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Wellness Wednesday for February 19, 2025

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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).

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I have been on an SSRI for two years to treat my dysthymia, which I’ve had my entire life. It took six months for the SSRIs to fully get into my system at the right dose. They have been incredibly successful for me; they have turned the mountains into hills, and through a combination of medicine and therapy I’m on the road to winding it down this year and getting off of because I’m seeing the results me and my doctor were looking for. I did get fat, but getting fat is worth it lol, plus when I get off of them I’ll go back to normal.

Imo, mental health should be treated the same as physical health. If you had a headache, you could go without painkillers and try to tough it out on your own, but you could also save yourself a lot of time and energy by taking a painkiller in the meantime while you’re trying to sort out the cause of the headache. SSRIs are the same, but I would not start them without clearly defined health goals so you know when to stop them. You are not going to lose yourself in them lol, you have to gradually build it up and will have plenty of time to adjust to any mental changes.

The only drawback for me so far other than getting fat is you can’t miss a dose or your brain will start to glitch out with vertigo and things Will Not Feel Good, but Idk, people with migraines carry around pain meds, the diabetics have insulin, and the sad have their SSRI. At least one of the three is curable.

I'm a thin dude to begin with. Probably could use some extra pounds. But can the fatness be mitigated with exercise?

Oh definitely.

I wouldn't super worry about getting fat if you trend towards thin. I've also been off and on SSRIs for a decade and never had any weight gain.