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Wellness Wednesday for November 22, 2023

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 cannot speak to the efficacy of therapy. I myself have seen a therapist for the last year and a half and been involved in a men’s group for six months. I actually just quit doing my individual therapy, but will absolutely continue my men’s group.

My thoughts are that therapy really doesn’t work, but it offers at least some placebo effect. That is, it gives me some peace of mind that I’m doing something to try to fix my negative mental health. But I still have a deep rooted belief that therapy is not all that helpful. Which is interesting. Because when I posed this belief to my men’s group, all the men in the group strongly agreed that therapy was helpful to them. I, myself am not convinced. Really, the main reason I like men’s group therapy is that I get to shoot the shit with men for two hours a week without phones. The sessions are therapeutic, but I don’t feel like I take much with me out into the real world.

My opinion on SSRIs is that they also don’t work. At least not for me. But I do have good experience with other, stronger drugs, particularly those prescribed for bipolar or stronger mood disorders. You may consider giving those a try. And you don’t need to see an in-person psychiatrist for those. Depending on where you live, you may be able to find a virtual doctor or nurse practitioner. Ive found this to be low to medium helpful.