What do you do if you can’t afford therapy, no hotlines are available in your country, and nobody will talk to you? How do you keep yourself from going insane in situations like that? How do you find help or help yourself in anyway in a world that wants you to bottle everything up and keep to yourself?
Next best option is a support group. They tend to be something you have to look for, because they tend to only “advertise” their existence via established therapeutic outlets. You’ll find flyers or cards or whatever at a clinic, or a therapist might recommend it, but you won’t see an ad in the paper (so to speak).
But a lot of them have an online presence. So you can usually search for “your specific issue support group your location” and have a decent chance of finding one.
After that, look into online options. There used to be a site that was dedicated to hosting such things, kinda like a reddit for support groups. Can’t find it though, and can’t recall the name. But there’s online support groups for pretty much everything nowadays.
Then there’s stuff like reddit and lemmy. You tend to not have the degree of reliable good help in those kinds of groups, because it’s much easier for people that aren’t acting in good faith to be a pain in the ass. But it can help. Lemmy has a mental health community, though I can’t search for it while writing, so I’ll come back and edit it in when I find it.
But, overall, in person support groups are almost as beneficial as structured group therapy, imo. You lose a bit of the structure with lessons and being guided by a professional, but you gain more ability to vent and get affirmation that your reality is real, that you aren’t alone even when what you’re saying in specific isn’t necessarily useful or helpful in a clinical setting. If you can find one close enough to get to even monthly, it can help a ton.
My PTSD support group actually helps me more than group therapy did, but I’m an edge case that has trouble being able to maintain mandatory degree of showing up. My body is fucked, so making every session isn’t realistic, and a lot of group therapy providers have limits on how often you can miss because they have limited spaces. If you aren’t showing up, that’s a seat someone else could benefit from. Support groups rarely have that limitation.
I’ve had no luck on any of that irl or online, couldn’t find anything, not really helped from where I’m from, my country and society could give less of a fuck about any of this lol, so irl is not really an option for me, I’m not rich so I can’t afford whatever scraps are available in the first place anymore, conform or die, that’s all society has to say to me.
Every single online forum I’ve tried searching for is either broken, dead, or will not allow me to register, or all three combined. Tried registering for one who immediately rejected my account, and I couldn’t reach out to the admins for support on it because apparently I need an account with them to contact them, which got rejected, so fuck me I guess, it’s been a headache and utterly defeating, no luck on that front whatsoever.
I would reluctantly go for reddit if I could, but it’s completely dogshit as well, won’t let me do anything on the platform at all other then lurk, and with the addition of random account bans for no reason, no warnings, no explanations, and no answers from support, the modern internet is utter hell, and rl equally so, literally everything around me wants me to rot, I’m completely stuck. So I guess I’m just fucked then? Gotta just bottle everything up until I burst? I’ve not been really seeing much beyond what you’ve suggested anywhere else, so is that all or?
Well, it can be a major pain in the ass.
Most of the old forums I used are dead, I just got finished checking them after initially seeing your comment. The ones that are left are essentially corporate, which isn’t great. Psychforums.com is the best out of what’s realistic, imo. Don’t know if that was the one you had trouble registering with, but that is a complaint about them.
Here on lemmy, this community, [email protected] is good. Maybe not as many people as the reddit possibilities, but also with less bullshit. There’s one of the same name on lemmy.ml too, but it never seems as active.
I can’t lie and say it’s an easy path. That hump of getting started is what kills plenty of people.
What country are you in? I can maybe dig around and come up with some options. Can’t promise anything, but I’m glad to look.
But, in the meanwhile, I found that one thing that helped me get through until I could get help was focusing on the very emotion stirred up by those frustrations. Anger is a bitter and ugly medicine, but sometimes it can bury the other stuff. There were times that nothing but the sheer rage of being fucked over by the system made me able to push aside the depression and anxiety long enough to handle one more day of looking, even when my usual support wasn’t working.
I now that would seem like shitty advice most of the time, but any coping mechanism is a good one when the options are limited
Take that anger and use it in some way or another. For me, I dumped it into writing it all down, then shredding or burning the paper. Both as a form of finality, symbolically destroying it, and also not leaving unhinged rants laying around. That might not work for you, but it’s something to try.
And that’s the key to getting through until you can find external help. You try the next thing. That’s part of what therapy is anyway, trying things out and seeing what helps the most. It’s more structured, and the people guiding it are going to present options in the order of what’s most likely to help you, but most of the techniques are still things you have to practice for them to work.
In person I could help more, but there’s no way to effectively teach you things like mindfulness meditation and progressive relaxation, which are two of the most broadly effective and fastest techniques to alleviate acute suffering. You do them, and they change what your body is doing, which changes what your brain is doing. Breath control is central to both of them.
That’s where you should start, while you/we look for external sources of help. If you’ve never done them, find YouTube tutorials on them, and do them. If you have done them, make yourself do them regularly. They work better the more you do them, and you need to practice them to get good at them so that you can use them when you’re in crisis.
There’s no magic bullet. There’s just work. It sucks, it isn’t fair, but when we’re lost in the shit, it’s doing the work that helps. A therapist makes that work easier, they make it faster and coordinate it while teaching methodology, but we do the real work. So get started on it. Learn how to control your breathing in a meditative sense. That’s the first step to almost every technique to gain control of your brain again. And it makes the ones it isn’t the first step for easier.
For me, when the shit was at its worst, being able to control that one thing was important because there was so much that was out of my control. And that’s something almost all of my group therapy and support group members said too.
All that? That’s what a support group does, btw. They say, I’ve been there, I feel you. Here’s what worked for me. It isn’t a magic bullet any more than meds are, or CBT is. But it does help.
You aren’t fucked. Well, no more than anyone is fucked at first ( and second, and third, and fourth, because mental health care isn’t a priority for society at large). Yeah, you’ll have to bottle some of it up. Which is fucked up since that makes it worse, but unless you have a safe place to let it all out, that’s the only realistic option.
You know, if we were face to face. If you rolled into my support group, what I’d do is my usual thing. I’d make you exercise with me. I’m disabled, physically, so my exercises aren’t usually impressive unless I’m teaching someone martial arts stuff. It’s physical therapy stuff, old man stuff like doing curls with cans and shit to keep joints mobile.
So that’s my next thing. If/when you get this far, put down the device, get down on the floor and do some pushups. Or situps, whichever your body can do. If it can’t do either, tell me and I’ll figure out one you can. No bullshit, no excuses, you fucking do something.
Why? Because it’s yours. It’s your body. You can make it work. It won’t fix you. But it’s a step. And what you need right now is a step.