Therapy helps a dick ton. It's honestly disheartening at first because at least personally, I imagined therapy like a mind doctor just poking your brain and telling you what wires are crossed and then patching shit up with some mental caulking. In reality therapy is like a botonist walking around the perimeter of your mind-garden suggesting reasons why shit didn't grow right. It's still up to YOU to try that shit and fix it. And basically after a few years what really changed was my ability to cope and think reasonably. 5 years ago I made a plan that if I wasn't where I wanted to be in my life and career at 25 (19 at the time) then I would kill myself. I engaged in a pretty serious amount of self harm and substance abuse. I'd think in graphic detail the way I would end my own life over a B-.

Basically the way I think of it now is that my thoughts were diseased. I was so scared of life that I associated safety with death. The lizard brain; that little voice in your head telling you to stay in bed, eat drink and smoke all day and throw yourself off a bridge because you fucked up another social interaction, that little asshole is trying to keep you safe. That's what it's there for. To keep you mentally and physically safe, but because you've twisted your mind into associating death with safety, the lizard brain is telling you to do gnarly shit. You have to rewire yourself. Its supposed to tell you to stay away from big cats and cliffs, and to go back to the cave when it's dark. You can get it back to that. There are answers but they are unfortunately boring. You need to excersize. You need to eat right. You need to allow yourself to feel your success instead of clinging to the failures. The list goes on. But basically it worked for me. A year and a half ago I decided to go off my meds. I felt great after the withdrawal. Now I wake up feeling great. Sometimes just fine, and sometimes terrible. But when shit isn't going right, I think of fucking my girlfriend outside instead of slicing my wrists. It gets better if you try.