My usual gynecologist was booked, but I just needed an annual so I went to her nurse practitioner at a different location this once. My blood pressure tends to be slightly high.

"Are you an ananxious person?" "You can see on my chart I have severe chronic anxiety as a diagnosis and that I'm on two meds for it so .. yes." "Well you have to calm down."

.... Oh I didn't think of that. Gee, thanks. I'll just calm down from now on.

Never going back to that lady again.

Years ago now, I had a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital after my thoughts of ending things got really bad. When I got out and was working on my recovery, two different people told me that I just needed God to cure my depression.

Jokes in them. Religious anxiety was part of what made me unwell.

Bonus advice: a friend told me I just needed vitamins. Like, wow thanks for that.

Had a psych tell me to have a glass of red wine whenever I was feeling anxious after explaining to her I had recently been tapered off of benzos and was looking for another option

Do you also have that one friend?

That one you know for 25 years and really want to value, and who is actually otherwise quite smart, but who, when you have a depressive episode, will tell you how to get cured? Who offers for the umpteenth time to send you some brain altering MP3 files to listen to for an hour a day? Who tells you about his out-of-body experiences and how everything you yourself have is just a symptom preparing you for a (not more specificially defined) enlightement of sorts?

And who, totally unironically, while proclaiming distrust for all things government and vaccinations, sends you a document from the Department of the Army, which seems quite literally to be the f***** document "Men who stare at goats" is based on, telling you to be more open minded about things like this?

Man, I'm so done with all of this. But also, writing out the last paragraph, I lol'ed. Possibly not in a good way, but at least I lol'ed about the absurdity of it all.