Open Thread for Personal Stuff: April 2016 Dogs Enjoying Couch Edition

@Scildfreja
If there is anything I can do to help you figure your situation out feel free to ask. I’m fortunate in that the TS contributes an element of “not giving a fuck” about society at large when a group within it is having trouble. Perfectly natural trouble that is explained by our life experiences no matter what society wants to pretend.

What people mean when they claim authority because of their age is, in my experience, “I have lived and seen things”. I.e. it’s just another way of saying “anecdotal evidence”.

us:

@proudfootz

not all counselors are equal. I’ve also had counselors whose agenda was less helpful to me. Like Momma said – you have to shop around!

This to me has always been one of the worst things about depression/anxiety/other mental disorders and illnesses. The time when you need therapeutic counseling the most is exactly at the time you are usually too debilitated to find it.

Knowing that my son may have inherited some of my mental issues and those that run in my family (not to mention some possibly undiagnosed depression on his father’s side), rather than wait until he had a crisis, I found him a therapist just to get to know and to talk to about things. He has some trouble with anxiety and she has been very helpful in teaching him ways to cope with it. He only sees her a few times a year, but he trusts her, so if he needs her at some point, he has a relationship with her.

He started seeing her in 4th grade, and would brag to his friends on the days he left early that he was “going to see my therapist” LOL

This month I learned that it is not a good idea to put off renewing one’s antidepressant prescription for five days after running out while trying to write a personal essay for a foreign language class. And by “discovered” I mean “knew better yet for some reason did it anyway”. It went as well as it had any right to.

Also, my prescriptions are caught in some perfect storm of controlled substance laws, pharmacy policy, incompetence, and insurance general unhelpfulness. With the end result that I can only get thirty days worth of meds from the most conveniently located pharmacy, and I can’t get refills through them because they aren’t covered by the student health plan I don’t have! But I guess no one told the pharmacy that, and apparently they also neglected to tell the insurance company (who I am entirely certain I am not paying) because someone is covering my meds and I don’t think I ever got the necessary paperwork to have the pharmacy use the insurance policy I do have. So I brought in a 30-day with refills prescription and they proceeded to tell me that the school insurance provider wouldn’t cover it with refills and I’d have to pay out of pocket, then gave me a 30-day no refills bottle. And just to make this whole nonsense dance thoroughly ludicrous, it turns out that apparently doctors can just give three thirty-day prescriptions labelled “do not fill before [date]” rather than one thirty-day prescription with two refills and that pharmacy accepts them. Which is even weirder with my ADHD meds on account of them being a Schedule 2 controlled substance and the prescription drug most likely to be abused by college students. I keep feeling like this ought to trigger some automated alert flagging me as a possible drug dealer.

Somehow the worst part is that my antidepressant is actually pretty cheap and the fixed copay to use the phantom insurance is a third of the out-of-pocket price. I could play phone tag with insurance companies trying to figure it out or alternatively I could do literally anything else.

@Viscaria
There are good days and bad days. This was a bad one, but she has had a rougher life than me so I mostly try to help her try to find old connections when this happens.

If there is a string of problems that makes depression and anxiety understandable. I think the same thing happened to me, but my mind likes to pretend that I have only been depressed since I was a substitute teacher in Texas about four years ago. My brain still does not like to act like things started going wrong in graduate school.

But I hope that you don’t feel that ADHD is all bad. Society just does not know what to do with us. We don’t store information and perceive things like the human stereotype, and we are 5% of the population. Things are disasters for reasons. I hope you have success with your therapist in understanding why.

Tracy, I don’t know, check if you can find some help under “intrusive thought” here and from the sources, branch further in internet research?

…and hangover. If I crossed any lines anywhere I definitely want to know about it.

@Tracy
I’m not diagnosed, but when one has trouble sleeping because they can’t get their social simulation software under control sometimes OCD is a reasonable thing to appeal to. Physical tics, obsessions and compulsions are actually different manifestations of the same brain systems in different areas. It turns out that these categories tend to blur in people with tourette’s like me.

Skiriki’s link is probably correct barring anything a specialist points out and GenJones offers a good example of how it can play out and I’ll be repeating a lot of what they said. Brains have a kind of “clock” that pulses filtered information at our perception. Some of these filtered categories are things like contamination awareness, social information, body status and other things that let us maintain situational awareness. There is individual diversity in how sensitive we are to these different filters and we can become more or less sensitive through experience and habit. Predispositions can also change the balance.

Sometimes we get hyper-sensitive to categories of things and then the background *tick-tick-tick* shoves it’s way in because we have somehow become more sensitive to that filter through habit (we can think our way to a sensitivity) or experience (getting sick or a social experience, either personal experience or seeing it happen to someone else) and sometimes a drug or other exposure can affect these systems . It’s a perceptual habit that we end up reinforcing and breaking the habit can involve:

Note: individual differences count here too and some people can do individual things and some can’t. Judgement is harmful to healing too because sensations have to be learned and understood on their own terms before they can be altered.

1) Understanding our triggers. These are things that tip our perception into that particular filter and then it becomes hard not to think of it because the *tick-tick-tick* gets tied to our center of attention.
2) Installing controls. Sometimes the solution is engaging in an alternate habit when one feels the urge to do the harmful one. We can’t really delete information, but we can overwrite it.
3) Changing our sensitivity. One can become less sensitive to the urges and over time they become less intense as we place less importance on them. They become information essentially.
4) Medication. This is “training wheels” ideally and makes the change possible. Medication rarely does anything on it’s own.

There are even benefits to having an OCD. One is essentially better at sensing these parts of consciousness and perception and when one gets control of them they are tools that are valuable for observation.

Oh yeah.
5) Selective stimulation. Sometimes you can disrupt a repeating nervous system phenomena by stimulating yourself with something specific (like someone scaring you when you have hiccups) or something general for longer that acts like “white noise”.

When I get a little too into an internet fight I have trouble shutting my social simulation off and my brain likes to keep analyzing things from lots of angles and that becomes an intrusive thought when I try to sleep. So reading something that is not stimulating in that fashion can get it to disengage.

Nikki, Your dad seems to be suffering from lack of structure and lack of purpose in his life-without-job. Even if he doesn’t get a part-time job, he needs to get out of the house more – for any reason. You and your mother can perhaps work out some reasons why you _need_ him to escort you to shops or appointments or outings.

He might be more settled if the calendar on the fridge has him lined up in advance with two or three settled arrangements each week. Look around for things like fairs and exhibitions or markets and other activities that cost nothing to enter and are not restrictive (in the way that going to the movies ties you to your seat). If you really want to get him out of this don’t-know-what-to-do-with-myself spiral, see if you can’t drum up some interest in golf or other sport or helping out with a local drama or school literacy support group or a community garden or a “men’s shed” or anything else that is out of the house regularly. My 91 year old mother has a rule for living successfully – despite being constantly riddled with anxiety – “get up, get dressed, get going.” You can’t nag him into this, but you can change the apparent pointlessness of his lack of routine by giving him some structure and anticipation.

GOOD NEWS!
Daughter number two gets married next week. Last night I discovered the reason why the happy couple had been so keen for us to meet up with them face to face when telling us about their plans a couple of months ago. The soon to be son-in-law is changing his surname to daughter’s name!

Husband might be (marginally) disappointed that daughter chooses to walk down the “aisle” alone for her wedding – no father to pass the parcel to husband, no attendants because it’s just her choosing to marry – but literally gaining a son will be an unexpected boon. S-i-l’s employer has got in the way of all our planned get-togethers by calling him in for lunch service at the restaurant at very short notice, so we’re telling him early on Friday so that even if s-i-l is called in for lunch we can still get it done a few days before the ceremony. (Husband’s a bit deaf sometimes so we can’t rely on him hearing it right first time in the midst of the excitement of the event itself.)

Congrats, @mildlymagnificent! That is pretty magnificent!

@brony, I gotta say, you are pretty magnificent too. Those are great summaries. I haven’t looked too deeply into those mechanisms, that helps a lot.

Cerberus is back in Sadly, No !

In addition to be the better writer of the various authors of Sadly, No!, I was a bit worried about her wellbeing ; also, despite/especially because I still can’t say trans people make sense to me, the point of view of one is helpful to try to improve and to be at least aware of what are their revendications and why they are important to them.