The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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Update since @FtttG already thanked me for my previous depression post, (read my blog already Ft!), but I am doing much better!
The primary issue in my case was playing too many video games, especially of the addictive, competitive kind. After I set that down I naturally went back to spending more time reading, in prayer/meditation, and generally just taking care of responsibilities at work and in the household, which has been great for my mood. Ultimately I find that in retrospect it's often quite obvious why my mood has dipped, but when I'm in the middle of a depressive episode it's frustratingly hard to understand or take action on it. Oh well.
I also want to do a quick shoutout here to anti-depressant drugs. For over a decade I dealt with depression and refused to take any prescriptions for it. While I do think it's good to resist treatment for a while, ultimately I caved and I'm glad I did. I'm on an SNRI and it has been a tremendous help to me. So if anyone is on the fence about it and has struggled with depression or anxiety for a while, I'd recommend at least trying some.
Has there been a new generation of antidepressant since 2012 or so? I have known four people who started antidepressants and then blew their brains out within a year. As somebody who's struggled with depression in the past, that scares the shit out of me.
I think SSRIs and that class are still the cutting edge. Scott Alexander has a good article about them but I can't find it at the moment, I think @self_made_human linked it to me a while back.
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