Internet self-diagnosis time!

[chess]

Having just snapped out of 'depression' into 'do-all-the-things-I-must-be-involved-in-everything', again, I kind of wonder whether it would be worth seeking some kind of actual psychological assessment. I quite like 'do-all-the-things-I-must-be-involved-in-everything' but it does have a tendency to make me into a ginormous flake when I suddenly swap back into 'depression' and drop everything on the floor. Also, the depression stage isn't so great.

Comments

[requiem-17-23.livejournal.com]

If you have blue spots on your tongue and a high fever and you've had them for a while, you go to your doctor. Reading medical texts and trying to self-diagnose will end up with you believing you have Bavarian flesh-eating tongue spot disease.

More seriously, actively avoiding treatment is a symptom of depression; one would hope that the people designing the medical strategies would have taken this into account.

[bouteillebleu.livejournal.com]

One would hope, but from my recent experience, some of the things you can be referred to have initial letters that mention "please call us / fill in this form and post it to us by this date or we will assume that you're not interested". I haven't yet been dropped due to this, though I came quite close when someone mistyped my house number and so the first referral letter arrived after the initial appointment date...

I think places do this because their services are in quite high demand and if someone doesn't get in touch, there's always another person who could use that counselling / space on a course. But it doesn't interact well with the sorts of mental health fun that involves curling up into a ball and not interacting with the world, or having difficulty with phone calls, or similar.

(And, as you mention, this is past even the inital hurdle of "avoiding treatment is a symptom of depression".)

[passage.livejournal.com]

Is there some important subtlety to 'actively' in that last sentence? Because I'm pretty sure most people without depression are avoiding treatment ...

[requiem-17-23.livejournal.com]

Unless there's some kind of conspiracy to sneak up behind people and give them CBT while they're not looking, I'm not sure it could be said that they were avoiding treatment exactly. Whereas people who genuinely need the help are also people who are most likely to be found hiding from everything, including people trying to help them.

[passage.livejournal.com]

I'm still a bit confused is it:
a) these statements are accurate, but in no way related to Chess
b) there's someone sneaking up on Chess to give her CBT, but she's outwitted them again
c) there is some useful way of distinguishing 'not getting treatment because you haven't done anything to get it, but you could do with it' and 'not getting treatment because you haven't done anything to get it, but you don't need it' without actually knowing in advance whether you need it, such that it could actually be spotted and used as a symptom?

[requiem-17-23.livejournal.com]

Upon investigation of what I intended it to be a reply to, it turns out that the comment is actually concerning one of the comments, the one about "lacking the self-discipline to follow through". So in fact it's d) requiem brain stack overflow in comment generation engine.