As in no motivation, no will, completely dead inside, too tired and too depressed to do anything, brain is stuck in PTSD mode all the time, etc etc. how do you manage? Especially if you have no one or anything to turn to and with a shitty economy everywhere to boot?
Yeah I feel like volunteering and community action is a few steps down the line. As for how to find people who can hear you out - they do exist. To be honest I answered a local reddit post looking for friends. I think her post mentioned she was struggling with mental health issues. It’s important to be open about that from the start. Maybe I got lucky, but we turned out to have so much in common. We started taking long walks once a week. Not too much of a commitment, but I had something to look forward to every week. And yeah, there was some trauma dumping from both of us at times. It’s far less embarrassing when there’s a back and forth, and we found we could relate to a lot of each other’s experiences.
It may seem counterintuitive that you need to find someone who is also struggling. It’s much easier for us to have compassion for someone else, even if our situations are the same. But eventually you’ll realize that if your depressed friend deserves your compassion then so do you.
And so what if you have to try this a few times to find the right person or it doesn’t pan out? At least you tried something and got some fresh air.