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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

I can relate to this article.

At 21 my life was all in front of me, then OCD, which I had seen symptoms of as a teenager, reared its ugly head and pretty much destroyed my life. I fell into a deep depression and only now almost 7 years later do I feel like I'm getting back to where I was.

For anyone going through hard times, keep moving forward. It does get better. Sometimes tomorrow and next week look pretty bleak, but you never know how you'll feel a year or five down the road.

I love this quote from MLK:

"If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward."

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As much as "moving forward" is well-intentioned, it's probably too vague for anyone going through significant mental shit.

It's advice your Grandma would give, a form of "soldier on". Likewise the advice from friends will often be too broad and frankly unqualified to be useful. Not that love and support isn't important, but your own friends have their own problems, and mental health is often deeply personal, that not even your own family has any hope of understanding the scope of the problem.

Nothing beats direct action against mental health struggles in the form of information you seek yourself. Your brain, set to task on fixing your brain.

Read, watch, listen and learn from experts and non-experts. Learn a few things about how the brain (including emotions) work and what others have done to fix themselves. Then get the ball rolling at your own pace the potential beneficial actions you've learned. If no progress is made then maybe seek professional help, but really, so much is possible on your own, and it's far cheaper and more rewarding to self-repair via your own research.

One quick example here about "emotional first aid". There's a lot of talks on TED and they don't go for long so can be good starting points for further research. Mental healing is a journey of learning as much as possible and applying new methods and perspectives to eventually form a picture of recovery.

http://www.ted.com/talks/guy_winch_the_case_for_emotional_hy...

The "It does get better" advice is about as good as suggesting playing lottery.

Another helpful quote: "If you're in hell, keep going"

To be precise it's by Churchill and goes:

"If you're going through hell, keep going."

Which does it a bit more justice.

Russian variant ends with "... if you can't crawl then at least lay and stretch your body in the direction of the goal ..."

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