…yeah.

My general mental state can be described as that one picture of the horse on the beach that says MAN

As someone else said upthread (and I’ve told a lot of people myself) if you’re depressed but know you can focus and accomplish things, the first thing you accomplish might be suicide.

This is one of the few places where I agree with standard practice. Depression first, then ADHD.

Why do that though? It’s not like not having the mental bandwidth to do basic things or your job would cause you to have less mental bandwidth to do stuff overall.

Also, the Adderall does wonders for my depression in addition to unlocking my superpowers

iirc there’s something called ‘depressive realism’ where depressed or otherwise overly pessimistic people tend to be more accurate at predicting outcomes. The implication being that to function as human beings we have to be at least slightly deluded at all times.

I looked that one up a bit ago. The source is Jiddu Krishnamurti, but it doesn’t look like the common quote is accurate:

It sure is more concise, though.

I remember that, and I have to say that this attitude contributed to me not thinking there was any point in pursuing help for my MDD.

Don’t let the world being shit demoralize you into not trying to improve your lot, ladies, gentlemen and citizens.

To add: they’re extremely good at noticing when you’re feeling down and will try to help.

This worked for me, still dealing with a lot of issues but there is atleast a hint of schedule. And one of of my two dogs is extremely finicky about time. She has to be out the door even if there no poop to be shat.

To quote Aesop Rock:

Fifteen years taking prescriptions then a shrink’s like “I dunno, maybe get a kitten?”

In my experience Adderall also gave me depression++ when I would come down at night.

Waiting for one of the various global crises to change in such a way as to become individually actionable, so that the famed ADHD crisis mode superpowers can finally kick in:

this is a PTSD thing right?

Yeah the ‘idk’ part is the important one because as a generation we’ve been so dependent on devices for everything from entertainment to productivity that we have no fucking clue what to do AFK. This has been a bitter struggle for me lately. I feel my life slipping away from me click by click but whenever I try to go offline my dopamine system SCREAMS at me to dig up the tablet I buried in my car’s trunk.

Yep, this has absolutely been what I’ve had to do.

No single one of us is the protagonist in some story where we’ll be the ones to tip the scales in what’s wrong with the world. Do what you can, where you can, and focus on the world around you. What directly effects you and those you care about.

There is not enough energy in any single person to be able to care about everything, and you’ll just burn yourself out for trying. This is true even in neurotypicals. It’s why people aren’t running around screaming constantly about the shit situations going on. It’s why people don’t seem to care, they can’t possibly care about absolutely everything.

So you, like them, have to at least try to exert some control over what you spend your time and mental energy on. It’s sure as fuck not easy and it doesn’t help improve shit in the grander world, but spiraling isn’t easy on you either and it also doesn’t help. It just makes you feel worse about everything.

I know this sounds just like someone telling you to “just focus more”, “just don’t be sad”, “just don’t worry”. But that’s not it. It’s not that simple. Never will be.

Even though it will likely be astronomically harder for you, you can exert some will and effort against the roiling storm of your own internal state. Anyone saying that it is literally impossible is letting the bad inside them win. Sometimes it is truly too much amd you have to, but you shouldn’t live in that space forever, and you need to remind yourself that it isn’t impossible whenever other people who are in a bad place are letting it win.

That internal bad is the bad you most need to try and fight, not the bad effecting the whole world.

The bad inside you may win. It may win most of the time, sometimes you might have to let it win because it’s too mich at the moment, but you need to try to fight it as much as you are able to. You don’t have to win, you just have to keep trying, as much and as often as you can.

Like if you haven’t eaten in 8 hours, and there’s food in your house, just eat some of it. Doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s appealing (is it ever when you feel like this?), if you don’t think it will help (do you ever think it will before you eat when you feel like this?), if you don’t want to (again, do you ever want to do anything when you’re spiraling like this?) Go shove some fucking slop into your goblin mouth. Something’s better than nothing. Hold onto whatever tiny bits of progress you can grasp by the edge of your fingertips and try to keep moving forward.

The secret is that you can do this. It sucks. It’s not easy. It may take years and external help. But it is possible. And it has been the most worthwhile thing I’ve ever done in my life to just keep trying.

This right here is why so many people with ADHD end up changing jobs so frequently.

Can confirm. When I got diagnosed with GAD, SzPD and rediagnosed with ADHD, my therapist asked me why I was so anxious all the time. After giving them the rundown of everything going on around me, they told me to not think about it.

Like, I get it. Would be cool. But, it’s around me. Would be easier to avoid the ground beneath my feet. They did end up helping me fine-tune my routine to unfuck myself when spiraling into a panic attack though.

You’re seeing the wrong therapist. Look for one that practices cognitive behavioral therapy, it’s really helped me personally.

I would say definitely try to minimize the doom scrolling tho, cut out some of the news if you can. I find life easier to deal with if I’m not always worried about how bad the world is outside.

When I was young I was a news junkie. Like, watching the local network news for an hour, then the world news. Every weeknight. This turned to news radio as an adult, especially since it was the only way to get traffic info at the time (yes, I am old). I cut this out save sports for many years, before there even was doomscrolling lol. Never had any social media to speak of for the longest time. Even when I joined Reddit about 10 years ago, I was just there for the niche hobby subs and avoided /all and /top like the plague.

Speaking of… when Covid hit it became fairly imperative to keep up with events. And it came right on the heels of getting screwed on a house purchase, and precipitated the work situation going from bad to worse. Felt like every time I tried to take a step forward I got a baseball bat to the kidneys, while the outside world made me question if the boneheaded decisions made in horror movies were really all that unrealistic.

The ironic part is that I had serious trouble finding decent mental health treatment while paying out the ass for insurance, since all it seemed to cover was pill mills and unqualified social workers (which I then had to further cough up dough for). So when I had a breakdown this past winter I was pretty much hopeless. But somehow, the Evil Socialist Freeloader Plan (aka Medicaid) let me hit the freaking lottery for both group and individual therapy (unhelpful PHP detour notwithstanding). I feel like I’m making actual progress.

The catch: in a month or two I’m either going to be homeless, or spending all of the spoons doing something I’ll hate in exchange for maybe enough little slips of paper that prove I’m allowed to exist (or, ya know, sleep). Either way, the clock is ticking, and the doc is slow-walking my meds. Meanwhile I’m selling off personal items to pay bills, and come November there may not be a functioning SSA to process my disability claim that that I still haven’t fully filled out because of executive dysfunction and the work questions being triggering.

Tick tock, tick tock.

paralysis intensifies