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[Devin]

Felt like talking, and I bother friends enough with this stuff.  I've actually lost quite a few, I suspect because this stuff is just too depressing to talk about much less experience.

Before I can get to the issues bothering me now I have to give some background for it to make sense.

When I was 19 I was diagnosed with my illness after getting so ill that it wasn't really deniable anymore that something was very wrong.  The name doesn't really matter, the short version is that there's a defect in my brain that causes it to skip a particular stage of sleep.  That stage is where muscles are supposed to heal the many tears they acquire during the day, and where lots of cognitive 'clean-up' sorts of functions happen.  When it doesn't happen a person gets constant pain in all the body's muscles, more of it the more they move, and get exhausted at the most trivial things like standing up or getting dressed or brushing their hair.  By 'exhausted' I don't mean a little tiredness, I mean exhausted like a person who never runs feels after they've run a mile.  Like all they want to do is lay down and not move for a long while until the various awful sensations have finally faded.  Cognitively the disruptions involve a lot of pretty profound confusion and forgetting.  I remember living in a little one bedroom apartment at the time I was diagnosed and not being able to find one of the rooms, wandering between the other two.

I'm 29 now, nearly 30.  My illness isn't curable, although it isn't fatal at least.  It is treatable to some degree.  Thanks to meds I'm maybe 80% to 90% of normal mentally.  Physically things weren't so dramatic an improvement.  Ten years later I spend my days mostly in bed carefully arranging every detail of my life around having to move as little as possible.  I want to go out and do things but it's so exhausting and painful and takes so much time to recover from that I rarely do.  I used to fence every week but it was two days of recovery feeling terrible every time.  After a while that pretty strong disincentive to going was just too much to endure.

Roughly 50% of people with any kind of chronic pain develop depression.  I lasted about a year past my diagnosis and then it hit me all of a sudden, and hasn't really ever gone away.  I managed to complete my undergraduate degree in computer science and then some of a doctoral program before I just got too sick to continue, a combination of the pain, exhaustion and depression.

I'm always in pain.  My sleep is disrupted so I never feel rested.  I'm exhausted by the tiniest things.  And it seems there's nothing I can ever do to change any of those things.

I can't really go out and do things or see people much.  I don't have many friends left as a result, and it's difficult to make new ones when you don't go out and do things.  I haven't had a romantic relationship in four to five years, meaning I've spent all that time alone.  Sometimes there are weeks or months between in person conversations with another human being.  It's a profound feeling of loneliness and isolation.  Sometimes my deepest desire in the world is to just have someone to hold and lean on while I cry myself to sleep, something it seems doubtful I'll ever have.

I never gave up on dating, but it's difficult.  I suspect people don't generally want to anchor their lives to someone who can't go out and be active with them, nor someone who is deeply unhappy with the way their life is, even people who would otherwise be excellent matches.  After every date I get a message saying 'You're smart and kind and I like you but I just don't feel romantic toward you.  I'm sure there's someone else out there for you.'.  It's almost weirdly predictable.  Then we usually e-mail or text back and forth a few times until I eventually just stop getting any replies from them.

I can't say I really blame them for not being interested.  Why would anyone want to be romantically involved with a deeply limited person, even one who's financially independent and has nice personality traits, when they could find the same in a person who could go out and do things and generally share the entirety of life with them? The people I like to be around who are kind and smart like I seem to be could do a lot better, for no reason I will ever be able to control.  As a result I have my doubts about ever finding anyone.

After so many years spent hurting and exhausted and isolated and lonely I'm feeling lately like my chances of ever having a better life are pretty low.  I don't know whether someone can think of some way around my various limitations and tortures that I haven't considered.  I'm quite thorough, so I have my doubts.

I am on the most comprehensive treatment regimen for depression available.  Currently it's an SNRI plus Buproprion (unlike other antidepressants it's OK to combine it) plus an occasional low dose amphetamine, as it turns out they have synergistic effects with antidepressants.

I'm thinking about maybe trying the families of antidepressants I haven't tried yet, but I don't really have high hopes.  Stabbing pain, sleep disruption, and isolation are all forms of torture.  I'm not sure any antidepressant works well enough to help someone being tortured not mind it.  They do certainly help me some.  Without them I'm a weeping curled up ball who has to spend all his mental effort constantly resisting the urge to die.  My present state of not constantly weeping and only wanting to die a little bit is a definite improvement.  But I'm not content.  I'm miserable.

I've tried therapy.  I didn't find it particularly helpful.  I might try it again just because it can't hurt, I'm not sure.  It might at least save some of my friends from me wanting to talk about this stuff endlessly, and maybe save me some lost friends as a result. 

So there you go.  I live a weird life, and it's been feeling pretty hopeless lately.  Like uncontrollable life circumstances have backed me into a corner of miserableness without leaving me any likely options to get out.

[LordBucket]

See a shaman.

[HeroPizza42]

im sorry your going through this. i think therapy will help at least to vent in a non jugding an safe place thats privet.
 i hope things get better for you lonlyness can be the most painful thing someone feels.

[Devin]

See a shaman?  WTF?

[LordBucket]

See a shaman?  WTF?

Doctors haven't been able to help, right? Why not try a shaman?

What do you have to lose?

[Cheeetar]

A great deal of time, effort, and potentially money? Try also: Snake oil.

[Devin]

Yeah, there's no such thing as magic or spirits.  People who promise cures with things that don't actually exist are running a con, they're not healers.  It's all the more disgusting because they're preying on sick people by giving them false hope and taking their money.

[Vector]

.

[Devin]

I'm sure many of them thought the stuff they practiced worked, but that's testament to the profound power of the placebo effect and of confirmation bias.

The things that do work are mostly much less effective versions of known medicines, or things that known medicine doesn't use because they kill people or otherwise aren't a good idea, like Chinese medicine's idea of dosing women with mercury to induce abortion.

It's exceptionally rare that anything novel comes out of this stuff.  Believe it or not herbal medicine has been extensively studied in a scientific way for a long time.  The stuff that was useful has been mined out into pharmaceuticals that work much better.

The vast majority is someone mistakenly attributing someone getting better to something that had nothing to do with them getting better.  For example, chinese medicine has resulted in the extinction or near-extinction of various species of rhino because of the belief that rhino horns have medicinal properties.  The thing is that rhino horn is chemically identical to the stuff your finger nails are made out of.  It's the same material.  There's nothing special about rhino horn at all, it's all just confirmation and other forms of cognitive bias convincing people for thousands of years that it's great medicine when in fact it does nothing.

Human brains are absolutely loaded with things that make them come to wildly wrong conclusions like this.  The problem is so bad that it takes heroic efforts to be able to tell with some degree of certainty what is true and what isn't.  This is what the whole scientific method is about.  It's about keeping us from deluding ourselves.

Here, have a list of experimentally confirmed human cognitive biases.  These are just the ones that are present in every single human being:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

It's a long, long list.  And it doesn't even include the logical fallacies.  That's another very long list.

[Vector]

.

[EnigmaticHat]

Trying to unload your issues on friends is always difficult.  Most people are either bad listeners for some reason (trying to fix your problem instead of simply listening is a common one), or don't want to help you.  Either because they are simply assholes, or because they don't want to have to shoulder someone else's emotional burdens.

That's why therapy is nice.  You can tell someone anything you want and you don't have to pretend that its an attempt at making conversation.  Its very honest in that respect, you're telling a person your problems and you don't need to be that person's friend.  If that makes sense.  At least that's the kind of therapy I'm getting, there are other kinds.

On the topic of friends, one thing you could do is find a website or forum or something that is exclusive to your area, and make friends there.  Then if you get close to anyone you could ask to meet in person.  A way to make friends without the pain of going outside and all that.

This feels like awful advice but no one else is going to think of it so I'll throw this out there: have you considered some kind of open relationship?  That would remove the whole problem of romantic partners feeling anchored to you.  Its 3:00 AM where I live and I'm just spitballing here.

Now, attempts at advice aside, I'm sorry that all that happened to you.  For what little that counts for.

[Vector]

.

[Devin]

I've been open to the polyamorous relationship thing, but it hasn't really helped.

As far as finding someone who likes me as I am instead of thinking of how much better someone who isn't broken would be to be with...I've yet to find one despite years of looking.  Just 'You're smart and kind and I like you but sorry I'm not feeling romantically toward you' over and over again.

It makes me wonder how many years of looking for something it takes before you have to conclude that the problem isn't with the people you're finding, it's with the common factor, you.

[LordBucket]

that's testament to the profound power of the placebo effect

If you acknowledge that pills and saline can sometimes make people feel better, why are you objecting to taking metaphorical sugar pills and saline solution?

logical fallacies

You've tried doctors. They haven't worked. And yet you insist on going back to doctors.

You've tried therapy. You didn't find it particularly helpful. And yet you might try it again.

You are on the "most comprehensive treatment regimen for depression available." And presumably over the years you've tried lots of drugs besides the ones you're on now. Apparently you're still miserable. And yet you say you might try yet more drugs.


What process of logic are you using to take an entire lifetime of evidence that the school of medicine is not suitable for addressing your situation, and therefore you will continue to depend on the school of medicine?


At the end of the day, what's more important: your faith in western medicine, or ending your suffering?

Predicted response: "I don't believe these other things will help me."

Ok, but you don't believe doctors will be able to help you either, you have an entire lifetime of experience confirming that they can't, and yet you still keep going back to the doctors. There are other schools of healing besides western medicine. Maybe some of them don't work. But guess what? Western medicine isn't working for you either.


Try acupuncture. Try acupressure. Try a faith healer. Try praying to Jesus. Or Apollo. Or Ra. Go to a Buddhist priest and have an ofuda made. Try a guy in a hut bopping you in the head with incense sticks and chanting at demons. Take your pick.

I'm quite thorough

Are you?

[thedrelle]

Is there no other way to induce the deep-level sleep states you need?

I know from personal experience that certain foods, like potatoes and orange juice can trigger or improve REM stages of sleep in an individual by increasing the levels of certain chemicals in your brain. (i forget the name) have you tried anything like that?

as far as relationships go, I think you need a few good friends. I don't think that a physical relationship will do anything but cause you more pain and stress right now. you just need people to talk with you, and help you when you need it.