Posted by SLS on July 9, 2018, at 11:19:01
In reply to Re: Are you okay scott?, posted by baseball55 on July 8, 2018, at 18:16:57
Hi, BB.
I embrace everything you have said here. I greatly appreciate the time you spent composing this post. It is good to see in black and white your advice. Right now, I have available to me a volunteer "job" that allows me to be around other people with mental health challenges. I can do relatively easy work to pass the time and contribute or I can do nothing at all. It gives me a chance to be around people and socialize with understanding and support. It is more of a clubhouse than a business. It is modeled after the Fountain House facility located in NYC.
- Scott
> Hi Scott - I identify with feeling empty and in despair. But I wonder, do you have any social supports - a 12-step group, a mental illness support group, a therapy group. I ask, because I still sometimes get so depressed that all I can imagine is suicide. But I am abel to reach out to people I've met in these sort of groups who make me feel less empty, more full. This has really been more effective for me that drugs, which only partly control the depression and do not hold me.
>
> I understand that desire to isolate and hunker down, but could you set yourself one small social task a day - like go to the grocery store and converse briefly with the clerk (if only about the weather). When I am depressed and despairing, I really tend to isolate, but I've realized this just makes everything worse. Even severe melancholic depression ca be partly situational.
>
> Maybe see a DBT therapist about concrete steps you can take to make things a little better.
>
> I just turned 63 and I understand that feeling that life has passed you by. How old are you? But I go to AA and have seen people, including people with severe mental illness change their lives dramatically with the support of others.
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> I realize you are not an addict/alcoholic (though there are many people who go to AA for the social support who are not really alcoholics), but I believe there are groups for people with other forms of mental illness.
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> For some reason, I believe (maybe wrongly) the you live in NYC? These must be all kinds of social support groups in any big city.
>
> You have my fullest empathy, hope an prayers.
Some see things as they are and ask why.
I dream of things that never were and ask why not.- George Bernard Shaw
poster:SLS
thread:1099195
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20180212/msgs/1099493.html