Do you mind me asking how you got through it Vault-Tec? Was it a change of pace in life, a change of scenery, i.e. moving in or moving out? Perhaps the borg bit-tech can offer at least some solace to play_boy_2000. I'm absolutely no judge of character, no prejudice meant, but I wonder if it feels, play_boy, like you're in a boat with only one oar, and feel like life is just going around in circles? You've really been dealt one of the bummest hand of cards, so to speak. It may be that, given a second oar though, you're able to at least move in some direction and maybe even have small victories, something that makes you smile and feel good. I'm thinking something really quite radical, like sell all you've got, up sticks and just travel as far as you can. Hitch a ride, walk, bus it, however you go and wherever you end up. Hopefully I'm not too presumptuous in thinking that, if you get stuck, family can be there to help out so you can keep going. But it might offer a fresh perspective on things and, while bit-tech is especially inclusive, there's other people people out there who are too. I feel you've not found your 'thing', not to sound all weird (hopefully) but like others above have said, there's been something there to keep them going, something to hold on to. Maybe it feels like that first grip on something is proving elusive? Maybe if things are shaken up a bit, it might offer you a fresh perspective? I dunno, just chucking words down to be fair. They might mean something, they might not. I certainly don't think any of my words have any deep meaning or hidden context, just suggestions really. It would certainly be very sad and nothing short of a travesty if what you intend to do happens, for sure. I only hope you find peace of mind.
Dude, we are more than a community we are one big family! If you need to talk we are all here, online or in person. Hell I'm sure we could even have a meetup. You are an awesome member of the community and a great person, the mere fact that whilst deep in these troubling thoughts you are still thinking of others and promoting getting help for mental health is proof of your inherently good nature. The world need people like you in it. Please just talk to us we are always here.
Hi, I am a mental health professional and can definitely attest to gps not really always the most helpful, physical health and mental health have a long way to go in joining up care. My path in to what I do comes from some not so fun personal experience that I would be happy to share, and you can see from what others have said, whilst you may feel isolated, many of us have been in some dark places. I am sad to hear you feel like you do, it sounds like things have been really hard. It may seem like there is no reason left but I think you can see from the responses on here, there are genuinely caring people around and I am sure your family care more than you will ever know. I am happy to listen and help in any way I can. You have more worth than you can see. Let the community you have given much to take our turn to give back.
I did a winter(summer) in Oz back in 2015/16. Getting away from the Canadian winter was one of the best things I ever did for my mental health. Even surrounded by hundreds of people in hostels, I never made any friends, just a few people that were in a idgaf state of life, but cared enough to chat with me before moving on to the next adventure. I suppose that was the ultimate test of trying to suppress my social anxiety and getting a good judge of how people viewed my facial deformity. Ever since then, it's just been solo missions for me to escape winter as much as I can. US customs and border is really suspicious of snowbirds in their early 30s, even for the 4 years that my parents owned property in Nevada. Money is running low, so they would never even let me transit through to Mexico now.
Kenco. I got through it with determination. Like I said, I’ve had a lot of pain. Both emotional pain and physical. Like Playboy I was born with 0 luck. Dad died. The next summer I got ran over. Themur was broken in two and twisted. No pins or wires back then so I had traction for 7 weeks. They said I’d always walk with a limp which they were wrong about. However, it’s hurt every cold wet day since. Two years later I had an accident on a trampoline and tore ligaments in my back. I could not breathe properly as it affected my diaphragm. That lasted for years until they invented naprosyn. At 12 I got a hernia. Forget the type, but it’s the one that comes out under your balls. I walked around with a grapefruit sized lump in my pants for a year. They removed it, it came back. They then forgot about it so two more years of agony before it ruptured. So like Playboy here all I’ve ever known is pain. Now it’s arthritis. Of course on top of that I have Bipolar 2 and Asperger’s. As I got older it got harder. So instead of self medication I went onto the pharmaceutical lottery. And after ten years of that I found the right combo. I’m a fighter and I’m tough but I’ve tried to commit three times. I then remembered what it did to my 3 friend’s families and started to think about them more than me. IE living my life for THEM not myself. And that was the secret formula. I stopped thinking about myself and focussed on the ones I love dearly. Whatever Playboy says about people getting over the loss? They don’t. Ever. My friend hung himself in 2004 and it still haunts me to this day. I still beat myself up over it so dude if you really think it will just be some sort of regular grieving process you are wrong. It destroys people. You leave a wake of pain that can never heal. It also shatters and breaks families.
So I'm thinking of taking one last crack at the mental health system. I was talking to my sister today and the topic of 'then what' kept coming up. Even if I could get on some medication to limit the severe depression, I still have the underlying physical problems and the mental disorder to deal with. I need to write stuff down because I just freeze up when it comes to in person stuff. As I was forming this idea, it kind of occurred to me, that the way my brain functions might partially be influenced by me doing almost all of my social interaction on internet forums. Think about it. Generally (at least the threads I mostly participate in), someone posts a problem, we all discuss it and at the end, come up with a solved problem. Maybe I'll get a new mental disorder named after me. I'm not sure if I'll actually give this to the mental health person, as it was a product of insomnia and it might seem stupid after a proper nights sleep.
My only “luck” is that I talk. I don’t bottle it up or hide it. I think that’s the trait that has saved me. I’m able to explain how I’ve felt and articulate it perfectly. I also know what meds work and what don’t, and have put that back onto doctors who have told me they know what’s best for me.
Hey playboy, I'm a bit late to the thread, but if I might offer my 2 cents. It may be relevant, it may not, you can read it or not as suits you, if you're still about. Everyone sees stuff through their own lens, right, a different set of priorities and concerns, formed by their individual experiences. For me, it's technology, social isolation, ostracision, culture shock, addictive media products, overspecialization and the loneliness of career paths, internet echo chambers and subcultures, fraternity and tribalism. And so on. The worldview I've developed over the past few years goes something like this. (Much of it is plagiarised and adapted from the Unabomber manifesto, and many of the talking points are routinely co-opted by terrorists, radicals, ethnic nationalists, primitivists, socialists, anarcho-capitalists, libertarians, hippies, fascists, authoritarians, evangelists, anarchists and every other imaginable flavour of ideologue, but I should clarify that I do not subscribe to any of those ideologies. It's just the nature of ideologues to apply leverage upon popular sources of discontent and suffering.) We are evolved for a very specific set of circumstances, with hardwired mental and physical needs closely matched to them. They include: physical activity; daylight; a varied and regular diet containing a lot of fruit and vegetables (mainly cooked meat, fruits, root vegetables, nuts, beans, and so on - not cane sugar or wheat); intimate daily social contact with a small group of trusted peers with kinship to ourselves, whose goals align with ours; a broader social context of only a hundred or so people, who share our values and beliefs and a common group identity; a geographically rooted legacy of tribal presence in an area; regular skilled physical and mental work, with our peers, on tasks which directly benefit ourselves and these peers, whose output reflects our effort and skill; the opportunity to become meaningfully skilled in a way which makes us valuable to our group; a general precarity and seriousness to our circumstances such that if we seriously mess up, we might die. This is not an exhaustive list, just the relevant ones to the point at hand. Now, in the modern world, we have circumvented basically all of these. We are physically inactive to the point of atrophy and strain. Where we are active, it is arbitrary activity, lifting weights and running distances without any goal other than narcissistic self-improvement. We exist largely away from daylight, much of our species pushed into climates that physically cannot give us enough vitamin D to remain healthy without supplements. Our sleep routines fall out of alignment for lack of natural light cues, and screens and artificial lighting exacerbate the problem further. We eat a nutritionally barren diet largely consisting of wheat, refined sugars and other bulk calories. The list of negative health outcomes which result from this is too long to include. We are largely solitary and isolated, even from our relations and closest peers. We spend our days alone or with people we dislike and/or distrust. More broadly, we are routinely surrounded by huge numbers of people we cannot know or trust, whose values and goals do not align with ours. The weaker culture sustained by our media tries to sustain a sense of single group identity, but is largely unsuccessful, as it is pushing upstream against evolutionary psychology once the group is bigger than a hundred or so people. Higher education and work opportunities routinely ferry us to different parts of our country or to different countries, and economic migration within countries constantly shuffles the local populations, stripping any geographic continuity in a place. The town has 900 years of history, but most of the residents moved in 10 years ago to follow work or to retire. More recently, internet culture has become a surrogate to fill the gap where real connections and belonging should be, but its culture is highly volatile and involves no actual face-to-face interaction, whose psychological value has been horribly underestimated by the internet's optimists and proponents. Text, video, audio and other crude intermediaries are presumed capable of replacing real social activity, and misery results. Our work is mostly non-physical and extremely sedentary. Where it is physical, it is highly arduous, singular and repetitive, almost always resulting in debilitating injuries and health issues by middle age. Our work is almost always divorced from our own interests and the interests of our trusted peers, except by the proxy of money; many roles have extremely oblique or intangible results, and where the results are tangible, they usually benefit people outside our trust circle who we don't know, people who retain no loyalty or alliance to us once the financial transaction is completed. Where we are able to become meaningfully skilled and produce tangible results with labour, the sheer scale of our society and economy pit us against many other similar people in strict competition. Slight changes in the market dynamics can turn this competition quite suddenly into a zero-sum race to eliminate business rivals, who in other social contexts one would reasonably want to consider useful allies and friends. Outside this financial rat race, our situations rarely contain any actual precarity. Despite offering no social comfort or inclusion, our society's systems will not tolerate a person actually dying, and so will intervene to ensure our survival even if we fail on every other count. While many forces conspire against our success and security, the absolute consequences of total failure are just poor material circumstances - a worse home, worse food and fewer luxuries. These short-circuits mean we simply do not feel fulfilled, secure, included, valued, special, in control or responsible. These problems are often used to justify political proposals such as the removal of social safety nets, heavy control of the economy, opposition to migration, opposition to religious or cultural freedoms, and so on. But the ideologues who push such agendas always fail to address the real root problem with their proposed alternatives. We are just lonely, alienated, without responsibility or purpose, without meaningful work, without control of our circumstances, without social belonging, without local history or culture. We're uprooted and atomized. If any of this sounds even vaguely true, plausible or relevant, I would invite you to consider that the sum total amount of misery, despondency and resignation you're experiencing may be a product of more than just the way your face looks, the health problems you have. I accept that some people will always treat you badly because of your appearance - believe it or not, that's true or a lot of people, even those without disfigurements or conditions. But trusted peers, people in whose group you belong, would not treat you badly. So to me, the problem isn't the people that treat you badly, it's the absence of the second kind - the trusted group of peers. The forum may be a factor. Bit-Tech is not a specifically bad or toxic subculture, but it is a text-based internet culture, which (see above) is a very poor surrogate for actual group belonging and inclusion. It isn't a trusted group of peers, not really. We're all using pseudonyms, we don't know each other, we just have overlapping interests and passions. It's not society. This goes for any technological social media, including TV. Before the internet was invented, generations of elderly people tried to fill the gap of their missing social group with TV hosts, weather reporters and quiz shows - a fallacy still endorsed by care homes to this day - to no good effect. If it seems plausible to you that your misery may be about more than your face, if these wider issues may be factors, then there are strategies which you could try. I say this as someone still grappling with these problems myself, still occasionally with suicidal ideation and depression too. I'm not out of the woods or having a great time, but since I started trying to focus on these issues and prioritize them, my life has gotten a bit better. It's helped me to quantify the problems - the things I lack, the things about my life's shape that are all wrong - and aim at possible solutions. Essentially, you'd want to be seeking: (1) a sense of belonging and group identity with peers you trust; (2) meaningful work with others whose result you care about, which benefits you or the peers; (3) dietary and exercise improvements. Part of the absurdity of modern living is we try to solve these problems piecemeal, each problem in isolation of each other. Lonely? Join a book club. Bored? Take up a craft hobby. Unfulfilled? Do some DIY. Unhealthy? Go to the gym. The problem is that each solution is arbitrary, pointless other than as a tacky, weak remedy to one issue. A book club isn't work so you don't develop fraternity or trust, working on a craft hobby isn't hard or that useful so the results don't seem important, DIY doesn't involve or benefit anyone else, going to the gym isn't social or constructive. So many disaffected people at the end of their tether try the gym or take up yoga, or go to a film club, but still feel cripplingly empty inside because those things are not substantial enough. You want solutions that are more real, that hit several Venn diagram overlaps. In an ideal world, if you have problems in all 3 categories, you want to find one thing that addresses all 3 categories. Working on a big build project with other people who are also looking for a sense of belonging and trust ticks several boxes: it creates a trusted group of peers, it's physical, envigorating and constructive, it yields tangible results that benefit people in your immediate vicinity. That's why there's a network of men's support projects popping up all over the place that use that template: they encourage men to hang out, talk in confidence about their mental health, and work on projects and builds together. The work part is crucial. Just hanging out and talking is perhaps therapeutic for some, but it doesn't build a peer group or a sense of self-worth and direction half as well as actually doing something productive in a team. You can also eliminate things which clearly push into these problems. Internet tech, entertainment media, porn, alcohol, sedentary hobbies, solitary pursuits (like reading) can all serve to further entrench them, even if they could normally form part of a healthy balanced lifestyle in better circumstances. My own changes included becoming a tree surgeon (office-based IT was a slow death), quitting porn (it absolutely destroys your mental health and stokes social anxiety), quitting TV (it's addictive, sedentary and isolating), quitting gaming (ditto), getting a lot more involved with my immediate neighbours (exchanging cooked stuff, looking after their dogs, helping them with garden work, etc.) and spending a lot more time with my family doing stuff. Again, doing stuff is key! I hate hanging out for no good reason. People hear you're lonely and they go "oh let's get a coffee" or "oh let's go for a meal", as if what you really need in your despondency and listlessness is the opportunity to sit idly in company, rather than alone, and spend a lot of money in the process. But my mother and I began cold water swimming every week in a swimming club, and that's actually fantastic; it connects me with one of my favourite family members, and is physically active and challenging. For a while my best friend and I were doing DIY with each other, and that too was great - a very different vibe to doing such work alone, or hanging out and just chatting or drinking. I also joined the Parish Council and a local annual festival committee, and started doing volunteer tree jobs for some other neighbours. Working for the benefit of others is such a win-win, it ingratiates you to them, establishes a rapport, makes you feel good about yourself and your abilities. Avenue Q says: "when you help others, you can't help helping yourself." Anyway there you have it, it may not be relevant, you may have tried it all, it may not work for you, but I'm on kind of a parallel journey to you emotionally and this is where I'm at so far and why I haven't given up yet. It's beautiful that so many people on here have offered to speak to you, and it can help, but I won't add my offer to theirs simply because I think it's vital that you focus your social energy on the real world, not the internet. Your first hunch was right. The internet isn't good for us, and technology is a lousy medium for social connection. However, I do have some free time coming up in 2 weeks, so if you want to take the famously safe action of sharing your postal address with a stranger on the internet, I would be interested in driving over and hanging out for a bit. I know I said hanging out by itself is daft, but idk, maybe you have a shelving unit that needs fixing or something and we can do that. Or an unruly tree? I'm good at pruning trees. Key advantages would include the fact that I'm not distraught or offended by your desire to off yourself, I understand the basic logic behind it, and I wouldn't call the cops or run round hiding the sharps, because it's your choice, not mine.
I know some people (I guess from sales forum activity) will know Playboy's name and address, since someone called the cops previously (a very ill advised move imo, but I don't want to start a fight over it, I can see their heart was in the right place) - it would be inappropriate to share that information of course, but could I ask one of those people to just find the nearest local-to-him paper online and keep an eye on its obituaries, and let us know if his name comes up? If the worst should happen I think we'd at least want to know, rather than simply never being sure. Fingers crossed he's still about and is talking to someone.
Still here. I'm starting to think it was a friend of the family that called the cops last time, but I would be curious to know if one of the site admins did respond to a request for my IP address. So, I'm going to go quiet on this topic as my posting here was once again used against me. The worst possible thing happened - one of my family members went before a judge and committed perjury to have me involuntarily committed. The law was never really meant to be used in that way, so instead of normal due process, you can be held without trial for up to a month (you can appeal to a mental health care review board, but I heard it can often take 2 or 3 weeks to get a hearing). It was a long weekend, so they were able to hold me for 4 days, but I think the doctors recognized that there was potential for serious professional or legal consequences if they kept me for any longer. So now I'm just in a worse place. I never want to speak to several of my family members ever again and my distrust of the medical and legal system has only deepened. The only bright side is that the staff in that place were some of the nicest people I've ever met - some of it was undoubtably just what they were being paid to do, but a lot of them seemed to go above and beyond.
Jesus Christ. Sorry you had to deal with that, man - you wouldn't expect it from family. Or, well, I wouldn't. Some of my friends have had family members like that and have my full sympathy. I presume your family members know your Bit-Tech ID and have eyes on the forum? edit - just noticed for the first time that you're in Canada, my offer to drive down the road and have a cup of tea now looks faintly comical.
