When I was explicitly talking about suicide with my GP while I was in a crisis he told me that my reasons for suicide weren't good enough.
I will never contact any GP ever again when it comes to my mental health. And never in a crisis situation.
That's astounding, I'm sorry that happened to you. It seems like GPs are given to either underreact or overreact. I don't know when it started happening that doctors make you fill out a little depression survey when you come in for a regular appointment, but it makes me extremely nervous, like if I'm truly honest about how I feel they'll just have me institutionalized, and then I'll have even more problems than I did to start with. The last time I went in for something routine I had to fill the survey out when I was checking in, and then because of some crazy redundancy I had to fill it out again in the exam room with a nurse literally breathing down my neck and watching each answer I entered like a hawk. Then my gp came in and it became obvious that my mental health was just something else for a doctor to be angry with me about, I felt like I was being dogged by my dentist for not flossing enough. Maybe I'm exaggerating because of my emotional state but the whole thing felt like a chore for everyone involved. It's like everyone is just out to make sure you don't create a burden for them, caregivers included.
I've never been completely frank with anyone about suicidal ideation, but I've had some interesting responses to how honest I am about depression.
My abusive ex-boyfriend worked very hard to whittle my self-esteem down to nothing, and then warn me that I had better cut out all the self-hatred because I was going to make him hate me too (obviously he already did).
Once when I was about 12, I was describing to my mother how my best friend had become very vocally depressed, and I didn't know how to deal with it. She told me that she just says "I'm sorry you feel that way" whenever someone is being a drag and she doesn't want to acknowledge what they're saying, she just wants to politely get rid of them. I suddenly realized she'd been doing that to me for my whole childhood, whenever I was feeling sad or frustrated or alone.
My father delivers these little speeches about how *sometimes* he *kind of* wondered if I needed help, but then he lists all these things (I got good grades in high school, had friends, etc) that supposedly meant that nothing was wrong with me. He says this in spite of the fact that I was talking about suicide from an extremely young age and had to be taken to a child psychologist for that and other dysfunctional behaviors. I think this is his way of trying to explain to himself that he's a good dad and there's nothing more or less he should have done for me, which makes me feel kind of bad for him, but it's annoying to have to be the audience for these little pep talks he gives himself. Still, it's better than when he just calls me "crazy" to my face.
When I tell my closest loved ones about how bad I feel about myself and why, they totally dismiss it. This is like a universal response, even though my reasoning is concrete, like I have a LOT of trouble doing basic tasks that don't seem to challenge other adults, for instance, and as a result I'm constantly breaking and ruining things and generally failing at whatever I try. But I get this feedback that amounts to like, all the bad destructive things I do are just a long string of incredible, coincidental accidents or innocent mistakes that have nothing to do with me; or they insist that I'm secretly really smart, even though all the evidence shows me doing dumb shit all the time because I'm actually very stupid and this is easy to quantify; or they'll full-on tell me that my problems and bad experiences are NOT REAL and are just the delusional products of low self-esteem. It's baffling because one of these people survived multiple suicide attempts, hit absolute rock bottom, and then got his life together. I would think he'd know not to load me up with fake positivity, that it just makes me feel ignored and gaslit, but oh well!
I had a therapist do that kind of thing to me, too. She was a CBT practitioner and her position seemed to be that if I ever said that I had a hard time with anything, then that was a lie produced by my low self-esteem, and she would challenge me to give evidence of my difficulties and then shoot down everything I said and insist that I was a terrific over-achieving person with no significant issues. The experience left me with a permanent case of paranoia where I constantly feel like I have to collect evidence and prove my existence to people in a court of law, or else no one will ever believe me about anything. And the thing is, people will act like they don't believe you in any case, if they believe it's anti-social to ever admit to anything negative-sounding.
I feel a little silly saying some of these things on a thread where people are describing horrific, direct abuse. I guess I'm just chiming in to say that, while I don't envy anybody those experiences, toxic positivity can also make you feel isolated and diminished and ignored.
why the harsh words
