What do y'all think? is this Jow Forums faggot right? in my experience this is accurately

Yeah, it seems you are right. I knew some things about the brain being able to regenerate and stuff. Neurogenesis and what not. Still, don't know nearly enough about it to know what might cause permanent or not brain alteration. Since you know, there's been some article a few months back about social defeats in childhood/young adulthood that can alter the brain chemistry and stuff for good.

>neuroplasticity
jew pls leave

>Be empty and miserable
>Think about going to a therapist
>immediately start over evaluating how I feel minimizing my problems until they feel insignificant
>decide not to bother a therapist
>Go back to feeling empty and miserable

How do I break this cycle pls help

How badly does heavy drinking damage my brain. I've been drinking every day for the better part of three years now and I feel like I'm noticing effects on my cognitive abilities.

Can I recover or am I fucked?

duuuuude I just LOOOOVE the WEEDLE-DEE-DEED xDDD BRO just get fuckin HYPED FOR THE ANTI-DEPRESSION WEEDLE-DEE-DEED BRO!!!!!!!!

>Tfw grew up depressed so im funcional
Feels nice man

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Because antidepressants don't magically fix your brain. They are honestly a terrible drug and I never recommend them to my patients as anything but a temporary crutch. If you are so miserable that you can barely get out of bed in the morning and don't have the energy to begin healthy life habits, then antidepressants can be useful to put your depression on hold long enough for you to start changing your life in ways that will fix your depression.

They are not there to make you happy. They are not a long term solution. Your antidepressant plan should be to stop taking them as soon as you possibly can because while they won't do irreversible damage to your brain, they will damage it.

Get your healthy life habits in place: go outside, get exercise, start eating better, make some friends, etc etc. Once you're in a better place physically and mentally, you can start to taper off your antidepressant use with the goal of eventually discontinuing them altogether.

Depression is not some mysterious illness with no cause. It is your brain's response to the environment it is in. It is a sign from your brain that there's something very wrong with your life. Antidepressants are there to put it on hold long enough for you to identify the cause of your depression and fix it.

Son, you don't even know what the word means.

Thanks for this sound logic user.

t. makes his therapist cry at night

>there's been some article a few months back about social defeats in childhood/young adulthood that can alter the brain chemistry and stuff for good.
This wasn't about permanent change either, but about self-reinforcing change. People who are successful gain self confidence from that success, and that self confidence enables them to be more successful in the future, and so on. The reverse is also true, with unsuccessful people losing self confidence and becoming less likely to succeed as a result. But none of this is irreversible and even simply being aware that you're being affected by a cycle like this is enough for you to start working to free yourself from it.

Like so many other mental processes, this one gains its power from being able to operate without the person being aware of it. Once you're aware of it, you can work to change it. You can make an effort to attempt small things with a very high chance of success and overly congratulate yourself for achieving them. You can make a conscious effort to build your self confidence. The only difference between the bullied kid and Chad is that Chad has had many more years to mold his brain in a positive direction. He has the same brain you do and yours can be molded in the same direction if you make an effort to do so.

Your brain and your body in general has a remarkable ability to recover from all kinds of damage. How well it can recover depends on how heavily it has been damaged but no matter how damaged it is, some amount of recovery is always possible.

As I'm sure you know, if you want your brain to recover then the first step is dealing with your drinking. As soon as you stop damaging it, your brain will start to recover. It's trying to recover right now; it just can't recover faster than it's being damaged.

Sounds like he's trying to circumvent responsibility for his own mental hygiene.

I really hated working as a therapist. For every person who took my advice and recommendations and seriously tried to put them into practice, I would have ten who basically told me the same story every week about the same problems and the same bad habits. You can tell people what they need to do to improve their lives but you can't follow them home and make them do it.

Offering advice here is a lot less depressing since I won't have to see these same anons with the same problems at the same time next week. Research is where it's at, boys.

Do you agree people like the ones who wouldn't follow your advice should be put down?

Of course not, it's not like they led entirely miserable lives that didn't have anything to contribute to the world. It's not all guys who are hopelessly depressed and suicidal.

For example, I had one guy I saw for years. His wife had divorced him and won custody of his three young daughters. She would regularly do evil things to screw him out of opportunities to see his children, or would find some excuse to take him back to court to increase his child support payments, or would just be a generally terrible mother and bad influence on the girls.

So he had plenty of reason to be depressed and angry but he made himself way more miserable than he had to be. He would spend all day every day obsessing over all this negative shit in his life. He never really put in the effort to practice the positive mental habits I taught him, no matter how much I would hammer it home with stuff like, "You know your daughters need you to be a stable and supportive parent to them to balance out what they're getting from their mother and you can't be that parent if you're angry and upset all the time".

But he never seemed to make it. Every week it was, "I know I shouldn't think about it so much but..." It's tough to make these changes and maybe some people just don't have the willpower for it but this guy had been on antidepressants for nearly 10 years and is probably still on them.

Do you think the men here should be put down then? We are all hopeless in a variety of ways.

also that guy sounds like a super cuck lol

>He would spend all day every day obsessing over all this negative shit in his life. He never really put in the effort to practice the positive mental habits I taught him
I'm not in the same situation as him, but I have been doing the same thing and have never gone for help. This is mostly because I feel defeated in all the countless scenarios I have envisioned.
As a therapist, how should I take the first step?

>been over a decade for me before I even bothered trying to get help
I could imagine it being so. I still do nothing. But, I mean, I still have hopes and dreams and such so maybe one day, even if my neurons have wired together negatively.

Nobody's hopeless if they're really willing to make an effort to better themselves. I've met people who are incredibly grotesque, physically, who are some of the happiest people I've ever met. The main things keeping everyone on this board from being happy are taking place inside their own heads.

>also that guy sounds like a super cuck lol
Well, he didn't have much in the way of options. He loved his kids and while he would occasionally mention fantasizing about just leaving and moving to somewhere like North Dakota where he could easily find a job to pay him under the table (he was an electrician), he wasn't willing to leave his children to be raised by a terrible mother. It's a shitty position to be in. All the courts are against you and your options are to either suck it up and be the best dad you can be or go the nigger route and just disappear and desert your kids to be raised by some crazy bitch.

What is it you're obsessing over and what sort of scenarios are you imagining?

How often did people come in and you laughed to yourself about their non-problems?

I bet those grotesque men never found gfs, no way were they ever actually really happy just cope

You didn't have actual clinical depression. You were just feeling down :(((

If you have real depression you will not have the energy for that shit you brainlet normalfag.

Real happiness has nothing to do with whether or not you have a gf, user. If anything, having one will greatly increase the likelihood of you being unhappy.

This is one of those cases of unhappiness being caused by negative mental habits. When you were a child, were you unhappy because you didn't have a gf? Did you spend all day thinking about how much you wanted one or did it never enter your mind? There's no better way to make yourself miserable than to find one specific thing and convince yourself that it's the only thing that can make you happy. Either you can't attain it and you make yourself miserable even though you're surrounded by things that could make you happy, or you attain it and discover that it isn't actually the panacea you thought it was, and you're completely lost and have no idea how to deal with your unhappiness when you discover that it still exists.

I tell robots this a lot and they never believe me but a gf is not your ticket to happiness. I've talked with so many guys with situations like the one I talk about in who would have had so much happier lives if they had never had a gf and had found happiness through other interests and hobbies instead.

Hmmm but I was single for years and sad about it, but then I finally got a gf and it was actually amazing and my life was great, but she left me cause I'm an ugly beta male and now I know I can't get another. So my unhappiness comes from the fact that I'm an ugly beta male. It sounds like your job is trying to make beta males complacent in the sexless lives they've been relegated too by women and society.

>I was single for years and sad about it
The point is that being sad about it is not something you're being forced to do. You can learn to not let it bother you as much, or at all even.

>she left me cause I'm an ugly beta male and now I know I can't get another.
My job would be to spend probably a couple months at least getting to the root of statements like that one so that you could develop the confidence and willpower to go out and find another gf, but thankfully I very rarely do therapy work these days. For your bite sized Jow Forums session: if you got a gf once you can get one again. If it's really so important to you that you feel like you can't be happy without one then you can either obsess over it and be miserable for the rest of your life or start identifying the areas where you can improve yourself to increase your odds of attracting another girl and start improving.

Yeah, don't listen to him user. He seemed to know what he was talking about at first, demonstrating some basic neurology knowledge but then he started spewing bullshit like "be like chad lmao, that's all it takes" and "you don't need women goy, let chad have them, you work to sustain the economy". He had no clue about the article with rats and defeatist experiences making up random totally unrelated bullshit that came nowhere close to the study. He also made up some other shits and kept trying to spoonfeed us the same jewries of "everything is fine, don't do anything about it goys". Hey shekelberg, there's a coin stuck on your chest. Be sure to look down fast so you stab your neck with your pointy ass nose.

answer me therapy man

Sorry for taking so long to reply back. I thought things over and it might have something to do with avpd.
Scenarios would include the real world.

>He had no clue about the article with rats and defeatist experiences making up random totally unrelated bullshit that came nowhere close to the study
I don't know what rats you're talking about, no. There are LOTS of studies about self confidence and the way it can be molded in childhood and unless you're going to give me a link to the specific one you're talking about then no, I probably won't instantly think of it. There was an article I saw posted here a few months ago which was the one I assumed the user I was replying to was talking about.

As for the rest of your post, well, I can tell you that as a professional, the sort of beliefs you guys instill and reinforce in one another are incredibly unhealthy. You simultaneously convince yourselves that only romance can make you happy, but all women will betray you for chad even if you could get one to want to be with you, which is impossible anyway since they only want chad and there's no way you can ever be chad, which means that you're just destined to be miserable forever and anyone who tells you differently is just a lying normie. It's really horrible.

People who didn't have problems didn't come to see me. All my patients were voluntary; I wasn't the sort of person who would see someone ordered to get therapy by a court or some kid who was just being dragged in by his parents.

>All my patients were voluntary

So you never had someone come in and thought "Wow this person is just a whiny waste who can't even deal with life what a pathetic worthless human" when they said why they came?

Yes. Because spacial sound perception exists even in normal people. It's just sharpening an existing talent.

Well, the more specific you can be, the better advice I can give. In general, the main issue with AVPD is that the person has a variety of negative beliefs about himself (I'm too ugly to make friends, people think I'm awkward when I try to talk to them, everyone looks at me and thinks I look weird when I go outside, etc) that are either entirely untrue or greatly exaggerated.

So if you're imagining yourself attempting some social activity and imagining specific reasons why it would go wrong, it's a pretty safe bet that you're exaggerating those reasons. Whatever you're imagining that's causing you to fail, it's not nearly as bad as you think it is. It might really, REALLY seem to you like it is that bad, but that's what makes this sort of thing qualify as a personality disorder rather than simply low self confidence or the like. Personality disorders in general are not things that tend to improve on their own if left alone. If anything, they'll continue to get worse: the more time you spend exaggerating what you perceive as your own negative attributes, the more you'll start to believe your own exaggerations, and so on.

Really, the best advice I can give you is to find a therapist who has some experience in this area. These sorts of personality disorders that center on a warped self image are difficult for people to deal with on their own. You need someone else who can point out the ways in which you're viewing yourself incorrectly and teach you how to see a more realistic picture of yourself. But most of these types of social anxiety disorders are not that bad, relatively speaking. It's definitely something that can be treated and fixed if you're willing to put in the effort to change.

I would really hope that the sort of person who would have that kind of thought would never end up as a therapist, but given the sorts of stories I've heard here in threads where anons discuss their therapy experiences, I suppose they do.

Everything is relative and what is unbearable for one person is trivial for another. I talked to plenty of people who had incredibly absurd levels of anxiety over very simple and mundane things but just because the reasons for their anxiety were objectively silly, it doesn't mean that the actual anxiety they were experiencing was any less severe. The goal of therapy is to treat the problem, not judge whether or not the problem is worthy of treatment.

for me it's not just depression anymore

between 18-21 I could get away with being a depressed neet but still occasionally drink with my old high school friends and engage socially. but now I'm 24 and it doesn't matter if I'm depressed or not. all those people are so far ahead of me in life that it makes socialising impossible. they all have good jobs, gfs, talking about getting married etc.
It makes socializing futile and depressing.

depression cuts you off from the normal stream of life and after a while you have to just accept you are walking a different path.

>sort of person who would have that kind of thought
That's like almost all people though, the majority of therapists are gonna be like that.

It's true because depression is self-reinforcing. There's no feasible way you'll muster up the effort to end your depression if you haven't already by 2 years.

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>You simultaneously convince yourselves that only romance can make you happy, but all women will betray you for chad even if you could get one to want to be with you, which is impossible anyway since they only want chad and there's no way you can ever be chad, which means that you're just destined to be miserable forever and anyone who tells you differently is just a lying normie. It's really horrible.

I mean just cause it's horrible doesn't mean it isn't the truth. The truth is often horrible

The most horrible part is that you believe it's the absolute truth and viciously attack anyone who tells you otherwise. For most of recorded human history, the people who have made the most serious attempts have been people who ignored normal social contact and remained celibate.

Monastics of any sect: Christians, Buddhists, whatever. Many yoga traditions teach that retention of semen leads directly to a longer life and that you are literally shortening your lifespan and losing vital energy every time you ejaculate. The traditional picture of the wise man across many cultures is that of the hermit who lives alone in a cave or on a mountaintop and learns how to be truly happy by giving up the mundane things most people base their happiness on.

There are countless examples in the world of people being happy without sex or romance but most people here refuse to even consider that their worldview might be flawed.

Those are people who choose to reject it, they could have it if they wanted. We are people who want it, but are denied it by women and out inferior genetics

>Well, the more specific you can be, the better advice I can give.
I do not know exactly what I think I have, but being a schizoid could be another possibility.
>Really, the best advice I can give you is to find a therapist who has some experience in this area
Finding one seems easy, but getting to one might be a little troublesome for me because of my overprotective parent(s).

From what I understand he's half-right, your brain has changed in a way that it can't be brought back to how it was before the 2+ years of depression. However, you can go back to feeling good and enjoying things and life if you get help or help yourself. SSRIs exist too.