That could be it.
Probably just youth, hindsight is a wonderful thing and it’s only as we turn into old cunts that we really appreciate what friends and bonds are; anything prior to that is probably just road kill.
More than likely 
There is much truth in this from my experience.
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Been there,
After my car crash got a letter from HR saying that if I wasn’t back in the car driving by Jan I was in breach of contract.
Quite literally told them to go fuck themselves (and got a letter from the Doc signing me off)
I was fucked up but knew I would be ok after a while, they made it much worse.
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It’s a common approach. They will either get you back before you are well enough (because you’re terrified of being axed), or they will subject you to an attendance management process of such crass insensitivity that by the time they actually dismiss you, you will be a basket case.
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Luckily for me that was the opposite, they wanted me back because I was fixing shit.
I was annoyed at the lack of patience or understanding so I told them to go fuck themselves and quit.
Not sure that at the time I would have or could have known how to contest it,
Or maybe you just saved them some paperwork.
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just edited to say very much the same.
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And to think that in my youth I very nearly went into HR.
I wonder how much more of a cunt I could have become.
Phew.
HR is there only to care about the upper management and the business. Always a 58yr old Karen or Janet that hates people and somehow gets into human resources. Fucking battle axes
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What is a Karen or Jnaet?
Anti depressants certainly seem to be a mixed bag. They’ve definitely helped me at times, but I’m not convinced the benefits outweighed the negatives of the side effects, especially the reduction in cognitive function it seems to give me. My memory in particular is absolutely shot to pieces these days, which is enormously frustrating.
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My dad’s mental health problems seemed to have been there from the start - some combination of what was in his genes and the miserable childhood his mother inflicted on him. I hardly knew her, and she was off the scene after I was 6 or 7, but what I thought at the time was just plain nastiness might actually have been issues of her own.
My dad got into real trouble with the meds though. Ativan, which the doctors thought might help, but didn’t, and alcohol, which my dad thought might help, but didn’t, particularly in combination with the Ativan. I think nowadays courses of Ativan are limited to a few weeks. He was on it, on and off, for years. He was not in a good place then.
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Just to add my voice to this threads primal scream into the void.
Pre covid I was a fairly happy chappy - life wasn’t perfect but it was good and I never saw myself as someone prone to mental health issues and while not in the best shape physically (really not) I was able to function.
Now I have dark thoughts about every day being the same - like a very boring groundhog day without the benefit of being able to do stupid shit, die and reset. I have weird physical issues such as fatigue, headaches, acid reflux and the like and everything is an effort.
It seems I’m not alone in this as my wife feels similarly (I can’t remember an evening she hasn’t fallen asleep on the sofa which she never used to do) as do many of those I still have contact with - via skype or similar natch.
Working from home is something that I’ve been doing for 10 years so that’s not the issue. For me it’s the inaccessibility of different places. Popping to the garden center, or shopping mall or beach or whatever is just not an option at the moment. Going for a walk involves dully trudging around our estate that’s still half building site, rather than taking a picnic to a national trust place. It’s fucking shit - damn as I write this I can feel my frustration at the shitty situation building.
Unfortunately alcohol is no retreat for me as it just gives me a headache if I have more than one small gin and other recreational chemicals are off the table as they’d explode my heart, except perhaps ‘special-k’ which I never really went for back in the day but may decide to give another chance if this carries on much longer. God knows I need some escape from the bland pablum that is now ‘normality’.
I sometimes wonder if it’s be worth diving down the conspiracy rabbit hole, as a couple of my friends have (oh boy have they), not from any deep conviction that bill gates wants to inject me with infant foreskins and 5g chips to control my brain, no, but just for something to do. Unfortunately that amount of cognitive dissonance is beyond me at present but I’m beginning to suspect that it may not be for much longer.
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Surely there are more rewarding things you can apply some critical thought to?
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I am fortunate that I don’t have to deal with serious depressive issues so I can’t comment on the use of CBT for that. I will say that, for the management of anxiety and some compulsive issues, CBT was an absolute gamechanger for me; a genuinely life improving set of techniques. It has helped me tremendously during this last year where, stuck with my own thoughts, I’d have risked becoming entirely non functional without having some processes on hand to stay ahead (I won’t use ‘keep on top of’ contextually, it isn’t right- ‘Stay ahead’ is more accurate).
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My daughter is now on the track of training to be a CBT therapist, albeit with a view to learning a range of other approaches and techniques so that she can pick the most appropriate one to her patients/ clients presentation.
We were chatting the other day about this (I am her unofficial career supervisor as she knows that I deploy similar therapy techniques at a level to unravel and put back together stuff for my clients). Her view is that 10 years ago there was very poor access to talking therapies of any kind, but now that the NHS has invested heavily into CBT et al, this has kind of become unwittingly the answer to everything, with poor processes to understand, triage and match patients needs to services.
GPs have become overwhelmed with low-mid level mental health issues and now find that it only too convenient to just refer into IAPT services and leave them to sort it out. The increased capacity in things like CBT (because they are relatively easier to train and teach (again I use unwittingly a lot of the same techniques so its not brain surgery) means that patients can end up with what’s available rather than what they need.
We were also chatting speculatively about the potential for AI to be developed which could interact with people and identify cognitive bias, and help the patient to recognise this (not suggesting whether this would be desirable or clinically effective, just feasible). We were both of the mind though that the much more difficult processes to recreate in an artifical environment, are the deploying and teaching of thinking strategies to counteract these, and how to manage and cope when things don’t work or you’re still learning etc.
Anyway, back to the point, its all about matching the appropriate therapy to the patients specific needs rather than one therapy being good or bad in an absolute sense.
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I dunno if this will help anyone. I caught myself advising @loo the other day which I’m not sure is very helpful but my own experience with my mental health is ongoing but now easy comparatively. I guess that we are all different and in my case therapy changed my life. I am prone to depression and I experienced it on and off for years.
Things really came to a head in the early naughties when divorce, work and my partying lifestyle overwhelmed me and I had a nervous breakdown. I absolutely hated myself, was completely panic stricken about the future and regretful of many things in my past. I couldn’t go forward so only looked back. I was honestly completely broken. It’s funny, because it was meeting my missus that really tipped me over the edge and yet it was Kerri who made me go and try and sort myself out, I’m so thankful she did, I was suicidal.
I started seeing a therapist weekly on a recommendation from my doctor, who also prescribed antidepressants. The tabs just made me feel really shit, they levelled me out but made life feel awfully dull. I dumped them after a few months. The therapy seemed absolutely pointless at first and made me feel worse but somehow I couldn’t go back. It took about 18 months but suddenly I started to get it, the idea of self knowledge giving you the tools to control trains of thought. Over the next year I started to actually enjoy going and it started to feel like a project. What if I could get rid of this shit?!
There came a point about 2 1/2 years in where all of a sudden I was like a barrel of effluent that someone had taken the plug out of the bottom. I remember being on a flight back from Shanghai (work) when I cried for the whole way back (there is a point to those blindfold things!) and it didn’t stop there, a purge that went on for a few weeks.
After this, again, suddenly, after a long period of even the tiniest optimistic thought setting off a panic attack, I began feeling excited about the future - the most exhilarating experience. I was throwing switches off in my mind, all the stuff that was dragging me down - that I wouldn’t have understood without therapy - suddenly didn’t matter to me anymore. What’s more, it gave me the feeling that I had done it myself.
The therapist I went to see was never once my friend, not in the way I would have previously imagined a friend to be anyhow. She was fucking hard and after a short while of just listening would not let me feel sorry for myself. She made me understand that accepting all the shit that bothered me was the only way, suck it up, swallow it. It took her ages to get me to stop denying that my upbringing was fucked up and quite dysfunctional for instance. There was quite a period of grieving this tbh. Later, If my conversation went down certain routes, in the end she only had to raise her eyebrow in admonishment and it would shut me up. She’d then nod her approval. 
In short she was fucking great!
As I said above, It changed my life. I’ve been through many things since, that beforehand would have tipped me over the edge. I now no longer say ‘why me?’ I take a deep breath, look at the stuff I have, realise that I have loads and generally the feeling subsides.
Therapy is a real commitment but for me it definitely worked and I would recommend it to anyone. It took quite extreme circumstance for me to approach it at the time though, I had a quite seriously escalating cocaine and alcohol habit and was a walking panic attack. I really couldn’t handle it, I couldn’t go on. I have friends who should probably do it (therapy), who’s lives are stunted by depression and anxiety but they don’t really fuck up and they manage to get by. I was genuinely frightening myself, getting in ever worse and progressively more dangerous situations. Without my extreme behaviour, I probably wouldn’t have approached it. Because of therapy though, I can look back at those times and earlier stuff and while im not particularly proud of my behaviour I can just shrug; everything brings you to where you are.
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Donna had therapy some years back and ended up with an eye twitch that made things worse
Luckily she got in touch with a brilliant therapist who sorted it
Many moons ago I was in an institution and they were going to kick me out, I didn’t want to leave as I would be homeless, my best thinking was to make out I had Schizophrenia… Had to sit on a panel with 3 shrinks, the only downside to this plan was that I didn’t know how to act
The best I could muster, was to keep looking behind me saying, what’s that Trevor whilst the shrinks just sat there with bemused faces
Unsurprisingly, I was booted out sharpish
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