WS 489 Mental Health and Sex

Listen to “WS 489 Mental Health And Sex” on Spreaker.

 

WS 489 Mental Health and Sex

 

On March 8, 2026 your favorite podcast host Mistress Harper brought you a discussion on Mental Health and Sex! Listen and learn about the major mental health challenges that you or your partners may experience in life. Everyone has a mind, therefore everyone has mental health! Sometimes you mental health may cause your life to become more difficult, and that includes sex, sexuality, and gender. Learn about the value of therapy, and why, if your mental health is impeding your ability to live your life the way you’d like to, you might want to consider talking to someone about it.

 

(0:02 – 0:34)
I am sincerely hopeful that you can hear what I’m saying, and if you can’t, I don’t fucking know at this point. Mercury is retrograde and it has been mean. It’s just been mean to me.

It’s been so mean. I’ve had so many audio issues lately. It’s fine.

(0:34 – 19:13)
This is fine. You know? Yeah, sure. Fuck it.

So, this is Whore School. I am Harper. You’re a hoost.

Hoostest with the mostest. I’m coming to you, hopefully, live, noisily, to talk to you about sex. Baby, let’s talk about you and me.

So, we’re gonna discuss sex. We’re gonna discuss sex, sexuality, gender, gender expression, you know, the good shit. If you are listening to the live show, please go to, um, where the hell am I? I pushed a button and I shouldn’t have.

Oh, okay. No, I’m good. I’m good.

We’re fine. Communitykink.com. The chat room’s open. You can come join me.

I’m having a day. Oh, my god. Y’all.

I’ve got EricCDF22, or EricDF. EricDF? EricDF? Collie, Mott, and Patty are all in here. Patty says, oh boy, mental health and sex.

I should maybe prepare for a ton of call outs tonight. Would I do that? So, you guys noticed that it was daylight savings, right? Did the time change get ya? I don’t, I don’t like the time change. The time change is terrible.

Fucking daylight savings. This is bullshit. I’m pretty certain that I sent out my little, uh, join the show, blah, blah, blah, to all the places that I was supposed to have.

There’s too many. There are too many places to go put stuff. I got the Discord.

I tweet it. Oh, I did not tweet. I just thought about it.

Y’all. All right, there, now I’ve tweeted. We’re going to discuss mental health and sex, just like when I did the episode about disability and sex.

Look, you have a body, and the current state of health that you are in is transient and subject to change. Everyone becomes differently abled or disabled at some point in their life. And if it’s not you, it’s going to be somebody that you want to have sex with.

It’s going to have some issue going on. Listen to that episode. It was number, I forget.

I’m super prepared. Look, it was recent. It was in this year, which really isn’t saying too much because it is, of course, 2026.

It was the disability and sex episode. It was from this year, right? Oh, no, it was from last year. Number 477, sex and disability from December 14th.

That only feels like it was from this year. It’s fine. Sex and disability.

Listen to that episode because it’s good for you. Patty says, ah, yes, the episode where I needed to confront my internalized ableism. That’s okay.

I’m going to do it to you again. So mental health, you have a mind. You have a mind.

The people that you want to have sex with also have a mind. Minds, much like bodies, can have some health issues. Most of us human beings have something going on with the brain.

Something’s happening in there. The theory of mind, we can talk about that. Sure.

The state of mental health that you currently enjoy is also transitory. It will change over time, subject to all sorts of things that can throw your mental health sideways. Patty says she slowly raises hand.

That might be me. Oh, that’s definitely you. That’s all of us.

All of us. If you have a mind, you have mental health. If you have a physical body, you have physical health.

If you have a mind, you have mental health. Just internalize that one. You have mental health and sometimes your mental health will be really, really good.

You will be on. You will be on your shit. You’ll handle what needs to be handled.

You’ll take care of what needs to get done. Stress will not upset you. You will be smart.

You will be on point. You’re all winning. And then other days you will not.

Sometimes your mental health may slow you down a little bit, slightly slower. Sometimes your mental health may fuck you over entirely in ways that are hard to visualize when you’re in good mental health, or even when you’re in poor mental health. It’s really, really fucking hard to be an accurate judge of your own state of mental health.

Because you’re trying to judge yourself logic that is affected by the mental health. Sometimes your brain and your brain chemistry make it very, very difficult to tell whether or not you’re having a mental health problem. Because it’s normal to you.

You feel normal. This is normal, right? This is average. I always feel like this.

Okay. Kelly says, clinical depression makes the first part of that rare. At least it did for me.

Yes. So we’re gonna I’m going to cover at least three different things today. That we’re going to talk about the three main things that I wanted to be able to cover for you.

ADHD and autism absolutely affect your sexuality and your sex, your sex life. Absolutely. Undeniably.

We’re also going to discuss mood disorders. We’re going to discuss personality disorders. And we’re going to talk about medication side effects just a little bit.

Because those are all things that are kind of a little bit important. Miss Addie has joined us in here. Yeah, Patty said it’s like how many extreme bouts of executive dysfunction have you had this week? And responding with just the normal amount.

The normal amount is zero. None. Yeah.

Okay, so let’s before we get too deep into things, let’s discuss mood disorders and personality disorders. They are the two main major categories for big fun mental health whoopsies. A mood disorder is it’s doing things to your mood and your ability to control and direct your mood.

What your what your brain is doing to you. The mood disorders. I had this pulled up and I think I closed it.

Disorders. Thank you. All right.

The mood disorders, depression, bipolar disorder, dysthymia, cyclothymic disorder, seasonal affective disorder, and other. That’s an actual category. This is off the DSM.

So dysthymia is persistent depressive disorder. Constant chronic low grade depression. It’s yes, I have other.

If you think about your mood, as your brain chemistry’s ability to react to stress and bad news, without catastrophizing and becoming mired in depression. Most people who do not experience depression, when something bad happens, and it is upsetting, they are sad about this, they cry a little bit, they engage in some catharsis, and then their mood inevitably rises again, and they become optimistic. And they return to their personal baseline, which is pretty fucking happy.

People who have depression, like depression, how do I explain this? Okay, if zero is normal, right? Zero is like, I’m kind of, you know, just present. Just there. Just there.

Then your mood can go above me, you know, up to like, say, a plus 10. Imagine the happiest you’ve ever been in your whole entire life. Everything is great.

You’re in love. You feel joyful, blissful, happy, ecstatic, just 10. You can also go to a minus 10.

Minus 10 would be the worst news you’ve ever heard your whole entire life. Nothing will ever get better. Everything is always going to be terrible.

And you’re incapable of envisioning a positive outcome for anything that happens. Ever. Nothing will ever improve ever.

That’s a negative 10. Most people, they fluctuate between about a five and a minus five. They’re in the middle.

They’re in there, you know, the super duper high highs, they don’t happen all the time. That’s not an everyday occurrence. It’s just sort of a, oh, wow, hey, look at that.

I’m insanely happy. And then you go back down towards more normal. Similarly, the vast majority of people never get down to a negative 10.

Because yikes, there are people who do get that low. It sucks. It’s terrible.

If you are that low. Get help. So depression kind of takes the positive numbers and says you’re no, you don’t get to experience any of those.

For most people who have depression, the highs that they may come up is maybe a too, you know, vaguely sort of happy ish. Like you can acknowledge the fact that sometimes happiness might exist. And then you go right back down into your negatives, negative two, negative three, negative five, or lower.

People with dysthymia, they never come up. Dysthymia is a persistent low mood. But dysthymia also does not have anything below like a minus five.

It’s just a persistent low mood. And it usually lasts for years on end. Dysthymia, for the record, sucks.

It’s just, you’re just, everything is just kind of blah and boring and gray and nothing is good. But nothing is so bad that you’re like, well, you’re just kind of down there. Major depressive, depressive disorder with recurrent episodes.

See, I got into the habit of being very, very clear and precise about stuff because of these sorts of this kind of language. The recurrent episodes means it comes back. It comes back again and again and again.

Major depression is you have dropped down into the below negative five, you are low low, you might come back up again, and then drop back again. That’s the recurrent part. If they tack on recurrent episodes, it means that this is a cyclic thing that has happened repeatedly, then it’s probably going to keep on happening again.

And again, the chat room is discussing whether or not zero could ever be negative. Y’all nerds. In addition to depression, there are other mood disorders.

Bipolar disorder. Oh boy, oh boy. Bipolar disorder is depression with mania.

If depression is now your mood stays in the negative numbers, and it’s just always down in there. Mania is your mood is in the positive numbers, and it never goes down. It stays nice and high.

Everything is awesome. Everything is wonderful. You have tons of energy, you are bouncing off the walls.

You are cheerful and excited and kind of a pain in the ass to be around. I’ve known a few people. So some people have mania, they just they go happy and they stay that way for a while.

This is not necessarily a good thing. And he says it sounds tiring. It is tiring.

People who are in a manic episode oftentimes they’ll spend money they don’t have. Because well, I’ll just make more tomorrow. It’ll be fine.

The future is a thing that doesn’t really happen to a person who is in a manic episode. There is right now right now. I want to buy the thing.

I want that. I’m going to learn to skydive. I’m going to start a new business.

I’m going to whatever it is that they’re currently fixated on. They’re going to do that and they’re going to run. And oftentimes a person who is manic will do the thing to one degree of all the way finished and done or another until they run out of energy.

So a person who is bipolar swings between manic and depressed. And they go back and forth. That nice, lovely zero in the middle of balanced, not super manic, not extremely depressed.

They pass through that briefly, on their way towards manic or depressed. And here’s an even more fun thing. People who have bipolar disorder sometimes are both manic and depressed at the same time.

It’s called a mixed episode. Mixed episodes suck. Because you get the insomnia and sleeplessness of mania.

You get the poor impulse control of mania and the hopelessness of depression all at the same time. So those are personality disorders. Amongst the personality or the mood disorders, mood disorders.

In addition to mania, depression and bipolar, there’s also anxiety. Anxiety is a mood disorder. Isn’t that terrible? Anxiety is sort of like mmm.

It’s a tricky one. Because anxiety can make you depressed. Anxiety might make you anxious.

(19:14 – 20:54)
Or manic. Anxiety is a bitch ass. And oftentimes, a bunch of these mood disorders happen at the same time.

The mood disorders are more about your emotional state. Anxiety is also an emotional state. They’re not fun.

Nobody likes these. So a person who has a mood disorder, will experience disruptions in sex. Like, absolutely.

And he says, we’re not supposed to be anxious 24 seven. No, dear God, no. There’s a happy zone.

There’s a happy zone where your brain does not do that. Okay. People who are manic or depressed will oftentimes make poor decisions about who to fuck.

Sometimes it’s because, well, I might as well. Tomorrow is never going to happen anyway. Right? So sometimes people who are depressed will have risky sex in order to feel something.

Sometimes people who are manic will have risky sex because they think they’re immune to bad things. The chat room is like, oh, yeah, sex. We forgot about that.

(20:57 – 21:46)
Yeah. Sometimes people who have depression can result in a lower sex drive. Your libido might fuck off.

If you get depressed, you’re just not interested in having sex. You don’t want to. You’re too depressed.

Think of it as if you’re so depressed that you don’t feel like taking a bath or brushing your teeth. You’re also too depressed to have sex. So if you have a partner or somebody you’re in a relationship with who has depression, it’s entirely possible that they might not want to have sex with you anymore because sometimes their brain chemistry goes, no, not interested in that.

(21:48 – 22:24)
Sometimes people who have a mood disorder may become hyper sexual. They might have sex with anybody. Anybody.

And sometimes this is a risk taking behavior in order to provoke within themselves an emotional response that they feel like they can have some control over it. Sometimes it is they want to feel valuable. They want to feel as if somebody cares about them.

(22:25 – 24:21)
And so the only thing that they think that they have that they can give to someone that is going to get them to like them enough is sex. Yeah. Patty says, I’ve definitely had the thought that I should really have sex with anyone who’d want to do it with me because what the chances anyone would actually want to.

They did eventually realize that was not a healthy thought. I’m better now. Yeah.

Mental mental illness, mental health will get you. It will get you. I’m glad you recognize that that’s not a healthy thought.

People with a mood disorder will often have disorder around sex, sexuality, intimacy, and relationships. And all four of those things are different. Okay.

All four of those are different things. As a professional phone sex femdom, I have had people call me before and talk about the fact that, well, you know, they want to go and do X, Y, and Z risky sexual behaviors. And I’m like, okay, that’s great.

We can talk about that. We can discuss it. I’m like, yeah, because you know, the world’s coming to an end and I won’t be here anymore.

Okay. That’s like three red flags in a row. Yikes.

And oftentimes it is somebody who has a mental health challenge. And they may or may not be current on their medications. And the brain chemistry is running amok and resulting in them making risky decisions.

(24:22 – 26:24)
Of the various risky decisions that you could be making when it comes to sex and sexuality, talking to me on the phone is the least likely to completely fuck you over. You will not get an illness from talking to me on the phone. Okay.

But going out to a truck stop and doing what you thought you were going to go do? Maybe no. Maybe don’t do that. Kali said, would an addiction count? It depends.

Oftentimes people with, to my voice, people with mental health challenges are prone to addiction and sexual addiction is a thing. Especially comorbid, occurring at the same time as a mental health challenge. It’s entirely possible to become addicted to the endorphin drop, to the dopamine, to whatever it is that you’re getting from… Like it’s why people do the risky behavior.

They do the risky behavior because it’s going to give them serotonin. It’s going to give them dopamine. It’s going to make their brain go… It makes them feel like they’re in control of something in their life.

It gives them all sorts of positive things that maybe are less positive, but you know, they’re having a real bad mental health challenging day. So sometimes a sex addiction or a masturbation addiction or an addiction to spending money. All of those are things that can happen as a result of your mental health going… and fucking you in the not fun way.

(26:25 – 27:17)
Okay. So those are the mood disorders. Personality disorders.

These are the fun ones. So a mood disorder is a thing about your mood, your ability to maintain that nice even keel instead of being manic or depressed. You’re just kind of even.

The personality disorders. Long-term, inflexible, unhealthy patterns of thinking, functioning, and behavior. Importantly, they diverge from cultural expectations.

(27:18 – 27:54)
So, which is a whole other discussion that we could have about what it means to conform to society and culture. We’re going to… I’m acknowledging that that exists. That is a discussion to have, but we’re not going to have it right this second.

The personality disorders. There are three major types of personality disorders. There’s the odd ones where it’s you’re just odd.

You’re eccentric. You’re weird. The paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal personality disorders.

(28:00 – 28:09)
Patty said, I feel like my laziness protects me from dangerous behavior. It’s not that I wouldn’t do the things. It’s just that it takes too much energy to do the risky things.

(28:15 – 28:47)
Patty said, I was about to type out a long thing about how I don’t consider my condition a disorder. Girl. Uh-huh.

Okay. Cluster B are the dramatic or erratic personality disorders, antisocial, borderline, histrionic, and narcissistic. And then Cluster C are the anxious and fearful, avoidant, dependent, and obsessive, compulsive.

(28:48 – 31:20)
And it’s rooted in what’s driving the behavior and what’s causing the action. What’s making you do the thing. Paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal.

The six pack said, the latest theory is that all personality disorders are ultimately forms of adaptation or adaption. Kind of. They would not persist in our species, in our population, if it didn’t have something at some point that made it more likely to persist in our population.

Right? And the odds are good that a large chunk of why people with personality disorders, why that still crops up, uh, it’s just because they don’t tend to prevent people from breeding. Like it’s less that it is a positive that makes them more likely to breed. Although risky sexual behavior could lead to that.

Absolutely. It can lead to pregnancy. It’s just that it doesn’t stop them from breeding.

It’s not a negative pressure on. So there’s nothing to really stop those traits from being passed on. Oh, six pack says it’s a adaption to bad parenting.

Sometimes it could be there. It’s the whole nature versus nurture idea. Like what, what causes the mental illness? Is it nature? Is it nurture? Is it genetic or is it environmental? And it’s not an either or like most things in life.

It’s a spectrum. Some of all. Yes.

Both. All of the above. The anxious and fearful personality disorder.

So avoidant personality disorder, dependent personality disorder, and obsessive compulsive. Obsessive compulsive personality disorder is, it’s an anxiety disorder. It is rooted in if I can control this part of the world enough, I can prevent bad things from happening.

(31:21 – 33:58)
It’s rooted in anxiety. Avoidant personality is if I can just eliminate whatever it is that’s causing the anxiety, then everything will be great. So I will avoid on oftentimes, they’ll be avoiding relationships.

Dependent, again, it’s about control. It’s about how can I, how can I manipulate myself and the world around me in such a way that the bad things will never ever happen to me? The cluster A’s, paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal. Those are tricky.

They’re very, very hard to be in a relationship with a person who has one of those. Paranoid people, they literally, the brain chemistry is making them think bad things are happening. And that there is a cause to those bad things.

And it is someone who is doing these bad things. Schizoid, oftentimes, it again, it is bad things are happening. Something thing is to blame for the bad things.

And oftentimes, that in conjunction with the fact that bad things happen, and something or someone needs to blame for the bad things, that if I change my behavior, I can prevent the bad things. And it’s a different bad thing for every person, which oftentimes is culturally mediated. But yes.

What says this insanity is making me horny? What disorder do I have? Narcissism. No. And he says why I get pissed when people dismiss intersex people as abnormalities or bullshit speech.

Everything is abnormality. Life and evolution is 1000% failure and mutation. The only reason that all the other fuckups are still around is because they don’t affect our reproductive capacities like intersex conditions, but they aren’t any more normal or positive.

Yeah, you cannot ascribe a moralistic judgment to any of these things, by the way. So like having a mood disorder is not a good thing or a bad thing. It’s a thing.

(33:59 – 34:41)
It happened. It is not a moral judgment. Some people will try to say that well, God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle.

If that brings you comfort on a personal level. Great. For the vast majority of people, however, a God that would give somebody depression sucks.

So we’ll just put that one right up front. Kali says all caps. Fuck those people.

(34:47 – 37:32)
So the cluster B personality disorders, I saved those for last because oftentimes they are the most challenging. Being in a sexual or intimate or romantic relationship with a person who has a cluster A or a cluster C personality disorder is challenging. Right? It’s tricky.

That’s hard. That’s really, really hard. It’s not impossible.

It’s difficult. You have to learn how to recognize when it is what your brain is doing versus reality. And oftentimes it is very much versus reality.

Over here in reality, if you check the door three times in a row, the third time you check it does not change whether or not it was locked the other two times. It was still locked. The door is locked.

You don’t have to keep checking it. The door is not going to magically unlock. It’s fine.

It is literally the brain causing you anxiety. And this you have to check. You have to check to assuage the anxiety.

That’s what’s happening with that. People who are paranoid, often it’s rooted in the same sort of a thing. If they have a paranoid delusion, recognizing the delusional thought from a rational thought requires both that the person who has the paranoid delusion understand and recognize that, hey, sometimes your brain is fucked.

And also the people that they’re in relationship with can tell them, I think you’re having a moment. Your brain is doing the thing to you. Let’s work on that.

Let’s calm you down and get back to a more rational place to exist. The cluster bees. Antisocial, borderline histrionic and narcissist.

There’s also emotionally unstable personality disorder. So you might think things like that crossover into mood disorders. No, no, no, no.

I’ve been in a relationship with a person who had borderline personality disorder. I’ve been in a relationship with a person who had narcissistic personality disorder. Narcissists are easier than borderline people.

(37:35 – 38:20)
Lot says, I have pronoia. You know, that’s actually a thing, right? Like that’s a real thing. Oh, good.

As long as you know, it’s a thing. So antisocial personality disorder, there are people who are, it’s not rational, but they have issue with being social. A long-term pattern of manipulating, exploiting, or violating the rights of others, often without remorse.

(38:22 – 43:09)
An antisocial person does not behave in the ways that we think people are supposed to act. An antisocial person, so like parasocial relationships, right? So the relationship between you and me is a parasocial relationship. We’re not in direct social relationship.

Like you will not see me walking down the street and wave and be like, hey, how’s your dog? And I’m like, oh, you know, they’re great. Like that’s a social relationship. We’re a parasocial relationship because we’re over the internet.

An antisocial person would lie and cheat and steal constantly, and there is no remorse. They will hurt you because they can. They will lie.

They’ll use aliases. They are con men often. They have a reckless disregard for the safety of themselves and others.

They break laws and they don’t care. They just, they do this. They’re often aggressive and indifferent.

So narcissistic personality disorder, excessive self-importance, a lack of empathy for others, and an intense need to be admired all the time. Yeah. Addie says, I think the name, the official name is a euphemism.

Shy people are antisocial and psychopaths aren’t just antisocial. Yeah. Patty says, it’s not like you’re a content creator or an A-list celebrity or talking directly to us.

This is still considered parasocial. I would have considered it a middle ground. It’s kind of parasocial because it’s not directly social.

So para, it’s not, you know. Kali says, so our current government, they’re lucky. You can’t actually diagnose somebody that you’re not directly treating.

So we can just describe some of these things and then, you know, look at them. So narcissists, again, exploitative behavior, entitlement, and a lack of empathy. They need to be admired.

They’re continually seeking validation and praise. They’re the kind of person who every time you tell a story, they will immediately twist it and start talking about how this relates to them. Like you tell them, oh yeah, man, I’m late to work because there was a car accident and it was terrible.

And they’re like, yeah, I was in a car accident one time and I broke my leg. It was awful. I had to, I walk with a limp now because I was in a car accident.

You know, like it just slips back around on you and it always circles back around to the narcissist. So histrionic personality disorder, a pervasive pattern of attention-seeking behaviors, dramatic theatrical emotional expression, and an intense need for approval. They’re often provocative.

The histrionic personality disorder person, they will, as bringing this back around to sex and sexuality, people with histrionic personality disorder will absolutely try to have sex with you in the most dramatic way possible. Narcissists will try to have sex with you because it makes them look and feel good. Antisocial people probably will, well, they might have sex with you, but it’s because they see you as an to use for their own sexual gratification.

Histrionic personality, that would be, I mean, you can go on Reddit and go look at any of the, my mother-in-law is a nightmare posts. Those are histrionic people. The mother-in-law, the one who’s always like the, you know, the mother-in-law or the mother of the bride who wears a white dress to the wedding, narcissist or histrionic or both because they’re often comorbid.

(43:11 – 43:34)
If it rises to the point of you have messed up your life about this, or you’ve messed up the life of other people around you because of what’s going on with whatever it is inside your head. If you rise to that level, now it is a disorder. Before that, it’s just a very irritating personality trait that nobody likes and we’re all going to judge you.

(43:35 – 44:08)
If it rises to the level of you have destroyed relationships, you have destroyed your own life over what is going on inside your head, then yeah, now it’s a disorder. Now it’s a thing that you really should go and get help for. I mean, you can go and get help at any point before you destroy your life or someone else’s, but once you have deliberately like absolutely risen to the level of a Reddit am I the asshole post, then yep, yep, you got a problem on there.

(44:12 – 48:05)
Sixpack says, Harper, didn’t you mention once that you have depressive disorder? Was that it? That’s not a personality disorder, is it? No, you missed the part where I was talking about mood disorders. Mood disorders, that was the first part of the show, personality disorders, but let me get here. The last one, borderline personality disorder.

Borderline BPD is a mental health condition characterized by long-term instability in moods, relationships, self-image, and behavior. There’s a fear of abandonment, impulsive actions, spending, risky sex, rapid mood swings. So oftentimes borderline does come along with some potential bipolar, and oftentimes people who have borderline are diagnosed first with bipolar, which is one of the mood disorders because they look an awful lot alike, especially before anything’s gotten under control, where bipolar involves swinging rapidly between manic and depressed.

Borderline can also have mood swings, but the cause of the mood swing is different. People who have a borderline personality disorder, therapy can help. You’ll want dialectic behavioral therapy, not cognitive behavioral therapy, because dialectical behavioral therapy can help you learn how to control the emotions that are driving the behavior.

People with BBT, borderline personality disorder, unstable relationships, if you are their favorite person, if you’re their number one, everything will be really, really great until it’s not, because everybody who is their number one apex top person on the pedestal, they’ve gotta fall eventually. Everybody does. Unstable relationships, the love-hate relationship, they either love you or they hate you.

Impulsive behavior, dangerous driving, substance abuse, spending sprees, self-sabotaging behavior, emotional instability, they are afraid of being abandoned, but they will also try to drive you away. They have self-harming behaviors on an internal level. Borderline people, their sense of self isn’t very super stable, so they’ll change who they are and who they want to be, and often they will have a paranoia going on.

It is possible to be in a relationship with a person who has borderline personality disorder, but they’d better have a really good therapy. Really good therapy, really great therapist, and be working on themselves. So, my diagnosis.

I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder with recurrent episodes and dysthymia. So, as I mentioned, dysthymia is one of the mood disorders. Yay! Persistent low mood.

Generally speaking, it has to last for a couple of years before they diagnose you with it, because it’s persistent low mood. It basically means your mood never rises above, like, meh. You never get to feel happy.

(48:06 – 50:41)
It’s also characterized oftentimes with anhedonia, which is a lack of ability to feel positive emotions or positive things. Yeah, Addy said, it’s interesting how many of these have links to money problems. Humans really don’t fare well with capitalism, right? Then Sixpack said, you seem pretty chipper.

All right, so dysthymia, I have great news for you. Of the mood disorders, dysthymia can be cured. How’s that for a kick in the ass? It’s the only one that can be cured.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t occasionally reoccur. You can’t have it twice. Yeah, you can.

You can have dysthymia twice. It can come back. It’s unlikely to.

Dysthymia responds really well to cognitive behavioral therapy. You can literally use your brain to think your way around a mental health issue to such an extent that it doesn’t reoccur. Isn’t that wacky? I wish the rest of the mood and personality disorders, you could do the same thing.

It would be so great. So the dysthymia took about two weeks, two weeks of CBT. And I was like, oh, what the fuck? Are you fucking shitting me? What the hell? So for me, from my lived experience, the dysthymia meant that I never rose above like a one or a two on that plus 10 to minus 10 scale of emotional stability.

So I never really got the happy end of the scale. But the major depression would have me I could get as high as a one when I was in a really good place. But most of the time I was down around five with occasional wonderful little forays down into the nine and 10 zone.

Luckily, I would only get that low a couple of months. And then I’d come back up around to a one ish for a couple of months and then go back down again. And then back up again and back down.

(50:41 – 51:18)
It was very cyclic. It would take about six months for me to cycle through sucked a whole bunch. Nobody enjoyed that.

I got the diagnosis was a whole big thing. I got weekly talk therapy for 18 months. I think that doesn’t teach you some things because it does.

Let me tell you. The dysthymia went poof. And then I learned how to how to manage what the major depression does.

(51:18 – 51:35)
So now I go, let’s see. I’m usually somewhere in the one or two range most of the time, like I’m pretty happy most of the time. I might get as low as maybe a minus three.

(51:37 – 52:09)
And then top three, like on a daily basis, I’m somewhere in that range, right? But also I gained access to the high end. I have been insanely happy. I have experienced what a 10 feels like what the shit.

So wacky. Like right now I would say I’m probably at a, like a four, four or five. Like if I think about I have plans for tomorrow, I’m going to a garden center.

(52:10 – 52:30)
We’re going to go get plants. It’s spring. I need plants.

That is like a seven. Like I am so excited about this. Yes.

So the dysthymia kicked that bitch’s ass. The major depressive disorder, it’s still around. It still sucks, but I can manage it because I went to therapy.

(52:30 – 57:18)
What it did to my sex drive when I was down at a negative 10, no sex drive. None. I was not interested.

Nope. Sorry. Even my high, like coming up to normal-ish, I wouldn’t feel that I was super like hypersexual about that.

I would feel like, yes, of course I would like to have sex. That sounds good. Okay.

But I would never be like, oh yeah, that made me horny. I’m into it now. Oh yeah.

Hey, how you doing? I’m feeling horny. It’s amazing what therapy can do for you. So that’s a lot about me.

People who have mental health challenges, the best thing to do is to ask them how you can support them. Or if you are the person who has a mental health challenge, step one, therapy. Seriously, it helps so much.

If the person that you go to at first, isn’t really helpful or this doesn’t feel like a good fit, see if you can get a different person. If it’s an insurance issue, is there somebody in the same practice that you could try? Is there a completely different place you can go that’s, you know, would still be covered by your insurance or whatever? Or are there options, like there could be a group support for people who have the same sorts of mental health challenges that you do that you can go to and hang out with and be a whole bunch of people going, yeah, it sucks when this happens. You’ll be like, oh my god, I thought I was alone.

And that all by itself can be useful and helpful for you. If you have a mental health challenge and they’ve given you medication for it, it can result in changes to your sexuality and your sex. One of my friends has bipolar disorder, rapid cycling bipolar disorder.

Actually, I have more than one friend who has bipolar. One of my friends is not medicated at all. And I wish that he was.

He swings between wildly dangerous, risky sex and can’t get out of bed. So he’s back and forth there. My other friend is medicated and the medication that they’ve got her on has resulted in her being effectively asexual.

She has no sex drive because of the medication that she’s on for her mental health. But when she was not medicated, because she wasn’t medicated, her brain decided that it would be a really great idea to couple her manic episodes. What says get them together? Oh my god, no.

They have hung out together. It’s like oil and water, cats and dogs. They did not get along.

It was bad. It was very bad. But before her mania resulted in her having paranoid delusions and hallucinations.

So she’s medicated because she was like, yeah, she was afraid to leave her room, her dorm room in college because she was convinced there were demons in the hallway that were going to get her. She’s medicated. She’s medicated now.

There are no more demons. We’re very glad for this. She has a budget.

She pays all her bills. She is a mature, upright, upstanding member of society, does not engage in wild, risky sex, no longer has depressive moments where she’s like, I just can’t get out of bed today. Nope, nope.

She can do like she lives her normal, normal life. She just doesn’t want to have sex with anybody. She was like, you know what? I’m single.

So meh, fuck it. She’s good. She’s fine that way.

(57:22 – 57:40)
So sometimes the meds can change your sex drive. If that happens, you can talk to the person who has prescribed them and get your meds changed. For her, she’s on the last mood stabilizer, unless they’ve come out with something new since the last time they changed them.

(57:40 – 58:36)
But it’s because the mood stabilizer drugs, oftentimes you have to cycle through a whole lot to find what’s going to work for you. See, Addie says, that made me think that my body doesn’t deal with any chemicals. It isn’t just the HIT that doesn’t work.

My body didn’t give a fuck about those meds either. Yeah, you have to cycle through and find what works for you. There’s some fairly recent modern ones that are out now that worked really, really well, except for the part where it made her asexual.

She’s not interested in sex at all. See, I was going to talk about autism and ADHD because both of those have some fairly interesting effects on a person’s sex and sexuality and relationships. I’m going to have to bring it for another episode sometime.

(58:36 – 59:54)
Don’t worry. In short, if you’re neurotypical or non-neurotypical, those can mess with your ability to have the sex. And oftentimes, it can and does result in kind of an asexual, sexless marriage.

Here, Patti, I’m going to send you a link. There you go. There’s also a creator, Katie.

I can picture her face. I will look it up and I will get the links for it. But she has a book out about sex for people on the spectrum and people with ADHD.

And it’s basically that sometimes your brain gets too distracted. If you have ADHD, sex may not be a novel enough set of experiences to make you pay attention to it long enough to get aroused. This is one of my best episodes in the podcast since.

(59:57 – 1:00:58)
Well, thank you. Don’t worry. I’ll circle back around to this one because I did really want to hit the ADHD and autism and sex part.

But hopefully, you have all learned something interesting or at least mildly entertaining tonight about mood disorders, personality disorders and your hostess. How you doing? If you think that you may have one of these mental health challenges, there is hope. It is possible to have a relationship.

It takes more work, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. And it also doesn’t mean that you’re not worthy of having a good, healthy, awesome, intimate relationship. Go forth.

Get fucked. Mont says I need to get screened for something after listening tonight. Earworms.

(1:01:06 – 1:02:13)
So, you can have sex. You can have a relationship. My friend who is on the meds that have resulted in her being asexual was in a relationship this whole entire time.

So, like, it’s possible. You just have to have really, really good communication and you have to talk to people and they have to be willing to put up with the fact that sometimes you’re just like, no, I don’t want to fuck right now. I’m tired.

I’d like a nap. All right. Whore school is adult sex education.

Heavy on the sex. Heavy on the education. Let’s see.

Oh, somebody over here was asking a question. What is a narcissist they wanted to know? Oh, and what I was saying is offensive? How was it offensive? All right. Well, we’re at the end of the show.

I don’t know why I have two different chat rooms. Thank you guys for listening. Whore school is adult sex education.

(1:02:17 – 1:02:24)
Hopefully, I will see you guys all again next week. Thank you all for listening. Good night.

 

Find the Whore School Schedule right here, and remember to join the Whore School discord for more memes, connection, and all the resources used by Ms Harper for the show. Whore School is adult sex education with no fear, no guilt, and no shame!