Pandora's Couch

I Need Some Direction

So I’m approaching a crossroads, and I have no idea which way to go.

I finished my bachelor’s degree in psychology back in May, and applied to the master’s in general psychology program at the University of Memphis and was accepted. My initial plan was to go on to a clinical PhD program and do something community-based, helping to transform the way people think about psychology into a preventative health science. I went to the masters program because my GRE scores weren’t quite good enough for a PhD program, and intended to work on bringing them up while I was in school.

Then my world collapsed. I spent the entire first semester of grad school in a black hole of depression. Somewhere in the midst of all that I lost sight of my goals, lost hope in them, lost faith in myself, and didn’t think about the future at all because, in my mind, every day was my last day on Earth.

Now I’m doing better (I suppose). I hate being medicated like I am but don’t really have any alternatives. My depression is creeping back and my anxiety is becoming more acute. I’ve still got the mindset that I’m not a whole person, that I’m neither capable nor deserving of getting into (and completing) a clinical PhD program.

But now I’ve got a professor that is really pushing me hard to apply to the clinical program, and a colleague that’s training me in a particular type of therapy keeps saying she’s impressed with me. But… I just don’t know. I can’t seem to move past this crippling fear that I can’t do it and this nagging thought that I’m not good enough. What if my depression gets worse? The little dark “voice” (not like a for-serious schizophrenic voice) in my head keeps telling me to just give up, give up… It keeps reminding me that I don’t want to be medicated, that I’m sick of talking to doctors, that I’m sick of pills that make me sleepy, that it’s pointless to keep fighting it, that I should just give up permanently.

I don’t know what to do.