Brain Spew in Lieu of Wit

I'm not entirely sure when I last did a general update, so I figured I would give you an idea of what's happening on my journey. As I've said in a few of my previous posts, I am back on Venlafaxine ER (the generic for Effexor XR). The dosage is significantly lower than I had been taking - I spent most of my adult life taking 150mg, but I'm currently on the 37.5mg dose. I have been entertaining the idea of going up to the 75mg to see if it helps my depressive episodes and nerve pain, but it's not at a critical point. As it stands, my depressive episodes are significantly shorter and less severe than they have been in my whole life. I'm able to recognize the spiraling thought patterns for what they are and have started using the tools that have been gifted to me over the years to treat myself gently. My pain levels have diminished greatly. In all honestly, my day-to-day is still between 3-5 on a 10 point pain scale, but that's a vast improvement of 5-8. My

There are so many difficulties with mental and chronic illness, and not the least of these is how we manage them. We are inundated with advice and solutions, but a lot of it misses some of the core challenges with treatment in the first place. I want to explore some of why it's so hard to seek treatment and to keep up with it. This is not to keep people from trying medication. I want to give a voice to all of the things people who do  seek (and continue) treatment overcome. I largely focus on medications, as they're a very tangible element of treatment, but many of these also apply to therapy, exercise, and procedures (such as surgeries, hormone treatments, ect , or tms ). Do I even need help? One of the hardest parts of seeking treatment is recognizing that there might be a problem to begin with. Seeing there's a problem isn't just recognizing how symptoms are affecting you, as the ill person, or the people around you. It can be really hard to realize your ex