What I'm getting out is a sign of what I've been putting in.
If I feel bad, it's because I've been thinking thoughts that produce bad feelings or taking actions that produce bad feelings.
This can't be short-circuited chemically. Or, rather, it can, which is precisely the devilry in it: cutting the link between cause and effect untethers me from reality and produces a life in which, temporarily, I'm freed from certain consequences.
Like a leper, I bang myself against hard or sharp objects, but, because I feel nothing, I do not rectify the behaviour and continue to damage myself. The injuries multiply and I laugh at them.
The damage is not with impunity, however.
Eventually reality bleeds through the chemical bandages, and then I'm in double trouble: the old, terrible feelings are back and have brought with them a crowd of new ones; and I've lost touch with how to live in such a way as to bring about peace and fruitfulness. I'm now locked into destructive patterns that seem the only normal ones.
This is what we call the jumping-off point.
There is nothing wrong with feeling absolutely terrible.
It's the starting point for doing something about the problem, because it contains within it all of the signposts to what it is I'm doing that is causing my problem.
It's not anyone else, and it's not even my body or my brain: it's the state of my consciousness, my thinking, and my behaviour.
Even being suicidal was good for me in the end (with the proviso that I did not go through with it successfully), because desiring heartily to do away with the old life formed the basis for taking the action to do just that and acquire a new one.