My Current Thoughts On Therapy And Mental Health

Mental Health

Part of my depression is a degree of apathy; the more I can focus and get excited about something the more I feel I’m on the right path. I do worry, however, that it’s a mask and I’m just distracting myself.

And that’s how I feel about all this in a wider context. Treatment and therapy don’t magically make you a happy person. Instead, they mask the symptoms or provide better coping strategies, ways to head off the worst of it before it can take hold.

Colin Walker.

As somebody who has had several mental health breakdowns and three therapists in my 20s (I’m 36 now), my current perspective on therapy is that you create the world in which you’re living in and therapy can give structure (and meds, if needed) towards creating a livable world, for you. Meaning that you are actually not just getting rid of yet another veil that makes you see things more clearly - or on the contrary putting another mask on to make you see things less clearly. Instead your world can’t literaly be anything else than what you focus on. If you’re focussing on being happy, coping and so on, chances are that your world “becomes” what you see.

This is not as simple as just using willpower, however. Not least, because willpower is like a muscle and ego depletion is a real thing. It’s also because depression can be thought of as an an active but independently acting agent in your consciousness: Deciding to want to focus on something else is important, but a mental illness wouldn’t be called that, if you could ‘just decide’ and stick to counteracting it.

This is where therapy can be incredibly helpful: In my experience visiting with a therapist changes your environment, your habits, which is itself - not even taking into account their skill at treating you - an important step to creating lasting behavioral change. But therapists offer also structure on top of just existing in your environment. In my experience they offer a source of serendipity that makes it possible to reach break throughs, new frames of thinking, new ways of looking at things. By showing up and interacting with a therapist you’re making a real effort to change what you believe to be the boundaries of your current situation. Yes, this can be in the form of recipe-like coping strategies, but it can also just mean to interact with an expert on mental health. And that communication has a very high likelihood of being surprising - which is so important to feel something, anything else as regards to your current mental health.

So in short: We are and our world is what we are focussing on. There is no trick here. Nothing is revealed or hidden by engaging differently with the world, instead it is just that: A different perspective, a different world. To make a sustained effort to change this perspective for good means to change the environment (because willpower alone won’t cut it) and to being open to be surprised.

Medicine can really help in some cases. But even then it’s not guaranteed that your conscience is built to accommodate even one new way of perceiving the world that doesn’t include your mental illness. People are different, they can and can’t do different things. A goal for one person to be completely healed from depression might just simply not be in the cards for others. However: Even temporary relief or a more manageable severity of symptoms might be totally worth the effort.

Finally, there is no relief in thinking that you may never find relief and therefore doing nothing. I would like to say: Whole-ass the thing, but I don’t mean it to say “don’t do anything else”, I mean it in the sense that if you’re doing therapy, take it seriously, treat is as a creative task. The task of reinventing your world.

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Task Management

Previously.

(I’m not using teuxdeux anymore. And after a short liaison with Todoist, I’m back with OmniFocus.)

Reading the old scripture on the forecast perspective makes it clear to me, that this was intended to be used as a way to tell how due dates and events on a calendar interact.

It’s true you can also show deferred tasks and use a forecast tag to surface tasks without a due date in this perspective, but that is just secondary functionality. And it shows.

Forward.

It’s a blessing in disguise that I do not have a big podcast backlog anymore and so fall back to audiobooks when going on longer walks with the dog.

Started to cry out of happiness after receiving a positive message as regards to my new job. The new employer and me we’ll figure something out together. 🥹

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Didn’t want to go out for Napu’s longer walk, but I never ever have regretted going after all.

A dog (Napu) is watching into the camera, while giving paw, giving the impression it is agreeing with the post's statement

Uff. I’m clearly not made to sustain existential dread. Hopefully things with the new job will now work out. I had to stand my ground a little and did not enjoy saying “No!” to my new employer.

Trimmed Napu’s nails just now. Always an intense moment for the both of us. But with lots of little sausage pieces and lots of calm praise we managed to pull through. 🐶😊

A dog (Napu) is looking at the camera, somewhat unsure. In the corner of the image a pair of scissors and a nail cutter are visible.

Don’t want to jinx it but… (famous last words) I’ve had a good start to the work week so far and am even using my task manager to get the right things done. 💪

Dinner was a success, albeit too late. Now (or rather 30 min ago) off to sauna. Having a good calm time over here. 🧖‍♂️

Today’s dinner is going to be a nice mishmash: Potato mousse, creamed spinach, red beed patties, green asparagus and fried eggs. At least it’s going to be colorful. 😊

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Dev Notes

When I try to figure how something works in my programming language I often use the service replit. It offers a simple bare bones php environment which is ready to go to test out some stuff, is portable and free to use.

One thing that is slightly annoying is that they only support PHP 7.4 out of the box, but it is very easy to upgrade the php version used to PHP 8. Let’s start with an example:

<?php
$str = "Hello, world!\n";
if (str_contains($str, 'llo')){
  echo 'YUP';
}

This code will not run as is on replit, because the function str_contains doesn’t exist before PHP 8.

Screen Shot 2023 03 09 at 14 39 02

So let’s change that. Click the three dots in the side bar and reveal hidden files:

Screen Shot 2023 03 09 at 14 41 39

Next, open the replit.nix file and change the used php version, like so:

{ pkgs }: {
  deps = [
    pkgs.php //from pkgs.php74
  ];
}

Without needing to do anything else we have instructed nix - the package and config manager underlying much of replit.com’s functionality - to use the latest php package which happens to be php 8.

If we run our little test program now, it’ll work:

Screen Shot 2023 03 09 at 14 47 10

NB: The version of nix on replit is not up to date, so trying to use php82 to get the latest and greatest PHP Version 8.2 won’t work. But php 8.0 is still better than php 7.4

Dev Notes

It still is a challenge to find the right words in code reviews, no matter what side I’m on:

As the reviewer I want to give really good reasons, be persuasive but also signal that I know that we live in a contingent universe. If I have knowledge to give I want to explain things well, without coming off as paternalistic.

As the reviewed I want to be open minded, interested, but also being able to challenge things back without coming off as defensive.