discussion What Has Helped You With Depression/Anxiety?

[Karla Cabello]

nothing. i might as well end it as this point

[Worm]

6 hours ago, GraceRandolph said:

I’m struggling right now. What has helped you?

If you want to stand the best chance of actually improving your situation, the most logical way to go about it is to try exhausting the low hanging fruit first. You want to rule out the stuff that’s easy to fix, and slowly work your way up the ladder towards the stuff that’s harder to fix so you don’t end up spending two years on something like therapy when the actual problem could’ve been solved in 2 weeks.

 

Basically, in order, this is what I would try: 

1) Get a blood test to check thyroid and vitamin D levels (you can order them online and have them delivered to your door to do at home). In around 10-20% of people with depression, the culprit is actually something physiological that has nothing to do with their brain or brain chemistry. If you’re lucky enough to be one of these people, the fix is easy and you just need to supplement or start medication. If your thyroid results come back low but not quite clinically underactive, you may still want to consider medication as I’ve heard anecdotally that it can be very helpful.

2) Get tested for other conditions that could be contributing to your decline in mental health (e.g. autism, adhd). The tests are quick and easy, and there is great medication for ADHD available. If you do have ADHD, you’re basically predisposed to also suffer from depression and anxiety because your amygdala is overactive and your pre frontal cortex is lazy and has real trouble regulating your emotional state. If this is the case, starting medication can basically cure your depression and anxiety because you’re treating the actual cause, the ADHD, rather than trying to treat the depression, which is just the symptom. For something like autism, there’s no medication available but just knowing why you struggle with particular things and understanding what parts of life are going to be the most difficult for you can be incredibly helpful and set you on the road to recovery.

3) Medication/SSRIs. Depression meds suck because they have a stupidly low success rate and come with a ton of side effects, which is why I’m putting them at number 3 on the list instead of at the top. For some people though, they can be a complete game changer. Essentially it pans out like this: for around 1/3 of people taking SSRIs, the medication will cure their depression by roughly 80%; for the next 1/3 of people, the medication will cure their depression by roughly 30% and (in combination with other interventions) can help them get their life back on track; for the final 1/3 of people, the meds will do nothing.

How to predict which camp you’ll fall into? Basically there are two kinds of depression - relapsing and remitting major depression (e.g. you have 6 weeks of not being able to get out of bed but then 6 weeks of being okay, and it repeats in a cycle) or persistent mild depression/sometimes called dysthymia (e.g. you’ve felt some level of depression for the last two years without relief and things are slowly getting worse). If you fall into the first kind of depression, relapsing and remitting with intense bouts of feeling terrible, the meds are much more likely to help you than if you have dysthymia.

There are also two main ‘presentations’ of depression symptoms - one is ‘low mood’ depression and the other is ‘loss of enjoyment’/‘anhedonic’ depression. The first case is what people typically think of when they think of depression, you feel lousy and like crap and you cry a lot and deal with lots of hard emotions. The second case is where you’ve taught yourself to repress the negative emotions and feelings so your brain doesn’t feel most of the bad stuff, but that act of repression is non-selective and also strips out all of the positive emotions and your ability to enjoy life. Some people describe it as feeling analogous to eating food without salt sprinkled on it, only it’s their entire life which has had the ‘salt’ stripped out of it. ‘Low mood’ depression is more likely to respond to medication than ‘anhedonic’ depression.

Even if you have anhedonic persistent mild depression, it’s still worth trying the meds in order to rule them out. The other annoying thing about depression meds is you have to be on them at least 8 weeks before you can rule out their effectiveness, so you basically just want to get that 8 week window out of the way as soon as possible so you can rule out SSRIs and focus on other things.

4) Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This is not likely to be a cure for your anxiety and depression, but is the most studied form of therapy for those conditions and has clear, clinically proven benefits for your symptoms. The good news is you don’t even need a therapist to do this, you can just google around online for the exercises and set to work practicing them. At best, this will lessen your depression symptoms and allow you to make other changes that will improve your overall outlook. At worst, it will do little to help your condition but will at least make you more aware of your negative thought cycles and how easily you slip into them. 

5) Some form of psychotherapy to identify and tackle the root causes of the depression. By far the longest and most expensive treatment for depression, but probably the one most likely to work if you’ve exhausted everything above and nothing has helped. There are many types of psychotherapy out there and you would have to try a lot of different styles of therapists to see what works for you. This isn’t a road I’ve personally gone down so I don’t know too much about it, but my understanding is that it has a lot to do with processing emotions properly and dealing with everything that you’ve repressed inside yourself that is currently causing your depression. You can probably achieve a ‘lite’ version of this on your own through things like journalling, meditation or looking on youtube for advice on how to process your emotions, but it basically will boil down to forcing yourself to face the unpleasant emotions and memories instead of running away from them like you normally do, sitting with those unpleasant emotions for as long as possible, feeling all the horrible feelings, forcing yourself to keep thinking about them, and then allowing yourself to release those unpleasant experiences so they no longer have a hold on you.

 

Bonus mentions of things that might help a little but won’t cure your depression on their own:

 

A) Gratitude journalling to make yourself happier. This is scientifically studied and can supposedly help a lot - just watch the 10 minute kurzgesagt video on it to get the lowdown. 

 B) Regular exercise to boost mood. 

C) Trying new activities and experiences to push yourself out of your comfort zone, interrupt the cycling depressive thoughts and activate new neurons and circuitry in your brain with the goal of shifting your perspective/getting yourself out of the depressive mindset.

D) Making life changes to improve your current situation.

E) Learning more about the underlying neuroscience of depression and anxiety because understanding your condition can make it a lot easier to predict and deal with.

F) Trying a dopamine detox/fast for a couple of weeks to force your brain to refocus on activities that bring actual happiness rather than a dopamine fix (this is currently scientifically unverified but it hasn’t really been studied yet, so in a few years it may have more evidence to support it). 

If you’ve tried all of the above things and your depression still hasn’t been cured, you probably have what’s called ‘treatment resistant depression’ and you’ll need to look at newer therapies to do what none of the above interventions could manage. The two you’d want to look into are ‘repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy’ and ‘ketamine infusion therapy’, which you can google to get more info on. 


To summarise, the things to remember when you’re on a depression journey - there is obviously no ‘one size fits all’ solution to depression, which is why this list has ended up so ridiculously long instead of just being ‘1) take an SSRI ’. Depression is not like a bacterial infection where you take antibiotics and in 99% of cases you’ll be cured, you often have to try a lot of things before you find the one that works for you. This can make it very frustrating, but it’s also cause for hope - if one thing doesn’t work for you, there are ten others you can try. The best advice I can give you is to be proactive in how you deal with your depression and try and exhaust the low hanging fruit as soon as possible, because you’ll kick yourself if you wait years to try something that could’ve solved it in a month or two.

Practically, that means you should order a thyroid/vitamin D test, schedule an ADHD/autism spectrum disorder assessment if either of those diagnoses seems likely, start a course of SSRIs for 8 weeks from your doctor to see if they’ll work for you or at least rule out their helpfulness, and google some cbt exercises to get started on those. There’s no reason why you can’t do all of those things at once to see if any of the easy fixes will work for you, and once you know they don’t, you can focus on more of the long term things like finding an effective psychotherapist or moving on to the newer, more experimental therapies like ketamine infusion and rTMS. 

   

   

[helpthomas]

I don't know where you're from but If real life therapy is available and affordable for you then please consider that over betterhelp. all my friends who tried online therapy were basically scammed and the therapists would say the most unhinged stuff.

[babyforlife]

1. Work out (the easiest way)

2. Eat a lot of food (something you never tried before)

3. Traveling, explore new places, new people, food, cultures etc. 

4. Go for a walk, enjoy the nature or cities

[ScorpiosGroove]

not drugs and dicks i can tell you that

 

weed / cbd (especially cbd if you don’t like weed/being high) calms my anxiety and other symptoms a LOT, helps for sleeping, easing an upset mind etc…

 

being outside helps a lot too, being in nature (hiking, walks through parks/forests…), being around people (friends, family…) and just keeping active, walking a lot but also spending time with myself to reorganize the mind and lots and lots of music 

[shookspeare]

quitting all drugs

no random hook ups

no social media

exercising most days of the week

getting to bed early

 

tbh therapy hasn't done all that much for me but I still do it. I personally refuse to take medication and for me living healthily has been enough to significantly decrease my anxiety

 

 

[FENTY.]

9 hours ago, Thickorita said:

SSRIs and the gym.

Same 

[Virgos Groove]

10 hours ago, 99sandthe2000s said:

I walk to and from work every day (1 hour each way). I initially did it to lose/maintain my weight but it helps clear my mind/anxiety. I also like to immerse myself in podcasts and audiobooks, I find reading to be a quick and easy way of escape.

9 hours ago, JoeAg said:

nightwalks

listening to new music on nightwalks is literally the most therapeutic thing ever. just completely blocking out the busy feelings of the daytime, and submerging yourself into the night and the stars and the emptiness, and letting the music be your guide on the journey. it's truly magical with some good music

This. Going for a walk can be so therapeutic. It honestly helps me appreciate life and my surroundings.

[zasderfght]

4 hours ago, Worm said:

If you want to stand the best chance of actually improving your situation, the most logical way to go about it is to try exhausting the low hanging fruit first. You want to rule out the stuff that’s easy to fix, and slowly work your way up the ladder towards the stuff that’s harder to fix so you don’t end up spending two years on something like therapy when the actual problem could’ve been solved in 2 weeks.

 

Basically, in order, this is what I would try: 

1) Get a blood test to check thyroid and vitamin D levels (you can order them online and have them delivered to your door to do at home). In around 10-20% of people with depression, the culprit is actually something physiological that has nothing to do with their brain or brain chemistry. If you’re lucky enough to be one of these people, the fix is easy and you just need to supplement or start medication. If your thyroid results come back low but not quite clinically underactive, you may still want to consider medication as I’ve heard anecdotally that it can be very helpful.

2) Get tested for other conditions that could be contributing to your decline in mental health (e.g. autism, adhd). The tests are quick and easy, and there is great medication for ADHD available. If you do have ADHD, you’re basically predisposed to also suffer from depression and anxiety because your amygdala is overactive and your pre frontal cortex is lazy and has real trouble regulating your emotional state. If this is the case, starting medication can basically cure your depression and anxiety because you’re treating the actual cause, the ADHD, rather than trying to treat the depression, which is just the symptom. For something like autism, there’s no medication available but just knowing why you struggle with particular things and understanding what parts of life are going to be the most difficult for you can be incredibly helpful and set you on the road to recovery.

3) Medication/SSRIs. Depression meds suck because they have a stupidly low success rate and come with a ton of side effects, which is why I’m putting them at number 3 on the list instead of at the top. For some people though, they can be a complete game changer. Essentially it pans out like this: for around 1/3 of people taking SSRIs, the medication will cure their depression by roughly 80%; for the next 1/3 of people, the medication will cure their depression by roughly 30% and (in combination with other interventions) can help them get their life back on track; for the final 1/3 of people, the meds will do nothing.

How to predict which camp you’ll fall into? Basically there are two kinds of depression - relapsing and remitting major depression (e.g. you have 6 weeks of not being able to get out of bed but then 6 weeks of being okay, and it repeats in a cycle) or persistent mild depression/sometimes called dysthymia (e.g. you’ve felt some level of depression for the last two years without relief and things are slowly getting worse). If you fall into the first kind of depression, relapsing and remitting with intense bouts of feeling terrible, the meds are much more likely to help you than if you have dysthymia.

There are also two main ‘presentations’ of depression symptoms - one is ‘low mood’ depression and the other is ‘loss of enjoyment’/‘anhedonic’ depression. The first case is what people typically think of when they think of depression, you feel lousy and like crap and you cry a lot and deal with lots of hard emotions. The second case is where you’ve taught yourself to repress the negative emotions and feelings so your brain doesn’t feel most of the bad stuff, but that act of repression is non-selective and also strips out all of the positive emotions and your ability to enjoy life. Some people describe it as feeling analogous to eating food without salt sprinkled on it, only it’s their entire life which has had the ‘salt’ stripped out of it. ‘Low mood’ depression is more likely to respond to medication than ‘anhedonic’ depression.

Even if you have anhedonic persistent mild depression, it’s still worth trying the meds in order to rule them out. The other annoying thing about depression meds is you have to be on them at least 8 weeks before you can rule out their effectiveness, so you basically just want to get that 8 week window out of the way as soon as possible so you can rule out SSRIs and focus on other things.

4) Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This is not likely to be a cure for your anxiety and depression, but is the most studied form of therapy for those conditions and has clear, clinically proven benefits for your symptoms. The good news is you don’t even need a therapist to do this, you can just google around online for the exercises and set to work practicing them. At best, this will lessen your depression symptoms and allow you to make other changes that will improve your overall outlook. At worst, it will do little to help your condition but will at least make you more aware of your negative thought cycles and how easily you slip into them. 

5) Some form of psychotherapy to identify and tackle the root causes of the depression. By far the longest and most expensive treatment for depression, but probably the one most likely to work if you’ve exhausted everything above and nothing has helped. There are many types of psychotherapy out there and you would have to try a lot of different styles of therapists to see what works for you. This isn’t a road I’ve personally gone down so I don’t know too much about it, but my understanding is that it has a lot to do with processing emotions properly and dealing with everything that you’ve repressed inside yourself that is currently causing your depression. You can probably achieve a ‘lite’ version of this on your own through things like journalling, meditation or looking on youtube for advice on how to process your emotions, but it basically will boil down to forcing yourself to face the unpleasant emotions and memories instead of running away from them like you normally do, sitting with those unpleasant emotions for as long as possible, feeling all the horrible feelings, forcing yourself to keep thinking about them, and then allowing yourself to release those unpleasant experiences so they no longer have a hold on you.

 

Bonus mentions of things that might help a little but won’t cure your depression on their own:

 

A) Gratitude journalling to make yourself happier. This is scientifically studied and can supposedly help a lot - just watch the 10 minute kurzgesagt video on it to get the lowdown. 

 B) Regular exercise to boost mood. 

C) Trying new activities and experiences to push yourself out of your comfort zone, interrupt the cycling depressive thoughts and activate new neurons and circuitry in your brain with the goal of shifting your perspective/getting yourself out of the depressive mindset.

D) Making life changes to improve your current situation.

E) Learning more about the underlying neuroscience of depression and anxiety because understanding your condition can make it a lot easier to predict and deal with.

F) Trying a dopamine detox/fast for a couple of weeks to force your brain to refocus on activities that bring actual happiness rather than a dopamine fix (this is currently scientifically unverified but it hasn’t really been studied yet, so in a few years it may have more evidence to support it). 

If you’ve tried all of the above things and your depression still hasn’t been cured, you probably have what’s called ‘treatment resistant depression’ and you’ll need to look at newer therapies to do what none of the above interventions could manage. The two you’d want to look into are ‘repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy’ and ‘ketamine infusion therapy’, which you can google to get more info on. 


To summarise, the things to remember when you’re on a depression journey - there is obviously no ‘one size fits all’ solution to depression, which is why this list has ended up so ridiculously long instead of just being ‘1) take an SSRI ’. Depression is not like a bacterial infection where you take antibiotics and in 99% of cases you’ll be cured, you often have to try a lot of things before you find the one that works for you. This can make it very frustrating, but it’s also cause for hope - if one thing doesn’t work for you, there are ten others you can try. The best advice I can give you is to be proactive in how you deal with your depression and try and exhaust the low hanging fruit as soon as possible, because you’ll kick yourself if you wait years to try something that could’ve solved it in a month or two.

Practically, that means you should order a thyroid/vitamin D test, schedule an ADHD/autism spectrum disorder assessment if either of those diagnoses seems likely, start a course of SSRIs for 8 weeks from your doctor to see if they’ll work for you or at least rule out their helpfulness, and google some cbt exercises to get started on those. There’s no reason why you can’t do all of those things at once to see if any of the easy fixes will work for you, and once you know they don’t, you can focus on more of the long term things like finding an effective psychotherapist or moving on to the newer, more experimental therapies like ketamine infusion and rTMS. 

   

   

This is probably the most comprehensive, well-thought out, and sensitive post I have seen on this thread. I'm guessing you either are studying psychology recreationally or for studies/work, or someone in your family works in mental health. I'm going to be on my 2nd week of Zoloft at 50mg, and while I'm cautiously optimistic since it worked wonders for my anxiety/depression last year (why I got off of it is a long story), I really hope this is going to be the kick-in-the-pants my mental health needs! 

 

Either way, thank you for this post as someone who is adjusting to my SSRI and having to sift through physical therapy, 

Edited April 17, 2023 by zasderfght

[AvadaKedavra]

I have a playlist of uplifting songs it always make me feel better and hopeful about the future 

I also like to read stories of people goin through depression in Reddit. It makes me feel less alone 



 

[Bacardo Royale]

LSD, fixing my posture and meditation 

[Theshigo Washidu]

Music

Gaming

 

[zasderfght]

3 hours ago, shookspeare said:

quitting all drugs

no random hook ups

no social media

exercising most days of the week

getting to bed early

 

tbh therapy hasn't done all that much for me but I still do it. I personally refuse to take medication and for me living healthily has been enough to significantly decrease my anxiety

 

 

I'm just curious, what makes you not want to try medication? I know it's not for everyone; I'm just wondering what your reason is. 

[MadonnasBoyfriend]

Distraction and avoiding this site. I suggest a regal unlimited movie pass.

[harwee]

volunteering my time to senior facilities and homeless shelters every summer

[Alldeezy]

This man right here, his music has helped me through so much! and even meeting him at my worst last year, the way his hug helped me right after a massive anxiety attack on the way to see his show.

 

 

 

his the most precious human i've ever met, and is helping me so much through times.

 

 

honestly music really is the best theophy imo, like so many artists do help a lot of people going through depression/suicide thoughts. 

[bigboss]

-Mindfulness, meditation

-Cognitive behavioral therapy

-Healthy diet and exercise

-Dopamine fasts

[Azealia Banks]

Meds(lexapro) and therapy