And on this day and age it is only normal to be somewhat depressed so… (or anxious whatever)
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Thanks guys
Job coaching is an useless activity that unemployed need to do in order to get money from the government. From 9 am to 4 pm every day, where you go to seminars about how to apply for jobs, how to behave on interviews and stuff like that.
I will ask my doctor about trying natural treatments, see what my options are.
thanks so much for the advice, made me feel more at ease.
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Yea so it is the same thing as here… i have never accepted going there thought 
but i was in something that could be compared with it… basically a thing you go few times a week and its not really a job nor course. I hate that kind of stuff, i’d rather do something real. So i fully do understand your depression about it, i just couldn’t live with that myself.
Where do you live btw? as we seem to have same sort of system.
I guess the thing that i was in the past was called “rehabilitation” but it is more like “humiliation” they really do make you feel like shit in those places - unless you have the mentality that you do enjoy being back in the fourth grade of primary school.
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I think if you feel able to do an honest assessment of where the line’s drawn between genuine magickal experiences, and what might be artefacts of a mental health problem, and/or you have people in your life (medical professionals or friends, family, etc) who can help you with that, that’s the most important thing you need to be aware of, and that’s just not something I or anyone else on the internet can really help you with.
So, I can’t personally comment that much on the medical side, but as far as the rest goes, are you depressed, or just deeply unhappy?
All my life from early childhood onwards I used to suffer from depression, but a lot of it was actual unhappiness at various things, mainly the dominant message in Xian & RHP eastern thought that there’s something wrong with the world, and with myself, and that both need to be escaped or denied or whatever, which is expressed with far more finesse in the teachings, but really does boil down to those concepts.
Once I consciously shucked that off, my underlying pain lifted rapidly, and that left me able to do other things to keep improving it.
Everyone’s different but it’s worth checking whether your core beliefs about life, injustice and suffering, the universe, your place in it, and the ultimate destiny of your soul etc. - beliefs which have been ingrained from your upbringing and culture, and which may be at direct odds with your hopes and conscious thoughts - support you in being happy in the first place.
I fail to see how a person can live in this world with those spiritual messages of inadequacy and failure in the air and NOT become unhinged, or at least unhappy.
Stephen Flowers’ book “Lords Of The Left-Hand Path” helped me to solidify what had been going wrong with me all those years (note that by LHP he doesn’t mean exclusively, or even mostly, baneful magick to hurt other people, the term refers to deeper philosophical issues which he breaks down very comprehensively) and that might be worth reading if what I typed seems like it might apply to you.
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And exactly like Lady Eva here says, at least some times when i have been “depressed” it has been caused by my dire unhappiness on the situation where i am at, so i don’t see help in medicine or doctor’s manipulation… But just trying to be strong and finding things to be happy about. The depression will go away with time, at least this is how it has been for me. And more you have other things to focus on the better, but things you like! not some job coaching you hate.
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Just another suggestion - try a book called “The NOW Habit” by Neil Fiore.
He deconstructs the myth of “the work ethic” when interpreted to mean that we’re all naturally lazy, weak, and childlike, and need to be bullied and forced into work, and replaces it with the idea that humans are naturally creative and just happen to live in a society polluted with toxic messages about how work must be “hard” and equate with drudgery, etc.
He points out that quite often, the only reward for completing a task successfully is to call down upon our heads more of the very same at a harder level, making completing things (or even beginning them) an entirely thankless task, and he discusses a few other widespread patterns like that which can result in chronic procrastination and underlying dread (and IMO in a lot of worse problems in life than that - depression being one of them) - he explains how these are actually rational and self-protective reactions to a destructive concept of work and our own true natures.
And then he comes up with very workable answers and mental shifts you can make, patterned on the behaviours of people who seem to achieve and succeed effortlessly while we’re still mired in resistance.
I’m not saying this to try to coach you into a job, but because it might empower you and counteract any similarly toxic messages you’re getting from this mandatory “job coaching” thing. 
(Edit to add, despite the title, this book is NOT a polemic about how we should stop being such snivelling lazy worms and “Just do it NOW” kind of thing, which just doesn’t work for some people and some tasks - it’s about ways to handle what you FEEL in the now, and ways to stop your present-moment reaction to a task from snowballing into a problem.
I have NO idea if you even do procrastinate but like I said, ref: the job coaching and general depression it might be worth checking out.)
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I was on anti-depressants in my 20s and they didn’t help me one bit. They just made me sluggish and less productive. That said, I know people who had the opposite reaction, so the decision is and should always be yours.
What worked for me was self-actualization. Like Lady Eva, I was raised in typical western religion and until I shed that like an old skin I was never happy. I have nothing against people who find comfort in those religions, but it never worked for me, personally. You need to find what beliefs are holding you back (religious or otherwise) and figure out why you believe them. If, after analysis, they don’t make sense, replace them with new beliefs that do. This takes a long time, but it’s better than anything else in life when you get it done. Even better than magick.
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I am uncertain if this will assist you, but it is offered in that spirit:
Much of what “conventional” science employs in its diagnoses of mental conditions is merely a way of categorizing situations, according to the observed symptoms, in an effort to more succinctly address them. The causation of which, remains speculative and somewhat dogmatic.
What is generally accepted amoung the psychological community is that “emotional disorders”, of which depression and anxiety are the most prevalent, most likely stem from trauma that leaves the individual bereft of “coping mechanisms” it perceives as common to all people.
It is, however, no secret amoung both the medical and metaphysical communities that those who experience the above are far more likely to be perceptive of the intangible facets of transcendent dynamics. Though the former has a history of publically repudiating it, research into this phenomena has been exponentially expanding of late. It is almost universally acknowledged within the later community that prominence in supranatural ability, (both passive and active) routinely involves a history of some form of psychological trauma (aka psychic shift).
From my own experience working with both communities, I tend to view this as a matter of barriers either having been stripped away, disintegrating due to their lack of function, or never having been present (most psychotropic pharmaceuticals being used as a form of substitute for them). As such, they may be replaced by filters, in which the metaphysical arts are uniquely oriented to assist.
In short: proceeding with consideration of both goals, and a healthy degree of caution that one does not extend beyond the influence and protection of the other, may ideally attend your journey.
Again, this is but my own perspective, and I do wish you much health and growth in your endeavours.
Edson
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FWIW, my two cents.
Magic is a stressful art. Shifting awareness to different levels of consciousness and back again, interacting with spirits who have an alien mindset, gaining awareness of different levels of reality, all of this can place stress and pressure on the psyche. So if you have any weak spots, any potential areas of mind or will that could crack, then that needs to shored up and fixed.
I certainly think you should do magic, but with an eye first on getting the depression and anxiety well and truly sorted. Were it me, I would bring the subject to my main spirit allies and see what suggestions and assistance they had to offer. Failing that, an evocation of Raphael would probably be my next step.
One final thought: congratulations. You have a dragon to slay, and, like Sigurd, you will find it’s blood will strengthen you in ways you cannot yet conceive. It may seem trite to say “that which does not kill me will make me stronger”, but I think you will feel the truth of it when you are on the other side of this. And I have full confidence that you will be.
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Others have captured the heart of the issue well therefore I will instead say, you are neither alone nor helpless to transform events. Perhaps not much as far as advices go but…
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I briefly took antidepressants over ten years ago, and I’ve only fairly recently recovered most of my normal mental and emotional functioning. Those things cause brain atrophy, mutilate your emotions, and the “science” behind them flatly isn’t science by any conventional meaning of the word.
If you’re feeling depressed, assess your life and make sure there aren’t any glaringly obvious and perfectly rational reasons you’re feeling depressed. If your life sucks, you are depressed because your life sucks and you should start slowly, gently working on improving it instead of trying to “cope” or “take the edge off” of the symptoms with pills.
Also, make sure you seriously go over your diet/exercise situation and be on the lookout for symptoms of psychic attack/parasitism which can cause many depression-like symptoms.
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[quote=“Sultitan_Itan, post:14, topic:4297”]I briefly took antidepressants over ten years ago, and I’ve only fairly recently recovered most of my normal mental and emotional functioning. Those things cause brain atrophy, mutilate your emotions, and the “science” behind them flatly isn’t science by any conventional meaning of the word.
If you’re feeling depressed, assess your life and make sure there aren’t any glaringly obvious and perfectly rational reasons you’re feeling depressed. If your life sucks, you are depressed because your life sucks and you should start slowly, gently working on improving it instead of trying to “cope” or “take the edge off” of the symptoms with pills.
Also, make sure you seriously go over your diet/exercise situation and be on the lookout for symptoms of psychic attack/parasitism which can cause many depression-like symptoms.[/quote]
I would like to hear more, like what do you mean by only recently recovering most of your emotional and mental functions ? (i mean more in detail) and also for how long did you use them? and what was the name of those drugs?
I understand if this is too personal to be talked in detail at a public forum, but anyways i wanted to express my interest.
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Effexor for nearly a year, but I started suffering severe withdrawal symptoms when I missed a dose by an hour, so I demanded to be taken off it. But in the period I was on it, I had some pretty extreme anger flashes. One time, I got extremely angry about something and it built and built until I felt something like a light-bulb exploding in my forehead. I blacked out and half an hour later found myself standing stock still in the kitchen shivering violently and realized I was going into shock. For years afterward there was a cap on my emotional intensity and I never regained the sharpness of mind that I’d always had before. Basically, my brain used to be an espresso machine and now it’s a percolator. Things like planning, discipline, acting quickly and decisively, developing or getting rid of habits, remembering what I said I was going to do today and actually doing it, this kind of stuff used to be second nature to me and now take a lot more effort. Whenever I decide I want to do something, I have to take into account that I’m not the same person and just “deciding and starting and seeing what happens” doesn’t work anymore. It takes a lot more commitment and planning.
When I read my writing from before then, there’s this phenomenally swift, razor-sharp mind there. But everything afterwards became much more diffusive and discursive. I also see a person who used to pull ideas and images from the world around him change into someone who exclusively channelled images from within. I remember what it felt like to be that person and to think that way naturally and easily, but that person was killed. I have the same components now, but they don’t work the same way, and it’s caused me to be a radically different person than I would have been. Everything about me is slower, milder, more mellow, but less out-going. Outside experiences in art and magic, my daily life doesn’t really “peak.” While I do enjoy emotions again now, they’re deep and nuanced and fiery and don’t really soar like they used to. I’m a lot less comfortable in social situations because I don’t really “perk up” like I used to - the only way for me to be friendly is to relax - mellow. I used to have a “giddy anarchist” side that balanced out the “mellow nice guy” and “vindictive witch” sides. Maybe I’ll get it back yet. Working with Mercury seems to help.
I rarely admit this, because it really upset me for years, but I don’t feel love the way most people do, though maybe it’ll come back. It’s another one of those espresso machine/percolator things. That was the most pronounced effect of the burnout experience, actually. From then on, I’ve always been mostly pretty cool. I can feel affection, but I can always dampen or raise it on the fly - I don’t get those raging bonfires that drive you crazy. I’m colder and more detached and don’t really “yearn” for returned affection from others.
Obviously, all of this has advantages and disadvantages.
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Thanks for sharing Sultitan, personally i only took those medicines for maybe 2 months (ssri and ranoprin) and my mind was pretty messed up at those times when i had just turned 16 and i think the medicine added its part to it when i was using it, but especially when i decided to stop taking it… I had so bad “cold turkey” i’m not even sure what was going on, but it was like i was fearing that i die or even the whole world disappears all the time - and i had ocd like thoughts coming in mega doses… It was like psychosis for a while, i even talked about weird shit to people.- Like i was partially brain dead.
I also remember that i started to get “mega emotions” after stopped those medicines, like i when was watching a movie and i got big chills and emotions as if it was something new to have those emotions.
Yeah early 16… Quite confusing times with first relationship,experiencing medicine,experiencing cannabis, and all that… Surely there has been other times of major confusement and chaos too.
But i think its quite dangerous how easily they “give” these medicines to young people. Maybe it was an option for my depression at the time, but surely there could have been a healthier alternative.
Can’t be sure how much damage those medicines did to me in the end.
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I know many have had negative experiences with medication but I have to go by my own experience and say that anti depressants CAN be helpful. I myself suffer from generalized anxiety disorder, as well as dysthymia, which is a constant, low grade depression, and I have found medication to be very useful (it depends on which medication as some are stronger than others). It helped me to achieve emotional balance. It did not negatively affect my magick in any way. If anything, it has helped me to relax, which is a prerequisite for getting into the necessary being states.
Having said that, I see medication as a short term solution (unless you suffer from clinical depression which can lead to suicide in which case it would be more long term), and recommend you take a holistic approach. Meditation, light exercise, and cold showers, have all been proven to alleviate low grade depression and anxiety, and they are all helpful for magick. In conjunction with medication, those practices will greatly help you and, eventually, you will be able to dispense with the medication.
Hope this helps.
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I also had a pretty bad case of GAD and depression ,but it all just went away this summer…I gradually started feeling better , so good that I started practicing magick even more than before. I still have some episodes now and then but …I am ok.
I did try to take AD, I tried Seroxat and another similar one but I gotta say, they only made me feel worse. I cannot tell you whether you should or should not take AD…they might help you even if they didn t help me .]
What I CAN surely tell you is that anxiety and depression will go away, they will vanish one day.I can assure you. Maybe you need a slight motivation, a change of some sort,something positive and motivating…like a new love story
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I’ve suffered from depression and anxiety on and off for most of my life. Meds never did anything for me, the biggest improvement occurred when I went paleo and my mood swings really leveled out. Also Bach flower remedies helped a lot, and iodine and magnesium.
It’s never deterred me from practicing magick, although in hindsight, working with the Goetia a lot while in a deep depression probably wasn’t such a wise idea, but I’m still here to tell the tale.
I’ve found Glas’yos very helpful for battling anxiety. I charged his sigil and carried it around with me and it helped me through a bad period when I was having panic attacks and insomnia.
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Why do you think it wasn’t a good idea?
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Because it was probably more than I could handle at the time.
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