Interestingly, solving symptoms can be important. My wife went to the physio with a sore back. He treated it with massage, of course, but equally importantly, he told her to take (over the counter) painkillers in substantial doses for 2-3 days. He said it was important to “solve” the pain. My interpretation is that this is a superficial fix but it’s important so that the body/brain doesn’t get accustomed to feeling that pain. Break the habit, so to speak. I see an analogy with what GP wrote.

Mm, perhaps it's tempting to think that. I understand where those feelings might be coming from. Before being on it, I probably felt some variation of that.

The best analogy I can think of is, imagine heating an iron rod over a fire and then pressing it against your skin. Would you want to ignore those feelings if you could?

Whatever part of me changed, I'm glad it did. My suicidal ideation dropped to zero, which I never thought was possible. In fact, I thought it was normal for everyone to go through life feeling somewhat suicidal.

All I can do is point to what few accomplishments I've made, and say "you have things to look forward to. Fix yourself, and your life can turn around. I never bothered to try. Once I did, everything changed."

I've been on psychiatric medication. Lexapro "worked" but I quit taking it because I realized it merely made me complacent. I'd occasionally look around at my surroundings and see how they were not changing for the better.

I went to a psychiatrist and it set into motion a series of events that gave me the worst experiences of my life. I would be better off having never gone, and attempting to go again has not restored any faith in psychiatric practice. I think your advice is reckless and ill founded. Doctors have plenty of stories of people they helped, but they can't have (or at least make no effort to track) the stories about people they have not helped or scared away.

Thank you for sharing. How are you doing nowadays? I hope things are better.

What do you feel is the best alternative to my advice? My problem is, although everything you say is true, there doesn’t seem to be a good “do X instead” option.

you dont need to treat the root cause to solve symptoms.

In fact, it can be helpful to treat the symptoms first, because the symptoms might make it impossible to productively approach the core issues one might have. They might be feeding back into each other in a never-ending loop of negative interpretation/emotion.