I mean literally the sane side of you “knew” you were losing your rationality?
I was utterly exhausted and I was driving back from Sequim down Hwy 3 in Washington. It was stormy and I felt like the trees by the side of the road were reaching down to grab me. Of course I knew that was ridiculous, but I also knew the trees were trying to get me. Very scary because I thought I was losing my mind and I knew I was losing my mind.
Anyone else have similar experiences?
I haven’t, but it’s odd that you posted this question literally within about a minute of me starting the movie Gaslight. I saw the 1944 version a few years ago and loved it, I just started the 1940 version a few minutes ago.
Hell I’m more surprised when I start thinking rationally.
I see planes falling from the sky frequently. Just like in the corner of my vision, and then they’re gone, but then it sets off a panic attack. Not sure why this happens but Zoloft makes it happen a lot less frequently.
Yes. Severe depression has a tendency to screw with one’s thought processes, and even though I knew logically my family and friends love me and do not want anything bad to happen to me, I also had the overwhelming, bone deep conviction that they would be relieved if I killed myself. I knew logically that I was a worthwhile human being, I believed I was a terrible burden, and the world would be much better off without me.
Yeah, depression sucks. Thankfully, I’ve gotten better.
Yes. When depression, in its early stages, hits me, I know I’m being irrational, but that doesn’t help. Similarly, at the opposite end of the mood scale, I get very hyper from time to time - I usually know my behaviour then isn’t normal, but can’t quite stop it. PMS adds a layer of complication every month, as do random flashbacks to unpleasant memories.
Really, it’s almost rarer that I am in control of my brain - I’m used to watching myself slide out of control, now. Luckily it rarely lasts a long time, these days.
Yeah. I used to have crippling depression and anxiety, and the anxiety in particular would really mess with my head to the extent I would worry about things that made no sense. For example, I would worry about the sun suddenly exploding. I also believed if I worried about something enough, it would come true. So worrying in and of itself made me more afraid of the thing I was worried about. Nuclear bombs, sudden changes in the earth’s atmosphere, and, even as Rushgeekgirl mentions, planes falling out of skies.
I felt so completely out of control that I worried I was really losing my mind. But I eventually realized I could correct my thinking. Once I realized my fears were vanishingly unlikely and in some cases impossible occurrences, I regained a sense of sanity.
I also have had experiences with dissociation, which is a fairly common symptom of PTSD in which things stop seeming real. During one of my major depressive episodes I remember crawling into a closet and staying there in the dark for hours, just completely detached from identity and reality. Dissociation can feel very much like you’re losing your mind, but it’s not a truly psychotic feature as far as I understand it. There are a lot of psychiatric symptoms that feel like going crazy, but aren’t.
It’s safe to say there are times in my life I wasn’t in the best psychological health.
My psych problems are much more in the normal range now. At least now the things I worry about – like a stranger breaking into the house – are rational. Maybe not statistically probable, but comparatively rational. Now I can look back on my old experiences and joke about them. I’ve always been kinda crazy, but at least now I’m a functional crazy, and life marches on.
I often fantasize about having god like powers and putting a stop to all the stupid shit in the world.
These fantasies make me feel slightly self conscience as I’m not sure most “normal” people day dream like that. And especially not with the frequency that I do.
Still, as delusions go, that one’s pretty altruistic. 
One of the symptoms of depression is confusion. I think that is one of the reasons that I can’t tell when I’m falling into a deep depression. I just don’t recognize it as many times as I’ve had bouts of it. I’m too confused to see it.
Shakes, I love to daydream! I always have. It’s practically a hobby!
Not until benzo withdrawal. And then it became a palpable fear.
Now I don’t fear going insane as much as just never getting better.
A couple of times I’ve reached to turn the radio off because the chatter was annoying me so much, and realized that the radio wasn’t on - all that background noise was inside my own head.
When it’s happened, it’s always been at a time when I was very stressed and trying to juggle way too many things at once. Both times, I asked for help getting a few of the things done and focused hard on one thing at a time, and it went away.
But it’s a little alarming anyway.
There are two versions of this movie?? :eek:
I know the Isabella Rosellini and Charles Boyer version, but not the other one. Will go to imdb to check.
And yes, I have felt that I was going insane. Well, not quite insane, maybe, but that I was losing my mind. When I was dating this one guy, he would answer my comments or questions with a complete non-sequitur, such as:
Me: What do you feel like eating?
Him: Black as well as white, you know?
Me: What?
And so on. This also happened when I was married to my ex-husband, but I won’t go into that. Funny thing is, as soon as I left both of them, I suddenly became sane. Go figure.
Yup. It was very frightening.
About 15 years ago I was partying in Singapore with my friend Beth, who has a very distinctive voice. We were drunk off our heads for an entire week on a shitload of Long Island iced tea and arat (banana rum).
The day we were leaving, I got a taxi to the airport at 5am after drinking arat until 3. Beth was due to get a cab about an hour later, as she was on a different flight. After checking in, I was walking through the airport, and I heard Beth talking somewhere behind me. I thought that maybe she’d got a taxi earlier than planned and happened to be in the concourse already. I turned round and scanned the crowd for her, but didn’t see her. I was a bit disappointed as I’d have liked to have gone for a coffee or something before we flew.
So I boarded the plane and we took off, and about 10 minutes into the flight, I heard Beth’s voice again. I knew there was no way she could possibly be on the plane, and became seriously freaked out. I looked around me for the source of the voice, and realised that what I could actually hear was a woman speaking Chinese a few rows back. The moment I realised this, the woman’s voice resolved into her own.
Beth’s voice continued on and off for the entire flight, and I really started to get freaked out. It was always the same pattern: if there was a woman speaking, whose voice I couldn’t quite hear, it sounded like Beth; the moment I could hear her distinctly, Beth’s voice went away.
I was terrified that I was losing my mind, and started to have what I now know to be a panic attack, and the feeling of the panic attack made me think I was indeed going insane, and triggered yet another panic attack. I was stuck in a feedback loop of auditory hallucinations and panic attacks. I was crying and shaking and hyperventilating under a blanket. Luckily I had a row to myself so nobody saw.
Eventually I got to Dubai to change planes, and felt OK again. However, after about an hour in Duty Free, I suddenly became convinced there was a bomb in the airport. I was getting cold sweats down my back, and wanted to stay as far from the gates as possible, as this was where I thought the bomb was. I stood behind a pillar.
Eventually got onto the next plane, and Beth’s voice started again, together with the panic attacks. Arrived in London feeling absolutely horrible, and got on the Tube into the city, and there was a Bangladeshi family in the same carriage, the matriarch of which was also speaking with Beth’s voice. Panic attack again. I eventually walked closer to her, and when I got close enough to her to make out individual words in her language, Beth’s voice went away. The skyline of London passing the carriage looked completely two-dimensional, too, like it was painted on a cloth.
I went to the pub with my brother and had a few beers, and the symptoms stopped, but that night I woke up with the feeling that Beth’s soul had entered my body, and that I had lost my own identity. I then felt a feeling of intense loss and nostalgia for my former self. I lay in the dark, and my entire body felt like it had an electric current running through it.
As I lay there, I knew I was experiencing symptoms of madness, and determined that if they hadn’t gone away in a month, I would have to get myself institutionalised, or else end my life, because it was unbearable.
The next morning I couldn’t make up my mind if I wanted tea or coffee when I was asked, and I started crying again.
By the end of that day, all the symptoms had worn off, but for the next six months or so I was constantly terrified that this kind of thing would kick off again, and I ended up second guessing everything I sensed or experienced, scrutinizing it for any signs of psychosis, but it never came back, and eventually I relaxed about it.
In retrospect, I think it was alcohol withdrawal that caused the problems, evidenced by the beer stopping the symptoms temporarily.
Nothing like it has ever happened since. I don’t drink liquor any more.
jjim that sounds like a horrible experience.
Some good news for those who may be worried about this kind of thing right now: If you think you’re going insane, you probably aren’t. Most people with honest-to-god psychosis have no fucking idea they are crazy. They take it for granted that their irrational beliefs are true and their hallucinations are real.
So if you find yourself wondering… cheer up! You might have a mental health problem, but it’s probably not schizophrenia.
I’ve had my share of anxiety, but at its worst it was just like medium anxiety, only more so. Once, as an undergrad I got very little sleep during finals and had some weird thoughts and dreams while trying to sleep my way out of it. But I knew it was temporary and due to the sleep deprivation.
Ingrid Bergman, but yeah, that was the only one I knew of until a few days ago.
Yep! Caused by panic attacks. I take Lexapro daily and Alprazolam, as needed.
St Cad,
Remember ‘HALT’ at all times. Don’t get to, “hungry, angry, lonely or tired”. It sounds like you were exhausted and sleep deprived and started to see creepy crawlies. It happened to me a few times when I was on the night shift.
I used to see things out of the corner of my eyes when I was exhausted and my doctor told me they were just tired eyes. Hope you get some rest.
No. I frequently believe I am the only one whose sanity is still intact.
Oh yeah . . . had the wrong generation there. I must be going insane.:smack: