People who've tried both meds & therapy and it didn't improve anything

[Cya89]

Wondering if anyone has tried both therapy + meds and found no improvement, or made things worse?

 

[victoria91]

No improvement for me long term. I'm in a very difficult relationship situation and that is my main reason for wanting to ctb x

 

[Cya89]

Can you leave him, or would that make things worse?

 

[EGR92]

Neither has helped for me, meds made things worse in my opinion

 

[Soulless Angel]

Following this one, Been told I need to do both to enable me to *get* better!

 

[BitterlyAlive]

I've been trying both for quite some time. Neither have really helped, although I'm not helping myself by dropping therapists so quickly.

Perhaps part of the reason why nothing has seemed to help is because I apparently have cPTSD - not just anxiety and depression. It requires different treatment.

Tbh I'm really tired of fighting and will probably just give up. But suddenly it makes sense why nothing has helped. Someone I trust once told me that I have a "rather complex case of depression" that will require equally complex treatment. I guess he was right.

Here's a stupid meme to sum it up.

 

[EmbraceOfTheVoid]

I mostly stayed away from the medications because I knew they were harmful to begin with; they merely suppress your real emotions at the cost of horrible side effects, some of which can be lifelong.

Therapy was equally useless because most of them don't help you address the root cause of your problems since they don't know what they're doing. I needed help to address my trauma and what they offered me was wasting years of my time having a social club trying to establish some fictitious bond with me that doesn't actually exist. People like me basically have to buy psychedelics and MDMA on the dark web and perform things like EMDR on ourselves to get anywhere. What most therapists have offered me is generic advice, harmful behavioral therapies, subtle threats of imprisonment, and talk "therapy."

I'm not sorry to say this but I'm smarter than these so called "experts." Most of them would make better car salesmen considering how good they are at lying to both their clients and themselves that they're providing help. I only found therapy harmful personally.

 

[Mr2005]

Getting involved with that was the worst mistake I ever made. Still haunts me to this day

 

[somniummalum]

I've been doing meds + therapy since I was 16 now (5 years), it did pretty much nothing for me, other than make me numb.

Edit: also most therapists are idiots, that have no idea what they are actually talking about. they get taught to see the world through some kind of tunnel vision, then they try to put their values, perspectives etc. onto you.

 

[EmbraceOfTheVoid]

I've been doing meds + therapy since I was 16 now (5 years), it did pretty much nothing for me, other than make me numb.

Edit: also most therapists are idiots, that have no idea what they are actually talking about. they get taught to see the world through some kind of tunnel vision, then they try to put their values, perspectives etc. onto you.

This sums them up quite well:

Yes, most therapists must receive post-graduate education and certification. The education they receive is functionally like that of a priest; e.g. they are taught to view things through a very particular scope - whereas the priest is taught the lens of their particular religion, the therapist-to-be is taught the lens of contemporary psychology and its endless pathologies. Therapy in-and-of itself, is like a confessional in a church, the therapist is the priest and the patient the confessor. The patient confesses their worries and problems much like a would-be blasphemer would confess their "sins".

The sad thing is, "just put your head in the sand" is probably a pretty common response to the OPs concerns not only at mental health resources across the world, but from peers and colleagues; the patient lives in a world where being open about such things in the dehumanized, hyperindividualized public sphere typically only invites scrutiny and further alienation (likely from individuals who are just as alienated and scared as them), which increases their reliance on the therapist as much as it increases their sense of cognitive dissonance, as though they are caught between two realities in a depersonalized limbo. Of course, there's only the one reality as far as we know, but to this patient their inner world has become an enigma and its workings thoroughly mystified by an industry that portends one must go through many years of schooling and certification before they can make sense of the human mind; which is as absurd and circular claim to make as "God works in mysterious ways." - as if that explains why your toaster catching on fire this morning and the delay that caused made you miss your train commute derailing, killing everyone on board. Likewise, it is just as circular to tell someone they have a disease called "depression", which can only be treated by "trained professionals" - trained, of course, in "psychology", an invention of the human mind as much as the phrase "mental illness" with all it's implicit meanings. But the backbone of the entire practice is to be a truthclaim, much like any religion - they suppose "mental illness" to be as sacrosanct as religions hold their Gods; that is, as self-evident and infallible as a physicist would consider thermodynamics.

Perhaps it would be too radical to admit "depression" is an entirely normal reaction to a world in which one exists as a dehumanized, chronically hollowed-out wage slave whose life has been reduced to a series of empty, mindless labor and emptier consumption rituals, comforted only by addictive drugs pushed on them at every turn, and vacuous social ties of similarly hollowed out wageslaves who only know how to monologue and compete; who breathes, eats and shits microplastic, pollution and pesticides, and can't remember the last time they felt somebody actually cared if they lived or died. It'd be far too radical to admit we're living through the slow-motion collapse of the living super organism we call 'civilization' and every case of "depression" is like one little support column showing signs of giving out under the weight of a monstrosity that has become too bloated and labyrinthine for its own good. Then we'd be engaging in reality, giving the "illness" the scope it deserves, and psychology cares not for this.

The reality is, contemporary psychology functions much like a religion or a cult does, in that what one receives from it depends very much on what one puts into it - the power wielded by such organizations are directly correlate to belief of their followers. This is the power of placebo, confirmation bias, and magical thinking. If one considers their reaction to, say, climate change to be "abnormal", they merely have to walk into a therapist's office and their belief will be confirmed - their conscious experience will become a list of "symptoms" of "illness", for which they'll receive "medication". The words, the labels, the pills, they're all momentarily comforting, but none actually deal with the original problem any more than popping an Aspirin cures a raging influenza infection. That's because the entire "mental health industry" is palliative at best - worse yet, it serves at the behest of the state, which benefits massively from an industry that teaches individuals to view their life's problems through a scope that is not only decidedly apolitical but atomized as well.

Take an issue like climate change and this scope fails almost entirely - its sufficiently large-scale enough that the therapist's individualizing lens has no real answer to it. One who is trained in end-of-life therapy may have some more substantial answers that verge into decidedly philosophical territory, but most "by the book" therapists will preach willful ignorance; their role is not to create independent-thinking individuals, community leaders, politically-minded citizens or would-be revolutionaries, because they don't operate in this paradigm; an office vending machine is more communalistic than a therapist's office could ever claim to be. No, their role is to keep people complicit and complacent in the consume/work false dichotomy lifestyle for they are part of the very same paradigm, this being their work as much as preaching is a priests'. The "mental health" industry is obliged to meet the absurdity of the world it exists in and profits off of, and so existential terror becomes "eco-anxiety", another cutesy label which can be "treated" with the right combination of benzodiazepines and willful ignorance, just as a village witch doctor may have once treated "spiritual possession" with a concoction of ayahuasca and a ceremony. Now this ceremony only takes 45 minutes and $200 a week and a monthly trip to the pharmacy. Who ever said capitalism wasn't efficient?! -Suicidal stranger from the internet

 

[TAW122]

I am one of them, and when I was very young (like elementary school), I do recall briefly taking medication such as Ritalin to help me focus and concentrate in school. While there has been some improvement in focus, it doesn't help the underlying problems that I have in life such as quality of life, reaching my goals, living (what I deem to be) an enjoyable life and more. I have been to no less than 10 mental health professionals and at best, it's just false hope and make believe, cliche garbage.

I have problems that I cannot do anything to fix and dreams and fantasies that I want to make reality but could not. This is untenable and I would rather not stay around for decades more just to endure all this suffering for no good cause, hence I am just planning to CTB near end of this year or earliest possible time. There is no reward for all the suffering just more suffering and platitudes. I don't want to get better (just for things to go to shit again). No thanks, I want out of this hellish existence. I am not fearful of an afterlife as I'm an atheist.

 

[SSlostallhope]

Tried both for 6 years no improvement