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I just turned 30 last November. Seems like all life does anymore is pass me by. I've dealt with severe anxiety and depression for the better part of the last 2 decades, and before that, ADHD as a child. I have tried every medicine under the sun, including experimental ones like ketamine and such. I've done ECT treatments, hundreds of therapy sessions and group therapies. The doctors switched my diagnosis from bipolar, to severe GAD, to borderline personality disorder, back to GAD, many times, and I'm not even sure what the current one thinks I am. I mostly sit there staring into space when I'm in his office. I have no hope or will left in me anymore. I haven't truly felt suicidal since 2009, which is when I had two suicide attempts, but I'm beginning to be okay with dying again. 2 years ago, I lost the love of my life and since then this hole inside me has become larger than ever. We were together for 6.5 years, and it was the most fulfilling, joyous years of my life. Now I'm at the point where feeling sad is a relief, because I mostly feel nothing. I rarely feel anything anymore besides resentment and anger because I know I should be feeling but I'm not. It doesn't matter where I am or what I'm doing, I remain empty inside. I'm so apathetic and detached from the world and the people in it, including friends and family. I isolate myself, turn my phone off for weeks at a time even. I just don't care anymore. I struggled with this beast before I met the love of my life, but she filled me with something that medicines and doctors never could. LOVE. It was like a breath of fresh air, with the sun on my face. Blissful, peaceful. I love her every moment of every day, and I know without her I won't make it. She's the reason I stopped feeling suicidal in 2009. That's the year we met, coincidentally in ECT therapy. We were both in the same waiting room. It's funny, we wouldn't remember each others' names or that we had started making plans to see each other outside of therapy. We were like kids in the recovery room, sitting on our hospital gurneys kicking our feet, sipping on those juice boxes they give you after they electrocute ya, completely nonjudgmental, embracing each others' company. Our mothers had to help us out hahaha. Our memory and attentions spans at the time were hilariously short. My mother would drive me to go see her, and I would forget who I was going to see on the way there. Her mother would remind her to get ready because she had company coming over but she would always forget who was coming to see her. But we would always remember when we saw each other, and we would embrace each other with the biggest hugs. It was like seeing each other for the first time, every time while we were still having ECT treatments, except we knew each other. Hard to explain. I'm simplifying everything but I truly have not ever felt something so strong and amazing, that attraction that soulmates share, if you believe in such things. I've tried dating (if you can even call it that) and talking to girls since I lost her but nothing makes me care. Sex is meaningless, conversations are meaningless...doesn't matter who's talking to me, or how much they're into me, they aren't her. They'll never be her. I just space out and imagine how comfy my sanctuary is where I can lay back with my feet on my soft carpeting and just rest. That's all I ever want to do anymore, just rest. Be as close to 'at peace' as I can. Life never had much sway over me, and now that I'm without 'her'...I'm so close to the final exit. It sucks because this could have all been avoided. I used to drink alcohol, A LOT. I even went to rehab for it, and stayed clean since then with a few hiccups/reminders not to drink. Alcohol never mixed well with me, and caused more problems than she could put up with. I hate myself for not seeing clearly quicker. For not listening to her. And so here I am, a broken being writing on this forum not because I seek help but because I just feel like I should put a brief summary of my story out there. I apologize if any of you were here looking for answers. I see many other souls in pain here too, which inspired me to share. It's nice knowing we aren't completely alone.

So I've been with my boyfriend on and off for almost 5 years. I want to love him I really do, I want to have a good relationship. But we don't even have sex. I'm 21 years old, almost 22. I still love with my mom and I suffer from depression. I'm worried I'll fall into a spiral of depression like I did the last time we broke up and I almost committed suicide. It would be so much easier if I had someone to talk to to tell me it would all be fine and i will find somebody else who makes me way more happy. Honestly I don't remember when my life was somewhat normal. I work 50,000 times harder then my boyfriend. I actually make decent money and I'm going places and being recognized for things I do. Where as my boyfriend hasn't worked in months, he just now got a job that pays him an average amount of money. For a man I think it's shit pay. My dad and all the men in my family basically except my mom side. Work super hard for their cash. My dads side is very traditional in that sense. So the fact that I'm dating a low life is very concerning. I have cheated and we broke up then got back together a few times. We have got in raging fights etc I've thrown things. Clearly very unhealthy. I used to be much happier. I wish I had friends. My only friend is my mom and him. It's very depressing. Right now I'm on a very low dose of escitalopram. Which helps a bit and my job definitely helps but I don't have a good support system at home. I miss having friends and a supportive boyfriend. I don't know how to help this situation. Or maybe I do and I just need some encouragement. Any advice? Anyone been through something similar? No judgment please. If I want judgment I'll go to Yahoo answers... lol thanks in advance ?? photo is from when we first started dating maybe less than I year in.

Also posted in bipolar page, but mostly related to my depression. Recently, I have been overcome with periods of intense sadness. Out of nowhere, I will experience crying and feeling completely overwhelmed to the point it sometimes takes an hour to get over it. This is a problem, especially when I am at work or in public. Any kind of slightly emotional thought seems to trigger it. I feel like I am always at the edge of bawling. Here is some background: In the past year, my adult son (23) nearly died in an auto accident, fully recovered, then had a massive stroke last month, fully recovered again, but has a couple more surgeries to go. In the meantime, my marriage with his step-dad has deteriorated quickly due to his unemployment and subsequent bankruptcy. Now I know this seems like a "Duh, Look at everything you have been through!", but I am not a person who "does" emotions well. I am pretty much of a suck-it-up type. I would prefer to schedule times to be emotional if I could. My meds have been working great this past year and got me out of a multi-year depression, but now I am really irritable and some symptoms of my mania are coming back (high libido, racing thoughts, lack of concentration). Going to start talk therapy again soon and have an appointment with med doc, but what do I call this what I am experiencing? Sadness Attack is the best I can come up with. Anybody else experience this kind of thing? The fatigue is ridiculous, too.

Recently, I have been overcome with periods of intense sadness. Out of nowhere, I will experience crying and feeling completely overwhelmed to the point it sometimes takes an hour to get over it. This is a problem, especially when I am at work or in public. Any kind of slightly emotional thought seems to trigger it. I feel like I am always at the edge of bawling. Here is some background: In the past year, my adult son (23) nearly died in an auto accident, fully recovered, then had a massive stroke last month, fully recovered again, but has a couple more surgeries to go. In the meantime, my marriage with his step-dad has deteriorated quickly due to his unemployment and subsequent bankruptcy. Now I know this seems like a "Duh", but I am not a person who "does" emotions well. I am pretty much of a suck it up type. My meds have been working great this past year and got me out of a multi-year depression, but now I am really irritable and some symptoms of my mania are coming back (high libido, racing thoughts, lack of concentration). Going to start talk therapy again soon and have an appointment with med doc, but what do I call this what I am experiencing? Sadness Attack is the best I can come up with. Anybody else experience this kind of thing?

Does anyone else have a similar experience? I have a lot of physical health issues, and I think that they can nearly all be traced back to my GAD. Migraine headaches, muscle pain and spasms, stomach issues, dizziness, general fatigue -- it just feels like a constant onslaught. While the rational part of my brain knows that I am a very healthy person - the only "real" illness I've had in the last few years is a kidney stone this past month, which is just compounding the situation because it's quite painful - I still feel like a very sick and broken person, even though I know my issues are mostly anxiety-related. My boyfriend is very supportive of me, even when I'm throwing myself a pity party, but I still wonder, who would put up with someone like me? And are there other people who deal with these problems? Or am I just, like, incapable of handling life's stresses?

so my started with FAS and taken away from my mom right at birth, she had drinking problems and drug problems while my dad was in jail and that was my first day on earth and its already that sad. Then i was taken to a foster home where i met someone i would know as my mom and since she raised me i thought she was my mom which i later found out she wasnt cause she left me in the dirt just like everyone else in my life later one. After that i would move to a bad home where the foster dad didnt give a shit about any of us he would tell me santa isnt real and all the stuff that young kids believe in he would steal money from what cfs gave him and spend it on himself while we were giving 10 dollars clothing allowance a month which is why i was made fun of during when i went to school and plus i had all these problems at home (foster home) already my life is starting to suck real bad so i started getting depressed when i was 9 and i didnt know what it was so i didnt know what to tell people or explain how i was feeling and also he would lock us in the basement every day we were not allowed to leave it..... yeah you care about me alright i would tell myself, He would always he my parents never cared, that nobody cared about me and that was why he was in my life he said that nobody cares and that i care he would say. So im already sad and depressed at age 10 and crying wishing i could live with my old foster mom again i called her crying on the phone begging take me back but she didnt care. so i move out of that old foster home but now i got problems and issues and im mentally scarred from it, so i move into some random place for kids who have no where to stay and oh boy there loved me i went out to see my friends on the 1st day i was there i since it was my 1st time being there i didnt know how to get back home and it was a new area so i couldnt find my way home i called them....BOTH OF THEM the mother and the dad and they said they couldnt help me because they gave me bus tickets so i was stuck on the streets for about 3 and a half days walking around i tried to sleep in a bus shack but it was raining to hard and it was loud and i ended up staying up for 3 and a half days in the rain and cold just wearing a t shirt and shorts so i go to my buddys place and ask if they can help me but they were racist and called the cops on me hoping i will do to jail. So then the cops take me away and i have no idea where there taken me and they took me back to that foster home the ones who didnt care about me at all they didnt even pick me up when i need them too. So i move out of that home and im living with one of my bros but now i got trust issues and im paranoid and broken and im only 13 i wasnt going to school because i was very depressed so after that i move to like 4 other homes none of them worked. so now i move to the home where im living at right now and i meet my family for the 1st time and they got me into drugs and a bad crowd and i remember my dad telling me that my mom was a hooker which brought me to tears i was trying hard to hold it in and hide them from my dad and then about a year after that i got paranoid schizophrenia and was put in a psych ward for almost 7 months and when i came out i was different it was hell in there, I was scared of my surroundings because i been in there so long and people tell to my life wasnt bad at all that there are people out there who got it worse than me and thats just the stuff i can put to words...........thats only some of the bad stuff that happened so i stand before you a broken men (the best way to break a man is to break him before he becomes a man)

My happiness is the only reason for me finding good meaning about me as a person and finding good meaning in this life. Without that, there would be nothing good about me as a person or anything good in my life. I can just use my thoughts alone to perceive me and my life being good even without my pleasure. But these are nothing more than neutral (neither good or bad) thoughts and that would not make me or my life anything good at all regardless of how much I help others and do great things in my life. Therefore, since I no longer have any pleasure 24/7 due to my anhedonia (emotional numbness) in which there are never any brief moments of pleasure to any degree whatsoever, this is why there is no longer anything good about me as a person or my life. My dream in life was to be a composer and I was in the process of learning how to compose. My dream was to be a great composer through my pure pleasure alone because, to me, that is the only thing that defines someone as being great. As a matter of fact, the fact that I had the ability to experience feelings of pleasure so great and profound, this would enable me to be a really great composer who would be able to channel those feelings in creating emotionally powerful compositions. Feelings of depression and anhedonia are not classified as feelings at all. They are the taking away of your pleasure and other emotions. Therefore, they are not anything to tap into and channel in creating any type of emotionally powerful composition. Instead, they make you a lesser person and a lesser composer who can only create compositions through intelligence alone which would be nowhere near great and emotionally powerful as opposed to if you were to create compositions through your profound feelings of pleasure. In other words, even the greatest composers in history who had depression and/or lack of pleasure could of been even better if they had their full pleasure to tap and channel into. But I have given up being a composer right now since my only goal in becoming a composer was to tap into and channel my feelings of pleasure I valued so much and create many different types of music through my pure pleasure alone. Creating music through my suffering is NOT what I want to do and doing so would only make me feel that much worse. To me, music is all about enjoyment and creating music through your pure pleasure alone. I have given up being a composer because me choosing to become a composer brings me nothing but anger and frustration now since I no longer have any pleasure to tap into and channel. I refuse to be the biological robot in a world that absolutely calls for our experience of love and pleasure (which would be the emotional world of composing) who does nothing but creates music through having no pleasure. I will not channel even my own feelings of anger and frustration in creating music because, again, that only makes me feel worse and is not what I wanted to do at all anyway. Now, if, let's pretend, that I were the greatest composer in the world right now and composed masterpieces, this would actually be the worst moment of my life. This is because these would be the greatest pieces of music I have written and this would be the greatest moment of my life and I am not even allowed to enjoy it to any degree at all. Sure, composing music for other people and bringing them pleasure is good. But music is a very personal emotional thing to me and I must, therefore, experience good feelings from my music. Otherwise, me being a composer is completely pointless and detrimental as it only brings me nothing but rage and frustration knowing that I cannot experience any pleasure from my own compositions whatsoever as well as that I don't have any good feelings to even tap into and channel in creating my compositions which would be much more emotionally powerful since they were created through my emotions (my pleasure) rather than them being created without such feelings. Since my personal experience of pleasure was so profound and meaningful to me in the past, then I absolutely cannot just simply ignore this and choose to view other things in life as something greater. This is because I reject doing so and reject being the lesser person with a lesser life as a result. Now if you or anyone else here has found other things in life of greater value than your pleasure (which would include finding greater things in life than even your own feelings of love), then you obviously have not experienced these feelings nearly as profound or meaningful as I have to know that they are truly the only good and greatest things in life. Now if you can never fully recover your lost love and pleasure, then at least you have spent your entire life by being the superior human being who has tried to fully recover these things. If you are going to say something such as that living your life trying to fully recover these lost feelings instead of accepting this loss and moving on is a wasted life, it's not a wasted life. Like I said before, feelings of love and pleasure are the only greatest aspects of me as a human being and are the only things that make my own personal life worth living. So for me to abandon them and instead live my life for other reasons besides trying to fully recover them, THAT would be the wasted life for me. Finally, one might say that I am still a good person since I still care and help others anyway. However, to me, someone who helps and cares for others is no better or worse than someone who is a psychopath and kills others. The only thing that makes you a better or lesser person is your amount of pleasure in life regardless of who you are as a person. Since I have lesser pleasure, that makes me a lesser person than even Hitler himself who has more pleasure in life (although there may be moments where he definitely had bad moments in his life from harming others). The reason why I say this is because, again, my personal experience of pleasure says this since it was so profound and meaningful to me and there is nothing in life that can ever take place of that regardless of how much I try and change my attitude and other things. I refuse to even try anyway since that would make me the lesser human being with a lesser life as I stated earlier in my writing.

Three months before Christmas last year, one of my dogs acquired what is referred to a 'doggie aids.' The actual disease is a tick borne illness. He lost over 40 pounds in three months and died a horrible death on Christmas Day. During my dog's protracted illness, I was triggered and had frequent flashbacks and intrusive thoughts and images come to me about my father's abuse. One of the symptoms of the tick borne illness was bleeding. This triggered me the most with disturbing images of my father using knives. I cringed whenever the images bombarded me. After my dog's death, I slipped into a suicidal depression and slowly went down hill. I was not even aware of how bad off I was until I decided it was necessary to see a pdoc. It was the first time in my life to see one. It took three months to see the pdoc during which time I thought I would go off the deep end. My dog's death and how he died reminded me of the abuse and deaths my father forced me to watch. It struck a chord deep within me about the intense emotions I carried inside me. I kept repeating to myself, 'this will be my undoing.' I understood what that meant. I would start to grieve everything which happened to me. Though... I feel stuck in the muck and mire of depression and I hate it. I hate that feeling of not being able to move past this. My therapist asked me to write down my feelings. I thought I had none. Tons emerged. Mostly rage and sadness. I misunderstood his assignment. He wanted me to write down how I felt when a memory emerged. So the next week I tried that and found I could not shut off the memory. Once the door opened up I was forever reliving bits and pieces of the memories and not being able to shut the door again. The feelings kept coming; terrified, overwhelmed, anxious. Those feelings left me depressed again. My assignment this week is to write a grief letter about my mother. Now there's a huge ball of crap to write about. After she died over three years ago, I started to remember more abuse my father perpetrated on me. She was a narcissist and had OCPD. She was anal to the max about many things in her life and therefore my life. My mother had to control everything around her and everyone around, especially me. I was her scapegoat. I don't have to do any of these assignments. However, they would help me heal from my childhood abuse and that is my goal in therapy. I am the one who set that goal, to express my emotions, to deal with the helplessness I feel. It is almost Sunday and I have not even sat down in front of my journal software to write a thing. Half of my week gone and I rotate on it avoiding that assignment. And I am a prolific writer and I journal daily but not since this assignment. Yesterday, I expressed some of the things I learned from my mother with my two granddaughters. This rings a familiar bell though: the ability to express good things about the people who raised me and the inability to express the bad things about those people. I can tell anyone all the horrible things my mother and father did to me BUT... then I am stuck. I cannot express the horrible feelings I have for those people who violated me in so many ways. I am stuck in the depression I hate so much. The only way out is through those yucky feelings.

Hi, I've been looking around on this site, learning some good information about meds and treatments. I've been depressed for years, trying every SSRI out there until I finally convinced my pdoc that's not the kind of med I need. There's something else wrong. I start Wellbutrin today. We'll see what happens. I've had a lot of sadness in my life. Nearly unbearable sadness. My dad died when I was a sr in high school, got married really quick, had 2 kids, then the youngest drowned in a swimming pool accident when he was 2. I was pregnant at the time or would have killed myself. Had my daughter but marriage didn't survive. Custody battle ensued for my son, not the baby girl. I left with her and not much else. Put myself through college on peanut butter taking my 2 yr old to class with me. Met a great guy who saved us from starving after 7 years in the wilderness. Had another boy, life was great for 17 yrs. still struggled with unresolved grief, depression but able to function. All of a sudden I turned 50. Big time acting out, going out partying, no interest in family anymore, want to be free, left husband, got apt on my own, divorced. I don't even know myself anymore. I'm angry, sad, sooooo depressed, no motivation. Pdoc isn't a therapist really, no time for it. Just dispenses meds. Tdoc agrees with everything I say. I've been In therapy forever, since my son died in 1984, different clinicians of course. They all just agree with me. Anyway, that's me, I do a good job of looking put together until recently when I stopped wearing makeup and dressing nice. Don't care much now. Seems very hopeless. Ive lived with the sadness for so long. I see people laughing and wearing smiles and skipping down the street. I wish I could do that.