The Mental Health Thread

[cartman]

Is the third Monday of January the most depressing day of the year?

[Radii]

My psychiatrist recommended light therapy to me the last time we met. Her recommendation was any light on Amazon that advertised a light of 10,000 lux, and to use it for 30 minutes a day early in the work day. I've been doing so for about a week, I can't really say if it's helping with anything yet, but there's tons of them available for relatively cheap so it seemed harmless to try out.

EDIT: specifically a suggestion for Seasonal Depression.

[Ksyrup]

Originally Posted by cartman

Is the third Monday of January the most depressing day of the year?

That's why 9 days later, I'm heading to New Zealand!

[RainMaker]

Originally Posted by Radii

My psychiatrist recommended light therapy to me the last time we met. Her recommendation was any light on Amazon that advertised a light of 10,000 lux, and to use it for 30 minutes a day early in the work day. I've been doing so for about a week, I can't really say if it's helping with anything yet, but there's tons of them available for relatively cheap so it seemed harmless to try out.

EDIT: specifically a suggestion for Seasonal Depression.

I've been using one too for a few years. Mostly because I like to wake up late and in the winter, I'm not getting much sun light. Can't really say if it works or not since I forget quite often, but I have felt better in the winter. I've also been taking Vitamin D and trying to get at least 10k steps in a day (or ride a few miles on the exercise bike).

The exercise has probably had the best effect on me. When I'm walking a lot, I do feel like I'm in a much better mood (plus it has improved my sleep).

The catch-22 is that when you feel shitty, the last thing you want to do is go outside and move around.

[Lathum]

So last March after my dad passed I started taking stock in my life and one of the things I determined was sports betting wasn't healthy for me. I made my last bet March 17 last year. I started seeing a therapist to deal with my grief as well as other things. He determined I was not a gambling addict, which is good, I just felt like it made me a person I didn't like being. It wasn't a financial thing, although I wasn't telling my wife how much or often I was betting. I would stay up super late at night, step out of family events to make bets, etc...I did eventually discuss it with my wife who was beyond supportive. Overall I am much happier a person.

This will be the first Superbowl in over 30 years I haven't bet on, other than squares, and it feels a bit weird not to hammer a bunch of stupid props. I haven't even looked at them.

[Qwikshot]

Not much changed on the marriage front. My wife is struggling with so much. I try to be supportive but she does a lot of self-inflicted damage.

Lawyer called and we're moving to mediation in about 30 days, if I decide to go forward.

I just feel the weight of disrupting my boys' lives over things that should've been so simple to keep in control.

She would have to drastically change so much that I don't think she's capable of, and I believe that to be okay. You can't change who you are unless you want to, but at the same point after 13 years, you know what you are getting.

I don't consider the post divorce lifestyle to be much better. I'm not a type A regardless of my aggressive posting on the board. I just want equilibrium to things.

When my kids needed things I didn't have any problems with that. This past Christmas my wife floated the idea of not having Christmas. I was so angry, because my children are being punished for her decisions. I was able to cobble together to get them a nice Christmas. But this entitlement and then when things go bad everyone else has to pay for it is exactly why I filed.

I work out which helps reduce the stress. I try to enjoy the time I have with my sons as if it's the last time because things are going to change.

Couples therapy just shows me we're locked into who we are.

[flere-imsaho]

I've shared my experience with my father having Alzheimer's upthread. This week I met with my Mom and her lawyer to chart the financial and legal intricacies of moving them both into a community where he can eventually have the option of Memory Care (and in the interim they'll have less to keep up around the house and the option of caretaker help) without losing all their money.

It's too much complexity for my Mom, so I'm basically in charge as the only sibling capable of doing so. Adding to the complexity is that they're half the country away. In addition, it is clear that in a worst-case scenario (either of them needing extended nursing home care), I'm likely the financial backstop, which has scuttled any hope of a near-term retirement.


To add to that, our 12-year-old son, who has had bullying issues at school for about a year now saw his therapist two weeks ago, who pulled us aside afterwards and told us he has a concrete plan to end his life and needs to go into a facility immediately. Which we did. We're now working through that while simultaneously doing all the work to transfer him to a private school (another hit to the retirement plans) for at least the remainder of 7th and all of 8th grade.

What keeps me going is the thought that at some point, X years from now, this is all better. But this is not a lot of fun.

[Lathum]

OMG flere. As the parent of a 13 year old this horrifies me. Not to freak you out but a 12 year old kid next town over took his own life last week so thank god you listened and took it seriously.

[JPhillips]

Jeez flere. God bless. That's incredibly scary and stressful.

[Kodos]

Parenting is so much harder than I thought it would be. Hang in there Flere, Qwiksot and everyone else who is struggling.

[tarcone]

Been a rough week. Today would have been my 25th anniversary and tomorrow is the one year anniversary of my divorce.
Been keeping busy. Have 4 new games to tackle. Went on a 3 mile hike today. Mix in Xanax annd weed and Im getting through it.

[GrantDawg]

Originally Posted by tarcone

Been a rough week. Today would have been my 25th anniversary and tomorrow is the one year anniversary of my divorce.
Been keeping busy. Have 4 new games to tackle. Went on a 3 mile hike today. Mix in Xanax annd weed and Im getting through it.

I probably need some Xanax in my life. Not weed, though. I get anxious instead of relaxed on weed for some reason.

[miami_fan]

*Long Rambling Post Alert*

My great aunt passed away at 99 years old. I know we sometimes talk about not wanting to live to that age but she lived and enjoyed every one of those years right up until the beginning of February when she had a stroke. She survived that and within a week or so wanted and then demanded to go home. They would not allow her to go home because she was still frail and in pain and lived by herself so she ended up going to my uncle's house. She was alive for another four days or so and then passed away peacefully in her sleep on February 12. Over the next two plus weeks, our family went back to our ancestral home and sent our matriarch home.

I have never experienced a death of a loved one where there was no stress, no sadness, no thought of what could of or should have been. That is what happened with my aunt's death. The only disappointment was I wish she could have made to April 5th for he 100th birthday party. But even that feels silly, she lived for 99 years! She traveled to every continent multiple times. Other than a year she lived at a relative for her first job, she lived in the same house her parents bought before she was born. She never married, had no kids but her house was always filled with family, friends, former teaching and administrative colleagues and former students. She enjoyed four generations of family after hers. And who the hell has former students come to have lunch with them every year and they handle everything including making sure to clean up everything before they left her house 20+ years after she retired. To say that she lived a life well lived is an understatement.

She planned and paid for every detail of her funeral. Every reading, every hymn, every speaker, every musician, if it happened at the funeral she had planned it. She told the family what she wanted to wear while in the coffin and during her cremation. She made sure this was going to be a celebration of life. Rule# 1- There will be one eulogy, the minister will give his sermon and that was it. No tributes or anything like. We could and did set up a separate service for that. The rest of the funeral was nothing but hymns hymns and more hymns. It was wonderful. I have never given serious thought to what my funeral would look like but having gone through funerals with what felt like a never ending conveyor belt of people giving their well meaning and understandably sad tributes to the deceased, I now know I don't want that. Save the tributes for another day. I hate the idea of family and friends being sad even it is because I passed. I want them to feel what I and everyone else felt after my aunt's passing. But I wonder if that can only be the case if the person lives to 99 and squeezed every drop of life out of each of those years.

Now a week or so after returning home, I am finally coming to grip with reality. My great aunt was the last of my maternal grandparents' generation. There is only one left in that generation on my paternal grandparents' side. My parents' generation are now the elders in the family for intents and purpose. They are now the closest links to the good ol' days. That also means all of a sudden, I have moved up on the family tree. I was definitely aware that my parents were getting older but now with the exception of my great aunt on my Dad's side, my parents' generation are the oldest living one in the family. And then it is mine. Damn, life comes at you fast.

[thesloppy]

That was a moving tribute, sounds like she had a great life and we can all only hope to be so well remembered.

[Kodos]

A nice tribute, Miami. Sounds like she had a great life. May she R.I.P.

[miami_fan]

Thank you the sloppy and Kodos.

As much as it was a tribute to her, it was me just reflecting getting older and moving up the hierarchy of family. Having kids 10+ years a part with the oldest in his late 20s with no kids (though that may be changing soon), I feel like others have already this experience. This trip found me sitting on the porch with my nephews and other members of his generation watching their kids playing in the yard. I was just doing that with her and my youngest son a few years ago.

[Schmidty]

I want in on this thread. I have been frightened to read it.

I’m reading it now. I hope that once I respond, I don’t tigger or make someone else’s day subpar.

[Schmidty]

Originally Posted by Radii

My psychiatrist recommended light therapy to me the last time we met. Her recommendation was any light on Amazon that advertised a light of 10,000 lux, and to use it for 30 minutes a day early in the work day. I've been doing so for about a week, I can't really say if it's helping with anything yet, but there's tons of them available for relatively cheap so it seemed harmless to try out.

EDIT: specifically a suggestion for Seasonal Depression.

DO LIGHT THERAPY!

Sorry for caps and this was 10 seconds from me saying I’d read the thread, but gosh dang! Light therapy saved my life! Light therapy in a controlled environment is therapeutic beyond belief. You get the wrong part of the spectrum for your trauma? It is terrifying. It has made me not be able to breathe and I had to quit.

But when you hit that mark? Those marks? You will get better.

[Edward64]

Condolences miami_fan.

3 of my grandparents died before I got to know them. The 4th live a pretty long time, but was blind and in a different country. I honestly did not know her well.

I did get a chance to take the kids to see her before she passed. I like to think that brought her some comfort.

It’s great you had 99 years.

[Ksyrup]

On the subject of grandparents... you know, it's interesting - my brother and I have had a lot of time to ruminate on our relationship with our parents given the rough 6+ months we've had since my Dad's accident. My parents continually gave us shit for never visiting them in Texas, despite the fact that nearly every year, my family would go on vacation with them, they'd visit us once on their own, and then we'd all gather for either Thanksgiving or Christmas (usually at my house). It didn't matter; it was always "it's embarrassing that our kids haven't been to visit us in years."

My response was always - we go on vacation with you. I only have so much time off. If you think I'd rather spend a week sitting on your couch while you play on your iPads rather than going to Hawaii, or Arizona, or Utah, or Michigan, etc. (all places we went with them), guess again. But it came up constantly (my brother has less of an excuse than me, so I leaned pretty hard into it, since my conscience is clean, lol).

For years before my Dad's accident, we begged them to move closer to us. We did not grow up in TX (we lived there for about 3 years in the early 80s, but that's it). We were living in GA when I went to away to college, and in FL when my brother went away to college. They left us in the mid-90s to move back to TX (for job reasons, completely understandable, but still). As they got older, we told them they needed a plan to be closer to us as they aged. They resisted for years. We finally conviced them to move, and if you've read my previous posts, you know what happened - my Dad fell on his head cleaning out the attic in the garage 2 weeks before closing on the sale of their house.

Anyway, I bring all that up to say, as my brother and I have struggled to deal with (mainly) my Mom's inability to handle the most basic aspects of life, let alone my Dad's accident - and all of the frustrations and bile that has surfaced given the ongoing stressful situation - we've discussed the fact that they have had some pretty unfair expectations of us, considering their own circumstances. My parents were both born and raised in the Detroit area. On my Mom's side, my grandmother died of cancer when I was about 5. We used to regularly visit my grandfather, and we'd visit my Dad's parents every Sunday and he'd mow the lawn. But in 1981, we moved to TX. They basically left their parents to be taken care of by their siblings who remained in MI (I believe there were some hard feelings, particularly on my Dad's side, but I was too young to really get into it). We went back once, that I can recall, for something other than a funeral.

And crucially, the one thing they didn't have to deal with was a long aging process. We left in 1981 - by 1988, all three of my remaining grandparents were dead. There was no long, drawn out process of having to deal with aging parents. They were all older to begin with, and they each died suddenly. So my brother and I have a bit of resentment for the way we've been hounded about my parents' situation, given that (a) they moved 1000+ miles away from their own aging parents, and (b) they didn't have to deal with 30+ years of navigating life with aging parents.

My parents were barely 40 when the last of their parents passed away. Between me and my wife and my brother and SIL, we have all 6 parents still alive. We're going on 53; brother and SIL are in their late 40s. So it's been particularly difficult listening to my Mom talk about their pre-accident beefs given the relatively light load they had to carry with their parents (and the inherent hypocrisy of the circumstances).

[Corny_1]

I've been feeling a weight of anxiety lately, mostly stemming from work and personal stressors. It's like there's a constant knot in my stomach that just won't loosen up.
Tried meditation and breathing exercises using this Calmer app, which has been somewhat helpful, but I need a bit more support.
I'm looking for recommendations from others who have dealt with similar struggles, and I'm open to exploring different ways to manage my anxiety more effectively.
Any suggestions?

[flere-imsaho]

Huh, my last post was February:

Originally Posted by flere-imsaho

What keeps me going is the thought that at some point, X years from now, this is all better. But this is not a lot of fun.

So, in March I called every Memory Care facility in Southern Maine and put together a short list for my Mom to visit. She finally finished these a few weeks ago. The good news is that there's a couple that she likes and seem do-able.

Now, the next hurdle is getting her to make the decision to put him into a Memory Care facility. She's not there yet, despite the fact that most days he doesn't recognize her, leading to some mornings where he's woken her up (they haven't slept in the same bedroom for years, mostly due to each of them having trouble sleeping), asked who she was, and threatened to call the police.

The good news is that my siblings are aligned that he needs to go into a facility, but....

I talked to her over the weekend about next steps and Dad overheard the conversation and yelled at her that he should be involved in the discussion and it felt like we were planning to lock him away in a home. So, whenever it happens, it's going to be messy.

Another lousy part is that her physical health is actually worse than his. It's quite possible she dies before him. I've already told my siblings I can't take him in. My one responsible sister has two special needs kids and a husband with MS so she can't do it. The other sister... no. And who the fuck knows about my brother, who only seems interested in himself these days.

I'm going there over Christmas and dreading it. I'll likely hardly sleep, be stressed the whole time, and the thought of having the same conversation multiple times a day, every day, with my Dad is awful. Plus, Mom & I have to do an appointment with the lawyers which means either he'll stay at home and I'm not sure how we explain that, or he'll come and we'll have to skirt around the subject we're talking about with the lawyers.

Meanwhile, after 4 years of work I think I've finally got them to a financial & legal place where putting him in Memory Care won't bankrupt them. However, if she ends up needing to be in a Nursing Home, it likely will. In addition, at some point she's still planning to move to a retirement community, which will likely require that I go out there for a couple of weeks to handle the move for them (the extent to which my Mom is overwhelmed by literally everything at this point cannot be understated).


Meanwhile on the homefront our son who we took out of public school we ended up getting into a local private school (at runious cost, of course). He did fine, but did have some behavioral issues towards the end of last school year, mainly of the sort of him being the bully, which turns the whole thing on its head and is its own special wonderful.

We were hopeful about re-setting over the summer which included a 3 week family vacation to Europe (which went OK) and 4 weeks at overnight camp with his best friend. Well, Europe went fine. But after a week at camp we got the call that he was being kicked out for behavior and had to drive up to Wisconsin to bring him home.

School year at the private school started out OK, but he's had some frustration issues with other kids that led to some altercations both physical and using really offensive language.

We've managed to work through it OK, but just today learned of two horrible instances from Thursday & Friday that resulted in him being sent home today until Fridays, so I had to leave work (wife is traveling for work) to pick him up and bring him home. Without going into too much detail he, on more than one occasion, talked to a male classmate about how it was OK for male classmate to rape male classmate's girlfriend. Straight out of the Andrew Tate playbook, which is littered all over his social media / youtube history and which I am effectively powerless to stop, unless I guess I want to remove all screens and/or police this shit each and every day of the week. His brother shared similar deeply misogynistic views, but at least has become smart enough not to share them within earshot of his parents.


And lastly, the 16-year-old got in a car accident week 2 of school (he was not driving) and suffered from concussion symptoms for about 6 weeks, making it very difficult to keep up with Junior year work, and so has been slowly catching up. The school has not been a lot of help, and his difficulty in working with other people (i.e. counselors, advisors, tutors) hasn't helped, so at one point I had to step in and basically project manage everyone's involvement in getting him caught back up on work. He'll continue to be catching up through the end of the semester. And, although he got his license just before the crash, he hasn't been cleared to drive, so we're still driving him everywhere.


Oh, and I guess lastly-lastly, my wife has been super busy this year with her work, having gone out on her own in March of 2023. So I've been pretty much covering everything at home, including all the above stuff with the kids. To enable this I've basically been avoiding all possible entanglements at work, and between that and the knowledge that I'll likely retire in the next 5 years (due mainly to inheritance from her parents who died too early to use it so, silver lining I guess) my career, such as it was, is basically over.

Then, this past weekend, while going over financial projections, my wife shares that her goal for her business was mainly merely to break even. This came up as I was pointing that if she starts netting a certain amount of money from her business it could theoretically speed up my retirement time, which would give me more time to, say, support the kids. So, I'm like why am I sabotaging my career through inaction so I have the free time to cover all the family stuff so as to enable her success when her plan is mainly to do "just enough" to break even while doing work she enjoys?


Honestly, I feel like literally everyone in my life is taking advantage of me. I am so done with all of this shit.

And just in case anyone's worried, I'm not suicidal or in danger of self-harm. I feel weirdly calm about everything, although maybe that's masking a deep-seated rage or depression or both. I appreciate the ability to vent here.