Too bad they don't sell any of that here :/

That's the problem, nobody is nice. E.g. at work people don't even greet me in the corridor (probably because I can't greet back, but still...).

Why can't you greet back?

It scares me

In the same way that you wish others to understand your faults and work around them, you can imagine them thinking the same about you. They see interactions with people like us as a one-way transaction so eventually they learn not to bother. They don't benefit from it.

I am the same, but I have gotten better. You just need to work at it more. Force a smile, even if you aren't happy, and try to make eye contact briefly when you pass somebody. Hold your head up high. They say that 80% of human communication is body language. People like us just need to work at making our bodies say good things about us. Something that just comes naturally to others. Those others aren't perfect though. They have faults and weaknesses too.

I understand that smiling is uncomfortable at first. I was to a point where it actually strained my face muscles to smile because I never did it! Like any other exercise, the more you do it the easier it becomes. It doesn't take long for that feeling to go away.

Well, I wish you were right, maybe one day when you're all grownded upded we'll talk again; but it doesn't. It stops anxiety dreams, nulls mild pain and makes computer games x100,000 times better, but not depression. It helps...but wears off.

Mine is similar....

while(1)
{
  if(!stoned)
  {
     setState(_WORRY);
  }
  else
  {
     setState(_LIVE);  
  }
}

...but, I'm an eighteen year in pro.

What's probably helped me the most is to try not to think about the things that cause my depression. I used to dwell endlessly on my past, and how fucked up my life was. The problem with that is that it just makes you feel worse, and you end up in a cyclic pity party.

So my suggestion is to not do that. If you catch yourself thinking negatively about yourself or dwelling too much on shit you can't change, just stop. It does you no good, in fact it actively harms you.

After I realized that and started actually practicing that, my mood got a lot better. I eventually took a group counseling course that taught a program called CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), which funnily enough, includes the tips I mentioned above! But it also goes a few steps further.

Some of them are:

1. You aren't healthy and you shouldn't expect yourself to operate at 100% Expecting 100% out of yourself will only lead to disappointment and deeper depression. Now, this doesn't mean you give up, you just give yourself more realistic goals given your current abilities. As time goes on, you get closer and closer to 100%.

2. There are a bunch of "little" negative lies we tell ourselves all the time. Even if you don't think much of them at the time, or even realize you're doing it, it is actively harmful. CBT teaches you to counteract such thoughts with a positive one, and eventually the negative ones will stop.
Such examples include "I'm stupid", "no one likes me", "I'm lazy", "I'm annoying", and other such things. Even just saying "God I'm a dumb ass" when you do something stupid can have a cumulative effect on your mood.^[1]

3. If you stopped doing the things you love to do, start back up again. even if you don't enjoy it initially, the enjoyment will come back.

4. Everyone needs recharge time. For some thats doing the things they love to do, or just quiet time (of course that may be one of the things you love... you dirty introvert!). Regardless, you need to take time from forcing yourself to do things you should do, and let yourself do things you would normally want to do. Also doing a little nothing along with that can help.

So yeah. That course really helped me. It is quite a bit easier to handle my depression. Sadly it did absolutely nothing to help with my anxiety.

You are a good person, Thomas Fjellstrom, and you do deserve to be told so. Your intentions are open, noble and sincere, and not cowering behind an exteriorized shield of inhibition deflectors. Actually, I can extend that observation in varying degrees to many in this particular "community" (I still have a bit of trouble thinking of internet centers of intellectual exchange as "communities"), as compared to most others. It is different, without pompously "marching about" aggressively declaring so. Someone with the concerns of the OP can quite openly state them and receive the appropriate feedback; elsewhere he would have been torn apart by several vultures that would not even have waited for him to stop kicking, so to speak.

Commendable. But just in case I am misinterpreted, as I frequently am, I in no way intend any of what I state, before or after this sentence, to seem pretentious. They are observations that I believe in.

On the topic of depression; you are so right with everything you say in so far as transitional or periodically recurrent depression, even to an abnormal level (let us say, contemplating suicide), is concerned. And bamccaig would appear to be so right about the social benefit game that can cause a case of acute depression to graduate into long term, chronic depression by deepening the cycle in one's mind as a result of peer reactivity.

But then there are people who's brain is physically "hard-wired" for depression. Whether this is more common in women or is hidden in men, I do not know, but both cases of this type that I have been in contact with were women. Well overweight women. Both required constant medication and long term treatment by professionals. Overeating appeared to be part of their own, flawed solution. The strangest thing was that both were the most outwardly cheerful women you could hope to meet, who would laugh heartily at jokes and funny situations, had engrossing hobbies, and both were excellent conversationalists. Though I am in doubt as to whether their jollity was a consequence of the medication, what was obvious when talking to them (which I used to do for hours) was that even in the center of the most hilarious events they detected a nucleus of melancholy that would later come back, grow and haunt them.

I would think that it would be worth confirming - if someone is relatively young but past puberty - that a continuation or deepening sense of what is described in John Clare's poem "I Am!" is in fact not a clinical case that requires synapse and such medications before taking the social adaptation course (this is where I think the advice of self medication with certain herbs or even recreational drugs would be very dangerous). The social adaptation scheme is of course essential, I think, but would be a pointless exercise if the person is predisposed to depression because of their brain structure. In my layman's experience with people, most I have known who go through a period of depression do so as a result of situations in their existences, and were able to overcome it, eventually. Some with help, some without. They were not "physically" predisposed to depression, which seems to be a minority, fortunately.

As for my association, even "mutual gravitation", towards people with disorders (depressed, autistic, and even sociopathic characters) probably was a result of my own far from perfect adaptations. On a person to person basis with these people, I am glad to say that the relationships, though not conclusively remedial, were always mutually therapeutic for some reason I cannot really pinpoint. However, I believe I have lost that form of art, now.

That all said, I honestly do not think the OP is clinical, as he is capable of reasoning himself out of the extremes quite soundly.

Yeah. That would be me. I've been clinically depressed for most of my life. I still fight it now. I should note, that I've been diagnosed with BiPolar 2^[1], GAD and Social Phobia, and could probably add Borderline Personality Disorder to it if I talked with a shrink again.

What I stated above is how I've managed to cope with my problems. Whether that will work for everyone is up for debate, but I do believe that for something to work, you have to want it to work. Too many people in that course I took thought it was silly and pointless, and never gave it a chance. It did seem silly to me, and rightly so, some of it is really silly for a normal person, but I and others like me are not normal, and you have to realize that, and work with that.

Indeed. Some people can manage without them. I was not one of them. At the very least it would take many years longer for me to do it without the extra help. I was and am not willing to wait that long.

All I can say is that its agonizingly slow, deliberate, and hard to do. Is it worth it? You bet your ass its worth it.

One of the observations the people at the CBT course made was that people who are depressed may be harder on themselves than maybe they should otherwise be. So when failures do happen they effect them a little more than normal.

It's true Arthur. But everybody has different experiences and preparation for dealing with this stuff. In the end though you can't feel sorry for yourself and just have to give thanks for what you have and move on with a smile. Life's hard for everyone.

Hence my statement about asking people who apparently had their shit together about what made them the way they are.