Anxiety, now with added depression!

When anxiety turns steadily in depression it becomes something else entirely. Most of the advice for social anxiety seems to obsess about just getting out more and being in the presence of other people. Learning social skills, general chit chat and exposure, a steady progression onwards and upwards to success.Face your fears and demand they must make you better anyway. When that doesn't work they often then just blame you for not doing enough, after all if this idea doesn't work then there really isn't anything else left. The idea falls to pieces and maybe other less settling aspects of human behaviour overall come into play such as bullying and human instinct for picking on anyone different or who doesn't fit in. Maybe even evolution eliminating the weak. People seem to hate talking about evolution when it comes to humans, strange considering so many now don’t believe in God either. Perhaps they believe in magic.

Depression makes even the most basic concepts of recovery that much harder. You become deeply miserable, exhausted and unhappy so social interaction is much more difficult. Even thinking of things to say on a forum is a drag when you do nothing and go nowhere all day.We know that most meetings with strangers require if not demand pleasantries and jokes and witty banter so why go to meets if you can't think of anything to say and feel like topping yourself even if you had no anxiety anyway? We know that people will not like us for being miserable so we hide away even more, become hermits which makes us even more isolated and depressed and the vicious circle continues. When you see only a hopeless future and spend every day alone and in misery then what the hell do you have to talk about? It’s very hard to break out of this cycle since people aren't very understanding at all actually but often quite cruel.

A plan for recovery I have read online is to remove negative or depressing people from your life to help you recover. Of course it’s never occurred to them that that’s why so many shy people have no friends in the first place. It’s because everyone else has already removed [B][I]us[/I][/B] from their life as we are boring, miserable and negative and thats why we are alone as nobody wants to be with us even if we do try to socialise! It’s also a bit hard to remove negative people from your life if you are already totally alone. The next step is often thinking about removing yourself from everyone and everything.