Caving and mental health

[pwhole]

There's plenty of good manuals out there though. Granted it's mostly working from the inside out, but a good therapist/guide should be able to assist with re-orientation for folks who want to do it as safely as possible, as most people will have never gone near anything like that. The main appeal from where I'm standing is that it may only need to be done once or twice and that's it, rather than an endless script of chemical subduers, often for life. It seems that one of the main benefits can be the 'realisation' of the depression as separate, and thus provide a path for removing it.

One of my friends used to be a psychiatric nurse at what remained of Middlewood Mental Asylum in Sheffield twenty-something years ago, when it was a more enlightened rehabilitation centre, and he was working on studies of depression across the city as part of his PhD, and the amount spent on prescriptions daily was staggering. Prozac was still under patent at the time and I think it was ?1.05 per capsule, per day, per person, and there were something like 50,000 prescriptions active in the city, on a minimum six-week course - but with no maximum, obviously. Every city in Britain was running it the same way. I would guess that there are no less today, and probably a lot more. Granted Prozac is now just plain old fluoxetine, but there's plenty more in patent they'd rather we tried. After all, if you make antidepressants, who wants to kill the market?

 

[JasonC]

Problem with psychedelics such as psilocybyn is that you are rewiring your brain without a wiring diagram.

Life is rewiring your brain all the time, for good or ill

 

[tamarmole]

Problem with psychedelics such as psilocybyn is that you are rewiring your brain without a wiring diagram.

Life is rewiring your brain all the time, for good or ill

True to a degree, but taking psychedelics can be like trying to fix a watch with a sledgehammer!  Having seen one or two people come a cropper with psychedelics (mainly LSD) I am not convinced the risk is worth it.

 

[pwhole]

I think therein lies the problem up until now - it's always been recreational, unsupervised use, often by people who really shouldn't be doing it - or at least in an unsupervised way! Hopefully as the stigma is reduced, more controls and more focus can be given to this sort of work, and then folks will actually feel the benefits rather than the downsides, and want to do it in a more useful fashion. I've seen a few friends come a cropper too, but it was only temporary and they climbed out of it and are still around. Again, the point with the depression treatment is that done carefully, it may only take one or two sessions, with follow-up support where required, but that's hugely cheaper than the current methods, and hopefully a 'cure' for some, rather than merely mitigation for life.

It's re-programming, for sure, but the brain is a very complex computer, to some degree accessible at processor-level by the user, and not of all its code is read-only. I used to have a terrible problem with blushing when I was a teenager, not always caused by embarrassment, probably just hormonal, but once my friends noticed it they could make me blush merely by pointing out that I did it, which was embarrassment as I knew they were doing it to hurt me. That took years to get over but it was a conscious decision I made to stop doing it, as I knew I could get to it 'in there'.

It's difficult to describe how, but then coding is

 

[pwhole]

It's all kicking off in that there psychedelics/mental health research this week, with further news that there finally be a 'non-hallucinogenic' compound that might work. I can't help thinking that the 'hallucinogenic' bit is the crucial factor, but I'm prepared to give them a chance for now:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/28/non-hallucinogenic-psychedelics-scientists-close-in-on-compound

 

[Speleofish]

Blushing, as a self-conscious adolescent, is miserable. I spent what seemed to be half my school hours imitating a lighthouse whenever there were girls around (my school had girls in the sixth form only) to the amusement of most of my classmates. Their ambition became to make me blush continuously for an entire double biology lesson. Unfortunately, they succeeded, and I remember it in painful detail (which is also why I remember more about various aspect of newts than I will ever need to know).

I still blush easily but am less self conscious about it. The 'cure' was spending my gap year working in the local hospital. There were very few young men and apparently infinite numbers of young women. To survive, I had either to blush less frequently, care less when I did so and accept that people could find such things amusing without being malicious. 

 

[pwhole]

Well I too found that increasing my quota of young women and decreasing that of young men helped with the blushing, no doubt about that. Helped with everything, frankly.

 

[thehungrytroglobite]

I suffer from borderline personality disorder / complex PTSD, which involves anxiety and / or low mood as part of the symptoms, however I have never had any issues caving at all. In fact I find caving extremely therapeutic.

I can in fact think of several benefits that people with mental health difficulties may have in a cave: such as greater awareness of ourselves, great resilience, stronger empathy and understanding for other members of the group, etc.

If I need help I will ask for it, but I've never seen my illness as a barrier to any of the sports I do.

 

[pwhole]

There's a great documentary on BBC2 right now about psychedelics and their use in treatment for depression:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000w7bq

 

[Keris82]

Caving has certainly helped me. This past year of being effectively imprisoned in my own home has had a detrimental effect on my mental health. I suffer from both anxiety and depression at times and getting back to some form of normality and being able to cave again and make future plans recently has really helped me and my partner.

 

[Paul Marvin]

It certainly helps me to switch of from running my business and puts a smile on my face caves, mines , cave and mine diving love them all 

 

[Paul Marvin]

I wasn't really going to post anything here but now feel I aught.
I think if a person freely admits that they have a problem then they are half way towards solving it. The experience of going underground in my opinion can be very therapeutic, taking a persons mind off personal problems etc.
The person to beware of is the person who has a problem but cannot see this.
I am unfortunately talking from personal experience.

Case in mind a person who for some reason if given an instruction, even something safety related, has an irresistible compulsion to do exactly the opposite or something different.

Just be careful.

Roy as always VERY true there are to many people that won't seek help or just not face up to things, and I find men especially to coin a horrible phrase are  far to often told to " man up a bit "