My experience has been one psychotherapist (psychology background) and one psychiatrist. I felt much better with the psychologist, but he also had a lot of experience and was nearing the end of his career. But it was really helpful to me.

I originally went to see the psychiatrist to get a possible ADD/ADHD diagnosed and we took expensive tests and nothing came of it. They were like welp maybe you had adhd as a kid but you’re good today! Okay but what do I do now lol, cause I didn’t feel like I was okay?

We mostly did therapy and yeah it was not as good as what a psychologist provides. Psychiatrists have to elect for therapy classes in uni, it’s not quite the same. I stopped seeing them when it was getting too expensive and I felt comfortable enough. I went back to them after my PE and disability started cause I was under a lot of stress and I could tell it was entirely out of their comfort zone. She just didn’t know how to help me. It wasn’t all bad, she told me I could cancel at any time at no charge when she saw just how bad the symptoms were, but everything else was kind of… I felt like I just came over (at great difficulty), complained for a bit, then left not feeling any better.

You can tell psychiatrists are not as comfortable with therapy and don’t conduct it perfectly. At times she said stuff that made me think ‘??’. Like “so you see there’s no need to catastrophize” oh yeah you’re right mb I was just under a shitton of stress, went through a PE and then became disabled for some unknown reason, and coming to your appointments makes me puke on the side of the road every time and I’m dry heaving for 15 minutes but yeah sure I’m catastrophizing. She wasn’t entirely wrong, in the end the thing I was worrying over went well, but it’s just an out of place comment coming from a therapist.

Eventually I cancelled an appointment cause I was in a really bad spell and never called to reschedule. I’ve been looking for a psychologist but it’s tough when you can’t easily go to the appointments. Psychologists learn therapy as part of their classes so they’re better at it, though I guess it also depends on your therapist.

Also I don’t believe problems are solely caused by capitalism. It just doesn’t make sense. Our body is very much capable of betraying itself, stress being just one example.

I lived with anxiety without ever knowing what it was growing up, and it was after I started going to the gym and lifting weights that it kinda just went away on its own. i know it’s the cliche and it sounds like a non-answer, but it really just improved naturally. it was very tough feeling comfortable at the gym in the early days but i quickly became comfortable and it became kind of like a second home for me. I even took a solo trip abroad 2 years in (well, solo for a leg of it lol). A part of it might also have been age and just getting older.

I know it sucks but you don’t have to live like this! There are answers.

Funny you should ask because I was just talking with my sibling’s new partner and she’s very aware of disability. We haven’t talked a lot yet but pretty much get each other on this bc she’s disabled too lol. She asked if I had gotten checked out for autism and I said no, and she said “because with us (she’s diagnosed) there’s often these comorbidities that we can’t explain esp with stomach problems”.

To be clear I’ve never had a diagnosis but as a teen I’ve often wondered if I might have been autistic. Even now I sometimes still wonder. At my age though most of the problems I noticed as a teen about my conduct/behavior seem to have gotten much better, especially after I started lifting weights some 4 years ago (and had to stop bc of the disability of course 🥲).

Like I was anxious a lot, in my own world a lot of the time, not really caring to understand that I lived in the external world - so didn’t really care how I looked or dressed. Lots of social etiquette and situations that I simply did not get, but to be fair we moved a lot across the world when I was young so I think some of it can be attributed to never really having a stable environment to learn in. Like the way they do things in one place (e.g. riding the bus or paying at stores) is completely different in another country. It kinda fucks with you and people think you’re mentally challenged (sorry if it’s not the correct term it’s very late here lol) when you don’t know this as an adult but what do you want from me, I literally moved here a month ago!

Even to this day I don’t really rely on facial expressions talking to people because I don’t really understand them. I still catch myself talking to people while looking elsewhere because I have no idea how to interpret most facial expressions so I rely on their words and tones instead. This part was tested, but idk I don’t think they really cared to interpret the results. It’s a test where they show you photos taken of people miming emotions on their faces and you have to match the 6 emotions to the pictures. I think I failed miserably lol it took me a good while for each picture and I failed 2 in the end IIRC.

I used to have a vivid imagination as a kid, I couldn’t fall asleep easily at bedtime (which I think was because of DSPS, delayed sleep phase syndrome which is a very unknown syndrome to the point that even experts often don’t know about it) so I used to play pretend for hours on end inventing worlds and stories lol.

I’ve heard masking comes naturally with age, I’m not sure if it’s masking or just the external symptoms softening. I don’t have anxiety anymore (I had it all throughout my teens + adult years and never realized what it was until I was in my 20s), and a lot of the time as a teen and young adult people used to think I was being rude in how I said things even when I thought I was talking normally. But I also have a booming voice lol but hey I was born with it can’t really do anything about it. I can go on for hours talking about something without even realizing it.

Anyway I could go on lol. I feel like I could try and get a diagnosis to be sure but I’m also not sure what good it would do. Maybe for my own closure.

Thank you for your kind words 🙌 I’ll try to take it easy until then but it’s not easy with a family that doesn’t really seem to remember that I’m disabled and has never once asked me about what my triggers are or how I manage with them. People incl family just assume what you can and can’t do and what you need or don’t need for you when they could just ask “Do you know your triggers, and how do you usually deal with them?”

The day I dread most is the 26th but it’s at my grandma’s house so I still want to go lol.

Hit by a very debilitating episode since yesterday 😩 I’m not sure if it’s because I stopped the tricyclics or my body just decided it wanted to throw a fit but here it is. Got prescribed stronger antiemetics to try but I haven’t ordered them yet (insurance bullshit) and I could go get them on the 26 when stores open but they will have to order it so I’ll only get it on the 27. I have a family dinner and drive on the 26 lol.

Aside from that I’m just managing one day at a time I guess.

Wish that for you!! I’m not sure if the tricyclics are doing anything, I do seem to have been doing better yesterday and today but sometimes that happens. I’ll wait until I see my dr in 2 weeks and what she thinks.

All the best to you, hope they’ll treat it.

reddit is so fucking negative lmao. i posted this to reddit too and it was deleted for “offering medical advice” when all i said was at the end, if you’re interested in finding exercises too here’s how you can ask AI. it’s a story about a positive accomplishment.

the rest of the subreddit is mostly people ranting about their disabilities which i totally get and it’s valid for them to do, it’s just that it’s not very good for your own mental health to be exposed to post after post that’s just ranting about stuff that deep down you know could happen to you too. but then when you post something a bit more positive it gets deleted despite that people upvoted.

i would have contacted the mods but chances are they’ll just say “no u”. let them have their shit space lol if they like crawling in it.

wish there were more people on lemmygrad though we need to grow this place 😭

Unemployment claims, immigration, disability pay, hiring are also all made worse by AI.

eeeeeh disability claim is already a nightmare without AI, they never have enough people for the amount of cases with new ones coming in every day. As someone waiting for my disability claim putting AI in the process can’t possibly be worse than what I’m going through already lol. it took them 3 months to send me a first update and it was to ask me some details about my past employment and nothing else. at worst the AI will deny me which a human will also do because they hope you don’t appeal, but i assure you i will appeal any denial lol

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It’s a terrible argument in general because it’s not targeting disabled people when people say to read. It’s implied already. Disability can of course look very different on each person but anarchists are making it about themselves. I’m not saying the anarchists saying these things are not disabled themselves, they probably are, but they are also barking up the wrong tree.

So I’m just one person, but I’m disabled, and i really don’t find these posts ableist. there’s also discourse around treatler that pops up sometimes, or going to the gym. i do depend on delivery services to get groceries, but again I’ve never felt targeted by these posts because I get that it doesn’t apply to special circumstances like mine.

Oh I absolutely wish that for you!!

That’s very interesting, thank you for sharing, I’ll have to look into it.

edit: from my quick googling, a lot of the signs are similar to mine except the part about episodes lasting for a week at most. In my case I’m always in an episode, with varying intensity. The times I’m feeling “mostly okay” are very few and far between and I still usually feel some amount of nausea no matter what.

Especially if your shower is in a bathtub, these things are scary. I have to grab onto the shower handle to get out of it when I’m not feeling okay (which is basically every time I get out of the shower)

Lol the only good thing out of this is it always comes up empty, even if I just ate. Yet even specialists can offer no explanation why that happens. But at least cleaning up only takes a second.

I’m thinking about it too. It can be dangerous also if you get light headed and fall in the shower, especially if you live alone or lock the door. I knew someone who got light headed from the hot water, but you’ve probably tried all sorts of combinations already. I had to learn to take it slower and get done in 5 minutes, I might also start using a timer so I can get out before my body starts acting up.

It was probably no longer than 30 seconds yeah, that’s about the normal time for passing out unlike the movies say. Any more than that and you have bigger problems on your hands!

thanks comrade, now I get to do it again next time they call me for this lol. They’re going to refer my case to their own doctor who may or may not need to evaluate me, and then after that they should accept my own doctors certificates.

I am so thankful to the doctor I went to see when I got my PE that he took it seriously from the getgo and ordered a CT scan. The blood test showed elevated D-dimer and even he explained that it could mean clotting but not necessarily, and that I was too young to get a PE (edit: he said something like this is usually something older people get), but he still ordered the CT scan just in case. How many people die every year because doctors don’t want to investigate? Dealing with them you really start to understand they’re not special people, most of them are bureaucrats who are scared of being investigated.