Hi,
Therapy and Antidepressants doesn't do anything for me. My Psychiatrist doesn't do that much except for describing another useless medication. I tried Venlafaxine, Zoloft, Escitaloprame, Bupropion, Mirtazapine and Opipramol.
Even HRT doesn't help me with my Gender Dysphoria. My Hormone-levels are good but I think my Dysphoria will never go away. It's just a permanent problem. That's why I want to ctb but I don't know when I will do it.
Are there any other things, that I should try before I will ingest my SN?
In regards to the therapy, I'd try several different psychologists if I were you. I've been to 5 psychologists (and one psychiatrist) total in my life. 4 of them didn't help me at all. But one has helped me a LOT over the years.
I started off with such bad social anxiety that I couldn't leave my house to get groceries. But with her help in a few months I was able to go back to school and about a year later I had overcome my social anxiety enough to find a girlfriend.
Obviously I'm here now so it's not like she completely fixed me. But that being said that mostly has to do with a lot of really bad luck in my life and the fact that I came to her after my psychological problems were already really severe and my life was already a complete mess. She's a great psychologist, but she's not a miracle worker. So I don't blame her for that.
Anyway, point I'm making is if you can try many different psychologists. Good therapy is about not only the quality of the psychologist, but about the quality of your connection with them, the method they use and how it fits you and your specific problem. There's a lot of moving parts and you can find a lot of psychologists don't help you but then one has the right approach that it works for you.
Personally, I'm a fan of cognitive behavioural therapy but everyone has their own specific problems and tastes. My current psychologist is someone who looks very practically at everything with me and is very hands on, rather than just pure talk therapy. And that works far better for me than just telling some person about how I'm doing every week (which was kind of what some of my other psychologists were like).
No guarantees, but that's how it worked for me, anyway. I just wish I'd been brave enough to switch psychologists earlier.
If you only go to a psychiatrist then you might want to try a psychologist as well. In my experience psychiatrists are much more quick to just jump to medicine. Psychologists can't prescribe medicine so I feel like they're much less prone to going down that route over and over again. Mine doesn't, anyway.
As for the medicine approach, there are a couple of things.
- There's some evidence that psilocybin for depression. A course of about 7-8 weeks together with therapy.
- Ketamine can also be effective for depression, specifically treatment resistant depression (aka when normal antidepressants don't work).
- And then there's always TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation). That helps about half of people who didn't respond to antidepressants feel better.
Those are the main things that I can think of.
