Mental as anything

[SteveTheShadow]

Not saying any of this is easy. It’s taken me a long time to get well, but I got well. Try not to lose hope Stu.

[slinger]

This might be worth a shot, Stu. You can either get a referral from your GP, or you can refer yourself, apparently. I remembered being leafleted about it some time ago.

https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/talking-therapies-medicine-treatments/talking-therapies-and-counselling/cognitive-behavioural-therapy-cbt/overview/

[Lindsayt]

Many thanks for all the advice. I could go on forever about this, but will set the scene with some family history.

My mother has been clinically depressed for as long as I can remember. Crying a lot, sleeping through the day, awake all night, never going out much. She has been on medication all my life probably longer. She spent some time away in an institution when i was 8 or 9. She was even persuaded to have electric shock treatment on her brain. Not long after that she started with MS and dementia and here we are 20 years later. A cabbage in her own home.

My middle sister took an overdose and missed the whole third year of high school whilst in Bootham mental hospital. My maternal grandfather slit his wrists when he was in his 20's. He survived into his late 70's. My oldest sister(58) has been diagnosed with early onset Lewy body dementia and now is stuck in Cyprus with not a lot of help.

It would seem my family is plagued with mental issues. Not much hope for me then is there. I will tell you all everything as I'm not ashamed but ill get to myself in due course. But for now lets just say I work in the outdoors a lot of the time in a rural area which is not unattractive. I am lucky in that respect. My house is surrounded by fields with not many close neighbours. I watch a pair of barn owls hunting in the field behind my house most mornings and evenings. If they don't show up I get worried. I have a loving wife who would do anything for me and two beautiful kids. Why the fuck am I like this ?

I can only give personal thoughts on this. What I think has a chance of having some merit. Or it could be a complete load of bollocks.

Your family's history is down to luck. We all have to be born to someone. Who we are born to is beyond our control. We can't do anything about who our mothers and fathers are.

About 1 in 4 people each year in the UK experiences some kind of mental health issue. It would be a rare family that had no history of mental health conditions.

The history of psychiatry and psychology shows us that all sorts of batty theories are created, which become trendy and are then followed for a while. Electric shock treatment is one of the more shockingly bad examples. You had an army of NHS funded practitioners that were eager to justify their jobs and did so in the 1950's and 1960's by forcibly or coercively subjecting people to large electric shocks to their heads. A form of electric lobotomy.
It's human nature to act in sheep like ways and to follow the Overton Window of the time. Even if this results in evil behaviour. The way that shock treatment was given to a large number of people was pure evil.

These days mental health practitioners are more enlightened - but I think that they have simply moved from the stone age to the bronze age.

Things like the stress and anxiety awareness course that I went on are great.
What's not so great is the eagerness of professionals to put labels on people - when people can be complex. As well as too much focus on mitigating the symptoms instead of aiming for more prevention.

Whilst there may be a genetic factor in mental health issues, there may also be epigenitic factors. "Bad" habits run in families.

My personal thoughts are that the brain sits in a chemical soup. And the balance of these chemicals needs to be right in order for the brain to function properly. It's also possible for certain parts of the brain to be under-developed or damaged.

In my case, when I was having trouble sleeping properly, there was a very clear "environmental" reason for it. The shit that was going on at work. I'd have had to have been a robot for it not to have affected me. Although having gone through it, if I were put in a similar situation again, there's a good chance I'd cope with it better.

There's a book I've just read called The Wisdom Of Psychopaths. At times it's boring. At times it's a very interesting book. There are situations where all of us non-psychopaths would function better if we behaved and thought more like psychopaths. One of the things that separates psychopaths from non-psychopaths is that they get very focused on the task at hand. To the point where they exclude many peripheral things - such as how their actions will affect the emotions of the people around them.
Psychopaths don't suffer from anxiety or depression.
A psychopath working in a rural area would get on with the tasks required each day. A couple of barn owls would probably be a peripheral thing to them. Something they wouldn't pay attention to. Unless, for example the owls actually did go missing and this had a knock-on effect on mouse control. In which case they'd go ahead and do whatever they thought best to solve the mouse control task.

Psychopaths don't procrastinate.

Toxoplasmosis. It's a common worldwide parasite, typically caught from handling cat shit or eating pork, lamb, venison. There may be links between this parasite and long term mental health. Ascorbic acid might help to keep the effects at bay.

Inflammation. This has been linked to depression. There are certain food types that promote inflammation and certain food types that are anti-inflammatory. EG Fried eggs with sausage and bacon are inflammatory. Blueberries with amla powder are anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory.

And then there's people's basic life philosophy. You can have 2 people that go through the same experience and each of them will internalise what happened differently. I know, for example, that how I have internalised my youth and upbringing is very different to how my brother and sister did. I think that they put too much of a negative, serious spin on our childhood.

I don't know if anything I've written in this post will help. It's the sort of topic that's better discussed over a pint, face to face.

[karatestu]

Thanks all. Keep it coming is really helping me to think about it a bit more clearly.

I forgot to add my father's sorry tale. Lost feeling in his legs. Had an operation to free a trapped nerve in his back. He was starting to take his first steps again with the aid of bars when he got an abscess at the top of his spine. The surgeons infected is spine with MRSA. He nearly died three times and I have lost count of the number of times I was called to the hospital over the years because they thought he wouldnt make it. He could move his arms (just) but couldn't move his fingers or feel anything below his upper chest for the next ten years before his death. The last ten years of his life in a nursing home with chest infection after chest infection. Survived pneumonia once but the second time got him. I watched him die - it was like watching somebody drown on their own bodily fluids.

My childhood was a safe one. I never felt in any danger. I'm not sure if it was happy or not. My parents were good to me but there was always something emotional to block out. Teachers said I never showed any emotion. They thought my mum was dead because they never saw her. I still find it hard to show any. I was left to my own devices as my mum was in bits and dad was either at work, asleep or the pub. I shunned company a lot of the time but had plenty of friends and never had a problem making them. Growing up on a farm i was forever doing something outside. I never got in trouble, couldn't bear to be told off and generally I said very little. I am still rather quiet unless I've had 10 pints.

I did really well at school but it all started to go wrong for me in the final year of school. Went from an excellent student to good and then by the time of my A levels I was a lost cause. University followed after two years out doing very little. I hated Uni, didnt like being away from home and my cannabis use went up a level. I passed my course but not glowingly. Still showing very little emotion, very easily distracted and getting bored very very easily. I'm still like that.

The negative thoughts started about then, shortly after one of my grandparents died. Liking solitude, not showing emotion and having negative thoughts is a bit of a fecked up cocktail.

There is more to this story but it'll have to wait.

[Fretless]

You tell it very clearly and honestly Stu.
Respect.

[Lindsayt]

If anyone ever says that you don't show much emotion: fuck 'em.
What the fuck do they know? Why are they making such a shallow assessment? Blithering idiots.

What someone is feeling inside and how they appear to other people - especially people that aren't good at the empathy - can be two completely different things.

None of us can help our emotions.
What we can help is how we act in response to our emotions.

And if anyone behaves in a way where they don't make ostentatious shows of their emotions, then that's totally fine in my book.

[CN211276]

People have said it alll my life. Along with cheer up and you don't say much do you. It doesn't bother me now but it used to. Actually, people have stopped saying it so much now - maybe it's because I'm older and mixing with older people who know better.

After trying to block out and runaway from the emotional train crash that was my mum for so long it made me unable to process the emotional problems of others. It gives me that feeling of not being able to cope. I turned to animals and I have an ability to relate to them more than humans. We had loads of pets on the farm. Four cats, several dogs (they kept dying in sad ciumstances), a goat and my favourites Sarah and Beauty the donkeys.

I asked for a pony when I was six and got two donkeys instead - the idea being that two donkeys would be comparable. They were absolutely amazing animals. Not selfish like cats but really really loving, gentle and placid. If I was feeling shit I would go and sit in the field with them. More often than not they would sense my mood, come over and put their heads over my shoulders. Like a donkey hug. It's bringing a tear to my eye thinking about them.

Sarah & Beauty lived many years (for donkeys years ) and for a couple of pets who are with you for thirty years they were my gest friends. I was absolutely horrified when they died, I have never cried like it. I have a collection of photos of them arranged in a large frame on the wall and a couple of trees planted where their graves are so I don't forget. When at the seaside guess what I make a bee line for

When growing up because my mum was in the state she was and my dad so busy on the farm we had a house keeper called Mrx Aldred. From a very poor life but she was adorable. She ended up bringing me up and her husband taught me lots of outdoor skills that have remained with me. I called them grandma and grandad (-they were of retirement age) and spent loads of time round their council bungalow in the village. The garden was crammed full of vegetables. I helped to grow and tenc to them and when they got too old I did it all more or less. When my adopted grandparents died I was distraught, much more than when my parental grandmother died.

There us a bit of a point to all this. I have seen a lot of death of both animals and humans and i didn't cope well with it, still can't. If there is somebody weeping uncontrollably at a funeral then odds on that will be me. Buried a pet rabbit recently and I thought I was going to fill the hole I was digging with tears.

[Grumpytim]

Death is too mind boggling bleak to think about. The thought that as far as we know, we will die within the next 100 years. And when we do our consciousness will be snuffed out of existance.

It's possible that there is some form of life after death. But there is no scientific evidence of this.

And that is a mind-boggling thought. Trying to imagine what it will be like for our consciousness to stop. Forever. So that the universe will continue as if we no longer existed in the first place.

The way that most people cope is to not think about our own personal deaths - most of the time. To carry on living our lives in a state of kidding ourselves about death.

Our own personal death is by far the most important thing in our own personal universe.

That is terribly sad and depressing.

Another way of looking at it is that it's a wonderful miracle of nature that each of us was born. With a brain so amazingly complex that we have conscious thought. And we have language. We have that continuous stream going on inside our our heads whenever we are awake.

Conscious thought and memories are so amazing that it takes us a few years after we are born for us to get them.

Each day that we are alive is valuable. It's a wonderful precious gift. And in the UK in 2022, what we do each day is largely down to us. Every day is an opportunity for pleasure, contentment, satisfaction, joy, laughter, etc.

Also, if we were to look objectively at our lives in the UK and we were to slice it up, hour by hour, or minute by minute, we'd see that although there are episodes or moments in our lives where bad or sad things happen, the vast majority of the time what's happening is either neutral or good.
This means that it's rational and realistic to be optimistic.

Plus most of the bad stuff that happens to us is either interesting or is a good learning experience or is something that can be joked about after a passage of time. Today's "bad" experience is tomorrow's amusing anecdote.

Sometimes it makes a lot of sense to reflect on how wonderful our lives are. Even if it's something as simple as appreciating the beauty of a tree outside our window. Or as cliched as taking a large amount of pleasure from making love with our romantic partners.

[karatestu]

Thanks Lindsay. I really appreciate you going out of your way to help me.

I am not sure where to go next in trying to describe me. I have been in bands ever since I was 18 and could drive myself to a rehearsal. As the years went by and i did it semi professionally my use of cannabis grew and grew. I smoked it every day for about 15 years. it made me even more insular. I worry now what effect it has had on me long term. A friend of my wife's had a brother who smoked too much and it totally ruined him. He took his own life during lockdown.

[antonio66]

The Cannabis usage is in the past. There's nothing you can do about that now.

I did plenty of things when I was younger that I wouldn't do now. It's part of growing up. Maturing. Gaining wisdom. Doing different things. Trying different things. And then developing as a person and cutting out more and self-destructive things. And doing more self-constructive or self-preservative things.