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Comment by toasted-subs | Hacker News Reader

I am unemployed in my late twenties and feel like nothing to go right in my life. I pray to die everyday, but I cant say that without getting sent to a mental ward taking another 20 grand of my money and a week of my life.

Everybody involved with mental health is sick. Especially when the healthiest thing I can do would be going outside, but I cant without police harassment. And I am an extremely attractive person who dresses well. Seems like a societal problem.

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I'm sorry you feel like going outside means harassment; I don't mean that in a negative way. Everyone should be able to head outside and enjoy the public spaces. Have you identified any root causes? I have no idea what part of the world you live in, so can't give any pertinent advice.

This is not a judgement in the slightest, just an observation:

Your post history on HN shows a very negative streak, about pretty much everything. Is this because of your depression, or is it the cause?

If you frame everything you see negatively, it will have an effect on your emotions. Maybe try seeing the positive in something you don't agree with offhand once a day and see if that helps at all?

This is not meant to belittle your positive and well meaning post. But for people with real depression, giving the advice to just cheer up and look a bit more positively on things is the worst possible thing you can say and give as advice. I know it is often well meaning and comes from a place where people simply does not know what to say or do. And this leads to slight desperation. But it is wrong and leaves people with and in depression in even more blackness. Being a bit more positive has nothing to do with it. Depression is debilitating and has deeper causes. And one thing you experience with depression is that you loose the ability to use internal automatic denial to filter out the bad realities of the world. And basically the world is a horrible place, with some positive things in it. Not the other way around, even though that is what normal people see.

I’m aware; I deal with depression constantly. I’m not interested in getting into a “my depression is worse than yours” discussion here because it sucks no matter how bad it is. Suffice to say that a TBI resulting in lifelong crippling depression and anxiety, which caused suicide attempts, is sufficient for me to understand what it’s like.

I’m the last person to tell someone to simply “cheer up”; I noted that almost every post the OP made was framed negatively and thought that may be a single factor that might help a little. It’s not a solution, but depression can be a fight of a thousand small things. Maybe that one thing helps them or someone else that reads it. Maybe not.

I take your point. The framing of ones thoughts is actually very important. It can be tricky though to get to framing that works, since in my experience it requires that the frames has solid meaning.

How can you offer this rebuttal with a straight face, when your own post suggests the OP "just" finds religion.

That's the problem, having society take away all our options so you pray to some flying spaghetti monster.

If I have to deal with swarms of police everytime I leave my house that's not"feeling like harassment" that's straight up harassment.

You may have reached a core existential struggle. This is in my experience fundamental to existence: does existence itself make up for the pain and adversity of the world? The spiritual struggle is in many ways to accept that life in this world has pain, struggle and adversity, but that this is a learning experience. But I guess this requires a spiritual look at things. Cause without this, I also think things look pretty bad... but if it is a spiritual quest, then there is light at the far end of the tunnel.

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