copious quantities of alcohol, barbiturates by the handful, dissociative anaesthetics (namely PCP, ketamine, TCP), and large amounts of psychostimulants (to wit: amphetamine, occasionally meth, methylone, 4-MAR).

The booze and barbs help me forget my sorrows; the dissociatives help me come to terms with them; and the stimulants are just used to get me through the day and extirpate the lethargy.

 

[herbavore]

^NomdePlume, I guess by proven "effective" you mean the end result you are looking for is a life in which your internal suffering is cured or at least alleviated by something from outside yourself? Have you ever looked to yourself for such a cure?

Booze and barbs are proven effective for killing people as well as temporarily alleviating pain.

My first thought as a moderator was that your post should be UAed as it does go against the forum guidelines. My second thought however is that it is such an outrageously harmful suggestion that it serves a purpose of harm reduction just by being so blatantly and obviously unhelpful.

 

[Nom de Plume]

^NomdePlume, I guess by proven "effective" you mean the end result you are looking for is a life in which your internal suffering is cured or at least alleviated by something from outside yourself? Have you ever looked to yourself for such a cure?

Booze and barbs are proven effective for killing people as well as temporarily alleviating pain.

My first thought as a moderator was that your post should be UAed as it does go against the forum guidelines. My second thought however is that it is such an outrageously harmful suggestion that it serves a purpose of harm reduction just by being so blatantly and obviously unhelpful.

I never made any suggestion to anyone in my post. I gave a germane response about my experiences with depression and what I, personally, have done to alleviate it. What works for me may or may not work for someone else. But that's beside the issue.

The OP asked for other people suffering with depression to share their thoughts. He did not request suggestions or advice. If I'm not allowed to share my experience because some dumbass, soon-to-be-dead-anyway imbecile might take it as an advisement, then that's unfair. Moreover, it would be egregiously inappropriate to remove an innocuous comment—such as mine—because of that highly remote and unlikely possibility.

 

[it5mark]

I find that being around nature is soothing.

have you considered visiting mother nature in Peru? - apparently she teaches you all sorts of stuff though the sacred vine called Ayahusaca...I'm planning a trip this year

 

[P.o.T.u.S]

I was also depressed through my 20s and the only thing that helped was really getting into buddhism and its principles.mainly "suffering" basically wanting our life to be different than it actually is causes anxiety that manifest in many ways.depression to me is like you are angry/sad that u are sad all the time but u are just sad there is not a seperate "self" percieving reality

http://static.squarespace.com/static/5037f52d84ae1e87f694cfda/t/5055915f84aedaeee9181119/1347785055665/

the link is for a "mastering Buddhism" book it helped me alot with depression and addiction and why i was like i was.to your friends that say u need to take control.control is an illusion live your life with morality and give back to the universe and it will give back to u.most ppls relationship with the universe is a highway and a bikepath because they dont give back and just want and want.if u are in doubt about what to do with your life stay idle and when you are sure of what u want/need to do strike with courage.best of luck brother

 

[paranoid android]

I'm predominantly anxious, but my anxiety started to transmogrify into depression approximately 3 years ago (I turned 21 last month). I chat with a shrink, to no avail. I talk with a doctor, to no avail. I take anti-depressants, to no avail. So, I just up and quit the doc's drugs and the shrink's drivel, and commenced the only therapy that's ever proved effective: copious quantities of alcohol, barbiturates by the handful, dissociative anaesthetics (namely PCP, ketamine, TCP), and large amounts of psychostimulants (to wit: amphetamine, occasionally meth, methylone, 4-MAR).

The booze and barbs help me forget my sorrows; the dissociatives help me come to terms with them; and the stimulants are just used to get me through the day and extirpate the lethargy.

Barbiturates are absolutely one of the worst class of drugs to take if your depressed at all. They even make people with no mental health problems depressed sometimes especially if taken long term. So i would strongly suggest cutting them out. I have a friend who suffers from depression and was put on Phenobarbital by her doctor for some condition i forget and she went from being mildly depressed to suicidal depressed within about 2 days. This is not even mentioning that mixing Barbs with booze is a absolute fucking death wish. Scores of people died from this combo until just about every Barb besides Butalbital and Phenobarbital where removed from the market. Even today there are people who wind up as blue as a smurf from mixing Phenobarbital or Butalbital (the barb in Fiorinal/Fioricet) because it doesn't take that many tablets to kill you and you may forget you even took them thus you take more. But unlike when your suffering from a benzo and booze blackout where you often have a case of the disappearing benzos too many barbs on their own never mind with booze will kill you.

The real kicker is that although tolerance to the euphoric effects from Barbiturates wear off quickly the tolerance to the respiratory depressant effects will not increase by more then double on average. So often people on Barbs will reach a point where they literally can't get any kind of high without killing themselves from the CNS depressant effects. Also do you really want to go through Barbiturate wd? I have never gone through it but the people i know that have say that it's far worse then benzo withdrawal, you get addicted much quicker and seizures are much more common during withdrawal from Barbs as opposed to benzos.

As for the stimulants in the long run they will certainly make your depression far far worse. A dose of Dextroamphetamine every now and then when you absolutely need it to get through the day when your depressed is not that bad but the problem is that it all to often leads to people using them everyday. Long term or heavy use of Amphetamines have been known to cause horrible depression and i have experienced this myself more then a few times. After being spun for 3 or 4 days on heavy doses of Dextroamphetamine it took alot of will power not to blow my brains out with a shotgun to end the bottomless pit of misery that i was in. So again that along with other stimulants like coke is not a good idea at all if your depressed.

As for Ketamine that one has been proven to help both unipolar and bipolar depression often with just one dose. But if you get into abusing it you will end up fucking yourself in the end for sure.

I honestly would suggest going to your doctor and seek medical help there. Treatment really depends on what type of depression you have. If you have the lethargic, constantly fatigued and sleep all day type of depression a stimulating anti-depressant such as Bupropion (Wellbutrin/Zyban) may be of help. If you get the type of depression where insomnia and severe anxiety present themselves then a sedating anti-depressant such as the Tricyclic anti-depressants Amitriptyline, Doxepin or Trimipramine may help alot.

Anyway my main point is lay off the Barbs, booze and stims and see a doctor asap.

 

[a dream]

The walk down the psychiatry road is a long and brutal process which I think has hurt me more than it has helped.

Same with me. Over the past few years I've taken at least 15 different medications. I'm much worse off having taken them. It's tough for doctors to truly get that and I've gotten sick of it.

 

[Nom de Plume]

Barbiturates are absolutely one of the worst class of drugs to take if your depressed at all.

Since "worse" is subjective, I won't attempt to prove you wrong, as matters of better or worse, good or bad, etc., are essentially matters of taste. Matters of taste cannot be proved factually or logically incorrect or invalid. De gustibus non est disputandum , as the Romans said.

However, I've determined the most considerable and principal cause of my moderate depression to be my severe anxiety. I tend to worry myself into a depressive state. Therefore, it would seem appropriate to use an anxiolytic—barbiturates, say—to lessen the severity of the anxiety and, in turn, achieve a commensurate lessening in the severity of the depression.

They even make people with no mental health problems depressed sometimes especially if taken long term.

Taking any addicting substance long term is inadvisable. That's why I take barbiturates only as needed (when my anxiety is at its extremity and most insufferable), which is about once or twice per week on average. Taking them every day for a long-term interval is not only risky, but it is unnecessary.

So i would strongly suggest cutting them out. I have a friend who suffers from depression and was put on Phenobarbital by her doctor for some condition i forget and she went from being mildly depressed to suicidal depressed within about 2 days.

Her experience is obviously idiosyncratic. My experience with barbiturates, over a much lengthier period of use than 2 days (I've used them for years), has been the opposite.

People can have entirely different reactions to the same or similar drug and dose, which means extrapolating from the particular to the general is invalid and unjustifiable.

But one could take the aggregate of particular reactions to a specific drug and use it to develop a statistical conception of the typical reaction thereof, which can then be used as a meaningful and factual expectation of a drug's reaction in a randomly-chosen or hypothetical person.

This is not even mentioning that mixing Barbs with booze is a absolute fucking death wish. Scores of people died from this combo until just about every Barb besides Butalbital and Phenobarbital where removed from the market. Even today there are people who wind up as blue as a smurf from mixing Phenobarbital or Butalbital (the barb in Fiorinal/Fioricet) because it doesn't take that many tablets to kill you and you may forget you even took them thus you take more. But unlike when your suffering from a benzo and booze blackout where you often have a case of the disappearing benzos too many barbs on their own never mind with booze will kill you.

Unfortunately, it would not be in my best interest to give a sincere response to this segment of text. It seems any opinion expressed in a comment posted about barbiturates, that doesn't consist of incredibly embellished accusations of risk and danger or that fails to explicitly dissuade barbiturate use, would invariably be censored and the comment's poster forcefully slapped with an infraction.

Therefore, I shan't get too intertwined in this excursus, for fear I'd mention the unmentionable and be made to feel like I'm on an Internet message board version of the plot of Orwell's 1984 (again).

 

[Seattle_Stranger]

I would say that EVERY 20-something goes through a severe several-year-long period of depression at some point, it's like a rite-of-passage into true adulthood. Most folks come to a certain level of maturity somewhere in their early 20's, probably not long after moving out of mom and dad's house, after school, when life's realities truly set in. When you realize you're not a kid anymore, life isn't so sugar-coated and exciting anymore, you don't have that boundless energy or piss-and-vinegar motivation anymore, and the novelty of "OMG I'M ON MY OWN AND CAN DO ANYTHING I WANT!!!" has worn off, and now you're left with a desire to be "young and free" again.

While I can't offer any silver-bullet advice on how to get through this, I will say that you WILL get through it, everyone does, try not to rely on drugs, alcohol or "professional help" to get through it, because this is your test to see if you can handle the rest of your life. Trust me, when you get over this and can look back and truly, honestly say "I'm not depressed anymore" and can't think of the last time you woke up feeling worthless, the feeling of accomplishment is like nothing else. Everything that ever gets you down again in life will be compared to this bout of mid-20's depression, and it will mostly-likely pale in comparison.

Using myself as an example, right now my life is in one hell of a rut, my living situation, my job situation, family situation, money situation, ALL are in an very stressful, depressing, undesirable state at the moment, not to mention my lady's life is in a similar boat too. I can honestly say that the depression and anxiety I feel as a result is potentially more intense than what I felt back in my earlier 20's (29 now), but I know how to deal with it better so it doesn't consume me. If I had been faced with this life situation back when I was in my period of "I'm 23 and life is hard" depression, it would've probably killed me. No matter how bad my day is, I look back and shake my head and give a chuckle, thinking about how glad I am I don't feel THAT way anymore.

Good luck, my friend. It will be over soon.

 

[malakaix]

While I can't offer any silver-bullet advice on how to get through this, I will say that you WILL get through it, everyone does, try not to rely on drugs, alcohol or "professional help" to get through it, because this is your test to see if you can handle the rest of your life. Trust me, when you get over this and can look back and truly, honestly say "I'm not depressed anymore" and can't think of the last time you woke up feeling worthless, the feeling of accomplishment is like nothing else. Everything that ever gets you down again in life will be compared to this bout of mid-20's depression, and it will mostly-likely pale in comparison.

I hope your right, i have a intuition that this is the case.

Even at my lowest i still have a sense of optimism that this will pass in time, i hold onto that optimism like a life-raft. But there are days where i feel i'm on the edge of breaking.. i'll be 26 this year and this has been by far the hardest period for me. For the first time ever nothing is able to provide a sense of relief or joy, it use to be that i could meet up with friends, watch a movie or immerse myself within a game for some temporary relief but now it's permanently there like a splinter in my mind. Minor hindrances in life feel like major obstacles and usually receive the full wrath of my frustration because i'm constantly in a state of feeling high-strung and heavily weighed down.

In some way though, i do feel like this breaking down of self is part of a greater process.. it could just be a coping mechanism i've applied in order to endure the experience. Or it could be my way of letting go of everything so that i can walk in a different direction. I always try to find reason within the chaos, in my mind it can't be for nothing.. your always learning about yourself through the good and the bad. And in my case.. if i can get through this and persevere then i will be-able to look back and understand that on some level i needed to go through it.. perhaps this is just idealism. But it helps me manage this cunt of an illness.

 

[herbavore]

In some way though, i do feel like this breaking down of self is part of a greater process.. it could just be a coping mechanism i've applied in order to endure the experience. Or it could be my way of letting go of everything so that i can walk in a different direction. I always try to find reason within the chaos, in my mind it can't be for nothing.. your always learning about yourself through the good and the bad. And in my case.. if i can get through this and persevere then i will be-able to look back and understand that on some level i needed to go through it.. perhaps this is just idealism. But it helps me manage this cunt of an illness.

That is really pure gold right there. I am reminded again of one of my favorite quotes :

Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror.

Rilke

here is the whole poem:

"God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand."

 

[Rio Fantastic]

I'm predominantly anxious, but my anxiety started to transmogrify into depression approximately 3 years ago (I turned 21 last month). I chat with a shrink, to no avail. I talk with a doctor, to no avail. I take anti-depressants, to no avail. So, I just up and quit the doc's drugs and the shrink's drivel, and commenced the only therapy that's ever proved effective: copious quantities of alcohol, barbiturates by the handful, dissociative anaesthetics (namely PCP, ketamine, TCP), and large amounts of psychostimulants (to wit: amphetamine, occasionally meth, methylone, 4-MAR).

The booze and barbs help me forget my sorrows; the dissociatives help me come to terms with them; and the stimulants are just used to get me through the day and extirpate the lethargy.

NomDePlume, you know I truly adore you, you are by far my favorite person on this board, but your razor-sharp wit and your admirable and inspiringly huge lexicon mean nothing when they're just defense mechanisms to prop up a sneering, cynical facade to mask pain, depression and loneliness. I know you're an intelligent guy, so you *must* know the dangers of the cocktail of drugs you use regularly, and you must be aware of the dangers of neurotoxicity - it would be a real shame if that beautiful mind of yours was destroyed prematurely so when the depression lifts you're no longer miserable but you're a shadow of your former self. Don't let the depressed Nom de Plume destroy the regular Nom De Plume, because unless you suffer from dysthymia, depression is an episodic disorder, and it will lift. I also can't believe you haven't done this already, why are you taking drugs to help you forget your sorrows, drugs to help you get through the day and other drugs to give you some interest in life when opiates would accomplish all of this and crucially aren't neurotoxc (or, indeed, toxic at all)? I mean yeah opiates like heroin encourage lethargy and slovenliness rather than alleviate it, but oxycodone or hydromorphone are energizing and motivating, and are much more sustainable than stimulants.

 

[Nom de Plume]

NomDePlume, you know I truly adore you, you are by far my favorite person on this board, but your razor-sharp wit and your admirable and inspiringly huge lexicon mean nothing when they're just defense mechanisms to prop up a sneering, cynical facade to mask pain, depression and loneliness. I know you're an intelligent guy, so you *must* know the dangers of the cocktail of drugs you use regularly, and you must be aware of the dangers of neurotoxicity - it would be a real shame if that beautiful mind of yours was destroyed prematurely so when the depression lifts you're no longer miserable but you're a shadow of your former self. Don't let the depressed Nom de Plume destroy the regular Nom De Plume, because unless you suffer from dysthymia, depression is an episodic disorder, and it will lift. I also can't believe you haven't done this already, why are you taking drugs to help you forget your sorrows, drugs to help you get through the day and other drugs to give you some interest in life when opiates would accomplish all of this and crucially aren't neurotoxc (or, indeed, toxic at all)? I mean yeah opiates like heroin encourage lethargy and slovenliness rather than alleviate it, but oxycodone or hydromorphone are energizing and motivating, and are much more sustainable than stimulants.

Well, my life is lived in strict observance to a few primary existential organizing principles. There's an aphorism in Latin that I think can serve as at least a rough, albeit adequate, approximation of one such principle, and it goes thus:

'Quam bene vivas referre, non quam diu' . (English translation: It is how well you live that matters, not how long.)

We're all going to die sometime, anyway. To me it seems asinine and bizarre to squander one's short life away trying to avoid the unavoidable in lieu of living one's life and living it enjoyably. Personally, I think a life worth living is only a possibility if that life is lived as if it was infinite, but while never a moment forgetting the inevitability of death.

 

[Seattle_Stranger]

Minor hindrances in life feel like major obstacles and usually receive the full wrath of my frustration because i'm constantly in a state of feeling high-strung and heavily weighed down.

This never goes away. You just get better at dealing with it, as you will a lot of the emotions you're feeling. Eventually it's not so overwhelming.