So, my therapist is referring me to a psychiatrist who she’ll work with to diagnose me, but currently she is leaning towards a social anxiety disorder with depression.
Firstly, I didn’t realize SAD was an actual disorder so I hadn’t considered it before.
But…I feel really crushed. I’m not trying to use SAD as an excuse or anything, but it feels like conscious brain knows what I should be doing as a communist, but my subconscious instinct over protects me and prevents me from actually being able to be social and organize and such. I just feel like such a useless sack of meat.
If anyone else here has suffered with this, could I ask for some advice, please?
as someone with years of experience both having and finally overcoming social anxiety and depression, i have a few things to say
i wouldn’t get caught up on labels and diagnoses too much. psychiatry can sometimes pathologize normal, rational human behavior. in my experience it also made it seem like i would be stuck with my diagnoses for life, which i don’t think is necessarily the case, either.
this is exactly, exactly what i felt, and i felt a lot of shame as a result of my values not being in alignment with my actions. but, a central aspect of marxism is that humans (and really all living beings) are inherently rational, that we react rationally to our material conditions in accordance with our material interests. i was forced to investigate my own history and why i had learned to be so scared of other people, and why i had learned to think so little of myself, so that i could then change myself in the present. this was a process that took several years and was very challenging, but was absolutely worth it because i feel like it tackled the underlying contradiction instead of the surface level symptoms.
and then on top of that, i’ve found that even still (like anything else) thinking positively and socially interacting with other people is a skill that can be learned. i have a much easier time learning it after resolving those issues from my past, but resolving those issues didn’t magically give me those skills either. taking things one step at a time, setting very small and achievable goals for myself has been what i’m working on: like saying hello or making eye contact with at least one stranger in a day, being around strangers a little more often, trying my best to reframe negative thoughts, etc
finally, i just want to say that with all the horrible things going on in the world and all the emphasis put on organization (rightly so), it can be so easy to think that because of your internal problems that you’re not a good enough communist, or that you’re not a communist in practice. but i think there are so many of us that are bogged down by mental health struggles such that sometimes being the best communist you can be literally entails tackling your mental health struggles head on. self care is valuable reproductive labor. this is how i’ve reframed the guilt i used to feel for being forced to work on myself for a time
hope you feel better soon, comrade.