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Michael Cochran

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More good advice to remember. Thank you guys for all of it. 

I had a pretty good day yesterday. Spent most of the day in a good mood hit a stumbling block and found myself dwelling on my problems for an hour or so then managed to shake free and came back up. Today was the best day I’ve had in a while. In spite of being shorthanded at work and being on a tight deadline I still made it through the day with little down time. The only time I did get down was a brief 5-10 minutes when someone asked about a specific issue I’ve been trying to fix in my life. I talked about it with them and got down at first but before we finished talking about it I was back in control. I’m not sure how much of my mood today was meds and how much was other things but I’m not too worried about it.

I think this weekend I’m going to find myself in the shop if all goes well and nothing comes up that’s more important. I can feel hope again and that’s a huge thing for me right now. 

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It takes about 30 days for the meds to start working (exept kedamine, as soon as you wake up it’s working) aperiantly “colesteral rafts” in your Enron’s that absorb neurotransmitters and medications. It takes about 30 days for them to fill up and run over. I’m glad you can bring your self to talk about it to others. It hurts, but we develop some immunity buy repeated exposure.

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The last two days have left me whirling with thoughts and emotions. Everything has hit me all at one time like I never thought it could. I have my feet back under me now and I’ve figured out my next few steps towards making peace. All will be better in the coming days and weeks as long as I can keep holding on. I have a couple friends in the real world who know about what’s going on and are constantly keeping a check on me if they think I’m slipping. 

Reading back over this it sounds bad but I’m actually not in as bad a place as it makes it sound. I’m still breathing and on top of the ground. :) 

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Michael, I'm glad things are working towards the positive. Sometimes things are not as bad as we make them out to be, other times they are way worse then we will say. I'm really glad you have some friends around you to help keep you in check. We need that you know. 

I Need my shop time. Forging, art, or just even messing around with my scrap lol. My fine lady understands that and when I'm stressed or just not right she Tells me to go up to the garage. In other words I'm not right and need to clear my head. We need friends in our lives to tell us we arnt right at times and need a mood adjustment. Well, I think she kicks me up to the garage when I practice my dad jokes too. Lol. 

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At one time I kept a journal, reading it now looks pretty bad, worse than it was. It always feels worse from the inside at the time. 

At the time it was worse but I lucked out and found something that works to pull me back up.

Frosty The Lucky.

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18% of the US population will suffer with mental illness each year, this is not the 50-60% who will face a mental health crisis, but acual mental illness. A further 20% of us will be considered as severely mentaly Ill. Your not alone, the peaple who love you aren’t either. If we make the grandiose assumption that similar numbers exist threw out the world (I acualy have reason to believe that other countries have lower rates of mental illness) then out of the 40,000 members some 1,600 of us are SMI. If we assume that we have a minimum of 10 friends and family members that our illness impacts that’s 16,000. We are all in the same boat. I will always be here to help some one else bail out their boat.

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As an Insulin dependant diabetic we are told "don't beat yourself up over having bad blood sugar numbers one day---just resolve to improve them the next"

With many such issues; it's not so much how many time you "fall off the wagon" as how many times you climb back on! Don't let momentary failures get you down and impeded slow forward progress. Many mental health  issues are  insidious in that they sap the will to work on improving and makes every failure seem immense and every success tiny.

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So don’t worry about days and focus on moments, you didn’t get this way in days. Took you years to get this bad, lots of stress and unhealthy coping strategies. Your doing just fine. Two steps forward and a step back is normal, tho we usually focus on the fact we slid back 6 wile forgetting we advanced 12.

“Control” is an unattainable illusion, we don’t control our wives, our children or even our cars if we get down to it. A car operates on a set of physical rules that we manage. Try to step out side those rules and it will bite you square in the butt. You will not be able to control your thoughts and emotions, you manage them. You avoid triggers, you break cycles, you redirect... mostly you learn to exept and forgive. This is all very tao, sailing directly into the wind never works out, one learns to tack. Right now your still struggling with the basic skills and your symptoms. I was diagnosed in 1990, my illness is so bad that I can’t hold down a job. It took me a solid year to exept the fact I could not control this, and a second to learn how to manage it. I am not responsible for controlling my symptoms, I am responsible for managing them. 

This is not unlike forging steel, we try to bend it to our will but until you exept the reality of steel and what it is willing to do you struggle. Once we exept the tou of it then we can shape to our desires as long as we desire what steel is capable of becoming. And in the end, we do everything “right” we hold our breath when we quench hopping not to here a “tink” of a crack. 

Control is an illusion, when you exept the Tao  of Michael Cochran, then you can learn to work with your nature, to manage it and find peace with it. Seeking to control it just generates stress, which make your symptoms worse.

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 It’s going to ebb and flow as the environmental triggers around you fluctuate. Some days, you just got more to deal with, and if your reserves are low, it’s going to hit you harder. Like ThomasPowers says, don’t beat yourself up about that. Just keep doing what you know works, and hang in there until things even out.

I have to thank you from the bottom of my heart for starting this conversation. It’s very difficult for me to say this —  I’m choking up as I write — but being part of this discussion and helping talk you through your situation helped me realize that my dysthymia was back.  The last couple of days in particular have been especially bad, and I only got a real moment of clarity last night while walking the dogs. I’ve been to the drugstore to get some St. John’s Wort (the herbal antidepressant that I used successfully the last time it was this bad), and I have also been using some of the relaxation techniques discussed higher up in this thread. So, thank you, Michael, for starting the conversation, and thanks to everyone else for contributing to it. Like so many discussions here on IFI, it’s not always just the person who asks the initial question who gets helped by the answers.

(And on a lighter note, the voice-to-text on my phone thinks “IFI” is “I have a guy”!)

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  • 1 month later...

No real good news to share. The meds are helping some but I’m still having bad depression that comes in waves. I was also recently informed by the therapist I might be manic as well and that I need to start keeping a record of my mood and the changes in it. 

I feel good most days and that’s a vast improvement. So I guess it’s not all bad news. 

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Therapy is good ... but therapist tend to want to pigeonhole or label their patient and that may not be so good. 

Remember you are unique. There is only one Michael Cochran and that you are the product of ... Michael Cochran.

Just like you made you how you are, you can undo what does not serve you.  

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True enugh, I find that “certified counselors” to be way down the food chain. They are great for run of the mill things like work stress and life in general, not mental illness. Masters level counselors and pcycoligists are the ones you need. After a wile you will be an expert on your particular problems and then you and your counselor and shrink will be working as a team. If they don’t like that idea, fire them. Done that before a few times over the years.

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Well said, Charles. I would like to say, though, that it is one thing to become a "certified" counselor, and quite another to combine ones desire to help people with a "deep understanding" of how human beings operate.  I am barely qualified to help people with their struggles, and yet, as a lay person, I have had success where all others have failed. My point being, it can be terribly difficult to make that connection with a client, an hour a day, two or three times a week, much less, an hour a month.

Once again, I am on schedule to lie in the ditch with a loved one, and somehow help that person to feel that he or she is not alone; that the delicate tuning of the brain can be accomplished by endeavouring to persevere; that we may alter our paths with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy; that we may train our Counselors by helping them to understand the depth and complexity of us as Human Individuals; to recognise that often, those deployed to help us may be as helpless as we are.

Michael, I have found myself in the position described above, I have come to understand that when I needed someone to throw me a rope, I had to teach them how to do that.

Medications are tricky - it can be quite a challenge to get it right the first or second time - keep at it.

ON CALL,

Robert Taylor

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As we see day in and day out, dedicated hobiests  turn out incredible pieces of work, certified only means one sat in class the required hours and can take a test. I find transference a real (many get into the field after receiving treatment for their own problems) issue with less than masters level therapists, and yes making a connection can be difficult. Never be afraid to ask to see some one else if your therapist don’t inspire confidence. Tho like a grumpy old NCO, they don’t need to acualy inpire friendship but trust. 

As to medication, we are just on the cusp of acualy understanding the structural and Nero chemical issues behind mental illness. Their are very few conditions one can take a drop of blood or spinal fluid or do a functional mri and diagnose. For the most part what psychiatrists call disease Other medical professionals would call syndromes . Syndromes are collections of symptoms wile a disease is a n illness with a well defined cause. To comparison somthing in my day job, we have nevecular disease and nevecular syndrom. The nevecular bone is a small bone, not unlike a knee cap behind the coffin bone in a horses hoof. Tensions and ligaments ride over and are attached to it. Symptoms include nerowing of the heals and pain. With out diagnostic imaging to detect inflammation and determination of the nevecular bone it is nevecular syndrom. Wile after imaging it is nevecular disease. The fact being that a few things can cause the same symptoms (and can lead to the symptoms developing into the disease. 

How dose this relate to mental illness and medications? With out a definitive tructural of chemical cause, the same symptoms can be caused buy different things. Let’s take one nerotransmiter for an example. Seritonin wichnis suspected to be involved in depression (among other things). So we can have three situations, you do not produce enough, you break it down to fast or you are resistant. Same symptoms, difrent causes. Each cause can be broken down further. We produce seritonin when we sleep, and their are precursor compounds that we make it from. So are you not sleeping? Nutritional deprived? Your body don’t make one or more precursor effecently or seritonin it’s self... 

so not knowing anything but your symptoms the doc diagnoses you and gives you medication. Because of variations in your biology (the way you acualy break down the drug) and the acual structural or chemical problems leading to symptoms you may or may not be helped buy that medication. This is experimental pharmacology. Unfortunantly some doctors have a favorite drug cocktail and resist the idea that a one size fits all treatment is not nessisaraly effective. 

This is difficult for you as a patient because you generaly can’t advocate for your self effectively due to symptoms and side effects. Others advocating for you generaly get desmised because they “want to here from the patient” 

sorry to be so long winded, it’s a very complicated and poorly served issue.

 

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My knowledge of the brain and issues comes from an entirely different direction than Charles but the results are the same. Counselors are human too and have their own issues. Unfortunately education tends to make us want to fit problems into what we know how to solve. Pigeon holes.  I've fired GPs, Endocrinologists and neurologists because I was being pigeonholed and could see I wasn't a fit. 

Charles has said it so well I shouldn't try to add because what I've learned doesn't really apply. Except (didn't see THAT coming did we. :rolleyes:) We are living with whatever is giving us troubles, we have to find help that fits US, not their pigeonholes. We need the personal connection, a partner who is adaptable, willing to learn and willing to do research. Deb taught  our GP about Fibromyalgia together they found ways to treat her. Deb's GP became my GP simply because Dr. Sloan listens and talks WITH her patients. Too many docs talk TO or AT you. Nurses are really notorious for talking AT you, being "trained" medical professionals. You CAN fire them though even if you're in their section in the hospital.

Nurses especially don't like being TOLD how to behave, I'm not bluffing when I tell one, "Treat me like a piece of meat again and I'll find a nurse who will listen, " and back it up by TELLING the hospital to find me another nurse. PERIOD. You can refuse treatment even in the hospital, they are bound by law to respect your wishes.

You can shop for good care. Your health trumps a doctor or nurse's feelings any and every day. Point blank and PERIOD.

Be well Brother, we're pulling for you best we can.

Frosty The Lucky.

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I’m looking at some lifestyle changes that will probably help me feel better. I plan to start a new diet (not the weight lose kind) and an exercise routine to help get some juices flowing again. I remember when I was exercising  several years ago I felt better overall and figured it was about time to start that again. We all know how important our diet is. If we eat poorly it affects our energy levels and our mood negatively and I’m guilty of not eating right most of the time. I’ve already made a few other changes, some small some bigger, and plan on still more changes as time goes on. Two of the biggest are not gonna be easy without support from the people around me. I need to quit smoking and I need to learn to like myself. I think someone might’ve mentioned it hear already but I know my therapist also told me that I need to love myself. I’ll settle for liking myself if I can manage that. 

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Yeah, being physically strong feels a LOT better than being the flabby couch potato I've become, good move. Liking yourself isn't always easy, just don't beat yourself up over it. THAT is a road to depression. 

Do NOT work at liking yourself! Ease up on yourself and just enjoy. 

What do you like on a salad? I like imitation crab made from pollock, onion, celery, tomato, to start with. SMALL radishes because the small ones are hotter than the big ones.  and oh REAL bacon. The old dry cure salty, smoky, crispy brown and delicious REAL BACON bits! Heck, throw the whole slab on my salad! Feta cheese is yummy salty goodness too!

Don't forget the, broccoli and califlower florettes. (I ain't looking either of those up, you know what I mean. Yes?) A blob of cottage cheese is good too, hard boiled egg is terrific with thousand island dressing, I put one in thousand Island when I make it. 

Want to swap recipes? I LOVE good food, you can turn "junk" food into good food if you want to. Easy peasy! I make halibut (or any kind'O fish) Olympia that'd knock your socks off in the good way and it's silly easy. 

Frosty The Lucky.

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If it helps, we like you. 

That isn’t an easy one. Smoking, if you don’t have a negative reaction to Chantix is relitivly strait forward. Tho you will always be a smoker, just one who doesn’t smoke. 

Sometimes it helps to have folks list your positives. Why they like or love you. This is a dispassionate descusion like the merits of Chevy over Ford (that might get me dunked over religion, lol). Besides your intelligence I have seen your willingness to help and stand up for others here. All those go to the plus side. 

Date the missus, mite not make you love yourself but it always makes you feel good to see that goofy “I love you” look in her eyes. 

Your onenof the good ones, Mike. 

 

on the healthy diet side of things, omega 3 fatty acids, especially DHE are your friends. Exercise and endorphins go hand and hand, and counter intutivly so dose over all brain effecency.  So be a carnivor as DHE is not a plant form of Omega 3 and unlike women we can not produce it from  other forms of Omega 3. The take away? Running it down, kill it and eat it.

 

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