I am angry. I am irritable. I don’t want to move. I feel only anger and fury and dislike for my children. I’m not feeling motivated to eat. I’m sleeping absurd amounts but not feeling even vaguely rested. The NHS page on depression is so belittling that I’d like to learn how to launch a DDOS attack and bring down the NHS website because I’m so fucking angry that I’m being told I should maybe talk to someone, eat healthy food, and exercise.

Here the treatment for depression is: nothing! Surely it will go away. Wait, it didn’t go away? Fine, then let’s give you a fucking self help book and you can go home and fix it without bothering us. You do a workbook on your own and a therapist checks up to make sure you did your homework. They might send me to a group exercise class since I can’t figure out how to exercise on my own. Bonus points for it being a kind of exercise that will cause me injury and then they can tell me that I don’t care about my mental health again. Then eventually if all that fails (which it will in 99% of fucking cases, but let’s abusively shove everyone through the process because EVIDENCE BASED MEDICINE) we will let you talk to a therapist many months of suffering later. When you talk to that therapist you will be told to go on an SSRI. You will get some cognitive behaviour therapy bullshit. CBT is widely considered to be gaslighting and wildly abusive. It is *the* form of therapy offered on the NHS. If I’m severe enough they might consider letting me have abusive CBT *while* I’m being forced on a drug that is going to make my life a living hell.

I want fucking EMDR.

Here they max out at 16 sessions for any kind of treatment. This is why I am considered treatment resistant because in 16 weeks a therapist has barely learned the shape of my problems.

Amusingly, the nerve pain medication I’m on–Amitriptyline–is their second line “I can’t take SSRIs” option. So I’m already on that antidepressant and I have been for years.

EMDR is not even on their list of possible treatments for depression. They won’t let me have it at all. I feel so angry that I am going to have to fight this hard for a non-invasive, non-drug form of help. That seems really broken to me. I want the least expensive option. I don’t want talk therapy for the rest of my life and 16 sessions is fucking stupidly a waste of time and resources. I am not a 16 session patient.

I feel sick and bad and useless and stupid and like I should die. I don’t want to snuggle and I feel like I am going to throw this fucking cat across the house if she doesn’t stop scratching me to ask me to pet her. (I haven’t thrown her.)

I feel like I don’t know how to stop roiling in rage and pain. Everything in my brain is saying that I am a piece of shit who should die. I don’t do anything that is good in the world. I am only bad. I feel guilty for backing out of the date with TB and also like I might cause serious damage to a long term friendship if I go and I flip out at him because I’m completely dysregulated. That’s not fair.

He dodged a bullet. Lucky him. He was smart to opt out of being a bigger part of my life. I’m really not worth it. And I think he was the one shot I’m going to take. He was barely passive and accepting and supportive enough of my marriage for Noah and no one else is ever going to care even 10% as much as he does about preserving my marriage. He’s a really good friend and I am lucky to know him. I wish I felt like there was any good luck for him in knowing me. I feel like a punishment and a curse.

I should be getting ready to bike over to go rock climbing. It’s hard to move at all. I want to lie on the floor in the fetal position for the whole day.

I want to fade away entirely.