Do you think a psychologist can help?

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I feel I am under major depression , living with As and being an outcast has made my life a hell. Life is a constantly fight for me, living with other people work with them ,and always hear “you are strange you might have a problem “,or tolerate their looks .I am some where between death and life. this rejection by others makes me depressed, and find life meaningless, How can an Aspie put a meaning to him/her life? Be happy despite people’s cruelness and rejection ? my last hope is seeing a doctor is it helpful I I don’t know where I must start my story to tell him, I am ashamed Of who I am .

I went to a psychologist and they did 'talk' therapy. The problem was I could talk circles around them, but was feeling no better. I went to another psychologist who referred me to a psychatric nurse practitioner that is doing SSRI reuptake inhibitors and a psychic energizer that mitigates a lot of the depression and focuses a lot of scattered energy.

I have only been on this other therapy for a couple of months and haven't a definitive opinion on what works or doesn't work. But I understand exactly where you are coming from, anahita.

Merle

A good psychologist or psychotherapist might be able to help a lot.....or a good counsellor. But I'd shop around because there are plenty of mediocre health professionals around, so if the first contact isn't sympathetic, move on. Cognitive therapy might be suitable - dismantling the old, negative habits of thinking and replacing them by ideas from a more hopeful perspective.

Good luck with the depression. The only self-help strategies I know are to try to stay active when you can, and to try not to let your mind wander onto depressing material.

I don't have much faith in psychologists. Far too many of them don't do much beyond making you talk about your feelings (alexithymia, anyone?) and relive your traumatic experiences by sharing all the details about it. Hello! How will telling someone how I felt while getting bullied, for example, and telling him/her all the details (like what names they called me) make me feel better about it? I once saw a psychologist who did those things. While she was very helpful in many other ways, I was really uncomfortable with these two things. I ended up fighting back by using "sacrificial topics", which were minor issues I could easily handle myself, but pretended to be a lot more worked up about it than I really was. For instance, getting a bad grade on a test.

I'm marginally more supportive of psychiatrists. While they can be too focused on the feelings sometimes, at least you get a "prize" in the end: a drug that can make you feel better. If the psychiatrist is see is a pill pusher, even better. I can get the medication without having to share my feelings, and he/she doesn't have to do much work; everybody is happy.

I think a few people here have had positive things to say about seeing a therapist who works works with ASDs.

I've found most therapy counterproductive. They've wanted to work on my self esteem, getting it up, making me think that I'm normal and capable and that people can like me.. and then I've discovered that no, people don't like me, and everything collapses. Or they support this theory that if people seem upset but you don't know why, it probably doesn't have anything to do with you; they're probably upset about something that happened earlier or whatever. So then I'd ignore people being nasty because I'd assume it wasn't about me.. even if they were actually pissed at me. There were just a million ways like that that advice that might help someone else only caused me more problems.

Medication can be helpful, but you have to be careful. A lot of doctors are quick to throw you on antipsychotics "to help calm you down"... even if there's no indication for them.
Getting onto medication for ADD really helped me, because at least if I'm feeling crappy about something, I can get into a book and distract myself from whatever it is I'm upset about.

Easy. Find something you want to do and do it. I felt a lot happier when I realised that life doesn't have to involve other people.

When you put yourself out there and try something different, good things often happen. There is nothing to be gained from sitting around feeling miserable because other people don't like you.

Yes, and as soon as I can get a couple of dairy goats and some chickens for eggs, I won't need to see normal people anymore! (that is, after finding a place that doesn't have an HOA that's banned farm animals.. I keep buggin' Kris about it, lol)

This. So much.

People can be happy even if most other people hate them and the rest feel indifferent. Other people are not the only meaning to life.

Talk therapy can be really counter-productive for Aspies, since often what the Aspie needs is some form of coaching, not hours and days and weeks of talking about their feelings to a stranger. There are therapists who specialize in behavior modification, but it can take some time to find the ones who do it well.

Thank you for all you replies , yes I myself feel more happy when I am alone, I found other people hostile I can easily omit them and live entire happily without them, but this is my or better to say our obligation of life makes us to be with them ,for example working , my job is a kind of one which I must have interaction with my colleagues and clients, I seem too strange to them, in a cruel way they all the time judge me, one of them say you are serious , brusque, and the other say you have a shell .our new boss at his first meeting with me said you are drowned in yourself , you are sad( because I am reserved and don’t participate in conversations, I think I belong to mute Autism group) but there is another colleagues, who is less social than others but nobody see her as a different person !I think I have especial facial expressions. our boss almost convene every month and talk about our daily works, duty, and other things… in this section at the beginning he told that” Miss.. is now much better than first day I saw her” Don’t they really realize their sarcastic words destroy me? All the time I say from today life will be different and want to be happy schedule my time and enjoy…. But suddenly their judgments, attitudes towards me attack like an Epilepsy and deactivate every effort of mine Or may be they just want to help!! Nowadays I hate every things for examples even ,films, music’s, entrainments, politics’ … , I say to myself this is people’s products this for them, their world, I hate them and their world so I reject everything relates to them. 2weaks age I had a travel but it didn’t make my mood better. may be this a high depression. Can I still say that everything is ok and I can be happy? Which I can never be. I think those aspies who live happily don’t have to tolerate NT and even an aspie never realize he or she is an aspie when he/she doesn’t have to live with them so it is true statement by Atwood(which one of this forum’s member indicate it):You don’t suffer from Asperger you suffer from other people . I still have doubt to see the doctor(another NT!). What do you think? I think I must go

I have some theories on why aspies don't respond well to talk therapy. They come from personal experience and the information I read on there.

Theory 1: The types of questions used in talk therapy don't mesh well with aspie thinking.
Consider the questions used in stereotypical talk therapy (i.e. the "client-centered" kind). A lot of them simply won't work for aspies, because they take things literally (unless it's very clear that they shouldn't). Many of those questions seem confusing, bizarre, or downright offensive to aspies; for example, the infamous "How did that make you feel?" I always hated it because it made the psychologist look like a blithering idiot. After all, how can someone with a Ph.D. in psychology not know what being bullied feels like? And we all know that it's hard to trust someone who shows low intelligence. It wasn't until I read on here that shrinks aren't looking for information; they want bring the patient's feelings to the surface and deal with them. I don't believe that this works, but I'll give them credit for trying. However, unless you know the real purpose of questions about feelings, just how much would you trust a therapist who doesn't know what bullying feels like?

Theory 2: Methods used in talk therapy can resemble bullying at times.
Obviously, this is all inadvertent. But the resemblance is till there. When I was seeing a therapist, I was always refusing to cry. She told me it was OK to cry, but I "knew better". Just as bullies tried to make me cry by saying things that touched a nerve, the therapist asked me things that touched a nerve as well. So in those cases, I knew that crying was out of the question. Plus there was the embarrassment factor of walking back to the waiting room and getting into my parents' car with tears in my eyes. Also, crying in therapy is a very objectifying experience. You're sitting there feeling weak and vulnerable, while someone watches you with an emotionless look in their eyes; this is vaguely reminiscent of schoolyard bullying.

Would you mind if I asked what sort of work you do?

For NTs, it's a valid approach. When an NTs expresses an emotion, this emotion gets processed, and its intensity reduces. This doesn't work at all for me, and I think it doesn't work for many other Aspergers/Autistics.

I am a bank clerk

Yeah, I understand this now. But in the past, all I did is think that my therapist was an idiot, or pretending to be one to make me feel smart. Under my logic, if she has a Ph.D. in psychology but doesn't know what being bullied feels like, she can't be trusted. Needless to say, she didn't get an honest answer, just a "correct" one (the one I knew she'd want to hear). I memorized a list of emotion words from an encyclopedia, and regurgitated them when I had to. I also avoided hard questions about feelings by pretending to have test anxiety, and asking the therapist to help me.

Lol. I did the same. Not on purpose, just based on my life experience I learned which emotion is mentioned in which situation. The truth is, I don't feel any of them. I do feel emotions, just they are different from the standard ones.